All My Ancestors

If you have tried to do research for Oklahoma from afar, you know how scarce online records for this place are.  Today I learned of two new to the internet resources.

The first is that early burial records for Fairlawn Cemetery here in Oklahoma City has gone online.  This is one of the oldest burial grounds in Oklahoma City, which if you recall was established overnight by the land run of 1889.  The images are of Fairlawn’s record books and they are not searchable.  However, it is fairly easy to browse them, and the benefit of being able to look at the book is that you actually get more information.  There is no public index for deaths in Oklahoma so this is a wonderful resource for central Oklahoma.

For now, the information begins in 1901.  My source tells me the earlier books have been scanned and will be up within a month or so.  We look forward to having access to these records for so many of Oklahoma City’s early citizens.

Secondly, I have just found marriage records for Oklahoma counties have been put up at FamilySearch.  As with many states, Oklahoma has no statewide index to marriages.  This database has images where available–I found an image of my parents’ 1950 marriage in Beaver County, including images of the index–one for the grooms and one for the brides.  However, I found only an index entry to what I believe is probably a 1909 marriage between my the great-great aunt and uncle in Alfalfa County. (My great-grandfather’s brother (Simon B. Unruh) married my great-grandmother’s sister (Josephine Buller)–I was hoping for the record of my great-grandparents 1904 marriage, but because of the pre-statehood date, I really believe it is only available in the church book.)

The entire state is not included–my understanding is that some counties declined to have their records filmed.  I hope you are one of the lucky ones!

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Pearl Jantz

daughter of Joseph H. Jantz and Helma Buller

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Today at work I was looking for an online listing of a tombstone for a family I assumed was of German from Russia descendancy. I was looking at the usual sites–Findagrave and Internment.net and the web page for the county on Oklahoma’s GenWeb page.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my great Aunt Edna. She was my maternal grandfather’s sister, the oldest child of that family. I was talking to her about the Karoma Cemetery in Goltry, Oklahoma where her parents and both sets of her grandparents, and a few of her great-grandparents are buried. (This is the cemetery I took my husband to early in my genealogy quest. We wrote down all the family names I knew and we came up with 86 people!) I told her that I’d found tombstones for all the family at Goltry but there was only a small funeral home marker on the grave of her Unruh grandparents who had died in 1929 and 1932.

She told me they’d be pretty unhappy to know there was even that much marking of their grave. I knew that side of the family were all Mennonites, but all Mennonites are not created equal. Benjamin John Unruh (1854-1929) and his wife Helena Nachtigal (1852-1932) were evidently from one of the more conservative sects. Aunt Edna said there had been no mirrors and no photographs in their home, and they would not approve of a tombstone to mark their grave. Then she grinned and said they were called the “fur-bearing Christians.” She said her grandfather Unruh always had a big long beard, also part of his religious beliefs. Aunt Edna’s description of them as “fur-bearing” still makes me smile.

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Today I was reading Kimberley Powell’s posting of the same title.

My first thought goes to the irksome Christopher Osborne. He’s the one that I can’t get beyond. He may be my immigrant ancestor, but I can’t find his origins so I don’t know for sure. I’ve written about him before, including what I found by going with the DNA test.

But I’d also like to talk to my 3rd great-grandmother, Elizabeth Landrum Cooper. I’d like to know more about her mother and father, and I also would like to talk to her about her losing 4 sons in the Civil War. Would knowing about her descendants and their admiration for her provide any comfort? What was the impetus for her and her family to pull up fairly deep roots in Tennessee and move to Texas in 1841?

And then there are those enigmatic Germans from Russia–the person from that line who I’d most like to talk to is probably my great-grandmother Matilda Amanda Buller Unruh. Yes, she’s the one who shot herself, and I do have some questions for her about that violent act. But I’d also like to know some more about her family and their journey from Russia to Philadelphia to Kansas to Oklahoma. She wasn’t on the original voyage, but her parents were and I guess I think talking to her would be the “most efficient” way to find out about her and her ancestors. And maybe knowing more about her descendants would bring her some peace as well.

The bottom line is there are too many I’d like to talk to. And while it’s not perfect, searching for details about their lives is the only way I know to converse with them. I’m determined that Christopher will give up his secrets.

We’ll see.

Do you have any ancestors you’d like to meet?

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One of the purposes of posting the stories from one’s families is to generate even more. And I’m thrilled to say that has happened.

Months after posting the pictures of my 4th great-grandparents I heard from a woman who had the wagon train story as part of her family lore. Her husband’s ancestor evidently purchased one of Dr. Ball’s farms in Iowa and they had handed down the story of Martha Jane’s rescue.

And after I posted the story of my great-grandmother’s suicide, I heard from my Cousin Kitty, whose mother Katie was one of my grandmother’s little sisters, who’d told Kitty a story about my grandmother’s mother-in-law. Neither Kitty nor I know the amount of truth in the story, as Kitty notes. But here’s the story she tells:

I just read your blog. My mother told me this story of your great-grand mother. My mom was only 11 when she died so I don’t know how accurate this is and may be you have been told this one too. When your grand parents were first married or just before:

Your great grand mother Unruh offered Lide (as a gift) as many chickens as she could kill and clean in a time period – don’t remember for sure but think it was a couple of hours. Thinking Lide was a “prissy” city girl her new mother-in-law was surprised when her chicken population was quite diminished at the end of the day.

For what it is worth that is the story I was told.

I don’t know why great-grandmother Matilda would have thought my grandmother Lida wouldn’t have known how to dress chickens. She was an oldest child of 12 children, was a “hired girl” in a neighborhood family, and her family, ironically enough, lived in a chicken coop–trust me, they were not city folk. They were poorer than church mice.

But the point is this is a story I’d never heard because the suicide overshadowed everthing. I laughed when I heard the story because I remembered the morning in South Dakota when I was probably about 10 or 11 when Grannie dragged me out of bed one morning to help her dress 10 chickens. She had 9 cleaned and dressed by the time I had 1 done. I guess I made a small contribution–I mainly remember the camaraderie and the lessons–we dressed them outside, going inside to heat the galvanized buckets of water and to singe off the pin feathers on her huge old O’Keefe & Merritt range.

But there was never any doubt in my family as to who was the master of the chicken and I guess she knew it at at early age.

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This is a picture of my great-grandmother. She’s always been an enigma to me. I wish I’d known her. Or maybe I should say I have some questions I wish I could ask her now.

She was one of ten children who were the first generation Americans born to immigrants from Russia. They were part of the German Mennonites who left in 1874 when the agreements their ancestors had made with Catherine the Great were being threatened. They brought their hard red wheat and came to Canada and the Great Plains–my family came to McPherson County, Kansas and then, later, to Woods County, Oklahoma.

And I’ve thought a great deal about posting this story. But I think I have to do it. I mean absolutely no disrespect. I believe that my family has been damaged by the secrets it has kept, though I certainly understand the reasons for wanting to keep those secrets.

One of the early memorable experiences I had in my genealogical adventures was going to the library to look for her obituary. I knew she had killed herself and I wanted to see what her obituary said. No one in my family talked very much about this incident, or at least they didn’t talk very loud about it, all of which I eventually understood, but I was determined to see what I could find out.

I knew she’d died in 1933, and that my mother, who was born in 1932, was of very little help. So I pulled out the Beaver County newspaper microfilm to see what I could find. I started looking for an obit sometime after the 24th of May in 1933. I was shocked when I didn’t find an obituary but a news story on front page of the newspaper. Today that wouldn’t surprise me, but at that time, it was quite a shock. I had to get up a take a little walk down the hall and then come back before I could make the copy. Here’s what I found:

It explained a lot.

It explained why my grandparents always traded in Perryton, Texas rather than Beaver, Oklahoma. It explained why my grandad was so nervous when I started the search and talked about wanting to read the Beaver newspapers. (I’d also found their names listed among the delinquent tax lists–who knows if those were correct. It was the depression, they lived a long way from the county seat, they “traded” in Texas (see comment above), who knows? I know my grandad was a bit of a fanatic when it came to bill paying and I didn’t bring it up–I can’t imagine how much shame it would have brought him.)

Anyway, back to the news story. My grandmother had told me about the previous attempt. She said her mother-in-law drank carbolic acid. She said Doc Smith came out to their house and said Matilda wouldn’t live through the night. He left a signed death certificate with them and said the only thing he knew to do was to feed her raw egg whites or yolks, I can’t remember which now, so my grandmother and my great-grandfather did that. My grandmother said there were holes in the linoleum floor where she threw up from the eggs. I can’t imagine what the acid must have done to her mouth, throat, esophagus and stomach. But she lived.

The other thing my grandmother told me was that my great-grandfather and my grandfather took my great-grandmother “all over the country” trying to get her help. I believe they must have taken her to Mayo Clinic–I recently found a picture of my grandad that has “Elmer at Rochester” written on the back with a date that would match. Research note: I need to see if I can get records from there regarding her being there. I don’t know where else they may have taken her.

I suspect she suffered from depression. I usually blame the Germans from Russia for this family trait, but I don’t know. I do believe that she suffered from some sort of chemical imbalance that resulted in a type of mental illness. You read about people who lived through the Dust Bowl as sometimes having mental issues. Living in Beaver County certainly counts as the Dust Bowl–my grandmother talked about scooping off the window sills and hanging wet sheets and towels over the windows. But I also believe depression is genetic in our family. My grandad used to work like a maniac to get through harvest and then just go to bed for days on end. And I believe it was my grandad who found his mother after she’d shot herself. Again, something we just couldn’t talk about, though my gran and I came pretty close, God bless her.

We know now that women don’t typically use guns to kill themselves, so great- grandmother Tillie, as she was known, was very, very determined. This far after the fact I can’t separate that act from her disease–all I know is that I can see the effect of the lack of good mental health care. What might have happened if she’d had access to some good medication?

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