Finding the Missing Teachers

As I was trying to gather information about all the teachers I had growing up in Wolcott, CT, there were a few who I was not able to locate. The two who most troubling to me were two teachers who I had in elementary school – Alcott School. Here is the story of how I eventually found them.

 

Miss Chandler

[picture of Gladys Chandler]

 

Of particular frustration to me was my first-grade teacher at Alcott School. She was only there for one year. 1954-55 was her first year teaching and she left at the end of the school year and got married. The problem was that I only knew her by her last name as we only called her Miss Chandler. Without a first name or some other information to go on, the methods I used were not working. But part of the reason why it was important to me that I find her was she had been my favorite elementary school teacher. When I wrote a blog back in 2017 about my favorite teachers, here is what I wrote about her (you can find that complete posting here):

There are two others I want to recognize for their contributions that helped make me what I am today. One is my first grade teacher, Miss Chandler. It was her first, and only, year of teaching as the summer after that year she got married and moved out of state. I don’t remember her first name –what first grade student does – although I suppose it’s written on my first grade report card. And I don’t have the time to dig through my archives and find it. But that’s not important, what is important is how she impacted my education.

 

As I mentioned earlier, there was no preschool or kindergarten available, so first grade was the first education experience for me and my classmates from the northern half of Wolcott who went to Alcott. But I was already quite academically inclined, had taught myself to read and had been reading for a couple of years already, and was also quite gifted in arithmetic.

 

Miss Chandler recognized this and quickly realized that I knew everything that she was planning on teaching in first grade. She recommended that I be allowed to skip first grade and enter school directly into second grade. However, the second grade teacher, in the room right across the hall, was Mrs. Bane and she replied that she would not accept me by responding, “Just keep him in first, his classmates will catch up to him soon enough.” That turned out not to be true and I remained ahead of most of them all the way through my elementary and high school years, but there was no way that Miss Chandler could challenge the much older Mrs. Bane. Instead, she decided to do whatever seemed best to keep me challenged in first grade.

 

She did this in several ways. In reading, she simply gave me harder books to work with, basically on my own, while she taught the rest of the students – from the Dick, Sally, Spot reading series. In arithmetic, while she worked with the majority of the students, I took the kids who needed extra help out to the steps in the hall just outside the classroom door and drilled them with flash cards, etc. And during other times of the day she gave me extra projects to do. For example, a friend, Gary Booker (with whom I have recently gotten to know again through Facebook) was the most skilled artist in the class. She was helping him by letting him do construction of the upcoming art work as an example to the others, and since I was not otherwise engaged in learning I got to work alongside him. (Gary’s talent far exceeds mine, but we worked well together with me as his assistant). As a further example of her going out of her way for the advanced students, after she had married and was in Massachusetts she became aware of an art competition and sent Gary a personal letter asking if he was interested in entering the competition. Gary still has that letter! He recently wrote of it, “I never did enter that contest and I never wrote back to her because she broke my heart by going off and marrying that David guy. Didn't she know I loved her?”)

 

Also, for the class little play which we put on for the parents, The Little Red Hen, I was the narrator since I was the only one who could read at that level. In all these ways she kept me involved, interested, and engendered in me a continued love of learning, even though the rest of the class was doing things that I already knew.

But with such limited information, would it be possible to find her?

Starting the search

Looking through the above, what facts did I have and what else could I surmise. Here is the short list:

·        Last name (and maiden name) – Chandler

·        First name of husband – David (from Gary Booker’s letter from her) [note that Gary passed away in 2017, so I could not ask him for any further information in that letter]

·        Date and place of marriage – summer of 1955 in Massachusetts

·        Place living during 1954-55 school year – somewhere in the Wolcott area, probably in Waterbury

But there were other things that I could surmise:

·        Place of birth – Massachusetts (since that’s where she married and the tradition, at least back then, was to get married in the town in which you and your parents lived)

·        Date of birth – about 1932 +/- 1 (since she started teaching in the fall of 1954, she would likely have graduated from college the prior spring and most people graduate from high school at around age 18 and then four years later from college at age 22)

Even with these half-dozen facts, my typical searches were going nowhere. I needed another approach. I knew that the Waterbury city directories would often give me information about a person, but without a full name ancestry.com would not give me any matches. So, I decided to use the card catalog, just open the directory for 1955 (released in the beginning of the year which was after Miss Chandler had started teaching the prior fall). I scrolled through, looking for the last name Chandler – and there it was! An entry for Gladys Chandler, with the notation “tchr Wolcott”. I had a first name!

Finding the rest of the story

Now I could use my normal search methods. By entering her name, estimated year of birth, and noting that she lived in Massachusetts, ancestry.com immediately gave me a few hits. I was surprised that one of the hints was a picture. When I looked at it, I immediately exclaimed, “that’s her!” The picture turned out to be from a college yearbook from the University of Massachusetts in 1954.

There was also a nice bio next her picture which gave some additional facts: Full name – Gladys Ann Chandler, degree – Elementary Education, Born – 1933 at Northampton [MA].

Next, I zeroed in on marriage records. In Massachusetts these are in the form of an index. Looking for marriages for Gladys Ann Chandler in 1955, there were two entries. But one showed a marriage to a man named David Powers. Now I had her married name as well. Entering that information, I received additional hints, including public records showing that as recently as 2020 a person matching her criteria was still living – in Northampton, the same town she was born in.

 

Miss Mueller

[picture of Dorothy Mueller]

 

The other teacher still needing to be found was my 4^th grade teacher. Like Miss Chandler, the year I had her, 1957-58, was her first year teaching. Because of the continued growth in the town, more space was needed. The main floor of Alcott School had five classrooms on the right side (in order 2^nd, 7^th, 6^th, 5^th, 4^th) and two more on the left (ordered 1^st, principal, nurse, teacher’s room, bathrooms, stairs, 3^rd). Because the building was on the side of a hill, the downstairs level was only one room wide and was ordered kitchen, cafeteria, multi-purpose room (could be used for art/music/etc., stairs, boiler room. There was no hall, so there was an accordion folding wall separating the cafeteria from the multi-purpose room. There were two changes made that year. First was to put desks in the multi-purpose room (meaning that activities that used to use that room would have to be in the classrooms), and, in order to accommodate the new music program that was just starting up that instrumental music practice would be in the boiler room (pretty toasty in the winter!) The “new” classroom that year would be used for a 4^th grade class. But what was the teacher’s name?

I had been only able to remember a few things about her. First, that she was unmarried and that it was her first year teaching (just like Miss Chandler), that she only taught for a year or two before getting married (again like Miss Chandler), but I believe that she lived in Wolcott on Todd Road (at the other end of town), and I had a vague idea that her last name started with the letter “M”. But that was not enough for any search engine or for ancestry.com to help locate her.

Then, just a week ago, the 1950 census was released. The images can be scrolled through, but they are not yet indexed. Having been waiting for them, I had already scrolled through the ones for Wolcott (about 150 pages), locating first myself, then seeing how many of my classmates were there (at age 1-2). So, I wondered – was my memory of this unnamed teacher living on Todd Road accurate, would she have been there seven years before I had her as a teacher, and would I recognize her name if I saw it? There was only one way to find out.

As I scrolled through the pages, I was reading the vertically written road names. (The census taker fortunately had very good handwriting!). Not too far in, on page 16, I found Todd Road and began looking at the family names to see if any looked familiar. And suddenly, there she was – living right next door to one of my classmates, Linda Clark, was the Mueller family! Both the parents, Karl and Martha, had been born in Germany, but their oldest daughter, Dorothy, was age 15 – just the right age to be graduating from college at age 22 in 1957 and taking her first teaching assignment! My memory had not failed me.

Now having a full name, I was fairly quickly able to locate a marriage announcement for Dorothy where she married in 1959 (meaning that she taught for two years, 1957-1959) and the announcement conveniently made reference to her being a teacher at Alcott School – final confirmation that I had the right person. She and her new husband were to be living in Meriden where she still lives over 60 years later. They went on to have five children and eleven grandchildren. Her husband passed away just a few years ago. The above picture is from her wedding announcement.

My memories from over 60 years ago have turned out to be pretty accurate. But when you only have a few pieces of information about a person, figuring out how to put together a plan that will locate that person can be challenging. But as the above shows, it can be done!