Georgia Who?

By Eilene Lyon

Late last year I shared with you the story of Ann Jenkins Ransom, who was William C. Ransom’s first wife. He had five wives and an unknown number of affairs. He did not always bother with the nicety of divorcing one wife before marrying another.

The wives are well-documented except Number Four. She has only been known to me and my many cousins as “Georgia.” This information comes from the 1900 census where we find them in Skagway, Alaska: “Ransom, Wm C…head…60…Physician” and “Georgia…wife…28…At home.”¹ Per the census, they arrived in Alaska in March 1900, and their home post office was Portland, Oregon.

In Skagway, William put out his shingle as a doctor and surgeon, specializing in treating women and children. An odd choice in a gold-rush-mining boomtown filled with grizzly prospectors. He also applied to be the local health inspector.

Certainly at his age, he would not be heading over White Pass to the Yukon Territory to pan for gold. By the time he arrived, Skagway was starting to look a bit like a real town and less like a collection of shacks.

William’s actual age in 1900 was 72, and Georgia was just 21 (as we shall see)! It’s known that Dr. Ransom was in Oregon, primarily in Portland, from 1894 to 1899, as there are many news reports establishing his whereabouts. In 1896, he was seen with a “lady,” as well as with his son, Dr. Harvey Ransom.²

This lady was not his current wife, Emily, who was at home in Michigan. Georgia would have been 17. It’s unlikely she was his escort, though it’s not impossible.* We do know that William left Michigan under a cloud, and Harvey soon joined him out west, where he also took a bride in Portland. Never mind that Harvey also had a wife and son in Michigan. Bigamy was a family tradition.

I’ve not found any legal marriage record for William and Georgia, but they did present themselves as husband and wife. When Georgia left him (no big surprise), William obtained a divorce by default in Skagway in November 1904. According to William, he married Georgia on March 20, 1899 and they came to Alaska about a month later. Around fall 1902 she went to Whitehorse and Dawson, Yukon, and never returned home. Instead, she went back to the Portland area.³

This was all I knew about William’s fourth marriage until I decided to run another full-text search for him in FamilySearch. This is now a regular function and can be accessed from the Search menu. You can also do these searches on select individual digitized reels of microfilm.

My search criteria were “William C Ransom” “W C Ransom” and “Wm C Ransom.” (These won’t catch everything, of course.) A surprising document appeared from an Oregon county that has never been associated with him, thus I would not have found it any other way. Thank you A.I. for this one.

The document is a deed recorded in Baker County, in eastern Oregon. The property is being conveyed from “Joseph Padrick Heirs to Oregon Commercial Company.” The indenture is dated September 10, 1901. The grantors listed include Joseph Padrick’s widowed mother, Mary G. Padrick, and all his siblings and their spouses.⁴

One of Joseph’s sisters turned out to be “Georgiana Ransome [sic]…and William C. Ransom, her husband, of Woodlawn, Oregon.” Woodlawn is a Portland suburb. In the 1899 Portland City Directory (the year he allegedly married Georgia) Dr. William C. Ransom was the only one by that name in the city.⁵ I was unable to locate Georgia in the directory under any surname for any year.

Georgiana Padrick was born in Baker County, Oregon, on August 14, 1879.⁶ Her parents were Daniel Padrick and Mary Georgia Rackerby, who wed in Baker County in 1865.⁷ The Padricks were a large family; eventually, there were ten children in all, with Georgiana being seventh in the lineup.

When Georgiana was just 15, she married Horatio W. Goodell, ten years her senior. They married in Weiser, Idaho, which may have been a bit closer to home than the county seat of Baker City.⁸ Or perhaps they eloped. What happened to the marriage is unknown. How did Georgia meet William in Portland? A complete mystery for now. Horace did not remarry until 1912.

After Georgia left William in Alaska, she returned to the Portland area. By 1904, her mother and several brothers were living in the city.⁹ (Her father had died when she was very young.) Georgia is not listed, but she may have been with her mother.

In March 1906, she married under her maiden name to a widowed engineer named William D. Kisbey, stating it was her second, not third, marriage.¹⁰ This relationship lasted the remainder of their lives together.

It was Kisbey’s second marriage and he had four sons by his first wife, Sarah Belle Baldwin. Belle died in 1903, and by strange coincidence she is buried in the same small cemetery as my mother, and my 2^nd great-grandparents (on my father’s side), in Tigard, Oregon.¹¹

Georgia and William Kisbey eventually relocated to Bakersfield, California. They are both buried there, but not in the same cemetery! He died in 1939 and she in 1956.¹²

After Kisbey’s death, 61-year-old Georgia “adopted” a 38-year-old man named Harry Kane, who had been a lodger in the Kisbey home since at least 1930.¹³ The pair opened a used-car dealership together in 1947.¹⁴ There must be a story there, because Harry apparently never married until after Georgia’s death.

Feature image: Broadway St. in Skagway, Alaska, 1898. (Wikimedia Commons)

Georgiana’s photo is on Find A Grave.

P.S. This post is dedicated to my late double-cousin, Mary Gill, descendant of William C. and Ann (Jenkins) Ransom. She would have loved to have known Georgia’s story.

*There are other news reports of a “Dr. and Mrs. W. C. Ransom” in Portland and Coquille City in 1897. Whoever this woman was, she apparently had some health issues. Another mystery.