#52 Ancestors #Week52 Me (Alternatively, We Made it!)

These books were perhaps my first introduction to history.  And I was the perfect age to be entranced by the TV show. My Dad’s girlfriend at the time even made for my cousin and I, matching calico dresses in red (mine) and blue (hers), with matching white pinafores and calico bonnets.  Yes, there are pictures.

Last night as I was falling asleep, I had several good thoughts about what to say about myself, but got a bit bogged down. In addition to history, I enjoyed other pastoral pursuits as a child in the 70’s: Holly Hobbie, Betsey Clarke gifts from grandma, crafts like macrame and embroidery, although coloring was a personal favorite.

My mom’s 2nd cousin (or is it 1st cousin once removed?) Joe self-published his first copy of The Slaney Family Tree in 1976.  To say I was obsessed with this little book was not hyperbole.  I don’t think it happened right away as I was pretty young, but by Junior High it was one of my favorite pursuits, copying out as much of it as I could onto several pages of notebook paper taped together for a school project.

While that project has continued now for over 40 years (that’s a tough phrase to type), and I’ve reached to paste together stories for many of my “forgotten” ancestors, what about me is the question or challenge for this week.  Like my best Cuzzin, I hope that my youngest will take over or at the very least preserve my research. 2024 would be a good time to add that addendum to my “final wishes” folder as my husband and I finally updated our wills last year.

How would I like myself to be Remembered is a question for the ages.  Many of us have thorough well-thought out answers to this question, and many like myself throw up our hands.  Not because I haven’t thought about it.

As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a mom.  If you ask my children, I’m quite certain you’d get three very different answers as to what kind of mom I’ve been.  It hasn’t been easy, but I love all three of them with all my heart.

Over the years I’ve come to identify with my grandmothers more and more. Genealogical hazard, perhaps.  I knew my grandmothers, but I didn’t know them deeply as women, only as their role as “Grandma” for the most part. What a lost opportunity!

Over the last few years, though, I’ve gotten to know myself better (I’m a Grandma now, too!) and here are the few things I can make as a list, things I’d like people to know:

I loved imperfectly, but fiercely. 

I love reading, I love descriptive words and detail.  Words like Serendipity and Diaphanous make me excited.

I love a rich landscape, and provided it’s not freezing, I love being outside.  Trees are breathtaking, mountains make my heart soar, and the prairie tells stories we can only hear if we are still.

I was sad, and anxious with more frequency than anyone deserves, and I’ve worked hard to overcome both.  I am learning that making peace, rather than overcoming is a more practical answer.

So here is my year of blogging.  I’ve found out a little bit this year about what I CAN do, as well.  I don’t know yet if I can write terribly well, but I can keep going!  Well done to us, Cuzzin! 🥂

#52Ancestors, Final Week! Me, Myself, and I

I did it!  I wrote about an ancestor every week for 51 weeks!  For the 52nd week, I have been asked to write about myself and what I hope future generations will know about me.  That's a tough question.  I'll start with the easy part.

I've been an English teacher for 21 years.  I love reading aloud to my students (even though they are high schoolers) from my favorite works.  I have students who remember, with great fondness, my passionate reading of the scene where Beatty meets his grisly end in Fahrenheit 451.  I love discussing the implications of short stories like "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."  I sat back and smiled like a benevolent goddess of literature and hidden meanings as my AP students debated the ramifications of accepting another's suffering.  Sometimes, when the mood hits and the subject matter is applicable, I tell my students of some genealogical discovery. Generally, they are as disinterested as my husband and daughter 😂, but there is occasionally a student who evinces a modicum of interest.  I take interest wherever I can find it, so while my job is to teach literature and language, I am happy to also teach an appreciation for ancestral research.

I couldn't tell you when/why I started researching my family's history, though I suppose it's worth mentioning that I am qualified to teach middle school social studies, and history has always been a secondary interest of mine. I could talk your ear off about the 6 wives (and innumerable mistresses) of Henry VIII and the political, religious, and social influences at work in the various dalliances, marriages, and offspring.  And let's talk about tracing the lineage of these royals!  Not a whole lot of 'branching' going on in Henry's family tree!

I have read every work of historical fiction that Philippa Gregory has written concerning the key players in the War of the Roses, and I love the way she weaves history and fiction into a cohesive work.  (I assure you, I am not being paid to plug her books - she doesn't need any help from me.)   Her novels inspired me to try my hand at a little historical fiction of my own, and I have written a first draft concerning my Pearson ancestors from Pulaski County, Illinois.   

And I guess that brings me to the second part of this prompt.  What do I hope future generations will know about me?  I'm not a vain person.  I don't feel I'm of any more importance than any other person trying to live his/her life.  My family history certainly isn't any more important or interesting than anyone else's, so I'm not sure there is anything I want people to know about me, specifically. I suppose I hope someone will be interested in carrying on with what I've spent at least the last decade researching. I hope someone will see the value in the boxes of pictures I have yet to sort or label.  I hope someone will understand why I felt the need to write about a great grand aunt and a great grand uncle not a single person remembers.  (I'm really hoping it's my daughter who currently rolls her 8-year-old eyes at my "dead people.")

Whether or not someone is willing to continue my research, I will continue to do it.  I'm very excited to start 2024's #52Ancestors next week.  Cuzzin Heather and I have figured out how to label our posts, so now they can be filtered by surname!

#52Ancestors, Week 51: Cousins

This post was moved to the Collecting Dead People blog:

Cousins

#52Ancestors #Week51 - Cousins, AKA Cuzzins

 The Twelve Days of Christmas for the Genealogist

(An Ode to My Cuzzin)

On the twelfth day of Christmas my Cuzzin gave to me ...

12 Mystery photos

11 Hundred e-mails

10 Websites beckoning

9 Surname spellings

8 Great-grandparents

7 States to search in

6 trains a-smoking

FIVE TALL BRICK WALLS!!!

4 Mugs of coffee

3 cats a-napping

2 Laptops running

And a Long-Distance Kindred Spirit!

A Happy Christmas to all who celebrate.

#52Ancestors #Week50 - You Wouldn't Believe It

It's been nearly 250 years since Benjamin Franklin wrote that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. I add to that that we can all expect laundry, and surprises. If surprises aren't coming in your genealogy search, you might be doing it wrong (tongue firmly in cheek).

Last week's surprise may not have been a huge deal, but it did lead me down the proverbial rabbit hole to try to document the lives of three of my Gramps' 1st cousins. The three of these siblings were all born within just a few years of Gramps in the same neck of the woods in Pulaski County, Illinois, but when the cousins were very small, they had moved to busy St. Louis.

In writing about the middle sibling Henry last week, I believe I only mentioned his sisters briefly (runs to look). Grace Lillian Chamberlain was born in November 1896, six months after her parents' marriage. As a 4-year-old in the 1900 Census, she is listed as Grace, but spent the majority of her life as "Lillian." She is fairly easy to follow through years of records, and lived with her husband and daughter in Kentucky, eventually moving to the Carolinas. Her daughter Elizabeth does not appear to have married or had any children, so like Henry, that line is now extinct.

Minnie Elizabeth was born on an unknown date in 1901. She is not nearly as cooperative at appearing in the records, but down that rabbit hole, there were a few surprises. At age five, she wanders from her maternal aunt and uncle's home with Henry and is found sleeping in the doorway of a St. Louis theater. When Henry is living with Dad in Arkansas in 1910, the girls and their mother are nowhere to be found. I could assume that the three of them were together, but prefer to keep looking.

In 1915, a Minnie Chamberlain, age 14 and born in Illinois, appears in Sioux City, Iowa as an inmate at the Convent of the Good Shepherd. She is working as a laundress. She is still in residence there in 1920, although she has reached the age of majority (I think - it may have been 21 in those days). She may have had no where else to go, I am still looking for Lillian and their mother had remarried and was living in rural Missouri with her much younger husband, Lonie. Had Minnie done something to be judged the equivalent of a juvenile delinquent? Had she been housed as an orphan? Regardless of how she came to be in western Iowa, she appears there a 3rd time in late 1922, on a birth certificate for baby girl Chamberlain, with all of the information for father entered repeatedly as "unknown."

In 1927, Minnie appears back in St. Louis in a single newspaper article. She was working as a dancer and had been caught in a significant theft of her employer. The same article reports she has left her husband behind in Illinois, but declines to state WHERE in Illinois and does not clarify what her penalty is for this theft. A short time later, for the 1930 Census, Henry is out of state and Minnie and Lillian "missing."

However, what I have found in 1930 is their mother May, her husband Lonnie, and a 7-year-old whose relationship is not noted. My wonderful Cuzzin can tell you how eager I am when it comes to surprises, and it took me approximately an hour to follow THIS new trail and find that this young girl had an extremely similar name AND the same birthdate as that baby born in 1922 Iowa. I've withheld her name and date of birth, but my working theory based on all of the facts and the available information on her adulthood, is that this 7-year-old little girl was the daughter of Minnie and her young step-father, only 7 years her senior. However, this woman appears to be still living, just 101 years old.

Minnie, of course, is long deceased.  At least by about twenty years, if her longevity reached anything similar to her daughter's. Despite the fact that she is listed as Mrs. Montgomery in her parent's obituaries in the mid-1940's, her location is missing, and I have no further information on her.  What I do have is the information that my Gramp's cousin was a flapper or perhaps burlesque dancer in the same city and at the same time as Josephine Baker was taking flight on an international career (they'd even been small children in the same neighborhood)!

#52Ancestors, Week 50: You Wouldn't Believe It

I feel like I've written any number of posts that might fall under this particular theme.  When trying to describe the stories of Horace and Nettie to one of my students, he stared unbelievingly at me and said, "That is literally stranger than fiction." 😆  I can't say as I disagree with his assessment.

One phenomenon that I found particularly surprising when researching the Pearsons of Pulaski County was how common divorces actually were.  Nowadays, people like to say "divorces didn't happen back then like they do today," but I am here to tell you that's not true. 

Let's take my great great great grandmother, Ann (Echols) Green Pearson, for instance.  In 1869, she divorced my great great great grandfather, Thomas Green.  In Thomas's Civil War pension paperwork, there is an affidavit from Ann that reads, in part, "After he came from the army, he got to drinking pretty hard, and that is the reason we separated."  A quick search on divorce laws in Illinois revealed that Illinois passed its first divorce laws in 1819 and that Abraham Lincoln frequently represented divorce litigants!  Aside from the typical grounds for divorce (cruelty, adultery, and abandonment), habitual drunkenness was also considered an acceptable reason to file.  It is interesting to note that, unlike other states, Illinois granted divorces to women and frequently awarded them custody of minor children.  In the 1870 census, Ann listed her daughters, Emma Kate and Dora, as living with her.  Thomas listed Dora as living with him, so it's uncertain what the custody agreement was.

Ann's case and reasoning seems fairly cut and dry, but let's take a look at her daughter, Emma Kate.  Emma Kate, born in 1855, married her step-brother, John Winston Pearson, in 1874.  Based on their children's birth places, it seems that John and Emma Kate went to Virginia at the beginning of their marriage (John's father was a native Virginian).  By the mid-century, Virginia's divorce laws were becoming more liberal. Starting in 1853, grounds for absolute divorce in Virginia were "adultery, impotency, confinement in penitentiary, conviction of an infamous offense prior to marriage, willful desertion for five years, pregnancy of the wife at the time of the marriage by a person other than the husband, and a wife working as a prostitute prior to marriage without the knowledge of the husband." Like Illinois, Virginia also granted divorces to women. Still, my guess is that when John and Emma Kate decided to divorce, they returned to Illinois.  At any rate, by 1883, both of them had remarried - Emma Kate to my great great grandfather (and John's cousin) George William Pearson, and John to Zana Coble.  Again, it is uncertain what the custody arrangement was.  In the 1900 census, William and Rosa Pearson (John's children) are listed as living with Emma Kate.  However, another 1900 census lists William as living with John Winston.

And then, of course, we have Emma Kate's youngest daughter, Nettie, for whom divorce seemed to be a hobby.  No documents exist (that I have found) for her first two marriages, but as her first two husbands were from Illinois, I imagine divorces were procured there - most likely in 1915 and late 1917/early 1918.  She also maintained custody of the son she had with her first husband.  Nettie's next two marriages were dissolved in the state of Michigan.  Both times, her husbands charged her with cruelty.  Walter Miller divorced her in 1933, and Walter Reed divorced her in 1939.  She next married a man by the name of Johnson, and while I haven't found definitive proof, all signs point to another Michigan divorce before 1950.

So, we have three generations of women, living from 1839-1968.  Between the three of them, they were divorced a total of seven times.

Sources:

"The History of No-Fault Divorce in Illinois," Nottage and Ward, 17 Apr. 2020, www.nottageandward.com/blog/divorce/the-history-of-no-fault-divorce-in-illinois/.  Accessed 15 Dec. 2023.

Riley, Glenda. "Legislative Divorce in Virginia, 1803-1850," Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 11, no. 1, 1991, pp. 51-67, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3123311. Accessed 15 Dec. 2023.

#52Ancestors, Week 49: Family Recipe

I can't think of any particular family recipe, unless it's the cheesy potato casserole that we whip out for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and any random potlucks in between.  It's a completely unhealthy concoction of cubed potatoes, sour cream, cream of mushroom soup, onions, butter, and shredded cheddar covered in a crust of buttery corn flakes.  As someone who lacks culinary talent, it's one of the few recipes I've perfected.

I'm not here to talk about hardening arteries, though. This week's prompt made me think of all those old recipe books from churches, schools, family reunions, etc. - recipe books printed on colored paper, spiral bound, and littered with amusing typos and accidental ingredient omissions.  The recipes have titles like 'Aunt Lottie's Famous Jello Mold' or 'Lazy Day Soup.'  They aren't necessarily culinary masterpieces, but they are tried and true comfort foods.  I have one in our pile of cookbooks, and I pulled it out today.

I don't know where this Oak School is.  The book was published before I was born, but not by much, so this isn't a school that my parents attended.  I flipped through the recipes, but none of the submitters' names rang a bell.  Maybe it's something I happened to pick up at a garage sale.  It doesn't really matter.  I suspect the contents are more or less the same from one book to the next.  What makes them unique are the personal touches, like this page:

Just a few gentle reminders to be thankful for the food on your table and the people in your life

I hope these types of recipe books make a comeback.  Yes, I know we can find everything we need on the internet, but sometimes nothing can top opening one of these collections, stained with the ingredients of countless recipes, and finding that 'Cousin Bob's Meatloaf' is exactly what you've been craving.  When we took my daughter for her picture with Santa at the bank last weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to be handed one of these.

It's a little bit fancier than the photocopied books of yore, but its intent is the same.  Here, people from my little community have shared their treasured recipes - crockpot meals, casseroles to make for those who are grieving, desserts for the Christmas table, and everything in between.  My husband says maybe he'll contribute when they take submissions for the 10th anniversary printing.  :)