Geneva Grave Tales: Mystery Girl Grows Up to be Title Abstractor

Frances Ferris Clark apparently didn’t rate a big tombstone when she died April 14, 1916. Possibly her daughter, Caroline, couldn’t afford a big stonecutter’s bill after paying to ship her mother’s body to Geneva from Hamilton, Ohio. But the fact that Caroline wanted to bury her mother in West Side Cemetery even though both of them had been living together in Hamilton testifies to their enduring love for Geneva.

Frances Ferris’ origins are something of a mystery today. Her obituary in the Geneva Republican states just that she arrived in Geneva in 1854 at age 9 and took up residence with the Noah Spalding family, which lived on a small farm on First Street between Hamilton and Peyton in 1848. Quite probably she was born in New England and belonged to a family with Colonial roots: the Daughters of the War of 1812 accepted Caroline as a member sometime before 1916.

Regardless of where she came from, Frances sunk deep roots into the city where she grew up. In 1866, she married John Gordon Clark, a Geneva resident who had served alongside his father in the Civil War. John Gordon might have been born into one of the two Clark families who lived on the West Side in 1848, according to a reconstructed tax assessment map. John Gordon operated his own title abstraction business in Geneva, while Frances kept house and raised Caroline, the couple’s only child.

When John Gordon died around the turn of the century, Frances refused to retire into widowhood. With Caroline, who had graduated from Geneva High School in 1890, she took over his business and ran it for at least 20 years. “It was said of Mrs. Clark that she was the most careful and efficient woman abstractor in the world,” her obituary stated.

Eventually Frances sold the business and moved into her daughter’s house in Hamilton, Ohio, where Caroline had relocated after marrying William Clark (presumably no relation). Frances must have turned a tidy profit on the sale: she was visiting friends in San Francisco at the end of March 1916 when she “was stricken with paralysis” and sent by train back to Hamilton to recover.

The obituary noted that her train actually passed through Geneva on its journey east. The Republican also offered its condolences to “Mrs. Clark’s many friends still in this city” and announced that her funeral would be held at the Unitarian church.

Though Frances’ grave lies overshadowed by larger memorials, her name and work still surface every time a property in downtown Geneva changes hands.