Now the center of various and sundry conspiracy theories, he was once a Fortean.
And because he is the subject of so much speculation, I am trying to be especially careful here. So this post is very long.
Morris Kethcum Jessup was born 2 March 1900 in Rockville, Indiana. I have not seen a birth certificate, but all the important sources agree on this point. (There may not be a birth certificate, either: one of the people to swear out an affidavit affirming Morris’s identity for a passport was the family doctor, who said his birth records had been destroyed by a fire.) Morris’s mother was the former Alice Edna Swaim. His father, George Washington Jessup, was a farmer. Both were native Hoosiers. George and Alice married around 1893; Morris was their first child. At the time of the 1900 census, Theodore Jessup, George’s brother, also lived with the family. There were also several other Swain families living very nearby. Two years later, Morris’s only sibling, Marjorie, was born. (There are some variations in the spelling.) According to the 1910 census, Theodore no longer lived with his brother and sister-in-law. Instead, there were a couple of hands, presumably a brother and sister, Jay Wells, aged 20, who was listed as divorced, and Lollie Wells, aged 18, listed as single. They were Hoosiers, too.
I do not have very much information on Jessup’s doings during the 1910s. According to a later recollection—he wrote this in 1955—Jessup got his first camera in 1913. It was a Brownie. One of the first rolls of films he used was spent taking pictures of a creek that was swollen that year. The Midwest received an unusual amount of rain, and there were large floods. These impressed themselves on his memory enough he would recall them four decades later. Photography would remain a passion, too, at least into the 1920s.
And because he is the subject of so much speculation, I am trying to be especially careful here. So this post is very long.
Morris Kethcum Jessup was born 2 March 1900 in Rockville, Indiana. I have not seen a birth certificate, but all the important sources agree on this point. (There may not be a birth certificate, either: one of the people to swear out an affidavit affirming Morris’s identity for a passport was the family doctor, who said his birth records had been destroyed by a fire.) Morris’s mother was the former Alice Edna Swaim. His father, George Washington Jessup, was a farmer. Both were native Hoosiers. George and Alice married around 1893; Morris was their first child. At the time of the 1900 census, Theodore Jessup, George’s brother, also lived with the family. There were also several other Swain families living very nearby. Two years later, Morris’s only sibling, Marjorie, was born. (There are some variations in the spelling.) According to the 1910 census, Theodore no longer lived with his brother and sister-in-law. Instead, there were a couple of hands, presumably a brother and sister, Jay Wells, aged 20, who was listed as divorced, and Lollie Wells, aged 18, listed as single. They were Hoosiers, too.
I do not have very much information on Jessup’s doings during the 1910s. According to a later recollection—he wrote this in 1955—Jessup got his first camera in 1913. It was a Brownie. One of the first rolls of films he used was spent taking pictures of a creek that was swollen that year. The Midwest received an unusual amount of rain, and there were large floods. These impressed themselves on his memory enough he would recall them four decades later. Photography would remain a passion, too, at least into the 1920s.