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The Woman Who Signed with an X

Charlotte Matilda Hoffer Hollabaugh, 1828–1911

There is a mark in the pension file of George Washington Hollabaugh that appears again and again across two decades of correspondence with the Bureau of Pensions in Washington. It is not a signature. It is an X, carefully made, with Charlotte Hoffer Hollabaugh’s name written beside it in a clerk’s hand, attesting that the mark is hers, that she is the person making the claim.

But Charlotte Hollabaugh could write.

She had proved it nine months before George died. On February 4, 1862, while he was still alive and in camp at Columbus, Kentucky, she sat down and wrote him a letter. She described the winter — the cold, the children going without shoes, the road she watched from the window for a husband who was not coming up it. She closed it the way you close a letter when you do not know if you will see the person again: “I remain your humble, loving wife until death.” And she signed it, in her own hand: Charlotte Holabaugh.

The woman who could write her name signed government documents with an X for the next twenty-three years. Make of that what you will.

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Perry County to Ohio, 1833

Charlotte Matilda Hoffer was born on October 30, 1828, in Perry County, Pennsylvania, in the limestone hill country west of the Susquehanna. She was five years old when her family — Jacob Hoffer and Elizabeth Brubaker Hoffer — loaded what they could carry and came west to Ohio in 1833, part of the great movement of Pennsylvania Germans into the Ohio frontier. They settled in Seneca County, in a German-speaking community where the church was Lutheran, the home language was German, and the rhythms of life were the rhythms of farming.

She was confirmed in the Lutheran church on July 11, 1845. She married George Washington Hollabaugh on January 24, 1848, near Tiffin City in Seneca County. She was nineteen.

For the next fourteen years they had the ordinary life of Ohio farming people — children, work, seasons, the accumulation of small prosperities and small losses that constitutes a life lived close to the land. Then the war came.

The Letter She Wrote

George enlisted in the 57th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in late 1861. The regiment went south. By February 1862 he was at Camp Nelson in Columbus, Kentucky, and Charlotte was at home in Ohio with their children, pregnant with their last child, watching a winter go by without him.

She wrote him on February 4, 1862.

The letter tells you what the winter was. The children did not have shoes. The cold had come in and stayed. Charlotte — who could write, who put words on paper in her own hand — described it as “the lonesome winter I ever had.” She mentioned a “bad cold,” which anyone who knew her would understand. She was carrying George’s child and did not say so plainly; she said it the way farm people say things, sideways. She watched the road.

She closed: I remain your humble, loving wife until death. Charlotte Holabaugh.

George wrote back from Paducah on February 24. He wrote again from Memphis on July 27, 1862. By the July letter he had figured out what the bad cold meant. He made a gentle joke of it — he wrote that he truly hoped it would be a soldier — and he told her not to overwork herself. He sounded like a man who expected to come home.

He died one hundred and three days after he wrote that letter.

November 8, 1862

George Washington Hollabaugh died on November 8, 1862, at the Regimental Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Typhoid. He was thirty-six years old. The army buried him in Memphis, in what became the Mississippi River National Cemetery, in a grave marked UNKNOWN U.S. SOLDIER.

Charlotte was thirty-four years old. She had small children, a farm she could not work alone, and the letter he had written from Memphis, and she had to figure out what came next.

What came next was the Bureau of Pensions.

The Bureau of Pensions

A widow claiming a federal pension in 1862 had to prove the marriage, prove the service, prove the death, prove the death was service-related, and prove she had not remarried. She had to do this with documents, sworn statements, and corroboration from witnesses. The Bureau of Pensions was processing hundreds of thousands of claims and was structurally inclined toward skepticism.

Charlotte assembled what she needed. She got neighbors to swear to what needed swearing. She got the Lutheran church records into play. She got Colonel Americus V. Rice, who had commanded the 57th Ohio, to write a supporting affidavit. The colonel knew what his men had done and was willing to say so in writing to Washington.

And then she signed the pension documents with an X.

My cousin James Biddle, whose research into the Hollabaugh family started me on all of this, examined the pension file and noticed something. Charlotte used the X consistently across all official correspondence, year after year — but she had children who were approaching the cutoff age for dependent benefits, and the pension rules for dependent children were strict and worth fighting over. Jim noted that Charlotte may have been “playing games with the federal pension office” — using the mark strategically, keeping the bureaucracy off balance, making it harder for the Bureau to close her file or question her claims on procedural grounds.

Whether that was the plan or simply what happened, Charlotte got the pension. She kept it. She worked it for her children’s benefit as long as she could.

There is one more thing worth noting. By the time Charlotte was navigating the pension correspondence most intensively, Joseph Faber — Pappy — was her neighbor on the next farm road. He ran a general store, kept accounts, dealt with suppliers and orders and business correspondence. He was a witty man who understood how institutions work and how to handle them. I would bet the farm that he had a hand in how Charlotte managed her government transactions — helping compose the letters, framing the claims, knowing what to say and what to leave unclear. Charlotte brought the tenacity. Pappy likely brought the tactical wit. Between them, the Bureau of Pensions never got a good foothold.

She had written the letter to George in her own hand. She signed the government papers with an X. She knew the difference between the two kinds of writing, and she used each one where it would do the most good. She may not have been working alone.

The Years Between

By 1863 Charlotte had done the practical thing: she turned the farm over to a tenant farmer. The title stayed in her name, but the fields belonged in practice to another man’s hands. The rent came in modest and erratic; it kept starvation away, not worry.

She made up the difference with her hands. She sewed for neighbors, turned worn garments into usable ones, made bread that rose high and noodles cut fine and even. In a county where grief was common and cash was not, a woman who could bake properly never quite lacked for work.

On the next farm road lived Joseph and Christina Faber. Pappy had his own war behind him. He had served with the 62nd Ohio Infantry and come home intact, which was not nothing. He was a wagon maker by trade, the kind of craftsman whose work people depended on every time they hitched a team. He was also, in the way of small Ohio communities, simply there. He could fix a broken gate, show a boy how to handle a tool, talk to the Hollabaugh children as if their questions mattered.

Charlotte and Christina Faber were friends. Two women who knew about children and chores and waiting for news have no trouble finding common ground. There were borrowed recipes and traded patterns and the small conspiracies of neighbor women who know which husbands work too hard and which work too little. The Hollabaugh children, growing up without their father, found in Joseph a reliable, steady presence at the edge of their lives — not a replacement, not trying to be, but there.

1872

In 1872 grief came for Joseph as it had for Charlotte ten years earlier. Christina died, leaving him with his work, his house, and a silence where a partner had been.

By then everyone already knew that Charlotte and Joseph understood each other. They were not strangers meeting at a funeral. They were neighbors with a decade of shared favors and borrowed cups of sugar behind them. He had watched her stretch tenant payments and sewing money into a living. She had watched him turn his wagon shop into the kind of livelihood where the accounts balanced at the end of the year.

Charlotte and Joseph married on July 11, 1872.

The Hollabaugh children needed no convincing. They had been unofficially adopting him for years. When talk turned to the marriage it felt less like a surprise and more like the naming of something that had been growing all along.

In every story that came down through the King and Bell families, in everything my mother remembered hearing, he was Pappy — the name that stuck, the name that survived. He had been Pappy to the Hollabaugh children long before the marriage made it official. He filled the kitchen with stories from Ohio roads and the 62nd Ohio, carefully edited for young ears. He never treated George’s memory as a rival. He had chosen them, not just their mother, and they knew it.

The Entanglement

If the story ended there it would be a good story. It does not end there.

On August 11, 1881, Charlotte’s daughter Sarah Emily Hollabaugh married John J. Faber.

John J. Faber was Joseph’s son from his first marriage, to Christina — from before Christina died, before Joseph and Charlotte married, before any of this. He was Pappy’s boy.

Charlotte was simultaneously Joseph Faber’s wife and mother-in-law to his son by his first wife. Sarah Emily was simultaneously Charlotte’s daughter and Joseph’s daughter-in-law. The two families, already bound by neighborhood and friendship and the war and the years after, wove themselves into a single household story from which there was no separating the threads.

The Hollabaugh children had called Joseph “Pappy” for years. Now he was also their brother-in-law’s father. They were family in every direction.

Sugar Ridge Cemetery, 1911

Charlotte Matilda Hoffer Hollabaugh Faber died on August 21, 1911, in Leipsic, Putnam County, Ohio. She was eighty-two years old. She had outlived George by nearly fifty years and outlived Joseph — who died in 1912 — by less than a year.

She is buried at Sugar Ridge Cemetery. Her stone reads: Charlott Faber — Oct. 30, 1828, Aug. 21, 1911.

The name on the stone is Faber, not Hollabaugh. She had been Charlotte Faber for thirty-nine years when she died. It is the right name for the stone. But the letter she wrote on February 4, 1862 — the letter that proves she could write, that she chose her words carefully, that she watched the road and called the winter lonesome — she signed that one Charlotte Holabaugh.

She is my great-great-grandmother, through Louisa Hollabaugh, through Bertha McConnell King, through Lucille King, to me. She came to Ohio at five years old from Perry County, Pennsylvania. She wrote a letter to a man going to war. She signed government papers with an X for twenty-three years and never gave the Bureau of Pensions a good reason to close her file. She baked bread and cut noodles and kept a farm alive by renting it out. She married her neighbor. She watched her daughter marry her neighbor’s son.

She had no choice about most of what the war took from her. She made choices about everything else.

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Charlotte Matilda Hoffer Hollabaugh (1828–1911) was born in Perry County, Pennsylvania, and came to Seneca County, Ohio, in 1833. She married George Washington Hollabaugh on January 24, 1848. George served in the 57th Ohio Volunteer Infantry under Colonel Americus V. Rice and died November 8, 1862, at the Regimental Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He is buried in the Mississippi River National Cemetery. Charlotte obtained the widow’s pension and raised her children. She later married Joseph W. Faber of Leipsic, Ohio, on July 11, 1872. Joseph came from Württemberg, Germany; he had served in the 62nd Ohio Infantry and worked as a wagon and carriage maker in Putnam County. Charlotte’s daughter Sarah Emily Hollabaugh married Joseph’s son John J. Faber in 1881. Charlotte died August 21, 1911, and is buried at Sugar Ridge Cemetery. Her tombstone reads: Charlott Faber. Primary sources: James Biddle, Hollabaugh Family Genealogical History (compiled research, used with permission); the Charlotte-to-George letter dated February 4, 1862, and George’s letters of February 24 and July 27, 1862, preserved in family records.

George Hollabaugh’s story — his enlistment, service, and death at Memphis — is told in A Soldier’s Promise in the Our Histories section.