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.....

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

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. 

Art, the IWW, and WWI

The Thomas Brooks family, ca. 1890, in Texas. Artemus Clark Brooks stands tallest. Photo courtesy of Linda Schritter. 

I'm still catching up on everything after a month of travel in all directions. Next up is The Next Major Event at the new building, in which we add the emeritus curator's name to the building in front of his friends and family. This is a little overwhelming emotionally for everyone who has worked with him all these years. Just to make sure that everyone in the vicinity finds out how easily I choke up at these events, the Powers That Be have asked me to emcee the presentation. I'm not sure how long I'll make it before I have to claim laryngitis, the sun in my eyes, or whatever other pathetic excuse comes to mind. 

There's also a lot of catch-up work on the genealogy front. As I have had cause to mention before, one should not get into this line of investigation if one is not prepared to deal with all sorts of startling and even abhorrent behaviors on the part of one's ancestors. So far Shirley's family is winning in the reprobate sweepstakes, but that may be only because Ralph's family is a bit more difficult to track. In Ralph's family, we have the die-hard Confederados. In Shirley's, we have at least one known moonshiner, we have Cleophas/Clovis, and now we have Great-Uncle Art. None of this was anything anyone expected. 

Cleophas/Clovis Walker was my grandmother Johnson's uncle on her mother's side. We've discussed his fall from grace with the Feds. His father, John Hinton Walker, was a known moonshiner (which my grandmother denied hotly to the end). On her father's side, however, we find her uncle Artemus Clark Brooks. And his troubles were also with the Feds, but in a strikingly different way. 

Take a look at that gang up at the top. Those are mostly the Brooks children. Twelve of them. Art is standing at the far left. My great-grandfather, Joseph Newton Brooks, is seated at the far right, with his little sister Mandy standing behind him, and his oldest brother William Washington seated next to him. Newt is in his late teens. Art was a couple of years older, the next-to-oldest, born in 1873. 

This is a frontier, homesteading family with precious few resources beyond their own capacity for hard work. That board-lumber house was a lifetime accomplishment. The three oldest boys will take very different paths. William Washington Brooks, the oldest, took his wife and daughter to Mexico--no one seems to know exactly where--and died there. No other details are known. Newt went down to Mexico to bring the widow and daughter back. He homesteaded and made a fairly decent living. 

But Art was different. 

I didn't have any problem finding a reference to Art online, even after all these years. His records were right there with all the others released by the FBI. THAT got my attention. 

Great-Uncle Art was prosecuted as a draft evader in 1921, it turns out. He was not, however, just a typical slacker. 

There are two records for Art that are available. In the first one, we find him charged in Arizona with evading the WWI draft in 1918. Apparently he had moved there to work in the mines, and had incurred the wrath and suspicion of a neighbor who was a grieving father of two soldiers killed in action. The FBI (actually, at the time, just the Bureau of Investigation) followed up on the (anonymous) neighbor's complaint that Art Brooks was a draft evader and  probably plotting the overthrow of the government. 

From the neighbor's complaint: "Art Brooks was very loud in his condemnation of the government and parising [sic] the I. W. W."

Art was arrested on the Forest Reserve near Prescott, Arizona, as an alleged draft evader. His defense was that he was way past draft age: in 1918, he would have been 45. He was 48 when he was arrested. 

P. 2: "A further investigation of subject at post office developed the fact that subject has been receiving what the clerk of the Post Office thot [sic] was radical literature in large packages. On examining his post office box, No. 799, Agent discovered two copies of the APPEAL TO REASON, addressed to Art Brooks, Prescott, Arizona." 

"Subject was unable to make bond and was remanded to the county jail." 

Appeal to Reason was a Socialist Party of America newspaper founded in 1895, when Prairie Populism was a growing trend. In 1921, it was on its last legs and would in fact cease publication the next year. Great-Uncle Art was apparently the family's outspoken Socialist, at a time when Socialism was seen as a major threat by the government. As a supporter of the International Workers of the World, Art would have caught the BI's attention even without the draft evasion charges. Or perhaps he had, but the charges were actionable. 

But it makes no sense, because he was in fact 45, past draft age. He seems to have been guilty of, at worst, being obnoxious. IWW membership was not illegal, and he was not in a place to pose much of a threat to anyone. 

When he appeared for the hearing, the rest of the story came out.

"On cross examination Agent questioned subject with reference to his registering for voting on August 3, 1910, at which time he gave his age as 36 years. He stated that he always stated that he was younger than he really was for the reason that he was unable to secure a position as a miner if he were to disclose his true age." 

The agent seemed to realize at this point that there was not a lot of evidence for draft evasion. The trail stops here. Art seems to have been caught up in a bad combination of his misrepresentations and his unpopular Populist political beliefs, at a time when the country was still recovering from The War to End All Wars. If only that had been true... 

Art died 7 years later in Texas and is buried in the family plot in the Panhandle. He was 55. No descendants are known. Obviously he got out of Arizona and made it back to Texas, but I get the feeling that his life was blighted by his arrest in Arizona. 

If there is a moral to this story, it escapes me. Art was probably never much of a threat to anyone. He was too old to fight in WWI, and he was the only one who suffered for his misrepresentations. But he's not exactly a likable character, either; not much of a poster boy for his beliefs. The Socialist Party of America was collapsing at the time, due in no small part to dissension within its ranks. If Art is a representative of its stance in 1921, it's not hard to see why. 

Content Source: The National Archives Publication Number: M1085 Publication Title: Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation 1908-1922 Publisher: NARA Short Description: NARA M1085. Before it was called the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation investigated real and perceived threats to the nation and its citizens. Collection Title: Investigative Reports of the Bureau of Investigation 1908-1922 Series: Bureau Section Files, 1909-21 Case Number: 25-8-259-1 Case Title: ALLEGED DRAFT EVADER Suspect Name: ARTEMUS CLARK BROOKS 

Cleophas and Clovis

I have struggled with this post for a few weeks. It involves a family member, long since gone, whose life was a classic tragedy. No one in our family knew anything about this saga until I started poking around in the family genealogy and breaking down walls that were, in retrospect, put up for a reason. I have no pictures because I can find none. It's a story worth telling, I think, and I am still piecing it together. 

His name at birth was Cleophas Dewitt Walker, and he was the youngest child of John Hinton Walker and Nancy Ellinor Honnoll Walker. That makes him my great-grandmother's baby brother, and my great-grand uncle. He was born in Altus, Oklahoma, in 1892. Times were tough for farming families in the drylands, and by 1917, according to his WWI draft registration record, he was living in Homestead, Florida. In 1922 Cleophas married a girl from the same part of Oklahoma; it appears that he had moved back there. At that point the trail stopped cold. 

I was working on documenting all of my great-grandmother's siblings--all 9 of them--and I could not figure out why someone with such a distinctive first name simply never showed up after that. Finally I called Shirley, who remembered that the family generally called him "Clovis." Easier to spell, I guess, and pronounced almost the same....but not the same name. More on that later. 

Bingo. Clovis D. Walker he was, starting about the time of his marriage and lasting the rest of his life. And it was quite a life for a young man from a dryland farm. 

He had gone to work for the Department of Agriculture. By 1938 he was chairman of the Oklahoma headquarters in Stillwater. Clovis kept moving up in the Agriculture Department, and was transferred to the main office in Washington, DC. He sailed to England in 1948. Apparently, he was the Walker family success story, living in Florida when he was not in DC. I get the strong feeling that he was trying to escape Oklahoma and farming in any way possible. 

And then, in 1952, it all came crashing down. 

From Time magazine, 12 May 1952: 

"When the U.S. Government began stockpiling Egyptian cotton 15 months ago, it looked to a Senate investigating committee as if one Loutfy Mansour, a broker for an Alexandria firm, had an inside track. Out of some $70 million worth bought by the U.S., the committee was told last week, Mansour got a $37 million share.

"From Harold Mesibov, a special investigator for the Department of Agriculture, the committee learned that Mansour had the benefit of some intimate contacts with the man who handled the purchases, Clovis Walker, head of the cotton branch in the Production and Marketing Agency of the Agriculture Department. Walker had sent many messages to Mansour; some signed 'Eula' had been sent by Walker's wife; others which referred to 'the Florida situation' used some kind of code. Walker, who had listed his 1951 income as $17,000, explained this by saying that he had bought $50,000 worth of Florida land after selling off some Oklahoma farmland, and that Mansour was interested in buying an adjoining tract for a 'nest egg.' Walker denied profiting by any of his transactions with Mansour, but admitted: 'Some of the things I've done have been improper.'

"At first, none of this seemed to perturb Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan, but his aide reported that Brannan felt Walker had been guilty of only indiscretions. But this week Clovis Walker suddenly quit his job, denying 'any implication of guilt,' but adding that to stay on would be 'embarrassing to the department and detrimental to my health.' "

A high rise and a devastating fall, all on the national stage. In September, according to the New York Times, Clovis was indicted. 

"WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 -- Clovis D. Walker, former Director of the Cotton Branch of the Department of Agriculture's Production and Marketing Administration, and Loutfy Mansour, an Egyptian cotton importer, were indicted today for conspiracy to defraud the United States."

The rest of the story was published six years later by columnist Drew Pearson. From his column released on 29 June 1958:

"Recent revelations regarding Sherman Adams, his gifts, and his influencing of government agencies, make me regret a column I wrote on Feb. 14. 1952. It pertained to another case of gift receiving inside the government. 

"I reported that Clovis Walker, head of the Agriculture Department's cotton branch, had received some gifts from an Egyptian cotton broker named Loutfy Mansour, in the form of Egyptian glassware and silver. I also reported that Walker had given Mansour, in turn, some electrically illuminated pictures which he makes. 

"The column also called attention to the fact that the Egyptian cotton broker had cornered 17,500 bales of cotton just before the Agriculture Department had suddenly decided to buy Egyptian cotton and had cleaned up. But the column did not accuse Walker of giving any inside information to his friend, Mansour.

"Following publication of the column, Walker was promptly removed by scrupulous Charlie Brannan, then Secretary of Agriculture for Truman. Walker had a good record as a civil servant and career official, but in those days more people were removed from office than in the present administration [nb: Eisenhower]. He was also tried in district court for a conflict of interest--which has not happened to any of the conflict-of-interest officials in the Eisenhower administration. 

"In the end, and after a lengthy trial, Walker was acquitted. The trial cost him most of his savings and he is now living in Florida on a meager income...Under the circumstances, I owe an apology to Mr. Walker, which I hereby tender." 

Clovis fell from grace in 1952. He died in Homestead, Florida in 1977, at the age of 85. I cannot find an obituary or a grave for him. Eula remarried after his death and returned to Oklahoma when she was widowed for a second time; she is buried in the same cemetery in Altus where Clovis's parents and some of his siblings are. She died in 1996 at the age of 97. Her obituary makes no note of her life in either Florida or DC. It's written as if she never left Oklahoma.

Shirley was in college in 1952 and raising two tiny children in 1958. At no time did her mother or grandmother ever tell her what was going on with her grandmother's youngest brother, the family success story, the Federal official in Washington, the shamed one, the one on trial. Shirley went to Homestead with her grandmother to visit the next-to-youngest Walker brother, Uncle Marcus. Clovis, Cleophas, whoever he was by then, was still living there, but no one went to visit him, and the feeling she got was that he did not want to see family. 

25 years is a long time to live in disgrace. There were no children, and everyone involved is long gone. It is hard to find words for this situation. I wish that I knew more about Cleophas/Clovis, but I also wish that he could have turned to his family for support. Instead, he turned away and never spoke to them. Drew Pearson's apology came far too late. 

He was one person with two names. The names are not the same. 

Cleophas is Greek in origin and means "vision of glory." 

Clovis is Old German and means "renowned fighter."      

I don't know if that means anything about his life or not.      

If anyone knows anything more about him, please let me know.  

Confederados

Women's History Month challenges to date:


March 13 — Moment of Strength: share a story where a female ancestor showed courage or strength in a difficult situation.
March 14 — Newsmakers? Did you have a female ancestor who made the news? Why? Was she famous or notorious? Did she appear in the social column?
March 15 — Write a six-word memoir tribute to one of your female ancestors


Watch me do all three.

Picture by Dan Ellis 1/20/2008

The Campo Cemetery in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, in the State of  São Paulo, Brasil.

The women in the Brooks line of my mother's family are notorious famous for having steel spines, great coping skills and the genteel tact and diplomacy of a wounded mother bear. Their history is nothing but courage and strength. I have yet to find a branch of the family that wasn't devastated by war. One of Nancy Honnoll's siblings died at Richmond. They were all too familiar with childhood and childbirth mortality, failed crops, killer storms, and epidemics that laid whole families low.

For the next few years, the United States will be in the midst of the 150th anniversary of its Civil War. I was not planning to focus on that until yesterday, when I stumbled into the saga of the Confederados and discovered that my father's side of the family had a story to tell that neither Ralph nor I had ever heard before.

The monument pictured above marks the American cemetery in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, a city in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, where Confederate soldiers and their families moved en masse in the 1860s. They were broken and angry, facing a ruined land and a bitter Reconstruction, and so they left. One group left central Texas in 1867, a group full of Keeses and Hardemans and Seawrights and others, leaving South Carolina and Georgia and Tennessee behind for good. They had first moved to Texas because it was not blighted by battles, but the anger and grief were still too much, and so they set off for a new life with no reminders of the old one.

Nancy Caroline Keese was the daughter of George Washington Keese. She, her husband Thomas Lafayette Keese, her husband Peter Hardeman, and their familes were part of this exodus. They were children of George's first wife, Helen Clarissa, who died in 1848. George remarried Harriet Adeline Perkins (born in Vermont) two years later and started a new family, including my great-grandfather, George Washington Keese Jr.

Loss of a parent, a new Yankee-born stepmother and stepsiblings, the horrors of the Civil War...apparently Thomas Lafayette and Nancy Caroline had enough. Their trip to Brasil was one-way. Their descendants became part of Brazil and only rarely returned. Today there is an annual celebration of the Confederados, including replica Confederate uniforms (splendid dress uniforms at that), American Southern cooking and Civil War songs in Portuguese. The Confederate flag is displayed everywhere, with little or none of the negative significance it has here. There are still Keeses and Hardemans in Brazil. There is still a town called Americana.

The cemetery was set up to serve as the resting place of the overwhelmingly Protestant Confederado community, who could not be buried on Catholic grounds.Thomas, his son Thomas Alonzo Keese, and Lt. Hardeman's names are on the monument, along with dozens of family members.

Nancy's is not. I've identified a dozen of our relatives on this monument, and hers is the most striking absence. Is she there and just overlooked by the chronicler? Is she in an unmarked grave? It's certain that she did not return to the United States.

How did she find the strength to leave her country for an unknown place a hemisphere away? How did she cope with children fluent in a new language? Did she leave the little expatriate community at any time? No matter what one's feelings are on the American Civil War (and they are still deep feelings), emigration as an adult is bitterly difficult.

She was famous in a way--many families were torn apart by the emigration, and many of the emigres are today the only stories still told from that generation. In my father's family, though, it was as if they had never existed by the time Ralph was old enough to hear family stories. This was never mentioned in any way whatsoever. He has cousins in Brazil, which for us is about as exotic and unbelievable as can be imagined. His great-grandfather had older half-siblings who left the country forever.

Today Ralph and I are tracking our family's role in this story. It's a father-daughter effort, and it's addictive stuff. But we don't forget that every record was a living, complex person.

Six words for Nancy Caroline Keese Hardeman: Determined. Griefstricken. Hopeful. Lost. Found. Enigmatic.

Ralph and Shirley II

Women's History Month challenge forMarch 6 — Describe an heirloom you may have inherited from a female ancestor (wedding ring or other jewelry, china, clothing, etc.) If you don’t have any, then write about a specific object you remember from your mother or grandmother, or aunt (a scarf, a hat, cooking utensil, furniture, etc.)

We interrupt the Women's History Month blog challenge to bring you an important announcement. Today is Ralph and Shirley Shelton's 57th wedding anniversary.

Shirley at Texas Tech, glamour shot.



Ralph at Texas Tech, glamour shot.

They majored in journalism and edited the college newspaper. She graduated. He graduated. And on March 6, 1954, they were married in First Methodist Church, Lubbock, Texas. They moved to their present house in 1967 and raised four obstreperous young, who fanned out across the country but somehow manage to stay close.

They gave us everything and still do. Heirlooms? I could list some lovely things, but the greatest is the way that they still look at each other. Happy anniversary, you crazy kids, and thanks for the world. From your loving children.

Ralph and Shirley I

Women's History Month challenge for March 5 — How did they meet? You’ve documented marriages, now, go back a bit. Do you know the story of how your parents met? Your grandparents?

Shirley Johnson and Ralph Shelton, Ko Shari Dinner Dance, Texas Tech, 1952.

I don't know exactly how my grandparents on either side met each other. My parents, though: that's an easy story. Journalism at Texas Tech.

One reason the Johnson grandparents moved from Altus to Lubbock, Texas, was the presence of a good, new state college. Neither one of them went to college, but the Depression and general hard times made them fiercely determined to send their own children to college, no matter what. I think everyone in my mother's crop of cousins went to college, many of them to Texas Tech.

Shirley was a very bright student who skipped two grades and graduated from high school at 16. That happened in those days. She had (and has) a talent for writing and editing, and majored in journalism at Tech. In those days, that was primarily newspaper writing, photography and publication. By her senior year, she was the editor of La Ventana.

Shirley Johnson, editor, ca. 1953.

Meanwhile, in Dallas, Ralph Shelton Jr. confounded his family's plans and made his way to Texas Tech for college as a (you guessed it) journalism major. He is also a talented writer and editor. His great-aunt Blanche Keese Heaton had just moved with her husband, attorney Nathaniel Heaton, to Slaton, where he was the new judge. This gave Ralph a family connection in the area, and a bit of distance from his parents (he is an only child).

Ralph and Shirley are the same age, but grade-skipping put Shirley a year ahead of Ralph. They worked on the paper together. She was editor first, then he was editor the next year. The rest is history, and saved for tomorrow's post.

Ralph Shelton, editor, ca. 1954. He will kill me for posting this. Snicker.   

Mack and Vada

Women's History Month challenge for March 4 — Do you have marriage records for your grandparents or great-grandparents? Write a post about where they were married and when. Any family stories about the wedding day? Post a photo too if you have one.

Mack and Vada, date uncertain, possibly after their move to Lubbock.

Do we have marriage record stories.....

These are my maternal grandparents, McKinley "Mack" Johnson and Vada Vivian Brooks Johnson, possibly in Lubbock, Texas, where they moved in 1937. They were married in 1923 in Montgomery County, Arkansas. Mack was the youngest child of the local doctor, Dr. John Johnson, and his second wife, Elmyra "Myra" Elizabeth Wacaster Johnson. Mack was a good-looking boy and the first in the area to have his own car. Vada's family had recently moved back to Arkansas following the death of her father Newt Brooks in Homestead, Florida. She set her cap for Mack and got him. 

At the time of their marriage in 1923, Mack was 21. According to the marriage certificate that Shirley has in the safe deposit box, Vada was 16.

Except that Vada was born in 1909.

You do the math.

That's right: Vada married at 14, even though her mother and younger sister tried to talk her out of it. Clearly she fudged the truth on the marriage certificate: the question is, did Mack know, or did she fudge the truth with him, too? Or were they all in it with the county registrar, since she was underage?

No one knows. We didn't find this out until long after the two of them were gone. They never fudged the truth with us. We knew that Grandmother married at 14 and didn't think too much about it. Times were different then, and harder. But we did not know that the marriage certificate told a very different story.

It was a very small, quiet wedding; that much we know. She wore her best dress, but not a wedding dress, which was common in that time and place. They moved to Altus, Oklahoma, with her mother, Mossie, who opened a boarding house. Mack became an architectural draftsman. Guinn was born in 1925, when Vada was 16. Shirley was born at home in Altus in 1933, and discovered, many years later, that she had no birth certificate, again not uncommon in those circumstances. Fortunately, that can be corrected now.

Whoever said "Truth is found, not in accounts, but in account books" should have a word with the registrar of marriages in Montgomery County, Arkansas, and births in Altus, Oklahoma.