#52 Ancestors 2022 Week 5 Branching Out: The Bird Family

 The marriage of my 2X-great aunt, Mary Priscilla Scrivener, to Stephen Lee Bird led to the family branching out from Maryland to several different states including Pennsylvania, New York, and Indiana.

Mary Priscilla was the daughter of John Scrivener and Eliza Smith Boswell, the ninth of their twelve children, born in Anne Arundel County MD in 1835.  She married Stephen Lee Bird, the son of Jacob Wheeler Bird and Susanna Lee, on the 31st of October 1851 in Anne Arundel County. 

Stephen was a Baltimore merchant, specializing in fancy dry goods as shown in this ad from 1857.  

Mary Priscilla and Stephen lived in Irvington in Baltimore County, where their five children were born, several of whom moved away from Baltimore. Mary died in Baltimore in 1884 and her husband died the following year.  Both are buried in Loudon Park Cemetery. 

Adelaide "Addie" Lee, born in Baltimore in 1852, married Warrington Gilmore Smith, a miller's agent, at the Church of the Redeemer in Baltimore in 1885. They had a daughter, Adelaide Gilmore Smith, in 1886. Addie died just a few days after the birth of her daughter and is buried in Loudon Park near her parents. Warrington remarried in 1890 to Margaret Bowie Chichester.

William Lee Bird, the only son of Stephen and Mary, was born in Baltimore in 1854.  He married Amelia "Amie" Von Phul in Baltimore in 1879.  She was the daughter of Henry Von Phul and Esther Powell of Cincinnati OH. 

In 1881, William partnered with Franklin Weems to open a foreign fruit and fancy grocery business in Baltimore, which he ran until about 1888 when he is shown in the Baltimore City Directory. 

Amie Von Phul Bird

But sometime after that, the family moved. In 1892, William and his family were living in Brooklyn where he was selling insurance. His youngest daughter Esther was born in New York.  He died 23 August 1894 at St. Mary's Hospital in Brooklyn NY of alcoholism according to his death certificate. 

Amie and William had six daughters (Anna, Alice, Disney, Mary Louise, Amie, and Esther) and one son, William Lee Bird Jr. Amie and the children moved to Indiana after William's death. Amie died in Greensburg, Decatur County IN in 1921 and is buried in her family's plot at Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.  

Mary Thomas "Minnie" Bird was born in Baltimore 2 October 1855.  She did not marry.  She died in Baltimore 11 July 1939 and is buried in Loudon Park near her parents.

Katherine "Kate" Bird born in 1858, died as an infant in 1859.

Werner Heimendahl

Elizabeth Lee "Bessie" Bird was born in Baltimore MD 27 October 1860.  She married Werner Edward Heimendahl, a German musician, in Fairfax VA in 1895.  Heimendahl was a gifted composer, director, and music theorist who was a professor at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.  According to his obituary, he made his first public appearance as a violinist at the age of 8 and was a personal friend of such musical greats as Wagner and Liszt. Werner and Bessie had one daughter, Frederica Lee Heimendahl, born in Baltimore in 1897.  Werner died in Baltimore in 1910 after a fall on an icy sidewalk and is buried in Loudon Park.

Frederica married Henry May Gittings, a scion of the wealthy Gittings family of Baltimore, in 1924. They had one daughter, Rosalie May Gittings, in 1925. After Henry's death in 1931, Frederica married Alfred Coxe Gilpin in 1938 and moved to Philadelphia. 

Bessie Bird Heimendahl lived with her daughter in Pennsylvania until her death in 1944. She is buried in the family plot at Loudon Park Cemetery.