Family legacy challenge week 1: What is your name?

What is your full name? Explain why your parents gave you that name.

I'm starting the challenge at Family Legacy: check it out at https://familysearch.org/blog/en/52-questions-52-weeks/ . They claim that this is the easiest way to write your life story. We'll see. Feel free to try it yourself and share the results. Now, if I can only get my parents to play....

So. First name. I was named for my great-aunt Sallie Johnson Plemmons, my grandfather McKinley Johnson's older sister. She was a love. I re-met her when I moved to San Diego, where she had settled with her large and loving (and cheerfully crazy...) family. Sallie passed away at the age of 98 1/2, and by consensus the family celebrated her 100th birthday a year or so later anyway. She's a good person to be named for: a sweet, funny, tough woman who moved from Arkansas to New Mexico, survived the Depression in the desert, and made a good life in Southern California. All the Johnsons in this family are smart, share a wicked sense of humor, and look out for each other.

Middle name: My mother shared hers with me; we are both S. Yvonnes. She is Shirley Y., so our names are very close. In fact, the original plan was to call her Yvonne, and a Double wedding Ring quilt made for her as a baby has that name embroidered on it. For some reason, they later opted to go with Shirley instead. Now, where Yvonne came from, I am not sure; it's not a name with any other history in my family. More research is needed.

Last name: I'm researching the Sheltons and they are tough. Maybe that's because the men were only allowed one of five first names. At least, that's how it seems. More on that soon.

Ghost towns

House, SD

Many of the structures I document are part of ghost towns. For many reasons--loss of railroads and employers, agricultural disasters, economic downturns, greener pastures elsewhere--settlements and towns flourish, wither and are reduced to clusters of brittle structures. Their stories are not always well known.

Today in family history: Emma Nellie Keese Kelly, who had just turned 19, died in Kellyville, Marion County, Texas, in 1880. She was the daughter of my great-great grandfather George Washington Keese, who was born in Georgia and migrated to Caldwell, Texas, with his family by 1850. Somewhere along the way, in Tennessee, George married Harriet Adeline Perkins, who according to census records was born in Vermont, whose story is uncertain. Emma Nellie was their youngest child.

Emma Nellie married Lewis Dennis Kelly, whose father George Addison Kelly was a founder of the industrial settlement known as Kellyville or Kellysville (originally named Four-Mile Branch). The Kelly Foundry, Furnace and Plow Company manufactured and reapaired agricultural equipment, and during the Confederacy produced ammunition as well.

According to the Texas State Historical Association, "By 1880 the Kelly Iron Works was listed as the state's outstanding producer of agricultural implements, the Kelly Blue Plow being its most popular finished product. However, due to the loss of cheap water transport following removal of the Red River Raft, a fire that destroyed his furnace, and a joint-stock arrangement with the state Grange not suitable to him, Kelly closed his foundry and moved his plow production operation to Longview in 1882. Kellyville rapidly declined." Kellyville and its decline is discussed in T. Lindsey Baker's Ghost Towns of Texas.

Emma died before the foundry moved and Kellyville became a ghost town. Her infant son, George A. Kelly, born just before her own birthday in November 1879, died in February 1880, less than two months after her own death. Lewis died in June 1880. Kellyville was abandoned in 1883. It's not often that so much is so thoroughly lost in one small family. I do not know what happened to Emma Nellie; there is so much that could have happened, but we can only speculate.

So I slow down for ghost towns. Someone has to. They are memories captured in structures, not words, and the images are all we can keep. 

2013 is in the building

Shelton, Nebraska

Having once more taken care of that peculiarly Southern ritual of serving black-eyed peas, cornbread and green leafy stuff for luck in the New Year, we are looking out on a somewhat snowy landscape and watching the sunset in tones of blue. A little later today; we've passed the solstice and are heading into longer days. The light slants just a bit less today than it did yesterday, and will ease up another notch tomorrow. You notice these things up here, just as you notice the scent of snow. Yes, it has one.

The family genealogy project now includes records for over 16,000 people, on both sides of the family. Cousins continued to marry cousins, so the intertwining can be dizzyingly complex. I am finding that I am most interested in the ones who kept looking for the next frontier, the next promised land, the next homestead. There is so little left of their hard work, which is why those small structures on the endless prairies stop me in my tracks every time. They were not always so silent.

Today in ancestral history: Ambrose Cobb, 10th great-grandfather on the Brooks/Honnoll side, died in 1605 in Kent, England. He was 42 years old and didn't get out of Kent during his lifetime, as far as I can tell. At this remove of time, there is so little that we know about people who just lived their lives without fanfare. His descendants made up for it, though. His son Ambrose emigrated to Virginia, eventually patenting 350 acres on the Appomattox River. There is speculation that he first built an English-style small thatched house, followed by a mansion known as the Cobbs Hall. Ambrose and his line are ancestral to the Savages, Moons and eventually Nancy Ellinor Honnoll; Cobbs Hall is the burial place of Col. John Bolling, only great-grandson of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, to whom there is a whisper of a connection on the Shelton side of the family. I think I am related to everyone in the world at least twice at this point, and have just started calling everyone "Cousin Cousin" for simplicity's sake.

Ambrose's descendants didn't stay in Virginia long, not all of them, anyway. They moved onward, south and west, from Virginia to South Carolina to Hardeman County, Tennessee (named for, again, a family connected to the Shelton side of the family), and on to Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma. They lived in structures far more like the thatched house than like Cobbs Hall, including half-dugouts on the plains. There was always some kind of roof made out of the materials at hand, it seems.

Starting this week, I will be part of the city Historic Preservation Commission, which I hope will help me put these tiny architectural stories into a good context. If I have a philosophy about all of this, it's that one should learn everything possible about the immediate vicinity and the recent ancestors, while those stories can still be saved, so that we have images and sounds and accounts of the people themselves, not just the structures they left.

Forward into the past.....

Definitive cornbread dressing

In the spirit of Thanksgiving and sharing, I am happy to present the absolute, the standard against which all others are to be judged, the definitive cornbread dressing recipe, updated by cornbread guru Bill Page. "Dressing guru" sounded a bit strange. This updates an earlier truncated version. Take some time to enjoy making this. Festina lente, y'all. 

Please note: it's dressing, not stuffing. 

Real Southern Cornbread Dressing

Making cornbread dressing is an art, not an exact science. 

This recipe makes enough dressing for a crowd of 30 or more. 

Experiment with the recipe to match what your family likes. 

Remember, cornbread dressing is a special type of bread pudding ... you need plenty of liquid to start with.

Do not cook the dressing inside or with the turkey. You run the risk of undercooking one item or overcooking the other. Just cook the dressing in its own pan.

Oil the roasting pan. I use PAM, but you can use butter or Wesson oil.

Most recipes call for equal amounts of white bread and corn bread. 

I use a little more cornbread, and a little less white bread, rather than a 50-50 mix, roughly 2/3 corn bread and 1/3 white bread.

For the white bread, use rolls or biscuits, not plain white bread. 

Buy the cheap kind of canned biscuits--those without butter or other flavoring. 

You can also substitute crushed unsalted saltine crackers for some of the white bread. 

Rip the bread into pieces about the size of the end of your thumb--it's therapeutic. 

I usually cook about 40 biscuits and 48 dinner rolls. This makes enough for me to eat a few while I am cooking. 

Cook this bread several days early, rip it up, freeze it, and then pull it out to thaw the night before the day you will cook the dressing. 

I make four 8.5 x 11 pans of yellow cornbread (each pan requires 3 packages of instant cornbread--so, you need to buy 12 packages total of cornbread mix). The corn bread should be crumbled into lumps. 

You can make the cornbread from scratch, but it will not improve the flavor. I cook the cornbread in advance, crumble it, freeze it, and put it out to thaw the night before. 

If you live in a dry climate, you can let the bread and cornbread sit out and go slightly stale (the mixture soaks up more liquid that way). Otherwise, you can lightly toast the bread, if you want. But, you can also use untoasted bread if you prefer. 

You will have bread left over after you assemble the dressing. This is okay --the exact amount you will need will vary depending on how dry it is and how much liquid it absorbs. Bread is cheap, and it is okay to throw some away (or feed the birds) -- but you don’t want to be left short when making dressing, trying to get more at the last minute.

I use two bags of frozen onions and 3 or 3.5 cups of chopped celery. 

Most recipes call for a lot more celery, but unless your crowd is a big fan of celery, err on the side of adding too little.

You can also keep some onion powder on hand, in case you decide you need more onion flavor at the last minute, after you have mixed up the raw dressing.

Sauté the onions and celery before you mix everything together. As my mother and my Aunt Madge both used to say, no one wants to bite down on a piece of raw celery. I do this the day before, when it is less hectic. 

I sauté the celery first in a little Wesson oil. While that is cooking, I thaw the onions in the microwave. 

Then I sauté the onions (separate from the celery), again using Wesson oil. You can use other vegetable oils, but avoid any with a strong flavor. 

After those vegetables are cooked, I mix in some of the butter (or margarine) and sage, and let those flavors meld together in the refrigerator overnight. I am not sure it makes a lot of difference, except that it is less work when I am actually putting the mixture together right before baking.

I add two or three small tubs of margarine to the dressing. You can use butter, if you prefer. This total includes the butter you already added to the onion / celery mix.

I can't tell much difference between using butter or margarine. The butter has a slightly better flavor, but it also makes the dressing greasier. Soften the butter/ margarine before you add it to the celery and onions – this makes mixing the ingredients much easier.

When its time to add the celery / onion mixture to the dressing, soften it first in the microwave. This makes it much easier to mix the ingredients.

A lot of recipes saw to use poultry seasoning. Well, I use sage, and only about half as much as most recipes suggest. I usually add two or three teaspoons of sage – sometimes just a bit more. This depends on how well your crew likes sage. 

The most important thing is, buy a new bottle of sage. Old sage doesn't have much flavor (which is a good thing, according to some people). 

Tossing out the old bottle of sage is a Thanksgiving tradition at my house.

Most recipes say add salt and pepper to taste. 

I *never* use pepper.

Salt may or may not be needed, depending on how salty your broth is.

I add 4 to 6 eggs slightly beaten. You really do not have to beat the eggs, but you will probably break the yokes when you crack the eggs, and beating them slightly does not add much labor to the overall process.

If you're concerned about salmonella, you can add the egg last – because all great cooks (ahem) taste the dressing as they go along. 

I've never heard of anyone getting sick from the eggs in raw dressing, and I don't worry about it (you can quote me on your tombstone).

But I would not feed raw dressing to a young child or to a person with health problems … why tempt fate?

You need to add chicken broth or bouillon. I use a mixture of canned broth and powdered bouillon. You can make your own broth but I can't tell much difference, except it's a lot more work to cook the broth first. However, the broth does smell wonderful when it’s simmering. And if you carve the turkey the night before, cooking the bones makes you feel really virtuous. As for me, I favor sloth. 

I generally use two 2.25 ounce jars of Weylen’s Chicken bouillon granules (mixed in 3 or 4 cups of water), plus 2 to 4 cans of low sodium chicken broth. You can buy the more expensive organic chicken broth, but I can’t tell any difference.

If you are worried about the dressing having too strong a chicken flavor, add less of the powdered bouillon granules to start with. You can always add more later, but you can’t take it out once it is in the dressing.

I add enough milk to make the mixture "soupy". I usually use four small cans of canned milk, which makes for a richer flavor. If you use regular milk, you may want to increase the amount of butter somewhat. 

If you need more liquid, you can add a little water, or plain milk. 

The desired texture of the raw dressing is hard to describe – it should be a bit thicker than lumpy oatmeal, and you should have a little free liquid around the edge of the pan. Remember, you want the raw dressing to be “goopy” – this is a bread pudding you are making. 

The raw dressing should taste about like the final product, after it has been cooked.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 

It usually takes me 20 to 30 minutes to assemble the raw dressing – just about long enough for the oven to get hot.

Bake in a covered container. 

If you want, you can uncover the dressing for the last 10 to 15 minutes, either to brown the top of the dressing, or if you get too much liquid in the mix this will dry it out.

The cooking time depends partly on how much liquid you used. It typically takes between 1 ¼ and 1 ½ hours – sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. 

The dressing will stay hot for a long time, especially if you wrap the pan in clean towels.

Arlington

Tartan Girl spent a moving day at Arlington National Cemetery yesterday and sends this to all.

"The picture you have is of a block of marble--just marble at the end of a hall in honor of women in military service at Arlington National Cemetery. A moving memorial in a hallowed place that is filled with grace and and solitude, though with quiet vigilance for the grief of us still here.

"I came to this place today to honor two of you, and found this sight to honor all of you. The picture you have is of a piece of marble that is called the Sister Block--the little sister of the marble that was used in the construction of the Tomb of the Unknowns. Although she is smaller and somehow softer than her big brother, she stands as resolutely as he in honor to those resting in this honored place. Having a life made exquisite by brothers and sisters I can appreciate something deeper about her.

"I'd not met her, but I am so glad that I did today. You were each arrived with me today, and I was glad for your company. It was a day of clouds and breeze that would turn to thunderstorms and downpours.....but I was lucky enough to meet this little sister before I left.

"Thank you each for the grace and strength you bring to my life and for the endless joy you offer. I would not be here without you...."

Theophilus and Ralph: I

Ralph Moore Shelton Sr.'s military-issue New Testament

A note from a friend reminded me that this blog has not been updated in approximately forever.  It’s been one of those assignments subjected to a rigorous program of deferred maintenance. In 10 words: travel, life, work, nothing wrong, everything hectic, deadlines whooshing by. In a few more: drought, fires, good friends in town, good friends across the country. We put 4000 miles on the van during the first two weeks of June, an adventure that still needs to be documented once the statute of limitations elapses....

There has been a breakthrough (maybe) on the family history front. That’s as good a place as any to start for a catch-up post.

When I started this project, it was for my father as much as anything. I’ve gone through my whole life to date telling people that, no, I don’t know any Shelton relatives outside my immediate family of origin and my father’s parents.

My mother’s family and my paternal grandmother’s family were people I could understand. They talked to children, usually nicely. They were involved in the world. The relatives I knew and grew up with were a hugely varied lot, from the last gasps of the Deep South/East Texas would-be aristocracy to hard-scrabble homesteaders and half-dugout dwellers.  

My paternal grandfather, Ralph Sr., was the silent man, not silent in a strong way, but silent in a deeply withdrawn way. I doubt that I heard him say more than 20 words in my lifetime. My father is an only child, and left home for good when he left for college. My grandfather’s silence was deep and irrevocable.

I knew he had relatives whom he never saw. The story from my grandmother was that, when he left to fight in World War I, his family decided that he was not coming back, so they sold his things and cashed his checks as they came in. I have no way of checking the truth of this, but it is certain that he had almost no contact with his family once he returned. He went to Detroit to train as a mechanic, then returned to Dallas for the rest of his life. His orbit grew ever smaller. By the time I came along, he was apparently locked into the silence.

I’m a poster child for oldest sibling syndrome. I take responsibility for everything, and every time something goes wrong, I assume it’s my fault. My grandfather’s silence was puzzling and uncomfortable. I always thought that he didn't like me. Or children. Or my family. Or all of the above. Since I didn't know what I had done wrong or how to make things better, I tended to edge away from him. I wish now that I hadn't. 

We visited my Shelton grandparents a couple of times a year or so. My grandmother always had places for us to go and people for us to visit, so we didn't sit around the house very much. On one of these visits, when my brother was perhaps 4 years old, my father overheard something amazing. My grandfather was telling my brother about the battle in the Argonne, and how only two or three of them came back, and then had to go out again the next day. That’s all my father heard, and my grandfather stopped talking after that.

That’s all we knew. All we know. 

Next: Theophilus. 

Power of two

Thomas J. Brooks, second from left

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Whoa, horsie! Whoa, horsie! Please whoa, horsie!—Yosemite Sam

This is an interesting week in the family history saga. I seem to be alternating between lines that run hard into a brick wall, and lines that show no sign of ending. I’m working backward from the known to the unknown ancestors, and some of them are showing up and some of them aren’t. As a rank amateur at this stuff, I look at a combined list of 9600+ with great trepidation: who are all these people, and just how many ancestors can I have?

Well, of course, lots. Powers of 2. We are at least theoretically talking about the exponential increase from 1 person to 2 to…too many for a house party. I’m working with 27^th great-grandparents right now. Theoretically, I should have 134,217,728 in the 27^th generation back, or 268,435,456 in the 28^th. That makes the 9600+ group I have look pathetic. Of course, humans being what they are, especially in isolated areas with attractive cousins, the math is not that clean and the numbers are not that large. There are more common ancestors than we realize. And that’s complicated further by the accuracy of genealogical records, which can range from pinpoint perfection to speculative fiction. Still, it's clear that I don't have much of the picture, which tends to emerge 2 people at a time. 

6 March 1954: We just celebrated the 58^th wedding anniversary of Ralph and Shirley Shelton. This is also the date of the final fall of the Alamo, but never mind. 58 years ago these two kids, finishing up their degrees, booked First Methodist Church in Lubbock and made it official. This year, thanks to sister Laura, they duded up in their best clothes and went to a La Traviata concert performance.

Ralph and Shirley, if I’ve done the genealogy right, have a common ancestor, making them many-generations-removed cousins. (NB: if you ever discover something like this in your own family, do not announce it to your parents by calling them Aunt Mom and Uncle Dad. The ensuing conversation will be a bit tense. This is the voice of experience here. Besides, what does that make me?) Both are descended from the Hinton line. Shirley’s maternal great-grandfather, John Hinton Walker, is part of an unbroken line of Hintons that goes back to Ulbert Dehynton in England sometime around 1000.

Skip to 1574, when Thomas Hinton is born in Suffolk. Thomas marries Catherine Palmer in 1595. Of this marriage, there are two siblings of interest here: John (1603-1682), who is a direct ancestor of my mother on the maternal side, the Walker family, and Mary Francis Hinton (Matthews) (1601-1675), who is a direct ancestor of my father’s maternal line, the Summers family. Thomas is my 11^th great-grandfather; Mary is my 10^th great-grandmother; you can work out the cousinage for yourself.

8 March 1790: John Hinton’s  great-great grandson, Uriah Hinton Blanchard, dies in Chowan, North Carolina. His grandfather William came over from England and apparently liked the look of the Carolina countryside. Uriah (another Name You Just Don’t Hear Any More) lived there his whole life. Not until the 19^th century would the south-and-west wanderlust take the Blanchards out of North Carolina and on to Mississippi and Oklahoma.

8 March 1907: Thomas W. Shelton dies in Plano, Texas, at the age of 78. He is buried there at Plano Mutual Cemetery. Thomas is one of my most frustrating brick walls. He was born in Virginia (a hotbed of Sheltons) in 1828, but so far I have no record of his ancestry. By 1850 he is in Kentucky, where in 1853 he marries Lydia Theresa Rowland. Her line goes back forever, deep into Viking territory, but his stops at his birth. There are other Sheltons that enter—of all things—the Hinton line (those Hintons!) in the 1100s, but so far I have not made these lines connect.  Thomas farmed in Collin County, Texas; his son became a lawyer and judge in Plano. A newspaper article about him published 2 years before his death describes him thus: “Mr Shelton is now advanced in years, so also is his long life companion. In quietude and contentment they are waiting, on a pleasant evening, till the sun of life goes down and they, as nearly all their contemporaries have done, will make the last removal, that of going to the country sought by all the good of ages.”

10 March 1910: Thomas J. Brooks dies in McLean, Texas, at the age of 59. The wanderlust was strong in this one. His ancestry is also not known; we hit the brick wall hard here. He may have been adopted. Thomas moved from Georgia to South Carolina to Arkansas by the time he was 20. He married Sarah Catherine Wren there and moved on to Texas. They raised 12 children, of whom my great-grandfather Joseph Newton Brooks was the fourth and Art Brooks was the second. 

There is a DNA project to track down the related male Brooks family members. Maybe there will be an answer to his ancestry. Maybe there will be two. 

Names

Mahala Scott Wren with her descendants

It’s a cold, blustery Saturday evening, rye bread rising and everyone in the house torpid. For the first time this year, I had a day with nothing on the schedule. Almost every Saturday has been taken up with our final move into the new building, which was turning into Zeno’s move for a while there. Two weeks ago, however, thanks to an awesome team, we completed the last of it. A few tweaks here and there, and that was it: we have our collections 100% under one roof for the first time in decades.

So Gene went birding and I stayed asleep this morning. After a late rise, I came in here, looked out the window and there was a peregrine falcon on the telephone pole. It flew past so close that I could count its primaries. Apparently, it was the best bird of the day, and I didn’t have to leave the house or even put down the tea. We leave for the annual crane trip in 4 weeks, weather permitting, so I'm birding in slothful comfort while I can.

I’ve signed up for a community education class to learn Lakota 101. I have no illusions that I will ever be a fluent speaker, or even a Tarzan-level speaker, but I’m fascinated by the language and the culture of our Lakota friends and colleagues here. This should give them much amusement. It's nice to give your friends something to laugh at. 

I’ve been catching up on a number of things—grant applications, plans for the next few months, rearranging the sewing space—and indulging myself by spending a little time with the genealogy project. Lately I’ve been mired in fractious medieval relatives, if they are in fact relatives, which some of them appear to be multiple times over. Genealogy is not a good pursuit for those who do not wish to untangle the results of intermarriages between cousins. The on-line resources are not as useful as one could wish when one is trying to determine if a relative is a direct ancestor, a cousin, or both. I seem to keep running into “both.” The Brits in particular seem to have a cheerful lack of boundaries here.  I’ve been known to yell at them when the family trees start looking like kudzu.

The names fascinate me. I’ve been keeping a loose list of Names You Just Never See Any More. Here are a few from the files. These are all my relatives, if I’ve done this correctly, so I am not presenting this in a mean-spirited way. Quite the opposite—I’d like to see some of these in use again. Note: “Some.”

• Adeliza
• Antiocha (Hawkwood—may be one of the best names in the family)
• Clorinda
• Dulcenia
• Bertrade
• Egidia
• Rohese
• Eschyna
• Fluvia
• Hawise
• Mahala (occurs 6 times in the files so far)
• Osburga
• Permelia
• Telethia
• Petronilla
• Pinthy
• Rothais
• Leuca
• Frethesanda
• Kynion
• Littleberry
• Green Berry (Moon and Savage)
• Zilphia

The virtues: Comfort, Deliverance, Pleasant (Moon—another great name), Charity, Please, Increase, Rest, the lovely Rachel Obedience Rosebloom, and my particular favorite, Thankful Shears, which I will use as a business name if this quilting thing takes off.

The British lines tend to taper off in the 10th century unless Vikings are involved, in which case the lines can go back in time several more centuries. Say what you will about their pillaging--they kept good records of it.

There are no fewer than 8 women named Martha Patsy. I am finding out that Patsy was a common nickname for Martha, as Polly and Molly were for Marty and Sally was for Sarah. I am not sure how you get Patsy out of Martha. This goes back at least as far as Thomas Jefferson’s daughter and seems to be an American thing.

But my new favorite relative’s name is Devorguilla, or Dervorgilla, which sounds like a 1950s creature feature but is actually a Latinization of Dearbhfhorghaill. Of course it is. It’s supposed to be much easier to say. Right. I've also found a Derbforgaill later on, when consonants were harder to come by, apparently, so it was not a one-time thing. Gaelic cannot be harder than Icelandic or Lakota, can it? 

And the best name (twice) in the online hints is one I can’t really cite as a name, but has to have a killer story behind it. Ghilo DePinkney of Scotland is linked to the following records:

Father: Ghilo DePinkney (980-1030)

Mother: Agitated Lady of Scotland (980-1030)

Spouse: Agitated Lady of Scotland (1021-1130)

This is for real. I am not sure what this means, but somebody must have found it difficult to live with somebody. Maybe somebody was too close to somebody else’s cousins. It gets cold in Scotland. Agitatedly yours, sys

Mollie and Kendall

I think, after much sophisticated detective work, that I have finally identified the problem at the heart of my high-tech organizational system...

The updates have been missing in action lately while I worked through a little cardiac scare. One night in the hospital and a number of tests later, I am happy to report that it was, in fact, just a scare. We are chalking this one up to 2011 stress. My plan is to deal with it by acting like a cat and falling asleep on my piles of to-do lists. You never see a cat having to take a stress test, do you?

2012 is mostly behaving better than 2011 so far. The weather has been eerily warm until today, we seem to be on schedule at the museum, and several quilting projects are back on the front burner. There may even be a better camera on the horizon.

The ancestors have been quiet the past few days, but, now that they know that their antics are not in fact endangering my heart, they are back in force again. Today the theme seems to be war casualties on the home front.

14 Jan 1876: Mary "Mollie" Savage Honnoll dies in Prentiss, Mississippi, at the age of 67. Mollie was the mother of Nancy and the wife of Peter the beekeeper. She was born in Cumberland, Kentucky, in 1818, married in Hardeman County, Tennessee, in 1836, and was in Mississippi by 1850. Her parents were Hamilton Savage and Elizabeth Martin. Mollie had 9 children. One son, William Cacy Honnoll, died in the Civil War at the Battle of Richmond. His older brother, James Wiseman Honnoll, brought his brother's body home. I cannot imagine the ways in which this war tore everything and everyone apart. Mollie's picture, taken toward the end of her life, looks as if it were all too much. I am certain that the skills that went into the quilt came from her.

Peter Ambrose Honnoll Jr. and Mollie Savage Honnoll, posted at the old Honnoll-Hunnell family site. 

Picture posted by Mona Mills at Find a Grave. 

Gravestone picture posted by Peggy Herridge Wilson at Find a Grave. 

Mollie is buried at Gilmore Chapel Cemetery along with William Cacy and  a tiny grandchild, Jimmie Honnoll Walker, my great-grandmother's next-youngest sibling. Peter remarried and died some years later. If his grave is at Gilmore Chapel, it is unmarked. Apparently he was a tough old reprobate who did not believe in churches. His son Moses Wiseman Honnoll more than made up for his father's apostasy by becoming a Methodist circuit preacher. My great-grandmother and her family must have left Mississippi soon after Mollie's death.

16 Jan 1815: Kendall Savage dies in New Orleans. The location and the timing makes me think that he was a casualty of the Battle of New Orleans, as he was from North Carolina and had no other connection with Louisiana, nor any sign that his family ever lived there. Kendall would have been Mollie's uncle, brother of her father Hamilton Savage, gone before she was born. There is no record of his burial place.

Today is a day celebrating peaceful change to make the world a better place, one neighborhood at a time, in celebration of the life of Martin Luther King. We remember what the price of peace is, but hope for a time when war is no longer necessary.

Belvy

Circa 1900 : Luther Hinton Saunders, Stephen Decater Saunders, Belvadier Walker Saunders, (on her lap) John B. Carl Saunders, Clarence Steve Saunders, girls: May Etta Saunders & Berti Florence Saunders. From the Honnoll family genealogy site. 

"WALKER NAME MEANING
English (especially Yorkshire) and Scottish: occupational name for a fuller, Middle Englishwalkere, Old English wealcere, an agent derivative ofwealcan ‘to walk, tread’." 

Today in family history (an ongoing series)

Today was another day of freezing fog and hidden ice patches everywhere. The landscape is closing down for winter, but it feels like winter has made it here early yet again. It’s a time to light fires and look for the first sign that the days are starting to lengthen again.

No one in the immediate line was up to much on Dec. 12, but Dec. 13 brings us to a heartbreaker.

13 Dec 1901: Belvadier Walker Saunders dies in Altus, Oklahoma, at the age of 29, 10 days after being gored by a bull. She was part of the Walker exodus from Itawamba, Mississippi, via Arkansas to Altus. This was a one-way trip with wagons—not romantic prairie schooners, but utilitarian wagons carrying whole households. Generally the people walked. And walked. The quilt I now have made this trip in one of those wagons.

Belvy was the oldest child in the family; my great-grandmother Mossie was the second child, and the infamous Clovis was the youngest. There were 7 others, a total of 9. The youngest 3 were not born in Mississippi, so the trek must have started after 1884 but before 1887. In 1884, Belvy would have been 12. In 1892, at the age of 19, not quite 20, she married Stephen Decatur Saunders in Altus and started what would become a family of 5 children.

She doesn’t look as if life was easy in any way. Altus was a frontier town then, and Oklahoma was not yet a state (that would not happen until 1907). They were homesteaders, farmers, not ranchers, and the enmity between the two groups was fierce. Belvy looks as if she could tackle anything and do everything except smile. I hope that is nothing more than an artifact of the photograph pose.

I cannot find where she is buried. She is not listed in Victory Cemetery at the geometrically straight crossroads outside Altus, as are her parents and some of her siblings. And cousins. And in-laws. There are 730 people here and I may be related to them all, as was Belvy, at least once. 

Stephen remarried, and raised 3 more children with Lillie Brisbin, whose brother Henry—keep up, now—married Belvy’s little sister Mittie Florence Walker. I am working out some complex descendancies here. It was an outpost town, with relatively few families but lots of children in those families. Mossie married Newt Brooks, and George Aster Walker married Nettie Melinda Brooks—siblings marrying siblings. Oddly, Nettie also died at the age of 29, leaving 5 children.

I don’t have any pictures of my great-grandmother at 29, but I suspect that she and Belvy faced the world with that same expression.  They could run a homestead, build a half-dugout, and carve out a living on a dry and trackless frontier. They took their Methodism straight and walked roads we would not be able to see today. In the end, the dangers of their world--livestock for one, a tornado for another--were too much. I have lit a candle for Belvy today. It's too cold without one. 

Savages and Moons

Mary "Mollie" Savage Honnoll

This day in family history:

11 Dec 1678: John Savage dies in Savages Neck, Northampton, Virginia. He was born in Accomac, Virginia, in 1624, son of Thomas Savage, one of the Jamestown settlers. Accomac is in Accomack County, just so you Virginians don’t assume I don’t know how to spell. Apparently the K is negotiable. Jamestown was a marshy, swampy, hostile environment for the English settlers; never mind that "History is Fun" stuff. Thomas came over in 1608 at the age of 14 on a ship called the "John and Francis," married Hannah Tyng there at 27 and died there at 39. John Savage confounds the family migration trend by moving east from the Eastern Shore across the Chesapeake to a tiny point of land close to the end of the Delmarva Peninsula. I’ve been there, on the way to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, though with no idea of the family connection at the time, alas. John lived on the bay side of the peninsula. His son Hamilton stayed there, too. His grandson Levin struck out for the Appalachians in the next century.  I wonder if John was a waterman on the Bay. That would make me happy. Just the idea that there is a place called “Savages Neck” is great. Keep reading for more Savages.

11 Dec 1710: Keeses, as promised. I hardly know what to make of this. Among his children, John Keese may have had two sons, William and Shadrach. Or he may have just had one, William Shadrach. At least one of them died this day in Providence, Rhode Island. The records are conflicting. In some, William was born 10 years before Shadrach (26 Oct 1685 vs. 05 Nov 1695). William was 25; Shadrach was 15. Whoever, or whichever, someone died this day and did so 10 years after their father almost to the day, and 10 years before their mother. There is no other information that I can find. Some young man died far too young, that’s certain. This must have been devastating for their family. Their brother, Jonathan, lived to 1771 and married Mary Bowne. He is my 6^th great-grandfather. Jonathan left Providence for New York sometime before 1719. I wonder if there was too much tragedy in Providence for him. His son was the first Elijah Keese in this line. One genealogy line insists that William (not Shadrach) married in 1743 after dying in 1710, but I don’t think my family is that talented. Always check your references.

11 Dec 1726: Stephen Moon dies in St. Peter Parish, New Kent, Virginia. St. Peter’s Parish is still in service today and is the site, among other notable history moments, of George and Martha Washington’s wedding. Stephen died five years before Martha was born, but the families undoubtedly knew each other, it being a small population at that time. He was born there in 1681 and was another one who stayed where he started. You’d think that the ancestors would stay put in such a lovely part of the world, but you would be mistaken.  His son Jacob headed west, from the coastal plain east of Richmond to the Appalachian foothills northeast of Lynchburg. My ancestors seem to have liked the Appalachians very much once they got there. The Moons are descended from Capt. John Moon, who came over in the early 17^th century from Hampshire, England. The line follows from Martha Patsy Moon through the Martins to Mary Savage, descendant of John (above) and mother of Nancy Ellinor Honnoll Walker, the quiltmaker. See? More Savages. 

England, old and New

Snowscape

This day (and yesterday) in family history: On a cold December day in 2011, I am mired in the cold 17th century of both old and new England. 

Dec. 9: None of my ancestors apparently admits to doing anything notable on this day. I may make it an official holiday.

Dec. 10, 1637: Judith Burrow Phippen dies in Somerset, England. Unless she didn’t. The lineage here is a bit shaky and could be wrong. There is not a lot known about Judith. She was born in 1595 and died at the age of ~42. If the lines are in fact drawn correctly, her daughter Elizabeth emigrated to the New World in before 1654 and married one of the John Adams who pepper the family tree. At the most recent OCD count, there are 13 John Adamses in the tree. On both sides of the family, no less.

Dec. 10, 1700: Mary Folland Weldon dies in Barnstable, Massachusetts. Mary is my 9^th great-grandmother and the direct ancestor of (among other people) my great-grandmother Elmyra Wacaster Johnson, mother of my maternal grandfather.  Her line goes through a few Bentleys, a Bailey and a Gibbs before it runs into the Wacasters of Arkansas, a large and complex family, as future posts will show. I’m having a hard time reconciling New England ancestors and Arkie-Okie-Texas descendants, but that move south and west was an overwhelming trend across our generations. Mary died at 70 and apparently never left the Barnstable area. I wonder what she would have thought about her restless migrating descendants following the ever-retreating frontiers. Her parents were among the first to arrive in the New World in this line—maybe one ocean crossing was enough for a few generations before the wanderlust hit again. There was no way back across the Atlantic for them, either.

Dec. 10, 1700: Close by, in Rhode Island, John Keese also dies on the same day as Mary Folland Weldon. They were not related and most likely never met, but there they are, both ancestors. He is a 7^th great-grandfather of mine. There are 5 John Keeses of one kind or another in the tree. This John Keese was born in Rhode Island in 1655 and died at the age of 45, leaving children with good New England names such as Patience and Shadrach. It is odd that the most die-hard Confederate line in my father’s family has such staunch New England roots. John is the ur-Keese: I have found no information on his parentage.

More on John Keese and his family tomorrow. 

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.

William Sharp(e)

Meeting House Hill, Delaware, 2002; an early Quaker meeting house in the New World

Today in the family history project (a continuing series):

06 Dec 1525: William Sharpe dies at the age of 67 in Islington, a London neighborhood which he was also born, back in 1458, date unknown. The name of his spouse is also unknown, as are the names of his parents. William Sharp just springs up spontaneously in Islington, which is not uncommon in the older records. I'm finding that there is no such thing as pinpoint accuracy when you get past the first three or four generations as you move forward onto the past. Spellings and dates change, stories mutate over time, and hidden information comes into the light. If my information about William is correct, he is my 14th great-grandfather, and he spent his life in a neighborhood originally named Giseldone by the Saxons in 1005. His descendants spelled Sharp in a number of creative ways, which makes the genealogy work so interesting (sigh). If the chart is correct--a big if--his descendants include the Bownes, who were among the very first Quakers, the Winthrops of New England, and the Keeses--remember the Keeses?--who wound up all over Texas and Brazil. The Bowne connection is particularly meaningful to me. As the saying goes, interesting if true, and maybe proof that there are deeper connections to the past than we think. 

Ancestors in the attic

Keese House, Jefferson, TX

Today marks the start of a year-long project to share stories from our increasingly strange family genealogy project. I'm using calendar software to turn up what the relatives were up to on this day in history. This helps me decide which part of the tree to work on next in a nicely random way, which seems apropos. With any luck, it'll be entertaining....

Today in the family history project (a continuing series):

05 Dec 1884: Oliver Hazard Perry Keese dies in Junction, Texas, at the age of 58. The Keeses went in for grand patriotic masculine names and Confederate sympathies in a big way. His grandson, who was born 6 years later, was named Oliver Napoleon Keese. His father, Thomas Jefferson Keese, was born in South Carolina and died in Menard, Texas. My great-great-grandfather, Oliver H. P.’s  first cousin, was George Washington Keese. Oliver H. P. Keese was born in Lawrence, Tennessee, northeast of Memphis, and was in Texas by the age of 24, following the trend moving at that time to the southwest of the Mississippi. He served as a private in the Confederacy, in the Company of the 2^nd Frontier. After that, he served as a Texas Ranger. These Keeses were cousins of the Keeses in my father’s line who went to Brazil as Confederados, but these Keeses stayed at the edge of West Texas, which was doubtless just as alien, just as removed from the aftermath of the Civil War. Interestingly, they don’t seem to have named any boy babies in ensuing generations for Confederate heroes—Oliver’s sons included yet another George Washington, yet another Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Clay Keese. The girls were not saddled with equally weighty names, fortunately. 

December?! How did that happen?

House, Cottonwood, SD

If you are eagle-eyed enough to notice that these shots do not look like December light, or even November light....congratulations. Now hush. I'm trying to get this line of thought back on track after an extraordinarily hectic couple of months. Every year I conveniently forget how fast-paced the fall semester tends to be. After traveling every weekend in October, I stayed in for November with a variety of work projects that also managed to consume every available weekend.

This culminated in a Thanksgiving dinner for 25 that happily, almost magically, worked out beautifully. We are in the heart of potluck country, after all, and the students, faculty, staff and friends of the museum outdid themselves. There is a quirky saying that the only Quaker sacrament is potluck. This is a great truism that only appears to be shallow on the surface. It's the same deep connection that we make when we share food at our meetings with our Lakota friends. You have to bring and share food, but it's not about the eating, it's about the bonding.

So here it is December, and snow is blowing around, and the temperature is supposed to be a whole 4 degrees F tonight. I fail to see why we can't just hibernate.

In other breaking news, the family genealogy project just took a bizarre turn when I discovered that my parents are actually related, and not just by marriage. I've checked this over dozens of times, and that's how it comes out. In the early 1600s, a brother and sister in the Hinton family started families that would eventually culminate in their 9th-great grandchildren meeting up, marrying, and unleashing the Shelton siblings on the world. My father's mother is descended from the daughter; my mother's mother is descended from the son. I don't know what that makes me, but I do know that my parents don't react at all well to being called Aunt Mom and Uncle Dad. And there will be no banjo music...

More genealogy later if I can untangle it. Here are some ghost town and prairie architecture shots from our trip to Brookings in October, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. And more mists. Enjoy.

Abandoned church and abandoned tree, Cottonwood, SD

Sod-topped cabin, Philip, SD

Shelter barn

Classic barn with a face

Brickwork

Damaged barn

Ghost house, Badger, SD

Building ornamentation

Octagonal barn