ARD BROWNING DISCOVERY

In the summer of 2000, I attended the ANA convention in Philadelphia. On August 9, I visited the Fourth Philadelphia Mint, the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. I could have spent the following day on the bourse floor shopping for coins. Instead, I joined Carl Herkowitz, his wife Barbara, and Scott Rubin on an adventure. We drove up a narrow winding road to the unincorporated village of Palm, Pennsylvania, looking for the burial place for Ard Browning.

I had commented in 1993 about my inability to do a biography of Browning. Very little was known of him before Herkowitz contributed an article to the July 1997 issue of The Asylum, Ard W. Browning Through a 1920 Looking Glass. Herkowitz was a colorful writer who could create a five-page article out of one census listing.

He later contributed a follow-up article in the Fall 2000 issue of The Asylum, Ard W. Browning Comes Home. In this he laid out some of the basic facts of the life of Browning.

Ard Browning was born in Chicago on January 12, 1869. He was the son of William H. Browning and Mary Virgil of Dayton, Ohio. Carl was unable to locate a birth certificate.

A 1905 New York census has Browning living as a lodger in Manhattan. In the 1910 Census, he was listed as a lodger and bookkeeper for a plumbing firm in New York.

Browning was employed as a stenographer at the Central Islip State Hospital for fifteen years from l918 to 1933.

Browning joined the ANA in February 1925 as member 2791 with an address of a P. O. Box in Central Islip, Long Island, New York.

It was also in 1925 when Browning's book, Early Quarter Dollars of the United States, was published by Wayte Raymond. He came from obscurity and returned to obscurity after publication. There has even been speculation that his name was made up to conceal the real author.

He died on May 24, 1933, at the age of 64. He is buried in the cemetery behind the Schwenkfelder Church in Palm Pennsylvania, next to his younger brother Charles V. Browning (1871-1957) and his wife, Annie. That's where we found him on August 10, 2000.

 

 

That's where the story stood until October 26, 2023, when I made the next big discovery. It takes a bit of an explanation. The FamilySearch site is a great source for biographical research. It includes copies of original records like census records.

Users of the site can link records to a family tree. These are not verified original documents and may be subject to error. This is true of the Browning discovery but I trust it is correct.

The later records for Ard W. Browning are linked to an 1880 Census listing for Ard W. Bolenbaugh, age eleven and born in Illinois. He is the son of William Harrison Bolenbaugh (1839-1906) listed as a house carpenter, and Mary N. Virgil Bolenbaugh (1844-1897). Also listed is a younger brother, Charles V. (1872- ), age eight. The Bolenbaugh names line up completely with the names listed for the Browning family.

William was a Civil War veteran. William and Mary Bolenbaugh remained married and are buried under the Bolenbaugh name in Galesburg, Kansas. A 1957 obituary for Charles V. Browning indicates that he was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but does not mention his parents. The mother and father are linked to several generations of ancestors. There is no Ard among those ancestors.

This is evidence that Ard changed his name and the reason why Carl Herkowitz could not find a birth certificate. It is curious that Ard and Charles both changed their names for reasons that remain a mystery.

One other Ard Browning appears in the FamilySearch records. He was born in January of 1836 and a Mississippi farmer in the 1900 Census. He had a son, J. S. Browning, born in 1869, the same year as Ard Bolenbaugh. There is no apparent connection between the two.

In 1917, the British House of Saxe-Coburn-Gotha was renamed as the House of Windsor to break ties with their German ancestry. Perhaps the Bolenbaugh name became uncomfortable and the sons preferred the more English name of Browning. I have been looking for answers for more than thirty years and those answers are being revealed slowly.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
ARD W. BROWNING ANA PILGRIMAGE PLANNED (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v03n32a04.html)

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