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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At Thanksgiving, I was able to go through my brother’s pictures and I was able to find some of our childhood pics.  This one is from about 1957.  My fat little brother in this pic was born in December of 1956.  That’s our Dad holding him.  Check out his hat and the boots–we had to rent shoes for him to wear with his tuxedo for our wedding in many years later.  Looking back, I’m not sure why we thought he couldn’t wear his boots, but it was before the cowboy clothes craze hit.

Anyway, this is where I remember our Christmas tree being every year that we lived in this house on the farm. (Just the year before, we’d been living in town–I was never sure of the reason for the moves, but we went back and forth several times.)  I’d forgotten that Mom pinned the Christmas cards to the curtains–I’m sure she made those curtains and I’m sure she flocked the tree with that terrific fake spray snow.   The bureau was borrowed from my bedroom and I know Mom painted it to match our wallpaper.  I wish I remembered what was in some of those packages.  When we lived in this house, this was always where the tree was.   We always had a real tree until after I was in college.   I don’t remember helping to decorate it until we got a little older–by high school, my dad and I usually did the decorating.  I do remember that about this time, when I was in the first grade, I had to take an ornament to school and Mom helped me make a Santa out of a blown egg.  The face I drew on was a little cross-eyed, and Mom made a red hat trimmed with fake fur.  I had that ornament for years until one of my brothers stepped on Santa and crushed him.  I like to think he got coal in his stocking that year.

I’m still hoping to find the picture of our tree the year Mom decorated a tumbleweed.  We lived in the Texas panhandle and they were plentiful.  We all thought it was some sort of sacrilege, but perhaps she was just a Southwest decorator ahead of her time.

written for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories 2010

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Another farm auction was held out in the Texas panhandle today.

It was the auction of my uncle’s farm equipment.  He’s my dad’s suviving sibling and tomorrow is his 82nd birthday.  He’s farmed my grandparents’ place since their deaths in the ’80s.

This was his last year to farm and when the family LLC voted to sell the farm, the bid submitted by my brothers and me was 2nd highest.

So the farm has passed out of the family.  And my uncle’s equipment was sold today.  It was probably very cold and my cousin said her dad was going to be there no matter the weather.  That didn’t surprise me.  That generation didn’t shirk from hard situations.

Tracing my family back to the 1700s shows no profession (with one exception) other than farming.  One of my two brothers would have loved to have farmed but couldn’t make it work.  Our other brother and I are not farmers.  This creates a little dissonance for me–I’m not willing to try to make a living farming, but it makes me incredibly sad to know that the end of farming has come for this branch of my family.  I think it would have been of some comfort if we’d been able to keep the land in the family, but that was not to be either.

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Here are Randy’s instructions for this week, should we decide to accept.

1) How old is your father now, or how old would he be if he had lived? Divide this number by 4 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your “roulette number.”

September 4 of this month my dad would have turned 80.  Given the Osborne genes, he’d probably still be with us if it hadn’t been for an unfortunate meeting with a staph infection after a hospital stay.  So 80 divided by 4 is 20 and that’s my roulette number for this exercise.

2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ahnentafel. Who is that person?

Number 20 on my pedigree chart is my great, great grandfather, John B. Cooper.

[For those of you who read this blog and don't have the faintest what an ahnentafel is, don't worry.  All groups have their own lingo, and I suspect ahnentafel is one that is not all that familiar outside genealogy.  Here's the definition from the Encyclopedia of Genealogy, where you will learn that it translates to "ancestor table."    It is the listing of one's direct ancestors--no aunts, uncles, cousins--just parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.  These folks are numbered, with the males being assigned even numbers--their associated female, usually a wife, has odd number obtained by adding 1 to the male's number.  So on my chart, my dad's number is 2 and my mom's his 3 (2 + 1).  Typically, each male's father's number will be double his number--the numbers double for each generation, in other words.  My paternal grandfather's number is 4 and his wife's, my grandmother's is 5, etc., etc. ]

3) Tell us three facts about that person with the “roulette number.”

• John B. and 3 of his 4 brothers all died in the Civil War.  He survived Camp Douglas only to die at the end of the war, probably in the Battle of Atlanta.  They were the sons of Job Cooper and Elizabeth Landrum Cooper.
• John B. married Mary Mitchell, daughter of Ephraim Miles Mitchell and Rebecca Jones Mitchell sometime in 1857, probably in Shelby County, Texas.
• He mustered into the 18th Texas Cav, Co. A (Darnell’s)  in Johnson County, Texas on 15 Jan 1862.  The value of his equipment is listed as horse, $125, horse equipment, $20, gun $35, and pistol, $5.

4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook note or comment, or as a comment on this blog post.

Done!

5) If you do not have a person’s name for your “roulette number” then spin the wheel again – pick your mother, or yourself, a favorite aunt or cousin, or even your children!

Didn’t have to spin again. 

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The Good Earth: Family Ties to the Land

Written for the 73rd Carnival of Genealogy

Writing about this topic could fill a book for me.

As far back as I’ve traced on both sides and all branches of my family, there have been land-owners and farmers.  I learned very early what was meant by a section or a quarter section of land, that there was nearly always a road on the section line, and I learned that land is organized by counties.  I used to take my dad to the county courthouses with me to read the deeds–he taught me to cut through the standard legal language to the “meat.”  He could read the land descriptions which looked like hieroglyphics to me–I still have to be very deliberate when I’m reading and mapping them.

No one was a land baron, though I suspect a couple of great-great grandfathers had such dreams.  For example, John Osborne ((1808 NC – 1865 TN) bought a large amount of land at the intersection of two railroads in what became Humboldt in Gibson County, Tennessee.  My understanding is that this was not an all above-board transaction, but there is even now a part of that town that is called the Osborne Plat.   His son came to Texas and had 9 children, born in about 5 different counties– his letters that survive all refer to his search for land.

My grandfathers kept moving south and west as the nation developed and  land became available.  Everyone farmed.  Even the one professional man, who was born in New York City, William Green Ball (1806 NY – 1881 IA), country doctor, was a founding member of the Warren County Iowa agricultural society.  My third great-grandparents (2 sets of them) who immigrated to McPherson and Harvey Counties in Kansas in 1874 from Russia brought turkey red wheat with them from the steppes of the Ukraine and southern Russia.  I grew up in a town in Texas nicknamed the “Wheatheart of the Nation.”

My dad farmed, his dad farmed, and so did my maternal grandfather.  In fact, my paternal grandfather and uncles often planted and harvested a crop in the Texas panhandle, and then they loaded up their equipment and traveled 640 miles north up Highway 83 to South Dakota to harvest their crop there.  My maternal grandparents left the Dust Bowl scarred Oklahoma panhandle about 1952 for the very cheap land available in South Dakota, and my paternal relatives farmed part time up there as well.

All of the men in my family farmed and all of the women had gardens.  Later, my dad planted a garden out in the field near the irrigation well, but I well remember my mom starting lettuce and some of the more tender plants in hot boxes dad built.  My younger brother was recently recalling his “first job,” at age 7 or 8, hoeing our great-Aunt Eva’s garden– for $.75 per hour and all the candy he could eat.  Aunt Eva managed to make the desert bloom like a rose–the desert of the high plains of the Texas panhandle–she grew peonies and roses and dahlias and foxglove and water lilies in her ponds.  In her garden she grew tomatoes and green beans and cucumbers and onions and peppers and dill for canning.  She also wielded a mean hoe if a snake of any sort dared invade her domain.  Further north, in the even more desolate Oklahoma panhandle, another great aunt grew a garden so lush and beautiful, you knew it had to be tended by a person with very exacting standards.  Aunt Edna always brought us gallon (!) jars of her delicious dill pickles and her pickled, stuffed green peppers, tied with white cotton string.  Yum.  I know now that she learned her gardening and pickling skills from her German Mennonite family.  I’ve given it a try and I can do it, but it sure is a lot of work.

My dad died about 6 years ago.  His brother, my Uncle Ray, is still farming at age 80–just one more year, you know. Uncle Ray is the only one of my dad’s 7 siblings still living.  I suspect my agricultural heritage ends with that generation.  My other brother wanted very badly to farm, but he couldn’t make it pay enough to support his family.  His current place on the lake, though, is tended by a smaller version of his favorite John Deere tractor and his garden is luscious.  And I do have a cousin with a PhD in agronomy–his email “handle” is “Dr. Dirt.”

Every quarter or so, I get a newsletter from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), because I still am part owner of the 1/4 section my dad owned when he died, and am a part of the partnership that still “farms” our grandfather’s land in Texas.  It gives me a sense of pride to get that flyer–I know it is counted as junk mail and unnecessary government intrusion by many of my family members, but when it arrives in my urban mailbox, I like it.

I have my herb garden growing, and I have a couple of vegetable plants in my flower bed.  I started some hollyhocks on the back porch and will transplant them soon.  Every time I do that, I think of my family and how many generations we have worked the land.

“We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand” is part of the Oklahoma state song.  I hope my 6 generations of Texas relatives will forgive me for using it as a way to sum up this posting.

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My Aunt Dot died 9 September 2008.  She hadn’t been in good health for a very long time.  She was one of two of my dad’s 7 siblings who were still living and since my dad died in 2003, they became even dearer to me.

Aunt Dot and Uncle Jimmy never had children of their own so we nieces and nephews usually felt pretty special.  I still treasure the Fostoria crystal pieces she gave me for my wedding, and I spent time with them back in high school when I was at “camp” at Texas Tech in Lubbock.   One week was photography camp and the next week was yearbook camp–I didn’t see any sense in traveling the 4 hours it would take to get home and then back to Lubbock, so I spent the weekend with them.  They took me out for Mexican food and any other place I wanted to go.  I remember they had a combination washer-dryer–it was all in one machine, a front-loader of some sort.  Coming from my family of 5 I couldn’t believe that anyone could get along with just one machine for washing AND drying.

I’ve always loved this picture of them–possibly on their wedding day in 1950.  Uncle Jim always wore his hat at that angle and Aunt Dot always looked that dressed up (with later subtractions of corsage and hat).

Family members used to say I looked like Aunt Dot–I can certainly see the family resemblance.  I tend to blame my shortness and wideness on my German ancestry, but truth be told, I get some of it from the women in the Osborne family as well.

I always loved it when Aunt Dot and Uncle Jim came to Perryton for Thanksgiving or for Christmas.  They were often driving Uncle Jimmy’s very clean, very spiffy pickup.  (There were only working pickups in my life then–it’s what my dad and all the farmers drove–you didn’t just travel in them.)  Uncle Jim worked for Texas Tech and I’m pretty sure he could build or repair anything.  For a few years he would bring the clay pigeons and device he’d built to “throw” them, along with all the shotgun shells he’d reloaded.  His 6 brothers-in-law and various other relatives entertained themselves for hours out at the farm with his toys–Aunt Dot was in the kitchen bossing and cooking.  She had on her good clothes with an apron and she always smelled good.  I was in awe because she was so dressed up and also, she was one of the few women in my family who worked outside the home.

Part of my dealing with grief is to record the lives and deaths of my loved ones.  I went to www.findagrave.com to post Aunt Dot’s obituary only to find that it had already been posted.  I felt a little robbed, though ultimately I am grateful that there are so many generous folks out there who do that sort of thing in their area.

I didn’t get to attend her funeral–the only one of my dad’s siblings that I didn’t get to go to.  We were getting ready to go to Detroit and I just could not get away and I knew I couldn’t drive that far and back in one day–all the time I had if I really squeezed the calendar.

So now there is one.  My Uncle Ray, at 81, believes he’ll farm another year, because what else would he do?

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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!

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I’m writing this as a response to Bill West’s invitation to a Geneablogger’s Picnic.  Bill blogs at West in New England. 

He provided these questions as starters:

• *What food does your family serve at picnics?
• *Are there traditional foods or family recipes?
• *Is there one particular relative’s specialty you wish you could taste again or one perfect picnic day you wish you could go back and relive?

At the risk of being as welcome as a herd of ants at the picnic, I have to say there really weren’t any picnics in my family. 

I passed up writing on Miriam’s AnceStories2 prompt about summer because I didn’t want to be too negative.  Summer is my least favorite season because I don’t like being hot.  As my brother says, “We come from a family that doesn’t like to sweat.” 

I think the root of this “problem” derives from the part of the country we’re from and the fact that our livelihood came from working outdoors.  It is just too hot in the Texas panhandle to enjoy a meal out of doors.  Most years, it gets hot in April and stays hot through October.  Here’s picture I have of some of my family making the attempt–doesn’t it look like fun? 

NOT.

The woman in the white dress on the right is my grandmother Rachel Cooper Osborne.  I believe the man just behind her whose face is hidden may be my grandfather–I’m basing my guess on the way he’s wearing his hat.  It looks familiar.  The women are her sisters-in-law–married to my granddad’s brothers, some of whom are in the background nearer the cars. 

I just don’t think this looks like a good time.  I don’t know the circumstances of this gathering–my guess is that it’s near Pampa since that’s where these couples lived at this time in their marriages.  It looks like they’re maybe getting ready to roast some marshmallows–can’t believe this crew would roast weiners.  I don’t know, but you can see how the surroundings just aren’t conducive to picnicking.

My dad wasn’t really a grouch, and he didn’t insist on many things, but he was adamant about not eating out of doors.  His view was that he worked outside all day and when he came home for a meal, he did not want to go back outside.  And don’t get me started on what he thought about picnic fare such as wieners or bologna.  He was a farmer to the core–he didn’t mind being outside dawn to dusk to do that work, but he certainly didn’t want to have a meal out of doors.  And his view of meat definitely didn’t include anything other than the standard cuts of beef he’d learned from his stock-raising relatives and his own experience.  We always had beef in the freezer and that’s what we ate.  (Those were the days before we were aware of the health and social consequences of raising and eating so much beef.)  My mom, with her German roots, occasionally sneaked some bologna into the house but trust me, it never appeared on my dad’s plate.

So my theory is that this is an important piece of info to record about my family.  I think we didn’t picnic because we didn’t live in a part of the country where picnicking was a part of the culture–the outdoors were part of our work life but not a big part of our recreational life. 

We had long hot summers–the closest to a picnic we had was when my mom and I would take dinner to the field during wheat harvest.  That was usually early June and it was often 100 degrees–we had the hot meal we’d spent the morning cooking loaded into the trunk of the car, we parked into the wind so the car wouldn’t overheat, and the men came in on their combines and trucks and used the shade the vehicles cast to eat.  (My mom had on gloves and wore long sleeves because she was so fair-skinned.)  My Uncle Pete always requested my mom’s smothered steak and there was always a lot of iced tea.  We served it unsweetened though nearly everyone put in varyig degrees of sugar.  There was always dessert–usually a cake or a cobbler.  It was too hot for ice cream–it wouldn’t have lasted a minute under those circumstances.  The men were grateful for the break and the meal and they put their dirty dishes back into the trunk and we were off, back to the house to clean up.  No paper plates or plastic utensils for us.    And, in response to Bill’s prompts, I’d only like to repeat this experience if I could be with my family for the event. 

In South Dakota, my grandmother usually fixed lunch at home for Granddad to come in for–which he didn’t need much of because Gran had fixed eggs, fried potatoes and pork chops for breakfast.  His fields were closer to the house than my dad’s were back in Texas.  The one thing I remember, too, about my South Dakota grandmother is that she had sewed some layers of fabric around some quart jars that she used for a “thermos” when she took tea or water out to Granddad in the field.  I don’t remember any of us ever having any official ice chests or picnic baskets. 

It really was a different world. 

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Here’s my response to Miriam’s AnceStories2 prompt for this session, “The Doctor”  

*Who was your doctor or health practitioner when you were growing up?

When I was a child, my doctor was “Dr. Roy.” At that time, there were only 2 doctors in town, I think.  Dr. Kengle had his own hospital and had delivered me, but I found in the county history that he started practicing in 1929, so I think he was probably retired shortly after my birth.  I rdo emember being in that hospital as a child–one of my aunt’s worked there.  I don’t remember why I was there, I don’t think it was for an appointment.  But I remember that it was built more like house.  It had wooden floors.  The building was later the local USDA office–pretty appropriate for the small rural town I grew up in.

Dr. Roy’s hospital was on Main Street and was a 3-story building.  I can still smell what it was like.  One of my brothers now has an office in the basement of that building–a few weeks ago we went up to the first floor.  It really still looked the same–the pharmacy, the waiting room, the two halls that the receptionist sat in front of.  It was all office space now but I could still see the hospital there.  We rode up to the first floor on the elevator–probably the first one I’d ever seen as a child.  I remember going to visit my dad in that hospital–he’d had to have an appendectomy.  Hospital rules prevented me from visiting him, but for some reason, they brought him down on the elevator and I got to see him.  He was in a hospital bed and I don’t remember getting to be very close, but somehow just getting to see him and have him speak to me made me feel better.  It was amazing being in that space again–somewhere in the late 1960s the county built a new hospital on the outskirts of town–probably about the time Dr. Roy retired.

So with that move to a new hospital, we could no longer tell by driving down Main Street whether someone was having a baby.  On the top floor on the north end of the building was the labor and delivery room, according to my mom, who ought to have known.  If the lights were on, we knew there would soon be another citizen of our area.  It was one of those rituals we always went through when we drove down Main Street.

*How often did you go to the doctor? Every year for a check-up, or just when you were ill?

I remember going only when I was sick, which wasn’t very often, and when I had to get vaccinations for school.

*Did you have a lot of illnesses as a child? Or were you fairly healthy?

I must have been fairly healthy.  The only childhood illness I can remember having is the mumps in the second grade–I still have the “get well” cards my class made, drawn on that thick now-crumbling paper we used for art in our classrooms in those days.  Earlier, I know I also had the chickenpox and have the scars to prove it, but I don’t remember having them.  The family story is that I got them from my brother who’d been hospitalized with the croup–he came home with chickenpox.

*Did you have any injuries (broken bones) or surgeries? Have you ever had to be hospitalized?

Not as a child, and it’s a miracle, really.  My brother built tree houses and I would help him and then sort of take them over for my own purposes–usually reading.  And we would walk the top of the corrall fence, which was essentially a 2″ x 4″ several feet in the air.  Grandad’s barn was always fun, too–despite dire warnings, we climbed to the top of the hay bales stacked to the top of the barn.  And if he was in the field for the day, we ventured onto the roof of the barn.  I only had brothers and there were only boys in my neighborhood so playing rough was part of my growing up.  My brothers ended up with stitches but I managed to escape with neither stitches nor broken bones.

*What specialists did you have to see?

I never saw a specialist of any type and I don’t remember anyone else having to see one.  Except maybe my cousins might have seen one because they had to wear special shoes.  I’m not sure that as a child I was aware of specialists.

*Did you have to see an optometrist and/or wear glasses?

We always had health screenings at school.  I remember the year I couldn’t read the eye chart–I was in the fifth grade.  So off to Dr. Nowlin’s.  His son was in my class and the last time I checked, he was the town optometrist, following in his father’s footsteps.  My first glasses were pink cat frames.  So cool.

*Was going to the doctor a pleasant or unpleasant experience? Share both your most unpleasant and your favorite medical memories.

I was always scared when I had to go to the doctor.  Probably because it wasn’t any sort of regular event.  My most unpleasant childhood medical memory is getting my diphtheria vaccination.  Those were the years when they stuck your arm repeatedly and then an awful scab almost the size of a dime appeared.  I still remember thinking the nurse wasn’t ever going to stop sticking me and I find myself checking the upper arms of people about my age for a similar scar.

I don’t remember any particularly pleasant experiences, except I do have this vivid image of sitting in the waiting room at Dr. Roy’s hospital, reading magazines.  I think the floor was those green tiles of linoleum and the chairs were red vinyl–it was the 1950s after all.  In my mind, I think I remember reading an article about Twiggy, but she was hot in 1966 and that was kind of late for me to have been at that hospital.  I don’t know–I just remember there were always lots of interesting reads in the waiting room.  We always had the newspaper at home and we went to the library, but there weren’t the glossy magazines that were in the waiting room.  It was a peek into a world I didn’t have much access to.

*As an adult, how do your current medical experiences compare with those of your childhood?

Probably the biggest difference is that I try to do “preventative maintenance” with fairly regular visits to the doctor.  I’ve had surgeries, including knee replacements and a couple of C-sections, with two healthy sons to show for it.  I use health insurance which is not something my parents dealt with until I insisted.

*Do you still see the same doctor?

Dr. Roy is long deceased and I am long gone from my home town.  About 8 years ago, my physician of 30 years retired–much to my distress.    He certainly deserved some time with his family without the stress of his practice, but I felt pretty abandoned.  I shopped around until I found a good replacement–I was careful to look for one younger than me (easier and easier to do these days) so I don’t have to go through the retirement trauma again.  

*What kinds of health problems are prevalent in your family? Are there any genetic diseases of which your relatives should be made aware? How have you attempted to avoid these risks or diseases?

The two diseases I know of that may be genetic are arthritis and heart disease.  I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis at a fairly young age (35) when I weighed what I should.  I had to have my first knee replacement 20 years later–again, a bit young for such an intervention.  My weight is more than it should be, but I also know that my dad and many of his cousins had knee and/or hip replacements.  Both of their grandmothers were in wheel chairs because of arthritis.  When I first visited him for my knees, the osteopath asked me if there was some sort of cartilege disease in my family–there very well could be but as far as I know, it has never been diagnosed.

My paternal grandmother’s family has strokes and my paternal grandfather’s family has heart disease.  That said, my grandmother lived to be 83 (she did have a stroke a few years before her death) and my grandfather lived to be 93.  And my grandfather smoked unfiltered Old Gold cigarettes until his late 80s. 

And then there’s my mother who had breast cancer despite there being none in the family.  Her mother lived to be 92!

So I eat healthy and attempt to be active.  I’m not as active as I should be but I’m doing better since my knees no longer hurt.  My weight is more than it should be, but my “numbers” are good–no high blood pressure and decent cholesterol.  I cannot discount fate’s role in my health.

*Are there any doctors, surgeons, specialists, nurses or other health practitioners in your family, or in your ancestry?

I have a sister-in-law and a niece who are nurses–they do not currently practice, but it’s nice to have them available as “resources.”

My fourth great-grandfather was evidently a country doctor.  William Greene Ball was born about 1808 in New York City, trained for his medical career in Clark County, Indiana, and practiced for many years in Warren County, Iowa until his death in 1881.  He’s referred to in the family as “Dr. Ball.”    I have a couple of his “recipes” for various ailments.

*Are there any stories about certain medical problems or injuries, or about interactions with medical practitioners that have been handed down through the generations?

My dad was always proud to have had Dr. Denton Cooley (whom his staff called “LJ” for “Little Jesus”) do a valve replacement on his heart.  My mother’s family didn’t have much use for “doctoring.”  My grandad on that side had a pacemaker implanted and never went back to the doctor–until about 25 years later when the battery was apparently run down.  And the other family story is of “Ol Doc Smith” who came to the family home in Beaver County, Oklahoma, in the early 1930s when my great-grandmother drank carbolic acid.  He left a signed death certificate there because he didn’t think she’d live until morning but left instructions to try feeding her raw eggs to cause her to throw up the acid.  She lived through that episode but was untimately successful in taking her life.  I don’t know where Doc Smith was based, but I do know my grandparents lived several miles out in the middle of nowhere, so he must have truly been a country doctor who made house calls on those dusty roads.

Thank you again to Miriam Midkiff for her prompt down another memory lane.

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This post is written in respnse to Miriam Midkiff’s prompt at her AnceStories2 site.

I have bad teeth.

Who knows why?  My dad had terrible teeth–he said they were “chalky.”  Supposedly he didn’t assimilate calcium.  I don’t know who made that diagnosis but I do know he didn’t have good teeth.  He had dentures fairly early.  I don’t know if he went to the dentist as a child, but I doubt it.  He was one of 8 children, born in 1929, and reared in a fairly rural area.  I just don’t think he would have been taken to a dentist–there may not have even been one there.  (Isn’t it amazing what you don’t know about your own parents and hometown once you start this sort of a project?)

I do remember being taken to the dentist as a child.  I guess somehow my mom got the word that it was important–I happen to know her own mother didn’t go until she was well into her 70s.  And then the dentist pulled the wrong tooth!  I’m pretty sure she didn’t go back.  My aunt, another daughter of my grandmother who didn’t go to the dentist until she was 70+, was also an adult before she went to the dentist.  When he told her to spit, she didn’t realize she needed to lean over the little bowl at the side.  I’m sure that dentist wondered where this rube had come from.  My mom inherited her own mother’s good teeth but she didn’t pass them down to me. 

I do remember Mom taking my brother and I to the dentist’s office–it was across the street from the library–probably my most important landmark in my hometown.  I really don’t remember anything about the visit except that the dentist was a youngish family man, new to town, and his name was Kelso.  This would have been in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  I started school in 1956, so maybe I went as a part of getting ready for school, though I’m not all that sure he was there that early.  Perryton was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else–there were generations of families there and of course the “new dentist” was a novelty in town.

This prompt has been rolling around in my head since I first read it.  I had to think long and hard about how I wanted to address this posting.  The difficult part is that what I remember most about my dental history is that Dr. Kelso and his entire family–his wife and their two children–were killed in a plane crash.  I had somewhere in my memory that it happened during a holiday but I had no idea of a precise date. 

I started looking to see what I could find to document my faint memories.  Imagine my surprise when I found the 4 Kelso death certificates indexed as 27 November 1963 for the date of death–just 4 days after the JFK assassination.  No wonder the memory from that time is blurred and dark.  I was in the 7th grade in November 1963,  12 years old going on 13.  

I didn’t go back to the dentist until I was in high school, by which time I had 16 cavities!  I remember the dentist sounding pretty shocked when he delivered that news–as was I.  He filled those teeth, 4 at a time, over the next few months.  I ended up with a mouth full of silver fillings.  Shortly after that, I had to have my wisdom teeth out.  That same dentist took them out, two at a time, the first pair while I was still in high school and the last two after I was in college.  (As I recall, the reason mom didn’t take me there to begin with was that he was an older practitioner and had a reputation for being kind of rough.  But he did so much to preserve my teeth, I’ve always been grateful.  I don’t remember him being hard on my mouth–I think I had a fairly realistic understanding that filling 16 cavities wasn’t going to be a cake-walk.  I’d already been on too many of those.)  I remember steeling myself for having my wisdom teeth pulled, but it really wasn’t bad.  I begged my mom to let me go out the evening after I’d had the first 2 removed–I think I won that one and don’t remember any ill effects.

As it happens, I went to the dentist today and he reminded me that I have one more of those “old silver fillings.”  I started going to my current dentist, whom I love, in the mid 1980s–he was fresh out of dental school and he was amazed that those fillings from 1967 or so were still in there and doing as well as they were.  The worst tooth, one of my molars, which ended up with more filling than tooth, plus 3 others, now have crowns.  And there was a root canal or two along the way.  But one of those fillings, now 40+ years old, is still serving the purpose. 

I don’t mind going to the dentist–I guess I just made up my mind that I was going to spend lots of time in the dental chair and I might as well deal with it.  Nothing will ever be as bad as going to that dentist who found 16 cavities.  My dental hygienist today asked me if I drank coffee, and if I flossed.  I do drink coffee–lots of it, so my teeth show it.  And I try to floss but my crowns are so tight it usually breaks the floss.  So I brush religiously and use tartar control toothpaste and do pretty well.  I haven’t had a cavitiy in years–course, it’s sort of difficult to get cavities in those crowns.  Thank goodness.

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