All My Ancestors

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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Directions for the 65th Carnival of Genealogy read:

The Happy Dance. The Joy of Genealogy. Almost everyone has experienced it. Tell us about the first time, or the last time, or the best time. What event, what document, what special find has caused you to stand up and cheer, to go crazy with joy?

One of the downsides of blogging and having to come up with topics for yourself is that once you decide to participate in the various memes or carnivals, you’ve often already written a post about that particular topic.  But I’m going to assume no one has read previous posts, or at least does not remember them. 

Searching for female ancestors names can be problematic.  Early in my searching I found a 3rd great-grandfather with his children in Anderson County, Texas in 1850.  He is listed as a widower.  Who was his wife, the mother of those children?  Some of the children were listed as born in Mississippi, so a search of the 1840 census showed William J. Duval living in Pontotoc County, Mississippi.  Of course this didn’t provide me with anyone’s name but William’s as the head of the household, so I started searching cemeteries and what records I could find for Pontotoc County.  I found lots of Duvals, who had apparently gone to Mississippi from Virginia via Tennessee, including William’s brother John A. I wondered if William’s wife’s name was Ann — the name of William’s only daughter.  I found the death of John A.’s wife Joanna Moon.  I ordered William J.’s will on the off-chance it might provide the name of his wife.  But I just didn’t have a clue about the name of my own great-grandmother, or at least a worthwhile clue.

I don’t remember what caused me to pick up the Inventory of the Church Archives of Virginia. It may have been that I was looking for information about my husband’s Virginia Baptist family–I just don’t remember.  (This is a WPA project–how many times I’ve been grateful for the work done by those folks!)  What I do remember is finding an obituary indexed from the Religious Herald, the Baptist newspaper of the day, and there was an entry for Duval, Catherine Bibb who died in 1847.  Wow.  Could this be her?  I remember doing a happy dance in the library those 20+ years ago.  That index led me not only to her obituary, it provided me with her maiden name.  In fact, it provided me with her entire name which I had not previously had.

Another happy dance involves another great-grandmother, this time a 5th great.  My finding Catherine Bibb Waddy/Woody Duval was before the Internet.  I had to write for that obituary from the Baptist Archives in Richmond.  And pay big bucks for it to be copied.  And wait. and wait.  But it was worth it when it finally arrived.

I’d looked for my Dr. William G. Ball’s mother’s name for over 20 years.  I was finally able to track down his siblings–a distant cousin helped me know he had brothers named Jacob Weaver and James Robinson Ball.  I finally discerned that their father William Ball died in New York City in 1818, and that the family left for Indiana and Ohio shortly thereafter.  (I still haven’t discovered the reason.)  My persistence paid off in providing the names of the daughters in this family–Isabella who married Joseph L. Webb before they left NYC and later Charles Pickett in Ohio, Adeline who married first James Linton (in Indiana) and then Chester B. Campbell (in Ohio), and Ann Pamela who married Milo D. Pettibone and then Charles A. Sweetser, both in Delaware County, Ohio.   But who was the mother of these children?  I chased Jacob Weaver for a while, thinking perhaps the first son had been named for a maternal grandfather.  I now believe Jacob Weaver was the shipbuilding partner of the father William Ball and William named his first son after his partner.  Who was James Robinson Ball named for?  (That question remains unanswered.)  If Green really was Dr. William G. Ball’s middle name, was this a maiden name for his mother?

I was handicapped by having this family be in New York City.  I’ve learned a lot about researching in these early NYC records, but early on, my experience was with rural Southerners.  Here was a family whose father was a shipbuilder and who were listed in the early city directories of New York City.  I felt a little like I was in the Pace commercial  “New York City?!”

Again, I don’t remember what I was looking for the day I found the name of the mother and wife in this family.  I do know I was testing out my new subscription to Genealogy Bank. Part of the family had gone to Clark County Indiana after William’s death.  I believe this is where William G. obtained his medical training–I know it where he married Elizabeth Charlton.  I wondered if Delaware County, Ohio, where the youngest daughter married and put down roots, was where Mrs. Ball died.  Ann Pamela was only about 14 when she married–would she have been in Ohio without her mother?  Searching for this family’s information in Indiana is complicated by Indiana being the home of the Ball family of Ball jar fame, Ball University, etc., etc.  Ball is a common enough name to search, but there are lots of them in Indiana.  I was reading through entry after entry with no connections to my family when I came to this:

There it was.

In a New York City newspaper.  A short notice of her death.

It had to be her–her daughter was Ann Pamela Ball, and Dr. William G. had a daughter named Ann Pamela as well.  William Ball had died in 1818, and this person is listed as his consort.

The common thread to these stories is that both of these problems were solved by publications back in the places of origin for these women.  I would have never found the one for Ann Pamela Green Ball had there not been an electronic means to do so, and even then, with the county named misspelled and a common name,  it was a lucky break.  I’d been through all sorts of indexes and considered the possibility that there might be mention of her in a newspaper, but I had not been successful in finding the “right” newspaper.  Finding the name of Catherine Bibb Waddy/Woody Duval would not have been possible without the indexing done by the WPA in the 1930s.  This source was also the tool enabling me to find females in some of my husband’s relatives–obituaries were not in the newspapers of the day, but they were in the church newspapers–particularly, it seems, for females.  These church newspapers are somewhat difficult to locate–again, it was expensive to obtain those obituaries but worth every penny for what they added to my family fabric.

Still dancing the happy dance for those two finds–one long ago and one more recent.  We love the hunt, don’t we?

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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.

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

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

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

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

And here’s Grandmother Elizabeth Charlton Ball.

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

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

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