All My Ancestors

This is Martha Jane’s aunt Mary, sister of her father John Washington Ball.

and here is another photo of her, which looks like it was taken about the same time.

I think she looks like her father’s daughter. And I also think these photos were taken around the same time. Mary died sometime between 1885 and 1890 at the age of 40 – 45. Her last child was born in 1885 and I don’t know if her death was related to childbirth.

Do you think she looks older here? I need lots more work in the styles and ways of earlier times as portrayed in photographs. I would have guessed she was at least 60 here, and I don’t know if it’s that her life was hard so she does look older or if the styles made women look older, or both.

Mary was likely born in Missouri, though I don’t know where. I believe her family went there from Clark County Indiana about 1842 and then was in Warren County Iowa by 1845. Some of the census records say she was born in Missouri, and I keep finding scraps of info about the “Dr. Ball family” who came to Warren County from Missouri. My initial searches of Wm. Green Ball’s land records did not indicate where he was in Missouri, but then again, when I was looking, I didn’t know he’d been there.

So that’s a lesson learned–I’ll have to go back now and look at those records again to see if there’s a hint of their location in Missouri. They might be in his Indiana records or they might be in the Iowa records–I just know that I’ve used land records before to track down the former residence of a person. Or to prove that the two men in separate counties are the same person. This happened with Dr. Ball himself–I did find records in Iowa of him having been in Montgomery County, Kansas. When these sorts of moves are in between census years and are stays of only 3-4 years, land records are one of the best ways to track them. Deeds will say something like, “Wm G. Ball of Benton County, Arkansas, formerly of this county. . .” in Montgomery County, or perhaps he’s sold the land after he left the county so it’s registered also in Benton County. You have to be a detective, and that’s the addictive part for me.

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Martha Jane Ball Cromwell’s grave is unmarked. I feel fortunate to know her resting place because of a trip I took to California in 19??. I took my parents out there to visit my brother who then lived in Fresno, but we also visited Auntie in Buena Park. As in any worthwhile family visit, we went to Olive Lawn to see her mother’s grave, my great-grandmother Roxy Grace Cromwell Anderton. Then we drove to Rosemead to see where Roxy Grace’s mother, Martha Jane Ball Cromwell was buried in Savannah Memorial Park, aka El Monte.

Martha Jane, born 1858 in Iowa, survived the attack on the wagon train that killed her father and uncle in 1862, went on to Nevada with her mother who shortly remarried and then died, and by 1870 was back in Iowa to be reared by her grandparents, William G. and Elizabeth Charlton Ball in Warren County, Iowa. She subsequently moved to Arkansas, married Daniel W. Cromwell, reared 8 children in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Sometime after Daniel’s death in 1925, Martha Jane went to California where some of her children were living. [Daniel is buried in a country cemetery named Blue Mound in Beaver County, Oklahoma. His grave is marked by the funeral home marker set in concrete. You can see it here.]

Her grave is not marked. No other family members are buried in this cemetery. I have since confirmed with the Southern California Genealogical Society that this is the site of Martha Jane’s burial. You can see the placement of her grave on a map I’ve posted with her entry on the family website at www.allmyancestors.com. And I’ve finally made a call to Valley Monument Company in neighboring San Gabriel to see what it would cost to put a marker on her grave. Here’s what I found–we can order a small (12″ x 24″) dark gray or black granite marker for $260. The cemetery’s setting fee 4 years ago was $100–the person I spoke with is checking to see if it’s gone up. So for probably less than $400, we can mark her grave. What do you think?

It’s been almost 70 years since Martha Jane died. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if by the 70^th anniversary of her death on 21 April 2008 we could have a marker in place? You can use Paypal to make a donation using the button below or I will most definitely accept personal checks, money orders and particularly cold, hard cash. I’ll keep a running total available so you can see how close we are to reaching the goal. Please, if you are one of Martha Jane’s descendants, consider helping with a small donation to mark Martha Jane’s resting place.

For more information about using Paypal (it’s free), check out this link.

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Remember the sons of Dr. and Mrs. Ball who were killed “crossing the plains?” And remember that Dr. and Mrs. Ball lived just south of Des Moines?

My #2 son has had a band of some ilk since junior high school. He’s now older–a college grad by 3 or 4 years, and he’s still in a band. Last weekend we celebrated the release of the band’s third cd, the first national release because they got signed (3 magic words). We are proud–we have watched these guys grow and struggle and work really hard and we have believed in them and supported them financially and emotionally.

Last Friday they set out on their tour. (Never mind that they booked themselves in places like Minnesota and Wisconsin and Kansas City and, yes, Fargo, North Dakota in February–and these guys college grads!). And yesterday, when I was away in a neighboring city at a church camp women’s retreat, something kept niggling in the back of my mind that I needed to call home. It was a busy day, and my cell phone is on the fritz, but when I finally called home about 9:00pm, I found out that the engine on their van had thrown a rod. In Des Moines.

So it just made me wonder if Des Moines is a cursed place for our family. Or if this is Dr. Ball’s way of letting me know that his spirit is still in the neighborhood or just what was going on. We explored all the options–apparently my vehicle will be going to Des Moines to enable the next portion of this adventure to proceed.

I’m praying, as the Balls must have, for safe travels for my son and for the sons of the other 8 parents involved in this venture.

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This is my 4th great-grandfather, William Green Ball.

Remember, he’s the one whose mother I finally found not too long ago. We’d always suspected his middle name came from his mother’s maiden name but didn’t know for sure. After all, he had brothers named Jacob Weaver Ball and James Robinson Ball, and those were perfectly good maiden names as well.

He died in Iowa in 1881, and I wish I knew more about when and where this photo was taken. I’ve never seen the original, but there seem to be some other family photos that were taken at the same time. On the 1880 census, he and Elizabeth, his wife, are living down in Benton County, Arkansas. He was born in New York City in 1808, went to Clark County, Indiana after the death of his father about 1818, and then on to Warren County, Iowa by 1848. I suspect he spent some time in Missouri before he went to Iowa but I haven’t dug that part out yet. I do have some indication that he was in Montgomery County, Kansas in between Iowa and Arkansas. He became a part of the community wherever he was, but he also didn’t seem hesitant to move on if he thought there were more opportunities elsewhere.

In Iowa he was a “country doctor,” but he was also one of the founding members of the agricultural society. On occasions he ran for a county office, and his home was sometimes the voting site for the precinct where he lived west of Indianola. His father had been a shipbuilder and both of his brothers remained in New York City. Two of his sons died “crossing the plains,” and he raised one of their daughters, Martha Jane, who was my grandmother’s grandmother. I feel fortunate to have a photo of him. It took me a long time to find it, and sure enough, it proved my theory that you have to track the daughters of the daughters of the daughters–she’s the one who had them. Thanks so much, Kel.

And here’s Grandmother Elizabeth Charlton Ball.

She was born in Tennessee, married in Indiana, and died in Iowa in October, just weeks after her husband. In fact, his obituary of September, 1881, says “he returned to Warren County about 4 weeks ago, with his aged wife, who it is expected will soon follow him to the long sleep.” Sure enough, they both “sleep” in Linn Grove Cemetery in Warren County, Iowa.

That tall marker just to the right of the flag pole is theirs. Her name is on one side and his is on the other.

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Through interlibrary loan, I ordered a roll of microfilm from Clark County, Indiana, hoping to find a “local” record of Anne Pamela Green Ball’s death that I’d found in the New York City newspaper.

I haven’t found one yet, but I did find some other information on the family I’ll post in another entry.

Much of the business of the day was printed in those early newspapers. I found lots of advertisements for merchants, minutes of the local medical society, ads for sheriff’s sales for back taxes, a few notices of runaway slaves, and then notices of spousal abandonment– usually the husband writing about the wife. As a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I remember seeing notices like “I will be responsible for no debts other than my own” in our small town local newspaper and asking my mom what they were for. She told me it usually meant the people were getting a divorce and this was part of the process.

The earlier matrimonial-distress notices I saw in the Indiana Intelligencer and Farmer’s Friend were much more descriptive. Here’s on from William W. Love, posted 1 January 1822.

Doesn’t he sound pained? I thought this was was a little more dramatic than the others I’d read, but what made it really different was what immediately followed:

I looked up “Replication” at Online Etymology Dictionary, and sure enough, it’s meaning has changed from how we use it most often today. It was formerly a legal term for a reply, “to answer to a legal charge.”

Mary is the only wife I’ve found who published a response. And she’s obviously not shy about answering each of William’s points. Now I’m curious about Mary. As far as I know, she wasn’t one of my relatives, but I’d be proud to be her descendant.

There is, by the way, in the paper about a month later, a statement that Mary has filed for divorce from William. Looks like Mary was indeed free to express her own opinion, despite William’s notice to the contrary.

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Here is the information I’ve extracted on Ball and Green families living in Baltimore according to the Baltimore City Directories I’ve been able to locate online.

It’s not telling me much that guides me to the “right” Green family yet. But it’s a start. My approach to solving this problem is to acquaint myself with the area–and this tells me how many Green families there were living in Baltimore around the time that Ann Pamela Green and William Ball married in 1797. For such a common name, this is not an overwhelming amount of persons.

I don’t know if any of these Ball men listed in 1796 are related. I do know that each of these names–William and John and Samuel–appear in later generations of Balls. But they are common names. I don’t think the William is “my” William–this “gold and silversmith” William appears in lots of records before and after this 1796 entry and I’m fairly certain “my” William moves right after his 1797 marriage to New York City.

Another task for finding the “right” Green family is to locate a map from this time period for the area.

And another note of information here–in my earlier years of genealogical work, I’m pretty sure I would have recorded the 1796 Robert Green as a lawyer rather than a sawyer. Here’s the way the entry looks in the original:

During this period of typography, note that an uppercase “S” looks more like a lowercase “L” through our 21st century eyes. You can look at the lowercase “S”, in “Fell’s Point” for example, when it comes at the end of the word, and it looks like we expect an “s” to look. But when it is the first letter in “St.” the abbreviation for Street, it looks like a lower case “F” or “L.”

Too tedious a lesson? Maybe, but when I’m working during this time period, in an urban setting, knowing a person’s occupations is sometimes the way to distinguish one person from another when their names are the same. Good ol’ William Ball the Shipbuilder, for example. So knowing a lawyer from a sawyer becomes an important distinction.

Now, what’s the deal with listing the Widow Green only as a widow? No first name, no occupation, just a last name and an address. ack! I’ve seen widows listed as “wid of [husband's name]” which is way more useful, despite it making women extensions of their husbands. But this particular year she’s just listed as widow with only her address as the distinguishing characteristic.

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I found a marriage for an Ann Pamela Green to a William Ball, date 11 Feb 1797, in Baltimore, Maryland–in the First Methodist Episcopal Church.

I first found it at the LDS website. Then I found it listed at the USGenWeb site for Maryland–minus the name of the church.

Is this her, the right Ann Pamela? I tend to believe it is–the time is right–I have the date of the birth of their first child as 1800. Their daughter Ann Pamela Ball Pettibone Sweetser’s 1880 account of her family history states that her mother and father were from Maryland and Scotland. I have not put much stock in this information as those early histories are notoriously unreliable. But this is the same history that states that her mother died in Clark County Indiana, and as posted just previously, this has turned out to be the case, based on the death notice in the New York Spectator.

Another bit of info that supports this hypothesis is that Ann Pamela Green Ball’s second son was named William Green Ball. He is “my” line. So does this mean Ann Pamela’s father’s name was William? Or is the William after his father and the Green after his maternal grandfather? Or both?

Much more work to do. But it feels like, for the first time in many many years, that a little progress is being made on this line.

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I am thrilled!

I’ve done genealogy for almost 20 years now, and the big finds are few and far between these days. But one came this week.

One of the first families I got interested in was my Ball line. My maternal grandmother used to tell me the story of her grandmother whose father had been killed while the family traveling via wagon train to California. She would tell me that story as we were driving across the prairie in South Dakota and I had no problem imagining it. I’ve written about documenting that story and when I took that family back a couple more generations, there I was in New York City.

What do I know about researching in New York City? It’s been along hard trip for someone who has most of her ancestors coming through the south and being landowner farmers. This New York City bunch were shipbuilders.

Sure enough, I documented William the shipbuilder–there’s a story about his burials on my genealogy website www.allmyancestors.com and in this post.

I think I’ve documented that his father was John, and that he also had a brother named John. But what was his wife’s name? William and wife named their first son Jacob Weaver Ball, so I hypothesized that perhaps her maiden name was Weaver and maybe her husband’s shipbuilding partner Jacob Weaver was her brother or father. William died in 1818 and some of his survivors went west to Clark County, Indiana. His son William G. Ball married Elizabeth Charlton there in 1828 and he supposedly studied there to be a doctor. Later I found a short biography of William G’s sister Ann Pamela who married in Delaware County, Ohio in 1824. That bio said she and her mother were in Clark County and that her mother had died there.

In 2000, Hubbo and I took a trip to Clark County. It convinced me of the importance of rivers in this country since it was right on the Ohio River, right across from Louisville, Kentucky. I searched diligently for signs of this family having been in Clark County, but I found very few. Another daughter got married there in 1820, Adeline Ball to James Linton, and that marriage record is there, as is William G. and Elizabeth’s. But that’s about it. I’m now sure that their mother is buried there but there is no sign of a marker that I could find. (It would probably be more accurate to say that I haven’t found a published record of her marker–I want to go back now that I think I know where in the county they were living, not to mention knowing her name.)

This week I put in my credit card number and subscribed to the new GenealogyBank database. I’d had some good luck with some of the holdings in this database, searching the old fashioned way. But being able to search early New York City newspapers electronically was just too tempting.

So I started searching on all the Ball family member’s names. And there she was–

In the October 26, 1821 issue of the New York Spectator, there was a short obituary. With her name. And her date, place and cause of death. And “consort of the late Wm. Ball, Esq. deceased” confirms that her husband is dead and she is the surviving spouse. (I consulted the Encyclopedia of Genealogy just to be sure.)

Y’know, I teach classes in doing genealogical research, I work in a place where the majority of what I do is respond to genealogical research questions, and I even do some “professional” genealogical work for others. It is more than embarrassing to admit that I’ve searched for years for a newspaper from Clark County Indiana that might have an account of Mrs. Ball’s death. Never once did I think it would be in a New York City newspaper. Maybe it would be more accurate to say I didn’t think I’d ever find anything about her in a New York City newspaper. I let my unfamiliarity with doing urban research and a common name keep me from doing what I should have known to do. After all, I’d found other “grandmothers’” obituaries in newspapers, and newspapers of where they’d formerly lived. What can I say? I hope the lesson is learned, but mostly I’m just grateful to finally have her name.

Now, what is her maiden name?

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Today I was reading Kimberly Powell’s column at About.com about the occupations of ancestors. As she says, I have lots and lots of farmers. One of my most oft-spoken phrases is “Give me one of those Southern Confederates, and I can track him from now to Tuesday,” which is pretty much the truth. Farmers had good land records, as a rule, and it really is all about the land. In North Carolina, as Jo White Linn says, you have to know the waterways–I think that’s true for most any state that has lots of creeks. But whatever the lay of the land, land meant tax revenue so there are records–usually even if the courthouse burned.

Anyway, I was thinking about my only non-Southern, non-rural line. Of course they started in New York City (you know, where the bad salsa comes from). At least that’s as far back as I can track them for now–late 1700s. There’s a story about old William Ball on the front page of my website at All My Ancestors–his burial site kept getting moved. Guess you could say he was an early victim of urban renewal.

He was a shipwright–I found him in the early city directories for New York City. I have to admit that I’m still a little overwhelmed by trying to track him down–I can’t tell from the addresses if he moved every year or so or if the address kept changing. From what I can tell, he lived and worked right down on the tip of Manhatten.

He evidently had a business–I found listings for Ball and Weaver, Shipbuilders. Jacob Weaver was his partner–I’ve spent many hours trying to track that man! Do you have any idea how many Jacob Weavers there were, especially in Pennsylvania? I haven’t come up with a way to sort them yet, or to even determine if one of them is the same guy who was in New York building ships. All I know is that he was a grocer for a year or two after his partner died and then he disappears. William and his wife named their first son Jacob Weaver Ball, so it makes me think there might be a family connection. (No, I don’t know Mrs. Ball’s name, either.)

Family lore says that the sons did stints in their father’s business. The son from whom I descend, William G., was only about 12 when his father died, so I suppose he may have spent some time there. He turned out to be a doctor–I don’t think he went to medical school. I believe he studied with a doctor in Clark County, Indiana, and did his training in that informal manner. But his oldest son, Simpson, is frequently listed on the census records as a cooper–did his doctor/father learn about shaping and bending wood into staves for buckets and barrels in his father’s shipyard?

Dr. Ball, though, despite his being a physician, was also a farmer. I can’t help but wonder where he learned to farm. When he ends up in Warren County, Iowa about 1848, he acquires a farm and is one of the founding members of the county agricultural society. A few summers ago Hubbo and I visited his land–it was great fun to look over the fields that he and his sons must have worked. They had soybeans planted on them that year–but they also adjoined a stand of trees along the creek that the Ball’s used for timber, I think.

This week I was working on a project for someone else and I came across “grizzly man” listed as the occupation. This, of course, conjured up all sorts of Grizzly Adams and even Bigfoot pictures in my head. But I looked closer and noticed that the man in question probably worked in a zinc mine.

So I did a little internet search for a mining dictionary, which I found here. A grizzly is evidently a screen or set of rollers through which ore is passed–for sort of a rudimentary first sort and breaking-up. So the guy who dumps the ore from the cars (underground) is called a “grizzly man.” Makes sense.

I don’t think I have any grizzly men (or women, for that matter) in my family. But it’s a colorfully named occupation. And I do have some colorful characters in the tree.

I’m trying to keep up the tradition.

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