The Archives of the Sigma Chi Fraternity

This just in: Lt. M. K. Schwenk’s first name was Milton, not Melton, as his obituary said.

In 1899.

His great-nephew, Dr. Daniel A. F. Schwenk, a retired dentist from Walpole, N.H., wrote to The Times last month, pointing out what he said were several errors in the 264-word obituary published on June 29, 1899.

“It’s a tad late” to bring them up, said Dr. Schwenk, who found the obituary online.

But it is never too late to set the record straight. If journalism is indeed the first rough draft of history, there is always time to revise, polish and perfect, even if pinning down the details about Lieutenant Schwenk after so many years turned out to be less than straightforward. In fact, a reporter’s attempts at fact-checking led to some head-scratching moments about seemingly basic elements of his life, such as when he entered the United States Naval Academy — and when he graduated.

Digging into the available records also turned up mistakes in other articles about the family, like the one The Times published on Oct. 26, 1922, about a divorce case that involved Lieutenant Schwenk’s daughter, Lillian.

That article said that her soon-to-be ex-husband’s name was Lieutenant Milton K. Spurgeon. In other papers — and in their wedding announcement in The Times 11 years earlier — he was identified as George Wray Spurgeon. The Times did not mention that Lillian Spurgeon had been having an affair with her best friend’s husband. Nor did The Times say that Lillian’s young daughter had tipped off the best friend, as The Pittsburgh Press did under the headline “How 5-Year-Old Catherine ‘Spilled the Beans’ For Momma.”

Lieutenant Schwenk was a Navy man who retired young, at age 39, two years after he was wounded in a bizarre shipboard episode in Central America. As one of his fraternity brothers wrote in the fraternity’s magazine, “He was a promising naval officer, but his career was cut short … by the unfortunate accident.” More about his fraternity connection in a moment, for that, too, seemed unusual, since the United States Naval Academy did not have fraternities when he attended.

Lieutenant Schwenk died in Manhattan of appendicitis. His obituary said that he had been working on plans for garbage-haulers for the New York City Sanitation Department.

His wife’s name was not mentioned, as was the custom in those days — someone writing a condolence note would have simply addressed it to “Mrs. Milton K. Schwenk.” Nor did her first name appear on his death certificate, although the document noted that he was married. Her name was Mary, according to the records at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y., where she was buried in 1904.

Now, about those errors.

The first was the most basic: His first name was wrong. The obituary gave it as Melton. Dr. Schwenk said that it was Milton, and he sent along a book about the family’s history that listed Lieutenant Schwenk as the fourth of seven children.

The obituary also said Lieutenant Schwenk’s family was from Schwenkville, Ga. Dr. Schwenk said the town was Schwenksville and was in Pennsylvania, not Georgia.

On first glance, those mistakes looked like careless typographical errors — each involved only one wrong letter, assuming that the abbreviation for Pennsylvania should have been “Pa.”

But they could not have been typos, because The Times was not the only New York newspaper that made the same errors. The New York Tribune published an almost identical obituary on the same day with the same mistakes.

The florid handwriting on Lieutenant Schwenk’s death certificate may have contributed to the mistake about his name. His name was written out twice on the document. Leonora A. Gidlund, the director of the city’s Municipal Archives, who looked it up, said that one “i” looked so much like an “e” that his name could easily have been misread as “Melton.”

The other mistake that Dr. Schwenk mentioned was clearly more than a typo, and more than the others, suggests that someone — perhaps the undertaker — provided the same inaccurate information to The Times and The Tribune. Both obituaries said that Lieutenant Schwenk’s father, Abraham, had immigrated to this country.

The book about the family says that Lieutenant Schwenk was indeed the son of Abraham Schwenk — Abraham S. Schwenk, born in Pennsylvania in 1816, long after the first Schwenks had arrived from Germany.

A check with the United States Naval Academy showed that there was another mistake that Dr. Schwenk did not spot: Lieutenant Schwenk’s time at Annapolis. Judy Campbell, a spokeswoman for the Naval Academy, said that Lieutenant Schwenk had entered in 1866 and graduated in 1873, not in 1863 and 1867, as the obituaries said.

She said the archives showed that he had been “turned back” at the end of his first year, meaning he was not promoted for academic reasons, “although he stood high in the class in conduct.” He was turned back again the following year.

When he finally graduated, seventh in his class, he was listed as a member of the Class of 1872. “We cannot account for this discrepancy,” Ms. Campbell wrote in an e-mail.

Another question about Lieutenant Schwenk’s college days arose when his name turned up on the membership roll of the Sigma Chi fraternity’s Kappa chapter at the University of Lewisburg, in Pennsylvania. When he died, Sigma Chi reprinted The New York Journal’s obituary in its quarterly magazine beneath this comment from one of his fraternity brothers: “Brother Schwenk was one of the best ‘Sigs’ who ever lived.”

Noah Phelps, the archivist of the Sigma Chi Foundation and director of the Sigma Chi Historical Initiative, found a photograph of Lieutenant Schwenk in the fraternity’s files. But he could not say why someone attending the Naval Academy had been allowed to join.

Neither could a spokesman for Bucknell University, as the University of Lewisburg has been known since 1886. The school has no record that Lieutenant Schwenk attended, although two younger brothers did.

The Navy was also at a loss to explain Lieutenant Schwenk’s connection to Sigma Chi, according to Dr. Timothy L. Francis, a Navy historian. “The Academy does not have fraternities,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Library of Congress

The Times and The Tribune could have said more about Lieutenant Schwenk in their obituaries, because The New York Sun and The New York Journal did. The Sun and The Journal covered Lieutenant Schwenk’s funeral, at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn — now Evergreens Cemetery, on Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn — four days after he died.

The Sun said that a chaplain from the Brooklyn Navy Yard officiated. The Journal said that “a squad of Marines fired a salute over an open grave” just after the flag-draped coffin had been lowered. (Lieutenant Schwenk’s body was moved to the Kensico Cemetery three months later.)

But the Journal’s article was not without mistakes. It said that he had graduated from Annapolis in 1871. It also said that Lieutenant Schwenk had headed an Arctic expedition. Actually, he only served on a ship sent to find Lt. Cmdr. George DeLong, who had disappeared on a mission to find a route from the Bering Strait to the North Pole. The bodies of DeLong and his crew were eventually found not by the Alliance, which had been hunting in Iceland and Norway, but in Siberia.

The Journal also touched on the episode in 1887 that appears to have all but ended Lieutenant Schwenk’s career. “Off the Isthmus of Panama he accidentally shot himself in the hand,” The Journal said.

The story that was passed down in the family was that Lieutenant Schwenk tripped and fell while serving on the U.S.S. Alert, and that his revolver went off.

But there were newspaper articles that suggested something sinister was going on. “Assassin on the Man-of-War Alert,” The New York Tribune declared.

The Alert sent a report from Costa Rica that said the episode had happened in the darkness before dawn, when Lieutenant Schwenk had been the officer of the watch. “In walking up and down the port side of the poop,” the report said, Lieutenant Schwenk “struck his foot against something.”

“It proved to be a revolver, which was at once discharged,” the report said. The bullet tore through his wrist.

The report said a line had been knotted around the trigger. The report blamed a sailor who had deserted.

“Wound serious,” the commander of the Alert telegraphed the Navy Department in Washington. The Navy convened an inquiry that took testimony from witnesses. The record, now in the National Archives, filled 65 pages.

Lieutenant Schwenk left the Navy in 1889 and moved to New York. He volunteered for duty during the Spanish-American War in 1898, and The Times reported that he had been ordered to the Vermont, a 2,633-ton storeship that had been docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard since the Civil War. Daniella Romano, a vice president of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, said the Vermont had served as a barracks for enlisted men because there was no housing in the yard.

He died the following year. “He was about to undergo an operation,” The New York Journal said, “and an ambulance was at the door to take him to St. Luke’s Hospital, where the surgeons were waiting. ‘Are you afraid?’ His wife leaned over his couch as she asked the question.

“‘Afraid? No. Never fear, I’ll soon be back to take care of you.’ These brave words were his dying speech.”