Gholson and Arman

Today (and yesterday) in the bulging family history file:

07 Dec 1802: Gholson Stepp (or Stapp), my 4^th great-grand uncle for anyone counting, dies in Lancaster, Kentucky, at the age of 44. He was born in 1758 in Culpeper, Virginia, and so exemplifies the extended family’s insistence on restlessly moving west, south or both. He was the son of Lucy Gholson and James Stapp (or Stepp), hence the unusual first name. I see a lot of that across generations. He spelled his last name differently on various legal documents, ensuring job security for OCD genealogists, bless his heart. Gholson was the brother of Celia Stepp (who seems to have made her mind up about how to spell her name), who married Elijah Harrison Keese and is thus my 4^th great-grandmother at that end of the Keese line. She named one son for her brother, Gholson Stepp Keese, who does not seem to have perpetuated those names in his descendants.

08 Dec 1875: Arman O. Jackson dies in Augusta, Arkansas. Arman married one of my Honnoll relatives, the one I give the Best Name in the Family award to, Cinderella Lucinda Honnoll, my 3^rd great-grand aunt, sister of Peter the beekeeper. Oddly, she is not the only 19^th-century Cinderella I am related to. Arman was born in Tennessee in 1810 and married Cinderella Lucinda in Hardeman County, Tennessee.

(Let’s pause there for a Your Family Tree May Not Fork moment. Hardeman County was named for the Hardeman family to whom my father is related via those Keeses that keep cropping up. Six Hardeman boys married six Keese girls. You try straightening that out. All my ancestors from Hardeman County, though, are on my mother’s side. End of digression. I may yet prove that I am my own cousin three times over, which many would say accounts for a lot.)

Cinderella Lucinda died at the age of 30 after bearing 4 children to Arman, including a daughter named Permelia. I am collecting Names You Never See Any More with great glee, of course. Arman remarried to Hannah Tarbutton the same year that Cinderella died, 1845, and had another family. Very common for the time. There was nothing more dangerous for a woman then than childbirth and its complications, and many men had 2, 3 or 4 families. He married Hannah in Alabama and moved back to Tennessee. They both moved to Arkansas some time after 1860, where Hannah outlived him. A lot of people seem to have moved to Arkansas after the Civil War, keeping up the east-to-west movement. These were almost always one-way trips, total breaks with the home state and the friends and families left there.

There was no way back home.

Sallie, Myra and Cinderella

Women's History Month challenge for March 3: Do you share a first name with one of your female ancestors? Perhaps you were named for your great-grandmother, or your name follows a particular naming pattern. If not, then list the most unique or unusual female first name you’ve come across in your family tree.

Mack Johnson with his sister Harriet Johnson Hardcastle in Whitewright, Texas, standing in for his sister Sallie, of whom I do not seem to have a photo. Ca. 1985.

That's several questions, there.

I am a Sally, which is supposed to be a diminutive of Sarah but in my case is not. Just Sally. I am almost but not quite named the same as my mother: she is Shirley Yvonne, I am Sally Yvonne. Both my mother and her brother received lovely romantic names, possibly inspired by my great-aunt Coy, a lover of novels. My uncle was Guinn Selwyn, which was undoubtedly a bit much when he was growing up. We knew him as Uncle Johnny. We know her as Shirley.

Shirley was supposed to have been called Yvonne, but that faded out by her third year. There is a Double Wedding Ring quilt made for her as a baby which has the name Yvonne and the date embroidered on it. If she sends a photo of the quilt, I'll post it. There are no other Shirleys or Yvonnes in the family that I can find, and Yvonne may have been a bit much for Oklahoma and West Texas. She and I carry the name in the family.

There is another Sally, actually a Sallie, and she was one of my grandfather Mack's four older sisters: Nancy, Samantha, Harriet and Sallie, not necessarily in that order. Sallie Johnson Plemmons was a lovely lady. As did so many other people, she and her husband moved to California during the Depression and settled in San Diego. I re-met her when I moved there in 1994. She passed away just shy of her 99th birthday, and her family held a reunion on what would have been her 100th birthday. Sallie seemed to know who I was after all those years, and gave me a ceramic rose a few days later. I still have it. Her brother, my grandfather, had been gone for several years at that point.

Sallie and her siblings were the children of Elmyra "Myra" Elizabeth Wacaster Johnson, Dr. John Johnson's second wife and from all accounts a merry and devout little soul. Sallie was the same, and her family adored her. They still do.

As for unique female names in the family tree: when I was researching the quilt I have (the subject of a later post), I discovered my connections to the Honnoll family. My great-great-grandmother was Nancy Ellinor Honnoll Walker (the Ellinor spelling comes from the family Bible, so no trying to correct it). Her father, Peter, the beekeeper, had a sister named Cinderella Lucinda Honnoll. I respectfully submit that as our entry in the Unique Female Name Sweepstakes. She was born in Tennessee in 1815 and died before she was 30. I have found no images of her anywhere. They may not exist.

To Sallie, Myra and Cinderella Lucinda.

Lacreek NWR

Young ferruginous hawk on his mountain

It should have been another errand- and chore-filled day up here. There is more than enough to do on both the professional and personal fronts. Weekend time is precious. We have three weeks left to complete the first phase of the move to the new building and to get ready for the big ribbon-cutting ceremony and dedication.

In theory, I should be making the most of every minute with Getting Things Done Now.

In practice, we got up early this morning, left the phones at home, and drove down to Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge for a day of meandering down the smallest backroads imaginable and looking at the wildlife, buildings and achingly beautiful vistas.

Eastern kingbird sneering at the photographer

We needed the scenery, the abundance of bird calls and the near-total absence of electronic and traffic noises. Lacreek NWR is at the northernmost range of the Sandhills, just south of the White River Badlands, a pocket wetlands habitat in the High Plains. It was a Civilian Conservation Corps project, as many refuges were, established in 1935. It is in every sense an oasis.

Original sign, as posted at the Lacreek NWR site.

We had never been there before, and we found that it soothed frazzled nerves better than anything else we might have done. The phones and the errands and the chores waited for us, for once.


Here is a selection of eye candy from the day. Enjoy.

Church on Pine Ridge Reservation.

Abandoned cabin.

Technicolor beehives.

Lacreek NWR marsh.

Great blue heron.

Common nighthawk.

Scenic, SD.

Sign with many, many interpretive possibilities, most not suitable for a family blog.

Sign at our friend Kenny's ranch. Yes, that is a pteranodon and that is also a mosasaur on top.

Sign, Martin, SD

Yellow-headed blackbird

Q: Why did the sharp-tailed grouse hens and chicks cross the road? A: Better you should ask, why did it take them 15 minutes to do so? First you get everyone lined up....

...then you get everyone crossing in random order, back and forth....

...then you finally get them in place.

Splendid summer vistas are all too rare these days. Enjoy.

Quilt Thursday: bees and quilts, or synchronicity strikes again

The Honey Bee quilt block from the Kansas City Star collection, originally published in 1929.

Our family genealogy work, as I mentioned before, started in earnest with my need to document an 1881 quilt. That led to the discovery of our connections to the Honnoll family. And that led to the discovery (thank you again, Bill!) of the unsuspected beekeepers in the family. Which in turn explained some of the older family recipes made with generous amounts of honey instead of sugar. Everything is connected; not for nothing is this blog called Threads and Traces.

So imagine my astonishment and delight to see today's Kansas City Star blog post entitled "Bees and Their Quilts." This is not just about quilting bees...it seems that quilts are actually part of the construction of some beehives. No matter which angle you take, you cannot separate bees and quilts.

Publisher Doug Weaver elaborates:
"A friend...is exploring the world of beekeeping. She recently shared some photos of her and her friends building beehives. And she mentioned that the Warre Hive style of beehive includes a quilt frame that sits toward the top of the hive, under the roof. ...The frame, with fabric attached at the bottom, is eventually filled with insulation – straw, sawdust, peat, wood shavings, etc. The quilt 'absorbs the hive's moisture more easily and communicates to the hive the heat outside,' wrote Emile Warre, the Frenchman who developed the hive design in the early 1900s.

"Warre called the design the 'People’s Hive' because of its simplicity. (All of his thinking is detailed in his book, 'Beekeeping for All.' I like Warre … clearly a man of the people and, like the bee itself, a lover of community, it appears.)

"Granted, this beehive quilt isn’t the kind of quilt you and I know and love. It’s basically a piece of plain cloth, attached to the frame....Still, there’s something comforting in knowing that, as we put honey on a biscuit, quilts might have contributed to that sweet combination."

A Warre hive with the "quilt" layer labelled, from http://thebeespace.net/warre-hive/.  

Weaver goes on to provide a link to an entertaining history of quilting bees and to compare quilting bee and beehive dynamics. There are many points in common; quilting bees were social microcosms of the larger community.

This line especially resonated with me:
"In isolated regions gathering women in the area together helped overcome the loneliness that so many pioneer women experienced. Often these women often didn't have a big house with a parlor for hand quilting."

So true. Every hand-stitched quilt is a collection of memories, often of friends and family coming together on rare and cherished occasions. I wish I knew more of the story of the 1881 quilt, but I can't imagine that it was anything other than a mother and daughter project, and that made the quilt so precious to my great-grandmother that she kept it close by her for her entire life. If you'll excuse me, I need to go touch it now and wonder.

Happy Thursday.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

--Emily Dickinson (1830–86)
 

Unexpected genealogy: beehives?!

I have a good friend from college, Bill Page, who is an ace genealogist. He can find anyone in the world, I think. My grasp of genealogy stops at the difference between first cousins once removed and second cousins, which fried my synapses when I was 12. So it was only natural that I notified Bill immediately of my discovery of the Honnoll family and my connections to it (see the quilt post for details). Did he commend me on my detective work? Hardly. Being Bill, he contacted me no more than 15 minutes later to say "Is this your ancestor who filed this beehive patent?"

Of course it was. Bill wins again. As if I ever had a chance. (He points out to anyone interested that patent archives can be an astonishing source of unexpected genealogical information.)

Peter A. Honnoll and Mary Savage Honnoll, parents of Nancy Ellinor Honnoll Walker

Peter A. Honnoll (1812-~1893) was born in York County, South Carolina, and died in Itawamba County, Mississippi. He married Mary E. Savage in Bolivar, Hardeman County, Tennessee, in 1836. The Honnolls seem to have kept wandering south and west after the original arrival, William Honnoll, arrived from Germany and landed in Harford County, Maryland (through which I commuted to work every day for seven years). Their daughter, Nancy Ellinor Honnoll Walker, wound up in Altus, Oklahoma, and her daughter wound up in West Texas.

But this post is about Peter and his beehives. The drawing above is part of the letters patent filed in 1875, titled simply "Improvement in Bee-hives." Apparently this was a major part of the family enterprise in Mississippi. Peter awarded two-thirds of his rights to his sons, James and Moses. Moses went on to receive yet another beehive patent in 1899, titled even more simply "Beehive."

Apparently beehives figured in Peter's will; a family genealogy correspondent states that he left his beehives to his second wife, Malinda.

Beehives would have been the difference between success and failure to the poor farmers of the time and place, but nothing about them has come down in any way through the years to my generation. This is as unexpected and alien as if Peter had been a pirate. Beekeeping was hard and constant work, both for the crops and for the honey harvest. There is no record as to when Peter started, whether he was the first one in his family to take up apiculture, or where he was in his travels when he set up beekeeping. Obviously he was good enough at it to take out a patent at age 63 and to inspire at least one of his sons to go even further, but other than the letters patent there is not a clue about this activity.

In 1875, Peter had survived the Civil War (in which he lost a son) and had left Tennessee for Mississippi. At least one of his children, Nancy, had packed up her family and left for Arkansas and Oklahoma; they never saw each other again. Farming in the Reconstruction South was a difficult life on a poor clay soil. And yet, he must have had that creative spark, looking for new ways to house the bees and harvest their hives without harming them.

I am fascinated. And I still don't know anything about beekeeping or why this beehive was so new. But I learned more about my ancestor from a patent file than any of us had ever known before. Thanks, Bill.

Look both ways before crossing

It's traditional at this time, the start of a new year and (arguably) new decade, to look both to the past for memories and inspiration and the future for hopes and dreams. As I enter the third year of prairie life, I am doing just that.

I have come almost full circle back to the Great Plains, 800+ miles nearly due north of the place I was born. The journey has taken me to both coasts after a sojourn in the Texas Hill Country. Museums and landscapes drew me across the country and refined my understanding and appreciation of places and people.

Why do I keep coming back to the prairie? Morning light. Horizons. Storms. Sandhill cranes. Killdeer. Prairie dogs. Silence. Sunsets. Finding my way back to a place I never really left.

I have worked in museums since the day I learned that it was possible to do so, and I would not change that decision even if I could. Whatever I might have brought to museums has been given back tenfold to me. This is not to say that I knew exactly what I was doing when I went into museum work, only that it turned out to be the best possible choice for me.


Today I am focused on quilting, which has pulled so many disparate parts of my life together for several years now. I'm in the fifth generation of quilters in the matriarchal line of my family. Here's the first part of the story: in 1994, my grandmother Johnson left me a quilt that I had not known existed. This quilt was made by Nancy Ellinor Honnoll Walker (b. 1852, d. 1922) in Mississippi. It was made for and most likely with her second daughter, my great-grandmother, Mary Marcella “Mossie” Walker Brooks (Gran Brooks to us), b. 1874. The name Mossie is embroidered on two central blocks, with the year 1881 on one of those. I suspect that this was Mossie's first real project.

I did not know much about the Honnoll line before I started researching this quilt. Now I know that they were, among other things, beekeepers. Here's an illustration from a patent awarded to Nancy's father Peter on August 31, 1875.


Beekeeping is one talent that did not span the generations to us, I fear. Not even remotely.


Nancy Ellinor Honnoll married John Hinton Walker (b. 1853) in Mississippi in 1871. We know that the Walkers moved from Mississippi to Oklahoma (near Altus) around 1882 in a covered wagon. Grandma Walker would have been 29 when she and her little 7-year-old daughter finished this quilt, with 5 children already born and several more to come. We have nothing else surviving of the Walkers’ records or possessions that I know of.

The quilt is appliqued with large solid-color autumn leaves in orange and brown. The back is a blue print-striped cotton. There appears to be little or no actual filling or batting in it. It is machine-quilted. How did they manage to afford a sewing machine of any kind in that place at that time? Let the purists sneer that it wasn't hand-quilted. I think is is extraordinary that it wasn't.

Gran Brooks kept this quilt with her, put away safely, all her life. She married Joseph Newton Brooks in 1897 at her parents’ home in Oklahoma and had four children, the next to the youngest being my grandmother, Vada Vivian Brooks Johnson (b. 1909 in Oklahoma). Gran Brooks quilted all her life and had quilting frames hung from the ceiling. Among other things, she ran a boarding house during the Depression in Oklahoma; we have a few of her recipes, but mostly things were just not written down. She lived the last several years of her life on a farm outside Littlefield, Texas, near her son and daughter-in-law.


Damage to the edges of the quilt is most likely the result of a devastating tornado that struck the farm in 1957. Gran Brooks died as a result of injuries suffered in this. Much of the family information above was gleaned from individual pages from the family Bible recovered after the tornado. My grandmother took the quilt and put it away, and no one saw it for the next 37 years or even knew about it. My mother did not even know of its existence until my grandmother gave it to her for me, very shortly before my grandmother died.

In 2003, my husband and I were married at the Historic Church of St. Thomas at the Delaware Agricultural Museum in Dover, a tiny gem of a Methodist chapel. The good staff and volunteers there kindly helped me by sewing a sleeve on the back so that it could be hung in the chapel as a backdrop for our wedding. This was its first public display ever, the first time anyone outside my mother’s family had ever seen it. We needed no other decorations.
 
The quilt has been with me ever since and has inspired me to quilt on my own. It will be 129 years old this year. May it see in many more new years on the prairies.