#52Ancestors, Week 22: At the (Wilmington) Cemetery

These two "headstones" sit in the center of Wilmington Cemetery in Paducah, Kentucky.  They are the only remaining indicators of a city that once "lived" here. Currently, this small county burial ground is a type of pauper's cemetery - used for the burials of those who cannot afford to pay.  Once, though, the town of Wilmington existed in this space and was McCracken County's first county seat. Here is its brief history.

McCracken County was formed from Hickman County in 1825, and Wilmington became its county seat in 1827. The town of Wilmington was approximately 102 acres, and McCracken County Deed Book A (p. 22) indicates the sale of 42 lots of land in Wilmington in 1827. However, only 8 buildings were ever completed, one of them being the courthouse which was completed in 1830. Perhaps this modest success encouraged more people to buy here, as another spate of lots were sold in 1830 (pp. 102-103). A post office was opened in 1831. In 1832, extensive flooding occurred, and the county records were hastily removed from the Wilmington courthouse.  They traveled by skiff to what would eventually become the new county seat, Paducah. This event is depicted on the Paducah Wall to Wall floodwall mural. In the foreground, 2 dejected-looking men linger by the steps of the courthouse.  Behind the courthouse, a man pushes off into the floodwaters, presumably carrying the last of the courthouse documents. Several submerged buildings, possibly homes, can be seen in the background. This rather inauspicious start more or less marked the end of Wilmington, not only as the county seat, but also as a town.  The post office that opened in 1831 closed in 1846.  Wilmington no longer exists, and while I have done quite a bit of searching, there doesn't seem to be much about it beyond what I have related here.

Sad and secluded Wilmington Cemetery is important to me, not because of anyone buried here, but because my 4x great grandfather, John Field, purchased 3 plots of land here (lots 2, 5, & 9) in 1827. He and his wife, Jane Staton, had married in McCracken County in 1825, so one can only assume he intended to build in Wilmington and be at the center of McCracken County life. As far as I can tell, though, none of the 8 buildings completed belonged to him.  The Deed Books indicate he purchased other land (outside of Wilmington) in McCracken County, but I haven't found any record of sale for the lots of land he bought in Wilmington in 1827. Did he "take a bath" in the flood waters of 1832?  I'll probably never know.  John Field is a slippery fellow who evidently died sometime between 1840 and 1850, leaving behind his wife and two children.  They moved to Illinois not long after.  

Last summer, standing in the emptiness of Wilmington Cemetery, I could certainly appreciate the desire to own property in this area.  It was lush, green, and peaceful, and I hope this post will at least preserve the memory of Wilmington, the-county-seat-that-was. 

#52Ancestors, Week 21: Brick Wall - Thomas Green's parents

I have many brick walls.  I think any genealogist does.  Eventually, records run out, family histories come up short...or you're really lucky and you are able to track yourself back to Genghis Khan.  I've been working on this particular brick wall for several years, and every time I think I've found something that I am certain will shed a little light...it doesn't. I will do my best to describe said wall and the ways in which I have tried to go over, around, under, and through it.

Thomas Green.  He is my 3x great grandfather and a fairly interesting individual.  He was born in Kentucky in 1826/1827 but spent the majority of his life in southern Illinois.  He served in the 11th Illinois Infantry during the American Civil War and was involved in the capture of Forts Henry, Donelson, and Vicksburg.  After the war, he and his first wife (my 3x great grandmother) divorced. Thomas went on to marry a young widow and have an additional four children.  He died in 1898 and was buried in Anna Cemetery in Anna, IL.  The only part of his life I don't know much about is his childhood...specifically, HIS PARENTS!  

Let's look at all the typical ways one can determine parents:

1. Census Data - Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a definitive 1850 census for Thomas, and anything prior to that only lists head of household.   Strike one. (Later census records indicated that Thomas's father was born in New York.  Thomas's mother was born in either Rhode Island or Ohio.  You try searching the surname Green in New York, and let me know how you do.)

2. Marriage records - I have not found an official marriage record for Thomas Green and Ann Elizabeth Echols.  The year of their marriage (1854) is mentioned in a biography of Ann's brother, Thomas Benton Echols, and is acknowledged in Thomas's Civil War Pension file.  Neither lists his parents. Strike two.

3. Death records - I have three death records for Thomas: an Illinois, Select Deaths Index, a death certificate, and an application for a headstone for Civil War veterans.  Even on the death certificate, there is nothing requesting the names of his parents. Strike three.

4.  Obituary - Found it.  No parents listed, and we're all out of strikes anyway.

Remember that Civil War Pension file I mentioned?  It's over 100 pages of depositions, interviews, documents, and other phenomenal genealogical information, but do you think there is a single mention of Thomas's parents?  That's a big NOPE

It does, however, mention a sister!  Hallelujah!  Now we're getting somewhere!  ...or so I thought.  Thomas's sister was named Louisiana, and she was born in 1819 in Ohio.  She died in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1912.  I haven't been able to locate a death certificate for her, although I have asked my sister (who lives in the area) to stop by the courthouse and see what she can find.  (I'll keep you posted.)  I did locate a very length obituary for Louisiana, but alas, her parents were not revealed. 

I've tried to piece together what I have.  Louisiana in 1819 in Ohio, Thomas in 1826/1827 in Kentucky.  Both children settled in Illinois, albeit very different areas of the state.  I wanted to believe that this narrowed my search, but I also had to take into consideration when/where the parents met and were married...which was a tall order when you consider that it could have been anywhere between New York and Ohio... 

Maybe my sister will get to the courthouse, and Louisiana's death certificate will reveal all.  Maybe a marriage for Thomas and Ann will materialize down in Pulaski County, Illinois, but I'm not holding my breath.  Maybe I'll just have a séance and hope that asking for Thomas and Louisiana Green's parents rings a bell somewhere in the afterlife.

#52Ancestors #Week22 - Brick Wall William

Oy, the ever-present brick wall.  Who among the Genealogically Obsessed hasn't peered at a record for the eleventieth time in hopes said record would reveal something new?  I have several private theories about what may have become of my 3rd great-grandfather, Illinois farmer William Alexander Hughes, none of them are likely to be true, but the facts remain elusive. 

My first encounter with the man was decades ago when I received his daughter (and likely only child) Florence's death records, listing her father as "Elec Hughes" of Illinois, and her birthplace in Pulaski County, Illinois. It also lists her mother with correct info, and as I recall, my next "find" was "Elec" and Mary Jane Pearson's marriage record in the same locality, in December 1874.  This gave me his full name, and I was then able to find him in 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880 Federal Census.  William Alexander Hughes was born presumably in Pulaski County, to William H and Martha (Echols) Hughes, and was about 10 years younger than his two brothers, John and Frank. He never moved from the above county, so very thankful for this small "favor."

Complicating matters is the number of William Hughes in this single county.  A couple of men bearing the same name in a rural location would be bad enough, but there are 6 of them. WIlliam H. Hughes, my 4th great grandfather, was born about 1811, another William A Hughes born in 1818, William Alexandrer Hughes in 1845. William Hughes born to Nancy Staton Hughes (another relation of mine) in 1856, Willam E to the senior William A in 1882 (died at age 6), and at least two more born later in the 1800's. One of those was William Alexander's nephew.

William Alexander (was he called Alex?) may have served in the Civil War. I have since ordered and received the Civil War pension file for one of two William Hughes' from Pulaski County, and the one I received and had judged likely to be "mine" does not appear to fit.  Two marriages, neither to Mary Jane Pearson, and several children with his second wife, all younger than Florence. I can order the other man's file, but he was an even worse match to the facts I have verified. The 2nd pension file also lists the 2nd William as William L.B. Hughes. I'm unsure what to make of those initials but will likely end up looking into that record.

As an adult, his widowed mother lived with him.  Alas, no death record for his father has been found either. After 1880, William Alexander, Mary Jane (with one possible exception) and Martha disappear from all record.  Pulaski County, Illinois has a fortunate recording of many area newspapers, rich with area detail, but no verifiable deaths are mentioned for this family.  I have been to the area twice, once in 2006 and again with my daughter in 2018. No cemeteries we walked revealed their burials, and no records at the courthouse list them, and there was no will. 

As mentioned in a previous entry on this blog, my great grandfather thought that his mother's maiden name was Ferrell.  I don't know if Florence's parents and grandmother died when she was quite young and she was raised by a Farrell family, but it's certainly plausible.  She had no known siblings to leave behind any further information, although a possible record exists in the 1900 census of "Mary Jane Hughes" with daughter Nancy in a similar location to where they had been living in 1880.  No later record for Mary Jane or Nancy to confirm that this is the correct family has been found. Florence  married at age 17 in 1894, and by 1900 was living in Arkansas, although had returned to Pulaski County before 1903, when Gramps was born there. 

There are several reasons for the lack of records in this area.  The courthouse was damaged by both fire in the 1870s and later by multiple severe floods, including the very famous floods of 1937. The community has been very poor for a very long time, and many cemeteries are in poor repair and/or inaccessible. Someday, I hope to find just a morsel that will tell me something, anything at all about William's fate, or Civil War service.  Someday, time travel to circa 1885-90 would be tremendous!

#52 Ancestors #Week 21: A Search for A Beard

Similarly to Cuzzin Rachel, clean shaven men prevail in my lineage.  So much so that I had to really do a mental inventory of possible suspects a few times, and found myself mistaken a few times.  My dad sported a beard briefly in the mid-70s, when my brother was a baby, and my red-headed step dad sported one briefly in an attempt to channel a little Willie Nelson, although the beard was really the only resemblance.

I did find that my husband’s family REALLY answered the call when it came to facial hair, however! 🧔🏻 

James George Bear, Hubz great great great grandfather

James George Bear’s son, Solomon Bear.

Hubz great great great grandfather, The Norwegian.

My Great Great Great Grandfather Edmund B. Towne, believed to be an anniversary photo.

And my favorite honorable mention, more of an unshaven look than a beard, from a word ID card, my Great Grandpa McCarthy:

#52Ancestors, Week 20: (Almost No) Beards

I sat on this prompt most of the week.  To be honest, there is a noticeable dearth of beards in my immediate family. My husband has one, and my dad has had one from time to time, but other than that, clean-shaven or mustaches seem to be the order of the day. Allow me to demonstrate:

My grandfathers

My great grandfathers

A few great great grandfathers

Not much to see there.  Cuzzin Heather suggested my cabinet card book of unknown Swedish folk.  Surprisingly, it was much of the same.  There were two bearded men in my collection, but fortuitously, I *did* have an identification for one of them - this bearded fellow:

Meet Sven Svensson (and family)

That is quite the lush beard. The tall blond girl on the left is Esther.  The stern looking woman in the back is Nilla, my great great grandfather Ola's sister. I suspect the remaining children are Sven Jr., Nils, Axel, and the baby is likely Ruth.  I was able to identify them through the wonder that is Ancestry. Someone had this photo of Sven:

His hairline has receded somewhat, but there is no doubt about the facial hair (and the ears)!  So there, you have it, folks.  Enjoy the beard of the husband of my second great grand aunt. 😂

#52 Ancestors, Week 19: Bald (Eagles and other avian wildlife)

Well before my daughter was born (before we knew she was going to be a daughter), my mom purchased a My First Bird Book complete with a window-mounted bird feeder. When Marian was old enough to sit upright and observe her surroundings, we mounted the feeder in a window that overlooked the backyard.  As a toddler, Marian would sit, framed by the picture window in our game room, and identify the birds.  There were 'carnies' (cardinals), 'mourning does' (doves), and even 'hummytoomies' (hummingbirds) that would visit the daylilies.  She would proudly point them out and then page through her book until she came to the appropriate bird.  Sometimes she would toddle over to our dog, Inigo, and educate him.  He always listened patiently.

Slowly but surely, the bird sanctuary grew.  When my mother-in-law heard how much Marian enjoyed birdwatching, she gifted her a free standing post with attachments for various kinds of feeders.  There was a water dish, a tray, and hooks for hanging suet cages.  We replaced the first window-mounted bird feeder with a larger, see-through one. Buck, the backyard squirrel, had broken the first one.  With each new fixture, the variety of birds we attracted increased.  Marian's first book was no longer sufficient to identify all that we would see, so my mom contributed a few additional books, more comprehensive than the first.  Aside from the usual backyard fare, we enjoyed the company of flickers,

nuthatches,

and even redheaded woodpeckers.

One day, not long after Christmas of 2019, we looked out the double doors of our dining room and saw this:

Now, we can't claim to have attracted this fine fellow with any of our feeders, but his distance from the house did make us aware that we lacked a certain necessary viewing apparatus.  In order to really see him, we had to dig out my husband's heavy, ancient binoculars...or zoom in on him with our digital camera.  Obviously, the next addition to Marian's bird watching paraphernalia had to be a pair (several, actually) of binoculars. She now has a pair that we take on vacation and a pair that hangs from the bookshelf in her bedroom.  She used them just the other day to observe a pair of goldfinches playing in the bird bath in our front yard.

Some of you may be asking yourselves, what does this fiasco of feathered findings have to do with genealogy? Well, something this 52Ancestors challenge has reinforced is that genealogy is much more than just dates and documents.  It's about life's important moments.  It's about memories.  Because of a single gift, we have the memories of countless mornings and evenings sitting together, sifting through our growing collection of bird books, trying to identify an unusual backyard visitor.  We even have an old Audubon book that belonged to my grandmother.  We can read the notes she left in the margins concerning the birds she had been able to identify.  At my mother's house, there is a dry erase board. On it, she and Marian keep track of the type and number of birds they have seen.  My dad has hummingbird feeders at the front and back of his house, and Marian enjoys watching 'Grandpa's hummingbirds' fight for supremacy. And every day, as we drive to school, Marian keeps up a running commentary on the birds she sees sitting on posts or circling in fields.

#52Ancestors #Week19 - Bald!

Bald, Bald Bald!  Bald as a ping pong ball! - Free to Be You and Me, 1977

A few anecdotes on baldness, courtesy of my family (or shall I say at the expense of my family?) I suppose it depends on how you view baldness!

On my mother's side, the men had just gorgeous hair.  Grandpa had thick black waves, only turning salt and pepper late in his nearly 96 years.

My dad's side, on the other hand, so many shiny domes!  My dad, his dad, and most especially, Grandma's dad, are and were well-known for their shine. Thankfully, they had the head for it, as is apparently said!

My babies! Oh, my sweet, sweet babies!  All bald, with the perfect new-baby smell. My eldest kept her sweet baby look the longest. I did have a friend who had her little girl in for a HAIRCUT at 4 months old!  I'm sure that's more common than I think, but not in our genetic pool!

And then there's me! I badly wanted to shave my head at 40, but never did. I don't want to anymore but chalk it up to missed opportunity. Then, when I had breast cancer 2 years ago and chemo was still an unknown possibility, my aunt told me "You seem more upset about losing your hair than you were about losing your breasts!" In the end I didn't lose either, but my hair wasn't trying to kill me!

My husband, too, and my son (a namesake to the above-mentioned great grandfather).  And my husband's bald eagle tattoo, if he's to be included as a member of the family, lol!

#52Ancestors #Week18 Fondly, The Aunts

Yellowstone. All the rage right now, and then, as evidenced by this story having survived for over 115 years. I surely hope that my great aunts will be immortalized for continued generations due to their shenanigans.

Aunt Jo, the eldest sister, and Aunt Nellie, the next of 4 daughters in a family flush with sons, were later the matriarchs of the family in the years after their mother's passing, but in their younger years they were an active pair.  Both were known to have participated in the Suffragette movement and had careers of their own. Jo lived for quite some time in Chicago working as a nanny for several well-heeled families, and Jo followed in her father's footsteps, mostly as a schoolteacher while living on the family farm. Nellie even inherited the farm, after saving her family from mortgage default with her wages when her father passed away unexpectedly.

There were a few mentions of the sisters in the society column of the area newspaper, although I'm unsure if there was a mention of the following trip.  Additional archival searches needed, although I have a few cousins that have been mighty thorough!  Jo and Nellie, sometime around 1907 based on smudged postcard dates, headed to Chicago (or conversely, Nellie met her sister there), and they set out for Yellowstone by train. Both women were single and in their 30's.  They had one another, but I don't have any idea where or how long they stayed.  I do know from their postcard that they had a very nice time, and that both were quite used to animals large and small, having grown up on an active farm 15 miles from town. This trip took place when animals were still the primary mode of transportation!

Before heading home, Nellie (although I imagine Jo didn't need a great deal of persuading) made the acquaintance of a presumably orphaned coyote pup. So the sisters did what one does with a needy baby animal in 1907. They brought him home!  The coyote seems to be a male in the surviving story, I'll call him Jack. I know they put him on a leash, but even though I've heard and told this tale numerous times, as I type this, I'm still mentally reciting:  A Coyote.  On a Train.  For days! Add to that, through Chicago!  Not terribly unusual, then. It’s worthy of note that Nellie was also known for her advanced-for-the-time science lessons at the school back home, and passed down to family members her pocket knife known as “Nellie’s toadstabber” used for samples of both flora and fauna. Perhaps she planned to study the animal?

Nevertheless, Jack lived on the farm.   On a leash.  Did he visit in the house for table scraps?.  Did Nellie and her younger sister (about to be married) take him for walks?  We'll never know, because as Jack grew, he did what coyotes do, leash or no.  Yes, he ate more than his allotment of chickens.  Raw.

And so, Jack met his own untimely end.  My great grandfather Tom was Jo and Nellie's youngest brother, and he was about 17 and working the farm.  He took a shotgun from the house and dispatched poor Jack.  On a farm where absolutely nothing ever went to waste, I don't want to think about the rest.  He was a pet, so I'll assume that he, along with the other dearly departed, rests in the hills of Richland County, far from his native home.

God rest ye, Jack McCarthy!

#52Ancestors, Week 18: Pets - Trouble

The picture is of my dad's Aunt Nell and her beloved Boston Terrier, Trouble (#1).  This was taken at Aunt Nell and Uncle Sal's home on 259th St.  It was a small home with a beautiful backyard garden.  I envision a young Trouble capering through the gardens and maybe getting into some mischief digging holes or otherwise damaging the greenery.

Later on in their marriage, Aunt Nell and Uncle Sal moved to a large and lovely home at 34 Emerson Ave. It had 5 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, but that wasn't because they had dozens of children to raise.  In fact, they had no children of their own. Instead, Uncle Sal (though he had married into the family) took in any of his wife's family who needed help.  At various points in time, my dad's grandparents, his Aunt Eva, and his Aunt Tani and Uncle Jerry lived with them.  Tani and Jerry's kids, Pete and Sara, also lived with them for a time.  Of course, Trouble lived with them, too, and he snurfled into stiff and cranky old age in a beautiful house with multiple staircases, a grand piano, and one of those rooms that everyone looked at but no one went into.

My dad tells the story of how Pete and Sara wanted a dog of their own.  They got Cindy.  Dad didn't remember what kind of dog Cindy was, but she was large and rowdy and considerably younger than Trouble.  As Dad put it, Cindy would be tear-assing around the house, and you could hear Trouble snurfling around trying to get out of the way.  Trouble was too old to get up the stairs easily, and Cindy would go flying past, and Boom!  She would knock Trouble over.  Poor Trouble.  I guess Aunt Nell must have felt sorry for him, too, because after he went to that great dog park in the sky, Aunt Nell got another Boston Terrier, and she named him Trouble 2.