The Hess Family of Lancaster: Salinda Hess

I was at Joy's Antiques in Quarryville, PA and I was on a mission.

I was spending the holidays up in Rising Sun, Maryland and was in a completely unfamiliar part of the country, but if there's one thing I learned from watching all those hours of American Pickers, it's that when you're seemingly in the middle-of-nowhere-farm-country, you're pretty likely to find some steals on long-forgotten antique items.

So my mission at Joy's Antiques was to find some photos, and I hit the jackpot.

Seriously, if you live anywhere near Quarryville, I highly recommend this antique store. I didn't have time to dig through the three whole boxes of well-preserved cabinet cards, so I settled on one. And even at $1 per photo, I didn't have enough money to buy all the perfectly labeled photos I found. I'd say a good 1/3 of all the photos had first and last names on them: sometimes even names of spouses and parents! The owner of the store lamented how it was a shame people wrote on these old photos; as you can imagine, I kindly ignored that comment.

So with a $15 budget, I settled on a stack of photos that seemed to originate from 3 families. This post will feature the Hess family.

I found these two cabinet cards of Henry Hess, both taken in Lancaster a few years apart (right).

I also found a photo of a woman named Salinda Hess, taken in Lancaster (below).

Our genealogical journey will begin with Salinda.

Salinda Hess

I begin my research with Salinda, as it's an uncommon first name. Without searching for any particular dates, I enter Salinda Hess and Pennsylvania into Family Search and get a few different results.

The 1920 census gives us two Salindas, mother and daughter, living together in Lancaster. Salinda the elder was born about 1843, and her daughter in 1872. We can assume it was taken in the 1880s or 1890s, leading me to believe our Salinda is probably the daughter - the woman in the photo looks to be quite young.

There is also a 9 year old Ralph Hess living with the two Salindas, who is noted to be the grandson of the head of house. Interestingly, our Salinda is noted as single, leading us to believe Ralph isn't her son, but perhaps her nephew. Also interesting is that neither Salinda elder nor younger have a profession, and unemployment actually appears to be quite common in Mannheim Borough, where they live at 124 Charlotte Street, as the majority of other people listed on this census page also have "none" listed under trade.

Now that we've determined the subject in our photo was born in 1872, I return to the search results. I find a 1930 census for Salinda Hess in 1872, and she still lives with young Ralph - and this time, it is clearly listed that he is her nephew, so our guess was correct! Salinda and Ralph live at the same address, although it appears her mother has passed away. Unfortunately, Salinda, at age 53, is still identified as single, leading us to assume she never had any descendants.

A Hess Family Tree

My next step is to try searching for Henry Hess, the subject of the other two photos I picked up, but it seems to be such a common name in Lancaster at the time it's nearly impossible to identify which Henry is our subject. Instead, I attempt to build a larger Hess family tree.

Googling Salinda Hess, I come across Biographical Annals of Lancaster County, published in 1903, and a particular excerpt catches my eye. It outlines a family tree of Levi H. Hess and Salinda Gross, who must be Salinda the elder from our earlier research. It would appear the tree is as follows:

As the young Henry in our photo didn't appear to be too much younger than Salinda in her photo, we can assume Henry is the son of one of Salinda's elder siblings: and with that, we've introduced the subject of our next blog post on the Hess family of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Stay tuned!