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Note: !1. . Samuel had one dau. who was raised by his mother. From recollections of a niece, Mary Minerva Hogg VanDyke:
"Uncle Sam Hall, Ma's brother, had been staying with us but on the 4th of July he went up to Des Moines to see Uncle Will. They thought he went home but instead he went west and the folks didn't hear from him until Grandpa Hall got a letter from him wanting them to get him out of the Navy. He had joined the Navy so he could go to the Sandwich Islands (now called the Hawaiian Islands). Queen Lil was over in the U.S. on a visit and was going home. Uncle Sam thought it would be a good chance to see the Sandwich Islands, but they didn't even let the sailors go ashore. Grandpa got his release.
One night the folks heard someone come upstairs through the store. Pa wanted to know "who was there". He said it is "me". Pa told him to get into bed with the kids. Ma wanted to know who he was telling to get into bed with the kids. He said it was that bum of ours.
When I woke up in the morning there was a DIRTY red handkerchief on the floor. I picked it up by the corner and asked, kind of disgusted, "Whose is this?" When they told us that it was Uncle Sam's, it didn't take Will and I long to get downstairs to see him. He always was a pal of ours.
Mother told us that her Grandpa Hall was away from home much of the time, and to keep her children contented and out of mischief, Grandma gathered them around her and read to them. The family thus formed the good habit of reading.
Perhaps it was the tales of adventure or reading of the wonders of the world that gave her Uncle Sam Hall the urge to travel. He was never long in one place. He went around the world twice on a sailing ship. Once it wasn't of his choice. In 1875 he was shanghaied in San Francisco! When he came to, he was out on the high seas headed for China. That time it was two years before he set foot on American soil again. There was no Panama Canal at that time, and all ships had to sail around the tip of South America to get from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.
Uncle Sam would come home and then leave again, never telling his family where he was going, and they never knew when to expect him back. One day Uncle Sam showed up at his mother's door with a tiny baby about a week old in his arms. He told his mother that he had been living in Chicago for some time working around the docks on the Lake front, and the mother of this baby just "up and left him". To put his baby in a Foundling Home was unthinkable, so he got on the train and brought her to his mother. She not only gave the baby a home and cared for her, she also gave her, her own name, Minerva Hall.
Samuel Hall was a vagabond all his life. He never married. His last years were spent near Salem, Oregon, living alone in a small house on his nephew, Will Hogg's farm, helping with the fruit harvest and other chores. He died in 1936 at the age of 86."
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