When Margaret Mary Pike was born on 20 April 1908, in Monaca, Beaver, Pennsylvania, United States, her father, Charles Augusta Pike, was 26 and her mother, Ida May Kountz, was 23. She married Sidney Edward Martin on 15 December 1925. They were the parents of at least 4 sons. She lived in Bridgewater, Beaver, Pennsylvania, United States for about 10 years and North Rochester, Rochester Township, Beaver, Pennsylvania, United States in 1950. She died on 1 December 1994, in Rochester, Beaver, Pennsylvania, United States, at the age of 86.
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Table Of Contents
Table Of Contents
In the below spreadsheet...
In the below spreadsheet...
... any name followed by a plus sign and a number represents the number of descendants (rows below) of that person. This number is typically in error on the low side until / if I ever get every person's children and children's children etc... into the spreadsheet.
Underlined texts are hyperlinks...
Underlined texts are hyperlinks...
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Margaret Remembers:
Margaret Remembers:
How Margaret Meets Sidney
How Margaret Meets Sidney
This story is a cleaned up version of a transcript of Sid Jr's recording of his mother Margaret telling how she & Sid Sr first met.
Margaret:
I went to work at Phoenix Glass when I was 14, and I worked there until we got married. That was 1922 when I started there. When I met Dad on April 12th, 1925, I was only 16, you see. Oh, and of course, we didn't start going together right away. I knew Dad from April to December before we got married. I just met him that day. It wasn’t until after the 1st of May that we had our first date. (Now 17, her birthday is April 20th, 1908.) I remember we went to Rochester's Breakfast Store.
Sidney:
I met Mom in April. Our first date was around Easter. Yeah, Easter. Well, we used to walk from Monaca down to Vanport on Sundays. We’d walk across the bridge, down Bridgewater, and all the way to Vanport.
Margaret:
At the time, I worked at the factory, and Audrey and Joel lived in Bridgewater. I had walked over to Audrey's to go for a walk with her.
So, Audrey took me, and we went up to Ida Frederick's, which was still in Bridgewater, up the road. And, of course, Sid and the fellas would be standing at the corner. That’s what the fellas always did, no matter where you went.
Sid knew Ida and her brother then, you know. So he and Joel and the others would come up to Ida's because there were always enough girls going in and out of Ida's place.
That’s where I met Sid—at Ida’s. Sid had a car back then, you see. And Bridgewater wasn’t paved; it was just dirt roads at the time.
I'm named after both grandmothers...
I'm named after both grandmothers...
Mom's mother's name was Mary (1840-1915 Mary Ann Martin) and Dad's mothers'w name was Margaret. (1862-1930 Sarah Margaret Hixenbaugh)
- Mary Margaret Pike
As I transcribe the audio into text documents I can then easily do a search and find things I recall. Looking for the story of the sled ride I search "sled" and although it is not the story I am searching ...where Margaret speaks of sledding off the end of Becthal street and Sid is amazed asking "How did you do that?".. This does nevertheless cite the long forgotten road from the end of Becthal down to the old Coal tipple on Broadhead. I have included an old 1904-1909 map showing the path.
M: You could have went up here and went down the hill that we used to sled ride. Yeah, that road would go right down to the coal tipple. Oh, okay.
S: When you talk about the road you used to sled ride in, there used to be one that went down on an angle then?
M: Uh-huh. It went down right down over the hill. Yeah, but it didn't go straight down then, huh? Huh?
S: It didn't go straight down.
M: And then we would go down that and then walk across the railroad bridge of the tracks to get into Monaca.
S: Okay.
M: And if you went on down, you went down what would be Hood's Hill, which is the broadhead now.
M: Yeah. Look at there. And that's where Legoullon's coal tipple was. And there was a road.
Margaret Talks About Her Mom Meeting Her Dad
Margaret Talks About Her Mom Meeting Her Dad
Grandpa Koontz took his family out to Massachusetts to the sandwich grass place. See, Grandpa Koontz worked., Grandpa Koontz took Mom and them out to Massachusetts from Homestead. Grandpa Koontz is Mom's father.
And they went out to Massachusetts to work at the glass factory from Homestead.
She was, what, 21 when she was married, so she must have trusted about 19 when they went out there.
But she worked as a waitress in a boarding house out there. one of the sisters had a boarding house like the big homes that you lived in, one of the big ones, and they had rented rooms for the ones from Boston that came down for the summer.
And then they furnished the dinners for the ones, you know. And Grandpa and Mom would go out, go over there and help serve the meals when they needed the waitress, just like a waitress, you know. They weren't considered waitresses then.
They just came and helped serve the meals for the relations, you know. Okay. And then Mom met Dad.
Then they came back to Little Washington, PA to do glass works with it. And Dad came back down then and married Mom. Okay, and they got married down here In the St. John's Catholic Church. St. John's Catholic Church.
Grandpa's Mooseheart Jewelry Legacy
Grandpa's Mooseheart Jewelry Legacy
Well, before all that happened, my Grandpa Kountz had a patent for this special red heart design. As far as I know, the only red heart like that that's left is a unisex one.
They made these red hearts out of vermilion—it was so hard to get, almost like trying to get ruby material back then—and there was a hole right in the center of each one.
He designed this heart for the Mooseheart organization, you know, connected to the Loyal Order of Moose. I went out and stayed one summer with him, and every Saturday I'd have to take it up to order more of these red hearts that he'd bring home from the factory or the place.
There was a rigger that went around it, and then the jeweler would put a gold band around it to make it into a ring. He sold them through the Mooseheart for lockets. We all had them at one time, either as lockets or watch fobs.
And in that hole in the center, he'd either put a diamond or the Mooseheart signet inside. Grandpa had an awful good business going with that. He also had a patent for something tied in with Libby—well, just Libby at first. He had a good bit of money invested there. Then Libby went in with Owens, and it became Libby and Owens. Grandpa lost every bit of that money and everything he had, whatever it was invested in.
He didn't get anything back.
He lost everything. But even so, Grandpa would always come home on Friday night—it was payday—and he would never come home empty-handed. He always brought something for Grandma. And it wasn't costume jewelry back then; it was all real, good jewelry. He'd bring her beautiful pieces every time.
She'd always say to me, "Margaret, if you had your ears pierced, I'd give you these earrings. These diamond earrings would go to you." That's the reason I wanted Robin to have that stick pin. And that's a moonstone—Robin wrote and thanked me for the note about it. But anyway, he always brought her something every week.
One thing he really liked doing was that. So they were pretty well fixed when they were living in Sweden—I mean, they were comfortable. Well, when I came home, Mom sent for me to come back. She was going to have a baby at the end of May, and back then you didn't tell the children about things like that, you know.
So anyway, Dad met me at the train. Oh, I was so heartsick—they had to bring me home. I had to go to work. I had to go sign papers. I filled out the paperwork for the job when I was 14 that summer. I lived there with them.
And after that, we didn't see Grandma and Grandpa again until after we were married. Mom said she knew there was some trouble with Grandpa. They'd moved, and she knew what the trouble was. She wanted to see him.
Sid took the car, and we drove out there. It was a 15-hour drive—no real roadways or anything. It was terrible; nothing to get out there easily. To Toledo—oh yeah, that's where we went.
We'd gone before, anyway. When we got out there, we found them in an apartment, and they were really hard up. They didn't have anything. Mom was just sick about it.
We came back home, and Mom had Dad get Grandpa and Grandma to move to Manaca. They'd put all this money they'd had into this Mooseheart thing, you know. Grandpa would always say, "Well, we'll make it. If we don't have any money, we've got Moosehaven to go to when we get old enough." But Moosehaven didn't do anything for them. They didn't get a thing. It just took it, I guess.
So they ended up moving to the corner of 6th and Pennsylvania Avenue in Monaca, PA.
Andrew Carnegie, and Schwab... and Kountz?
Andrew Carnegie, and Schwab... and Kountz?
(note: some of the grand and great grand's do not make sense; It is just the way she told it.)
And Grandpa Kountz—and Andrew Carnegie, and Schwab, and all of them were boyhood friends growing up. I can remember so well how Grandpa Kountz wrote his autobiography because he always said, "Someday this is going to be important, and you'll want to know about these things." He kept insisting we'd be interested in how he made his money and what happened back then. But Mom threw it out. Well, she used the excuse that she didn't want to bother with it, and when the flood came—well, you know how it was. She never kept anything like that. He'd keep asking, "What's up there? They'd be interested to know what happened and how he made their money."
I don't know exactly where he learned the molding trade, but he learned it at Homestead. He had to learn it there. Grandpa Kountz's original home, where Mom was raised, is gone now—it's at the corner of Indiana, where there's a store there today. It used to be a big gray house. Mom had a picture of that house. In Monaca—on Indiana, Pennsylvania, on 9th Street. It was a big gray house, and that was the original Grandpa Kountz place where Mom grew up.
Yeah, and now they've got a store in there. That's where we'd go up to the store whenever it was built, right on that corner with Ron. Oh, you mean on 9th Street—9th and Indiana, I think it was. Used to be a big gray house there, set back with a fence around it, two blocks down on the main street.
Another thing he told me was that he had a horse. Yeah, and it bit her—Grandma Kountz's breast. He came from East Liverpool up. Grandpa Kountz used to go down to East Liverpool back then because there were some works or something down there. He rode down on the horse or with the buggy. And he told me about it. When he came up, they fed the horse in the buggy, and the horse just reached over and grabbed her breast. I don't know how bad it was, but he said it was bad. That was Grandma Kountz, his wife.
And Great-Grandma Pike (Nancy Jane Hursher 1828-1900) was blind. My mother said that she cooked on a coal stove and kept that coal stove locked(?)—she polished it and polished it. The kitchen was spotless; it never went dirty in that place. She was so particular. When she was younger, she came around the corner, and somebody with a bow and arrow—a kid shot the bow—and it hit her eye, that's how she went blind. I'm talking about Grandma Pike. (Sarah Margaret Hixenbaugh 1862-1930)
Since Dad was the youngest boy, and she was Catholic, she would always take Dad to church. Grandpa Pike (John W Pike 1829-1918) wasn't Catholic; he was Episcopalian, I think. And what kind of instrument did he play? The scyther—wait, the zither. Grandpa Kountz told me about it. Mom used to lay it on the bed when the girls and I were little, and on Sunday mornings we'd sit there and play that zither.
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