Author: FHadmin

No Grandpas

Posted on by FHadmin
Grandpa Together-we-are-strong pixabay.com

I never knew either of my grandfathers.  Similarly, my dad didn’t know his grandfathers and my mom didn’t know her grandmothers.  It is like a piece of your life is missing when you don’t have the opportunity to know a parent or a grandparent.  All I know is what I learned from family, primarily from my parents, about them.

 

Grandpa McCracken

 

Grandpa McCracken died when I was about a month old. From things I have heard about him, I know he  was very intelligent, had high expectations for his children,  did not put up with anyone saying “can’t,” and was loved by his kids and grandkids. 

A few quick stories . . .

  • Joe McCracken
  • Grandpa Joe didn’t think his kids needed to do homework.  He thought school work was very important, but he believed school was for school work and homework was things like feeding chickens, doing dishes, etc.
  • He didn’t think people needed a lot of paper as he could “figure” things in his head.  One night he sat down and was quiet.  After some time, he had Dad get a paper and pencil.  He proceeded to give him a list of lumber to buy along with how much it would cost.  He had designed the building in his head.  Determined how much of each type of board was needed. And, then calculated the cost without writing down anything.
  • He  gave orders to each of his sets of boys by telling the oldest one of the set and then expecting the younger one to do what the older one told them to do.
  • He was semi-ambidextrous.  He did somethings right-handed and some things left-handed.  Therefore, he had some right-handed tools and some left-handed tools.  But, he couldn’t just switch back and forth doing the same task.  And, he didn’t understand why other people couldn’t use both their hands like he could.  He was proud of Ruby for being left-handed.
  • He once shot a rat that was outside the house from inside right through the screen door.
  • Grandpa liked his coffee very, very strong.  His daughters teased him about it and even got a spoon that melted in hot liquid as a joke.
  • Although Grandpa trained to do mechanical work, he didn’t have the patience to do it.
  • Dad always said that Dewey was like Grandpa and Dewey always said that Dad was like Grandpa.

 

I have been told at times that I am like Grandpa, but that is only when I was doing something that likely annoyed my dad (e.g. I wasn’t being patient). 

Grandpa Pellett

 

I was six when Grandpa Pellett passed away.  However, he had been in a VA hospital in Iowa for a very long time.  Thus, I had never met him.  He is more of a mystery to me than Grandpa McCracken as Mom didn’t spend very many years with him herself and Grandma never told me about him either.  The little I know about him is as follows . . .

  • Grandpa Pellett served in the Kansas 353rd Infantry Regiment  in WWI in France.  Seventy-five people welcomed him home.
  • He had perfect attendance multiple times when in grammar school.
  • When he was a teenager, he was seriously injured when kicked by a mule.
  • He was baptized in Buck Run Creek in 1916 (he would have been about 21).
  • When picking pecans, he fell and was injured.  His injury combined with what was likely PTSD  landed him in the VA hospital starting in the early 1940s through the rest of his life.

 

Writing this makes me realize just how little I know about Grandpa Pellett. It really makes me wonder how my life would have been different if my grandpas would have been a part of it.

 

Identification Complications

Posted on by FHadmin

Identifying a person’s ancestors isn’t always easy even with records and DNA.  I have worked a quite a few confusing lines in my own families and other people’s families where family information, records, and DNA didn’t all align.  And, in some cases, almost no information seemed to exist.

 

Louisiana

 

One of those cases was my great-great grandmother Louisiana Matteer.  My part of the family always believed that her name was Louisiana Johnson and I spent many years researching that name without success.  One day I came in contact with a researcher that said that another researcher that he had a lot of confidence in had found that her name was Louisiana Mattser.  Well, there was no one with that last name in any record in the area where she lived leading up to the time she married.  However, it got me looking at records differently. 

 

With some digging I found the record that the person read as Mattser.  Based on the handwriting, that appeared to be the name.  Yet, Mattser did not match anyone.  Eventually,  I found more records and determined that her name was really Louisiana (or Louisanna) Matteer.  Once I searched with this name, I was able to piece together more of her story and find DNA matches to people in that family line.

 

Adoptions & More

 

Despite the research on Louisiana taking several years, it isn’t the most complex cases of identity that I have worked.  Helping people who have been adopted or do not know an ancestor for some reason has presented me with far more challenging circumstances to research.  Imagine people that don’t know who their parents are and no paperwork was ever filed on their under the table adoption.  Imagine cases that take you coast to coast and even to multiple continents.  And, others are at a known locale, but there is lots of intermarrying in the area and separating family lines becomes difficult.

 

The Extreme

 

I am still working on an extremely difficult case.  In this case, not only is the person adopted, but so is the father.  Add to that at least two other  close ancestors whose birth was the result of an affair.  The case Includes multiple countries, multiple languages, and many of the families intermarried over and over.  Now, that makes identifying ancestors a challenge!

 

 

Turn That Picture To The Wall

Posted on by FHadmin

Some year ago, my uncle sent my family an article about General George Henry Thomas.  He was a well known and well respected general for the North in the Civil War.  Thus, my uncle really wanted him to be a member of our family.  After all, the names George and Henry both show up in our ancestry.

 

North Or South

 

George was from Virginia.  He had trained at West Point and  was against slavery.  When the Civil War was imminent, he decided that he would fight for the North.  His family back in Virginia was very upset by this decision as they felt he was turning his back on his home state.  Therefore, the article claimed that his family turned his photo to the wall.  They continued to be upset with him after the war.  When he died, it was said that a member of his family stated that he had died when he decided to fight for the North!

 

Relation or Not?

 

Although he was born only a few miles from the Virginia-North Carolina border, no evidence has been found tying the general to our Thomas family in North Carolina, .  However, when we heard the story, we thought it was definitely possible that his family was related to us as our Thomas family was  strong in their beliefs and they stuck  together. We could  see the Thomas family turning their back on someone that they thought had turned their back on them.

 

 

 

What’s Happening?

Posted on by FHadmin

Today when we want to know what is happening with somebody, we check their social media accounts.  If you aren’t connected to a person, it can be a bit challenging to find out what is going on in their life. 

 

Local Items

 

Back in the day, it was common to print items  in small town newspapers about people from different neighborhoods.  In this case, you could check up on anyone.  However, you were limited by the other person’s connection to the person that wrote the local items.  So, if someone in your family wrote the local items or was tightly connected to the person who wrote them, your family would show up in the newspaper a lot.  On the other hand, if you weren’t connected, you might never show up.

 

Local Items For Genealogy

 

Items written in the newspaper are a far cry from a primary source for genealogy.  However, they can be invaluable in your research.   They have helped me find people that weren’t where they were expected, learn about schools and churches that are long gone, find unknown family members etc.  But more than anything, they bring these characters in my genealogy to life with details and stories that go beyond basic facts.

 

Ten Specific Stories

 

The following are a few of the things  that I learned about by read reading local items or other small articles in newspapers.  Some were exciting new information that led to additional research, while others were just fun tidbits of information.

 

  1. My gg-grandfather Lemuel McCracken’s birth date is  April 12, 1831.  Records showed April 1831, but no day had been found until an article that talked about his birthday party.
  2. My husband’s grandmother Minnie (Kutzner) Helm had two half sisters that she knew, but apparently never told her daughters about.
  3. My ggg-grandfather Abel John Pellett voted for General Harrison in 1836 and 1840.
  4. At age 16, my g-uncle Oren Thomas was run over by a wagon when the team of horses ran away.  They thought at first that the injuries might be fatal.  He survived and died at age 70.
  5. My husband’s g-grandparents Herbert & Blanche (Klinefelter) Thomson met in Colorado at a train station in the early 1930’s.  Blanche lived in Pennsylvania and Herbert lived in Nebraska.  So, it must have been meant to be.
  6. The Jury family arrived in Fort Scott, Kansas from Oxford, Canada  in November 1869, staying at the Western House Hotel in Fort Scott.
  7. John Peelle, brother to my ggg-grandfather William Peelle, was quite a story teller.  He would get up at the Old Settlers Picnic in Indiana and tell stories of picking cotton in North Carolina, swapping pants with another man at a log rolling, marrying his wife, and witches in “North Caroliner.”
  8. Williamsburg, Indiana was named after my gggg-grandfather William Johnson.
  9. In 1916, my grandpa Joe McCracken decided to move into Farlington.  He had a sale (selling cattle, farm implements, etc.) as he was quitting farming (which he returned only a few years later). 
  10. My gg-grandmother Mary (Portwood) Conner was seriously hurt when she was thrown from a horse she was riding (she was 40 years old at the time).

 

 

Oops!

Posted on by FHadmin

This week’s challenge was “Oops.”  The first thing that came to my mind was all the short pregnancies.  What I mean by that is all the people who married and had a baby six to seven months later.  I have seen that in many different families in many different people’s genealogies.

 

It’s Not New

 

Many people think pregnancies out of wedlock are a modern phenomena, but in reality they have always occurred.  One of my favorite storiesin my family is about Matilda Jury Peelle’s short pregnancy.

 

Matilda

 

You see, the Jury family was, shall we say, a quite proper English family.  As such, her short pregnancy was never ever mentioned.  Matter of fact, the day her first child, Lydia, was born, her husband simply wrote in his journal that he did not work due to illness in the family.  Well, this was the 1890s.  Matilda and her husband William J Peelle were both well into adulthood. 

 

It was clear, based on her daughters’ behaviors, that Matilda did not intend to have her daughters end up in the same situation. None of us knew what she told them.  Did she admit that she was pregnant when she got married?  Did she have a story about how it happened? None of the details were clear, except that she clearly stressed to them to be careful of men being around.   So strongly was it stressed upon them, that when my dad did his DNA test, I wondered if we could uncover a family secret. (We didn’t.)

 

Lydia

Her mother’s words clearly impacted Lydia to the core.  She never married and was so scared of men that she poured concrete on the locks on her windows.  Of course, she lived in the big city (Wichita, KS, which had a little over 70,000 inhabitants in those days), moving there from a very rural area when she was barely of age.  Even years later, upon arrival home, she wanted her nephew to check the house to make sure there were no men inside.  And, she did not appreciate him joking about her wanting him to make sure no men escaped.

 

Nellie

Nellie, on the other hand, didn’t take the advice quite so much to heart.  Although she came across as a very proper woman, she had a bit of flirtation in the letters she wrote to her future husband.  They had a large family and seemed to live a normal life. However, she never openly talked of indiscretions of any kind.  Such topics were clearly not to be discussed.  However, any time Nellie and Lydia were talking and their voices became inaudible, family suspected they just might be discussing some of those topics. But, to everyone else, they were always “hush, hush!”