All My Ancestors

Using Ancestry.com, I found my paternal grandparents in the same place they lived until their deaths in the 1977 and 1982. Trolling through the unindexed Ancestry images reminded me of the days when we scrolled through reel after reel of microfilm–ok for the short term but I’m eager to have access to a search engine for more mobile folks.

This is one of the few records I’ve seen that shows all 8 children in the same household. It sort of makes my heart stop when I see children aged 25 through 4–I can’t imagine a house full of 10 people, including grown sons as well as a 4 year old.

Granddad is the last person on page 2B and then the rest of the family begins the next page:

This list of my aunts and uncles, along with my dad, reminds me once again that practically no one in this family used their birth names.

There’s Lowell C[ooper], Cooper was my grandmother’s maiden name, who was always known as Scoops.
Clark Mobley (Mobley was Granddad’s mother’s maiden name) was Pete.
Dorothy E[valyn] was Dot.
Gertrude R[uth] was Ruth. (Gertrude was Grandad’s mother’s first name)
Donald G[uice] was Jack–later legally changed to Jack. Guice was also a Mobley family name
Raymond K. was known as Ray–pretty close to his actual birth name
T. Morrison was my dad, named after his father, officially Thaddeus Morrison Osborne, Jr., known as Morrison
and the “baby” was G[eorge] Landrum, always known as Landrum. George was Grandmother Rachel’s father AND brother’s name, and Landrum was another family name.

I was most anxious to see the 1940 census to find my mom as she had not been born on the 1930 census. But seeing this entire family together in one household was rewarding as well.

No Comments »

You just never know when you start trolling through newspapers.

With work in the library and client work I haven’t had much time for looking around my own lines, but this week I came down with a sinus infection that kept me in bed but not off the net. I’ve written several times about my “not very well-liked” 2nd great grandfather John Osborne who died in 1865 in Humboldt, Gibson County, Tennessee. Shortly after his death, some of the older sons moved to Texas, and my great-grandmother and the younger children moved as well.

The two youngest children in this family were daughters–Alice Massey Osborne and Lillie Lenoir Osborne. (I have this theory that the middle names for these girls came from the surnames of their older sisters’ husbands. The older sisters were from John Osborne’s first marriage to Violet Cathey–Martha Jane married Henry Carter Massey and sister Harriet married Walter Franklin Lenoir and these families remained in Tennessee after the war when most of the rest of the family went to Texas.)

Despite not being able to locate many of this group in Texas on the 1870 census, I do have a record for my great-grandparents marrying in 1871 in Grimes County, Texas.

But back to the girls.

Alice and Lillie were about 9 and 6 when their father died. Their older brother Charles W. was my great-grandfather who married Gertrude Susanna Mobley in 1871 in Texas. Alice married Alexander Franklin Brigance in 1874, also in Grimes County, Texas, and Lillie married Thaddeus S. Clark in Falls County in 1885. In 1880, Lillie is not living with her mother and brother John Morrison in Grimes County–I believe she is in Bell County boarding in the household of John and Clarinda Regans, working as a teacher. Both of her older brothers George C., now widowed, and Charles W. are also living with their families in this county.

I was prowling through various online sources such as Find A Grave, Texas death and marriage records at FamilySearch, and a couple of newspaper databases, tracking descendants of these two women. One of Lillie’s daughters lived in Waco and fortunately, the Waco newspaper is available through my NewspaperArchive subscription. I determined that Lillie’s daughter Rosa married William E. Thrash, and, based on several newspaper articles that their daughter Adelaide married a man named Lee.

Then this article appeared–

Pampa Daily News 8 Dec 1946

What are the chances of two people in the same family being involved in major hotel fires in the same year?

Further, I actually found this article in several newspapers, including the Dallas paper. But this one from the Pampa, Texas, paper is particularly interesting since this is where my great-grandfather Charles W. Osborne and his family “landed.” He died there in 1926 but several of his descendants still reside there–it’s the site of our family reunion every two years. I wonder if any of the family recognized the names–I’d certainly never heard the story through the usual family grapevines.

Neither of these hotel fires was familiar to me–so, of course, this sent me off on a whole other chase. At which time I found this picture! Again, it appeared in several newspapers since it went out on the AP wire but this one is from the Cullman, Alabama newspaper.

This is Langdon Thrash in an Atlanta hospital in December 1946, being ministered to by nurse Mrs. Gloria Horton. As the story indicates, he survived the Winecoff Hotel fire by putting his head out the window and closing the window so he couldn’t withdraw it. The firemen found him unconscious. All of his possessions with him were destroyed but his life was spared, unlike 119 of the other residents. The article on the Winecoff Hotel in Wikipedia indicates it remains the deadliest hotel fire in US history.

There were no such photos of Adelaide’s son Billy, but there were several stories about the fire at the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago earlier in the year, June 5. Many of the stories about the Winecoff Hotel fire indicated that if the lessons of the LaSalle fire had been learned, many of the fatalities of the Atlanta fire could have been prevented. Neither building had sprinklers nor effective fire escapes–building codes were put into place soon thereafter as a result of these tragedies. Billy evidently escaped with no severe injuries and lived long and well if he turned out to be who I think he was.

That’s for another post.

Bottom line, newspapers are wonderful resources and we are fortunate to live in the day of digital availability of SOME of the stories published in them about our ancestors’ lives.

1 Comment »

1 Comment »

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

No Comments »

I’m finally home from my Spring Break trek.  Last January my brother and I went to Shelby County Court House.

This year, we spent some time in La Grange in Fayette County, Texas, looking for our great-great grandmother Mary Mitchell Cooper.  She supposedly died there shortly after the Civil War, leaving her two children George C. and Rebekkah Ann, known as Annie, orphans.

I didn’t really expect to find anything about her there, but I had to try.  I’d found some court records regarding the guardianship of the children back in Johnson County, Texas, where their grandparents lived.  The family story is the children were surreptitiously taken from La Grange by their Uncle Job Cooper–the “escape” had been planned earlier in the day when Job had found young George and talked to him about the arrangements.  Because of the children leaving under these circumstances, I didn’t expect to find anything “official.”

And finding a marked place of Mary’s burial is probably hopeless.

However, as I said, I had to try.  I don’t count trips like these as a waste.  I always enjoy being where my ancestors lived–something about just being in that place provides me with some sense of being in touch.  It was a beautiful day–I was hoping to see more bluebonnets but I was a little early, according to the locals.  My brother and I had a good time traveling through the countryside and visiting about our families, past and present.

The county courthouse in Fayette County was remarkable–it had evidently been remodeled a few years earlier.  Restored might be a better word.  There was a beautiful atrium inside so it was not one of those dark places that late 19th century county courthouses often are. Wooden shutters were on all the windows and the floor inside was beautiful black and white marble tiles.

Here’s what I found on top of a small table in the ladies’ room:

I love Texas.

And I loved the old original wooden doors.  The door sills were wonderful–here’s one of the side doors.  See the worn limestone on the right?  The one on the front door was even more worn.

The people at the Museum and Archives were very helpful–they even remembered a letter I’d written earlier in the year.  They said they kept those types of requests on file in the event someone else wrote on the same subject.  Here’s hoping.

When I posted about my quest in La Grange, I did hear from two folks who know people in the area and they said they too would keep an eye out.  So maybe some seeds were planted that will produce something in the future.

My brother and I are already planning our next year’s Spring Break Court House tour.

2 Comments »

March is Women’s History Month and Lisa Alzo at The Accidental Genealogist has posted 31 prompts for celebrating the women in our lives.  I, of course, am late getting started, but here’s today’s prompt.

March 7 — Share a favorite recipe from your mother or grandmother’s kitchen. Why is this dish your favorite? If you don’t have one that’s been passed down, describe a favorite holiday or other meal you shared with your family.

Cooking was not my mother’s joy or strength.

She did it and she did it fairly well–especially since her boundaries were fairly fixed.  We lived in a rural area where it was almost too hot to have a garden–at least for my red-haired, fair-skinned mother.  And we always had beef in the locker in town, and later, in our home freezer.  I was shocked once to hear a friend’s mother talk about how tired she was as a child of eating lobster.  But she was a child of maritime Canada–I was a child of the Texas plains, and we ate beef.  My mom was known to sneak in a package of bologna or liverwurst occasionally, but it was never put on the table as the main dish.  She did pass to me her skill at making gravy–one of the secrets is letting the flour cook a bit first–I later learned this was called “making a roux” in official cooking terminology.  The other secret is having the right utensil to stir to keep from having lumpy gravy as the liquid (usually milk in our case) is added.  Mom’s utensil of choice was some sort of coiled, springy metal thing probably originally intended to beat egg whites or somesuch.

But at some point she had a great recipe for a dessert that has been lost.  She got it from her best friend Phyllis, and when I moved to the same city Phyllis left our small town for, I called her, but she couldn’t remember the recipe.  I can see it written on a scrap of paper and stuffed in the recipe drawer, but I cannot re-create it nor can I find one despite handy sites like AllRecipes that let you type in the ingredients and provide you with a recipe using those foods.

It started with graham cracker crumbs.  I think it probably had sugar and seems like some whipped egg whites folded in.  These, along with some undoubtedly additional forgotten ingredients, were patted down into a 9 x 13 pan and baked for a bit.  Then, what made it truly amazing, a boiling mixture of crushed pineapple and I can’t remember what else poured over it right as it came out of the oven.  This resulted in a yummy gooey bar that was so good, at least as I remember it.

And maybe it’s the best kind of recipe.  I certainly don’t need the calories, but I relish the memory of cooking in my mother’s kitchen, from recipes she’d scrawled on scraps of paper, making food that had come from her shared friendship with other women at the church.  I was able to locate her “quick” fruit-cake recipe after many years through the magic of the Internet, so perhaps the pineapple, graham-cracker bars will eventually appear as well.

No Comments »

Written for 52 Weeks To Better Genealogy – Challenge #7

from Amy Lenertz Coffin at http://wetree.blogspot.com/2010/01/52-weeks-to-better-genealogy.html

Play with Google Maps (http://maps.google.com). This is a helpful tool for determining the locations of addresses in your family history. Where your ancestral homestead once stood may now be a warehouse, a parking lot or a field. Perhaps the house is still there. When you input addresses in Google Maps, don’t forget to use the Satellite View and Street View options for perspectives that put you were right there where your ancestors once stood. If you’ve used this tool before, take sometime and play with it again. Push all the buttons, click all the links and devise new ways it can help with your personal genealogy research. If you have a genealogy blog, write about your experiences with Google Maps, or suggest similar easy (and free) tools that have helped in your own research.

As I’ve written here many times, I come from a family of farmers–persons who had land, for the most part.  Those farms and ranches are no longer in the family.  But I can visit any time I like using Google Map.

My maternal grandparents lived on a ranch in South Dakota.

The main buildings were the house and the barn.  The barn, at the time of this photo, sported my grandad’s brand above the doors, Lazy XY.  The house actually faced north, but this is the southern exposure.  It was too cold in South Dakota to have a north facing entry, so we always used the “back porch” as the entry.

My grandparents had moved most of their things back to Texas by the 1980s–they were in their 80s by then and they first spent winters in Oklahoma and Texas with my folks and my aunt and uncle, and later stayed “in the south” year round.  Shortly before my grandmother died in 1998, the house burned.  We don’t know the details, we just know that it burned to the ground.  In a sense, it was a blessing that the house took care of itself–

When I find myself thinking about the carefree summers I spent at my grandparents’ ranch, I look at my photos, but I also often pull up their place on Google Maps:

I can still see the barn and the tree rows planted east of the house to catch the wind and snow.  A trailer home replaces the house for the family that lives there now.  If I really want to, I can move to the right on the map to “roam” the pasture.  And I can follow the road (306th Ave. on this map) a couple of miles down the hill to the little village of Canning where my grandmother ran the country store and post office, and where we lived the year I was in the 6th grade.

This picture brings back lots of memories.

Over there at the left is the beginning of the spring-fed lakes where we swam in the summer time and ice-skated in the winter.  At the right, the “top” of Cactus Loop, is where the school was.  There was a cemetery behind it and a huge hill down the side.  We sledded in the winter and rolled down in tractor tires in the spring.  Why we weren’t killed is amazing to me.  My grandmother’s store and PO was to the left of the intersection of Chesley Rd and 206th St.  It looks like there’s some sort of barn there now.  Above where Spring St, crosses Chesley St. is the church, with another cemetery behind it.  On up that hill takes me back to my grandparent’s ranch.  See the house at the lower right?  I won’t include the name of the people who live here, but my granddad helped build that house–with someone as particular as he was–they got along fine.  The drilled holes for the nails before they pounded them in–no nail guns here.

I have these places, and others, bookmarked on Google Map.  I like visiting them occasionally.  There’s a country cemetery in Beaver County I like to visit–it’s easy to count the miles as I travel down the road, and I know how many miles and which directions it is to visit where my great Aunt Edna and Uncle Gurly lived, and where my great-grandparents lived out there in Beaver County Oklahoma.

And then I can always “drive-by” the house where I grew up (marked with the small white heart)–it’s a different color now but it’s still located across the street from the high school, between the First Christian Church and the Church of Christ on Jackson Dr., and I can drag Main Street if I’m feeling really nostalgic.

3 Comments »

I received and read this book this past week.

I discovered its existence last week.

As I’ve been blogging,  I’ve been working on my Mitchell line.  Mary Mitchell was the wife of John B. Cooper and they were the parents of George C. and Rebekah Ann Cooper.  Both of these children were orphaned by shortly after the Civil War.  I am descended from George C. Cooper–he was my great-grandfather.  The author of From Flour Sacks to Satin is the granddaughter of Rebekah Ann, or “Annie” as she was known.  I did not know my great-grandfather–he died almost 20 years before I was born.  But one of the chapters in this book is entitled “Grandma Hall,”–Annie, my ggrandfather George’s sister.  She knew her grandmother.

Some pages of this book were difficult to read.  It is illustrative of the point that we don’t all grow up in the same family.  My youngest  brother remembers events in our family much differently than do I, for example.  He wasn’t there for some of them, and I wasn’t there for others–his being 6 years younger and having siblings who essentially left home when he was 12, leaving him to be a type of only child, means we were reared in families essentially different in many ways.

That is the case with the story told in this book.  Her story is no less true or valuable or compelling for having been the descendant of Annie.  The bones of the story are the same–the children left Johnson County with their widowed mother after the War, were orphaned, were rescued from Fayette County, Texas from living with a Mr. Burns after the death of their mother, and were returned to Johnson County to live with their grandparents, Job and Elizabeth Landrum Cooper.

Other details and events vary.  According to Flour Sacks, George was offered opportunities to continue his education.  Annie was allowed to only attend school through the third grade, despite her thirst for more knowledge and formal education.  I do know that George was a school teacher–that’s how he met Sallie Duval, his wife.  Annie and her now-blind husband and children were “invited” to leave the Hall’s place.  The subtitle of the book tells the tale: The Story of a Sharecropper Family. These are events of which I have no knowledge–either from firsthand experience or from family lore.  And the author herself says in opening remarks,

“The purpose of this books is not to embarrass or slander anyone in recording the events of my early life, which I believe were unique in the circumstances I experienced.  Through the years I have come to dearly love all of my relatives and appreciate the people with whom I was associated, both living and deceased….”

I am indebted to her for writing this story.  It is on the shelf next to one of her books of poetry she gave me nearly 20 years ago–a collection that includes the thoughts of a young John B. as he looked out over his plowed fields, as the clouds of War approached.  They are treasures.  I wrote her a letter before I received the book, asking her if she wanted to know more about our Mitchell line.  Unfortunately, it was returned–putting it out on the mailbox for the postman to pick up evidently resulted in part of her address washing off the envelope.  I must revise and send it along again–none of us are getting any younger.

And I must express to her directly how grateful I am to her for putting down her story, which is, of course, part of my story.

No Comments »

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.

4 Comments »

I began knowing only the unexceptional name of my great-great grandmother–Mary E. Mitchell–and that her first child was born in Texas in 1859.  I have yet to find any sort of marriage record for Mary E. and her husband John B. Cooper.

By consulting Texas school census records and comparing them to the federal census, I found her father’s name –Ephraim M. Mitchell.

This helped me make contact with others who were researching Ephraim and his wife Rebecca R. Jones, and their 13 children!

There is family lore about Rebecca being the daughter of Sam Jones and Itee– Sam, aka Arpeika, the fierce Seminole leader and Itee, 1/2 Irish and 1/2 Choctaw.

But what about the Mitchells?  No one in my family knew anything about them.  Mary Mitchell’s husband was killed in the Civil War and she died shortly thereafter, leaving my great-grandfather George C. Cooper and his sister Rebecca Ann.  The children were reared by their father’s family and very little was known about their mother Mary, much less her family.

But this year, with the help of some other Mitchell researchers, we have connected the dots, as one of them so aptly put it.  With all the apparent relationships so obvious after the fact.

Ephraim’s father has been identified, as have some of his uncles–indentifying the uncles is part of how we got to Ephraim’s father John Mitchell.  And, we found his mother, identified in Lightfoot’s “Let the Drums Roll” about Maury County Tennessee Revolutionary War veterans, only as “Patsy McClain.”   Just this week we not only found her name to be McLean, but we likely found her father and mother and more.

Of course the path was not straight.  John Mitchell apparently died in 1847 in Mexico as the result of illness contracted during his service in the Mexican War.  The probate file for settlement of his estate is missing from the Shelby County, Texas, courthouse.  (of course it is!)  There is another younger John Mitchell enlisted in the same unit–but he cannot be found after the war in 1850–at least not yet.  And is he even the son of John Sr. or is he a nephew?

Gratefully, someone saved some family letters and shared them with the rest of us.  It’s only the transcription of a letter John Mitchell wrote in 1847 from Austin Texas where he’s awaiting deployment to Mexico.  He talks about having stopped by Corsicana to visit his brother D.R., he mentions his horse Charley, and he admonishes his son Ephraim to take care of his mother.  D.R. turns out to be John’s brother David Reed Mitchell, living and working in Corsicana, Navarro County, Texas, and early correspondent from Maury County Tennessee with President Andrew Jackson regarding his deceased brother James’ estate.  Charley the horse is mentioned later in another preserved letter written to Ephraim by an attorney on behalf of his cousin “H. R. Mitchell”–H.R. had evidently traded the sorrel horse Charley for 100 acres of John Mitchell’s head right land  in Rusk County.  H. R. turns out to be Hiram Reed Mitchell, probably the son of David Reed Mitchell.  Researching his family takes us back to Mississippi where there are indications that the Mitchells were between the time they were in Tennessee and Texas.

When a Patsy or Martha Mitchell who would be a good candidate for John’s wife cannot be found in the 1850 Texas census, I go looking in Mississippi.  Sure enough, there’s a good possibility living in an R. L. Boyd’s home, listed as “mother-in-law” and R. L.’s wife’s name is Mary E.  The longer I examine this family, the more convinced I am that this is John Mitchell’s “Patsy McClain” and Ephraim M. Mitchell’s mother.  The name Boyd keeps appearing, too, as a middle name for Mitchells–both Hiram and Ephraim have children with Boyd middle names.  Robert Louis Boyd dies too early for them to be named for him, so where did this name come from?  My search for more info on R. L. Boyd ends up in a dead end, but I believe the Mitchell search has yielded some more clues.

I am grateful that Martha “Patsy” McLean and John Mitchell broke out of the Mitchell’s inclination to name sons John, James, Andrew or David, and named my ancestor for his maternal grandfather, Ephraim McLean, Jr.  And Ephraim McLean, Jr. is married to Mary “Polly” Boyd.  The McLean line is well-documented–there’s even an DAR chapter named for Ephraim McLean, Sr., a Revolutionary War vet who lived to be +90, living in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee.

So it’s been a very good year for Mitchell research.  Of course, I still have questions–and this is still a challenging search because all of the Mitchell families apparently named their multitudinous sons for their relatives–John and Andrew and James with an occasional David thrown in.  But it feels like a brickwall has come down, and much of it since the 4-days-ago Mad Monday post about the Mitchells.

It’s a great way to end one year and start another.

Still digging.

10 Comments »