Finding Fred

The last three blogs dealt with Frances Ann (Tapscott) Lockard, her daughter, Mattie, and her son-in-law, Joseph Watt. But Frances had a second child, Fred.

Fred’s actual first name, Frederick, is found in Terre Haute City Directories for 1887 and for 1890-1891. His middle name, George, is shown in the 1904 Alameda Co, California voter registration. But he nearly always went by “Fred G.”

Tracking Fred was laborious because when he went to live with his sister and her husband, Mattie and Joseph Watt, following the death of his mother, he took the surname “Watt” and it took a while to figure that out. The surname  change may have occurred because he was adopted by his sister and her husband though no record has been found. Fred was only twelve years old when Frances Ann died. And his father married again shortly afterwards.

Bowie Southern Pacific Hotel

Fred G. Watt lived in Terre Haute with his sister and brother-in-law in the 1880s, working as a pressman in 1887 and as a clerk at T. J. Griffith’s shoe store in 1890. In 1894, he was a salesman in Wheeling, West Virginia. Then he traveled with his sister to California, where he was a San Francisco hotel clerk in 1900 and an Oakland shoe salesman in 1910. Following the 1911 death of Mattie, Fred began work as a night porter for the Southern Pacific Railroad, ending up employed in the railroad hotel in Bowie, Arizona in 1920.

And it is in Bowie, where a beautiful train station with a first-class hotel and dining room once served thousands of passengers passing through, that we last see Fred. As far as we know, Fred was never married and had no children. Where he ended up is a complete mystery. Perhaps one of you readers know what happened to Fred. I don’t.