"Dreaming of you / that's all I do-- / Night and day for you I'm pining, / And in your eyes, / blue as the skies / I can see the love-light softly shining."

Searching for Florence
Benjamin Filene

Part I | II | III

I start to play the song and immediately run into trouble. It's a waltz-time piece meant to be played "dreamily," according to the notation. But as the music moves along, with three-note chords in each hand, my rendition brings to mind a three-legged cow. I haven't taken a formal piano lesson in twenty years, but I do play for pleasure pretty regularly. Is this the "easy-to-play" music that historians have told me about? Could a young girl in 1912 really play this piece? Did someone else play it for her? Regardless, I'm impressed. Struggling along, I gain a new appreciation for the piano's place in people's lives a century ago. If songs like this were considered a dilution of the repertoire, then people must have had quite a degree of facility, and that, I know, requires many hours of practice.

Listen to an MP3 of
"Meet Me To-Night in Dreamland" (2.3M)
This recording was made from a contemporary player piano roll.
MP3s are compact audio files playable by a number of applications, such as WinAmp (PC) and iTunes (Mac).

After a second and third try, "Meet Me To-night" starts to come through a little more clearly for me, although still at a ridiculously slow tempo for a waltz. The tune is just as schmaltzy as the title would lead you to expect, and the lyrics follow suit: "Dreaming of you / that's all I do-- / Night and day for you I'm pining, / And in your eyes, / blue as the skies / I can see the love-light softly shining." And the chorus: "Meet me to-night in Dreamland / Under the silv'ry moon / Meet me to-night in Dreamland / Where love's sweet roses bloom." I imagine young Florence singing these words. Could she deliver them without the edge of a smirk that we would feel obligated to add now? Probably. At her age, she was likely just starting to become preoccupied with this sort of sentiment.

But what age was Florence in the photo? I still know so little. I go down to the MHS library and begin looking at the 1912 city directories, alphabetical listings of people, their addresses, and occupations. Florence could have lived anywhere, but I start with Minneapolis and St. Paul. In those two directories alone, I count eleven Bloods, none of them Florences. As today, the directory doesn't list children. The census does, but the 1910 census has no index. You have to know the name and address of the person you're searching for; and, again, entries appear under the name of the head of the household. The 1920 census does have an index, but it seems unlikely that Florence would show up in it, eight years after she posed by her piano.

With the feeling of turning over the last stone, I listen as a reference librarian explains how the 1920 index works. Called Soundex, it's an arcane but, in its own way, beautifully simple system. The first step is to convert the last name you're searching for into a code. The first letter of the last name stays as is, but the remaining ones are assigned numbers from zero to six, except for vowels, which are ignored. If you run out of consonants, you add zeroes. (Today, driver's-license numbers start with Soundexes.) B-L-O-O-D becomes B430. This bureaucratic finagling has a practical, even noble, purpose. B430 leads to Blood, but it would also lead to Bloud or Blaud or Blode. Spelling variations introduced by a time-pressed or tin-eared census-taker or Ellis Island clerk cannot wash out the trail.

On microfilm, I flip through the pages of the Soundex, four handwritten 3" x 5" cards per screen. And there she is. Florence E. Blood. She appears under the entry for Hulda (yes, Hulda) Blood, whom I remember as one of the names in the St. Paul city directory. I had been searching for drops of information; suddenly I have a flood. Florence was twenty-one in 1920, so she was thirteen when my photo was taken. She was born in Minnesota. Her mother, Hulda, was born in Sweden. Hulda, forty-two in 1920, emigrated in 1888 (at age ten) and become an American citizen in 1893. Florence had a brother, Wallace, three years younger than she. The family of three lived at 666 Ottawa Avenue, just across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Paul.

I can't believe my good fortune. If Florence had married and changed her name before 1920, I wouldn't have found any of these morsels. From the Soundex card, I go to the census enumeration sheet itself. Following the handwritten list, I feel as if I'm walking down the street with the census-taker as he visits the Clarks at 660 Ottawa, the Silvers at 662, the McCarthys at 664, the Bloods at 666. The enumeration sheet tells me that the Bloods rent their home; that all three can read and write; that Hulda does not have a job; and that Florence does, as a clerk for the railroad. (Florence is all grown up!) Wallace is an electrician apprentice with the telephone company. Interestingly, Hulda appears as the head of the household, and she is listed as divorced, quite unusual for the early decades of the century.

With my new information, I can look for the Bloods in the 1910 census. I find them renting at 695 Ottawa. Hilda (yes, Hilda) is again identified as the head of household (again without a profession), but she is listed as married (for thirteen years), not divorced. Her husband was apparently born in New York. Returning to the city directories, I find Hulda (yes, Hulda again) at 695 Ottawa from 1911 to 1914, around the corner at 322 West Page Street between 1915 and 1917, and then at 666 Ottawa from 1918 to 1921. I'm startled in the 1917 directory, for there Florence appears, clear as day, sharing the Page Street house with her mother. She was there all along; I just hadn't thought to check so far beyond the date of the photo. The listing identifies her as "clk G N Ry." I talk to two reference librarians before we figure it out: clerk, Great Northern Railway.

The 1917 directory also is the only one that lists Hulda as the "widow of Geo W." Widow? George W.? I backtrack and, yes, George W. appears, living in various addresses (but never with Hulda) and working for Blood and Thomas, which, according to the directory, is a downtown St. Paul firm that handles real estate loans and building contracts. George is listed in 1917, disappears in 1918, the year after Hulda is listed as a widow, but then resurfaces in 1919 and on into the 1920s, still in the real estate business! So was Hulda widowed or not? There was significant stigma attached to divorce in this period. Had Hulda told the city directory surveyor that she had been widowed to avoid uncomfortable questions? Had George moved out of town in 1917-18, prompting Hulda to imagine being rid of him once and for all? Or could she have lost touch with him for a while and presumed him dead? Once again, the historical record is as fallible as it is revealing--and revealing in its fallibility.

As for Florence, the trail abruptly dries up in the 1922 directory. Her mother has moved again, this time to South Smith Street, where, for the first time, she is listed with an occupation: seamstress. But Florence Blood appears nowhere in the 1922 volume, nor in directories for the rest of the decade. No doubt she got married, I figure. I learn that St. Paul's marriage records, wonderfully indexed, are housed in the Ramsey County courthouse, just down the hill from the Minnesota History Center. I'm buoyant as I walk through the doors of the Art Deco building, past the gigantic white onyx statue of the "Indian God of Peace," and into the marriage-record office. After I find Florence's married name, I'll use the directories to trace her and her family down to the present, interview her children, hear stories about how much music meant to their mother, maybe even see the family piano itself!

But Florence doesn't appear in the marriage index--not in 1921 or '22, or '23, or even up to 1930. I almost wish the indexes were less neat so that there would be room to consider other options. I trudge back to the History Center, sit in the microfilm room, and ponder my possibilities. There are few. Florence could have moved out of town or gotten married somewhere else entirely; if so, I will never find her. Or, gulp, she could have died.

The reference librarian tells me that, yes, the historical society has death records on microfilm. In contrast to the marriage records, they are organized chronologically with no index at all. Mainly to avoid admitting that my search is over, I begin paging through the death certificates for January 1922. Almost immediately, they make me feel even more down in the dumps than before. Baby Boy Brown--stillborn. Baby Girl Robbins--mycosarcoma of neck (urgent). Julia French Metcalf--cerebral softening. Fanny Claus--ruptured liver due to auto accident. Florence Grant--diabetes mellitus. Albert H. Neuenfeldt--organic heart. As I turn to each new record, I feel a queasy tension, hoping to find Florence but just as much hoping not to. I want to imagine her as the flashing-eyed girl in the photo, not reduced to an anatomical malfunction.

After three hundred deaths in January 1922, I give up and, for the first time in this process, start to wonder about myself. What is going on here? Earlier, I had joked with a colleague that my search for the Bloods was a quest for a surrogate Minnesota family (Blood-lines, so to speak). Lacking local roots of my own (I grew up in North Carolina), I was adopting some. Now I wonder if there might be some truth to this theory. My wife and I moved to Minnesota in 1997 and have loved it from the start. We know, though, that we will always be easterners in a midwestern culture that accepts outsiders but does not exactly embrace them.

If the Bloods are supposed to be surrogate family members, though, they're proving to be more than standoffish. Have I reached the end of the line? Lacking documentary clues, I decide to return to physical evidence. I hop into my Chevy Nova and head for Ottawa Avenue.

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