All My Ancestors

Read all the postings on this topic at Donna Pountkouski’s What’s Past is Prologue.

This week I was reading an Okahoma small town newspaper from about 1915, and in the “News About Town” column, the 2 local grocers seemed to be in competition for access to the local eggs and butter.  One of them used the term “cackleberries” for eggs and I’m pretty sure I laughed out loud.  My dad used that word for eggs, much to my mother’s chagrin.  He wasn’t born until 1929, so the term must have lasted longer than 1915, and gone beyond small town Oklahoma to small town Texas.  My dad also referred to getting around by walking as going via “Shank’s pony,” and using “Armstrong power steering” on our early cars and his farm equipment.  My favorite language use from my dad that I remember was when he used to sing “mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy….”  That was magical to me for some reason.

My maternal granddad was probably the most colorful user of language in the family, much of which isn’t appropriate for a family blog.  :-)  But one of his phrases was “Ned in the first reader.”  This phrase was used to convey simplicity and not always in a good way.  If someone was putting you down, they were trying to make you feel like “Ned,” for example.  The only other person I heard use this phrase was as far from my granddad as he could possibly be–one of my grad school professors.  In fact, this man was cause for another student and I recording his phrases in the backs of our notebooks–wish I’d kept them.  They were colorful!  Despite his advanced education, I’m pretty sure he and Granddad would have gotten along just fine, based on their language alone.

Other phrases I remember from my maternal grandfather:  He referred to eating ice cream, which he loved, as “cooling his belly,” as if this were one of the requirements for a healthy life.   He frequently asked us grandkids if we needed any “walking around money.”  We learned that one quick!  And he called their outdoor toilet “Ike.” 

I never quite got around to getting the explanation for that one.  He also referred to “cutting di-does”–I assume this came from the lathe cutting dadoes, but he used it to refer to someone slipping or driving recklessly or some such near out-of-control action.  He also talked about “tuning up” someone, or “dusting” them off as a way of talking about some sort of physical “corrective” action.

Last September I went to Ireland and I loved listening to the Irish talk, including one of our tour guides.  One of my favorites was the phrase used by our guide when she was discussing a strike of the airline workers.  They were protesting there not being enough flights going out of northern Ireland, as I recall.  Patricia had no sympathy for their protests, believing the issue had been settled and pronouncing it  “done and dusted.”

And then there’s the learning curve that occurs when two families unite by marriage.  I could not understand what my husband meant when he talked about putting his clothes onto racks (we called them hangers) or chewed a block of gum (they were sticks to my family).  And we were even from the same state!

I thought I’d take this “53rd Carnival of Genealogy, Carousel Edition” to invite interested folks to participate in this great project–

Do you have a World War I vet in your family who served from Oklahoma?  The Oklahoma Genealogical Society is working on an index to honor these persons.  Some records already exist, many of which were gathered for the Veteran’s Memorial at the state capital.  A list of those killed in action exists, but not a list of all those who served.

However, in my position as research coordinator at the OHS Research Library, I’ve received at least 3 requests for information about young men who served whose names I did not find in those files.  So I have 3 names I’ll be contributing.  Do you have any info to add?

If so, you can send it to: June Stone, 3601 NW 19th Street, Oklahoma City, OK 73107-2815, by e-mail to JuneCStone@aol.com or fax 942-0546. 

OR you can send it to me and I’ll pass it along to June.  I see her each week.

Requested information includes full name of veteran, date and place of birth, date and place of death, date and place of marriage, name of spouse, names of parents, rank, branch of service, medals earned, obituary, pictures and anything that would contribute to the veteran’s file.  Like Dick Eastman, I’d also recommend that you include the place of burial if you know it. 

I’m excited about this project–I’ve been through those files many times and lamented the shape they were in and wanted to work on making them more accessible.  Now it’s being done! 

As I’ve said here before, I grew up in the Texas panhandle. Needless to say, the region is not known for its recreational water spots.

Here’s my mom on an outing with her girlfriends–they’re wading–barely. This is about the extent of the water in the area of the panhandle I know.

There is a picture somewhere in my family of me, my brother and my aunt when we were about 5, 4, and 9 (respectively). We all have on swimming suits that are way too huge for us. I certainly don’t remember the occasion, but I do know that both my granddad and my uncle carried that photo for years. We were standing in the driveway of my South Dakota grandparents’ home–South Dakota was the only place we ever swam.

More frequently we fished.

There was the truly old-fashioned swimming hole down the road from my grandmother’s country store. We often spent entire afternoons in that lake–the Hilmer kids from next door to the store could usually be persuaded to come along, or vice versa, and we had a lot of fun there. (That’s Doug H. with my brother Thad in the photo above.)

Someone had rigged up a diving board–I, of course, was too chicken to jump. And if you got to close to the underside of the board, you were at risk of getting leeches. I suppose it was actually a fairly clean lake as it was spring-fed, but when I think back on it now, I’m surprised we survived. There was a very small island a few yards out–I wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to make it out there except floating in my inner-tube. And in those days, it really was the inner tube from a tire that we used. If we could wrangle a tube from a tractor tire, we’d hit the big time! There was gravel in the bottom of the lake so it really wasn’t a bad place to swim.

Here’s the best picture I have of someone in my family in a swimming suit:

It’s my mom, and I think this photo was taken on her honeymoon. Mom and Dad married 21 May 1950 in Beaver County, Oklahoma, and came to Oklahoma City for their honeymoon. I suspect that’s Lake Overholser in the background.

My mother had red hair and the palest skin you can imagine. She really really didn’t like water–she’d never learned to swim and it terrified her. It’s just as well my brothers and I did most of our swimming in the summers we spent with grandparents. She also sunburned through her clothes so this picture is pretty amazing. But it was her honeymoon, and she was very young, so I’m sure allowances can be made.

But I love this picture of her–I’d saved it as “Bathing Beauty Mom” in my files. I’m really surprised it survived her culling of the family pictures, but I’m really glad it did.

Written for the 49th Carnival of Genealogy.

It was a 1963 Chevrolet Impala SuperSport convertible, with a 409 engine. It was navy blue with a baby blue interior. I think the top was white.

I suppose as a female I shouldn’t have cared much about cars. But I did. I had a girlfriend whose brothers were proud of their mechanical skills and their restored antique cars, and I picked up some car knowledge from them. Plus this was the era of the original Mustang and the GTO, so there was a lot of car talk going around.

Additionally, I grew up in the Texas panhandle, where the highways are seemingly never-ending, disappearing off into those unreachable horizons, and vehicles are important. It goes without saying that the cars had to be powerful because things aren’t close together out there, and when you had to go to the neighboring town, like maybe sneaking off to see your boyfriend, you wanted to get there and back home in a reasonable amount of time. Amarillo, the nearest town of any size, was 2 hours away–we didn’t measure in miles, it was too depressing. Rather, we used time.

My grandad bought that car for my brother and I. I asked my brother once why he thought Grandad took us squirmy, loud kids fishing–understand that our grandad wasn’t the stereotypical warm, fuzzy grandpa–he swore like a sailor and he was probably more than a little bipolar. My brother said, “I think he liked us.” Leave it to my brother–a man of few words. So I guess Grandad bought us the car for the same reason.

I’ll never forget walking across the big round gravel driveway, out to the granary, and around to the back to see the car. There it sat out in the middle of the South Dakota prairie, a sort of enigmatic picture. The granary was ancient and held my great-grandfather’s carpentry tools. And then there was this gorgeous car. I still wasn’t clear on how I got so lucky, but I was willing to deal with the ambiguity.

I don’t remember how we got the car home to Texas. I guess we must have driven it all 640 miles home, but I don’t remember that as well as driving it back and forth to college. You couldn’t have a more impractical car than that one in this part of the world–it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Riding with the top down was almost an impossibility because you risked baking. Anytime it rained, of course, if you were driving at any speed, it leaked. But who cared? We were young and the car was fast.

My brother and I were driving home from college one night–actually early morning– through the back roads in rural Texas. From nowhere, there was a sheriff or a highway patrol–my brother got a ticket for going 121 mph! The thought of that gives me cold chills now, but at the time, we were pumped about beating our time driving home from school. That car could fly.

There are other special cars in my memory–the 1959 Bel Aire sedan I drove when I first got my drivers license at 14! And used it to break a guy’s ladder that was sticking out the back of his pickup the first time I drove it to the grocery store. I think this was the car that we had air-conditioning put in–it was a unit under the dash in the middle–it froze your shins if you were riding in the middle, but what a luxury we thought that was.

About 3 months after I went to college, Dad bought me a used Chevy of some sort–one time having to come pick me up at school and get me back somehow impressed on him that he needed me to have a car. When I graduated from college in 1973, he bought me a new car–the first new car I’d ever owned. I think he was a little disappointed that I wanted a Toyota Celica, but he got it for me since that’s what I wanted. My high school boy friend’s 1956 Olds 88 (the tales that car could tell!), my Grandad’s ‘48 Ford pickup I learned to drive in, with an in-the-floor shift, my brother’s first car that was a really a pick-up, a family Buick that kept catching on fire, my Uncle Larry’s’57 Chevy with Hank Williams songs on the radio, my grandmother’s circa 1954 purple Pontiac–all cars that are strong in my memory.

But they can’t top the Chevy SS convertible–I loved that car.

This version of the Carnival of Genealogy asks which 4 ancestors I would invite for dinner, whether we would meet in my time or theirs, and what I would tell them. I can’t hope for my version to be as clever as The Genealogue’s conversation over pizza rolls, but I’ve chosen 4 of my ancestors that I have some questions for. We’ll meet in “my” time and it probably won’t be all that enjoyable an event for them as I plan to quiz them hard!

Jonathan Osborne (c 1771 NC-1826 NC) 3rd great-grandfather
Jonathan’s father Christopher is my brickwall–the family brickwall for over 50 years. I just want to know where he came from and why he didn’t leave deeper tracks. My theory is that if I talk to Jonathan rather than his father Christopher I can find out more about the succeeding generation as well as the preceding one–conservation of resources, don’t y’know? Christopher

I want to know if Jonathan’s brother Christopher had children in his first marriage. I want to know why this Christopher’s mother-in-law, Mary Stutts Furr, disinherited her daughter, Catherine, his wife–did it have anything to do with Christopher’s first marriage or that in 1818 he moved to Alabama with other families to start Valley Creek Presbyterian Church in Dallas County, Alabama?

I want to know if Jonathan and Christopher had another sibling born after their father’s death in 1789–their father says something in his will about his belief that his wife might be pregnant. I also want to know who all his sisters married–there are names like Brown and Smith and Polk among Jonathan’s brothers-in-law and I want to know first names, marriage dates, and where this tribe ended up. Not too much to ask, do you think?

Delilah Jackson Landrum (1780 SC-1870 TX)4th great-grandmother
I’ve written about Delilah before. I first wanted to know here when I read my great Aunt Marge’s memoirs. She was writing about going to a youth camp where there were racial tensions. She was very much for accepting everyone, regardless of color or creed. She was discussing this with her father and he tells her, “You are very much like my Grandmother Delilah.” I found that statement fascinating because as far as I knew, her father, born and reared in Texas, did not have contact with his Grandmother Delilah who lived in Tennessee. On the other hand, she did spend her later years in East Texas with her youngest daughter, so perhaps he did know her. I love her self-possession when she refused to join the frenzy at the revival as I wrote about here. I have lots of questions about her Jackson family back in South Carolina, and I particularly want to know about the “Dutch fan” that her father left her in his 1817 Union County, South Carolina, will.

William Green Ball (1806 NYC-1881 IA) 4th great-grandfather

Dr. Ball is chosen as another bridge between generations. I definitely want to know more about his father–even though he was a young boy when his father died, he must know about his origins, and those of his mother. His parents were married in Baltimore, I think, in 1797, and then his father was a shipwright in New York City. After the death of his father, his mother and family moved to Clark County, Indiana and then some went on to Delaware County, Ohio. His sisters married well–one married twice, first to the district attorney and state congressman, and then to another attorney who was a national congressman. What was the basis of these sorts of alliances? And I also want to know what kind of medical training Dr. Ball went through–I believe he did that while he was living in Indiana, but who was his mentor and how did he come to that profession?

What can Dr. Ball tell me about his wife’s family? Why did they move from Tennessee to Indiana? Who was the minister, John M. Dickey, who appeared on so many of their records? How did his being an abolitionist fit in with their own beliefs?

It was Dr. Ball and his wife who reared their granddaughter Martha Jane after her father was killed enroute to “the West” and then her mother died shortly thereafter. How did they learn of their sons’ deaths? What were the circumstances under which those two sons were moving? Did Dr.and Mrs. Ball plan to join them in the west?

And, finally, what was the impetus for this man to move from New York City to Indiana to Missouri to Iowa to Kansas to Arkansas and then back to Iowa?

Sarah Ann Davis Anderton (1841 AL-1915 OK) Great-great grandmother
I don’t know very much about my Anderton and Davis lines from Alabama. There were about a zillion Anderton families in Marshall County and most of them were named John or James. I believe I have the right line back to a James Anderton, b. Virginia about 1760. This is not work I’ve done myself, but I believe it’s probably correct.

I don’t even have all of Sarah Ann and her husband James’ children all documented. Some of the older daughters stayed in Alabama when they came to Oklahoma after the Civil War. I always have questions about what makes a family move that far to an area that must be unfamiliar to them, not to mention what would possess them to move to the Oklahoma panhandle, aka “No Man’s Land.” Their granddaughter, my grandmother, told me that they did logging back in Alabama–they floated the logs down the river. That kind of work was certainly not a big draw here in Oklahoma. I suppose it was the opening of the land that drew them. They were still in Alabama on the 1900 census, but by 1910, they had “proved up” on their land in Beaver County, Oklahoma. I have their homestead files and they worked hard.

I found this picture of them in a county history, she’s on the left and he’s on the right. One reason she is dear to me is that she doesn’t appear to be “dainty.” And doesn’t he look like the stereotypical Civil War vet?

Sarah Ann is buried out in Blue Mound Cemetery in Beaver County, Oklahoma.

My grandmother told me she really wanted to go back to Alabama but she died before that could happen. Her husband James got his Civil War pension here in Oklahoma– he’d served in the artillery back in Alabama. He was approved and apparently went back to Alabama. Years ago, I sent for his death certificate only to be told that it could not be located. Then a few years ago, I was at Samford Institute in Birmingham, Alabama with some friends. The husband of that group was going out to do some research and I told him if her ran across a tombstone for James Anderton, to be sure to let me know. Amazingly enough, he did. He’s been my genealogical hero ever since. James evidently died in March 1918 and he’s buried in Cochran Cemetery.

Anyway, I have lots of questions for Sarah. Her mother’s maiden name was Campbell–another name I haven’t pursued due to the overwhelming amount of info and my lack of familiarity with records in that part of the country. Her father left all of his 1868 estate, 1450 acres, to his youngest son, Joseph Montgomery Davis, with the proviso that he care for the oldest son, William B. Davis. What were the circumstances that required this sort of care? The will did not stand and the estate was eventually equally divided among the widow and 8 children, including Sarah.

So those are the folks I want to interview, two from the maternal and two from the paternal. I want them to know how much I’ve enjoyed learning more about them and how much I honor their lives and their sacrifices. It’s not surprising that I’ve already written about some of these folks–their lives and times are the targets of some of my greatest curiosity.

I don’t know yet what we’ll have to eat, but I’ll definitely cook. I’ll bet those grandmothers could use the rest.

I’ve been struggling a bit with whether to continue this blog or not–I don’t want to get maudlin and repetitive with my family stories. In order to help generate topics, I’ve decided I’ll try participating in some of the questions and issues that other genealogical bloggers address.

My first effort in this vein is to write on the topic for this month’s Carnival of Genealogy–Here’s the explanation at the Creative Gene blog–”Living-relative connections made during your research processes and/or blog. Who found you or how did you find them? Were they helpful or did they send you on a wild goose chase for further information? How much and what kind of information did they share with you? What did you share with them? What kinds of contacts have you had… in person, via phone, online chat, email, snail mail, web casts?”

My husband’s father died when my husband was 18 months old. Both his sister and his brother are quite a bit older than him and established their own families early. Their mother never remarried but she and her young son moved from Texas, where all their family was, to Oklahoma where the oldest son was in college. It was the best thing for the boy who was to become my husband–he used to say he’d just be spitting tobacco and stirring up dust if he’d stayed in the little town where he was born. Here he could flourish in a larger church and school and begin what was to become a lifetime of schooling.

Anyway, after we had two sons of our own, we wanted to know more about his family. One of his aunts had done some research, but even as the novice I was then, I recognized that generations and people with the same names were mixed up. We knew his great-grandfather had come from Virginia to Texas just after the Civil War and that this great-grandfather had died in New Mexico–a “go west, young man” story if there ever was one. Somehow, we also knew that great-grandfather’s family had owned a place in Middlesex County,Virginia, named Corbin Hall.

I studied the map and decided to call Middlesex County to see what kind of records existed and if there was an historical or genealogical society that I could contact. Keep in mind that this was about 25 years ago, and while I usually took the safer and more thrifty step of writing a letter (with the always-recommended SASE), this time I decided to call. It looked like to me that the county seat was Urbanna and the best contact information I could find was for a town hall of some sort. I started explaining what I wanted to the woman who answered the phone, and you could have knocked me over with a feather when she told me not only was Corbin Hall still in existence, but that she’d grown up there. Her father had been the farm’s manager and now her brother lived there and served in that capacity.

She wasn’t a relative, but she offered to send me a photocopy of the area phone book with all the listings of my husband’s surname. It’s not a common one–Spindle–and I was shocked to see how many there were living in Essex and Caroline Counties, Viriginia.

My husband and I looked at that list for weeks. I guess I’d lost my nerve on cold calling, or else I was afraid I’d used up all my luck. One evening, it was time to put the boys to bed–a task usually performed by their dad. But this evening, I asked my husband if he would call someone from the list of names we’ d been sent. I told him I would put the boys to bed. We tried to choose from the list and finally, I just told him to pick a name and call. I went upstairs to wrestle the 2 and 5 year old into their beds.

My husband was still talking on the phone when I came back downstairs. Here’s how fortunate we were–he’d called the only Spindle family that had done any research or who really had any interest in their genealogy. Grace, the wife of the man who answered the phone, had traveled the counties and had done meticulous work–she was a retired English teacher. They were both in their late 70s and they still lived on land in a house that had been in the family since the 1700s, and it had a name–Bloomsbury. They were thrilled to hear from us.

I have a drawer full of letters that Grace wrote to me, sharing her research with us. She told me she was too old to learn the computer so those letters are written in her beautiful long-hand–page after page. She was methodical about answering my questions and she sent chart upon chart. My letters and charts went to her “hot” off my dot-matrix printer. She was a generous person and she took great pains to be sure that I got the “right” facts. There were generations of Johns and Mordecais and she helped me untangle them. She’d traced the land and she knew that one of the Johns had married a woman several years his senior, and she also knew the wife’s former husband’s name. She knew that neighbors married neighbors and that sometimes those neighbors were cousins. But she had them all straight and documented. Her research enabled some of us to enter the immigrant ancestor’s firstborn as a patriot in the Sons of the American Revolution.

A few years later, we traveled to Virginia to visit them in person–and we were fortunate enough to be able to return a few times more. My husband was overwhelmed when he set foot on that land–he didn’t expect to have such a strong reaction. We got to go down to Corbin Hall and visited with the family of the young woman from the town hall who helped us so much. We drove over to the Rappahannock River and looked at the place his family must have shipped their crops as well as received goods. William and Grace toured us through the country side introducing us to relatives and taking us to places my husband’s ancestors had owned. We visited Spindle Pond–owned by William’s twin brother, and looked at the mill wheel from the family’s mill.

When first William, and then Grace, died, we were very very sad and so grateful we’d found them. We felt fortunate indeed. Bloomsbury had to be sold out of the family, but what a treasure of memories remains. I don’t really expect to find other living relatives as dear as William and Grace were, and maybe part of what made that relationship so special was that it just seemed destined to be. Grace didn’t suffer fools gladly, but she took us in, shared her years of research, fed us the best blackberry cobbler I’ve ever eaten and let us prowl through her attic, both literally and figuratively. I’ll always be grateful–it’s a large part of the reason I’ve continued to look for family and their stories.

Now to find the pictures to include with this post.

Found ‘em!