All My Ancestors

This is another prompt of a sort that is making the rounds of genealogical blogs. It has to do with placing our families 100 years ago. See Lisa’s 100 Years in America that started it all. See the end of the comments of her post for additional blog posts.

Here’s a photo of part of my family that must have been taken about 1908.

Someone in my family identified the people in this photo–making allowances for corrections based on gender and age, I believe the people in this photo are, from the left, Eula Price Cromwell, Lillian Cromwell, Lida Lee Anderton (child, and my grandmother), Grace Cromwell Anderton (my great-grandmother), Daniel Webster Cromwell (my gggrandfather), Gordon B. “Jack” Cromwell, Martha Jane Ball Cromwell (my gggrandmother).

My grandmother was born in January of 1906 and this photo of her looks like she’s about 2 1/2. Uncle “Jack,” the other child in the photo, was supposedly born in March 1898–he certainly doesn’t look age 10, though I did find him listed as attending Poarch School in 1908. Grannie might be a bit older, but I thought this was an interesting picture of a century ago. I believe it was taken outside their home in the Poarch Community, Beckham County, Oklahoma. Statehood was in November 1907, so this is also just after Oklahoma became a state. The Daniel Cromwell family is enumerated in 1910 as living in the Poarch Community, Beckham County, Oklahoma. I know they were in this area by 1904 because they have a son, Burton, buried in the Poarch Cemetery in that county who died in April of that year.

It looks like Great-great Grandfather Daniel is holding a crutch. I know he had what was probably rheumatoid arthritis. I also found this blurb in the newspaper from the time that confirms his ailments:

from the Carter Express, (23 December 1910) “Mr. Cromwell is reported to be suffering very much yet. Being a cripple already with rheumatism we fear that this accident will go hard with him.”

They didn’t mince words in those days, did they?

And if you have relatives in Beckham County, let me recommend their USGenWeb page–it has lots of excellent transcriptions of early newspapers and county history. It provided lots of data for filling in between “just the facts” of dates, places and times.