At the Cemetery - Isaiah Herndon

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 21  (May 24-30)
Prompt: At the Cemetery
#52ancestors

Cemeteries can be interesting places even if you aren't doing genealogy research and I like to drag others with me. Like the time we were on a motorcycle trip to Mena Arkansas, when I talked our entire group into back tracking 10 miles to the historical cemetery we passed that no one else had noticed.  There was a small area where we could all park and then traipsed down an overgrown faint trail to about 9 graves. The stones were  from the 1800s and very different from now.  Even the ones who weren't  fascinated by the stones, enjoyed the stop because it was so quiet and peaceful. We were not that far off the road, but it seemed like we had stepped back in time.

Now I'm working on another cemetery mystery.  Isaiah Herndon is my 3rd great grandfather.  His family has been hard to find since he died in the civil war with  4 young children.  My 2nd great grandfather may not have even been born yet when Isaiah died. His widow remarried and I have only recently been able to track her down to discover that she was married twice after Isaiah died. There are few records pertaining to Isaiah, a few land records, and a marriage certificate.  Even the civil war records that some attribute to him are probably someone else. The name on those records is I.H. Herndon, but he was from a different county.  When I did research in that county, I found an Isaac Herndon who is most likely the I.H. Herndon in the civil war records.  He is found in that county after the civil war so he returned and lived out his life there.

In the last half of the 18th century,  Silas Claiborne Turnbo traveled around the Ozarks interviewing members of the community. He interviewed Elisha Herndon who was the son of Isaiah and Sarah Daves Herndon.  Elisha stated that his father died near the end of the Civil War and was buried  in the McMahon Cemetery near  Seymore, Missouri.  Unfortunately, I cannot find that cemetery.  I believe now that the name was changed at some point. 

 Jennifer ______ had a picture of a tombstone for Isaiah on her ancestry tree.  The name and dates fit everything I know about my Isaiah.  However she didn't list a cemetery name, so I contacted her to find out where she found the tombstone.   A boy scout troop was cleaning an old overgrown cemetery on private land and sent the picture to her.  The scout leader didn't give much information about where it was located before she emailed the picture to her.  Jennifer did give me the scout's leader  name, but I have not been able to get in contact with her. So the mystery continues. Eventually I will track it down, but it may take a field trip to Missouri to do it.  

  Another story about a cemetery trip.

 

Cousin's Fishing Camp

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 20  (May 17-23)
Prompt: Cousin Bait
#52ancestors

Cousins and bait go hand in hand when you are an Evans. Ira Lee Evans’ children and his brother, Bill’s children have spent many hours together fishing. Some of their earliest memories include the old home place on the Sunflower river fishing for catfish. Even the grandchildren fished with Grandpa Ira off the dock. Once they were grown, Uncle Bill’s family bought a fishing camp together on a slough in the Delta wildlife area in Mississippi and Uncle Ira’s family were always welcome. There was always plenty of things to do and fun to be had. 

Fishing was just a part of going to the camp. Everyone fished and then gathered in the evenings for story telling and visiting. Then there were the fish frys. The cousins knew the secret way to prepare the fish which involved soaking them in milk to have the absolute best flavor.  There were big pots for deep fat frying the fish and the hush puppies. That was just one of the reasons that reunions were epic when the cousins got together. 

Asa “Smoky” Evans became an avid fisherman when she came to the states. When she fished, she spit on the worms because she was sure that it attracted the fish.  She was willing to sit in a boat all day fishing even when the fish weren’t biting, but most of the time she had the most fish at the end of the day.  

We always claim that everything is bigger in Texas but were willing to concede the biggest mosquitoes to Mississippi after one trip to the fishing camp. Bob took Grandpa (Uncle Son), Noah and Bo to the camp one year during the Summer break. Uncle Max took Noah with him to check the trot lines. They paddled the boat away from the camp at a leisurely pace. When the sun started to sink, they came paddling back as fast as they could from around the bend. They were doing their best to outrun the swarm of mosquitoes that surrounded them.  It was worth it though to watch the preteenagers, Bo and Noah, learn how to fillet fish. 

Over the years, the fishing camp flooded several times. Each of the cousin’s families built a cabin which were eventually raised on stilts. In the last flood the water was high enough to go halfway up the walls even though the cabins were high enough to walk under them.  But that hasn’t stopped the memories. 

  

 

My Mother: Gwonda Jane McCarley

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 19 (May 10-16)
Prompt: Mother's Day
#52ancestors

 Gwonda Jane McCarley married Leeland Golightley when she was 22 years old.  Two years later she had me and became a Mother.  Over the next 8 years, she became a mother 5 more times. Well, really 3 more times considering two of those times she had twins. Over the next years, she became a grandmother and a great grandmother. I want to celebrate her life in pictures.

 

#52Ancestors: Loss

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 12  (Mar 22-28)
Prompt: Loss
#52ancestors

It has been awhile since I posted anything. Life and work displaced genealogy for awhile.  Yesterday I presented a program at the TXGenWeb Virtual Seminar and the seminar has inspired me to take my time back and start writing again. I want to go back and write about all the prompts that I've missed so I'm going to add some empty posts to keep them in order.  I'm going to be patient with me as I get caught up and continue on. I hope you will be too.

The prompt for March 22-28th was Loss and I am feeling the loss right now of time spent in different ways.  I have been doing genealogy research for over 40 years off and on. In the beginning it was often only a couple of times a year when I had time to travel to the downtown library in Dallas or time to write a few letters to courthouses in far away places.  Now those places don't seem so far away when I can jump on the computer at 10 o'clock at night and search the street view of Google or find an index of courthouse records available or search one of the big database websites, like ancestry.com, familysearch.com, or the USGenWeb Project. 

While I'm feeling the loss of time over the last few months due to a reorganization at work and the knowledge that in the Fall I will no longer be working on the El Centro campus, I am thinking of the loss that our ancesters must have felt when they immigrated or moved from one place to another.  They didn't have email to keep in contact with friends and family that were left behind. Letters didn't take 3 or 4 days to arrive. Sometimes letters traveled months to reach their destination.  Even close family eventually lost contact.  Now we keep in contact with email, FaceBook, Tumbler, Instagram, and other social media. 

 One of the ways that I keep in contact and try to bridge the gap between the past and the present is with this blog. That may be one of the reasons that I feel a sense of loss for not posting over the last few months.  Perhaps I'll do better in the future, but either way I plan to be patient with myself. 

Fortune: Ira Lee Evans

 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 10 (March 15-21)

Prompt: Fortune
#52ancestors

The American Heritage Dictionary has one definition of fortune as the turns of luck in the course of one's life. As I research our families, it is not uncommon to see that turn of luck.

Ira Lee Evans had a turn of luck during the great depression.  Before the great depression, he was a successful logging camp owner with several camps, mule teams and trucks which hauled logs to the sawmill near Sumner, Mississippi.  Below is a picture of some of the mule teams with a driver named "Cushfoot".  That was a nickname, but he was remembered with fondness by Ira's son, John.  John remembered him as being kind to him as a young boy who was probably in the way most of the time. 

By the time the depression was over, Ira had to sell the logging camps but there was little money left after paying his employees and bills. He moved his family to Holmes County where he worked as a logger again.  A turn of luck again and he was able to buy some land with a house and a store on it in Sharkey County.  It was a fun time as other family members lived near by and they worked and played together. After the hay bales were picked up from the railroad platform, they often had dances on the platform with adults and kids alike having fun.

They had not lived in Sharkey County too long when there was a big flood. The family loaded up in Uncle Bill’s old truck and headed for higher ground. For seven days they stayed in a train on a railroad siding before they could go back to the big house. The flood caused the next turn of luck as they lost everything in the house and started over with repairing the house.

In his later years, Mr. Ira began running a ferry across the Sunflower River not too far from Anguilla. There were no bridges near there for years. The ferry ran on cables across the river and his grandchildren remember going with him across the river as he transported cars across. It didn’t seem like work since he fished with them between cars.  After he retired, his grandson still operated the ferry when visiting because the new operator, Mr. Hall, lived just across the river and let him use the levers to move the ferry across the river. Between trips they still fished and built a 2 x 4 wired cage that rested in the river. When they caught a catfish, it would go in the cage, where Ira fed them with dog food. When it was time to eat, there was always fresh catfish to be had when the cage was pulled out of the river. 

A turn of luck, fortune, moved through out Mr. Ira’s life, changing his and his family’s life for bad and good.  Through out it all, he moved forward providing a stable rock for his family.

                                                     

Abraham McCarley

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 9 (March 8-14)

Prompt: Name's the Same
#52ancestors

You wouldn't think there would be too many men named Abraham McCarley.  However, in many cultures it is tradition to name the oldest son after the paternal grandfather and the second son after the maternal grandfather.  That can sometimes be a good clue in linking generations together. But if a man has 4 sons and all 4 sons name their oldest son after the grandfather, there could be as many as 5 men with the same name in the same area.

How do you separate out the men and decide  which facts go with which man?  I started with finding out who each man was married to and finding an approximate birth date.   Any stray facts that didn't belong to a known Abraham went into a different column in my Excel spreadsheet.  In the beginning, I had 7 different Abraham columns. Gradually by using a timeline, I was able to move facts from three of the columns to the other columns, narrowing my Abrahams down to just four.  All of them lived in the same general area, and moved to the next area. Sometimes their moves were as much as 5 or 6 years apart.  Sorting out the land records were easy when the wife was named with the husband, but some of the land records did not name the wife. Some of the owners of land were only determined when they died and I could see which son the land was passed to or if the wife was named in the will.

One record which I will probably never be able to assign to a particular Abraham is a newspaper article in Maury County, TN.  It states that Abraham McCarley took up a brown horse and was advertising for it's owner. In Maury County at that time, lived Abraham Sr. and his son, Abraham Jr. as well as Abraham, Sr's grandson, Abraham (son of Thomas T).  It probably wasn't the son of Thomas T as he was only about 13 at the time. But was it Abraham Sr or Abraham Jr.?

Any time I have trouble sorting out a genealogy problem, I resort to Excel.  If you haven't used it to solve a problem yet, I recommend it.

 

Twins and more Twins

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 9 (March 1-7)
Prompt: Multiples
#52ancestors

The myth is that twins come every other generation.  That is not true in my family.  It seems as if every generation has twins. My mother even had two sets of twins.

Going backwards from the youngest generation and their relationship to me: 

(Gen 1) Eryn Nissa & Kenneth Lee - Grandchildren 

Kenny & Eryn are 21 now
How time flys!

(Gen 2) Heather LeAnn & Chase Wayne- 1st cousins, once removed 

(Gen 3) Bobby Lee & Barbara Lynn - Brother & Sister 

(Gen 3) Bryan Keith & Brent Kevin - Brothers

(Gen 4 ) Sadie Fay & Vadie May - Aunts 

(Gen 5) Not in my line as there was only one child born in this generation, but maybe some of her cousins? 

(Gen 6) That brings us to the 6th generation.  The family story is that two brothers drowned in a tank (pond) when one brother tried to save the other.  There were some who thought that they were twins or at least very close in age as they were supposed to be in college at the time.  At this point, I have not been able to prove this story. I have found no indication of any twins for this generation in either the maternal or paternal line of generation 5. Nor have I found any proof of two brothers drowning. 

(Gen 9)  Going back in this line, there is a brother born on 1 Jan 1830 and his sister, born on 2 Jan 1830.  Is this a mistake?  or twins born hours apart?  This brother and sister are not in my direct line but siblings to my 3rd Great Grandfather, so this genealogy conundrum hasn't been a priority for me to solve. Maybe it should be. 

Brands and Barbed Wire

 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 7 (Feb 15-21)

Prompt: Unusual Source
#52ancestors

I’ve found unusual and important information from lots of different kinds of records, but the records themselves were not unusual sources. Most genealogy is being meticulous in searching the usual sources. However, often the family heirlooms are what give you the life stories.

For several years, we had a camping family reunion. On one of those weekends, my Uncle brought my Grandparents branding irons. My Uncle Ted shared stories about using the irons as he was growing up. There are two irons, one a capital M and the other a bar. Up to that point, I thought that my Grandparents brand was a rocking M, but my Uncle who helped in the branding when he was growing up knew it was bar M, a bar over the M.

I discovered that brands are often recorded at the local courthouse. The McCarley brand was not recorded at the courthouse in Duncan, the county seat for Stephens County, Oklahoma. However, there are still several courthouses that need to be searched to see if the brand was recorded.

 Bringing the branding irons to the reunion not only allowed us to learn more about the family but caused us to build more memories. We found chunks of wood left around the foundation of the old house, built a fire, and burned the brand into the wood for anyone who wanted it. I also found some short strands of rusted barbed wire on the old homeplace and wrapped it around the chunk of wood that I branded. My Uncle supervised us to make sure that brand was correct.

 

 

Love in the Old West

 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 6 (Feb 8-14)
Prompt: Valentine
#52ancestors

Valentine brings to mind love stories. I'm sharing the story of my Great Grandparents and how they met. 

Picture the old westerns that you see on the AMC channel. Frontier towns with wood sidewalks and one main road through town. Nocona, Texas was established in 1887 along the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad and was the last stop in Texas before crossing the Red River on the Chisholm Trail. 

Mattie Niblett moved to Nocona to learn the milliner trade. Steaming the felt while making hats created even more heat during the hot Texas summer days. Mattie stepped outside the hat shop to catch a breeze one summer day in 1895. She was standing on the wood plank sidewalk leaning on the railing when Sid McCarley rode through town with a herd of horses headed to Indian Territory with his brothers.

About 1900 in Nocona, TX only 5 years after Sid and Mattie married.  

Found on Linda Ballard Shields Mooney's Pinterest. Originally sent by Tom Chambers.

 Sid was a bold young man of only 21 years old and Mattie captured his eye. As his brothers and horses continued through town, he stopped to talk to her. When the herd was almost out of sight, he told her that he would be back and rode to catch up with the herd.

 Sidney E McCarley and Martha (Mattie) Elizabeth Lydia Niblett married in Indian Territory on December 8th in 1895.

In the Kitchen

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 5 (Feb 1-7)
Prompt: In the Kitchen
#52ancestors

This week I’m writing about my grandchildren’s ancestors again.

Far away from home when we first married, my new husband was longing for home cooking. I knew how to cook but to him home cooking was Japanese food, along with southern Mississippi.  So, trying to be a good wife, I decided to learn to cook the foods that he missed.  I called my mother-in-law to get her recipes, but she cooked like my mother. A little bit of this and a smidgen of that mixed in with ingredients that I had never heard of. Not to mention I was trying to create a dish that I had never tasted.  It was trial and error at its best. I would try. He would taste it and tell me that it wasn’t quite like his mother's but good, just needed a little more of something. No matter how bad it was, he ate it and tried to help me get it right the next time.

After he got out of the Navy the first time, we lived with my mother-in-law for about a month while we painted my parent’s house before moving into it.  During that time and for a long time after we moved out, she taught me to cook my husband’s favorite foods.

One of my favorite memories was when she was teaching me to cook sukiyaki.  It isn’t a hard meal, and it is generally cooked family style. She used an electric fry pan in the center of the dining room table and as the slivers of meat and vegetables cooked, we would use chop sticks to move them from the pan to our plates. Sounds simple but it wasn’t. It took several hours prior to the meal to prepare the beef strips and all the vegetables and yam noodles. Each piece had to be cut in a very precise manner, the same size and with the ends cut at the perfect angle.  As we were cutting the vegetables, I started getting in a hurry and my vegetables were not the perfect uniform shape.  Before I realized what had happened, Mom reached out and smacked my hands with her chopsticks.  I think she was more shocked than I was when she realized what she had done. I had to duck my head to hide my smile at her shocked expression. That is when I knew she thought of me as her daughter. She was so used to handling her two boys that it was an automatic reaction to my carelessness.

Several years later, I was checking my mother’s recipes. I found some written in my Dad’s Mother’s handwriting. Recipes like minced meat pie and rhubarb pie. My Mother told me that her mother-in-law gave her the recipes to make sure she could cook my Dad’s favorites.  I guess my experiences learning to cook Japanese were not much different than what every new wife goes through.

Oh, and by the way, my husband is now a pretty good cook himself and his sushi rolls are tighter than mine.

Gladys & Thomas Osa (aka O.C. or Ocie) McCarley

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 4 (Jan 25-31)
Prompt: Favorite Picture
#52ancestors

I have so many favorite family pictures that it was really hard to choose.  I decided to share the two favorite pictures that I have of my Grandparents.  I've shared them before at different times, but I'm not sure that I shared the story behind the second one.  The first is my grandparents with my mother. My Grandmother was 15 when she got married and was probably 16 in this picture. The picture was probably taken in Marlow, OK. So if any of my relatives in OK know where this gas station is or was, please let me know. 

    

The second picture is of my Grandparents after their children were grown and married. You can see their children's pictures on the piano behind them.  All of them took lessons and practiced on this piano.  As you can see, Grandpa has a twinkle in his eyes.  Grandma told me that he was pinching her on the behind at the time the picture was taken, which explains the look on her face, too. 

Grace Truman Jordan Evans

  

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 3 (Jan 18-24)
Prompt: Namesake
#52ancestors

 

Grace Truman Jordan

 Grace Truman Jordan was born on April 6, 1909 to William and Minnie Lee Jordan.  There was a mystery pertaining to Minnie Lee’s parents. The only record I could find for years was the 1880 census record where M. L. Dottry, was living with her parents,  T  and J Dottery.  For years that is all we knew about her parents.  It seemed easy to assume that Grace Truman Jordan’s name might be the clue needed to find her grandparents. Surely, she was named after her grandfather, T Dottery, making his given name, Truman.

 Alas, that proved to be wrong, her grandfather’s name turned out to be Thomas G. Dottery, which is another story. Where did the name Truman come from?  It seemed like it should be a surname passed down. Could she have been a distant relative to Harry S Truman? That proved to be wrong, too. 

 In the 1850s, Sallie Rochester Ford published a serial story in the Christian Repository owned by her husband, Reverend Samuel Ford titled, Grace Truman, or Love and Principal.  The serial was published as a book in 1857 and republished multiple times[1].  The 1886 edition included an afterword in which “Ford noted that the work was semi-autobiographical and referenced her own personal and public struggle as she converted from Presbyterianism to the Baptist movement[2].” This book was influential in Baptist circles for many years.

 The two sides of the character, Grace Truman, spoke to many of the faithful Baptist women of the last half of the 1800s and early 1900s.  While Grace Truman was the epitome of the faithful, submissive, devoted wife, she was also a fierce warrior of her faith.  She reflected a strength that appealed to many women of that time. The book, Grace Truman, must have made an impression on Minnie Lee Dottery Jordan for her to have named her daughter, Grace Truman.  In fact, there were many girls named Grace Truman after different editions of the book were published. A search of the first name “Grace Truman” with no other information gives over 4 million results in Ancestry.com and 1,184 results in the family trees. 

Grace Truman Evans with niece, Christine and sons, John (Son) and Ed

 Grace Truman Jordan’s namesake was not another relative but a fictional character, a woman of faith. It gives an insight into the character and faith of her mother, Minnie Lee Dottery Jordan.

---

[1]Sallie Rochester Ford.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Rochester_Ford

[2] Sallie Rochester Ford: fiction, faith, and femininity: nineteenth-century Baptists offered two general, and different,  cultural messages to women within the church regarding social expectations. - Free Online Library (thefreelibrary.com). https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Sallie+Rochester+Ford:+fiction,+faith,+and+femininity:...-a0138811971

Gunslingers shoot down McCarley

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 2- 2021
#52ancestors 
Prompt: Family Legend

 In the old west, Malcom McCarley and one of his brothers, were fixing a fence. A couple of gunslingers came by and shot one of the brothers. Their father, Mitchel McCarley and another brother rode to Bowie to post a bond. The brother who was able to get away  and a fourth brother rode out after the killers. One of the brothers came back and the other was never seen again.  

 That is the family legend that my Mother brought home from a reunion one year. Despite my grilling her, that is all she knew. Was this a true story and if so, who was the McCarley brother who was shot by a gunslinger?   

 I was very curious about the idea of them riding to Bowie to post a bond.  I thought a bond is what you paid to get out of jail until your trial started. But a legal definition is that "someone receives a bond (monetary payment) and promises to engage in a specific act. Then a failure to perform results in them forfeiting the money. So a bond is an incentive to do something.  I went to the courthouse in Montague County, where Bowie, Texas is located.  While I found some very interesting things, but I didn't find anything about a bond being posted.  I could only guess that it was some type of reward for finding the killer.  

 As I discovered, many of the details in the original story were wrong. In sorting out the brothers, I started with reviewing Mitchel McCarley's sons and finding when they died. Using census records, I determined their last census record and was able to find the date of death for most of them.   Eli and James seemed to disappear after the 1900 census, so I began to concentrate on finding them.

 Then due to the new rootsweb message boards, I made contact with my Mother's 2nd cousin, Jim Hupp, gave me more details about the story as he had heard it. 

 Jim and Eli McCarley were repairing a fence that had been cut during the fence wars of Texas when a group of gunslingers rode up. Jim and Eli were unarmed but the gunslingers shot and killed Jim anyway. Eli got away. Their father, Mitchel McCarley, and another brother, Sidney, rode to Durant to post a reward. While they were gone, Eli and another brother, decided to ride out after them men who shot Jim. The unknown brother returned to Nocona, but the other brother disappeared. A few months later his family disappeared. It was believed that they went to California.

 As I continued to research, I found that James (Jim) McCarley died on April 6, 1904 and was buried in Marshall County, Oklahoma. Of the older boys in the family, Jim is the only one who died that early in the 1900s.  Eli disappeared in the county records around that time, so it appeared that part of the story is consistent. Since he died in Indian Territory, it makes more sense that  Mitchel and Sidney rode to Durant, Oklahoma rather than Bowie, Texas. I haven't been to the courthouse in Durant but the courthouse in Montague County where Bowie is located did not have any records about a reward or about the killing.

Sometime later, when the Library of Congress started digitizing newspapers in the "Chronicling America" collection, I found these articles in The Daily Ardmoreite. 

 April 8, 1904. Henry Paris, who was present at the killing of Jim McCarley by his brother, Oscar Paris, who escaped, was bound over without bail at his trial yesterday.

The Daily Ardmoreite, April 6, 1904.   Ardmore, I.T., April 8 - ? McCarley was shot and instantly killed Wednesday morning, three miles southeast of Madill. Oscar Paris is alleged to have done the shooting. The two men had quarreled about some land, and, it is said, Paris shot McCarley in the mouth, the ball passing through and breaking his neck. Both men were farmers. 

 

Another article, called it a disagreement among neighbors. Oscar Parish or Paris was eventually caught and bound over for trial.  I have searched the court records in several courthouses in Oklahoma and the pre statehood court records housed at the regional archives in Fort Worth, Texas, but I still have not found the trial of Oscar Parish. However the archivist in Ft Worth told me that if the case lasted past statehood, which was possible, then the records would still be at the Oklahoma courthouse.

 Just recently in searching the "Chronicling America" database, I found the following excerpt from a column titled " Technical Points Not in Favor: Criminal Court of Appeals Not Hunting for Excuses to Set Aside Verdicts" in The Guthrie Daily Leader, dated May 10, 1911.

The case of Oscar Paris, sentenced to one year in prison and fined $100 for manslaughter, is reversed in an opinion by Judge Doyle, because the state was allowed to impeach one of its own witnesses, whose testimony helped out Paris' claim of self-defense. Paris killed J.W. McCarly south of Madill on April 6, 1904. 

So, it appears that Oscar Paris/Parish, did not serve any time for killing Jim McCarley.I am still looking for the court case and the appeals. If as in our family story, Jim was unarmed, how could it be self defense? Perhaps that is another detail that was wrong.

And the brother who disappeared? According to census records, Malcolm and his wife, Cassie are living in Socorro, New Mexico in 1910 and Eli lived in Love County, Oklahoma in 1910 until his death in 1933. Love County is very near where the rest of the family was living during those years, so perhaps, it was Malcolm who disappeared from the family.