Genealogy « Janice Williams Loves Austin

May 14, 2013

Columbus’ City Cemetery

Filed under: Cemeteries,Genealogy,Taphophilia — Janice @ 2:14 pm

I’m going to put more of my cemetery adventures into my blog for safekeeping until I get around to creating another place for them. I need a place for the NARRATIVE of my cemetery visits. If there were a transcript of all my thoughts as I walk through a cemetery it would be a multivolume set. I don’t think, “Oh, that’s a pretty tombstone.” It’s more like, “Hey, that’s a Kuyper, didn’t I see a Kuyper on the other side of the cemetery? Is that a German name? Did this community have a lot of Germans? I don’t see any other names that are German. And she was born in 1810. I bet she came here when it was a Republic, I’m going to have to look that up. Oh, she had 3 children die in infancy, how sad is that? But she had a long life and there’s at least two of her children buried nearby so that’s good…” and it goes on and on and on. Then, if I have any chance at all to investigate further, it gets bigger and more all encompassing. Let’s take the City Cemetery of Columbus, Texas, as an example.

I won’t even go into why I was in Columbus on Friday, but I was and I took a spin through the little Southern town and spied an old-fashioned hamburger stand. They didn’t have car hops, but they did have a drive-through so I decided that was excuse enough for a chocolate malt. In the world I live in, sitting in a car for hours negates all calories from chocolate malts. I circled the block to get back to the malt shop, but didn’t go far enough so I drove up the main road and was going to make a U-turn somewhere. Cars turned into the post office and I started to follow them, but it kind of looked like a bottleneck so I went on up to the next drive/street and turned in, ready to turn right around and come back. And what did I see?

Yes, I think it is a gift I have to stumble upon old cemeteries. There were even beautiful wildflowers, lots of birds and butterflies, and cute birdhouses out front:

Columbus is a really old town, one of the oldest in Texas, and there were some unique, beautiful old graves. Maybe I’ll get back to them someday. These are the ones I’ll concentrate on today:

I noticed them because of this one:

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a military headstone for a woman outside of a military cemetery. And I also assume that this woman was in the military in World War II since she would have been in her 20s in the 1940s. That seemed unusual and rare, too. It doesn’t specify what she did or when she served. I went over and saw that it was a family plot so I took pictures all the way down the row of the Woods family.

At home today, I went to one of my favorite sites, Find a Grave, and looked these graves up and was surprised to see there was no photos of these gravestones there. It seems that almost every cemetery has been photographed over and over except maybe for the newest graves, but not this cemetery. It looks like I’m going to have to put every picture I just snapped “for fun” up as a record. I wish I had looked up the site while I was there and I would have been more serious and organized about it all. All of the Woods family graves were accounted for (listed and had information, just no picture) except Mary, so I have added her to Find a Grave now. I couldn’t find any more information on the web about her service or her marriage. It leaves me with questions.

But I learned a lot about her family. These are her parents and they were buried beside her:

French and Bertha. He worked as a car washer at a dealership in 1930 and she was a laundress at their home, raising at least 4 children. By 1940 he was working as a truck driver for a gas station, which I would think would have been a pretty good job. Bertha was working now as a maid in a private home. Mary Lee was an “under clerk” for the “N.Y.A.” now that she was 18 and was no longer in school. She had completed high school (I believe) where her parents had only completed 6th and 7th grade, so the family was progressing. Oh, yes, and this family is African-American and French’s parents were born as slaves and couldn’t read or write:

They were born in North Carolina (Jials – or Giles) and Tennessee (Julia). I wish I knew how they came to know one another, to get married, how they felt as teenagers to learn about the Emancipation Proclamation and what differences it made to their families. I think he was married once before he married Julia. I won’t go into all the details about why that might be. The item I was most happy to find on the internet was the record that he was registered to vote in Colorado County, Texas, in 1867. How great is that that a man that was born a slave was on the voter’s rolls so soon after the Civil War? Then I read how the KKK forced many blacks to register and to vote Democrat, so maybe it wasn’t as rare or great as I think, I don’t know. I also thought it was interesting that his grave says “He was a member of Methodist church.” I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an inscription like that on a gravestone.

He had a sad ending to his life. According to a story on Find a Grave, when Jials was in his early 70s in 1914, he was working for a farm east of town and it was after dark and he thought he was walking away from the Colorado River, but he walked toward it, fell in and drowned. Now, of course, I wonder how the writer of this news story knew what a dead man was thinking minutes before he died? Is there more to the story? We’ll never know.

In addition to Mary, her parents, and her grandparents, there is another Woods grave:

It looks like poor Fannie was the oldest of Jials and Julia’s children and she was living at home in her early 20s when he drown. She lived the rest of her life with her mother and never married. A devoted daughter.

Of course, off of these stats and details were pulled from internet sources (though most of them legitimate and actual photos of the real census, WWI draft registration, voter’s rolls, etc), but I’ve also drawn some conclusions. And that’s why I like genealogy and cemeteries, its creating those stories for these people and wondering what their life was like.

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January 23, 2013

My Procrastination Project

Filed under: Family,Genealogy,Writing — Janice @ 11:02 pm

I have been working on a project for too many years now and I’m sick of procrastinating. Maybe if I lay out some of it here it will get me going until I am done. I want to be done. It is a great story. A great project.

Almost THREE years ago … and it really does embarrass me that I’ve delayed on this thing this long … a man called me from the Abilene sheriff’s department. He wanted to know what information I had about an uncle that was sheriff of Taylor County. I was no help at all to him. Other than knowing that he WAS the sheriff at one time, I couldn’t even supply him with dates. But then he told me that he did have the “information about the gunfight in Kansas.” Well, I didn’t know anything about a gunfight in Kansas, so he sent me an article from the New York Times about my uncle killing a man in a gunfight in 1897 in Wichita, Kansas. Yes. It was in the New York Times. He also sent me two pictures of this uncle. Here’s the one that is hanging in the sheriff’s office in Taylor County to this day;

Don’t get into a gunfight with this man. He’ll shoot you down.

Since I talked to that guy, I have dug out the story and believe me, the story has everything: it has trains, a wedding, arson, fleeing criminals, a CIRCUS, dying testimony, wrongful arrest, a lynch mob, and … GET THIS… a GHOST! All of that in one story. But I don’t want to tell a story with exaggeration (except maybe the ghost part). I want to tell the factual story and I keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper. Every time I start to write I think, but WHEN did that circus start? What were circuses like in 1897? What clothes did people wear? Where were the train stations? and on and on and on and on. I can’t stop researching.

This is one of the best stories I know in our family. Okay, maybe not THE best, but it is the most documented story I know about the family. I have not only found it in the New York Times, I have found it in the San Francisco newspaper and newspapers all across the country. The Fort Worth paper had huge articles about it. It really captured people’s attention because a Federal Marshall (my uncle – he wasn’t a sheriff at the time) killed a circus owner and that would be like someone killing the head of Google today . No something more shady than Google. But something that popular. The circus was THE entertainment of that period.

So anyway, that’s on my mind and I keep getting caught up in the internet instead of crafting the story and footnoting it. I even tried to go back to the old tricks of high school essays this week with a thesis statement. “This article will factually lay out the story of John Valentine Cunningham in a clear and understandable, yet interesting, story, with clear details and facts and sources.” Next step will be the outline.

Another interesting fact to leave you with about ol’ J.V. Cunningham before I go to bed and dream of circuses and ghosts and gunfights… He was 5 feet 4 inches tall. All that stuff about the long lanky Texas sheriffs is just in the movies. The REAL Texas sheriffs … at least this one … made you look up to them metaphorically.

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November 18, 2012

Post-Election Now

Filed under: Family,Genealogy,Politics — Janice @ 11:06 pm

After I wrote that last blog, I kept thinking of more of the reasons why I voted for President Obama. And more and more reasons why I couldn’t fathom why someone would vote for Mitt Romney. Fortunately, that is all water under the bridge now. I was so incredibly relieved that the election was not close and there were no (major) shenanigans that affected the outcome of the election. I was really shocked it was called so early. I had to have my little celebration quietly because Mark had fallen asleep on his chair. Maybe an hour or so after it was called for Pres. Obama, he turned over and seemed to be in a lighter phase of sleep so I let him know at that point that we had four more years of Obama and he raised his head up enough to say, “Really? Cool,” before he fell back asleep.

I will go back to not talking politics here. I do worry, at times, that something I write here will affect me in my job or in future job searches. Everyone reads about employees that get fired for things that are on their Facebooks or things they write on their blogs. I know I will not be fired for lewd photos since none exist, but since we have seen employers already laying people off since the election because of politics, the possibility is always there, I suppose. I will hope for the best and hope that, it it were to happen, that I would make headlines and freedom lovers and first amendments supporters would rush to my aid.

Back to other topics of my life as I try to get into a writing rhythm again…

My Uncle Dick died at the end of October. I don’t believe you’ve ever read about him here. He was the younger brother of my grandfather. He was not just a little younger, he was a LOT younger than his 3 older brothers. My grandfather was born in 1908 and he was the second oldest. Dick was born in 1923. The 3 older boys were out of the house, married, and gone before Dick was even in school. This is my favorite picture of their family from that era, just because it does show the drastic difference in their ages:

I’d say this was about 1927. A pretty prosperous looking bunch. My grandfather is the second from the right. Dick is the little one.

I’ve kind of been watching over Uncle Dick for the last few years and I’ve been his medical power of attorney. I was the one who had to sign all the paperwork to let the hospice people take over his care in his last week or so of life. Up until then he really was in his right mind and I never had to make any medical decisions for him. My dad was only 5 years younger than his uncle and at some point in the 1990s, Dad insisted the Uncle Dick come and live in a nursing home near their house. Dad was good to visit him on a weekly basis and was his only male relative and only friend in the world. When Dad died in 2006, I couldn’t take over that role, but I did try to visit him from time to time (more like once a year instead of once a week) and send him a card occasionally.

Uncle Dick was really odd and not someone that we looked forward to seeing. And I don’t just mean because of the nursing home atmosphere. He was raised as a Mama’s boy and he lived with his mother his whole life. His own father died when he was only 11 and with his brothers all grown and married, he was left to help take care of the cows and the farm. He left school in about fifth grade (though he had fallen behind and was older than his classmates then) and never got any more education. He did get married once, but the story I heard was that she came to live with him and his domineering mother (my great-grandmother) and it wasn’t long before neighbors across the road heard her hollering one night, “Doyle!” (his real first name was Doyle) Doyle, we’re going in to town tomorrow and we’re getting’ us a divorce!” And they did. I don’t know how much of that is true, but I got it from a very reliable source.

The story that I love to tell about Uncle Dick, though, is about his encounter with “them men from outer space” (I think that’s how he put it). I had heard my Dad comment sometimes about Dick having seen aliens, always scoffing about it, of course, but I had never heard the stories. I hadn’t seen Uncle Dick at all in the 1980s and 1990s, I don’t think. He wasn’t the kind of uncle that you brought out to the house to join us for family events. After Daddy died and I began visiting Uncle Dick, I asked him to tell me about that encounter. Imagine if you went in and asked your uncle to tell you what he had had for lunch and he said, “Oh, I had a ham and cheese sandwich on toast and some pickles.” Uncle Dick told the story with about that much credibility. It wasn’t oversold or hyperbolic. He didn’t have to search his mind for details or think about things. He didn’t embellish in any way. He just told the story.

The story he told was that he was working as a janitor at a K-Mart in Burleson in the 1970s (he gave a specific year – see? his memory was better than mine). The store was near an air base and he frequently heard large transport planes fly over during the night. One night he heard a large vehicle flying over, but having some sort of engine trouble and he took note that it sounded like it might be in trouble. Then he saw a lot of lights from the front of the store. They were near a highway and he assumed it was a highway patrol with a traffic stop on the Interstate. But then the lights in the store all went out and he was in pitch black. So he made his way to the front of the store and those lights and he saw a space ship in the parking lot with the lights on it. And there were “them outer spacemen” up closer to the store looking at him. He said that they were on the other side of that big sidewalk in front of the store and he motioned for them to come closer to the window so he could see them, but they didn’t. They just stayed there on that side of the sidewalk “dancing around the way they do.” At some point they go back to their space ship and they fly away and lights come back on. And a policeman comes along and asks Uncle Dick if he saw a spaceship and outer space men and he told them that he had and the policeman drove off. What is interesting (well, it is all interesting)… I have a friend that is a science fiction writer and she writes about aliens a lot so she has studied all the alien sighting stories and I told her about his description of the aliens and that “dancing around the way they do” and she said that that description of the dancing around and sort of working in tandem as a group is a very common description of a certain type of alien that seems to have an “ant-like” mentality where they work together and function together like ants.

When most people die, it takes several members of the family to make a lot of calls and ask those people to call members of their family to let people know about the death. With Dick, there just weren’t many notifications to make. I had called my mom when hospice called me and said it was close, but didn’t call her back when he died because it was late. I called her the next day and told her. My sister was in Italy with her family so I waited until they were all home the next week to tell her. The only other relative that really cared was my cousin Nancy. She was his actual niece, the daughter of the man on the right in the picture above. She lived near where he lived and had visited him and been very sweet to him and had even taken her mother from her nursing home over to see him in his nursing home. I have only known this cousin a couple of years, but we have bonded a lot in that time. I called her as he was getting sicker. I asked her if she thought we needed to have a funeral. To my great relief, she said she didn’t think so. We felt like the two of us and maybe our husbands would be the only attendees. I made all the arrangements long distance and we will get together at some point in the future and pay our respects.

I’ll close with another sweet picture of Dick as a kid. That’s him on the right with my dad on his shoulders.

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June 23, 2012

A Lost Thimble and Texas Reporters

Filed under: At home,Family,Genealogy — Janice @ 9:45 pm

I’m cleaning off the desk, a never-ending task, and looking more closely through items my “cousin” Barbara sent me last week. I put “cousin” in quotations because she’s more of a friend than a cousin to me. I only know her through Facebook and emails. She was married to my Dad’s cousin Don, and I did know Don, but I never met Barbara. They lived overseas while he was in the military and a pilot and then after he died, she remarried and lived in Memphis, Tennessee.

I scanned an article she sent and I will put it below if you’d like to read it, but I’ll tell it with more detail, though it is a story I had never heard before.

Aunt Ruby was Barbara’s mother-in-law. She was my grandmother’s older sister. She was very sweet and lively and funny. She kept some records of her life that I appreciate so much. She wrote out in longhand her life’s story and I am fortunate enough to have a copy of it.

In this newspaper article, it tells about Aunt Ruby when she was about 14 and the family lived in the Killeen area of Bell County. This was 1914. Her father, Houston Puckett, asked her to go into town with him to buy a birthday gift for his mother. His mother lived in Robert Lee, which is further up in West Texas. The whole family had lived up in that area for a time, but Houston Puckett liked to move around and buy a piece of undeveloped property, build a house, well, and windmill, and then sell and make a profit. So they had moved back and forth from Bell to Runnells County a couple of times.

They made this trip into town and found a pretty silver thimble at a jewelry store. They had it engraved with “M” for Mary (Mary Victoria Riggs Puckett Newman) and sent it to the grandmother.

When “Grandma Newman” died in 1928 (she’s buried in the Fairview Cemetery in Winters, Texas), Aunt Ruby was now married to Uncle Tom Spencer and living in Luther in Howard County, Texas, where most of the Pucketts ended up. She inherited the thimble. One day she was working with the Home Demonstration Club in the Gay Hill Community. The group would meet at the school and make mattresses and comforters for people in need. Somehow she lost her thimble and that was the last time she remembered using it.

Years go by and her sons, Neil and Don, both graduate from Big Spring High and have families of their own. Aunt Ruby and Uncle Tom moved to Comanche County and lived just across the road from my big family reunion grounds. But that’s a whole different side of the family so that’s another story.

Neil Spencer, Ruby’s oldest son, married Jeri and she had a son “Skipper.” I love that name. I think he goes by a more dignified name now that he is all grown up and makes dentures in his lab in Dallas, but he was Skipper to everyone most of his life and I wouldn’t be surprised if he still is to some. He is to me (though I haven’t seen him in many decades).

One day Aunt Ruby and Uncle Tom went back to visit Neil and Jeri who were now living in Luther. Aunt Ruby needed to repair something while they were there so Jeri brought out her sewing box and Aunt Ruby said, “Where did you find my thimble?”

Turns out that Skipper had been playing in the area where the old Gay Hill School had been. It was torn down by then. He found something shiny and brought it home to his mother. It was the thimble from 1914 and was not even mashed or scratched. Having been lost for about 25 years, the thimble found its rightful owner again.

I don’t know who in the family has the thimble now. Aunt Ruby died just a few years after this article was written. She died in 1983. I hope the thimble is with Skipper’s daughter now.

I went looking for the author of this article. I don’t know what newspaper this was in, but most likely a paper out there in West Texas. I found this video on the web of her speaking. She is quite a newspaper woman.

I have pictures of Aunt Ruby and Uncle Tom to scan. They were sweet people and Uncle Tom was everything you think of when you think of a long tall Texas oilman or maybe cowboy. He always said I was the “tall statuesque” one while my sister was the “short cute” one. We both liked our descriptions.

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June 18, 2012

Time Passes

Filed under: Family,Genealogy,Website complaints — Janice @ 10:36 pm

I hate to go so long without writing because then everything I want to write about seems too big to write about right now or too trivial to write about at all. If I would write more often, the trivial would just be padding.

I am trying to do some updates on my website and it is proving as frustrating as it always has. I am not one for keeping track of passwords and I have to relearn or resubmit passwords every time I go back to a project like this. And I’m having to completely re-learn everything I have known about the website-making software and how to get the site to the Internet, too. If you go look at the main page you will see that, so far, I have not succeeded. I did get one step a little farther along tonight so I guess I should feel some satisfaction that that happened before I pulled out every hair on my head.

One of my distant cousins died over the weekend and I’m sad about that. I need to write her a nice something on my other blog. She’s related to me in 3 different ways, all going back to Comanche County, of course. Her funeral is Wednesday afternoon and if I can make it up there, I will. I know a lot of members of her immediate family because they come to the reunion too.

I’ll tell a story about Jessica… Last summer at the reunion, her son brought some beautiful plants for the silent auction. I had bought a spider plant from him in a previous year that was lush and beautiful. Of course, it barely clings to life now that I have it, but I do still have it. Last year I got a beautiful purple Jew from him. I also got a clipping from a plant that had belonged to Jessica’s mother. Jessica told me how this plant makes a pretty house plant and it will bloom, but it is a nighttime bloomer and blooms at about 2 a.m. She said she had never seen her mother’s bloom and she had had her mother’s plant for years and never saw it bloom. Then her husband died a few years ago and a month or so after he had died she was grieving and couldn’t sleep and finally got up in the middle of the night and walked in to find that plant in beautiful bloom. She said that was just the kind of sign she needed to get some comfort and relief. I’m very glad to have a piece of that plant to remember her (and her mother) with.

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May 27, 2012

Collecting from Another Person’s Life

Filed under: Genealogy — Janice @ 9:32 am

I just read an article in the New York Times about a men and things he has collected about his father’s life. It’s a lot more than that, but I will leave it there and hope you go read the beautiful article for yourself.

I understand this man. He has this need to gather things from his father’s life. I have that same need for my parents’ lives, but also for my grandparents’ and the greats and on and on — even to uncles and aunts and cousins, at times.

This week I found myself looking at Sanborn maps of Wichita, Kansas, and old postcards of the Manhattan Hotel there. I was recreating the environment of 1897 when an uncle, many generations back, went there from Abilene, Texas, to bring a prisoner back to be tried in Taylor County. While he was there he shot and killed a man and was charged with murder. I wanted to see where the train station was in relation to the hotel, what stores were around the hotel. How far did he have to walk from the hotel to the jail. And then where was the courthouse where his case was tried later that year? I am truly yearning for time travel, but until that day, I am busy collecting the bits and pieces of someone else’s life.

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February 21, 2012

Meeting Gary Hood

Filed under: Family,Genealogy — Janice @ 8:37 am

All weekend I thought of things I wanted to write about in my blog, but here comes Tuesday morning after the holiday and I haven’t written (hardly) a thing.

But I did get to meet my cousin Gary Hood this weekend. That was a highlight of my holiday. He and his wife Judy came through on Saturday morning and I met them at the highway corner so we could become acquainted. As is the case with a whole lot of my “cousins,” we have never met.

Gary used to correspond with my grandmother. Back in the days before I did a lot of correspondence in my genealogy, he was researching his family and found out about my grandmother somehow and wrote letters to her. She was a good letter-writer and kept up the correspondence. He lived in Arkansas and she had just moved to Austin, I believe. They were distant Hood cousins and Gary came down twice over the years for the Hood Reunion in Georgetown and met my grandmother and the others there.

Fast forward to about 5 or 6 years ago. I get email from Becky Hood in Amarillo (another cousin I’ve never met) introducing herself to me. She had heard about me from Gary Hood in Arkansas, but tracked me down through the radio station. He only knew of me because of my grandmother telling him about me. Becky and I began an email friendship and exchange of information and I got to meet her on a trip to Amarillo almost 5 years ago. We hit it off immediately and had so much in common, beginning with the same hometown. My best friend even knew her sister from high school, another connection.

When Facebook came along and took over the world, I eventually became friends with Gary and we exchanged some information and became friends. He travels the world frequently and takes beautiful pictures, so I have enjoyed seeing his travels from my home.

Gary’s great-great-grandfather and my great-great-great-grandfather (I think I have that right) were brothers and lived in Arkansas before the Civil War, near where Gary lives today. Mine fought in the Civil War and was injured and had to use a cane the rest of his life. That injury didn’t keep him out of the war, though, and he continued to be a part of the Confederate force and fought the Union soldiers in Mississippi. I’ve forgotten the name of the battle now, but the Confederates were forced into retreat and had to retreat across a large river. There was sort of a bridge made of boats and they were retreating quickly, but the Union forces were advancing so rapidly, the Southern soldiers had to torch the boats to prevent the Yankees from using them as well. This still left hundreds of Confederate soldiers on the wrong side of the river. Many swam and drown in their attempt to get across. My g-g-g-grandfather was captured and kept in a prison camp for a period of time.

He did survive the war and went home to Arkansas. I need to ask Gary about his ancestor’s service because I expect he was also in the Civil War – who wasn’t if you lived in the South and were of fighting age?

After the war, the two brothers, along with another brother who was the g-g-g-grandfather of Becky Hood, came to Texas to homestead. Becky’s ancestor and mine stayed and found their home here. Gary’s tried it a while and decided he wanted to go back to Arkansas. Which he did. The End.

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January 10, 2012

More from Zephyr–or Hamilton?

Filed under: Childhood Memories,Family,Genealogy — Janice @ 10:55 pm

After I posted yesterday and was undecided whether that was my family at Hamilton or Zephyr (which are only about 40 miles apart), my mother wrote with her interpretation. She felt sure it was the Hamilton farm because she only remembered going to the Zephyr farm one time. That gave me clarity on other pictures I have in my collection. Maybe. Now that I put them here I see that my great-grandmother is wearing three different dresses, so I’ll let Mom tell me when these were made.

Mom’s story was that at Christmastime, 1951, she and Daddy were dating in Amarillo. She worked for the telephone company and lived with her parents. Daddy was in the Air Force at the Amarillo base. He went home to Big Spring for Christmas and she took the bus down the day after Christmas to see him. She had already gone through the horror of “meeting the family” in October and my cousin Mike, who was 2, was already calling her “Aunt Patsy” when they talked on the phone. She went to Big Spring and Dad took her to the top of Lookout Mountain and gave her her engagement ring. The next day she and Daddy and my grandparents and my aunt and uncle and little Mike all piled in the car and went to Zephyr to see the rest of the Williams family. That’s close to 200 miles so it is not a fast trip, but Mom remembers it as fun and that there was a lot of Williams family there. I have these pictures and SOME of them must have been from that day. Mom certainly looks young and in love in this one, so I think it should be from that day. And zooming in I think there is a ring on her hand.

Then there is this one where Mike still looks the right age, but I think Mamma has changed dresses so this may have been a different trip. This is four generations with my great-grandmother, my grandfather, my aunt, and my cousin Mike.

There there is this one with lots of family there, like Mother remembers, but Mamma has changed dresses again, yet Mike still looks two. That my grandmother and grandfather on the left.

And then this one doesn’t seem to match with the last two, but Mamma appears to be in the right dress again, but my aunt and Mike are bundled up tight – yet it was December. So it could be the 1951 trip and the two above are another time. Of course, we laugh in our family because my aunt apparently always bundled up her kids no matter what season or what weather, so the picture below could have been made in July. But the picture above probably was not December. I don’t think everyone would have had short sleeves in December.

I’ll let Mom shed some light on these pictures, but I sure am glad I have them. In this digital age it is so nice to be able to share them and make them bigger and examine the little details.

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Distant Past

Filed under: Blast From The Past,Childhood Memories,Family,Genealogy,Writing — Janice @ 12:10 am

I want to write in my blog more, but I get here and am uninspired. Topics seem too big or trivial. I’m always thinking I can just pull a picture out and talk about it, but then I spend a half hour just looking through pictures, discounting them for being too much or too trivial. But I found this one tonight and it makes me feel old. It looks like I was growing up on a sharecroppers farm in the Great Depression, doesn’t it? Yes, I’m the little one in this picture in my dad’s arms. That’s Uncle Dick on the left, he lives in Abilene now in a nursing home. That’s his mother, my great-grandmother on the right. She died when I was in college. I’m not sure if this was their farm in Zephyr or in Hamilton. Probably Hamilton. There are some really good stories about Uncle Dick and Grandma Williams… another time.

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December 5, 2011

The Addiction Continues

Filed under: Genealogy — Janice @ 10:40 pm

I know I spend more time on my genealogy addiction than most people do on any hobby that they have (unless you count Facebook or television as hobbies). I spent a little bit of time on it this weekend. Mark asked me to do a little research into his family. Yes, believe it or not, in almost 20 years of marriage I have spent very little time looking into his family. This weekend I finally did.

I discovered that other people have fascinating ancestry that equals the Cunningham family. Ha, I’m kidding of course. No one has a family history as interesting or endlessly compelling as my Cunningham family. But, nevertheless, I enjoyed finding some clues to Mark’s heritage.

Mark’s dad has done a pretty good history of his mother’s family and a cousin has done a lot on Mark’s Hays’ family line, so I took what Mark’s mother had given me about her family and researched it for a while yesterday. We knew that Mark’s grandmother was a Cajun. Mark has always bragged about her gumbo and how he has never tasted anything like it anywhere since she passed away. But when I looked into her family history, I could see just how Cajun she was. For generation after generation (five in all), every one was born and raised and died in Louisiana, mostly in the Cajun country. And then the generation preceding those five generations? All from Nova Scotia, Canada, and beyond that, France. So these were truly the Acadians that were driven from their homes and made their way around the North American continent to find a home in Louisiana. There’s apparently a little bit of native American blood in there somewhere, too, so I am tracking that down. It is fun. I am corresponding with a woman that would be Mark’s third cousin and she’s done a lot of research.

I love analogies and I decided one day that working on genealogy is like having a big knitted afghan with broken threads. You can never get all the loose ends tied up. The side you are working on (the present) is always going to have those blanks in the “death” and “burial” positions and the past is always going to have another generation you can go back to. If you hit a dead end going backward, you can always work your way out on those loose sides where you’ll find brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and end up with cousins that are down here in your generation.

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