"'Know her?! I hated her guts!' The name Florence Blood certainly rings a bell with the woman who answered the phone."

Searching for Florence
Benjamin Filene

Part I | II | III

All of the homes that Hulda, Florence, and Wallace lived in were within a few blocks of each other in a neighborhood called Cherokee Heights. Some of the houses of their era no longer exist, but as I drive slowly down the street, I see the one I had been hoping for: 695 Ottawa, where Florence lived in 1912 when her photograph was taken. No doubt the house looks different today than it did on that February day eighty-eight years ago. The one-story place has green siding, a "Collie on Guard" sign, and, indeed, a collie looking at me amiably from behind a wire fence. In my mind, I subtract the front porch and side additions, and I'm struck by how small the house must have been when Hulda and her children rented it. What an act of optimism and determination it was for a divorced mother of two to bring a piano into this home! After briefly considering a knock on the door ("Hi, I have this photograph"), I drive home.

Cherokee Heights is in Ramsey County, but it's near the border of Dakota County. Somewhat dispiritedly, I decide to follow up on a long shot suggested by the Ramsey County marriage-license office. I drive twenty-five miles to Hastings to check if Florence by chance filed her marriage paperwork in the Dakota County courthouse. With the streamlined index system, it takes all of five minutes to bring Florence back to life once again. On March 11, 1921, in St. Paul, a Presbyterian minister married Florence Blood and Arnold S. Jensen. On the printed form, "Dakota" County is crossed out and "Ramsey" is handwritten above it. I walk out of the office with a secret smile.

Arnold S. Jensen, the 1921-22 St. Paul directories say, was a student in the Nichols Expert Business Office Training and Secretarial School. After that, neither he nor Florence are listed until 1930, when Arnold shows up as a clerk at the Great Northern Railway, the same position Florence had held a decade before. Florence herself has no job listing after 1921. In the 1940s, Arnold appears as supervisor at the State Railroad and Warehouse Commission. Arnold and Florence Jensen live on Margaret Street on St. Paul's east side, six or seven miles from where Florence grew up. By 1950 Florence is a widow. In 1956 she herself disappears from the directory.

Searching for further signs of Florence, I notice that Hulda Blood, at age 78, appears in the 1956 directory, living with her son Wallace at 305 West Annapolis, still in the same neighborhood where she had raised her children. Wallace is listed as a pressman at Brown and Bigelow, a printing factory, with a wife named Evelyn. Hulda no longer shows up in the directory after 1960. Evelyn is a widow by 1962 and last appears in 1978.

From the directories, I can't tell which Bloods or, certainly, Jensens, might be children of Wallace and Evelyn or Florence and Arnold, so I'm left with the last resort of the desperate genealogist, the cold phone call. It's going to be "Hi, I have this photograph" after all. Early on, I had looked at the list of fifteen Bloods in the St. Paul phone book with a feeling of helplessness, but now one name stands out, an E. C. Blood at 330 W. Annapolis--intriguingly close to where Hulda lived with Wallace and Evelyn. With a deep breath, I dial the number and prepare to try to explain my pursuit of Florence Blood without frightening the person on the other end of the line.

"Know her?! I hated her guts!" The name Florence Blood certainly rings a bell with the woman who answered the phone. "You, you did?" I stammer. "Wh--Why?" "I kept her mother for twenty-eight years. When I asked Florence to take her in, she threw me out of the house! When my husband died, she had to take her, but she put her in a nursing home the next year." Reeling, I grasp for the only solid information at hand: "Your husband? Could that be Wallace?" "Yes. Wallace."

Twenty years after the city directories had stopped listing her, ninety-year-old Evelyn Blood--Florence's sister-in-law, Wallace's widow--is living on Annapolis Avenue. Talking with her, I begin to piece together the story of a family feud. "It was like the Martins and the Coys," says Evelyn, referring to a 1940s ballad opera based on the feuding Hatfields and McCoys. Some of the tension had to do with caring for Hulda who, Evelyn tells me, lived to be 102. Whatever the cause, Evelyn says, "Nobody liked each other." For their part, Wallace and Evelyn saw the Jensens as "a real odd outfit." Relations deteriorated to such an extent that Florence didn't attend her brother's funeral. And, yes, Florence had died in about 1986, thirty years after I'd lost track of her.

Despite her bitterness toward her sister-in-law, Evelyn is being open and generous with me. I venture that the historical society has a wonderful photograph of Florence as a girl. Could I show it to her sometime? "I don't want to see her if she is eight years old." "Well, it shows her sitting by a piano," I say. "She didn't know how play the piano. She wasn't that smart!"

I end the conversation by asking whether Florence had children. She had three, I learn: Delores, Richard, and Carol. Evelyn recalls that the daughters moved away but thinks Richard still lives in town, although she hasn't said a word to him in more than a decade.

I thank Evelyn profusely, hang up, and try to get my bearings. In some ways, my search has succeeded: I have spoken to someone who actually knew Florence and, in fact, had strong feelings about her! Plainly, though, there must be another side to this story. One doesn't interview the Martins but not the Coys. In the Twin Cities phone books, I count twenty-five Richard Jensens. (Why couldn't Florence have married into the Jabberwocky family?!) Over the next two days, I call them all. In itself, the process turns out to be a heartening gauge of the civic fabric. Twenty-five times I tell my tale, and each time the person on the other end listens and responds politely, sympathetically, encouragingly. "No, that's not my mother. But best of luck!" "Sorry, that's not us. We're from Iowa." After leaving messages on several answering machines, I start getting calls back. "Hello, this is Richard Jensen." My heart leaps. "I'm calling to let you know that my mother was not named Florence. She was Alice"--or Gladys, or Doris. "Yes, my mother was named Florence," says Richard Jensen #14--but not, it turns out, the right Florence.

What more could I do to bring to life Florence Blood and that moment on February 25, 1912? Quite a lot, I suppose: mount a day-by-day newspaper microfilm search for Florence's obituary; enlist a piano expert to identify the model of Florence's instrument; search for the Presbyterian church that married Florence and Arnold; contact a genealogical society and enlist the aid of other Jensen buffs; consult the city's building records for 695 Ottawa Avenue; knock on doors in the Jensens' east side neighborhood; place an ad in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

But no, it seems time to call it quits. Somehow, having a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end is satisfying, even if the story follows a very different arc than I had expected. In itself, the unpredictability has been instructive. An image is not always what it seems. Your daughters don't always turn out as adorable as they start out--at least in the eyes of their sisters-in-law. Evidence is not always evidence. History is an improvised tune that deviates willy-nilly from the printed score.

These pointed reminders, though, have done nothing to dissipate the spark of feeling that Florence Blood first elicited in me. If anything, the search for Florence has deepened my sense of her as a living presence. In its own way, this sense of humanity offers the most valuable lesson of all. History isn't about building airtight narratives. It's about searching for human connection. And when you find it, you know it.

Reprinted with permission from the Fall 2000 issue of Minnesota History, vol. 57, no. 3.

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