Brands and Barbed Wire

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

Prompt: Unusual Source
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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
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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
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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
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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.