A number of advertisements appeared in Carson City NV newspapers in 1878 appealing for information concerning the whereabouts of Samuel Carr.  Respondents were asked to contact the Editor of the Carson City Morning Appeal.  The inserts appeared to have been sponsored by the newspaper itself as they are presented among the news items rather than as public notices.

I have recently discovered a report in the Daily Appeal of 9 May 1878 recounting an interview with Eunice Carr.  Mrs Carr it seems was on a visit to Carson City pursuing an inaccurate sighting report of her absconding husband Samuel Murray Carr. The interviewing journalist appears to have been impressed with her determination and resilience and wrote a very supportive piece about her quest.  It also seems that he was successful in persuading his Editor to take up the cause on her behalf.

The portrayal of Eunice Carr in this article contradicts any suggestion that she was a helpless victim of Carr’s abandonment – a victim perhaps but by no means helpless. The journalist notes that she is supporting herself “in the business of a nurse” and has done so “for several years past.” She has never abandoned her hopes of being reunited with her children despite hearing nothing of them for the past 11 years. (In her 1877 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle she accepts that they will be greatly changed but believes that she will still know them when she sees them.) She has made the journey as a solo woman across the country from New London or perhaps from a base in Boston in response to sighting reports in California.  We know that she established herself in San Francisco where she is listed as a nurse in the street directories for 1878, 1879 and 1880.  She has travelled from San Francisco to Carson City in response to a further sighting report.  Eunice Carr appears in this account as still “greatly distressed” at the loss of her children but also as resourceful and determined and bold in her endeavours to find and be reconciled with them.

The text of the article runs as follows:

TOO TRUE STORY.

A greatly distressed lady told me today a story whose outline  I will present to the readers of the Morning Appeal. This lady is now, as she has been for several years past, engaged in the business of a nurse. Some time prior to the war of the rebellion she married a man named Samuel Murray Carr, of New London, New Hampshire. This man joined the Eleventh New Hampshire Volunteers, Col. Harrimon’s (afterwards (Gov. Harrimon’s) regiment. He went to the front as a Captain. His term of service was cut short by sickness. On or about the 11th of February, 1867, this man Carr left New London with his wife and three children. She has never seen him nor any one of them since that day! Carr, assuming the name of L. N. Carter, joining himself with a woman named Mary Jane Burpee, whose maiden name was Flanders, took all three of the children by stealth and all the moveable effects belonging to himself and wife and suddenly left New York for Aspinwall on the steamer “Henry Chauncey.” He had purchased a through ticket to Wellington, New Zealand. Diligent inquiry, immediately instituted, failed to find any clue to the wretched pair. The children thus kidnapped were a girl aged about 7 years and a half, and two brothers, younger than she. Their names are Lizzie Florence Carr, Fred Elmer Carr, and Frank Weston Carr. In the more than eleven years that have intervened since she was thus robbed of her children, this unfortunate lady, worse than widowed, has never heard one word from them. It has come to her, as a doubtful rumor, that they have been sent to a Catholic school or convent. One George E. Lane wrote a letter from San Francisco to New Hampshire in 1867, stating that he had, on the 21st of September of that year seen Carr, alias Carter, in the California Theater on the night of September 21. The last clue to this scoundrel, Carr, was obtained by way of Texas. It was said that he and Lane were there dealing faro. In Texas, as also in Colorado, Carr had got himself another alias, and he called himself by the appropriate and suggestive name of Steele. Now I have given these particulars to the readers of the Morning Appeal in order that a bare chance may be laid open for this distressed lady to learn something of the whereabouts of her children. Of course she has long since lost all love for her false and cruel husband; but her mother’s heart has never ceased to yearn for her offspring. My bretheren of the press may be instrumental in helping a heart-broken woman to recover her lost bairns by reproducing the substance of this narration. It is all too true.

The Daily Appeal, 09 May 1878, Thu, Page 2