The Life of Walter Brister
The June 4, 1880 U.S. Census shows that Walter Brister was then one year old, the son of John and Lucy Brister, and living in Carlisle, Kentucky. He had a sister, Magdalena, who was eight years older. (Click images to enlarge).
For more on the family, including additional relatives, see the 1870 census (click image to enlarge). Source: Ancestry.com.
By 1893, his father led the kid band in the hit Broadway musical “In Old Kentucky,” while Walter was the star, a coronet player and “the youngest bandmaster in the world.”
(Standing, fourth from the right.)
The show was such a success that the managers made a bronze statue of young Walter for Christmas of 1893. He was 14 and already immortalized. In Old Kentucky spawned dozens of imitators and was made into four movies. By WWI it was the most popular American play of all time. Walter Brister was the direct forerunner of Louis Armstrong, who joined a brass band in the reformatory he was sent to at age 9 in 1910, part of the fad for black kid bands that Old Kentucky and Brister had created.
In 1895 the Cincinnati City Directory listed J. H. (John Henry) Brister, music teacher, and the Brister Cornet Band. P. 249.
The family briefly moved to Covington, Kentucky just on the other side of the Ohio River, where they listed themselves in 1897. Both Maggie and Walter had their own listings, though at the same home.
By 1898 the family was back in Cincinnati, though there is no mention of Maggie. She eventually moved to Washington D.C. and then Kansas City, MO.
But by 1903, Brister senior was dead. Grace Brister listed herself as his widow. So what happened to Lucy, John Henry’s wife in the 1870 and 1880 censuses and the mother of Walter?