Austin woman devoted decades to uncovering detailed family history
By Gary Pettis of Mankato
In the 1850s, Nicolas Coad, who was in his 20s, left his home in southwestern England, setting his sights on America, and eventually settling in the fertile farmlands of southern Minnesota. Before he began raising crops and livestock, his American journey took a peculiar twist.
From New York City, he traveled on a ship around the Cape Horn, navigating between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and reaching port on the West Coast.
Coad joined the California Gold Rush when it seemed to slow down, and mass interest waned. He proved adept at prospecting for gold. He labored in California and Utah for 10 years as a miner, finding the adventure and wealth he likely initially sought.
Traveling eastward after his mining days ended, Coad married Frances Bailey from the Lake Crystal/Garden City farming country, a daughter of the Bailey family, whose father had also migrated from the same region in England as Coad. The Bailey farm sat next to the Stevens family farm, and Coad also happened to be a cousin to the Stevens, also from England. Fate had it: he purchased the property next to Steven’s farm, and from there, he, like others, broke sod from the Minnesota prairie.
Coad worked on the farm for more than 31 years. He died in 1923 and was reputed as a highly respected settler or old-timer.
In 2024, Nicolas Coad’s life story lives on, thanks to the family history research conducted by his great-granddaughter, Francie Heers of Austin. For years, Francie has kept a hand-written, detailed family tree from which she has organized her efforts. She has dug up information and materials like public records and vintage photographs about the countless figures from her family’s history and the family of her husband, Paul Heers. Francie’s detective work found past family members who were either swept away by history or went to great lengths to survive it. But she has treated each of their stories with thoroughness and thoughtfulness.
Francie began pursuing her passion for her family’s history when she was a young mother, working with her husband, Paul, on their family farm in the early 1950s. The administrative and basic office skills she acquired at Mankato Commercial College served her well as she organized materials and cataloged information about many of the critical ancestors she was curious about. Over time, she produced soft-bound, self-published family history books to share her knowledge with her relatives today.
At 93, she still wonders about the people in her family whose names her parents and grandparents mentioned when she grew up in the Lake Crystal public school system. Many of her close and extended ancestors are buried in the Garden City Cemetery, in Blue Earth County. A stroll through that cemetery raises questions about the connectivity between her broader family.
In today’s internet age, budding genealogists log into websites like Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org to access records within seconds. The popularity of genealogy DNA tests helps individuals prove or challenge their ethnicity based on previous beliefs, enabling them to connect with previously unknown relatives. The interest in discovering a family’s heritage and preserving its past grows. However, as a recorder of family history, Francie was ahead of her time.
Francie pieced together her family history before the advent of personal computers in the technology market. Armed with a typewriter, she needed to keep countless pieces of paper straight, often organizing them in three-ring binders.
She delved deeper into her family lineage, posing questions to her immediate family circle and boldly requesting photographs or original or copied records. As word spread about her passion for genealogy, people volunteered information and handed over materials to her.
With her knowledge of family history expanding, she organized her early record-keeping by the last and maiden names of her eight great-grandparents and her husband Paul’s eight grandparents. Subsequently, she researched the older generations preceding her great-grandparents, hopeful of uncovering her ancestral family origins.
Years ago, individuals like Francie could purchase hardbound books dedicated to ancestral surnames, such as Gilman or Heers. Alongside snippets of family history, these books included mailing lists that identified individuals with the same last names across the United States. Armed with these lists, Francie initiated her first mailing campaigns to potential relatives she had yet to meet. Surprisingly, many of these relatives responded to her initial letter and, in doing so, shared their own family narratives.
Husband Paul supported Francie’s boundless curiosity about her family’s history. Together, they traveled to Europe and visited countries such as England, Germany, and Sweden, where they met numerous distant cousins and returned with colorful tales to enrich Francie’s family history tales.
For more than 66 years, Francie accumulated countless items associated with ancestors, great-grandparents, grandparents, family, age peers, and some members of newer generations. When some people hear about Francie’s genealogy efforts, they imagine it must be contained in a handful of photo albums and scrapbooks. But her collections are vast and detailed, containing voluminous history. In the summer of 2023, Francie donated most of her collections to the Southern Minnesota Historical Center in the Memorial Library on the campus of Minnesota State University, Mankato. The trip to Mankato from Austin, where Francie lives, required a car and trailer filled with differently shaped tubs and totes. In 2024, the contents of these containers fit into 50 archival storage boxes. Copies of Francie’s original family tree drawing serve as a guide on how to organize the boxes.
In time, many of the contents, especially photographs, will be available online as interest goes beyond southern Minnesota. Researchers can visit the center, thumb through the materials, and find information to serve a project or a need for writing for public publication. Thus, Francie’s legacy will live on.
The writer of his article, Gary Pettis, is the first cousin, once removed, of Francie Heers. Her father was a brother to Gary’s grandfather.
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