All My Ancestors

Today Kim Powell at About.com:Genealogy addresses the “our name was changed at Ellis Island” myth in her most excellent column..  She address 4 of the common family myths in an earlier article entitled “Family Legends–Fact or Fiction?“–the 3 brothers, the Indian Princess, name change at Ellis Island, and the family inheritance gone awry.

Where I work, we see these myths on almost a daily basis.   We have one customer who has written us 6 times about his Indian great-grandmother.  No matter how we phrase it, we cannot convince him that the girl with the same name who is on the Dawes Rolls is in fact not his great-grandmother.  And another repeat customer is certain we can find out what happened to the inheritance her mother was “cheated out of” by an uncle who went for ministerial training.

One of my great-aunts insisted that her family name was originally “Unrau” instead of “Unruh” and that it was changed at Ellis Island.   At some point in time, the family name may very well have been “Unrau,” though I’ve found some fairly old church records from the time they spent in Russia that have “Unruh” recorded.  As for the Ellis Island myth, the family actually came in through Philadelphia.  The came at the end of 1874, almost 20 years before Ellis Island was opened in 1892.

I tend to believe that most family stories have a kernel of truth, but it’s my job to research and sort fact from fiction.  It’s one of the things I love most about doing this sort of research.   Our family did indeed immigrate, but the port they came in through was not even in operation at the time of their arrival.  This underscores the importance of doing good, basic research of the history of the time.  Contemporary records, such as the church records, are another means of determining what’s gotten changed through time in the the family story.

OK, so we’ve got the Carnival of Genealogy and now we have a Genealogy Parade. Bill West has challenged us to enter a band or a float. Since it’s a virtual project and I really don’t have to stuff kleenexes through chicken wire (trust me, I’ve worked on my share of actual floats!), I’m entering a float.

When I was growing up, I was part of the school band that marched every year in the annual celebration parade in August. This was at the top of the Texas panhandle, and it was HOT!! The only uniforms our band had were wool, but we were at least exempted from wearing the heavy jacket–we could wear a white shirt. The main street is part of state highway 83, and it is long. It was always a big deal. Imagine my chagrin when after college, I heard the husband of another hometown girl describe the parade as the “tractor parade.”

However, he was probably right. I only knew my little part of the parade, and we were having a great time. But being an agricultural area, there were lots of tractors–the implement dealerships used the occasion to showcase their new products and lots of the floats were also pulled by tractors.

So all that to say, my float has to have a tractor, and it also has to have wheat. The area where I grew up now raises other crops–maize, or milo, and soybeans. But in the 50s and 60s, most of the crops were wheat. And I also descend from the Germans from Russia who brought turkey red wheat to the Great Plains. So there’s gotta be wheat.

The music has to be old-fashioned country-western. One of my uncles played in a western-swing band–maybe we’ll use his recording as part of the music But Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb and Ray Price and Skeeter Davis are the people who are singing when I think of my family history. I also have relatives who are accomplished musicians in other genres, an organist who also installs and re-builds organs, for example, but I think the country-western respresents the most people.

That about covers it.

My only non-rural, non-Southern family originated in New York City. But even the descendants of that family ended up in Arkansas–he was a physician, but he also was a founding member of the Agricultural Society in Warren County, Iowa. So we have wheat and country music and a tractor. Not all that exciting but very representative. I suppose I could try to put in some fire and hail to liven things up–we did lose a wheat field and a truck one year to a fire and it was always touch and go as to whether we would be “hailed out.”

I’ll have to work on the weather issue. It might liven things up a bit.

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.

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?

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?

I think all families have stories about bathrooms and underwear. And they’re nearly always told with a grin.

Today we were leaving work and I stopped by the bathroom on the way out. I caught up with my colleagues at the elevator and of course comments ensued. But it reminded me to tell them about an assistant I used to have who always reminded me of how dangerous it was to get on the road without stopping by the bathroom first. I’m sure it would be problematic to have a wreck and suffer internal injuries with a full bladder, but somehow it just always seemed pretty low on my list of considerations as I got ready to get on I-35 for the 40 minute commute home.

Then, of course, one of the other colleagues related how her mother really had always told her and her sibs to have on clean underwear when they left the house. We never got that particular speech at home, unless we were going to the doctor, but it did remind me of my mom telling about taking her 2 aunts to visit their parents’ (and grandparents’) graves.

This would have been about a 4 hour trip. Sometime into the journey, Aunt Edna requested a bathroom stop, with which Mom promptly complied. When Mom noticed Aunt Lorene wasn’t getting out of the car, she asked her if she didn’t need to use the facilities.

“No,” came the reply, “I’m training my bladder.”

I don’t know if my mom laughed then, but I know she did many times later on, as did the rest of us.

This was so typical of Aunt Lorene. She was always training something. She got me started on a quilt of the state birds when I was about 10. I still have most of the pieces and I WILL finish it one of these days. (This project has been complicated by the fact that Aunt Lorene’s house burned with blocks for the states from Texas up through North Dakota). She taught me a how to make hospital corners and a great deal about cooking–she’d trained as an LVN in Albuquerque. She made lots of her gifts and I still like to make presents for others and treasure a handmade gift when it comes my way. She taught my mom a great deal about home decorating and making curtains and slip covers. She was a smart woman. But she did have that “training” gene. She was, after all, the sister to my grandfather who was referenced earlier as drilling holes before he drove in nails. Either one could fix or make almost anything, except peace between them.

Today I was reading through the index to the oral histories at the library in the Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society. There are lots of categories of oral histories, but I wanted to see what the holdings were for the Germans from Russia. My maternal grandfather’s family immigrated from Russia in 1874, from an area called Volhynia. They came with with the wave of Mennonites that came to escape having to serve in the Russian army. They first went to Kansas, but when the land opened up in Oklahoma Territory, they moved south to what is now Goltry in Alfalfa County.

I didn’t find any of my family members interviewed–didn’t really expect to. Most of the interviewees appeared to be from families from the Volga region. But I remember I used to ask my grandad why he didn’t speak German because both of his parents were the first generation born in the US. His older sister, my great-aunt Edna once showed me her school books from when she started school–they were in German. She said she only went to that school one year. I asked her why and she said the German schools were closed after that.

When I went back to check the dates, I found that was about the time of World War I. That’s what I saw today in the interviews–the effect of WW I on the Germans who settled in Oklahoma. Several of the families lived out by Shattuck, in Ellis County, Oklahoma. Shattuck isn’t too far from where I grew up in Ochiltree County, Texas, and, in fact, lots of folks went to Shattuck for medical care at Newman Clinic. My family from Beaver County, Oklahoma, talked about it a lot. But what caught my eye today were the number of people who said that at the time of the first World War, they were not welcome in Shattuck. They were viewed as “clannish” and were not allowed to speak German–the merchants didn’t want them there.

As a result, they went just over the state line to Higgins, Texas. Higgins is in Lipscomb County, and is a little town with an interesting history. Will Rogers worked there as a young man, for example. Seems like I remember some connection between Higgins and Dan Blocker, aka Hoss Cartwright, but I can’t remember or find the connection just now.

Anyway, what I read in the interviews made me think about the current brouhaha about immigrants–of course people stick with the people they know–no matter if they’re from Germany or Mexico or Oklahoma. And the anti-German sentiment probably accounts for the discontinuation of the German schools my aunt started in.

My husband and I lived in Shattuck for a little over a year about 1976–I remember there were lots of German names in the community. And the grocery store sold some wonderful homemade German meat pies called bierocks. yum. Wonder if they’ll be selling tamales in that grocery store in another 60 years or so?