Family History Bites

Lancelot's Round Table

2011-12-08T19:08:00.004-05:00

One of the main reasons I started this blog was to put out some information that would attract distant cousins who were Googling family names so that we could find each other and share information. So the main reason for this post is to share some information I've gleaned over the last few years about the family of Lancelot Branch, the progenitor of all our Branch relatives in America. (That's his headstone at left, at the Horatio Cemetery near Punxsutawney, PA.)

As I talked about in this post a few years ago, Lancelot was an English coal miner who left England for Pennsylvania after the Civil War and sent for his wife and young daughter soon after. Unlike a lot of families who immigrated to America, Lancelot wasn't part of a bigger group including siblings and cousins—the rest of his family seems to have stayed behind in England. (The single exception I know about is his cousin Cuthbert Branch, who went to Ontario.) So even though there are a fair number of Branches in the U.S., we're not likely related to most of them.

When i wrote the last post about Lancelot, I knew from census records that he and his wife Elizabeth had three sons and three daughters: John George (my own ancestor), Thomas, Joseph, Sarah Jane, Elizabeth, and Maggie. At that time, though, I had only made contact with people from the family of Thomas. Since then, I have found what became of Joseph (he went to Canton, Ohio, and had three daughters) and Sarah Jane (she married John Commons and raised a large family in Southwest Pennsylvania). While I haven't found any of Joseph's family members, I have been in touch with a descendant of Sarah Jane's. Through online newspaper archives, census records, and even Facebook, I've been able to add dozens more people to my record of Lancelot's descendants.

But I'd like to add more! I don't know what became of Joseph's daughters, and not all of Thomas and Sarah's people are accounted for, and Elizabeth and Maggie are still complete mysteries. To that end, I'm posting this table of Lancelot's descendants—stopping at his great-grandchildren and excluding the names of any people who are likely to be alive (for privacy's sake). It may be of interest to some of you, but the main reason for posting it is essentially as "Google bait." If you've come to this page because you searched on a name and have discovered a connection, e-mail me at familyhistorybites@gmail.com.

I Lancelot Branch 1836 Staindrop UK–1907 Horatio, PA

m 1866 Tynemouth UK Elizabeth Charlton

II Sarah Jane Branch 9/9/1867 Seghill, UK–1914 PA

m ca. 1884 John Commons 1858–1942

III Maude Commons ca. 1886 TN– July 1961 Meyersdale, PA

III Charles William Commons 2/24/1887 Meyersdale, PA–8/16/1966 Carmichaels, PA

m ca. 1916 Mildred Margaret Crossland 4/28/1893 Glassport, PA–6/7/1966 Carmichaels, PA

IV Charles Howard Commons 3/16/1917 Boswell, PA–7/4/1971 St. Petersburg, FL

m 2 Lydia Lorraine Bryan 7/12/1927 Columbus, OH–5/18/1967 St. Petersburg, FL

IV Marguerite M. Commons 9/28/1918 Boswell, PA–11/9/2001 Bedford, VA

IV George M. Commons 9/2/1920 PA–8/27/1981 PA in Carmichaels in 1966

IV Edith Jane Commons 12/7/1922 PA–9/19/2000 CO?

IV [Daughter]

Virginia Ruth Commons ca. 1929 PA

III Harry Commons 2/26/1889 Meyersdale, PA–2/1960 Detroit, MI

III Raymond L. Commons 8/4/1890 PA–10/29/1963 Ligonier, PA

III Ralph Edward Commons 3/23/1892 Summit Twp., PA–4/25/1961 Miami, FL

m 6/5/1923 Detroit MI Emma Leonora Flach 12/20/1894 Detroit, MI–12/10/1966 Ferndale, MI

IV Ralph Edward Commons 3/20/1924 Detroit MI–12/20/1990 Pinellas Co., FL

IV Lenore Ruth Commons 10/7/1926 Detroit, MI–8/31/1976 MI

m Edward Marckwardt 6/14/1923–5/1/2009 Cadillac, MI

III Ruth J. Commons 9/22/1893 Meyersdale, PA–7/2/1967 Berlin, PA

m 4/22/1933 John Adam Gruber 12/28/1901 Penn, PA–6/9/1999 Topton, PA

III John Roy Commons 1/14/1896 Somerset Co. PA–6/7/1952 Altoona, PA

m ca. 1923 Emma J. Finnegan ca. 1898 PA

IV John Roy Commons Jr. 12/2/1923 PA–1/24/1997 PA

IV [Daughter]

IV [Son]

III Byron Earl Commons 8/19/1898 Meyersdale,PA–1/30/1986 Escondido, CA

m Roseanna McCabe 6/27/1917 Ida Grove, IA–1/8/2000 Rancho Murieta, CA

IV Richard Earl Commons 11/3/1948 CA–12/13/1997 CA

II John George Branch 3/4/1872 Somerset Co., Pa.–3/4/1940 Horatio, Pa.

m 10/1896 Punxatawney, Pa. Margaret Jehu 6/15/1877 Providence Pa.–1/4/1971 Commodore, Pa.

III Clarence Milo Branch 8/6/1897 Horatio, Pa.–4/1968 Bristow, Okla.

m 1928 Okla. City, OK Blanche Idella Vermillion 4/6/1907 Wayne, IT–11/28/2003 Drumright, OK

IV [Son]

IV [Daughter]

III Richard Branch 12/6/1900 Desire, Pa–1946 Youngstown, OH

m Bessie Elizabeth Johns 2/9/1903 Punxsutawney, PA–8/14/1993 Youngstown, OH

IV [Son]

IV Richard Branch 10/10/1925 Ohio–2/18/1997 Los Angeles, CA

III Ruth Branch 1903 Horatio, Pa.–1903 Horatio, Pa.

III Sarah Jane Branch 1/10/1906 Horatio, Pa.—7/22/2000 Hillsdale, Pa.

m 2/28/1925 Leonard Ball 9/10/1902 Elanora, PA–1/4/1983 Indiana, Pa.

IV [Son

IV Clarence Leroy Ball 1/11/1928 PA–May 15, 2006 Dixonville, PA

m 5/27/1949 Betty Mae Witherite 12/22/1927 Green Twp., PA–10/6/2001 Commodore, PA

IV William Eugene Ball 12/29/1930–7/10/1951 Cincinnati, OH

IV Gerald Wayne Ball 10/31/1935–7/27/2011

III George Branch 7/29/1908 Horatio, Pa.–7/1981 Greenville, Pa.

m 8/3/1929 Ruby Arlene Shovestull 6/14/1910 PA–5/1981 Greenville, Pa.

IV Robert Eugene Branch 7/15/1931 PA–11/8/2000 OH

IV [Daughter]

IV John George Branch 12/30/1934–3/1/2000 Greenville, Pa.

III Esther Branch 4/2/1913 Punxatawney, Pa.–1/1942

m Leroy Jones

III Harry Leeroy Branch 12/24/1916 Punxsutawney, Pa.–11/11/1994 Youngstown, OH

m 7/13/1942 Gladys Johnson 3/20/1923 OH?–8/1/2007 Poland, OH

IV Alice Esther Branch d. bef. 8/1/2007

IV [Daughter]

II Thomas James Branch 10/1874-5, Meyersdale, PA–1933 Arnold City, PA

m Annie Haddick b. Wrekenton, Northumberland Co., UK–1971, PA

III Leonard William Branch 6/4/1895–10/2/1966, Allen Park, MI

m 10/10/1928 Detroit, MI Mary Agnes Walsh 3/22/1902 Montreal, QC–8/31/2006 San Pedro, CA

IV Thomas Martin Branch 8/2/1929 Grosse Pointe, MI–11/1991, Troy, MI

IV [Son]

IV Robert William Branch 12/17/1932 Detroit, MI–11/27/1972 Los Angleles, CA

IV [Son]

III Margaret Branch ca. 1898 PA–aft. 4/1942

m ca. 1916 Frederick Homer Moors 6/26/1893 Butler, PA–10/12/1962 Somerset Co., PA

IV Arthur Gene Moors 6/26/1917 PA–5/18/1997 MI

m Hilda Blanche Arisman 5/15/1918–1/16/2000 MI

IV Dorothy M. Moors 8/10/1920 Boswell, PA–3/19/1985 Virgilina, VA

m Henderson Loftis 11/11/1919–4/1957

III Elizabeth Branch 2/11/1900 Punxsutawney, PA–2/26/1991 Clarion, PA

m ca. 1923 John Richard Baldwin ca. 1899 PA

IV Gloria Baldwin 12/5/1925 PA–12/17/2003 FL

IV [Son]

III Maude Pearl Branch 4/30/1903 Meyersdale, PA–8/1983 Bellevue, WA

m ca. 1925 Walter M. "Bus" McMillen 10/18/1903 Bridgeville, PA–4/13/1955 Bridgeville, PA

IV [Daughter]

IV Robert Branch McMillen 7/10/1935 PA–10/12/2002 Bellevue, WA

III Leona Louise Branch 11/22/1905–2/23/1997 Pittsburg, PA

m Edward William Schietinger 7/1/1894 Pittsburgh, PA–6/2/1985

IV [Daughter]

III Anna Branch 8/12/1908–4/21/2004

m Raymond S. Call 1901–1946

IV [Son]

III Ruth Branch ca. 1912

m Robert Schmidt

IV [Son]

III Thomas James Branch 7/9/1915 PA–11/17/1978 CA

m Rose Lillian Caplan 8/29/1915 PA–7/1/1977 CA

IV [Son]

IV [Daughter]

III Irene Branch ca. 1921

m Glenn Wilhelm

IV [Daughter]

IV [Son]

II Elizabeth Ann Branch ca. 1876

II Maggie Branch ca. 1879

II Joseph William Branch 8/26/1884-5 Meyersdale, PA–1947 OH

m ca. 1912 Mabel/Mable Lenora Burchfield 2/1/1893 PA–1/30/1974 OH

III Mona L. Branch 5/1/1913 PA–4/9/2000

III L. Irene Branch 2/4/1915 PA–1/30/1989 OH

III [Daughter]

Our Cousin in the White House

2011-03-15T20:52:00.005-04:00

I read today that President Obama went to Arlington National Cemetery to pay his respects to Frank Buckles, who was until last week the last surviving veteran of World War I. Somehow that reminded me that Obama's grandfather, Stanley Dunham (that's young Barack and his grandfather in the picture), was a veteran of World War II, and that started me off on one of those long serendipitious internet rambles that led me to a satisfying but not-so-surprising discovery: Barack Obama is a cousin to our Jones family.

Specifically, he's Cal Jones's 9th cousin twice removed, or, put another way, Cal was a straight 9th cousin to Stanley Dunham. The first common ancestor is a man by the name of Benois Brasseur (1620–1663), a French Huguenot who came to Maryland some time before 1635. (Huguenots were French Protestants who were persecuted by the Catholic powers-that-were in France; a number of them settled in Canada, New York, and the mid-South in the 17th and early 18th centuries. The Shumate ancestors on the Jones side were also Huguenots; their original surname was de la Chaumette.) The name was gradually anglicized to Brashears, now a common surname in the south.

Benois Brasseur was an ancestor of Stanley Dunham's on his mother's side, and an ancestor of Cal Jones's on his mother's side. (Specifically the line goes through Cal's mother Nannie Shumate, her father Bennett Shumate, his mother Sarah Ball, her father Bennett Ball, his father Moses Ball, his mother Ann Brashears and then back four more generations to Benois.) And the journey of the future president's family across the continent was not so different from that of Cal's family. Cal's Brasseur/Brashears ancestors moved over several generations from Maryland to Virginia to Kentucky to Arkansas and finally to Oklahoma. Obama's went from Maryland to Kentucky to Missouri and finally to Kansas. The original French Huguenots married into English and Scots-Irish families and assimilated into the backwoods Appalachian culture that they brought with them as they moved west from one scrubby stand of mountains to the next until they ran out of new woodlands.

I said the discovery was not so suprising, and that's because I've spent enough time looking at American family trees to know that if a piece of your family has been here for 300 years or so, there's a pretty good chance you're related to another American who can say the same. Without trying very hard, I've already discovered that Cal was a 9th cousin to Richard Nixon (through Cal's Quaker great-grandmother) and an 8th cousin once removed to George W. Bush (through his New England great-great-grandparents), and that his great-great-great-great grandfather was a second cousin to James Madison. And if one unconfirmed lineage is to be believed, Cal was a sixth cousin once removed to his own wife Clara. (They both had Quaker ancestors named Mills.)

The ironic thing for me is that while a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to show how foreign Obama is, we forget that half his lineage—and that of the people that raised him—is from that same Scots-Irish Protestant Appalachian culture that has produced the strongest and most vociferous opposition to his presidency. I'll bet his grandfather and mine would have had a lot to talk about.

Young Burton

2010-03-22T23:33:00.003-04:00

To make up for rudely fact-checking William McClung Paxton's book, I should give him posthumous thanks for gathering and documenting hundreds of Paxton cousins—including the Confederate general and Yale graduate Elisha Franklin Paxton and the Texas pioneer Sam Houston (both cousins of our Paxton forebears). Also, he published this nice picture of Burton Paxton and one of George that I blogged here.

Another family myth shot to hell

2010-03-22T16:43:00.006-04:00

Before I learned almost anything else about my family history, I knew -- or thought I knew -- one juicy fact: that one of Clara Paxton's ancestors had officiated at the beheading of Charles I during the English Civil War. This nugget came from a 1903 genealogy called The Paxtons: We Are One by William McClung Paxton. The book outlines the genealogy of a Paxton family that immigrated from Northern Ireland to Pennsylvania and then to Virginia in the 18th century. (Clara, her brother Burton, and their parents George and Grace are actually listed in the book, which also includes photos of George and Burton.) Here's how the Charles I story is reported in the book:

Several centuries of Scottish life had endured [sic] the Paxtons with love of liberty, and with the heroic faith, and piety of John Knox. Of course, they cast their lives and fortune to Cromwell. One of the family officiated at the execution of King Charles I. This may have been James, our ancestor. After the restoration, in 1603, James Paxton fled to County Antrim, in the north of Ireland, and found friends in the Scotch-Irish inhabitants."

The wording "officiated" had always puzzled me. Did it mean he was the executioner? The master of ceremonies? After living in Connecticut for a while and reading more history, I learned more about what happened to Charles I -- and what happened to the men who signed his death warrant after his son, Charles II, was restored to the throne. (Three of those men, known as the regicides, escaped to America and hid out among their Puritan friends in Connecticut. There are three streets in New Haven named for them: Whalley, Dixwell, and Goffe.) In my armchair historian kind of way, I searched in vain for any mention of a Paxton in connection with the story of the execution. Over time, I also learned that a lot of William McClung Paxton's scholarship has been found to be erroneous, if not fanciful, during the century since his book was written.

But my occasional Google searches recently led me to one woman's theory about the Paxton-Charles connection -- that it was just a case of mistaken identity because of vaguely similar names. On a genealogy listserv, Joanne writes:

[N]o Paxton was recorded as being present at the time of the execution of King Charles I. It was Dr. William JUXON -- not Paxton -- who was present and officiated at Charles' execution in in January 1649. Juxon was a well-know clergyman, the Bishop of London, and appointed as Lord Treasurer of England.

But wait a minute. The Bishop of London and Lord Treasurer of England would have been an ally of the king's. So maybe "officiate" means something different in this case. Off to Wikipedia's entry on William Juxon (that's their picture of him above):

During the Civil War, the bishop, against whom no charges were brought in parliament, lived undisturbed at Fulham Palace. His advice was often sought by the king, who had a very high opinion of him. The king selected Juxon to be with him on the scaffold and to offer him the last rites before his execution.

So he was that kind of officiant, acting in a priestly capacity. If this is in fact the story, it's hard to see how William McClung Paxton could have gotten it more wrong. Too bad. I liked having a bad-ass regicide in the family.

Putting a Face With the Name

2009-09-18T16:32:00.005-04:00

I've written a few times before about Levi Overholser, my pioneering, railroad-promoting, gun-toting, alleged-bankruptcy-fraud-committing ancestor. But I don't ever remember seeing a picture of him. Now, from an Overholser cousin, here he is.

Said cousin also sent this photo of Levi and Mary Overholser's graves at Fairlawn Cemetery in Oklahoma City. Thanks, Cousin!

Cousin Conclave

2009-04-06T11:03:00.004-04:00

This photo (click to enlarge) was probably taken around 1940 on the farm of John George and Margaret (Jehu) Branch in Horatio, Pennsylvania, near Punxsutawney. A couple of George and Margaret's grandchildren have identified themselves in the photo: Clarence Milo Branch's daughter is seated in the back row at right, and his younger son is seated in the first row at right. They believe most if not all of the other nine children are their Branch cousins, but they could not identify them definitively.

George and Margaret had 14 grandchildren in all, 12 of whom had been born by 1940. (The oldest of these was born in about 1924, the youngest in about 1936.) Clarence's older son does not appear to be in the picture. So the rest may well be children of George and Margaret's children Richard Branch, George Branch, and Sarah Ball. (Their youngest son, Harry, didn't marry until 1942.)

Let me know by comment or e-mail if any of those faces look familiar. Whoever they are, it's a great picture!

John Washington Vermillion, 1857-1928

2009-03-29T21:14:00.002-04:00

Someone I've tried to learn a little more about in my research is Blanche Branch's grandfather, John Washington (Wash) Vermillion. Blanche's father Walter Vermillion died when she was just five months old, and her other three grandparents died before she was born, so Wash was an important person in her life. She spoke of him with affection and reverence, and she attributed some of her life decisions (most notably being a Republican and a Methodist) to his influence. From a variety of sources I've been able to put together a partial chronology of his life.

According to his grave marker at the Hillside Cemetery in Purcell, Oklahoma, Wash was born on January 19, 1857, most likely in Lawrence County, Missouri (in the southwest part of the state--see map at left, click to enlarge). His parents were John H. Vermillion and Mary Smith. His mother was born in Tennessee, we know from the census, but we know little more about her except for some hunches. (It's hard to narrow down the possibilities for someone named Smith.) His father was born in Missouri, where the Vermillions had arrived in the 1830s from Ohio. (If you go back further, the Vermillions descend from a French protestant immigrant named Giles Vermillion who came to Maryland in 1698.)

In 1860, the census has John H. and Mary Vermillion with children Reuben (3), Wash (2) and Andrew (1) in Spring River Township. In this and subsequent censuses, John is listed as a farmer. Before Mary Vermillion died in 1888, she and John had 12 children in all, though some of them apparently didn't survive past childhood. (John would have another three with his second wife before his death in 1900.) In the 1870 census, 12-year-old Wash is listed with his parents and siblings; for Wash's "occupation," the entry reads "works on farm."

On November 25, 1875, when he was 18, Wash married Martha Burrow, a Missouri native who had lost both of her parents when she was about 5. (See marriage record above--click to enlarge.) I'll talk more about Martha in another post, but I'll note here that she was the great-granddaughter of the revival preacher William McGee and great-great-granddaughter of the Revolutionary spy Martha Bell. Wash and Martha soon got a piece of land to farm themselves: they were enumerated in the 1880 census in Aurora, the township just east of Spring River, with Martha and sons Walter (2) and Willie (5/12 yrs.). This squares with Blanche Branch's report that her father, Walter, was born in Aurora. Wash and Martha had five children in seven years: Walter Edward (1878), William R. (1879), Ira Monroe (1881), John (1883), and Cora (1885). It wasn't too long after Cora was born, apparently, that Martha Burrow died.

I have never run across any cause of death or even a date of death. One clue is an undated photograph taken of Wash and his five children without their mother (at left; click to enlarge). Bearing in mind that Walter (standing at left) and Cora (in front of Walter) were seven years apart, I'd guess that they might be 10 and 3, which would mean the picture was taken in 1888. If so, Wash found himself widowed with five children by the time he was 30 years old.

It would come as no surprise that he would want to marry again. And Susannah (usually called Susan) Bassett Lamar, the woman he married, was probably motivated as well. A year older than Wash, she was the widow of one William Henry Lamar and had two teenaged daughters. They probably married in 1894. (There may have been another wife between Martha and Susan: the 1910 Census reported that Wash had been married three times, Susan twice. But I haven't yet been able to track down any other evidence of another marriage.)

Around 1889, Wash took his family to Indian Territory, where he established a farm in the vicinity of Wayne in McClain County (see map at left). A 1900 newspaper account of his son Ira's murder trail (more on that here, here, here, and here) says that the family had been in the area for 11 years, so they would have arrived in Indian Territory just as Oklahoma Territory was opening to white settlement across the Canadian River.

The 1900 census shows Wash and Susan and four of his children in the Chickasaw Nation of Indian Territory, near Wayne in McClain County. His son Willie had died the year before at the age of 20; he is buried in Purcell.

While still mourning his son Willie, Wash and the family faced another tragedy in 1900 when 18-year-old Ira, drunk, lassoed Joseph Nemecek and dragged him to his death. In reporting on the sensational crime, the local press took pains to say that Wash was respected in the community and lauded him for standing behind their son throughout his trial. (According to prison records, Wash would be Ira's most faithful correspondent during his 13 years in prison, writing to him nearly 200 times.)

The episode must have been difficult for Wash, and perhaps it contributed to the family's decision to move to the state of Washington in 1901. Wash and Susan, daughter Cora, and son Walter took up farming in a township called Mesa in Franklin County (see map at left: Mesa is the small encircled red spot within Franklin County). This is an arid country covered with sagebrush. Blanche Branch's mother Mollie Jicha went up to Washington to join Walter and marry him in 1902 or thereabouts; Blanche always said that a result of her time there, her mother couldn't stand the smell of sagebrush.

(Left: sagebrush on the Snake River in Franklin County, Washington, 1800s.)

Blanche always spoke of the Washington venture as a sort of failed experiment. It wasn't long until most of the Vermillions returned to Indian Territory. Wash and Susan and Walter and Mollie were back in Wayne by 1906. It's not clear whether Wash's son John ever moved to Washington, and Ira spent all that time in, um, Leavenworth. Only Cora, who married Frank Lamb in 1906/7, stayed in Washington, learned to farm the country fruitfully, and begat a large flock of Lambs who are still in the area today.

In 1907, Wash lost a second son: Walter died from tuberculosis, leaving a wife, Mollie, and children John (4) and Blanche (five months).

On May 5, 1910, Wash and Susan were recorded in the census as living in the town of Wayne. Wash was not listed as a farmer; instead he had no occupation and the explanation "own income." Blanche said that he owned wheat combines. And in the years 1910 to 1912, Wash must have been busy with some sorts of ventures in southwest Missouri and northeast Oklahoma, as some of his letters to Ira have return addresses from towns in those areas.

At the same time, something happened to Wash's marriage to Susan. Because in 1911, Ira began getting letters from another Mrs. J. W. Vermillion, a woman named Carey (I've also seen it spelled Cary) who was only 26 years old (about his daughter's age). I had always assumed that Wash and Susan's marriage ended in Susan's death, but I saw an online source recently that suggested that Susan died in Purcell in 1917. So that one may have ended in divorce.

In 1912, Wash and Carey moved to Oklahoma City, where Blanche said he owned a furniture store. Some time between 1914 and 1920, Wash's third son John died, leaving a wife and a son, Leonard.

I don't know much about Wash's later years, except that he seems to have lived in Wayne during his last decade. He died in 1928, when Blanche was 21. Wash lost so many people by the time he reached his three score and ten. He outlived his first wife and three of his four sons. His surviving son Ira lived in Washington and Arizona after his release from prison in 1914 (and did another stint in prison for counterfeiting), and his daughter Cora and her large family were far away in Washington. Though he had his young wife for company, Wash must have been surprised and saddened to be so bereft of family in his old age. I would think that he would have especially valued Blanche, John, and Leonard, his nearby grandchildren. It's no wonder Blanche remembered him so fondly.

A Brush With Abe

2009-03-24T00:17:00.000-04:00

It's Abraham Lincoln's Bicentennial year, so here's the only thing I know about how Lincoln's life intersected with our family's (not counting that whole Civil War that he won). It's not much, but, you know, it's Lincoln.

Cal Jones's great-grandmother (father's mother's mother) was a woman named Salina Hash (you just have to say it with an Arkansas accent), who married Ambrose Clark. Salina was born in Warren County, Tennessee, to Alvin (Josh) Hash and Esther Drake Hash in 1823; family legend holds that her parents moved to Illinois in 1825 so that they might free the slaves that they owned. Whatever the reason, we know from the census that in 1830 the family was living on a farm in Sangamon County, Illinois—the same county to which the young Abraham Lincoln came in 1830. The Hashes lived there until 1836, when they moved to Washington County, Arkansas, where Salina met Ambrose Clark.

I heard the Hashes' Lincoln story from Marian Carter Ledgerwood, a Jones/Shumate cousin who is a well-published family historian. The details of the story vary with the teller, but it was set down in writing by Alvin and Esther's youngest son, Benjamin Franklin Hash. He wrote of his parents: "Abraham Lincoln surveyed their land. He made a mark in the door of the cabin so as to tell when it was twelve o'clock." Others fill in details by explaining that Lincoln was helping out after Esther complained to him that she didn't have a clock.

It is well documented that Lincoln worked as a surveyor in Sangamon County starting in 1833, so this tale is certainly plausible. Too bad the Hashes didn't know what was to become of Lincoln--they might have taken that door with them when they moved to Arkansas.

For what it's worth, Salina and her husband Ambrose Clark ended up being Union sympathizers when the Civil War broke out nearly 30 years later. They took in a wounded Union soldier named Charles Matthew (Matt) Jones after a battle near Fayetteville, and the story goes that Matt fell in love with their raven-haired daughter, Esther Clark. He came back and married her, and they became the parents of Silas Jones and the grandparents of Cal Jones. So I guess some of us have Lincoln's war to thank for our existence!

The Jichas' final resting places

2009-03-19T14:37:00.007-04:00

I wrote a couple of years ago about George and Kate Jicha, Blanche Branch's grandparents, who emigrated from Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) in about 1881 and took part in the Oklahoma Land Run in 1889. George died in December of that year, and Kate died in 1897.

I knew already that George was buried at Maguire-Fairview Cemetery, a secular cemetery east of Noble (see photo below). But I didn't know where Kate was buried until I saw online a photo (left, click to enlarge) of her grave marker, contributed by a third cousin. She is at St. Joseph's Catholic Church Cemetery in Norman, which is within the I.O.O.F. Cemetery north of the city. If you remember how she traveled five thousand miles, pioneered two prairie homesteads, and raised seven children, the words "At Rest" on her stone take on a little extra meaning.

George and Kate were Catholic, of course; their children, as far as I know, all became Protestants (though some of their descendants today are Catholic). At first I thought it was curious that Kate had chosen a Catholic cemetery for herself but not for her husband. But then I remembered when they died: I think it's entirely possible that a Catholic cemetery had not yet been established in their area when George died, just eight months after the Land Run.

Anyway, if you're ever in the area and want to give them a shout, here's how to get there:
Maguire-Fairview Cemetery
St. Joseph's Catholic Church Cemetery

Crank and Walty

2009-03-10T23:24:00.008-04:00

Donald Rumsfeld said you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish to have. That's the way one should approach family history, too, but I sometimes find myself devoting time and attention to the ancestors I wish I had. I'm not the only one: in years of poking around the internet, I've found wishful and quite erroneous information shoehorning famous people into our family. There was the hopeful family tree that imagined that Daniel Boone's sister was an ancestor of Nannie Shumate, and another that substituted one brother for another in order to bring Mayflower passenger John Alden into Silas Jones's line.

I don't want to make that mistake here, but I can't help telling you about an ancestor that I covet for our tree. George Lamberton was one of the earliest settlers of my adopted hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, which is reason enough for me to want to make that connection. But Lamberton was also central to a legendary episode in the early history of the New Haven Colony -- one that was immortalized in a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Lamberton apparently died at sea in 1646 while captaining a "Great Shippe" that the New Haven colonists had loaded with goods bound for England, hoping to reverse their colony's failing fortunes through profits from the trip. The ship was never seen again. Well, sort of. More about that in a moment.

First I'll tell you a little about where he fits in: I've told you before about Ambrose Clark, the great-grandfather of Cal Jones. Ambrose ended up in Arkansas but was born in Ohio to parents from New England -- the only New Englanders I've found in my family tree. I told you in my last post a little about Ambrose's mother, Marcy Humes. All we know about the origins of his father, John Clark, was that he was born around 1783 in Vermont and married Marcy in Middlesex, Vermont, in 1810.

But I have reason to believe that John ties into a family of Clarks from Connecticut who are descended from George Lamberton. I'm not the only one to think so; a Clark historian in Vermont has also made the connection. But there is no proof and at least one "missing link" between the families. I'll explain all that at the end. Let's get back to the tale of the sea.

So the New Haven Colony (which later merged with Connecticut) was founded in 1638 by English Puritans who had first planned to settle in Massachusetts, but who decided that that colony was both too crowded and insufficiently pious for their purposes. They came instead to a beautiful natural harbor on Long Island Sound, inhabited lightly by friendly Indians, and set about building a colony that would operate strictly under biblical law. They also hoped to make a lot of money, but that proved easier said than done. After some initial attempts at trade and agriculture didn't work out so well, they decided in 1646 that they needed to make a big score. They had a large ship built to sail to England and carry all the crops and merchandise they could produce.

The ship, built in Rhode Island, was the first oceangoing vessel built in the colonies, and it was apparently of dubious seaworthiness. So the man they chose to be its captain. George Lamberton, was either brave or optimistic or burdened with low foresight. George, a former London merchant, was 42 years old; he had come to New Haven with his wife Margaret and four daughters in 1638. The Lambertons had three more daughters before his voyage. (Their names are worth noting: Elizabeth, Hannah, Hope, Deliverance, Mercy, Desire, Obedience.)

George had been involved earlier in another scheme to improve the colony's fortunes: he led a 1641 excursion to Delaware to try to set up an outpost of New Haven for trade, but the party was chased out by the Swedes who had settled there. Along the way, he is said to have purchased the land that later became Phildaelphia from the local Indians -- when he sailed for England, he supposedly had a deed for this purchase with him.

The Great Shippe left New Haven Harbor in January 1646 (as depicted in the painting at left. Sorry it's so small--I'll try to find a bigger one). Colonists had to cut a path for the ship through the ice in the harbor. In addition to Lamberton and the cargo, there were passengers aboard who were going back to England, either permanently or to visit. More than a year went by without word of the ship, which never arrived in England. After a while, the New Haven colonists gave up hoping for their return. Being good Puritans who believed that God had predestined everything, they did not pray for the ship's miraculous return; instead, they asked that God let them know what had happened to the ship and its passengers. The answer came in an apparition in the harbor one afternoon.

Here I should stop trying to tell the story and let Longfellow do it. His 1858 poem, reproduced below, was based on an account by Cotton Mather in 1702.

The Phantom Ship

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In Mather's Magnalia Christi,
Of the old colonial time,
May be found in prose the legend
That is here set down in rhyme.

A ship sailed from New Haven,
And the keen and frosty airs,
That filled her sails at parting,
Were heavy with good men's prayers.

O Lord! if it be thy pleasure--
Thus prayed the old divine--
To bury our friends in the ocean,
Take them, for they are thine!

But Master Lamberton muttered,
And under his breath said he,
This ship is so crank and walty,
I fear our grave she will be!

And the ship that came from England,

When the winter months were gone,
Brought no tidings of this vessel,
Nor of Master Lamberton.

This put the people to praying
That the Lord would let them hear
What in His greater wisdom
He had done with friends so dear.

And at last their prayers were answered:--
It was in the month of June,
An hour before the sunset
Of a windy afternoon,

When, steadily steering landward,
A ship was seen below,
And they knew it was Lamberton, Master,
Who sailed so long ago.

On she came, with a cloud of canvas,
Right against the wind that blew.
Until the eye could distinguish
The faces of the crew.

Then fell her straining topmasts,
Hanging tangled in the shrouds,
And her sails were loosened and lifted,
And blown away like clouds.

And the masts, with all their rigging,
Fell slowly, one by one,
And the hulk dilated and vanished,
As a sea-mist in the sun!

And the people who saw this marvel
Each said unto his friend,
That this was the mould of their vessel,
And thus her tragic end.

And the pastor of the village
Gave thanks to God in prayer,
That, to quiet their troubled spirits,
He had sent this Ship of Air.

Here's a prose version of the Phantom Ship story. And if you really want to go deep into the story, the original telling begins on page 83 of this book from 1702 by Cotton Mather.

So these Puritans could rest easier knowing for sure that their friends and family had died in a shipwreck. One of the lost was the wife of Deputy Governor Stephen Goodyear (ancestor of the man who invented vulcanized rubber). The widowed Margaret Lamberton married the widowed Stephen Goodyear a year later.

What makes me think we might be descendants of George Lamberton? It's all in the name Ambrose. George and Margaret's daughter Hope married Samuel Ambrose, and their daughter Abigail married John Clark. The Clarks ended up in Middletown, Connecticut, up the road from New Haven, and they had a son and several other descendants named Ambrose Clark. If some of these Clarks moved to Vermont -- which is perfectly plausible, as there was much emigration from Connecticut to Vermont in the 18th century -- our John Clark could be one of their descendants, which would explain the origin of "our" Ambrose's name.

The line, with a gaping hole, might look something like this:

George Lamberton (1604–1646) m. Margaret Lewen
Hope Lamberton (ca. 1636–ca. 1700) m. Samuel Ambrose
Abigail Ambrose (1666–1732) m. John Clark
Ambrose Clark (1696–1764) m. Elizabeth Ward
Ambrose Clark (1723–? ) m. Mary Kilbourn
[Missing Link]
John Clark (1783–1850) m. Marcy Humes
Ambrose Clark (1818–1896) m. Salina Hash
Esther Caroline Clark (1848–1922) m. Charles Matthew Jones
Silas Matthew Jones (1871–1940) m. Nancy Lucinda Shumate
Sherman Calaway Jones (1895–1967) m. Clara Paxton

I don't know if we'll ever fill in that missing link. You'd think it would be hard to learn anything new about people who lived 250 years ago, but I hold out hope that someone has information in a family bible or a trunk in the attic that will clear all this up.

There's a classic old map (left, click on it to enlarge) showing the land held by settlers in the nine-block grid of New Haven in 1641. George Lamberton's tract, in the lower left square near the red letter "C," is right across the street from our favorite Chinese restaurant. I think of him whenever we have sauteed string beans.

Marcy, Marcy, Marcy!

2009-03-10T23:22:00.001-04:00

A while back (and it has been a while -- guess I've been distracted), I introduced you to the Joneses' only known New England ancestry, via one Ambrose Clark, whose parents John and Marcy were married in Vermont in 1810. I'll follow up on John Clark's family in the next post, but this time I'll fill you in on the knowledge we have -- sketchy and sometimes contradictory as it is -- of Ambrose's mother, Marcy Humes. She was apparently born in Douglas, Massachusetts, and moved up to Vermont with her brother, Ezra Humes. It's Marcy's family that connects by marriage to a lot of storied old New Englanders such as John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and John Alden (the Pilgrim who, as Longfellow told it, was urged to "speak for himself" by Priscilla Mullins).

Marcy's father, Samuel Humes, and her mother, Marcy Thompson, were cousins, both descended from a Thayer family that settled in Mendon, Massachusetts. Marcy Thompson's grandmother was Mercy Thayer (so I guess the name Marcy is a corruption of the very Puritan name Mercy), and Samuel Humes's mother was Martha Thayer. Mercy was the granddaughter and Martha the great-granddaughter of Ferdinando Thayer (I love that name and have no clue how a 17th-century Englishman acquired it), who emigrated from England to Braintree, Massachusetts, and was among the first settlers of Mendon. Mendon is only 40 miles from Boston, but in the 1660s it was a wilderness. The town was attacked and burned by Indians during King Philip's war in the 1670s.

(Left: a monument to the founders of Mendon, Massachusetts. Ferdinando Thayer is the first name listed.)

There is extensive documentation of more Massachusetts ancestors of Marcy's, but as I said, the various internet sources sometimes contradict themselves. Some of the trees have her ancestors going back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as early as 1634. If I can ever sort out all the contradictory claims and find some proof for the lineage, this line would be our best chance of reaching that holy grail of American genealogical snootiness, a Mayflower ancestor. But in truth, I'd rather find some Native American ancestry -- as Will Rogers said, "My ancestors didn't come over in the Mayflower; they met the boat."

The House Where Clara Grew Up

2008-08-19T12:36:00.009-04:00

Some time between 1910 and 1913, Clara Paxton went to Valley Falls, Kansas, to live with her Uncle Charlie and Aunt Sue Overholser, who had no children of their own. Her mother, Grace Overholser Paxton, had died in 1901, before Clara turned two, and her father George Bailey Paxton died in 1910. Clara and her brother Burton were living with their grandmother Paxton in Independence, Missouri, in 1910 (down the street from the future Mrs. Harry Truman), but some time before 1913 they left her home. Clara went to Valley Falls and Burton to his aunt Hattie Overholser Jones in Columbus, Kansas.

(At left is a picture of Main Street in Valley Falls in 1909; the population in 1910 was 1150.)

Clara lived with Charlie and Sue until she finished high school in 1918. Now, thanks to some recently posted newspaper archives online, I think I've found some information about just where she lived.

The picture at left is from the front page of the July 27, 1906, issue of the Farmers Vindicator, the newspaper in Valley Falls. With the headline "An Historic Corner," the accompanying article talks about an old local hotel called the Cataract House (cataract being another word for waterfall--who knew?). Most of the article describes the hotel, which was built in 1857, but the last paragraphs touch on our family in explaining why the hotel is no longer there:

In 1880 the Cataract House was purchased by Mrs. Susan M. Gardiner, of Winchester, which under the management of J. J. Gardiner continued a popular hotel for 20 years. . . .About the end of the century the Cataract was closed as a hotel and the property was transferred to Susan E. Gardiner, now Mrs. Chas. L. Overholser. The work of removing and tearing down the old house began in the Fall of 1901 and in the year following the present modern cottage home of Mr. and Mrs. Overholser was completed.
Herein are illustrations of the old house and the new. The first lights in the Cataract House were tallow candles, then sperm, a burning fluid lamp, and later the Kerosene Chandelier. The Overholser home is brilliantly lighted by electricity in every room, and even out to the wood house and the hen house.

So from reading this and later newspaper items about Charlie and Sue, I feel fairly sure that the house pictured is the one where the Overholsers lived while Clara was with them.

More nuggets from the Vindicator to come.

Finally! We're a Persecuted Minority!

2008-08-19T10:46:00.004-04:00

I suspect a lot of you are like me in that you never really had much of an answer to the question "What are you?" (i.e. Irish, German, etc.) Except for the dash of exotic Czech on Blanche Vermillion's mother's side--and Miles Branch's Welsh mother--I thought of my family as just a bunch of indistinct white Americans.

And I'm not alone. When confronted with the box asking for their ancestry on the 2000 census, 7.3 percent of Americans said simply "American" in 2000. While you might think that this is a widely varied group of people who didn't know any more about their ancestry (or didn't consider it the Census Bureau's business), there's actually a distinct geographical pattern to those responses. You can see it in the map above, where the counties with the greatest percentage of people answering "American" are darkest.

The shape that emerges is a map of Appalachia, a region whose first white settlers were the group known as "Scotch-Irish" or "Scots-Irish." Their real origins are in the border region between England and Scotland, though many of them lived in Northern Ireland before coming to America in the 1700s. I have slowly come to understand, with the help of a couple of good books, that the Scots-Irish were and are a very distinct cultural group--and that much of my family is part of that culture. It is a culture that overlaps with a lot of better-known segments of American society: born-again Christians, NASCAR fans, and, at least in this year's primaries, Hillary Clinton voters. (The map of the counties where she won by more than 65 percent looks a lot like the one above.) But it's also a culture that doesn't have a strong sense of itself as being different from other Americans--thus the answer to the census question.

One of the things I've learned is that the Scots-Irish culture in its early years was open to people of other nationalities who were willing to adopt its (protestant) religion and values. So even though I have found French, Dutch, and Swedish people in my backcountry ancestors, they all seem to have signed on to the Scots-Irish culture.

Cal Jones's parents were both very much of this culture. Blanche Vermillion Branch's father was, too, as was Clara Paxton Jones's father. (Her mother's family had some Scots-Irish blood, but they were part of a German-American culture that existed alongside the Mid-Atlantic Quakers.

One of the books I'd recommend if you want to know more is called Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer. Fischer breaks down the migration of people from the British Isles before the revolution into four distinct cultural groups: New England Puritans, Virginia elites (and the indentured servants who came to serve them), Mid-Atlantic Quakers, and the Scots-Irish who populated the hills and backcountry. Fischer's book is written for a scholarly audience and can be slow going sometimes, but it opened my eyes to a lot of American history that I'd never understood.

And it explained some things about the people we call hillbillies or rednecks. For example, the stereotype of the hillbilly in a tumbledown shack (or more recently, the mobile home) isn't necessarily a sign of laziness: the Scots-Irish, living on the border, were constantly in the midst of war between England and Scotland, and whatever they built was sure to be destroyed. This state of war also led them to develop close affiliations with family-based clans that were allied with one side or the other: the Hatfields and McCoys were continuing a very old tradition when they were a-feudin'.

A more readable book is Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb, a U.S. Senator from Virginia. Webb is a former Marine, and his take on his Scots-Irish heritage is less scholarly and more of a celebration and a rallying cry. He wants his fellow Scots-Irish to be aware of their heritage and think and vote more like a group. He also recounts a lot of history of the Scots-Irish before they came to America, which is enlightening.

About Ambrose

2008-05-28T21:14:00.007-04:00

Wow. It's been a really long time since my last post. It's not that I've been holding out on you; I just haven't been learning much new. But due to overwhelming demand from readers (I actually did hear from two of you!), I'm going to try to post some things that aren't new, at least to me. First up: a little exploration of my one strand of New England ancestry. As I may have said before, most of my family either emigrated to the U.S. after the Civil War or spent 300 years or more migrating across the hilly, woodsy middle of the country. The pattern is the same in several families: initial settlement in Virginia or Pennsylvania, migration into the hills of Western Virginia, Kentucky, or North Carolina, then west to Arkansas or Missouri before the Civil War. The one ancestor who traced his roots back to Puritan New England was Cal Jones's great-grandfather, Ambrose H. Clark. (That's him above.) Ambrose was the father of Cal's grandmother Esther Caroline Clark. The family legend—which I mentioned in an earlier post on the Jones family in the Civil War—holds that Cal's grandfather, Charles Matthew (Matt) Jones, met Esther when he was injured while fighting for the Union in the Civil War and was taken to Ambrose Clark's house to recover. They were the parents of Cal's father Silas Jones, the one who would ultimately be run out of Arkansas for killing a dog. (More about that here, here, and here.)

So most of what I know about Ambrose comes from an 1889 History of Northwest Arkansas published by Goodspeed Publishers. Goodspeed's books were more or less a racket. They published some history about a county or region, along with biographies of leading citizens—i.e. people who pre-ordered a copy of the book. The biographies were submitted by the subjects themselves, so Ambrose was presumably responsible for his entry. It's not that terribly long, so I'll reproduce it here:

Ambrose H. Clark, who is one of the old settlers of Arkansas, and
was first identified with the interests of Washington County in
1841, was born in Ross County. Ohio, April 28, 1818. His parents,
John and Nancy (Humes) Clark, were born in the "Green Mountain"
State, the former's birth occurring in 1783 or 1784. He died in
Dade County. Mo., in 1849 or 1850, his wife's death occurring in
Indiana in 1841. They first emigrated from their native State to
Ohio, and thence to Indiana, and then to Illinois, and afterward
to Missouri. They were members of the Christian Church, and became
the parents of eight sons and one daughter, only two of the family
now living. Ambrose H. Clark only remained at home until fourteen
years of age, and then began working on a farm in Ohio, but
afterward went to Indiana, where he lived four years, and then
came with a family, by ox team, to Arkansas. He has ever since
made his home in Washington County, where he has a good farm of
300 acres, a portion of which is under cultivation. He started out
in life with no means, but being of an ambitious and energetic
disposition, and having a true helpmate in his wife, he has
surmounted many obstacles, and can now enjoy the fruits of his
labor. His wife, who was a Miss Selina Hash, is a daughter of
Alvin Hash, one of the old settlers of Washington County, and was
born on the 20th of October, 1823. Her father and mother died in
Illinois in 1844 and 1878, respectively. Mr. and Mrs. Clark became
the parents of eleven children: Mary, Frances, Martha E., Esther.
William. John. Mestlina, Josephine, Ida, Lydia and Augustine, all
of whom reside in Washington County. One child died in infancy.
Mrs. Clark and four of her children are active members of the
Christian Church. Mr. Clark is a Republican, and takes an active
interest in all enterprises for the public weal. During the late
war, although he was not a regular soldier, he was in Price's raid
and participated in the battle of Richland.

The New England ancestry of his parents makes Ambrose unique among my ancestors. It also helps to explain why he might have been a Republican and a supporter of the Union during the war.

Working backward from this information, various researchers have tried to place Ambrose's parents in Vermont (the "Green Mountain State" to which the biography refers). The best lead is a marriage record from Washington County, Vermont, from May 27, 1810, listing groom John Clark and bride Marcy (not Nancy) Humes. Was Nancy really Marcy? On the one hand, if we assume Ambrose supplied the information to Goodspeed, he ought to have known his mother's name. On the other hand, Goodspeed books are known to be riddled with errors, and Marcy could easily have been mistaken for Nancy in handwriting. Many of us have come to believe that this John and Marcy are in fact Ambrose's parents.

Next post: more about Marcy.

The Uncle So Nice They Named Him Twice

2008-01-22T12:26:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I actually don't know how nice Jehu Jehu was. But as of last week I now know something about Mr. Jehu, who was Clarence (Miles) Branch's uncle--a brother to his mother Margaret Jehu Branch (1877-1971). I found the picture above (click on it to enlarge) among Blanche's Branch's photos. It was labeled on the back "Grandpa Jehu Theater in Pennsylvania." I'd made a few half-hearted attempts to find out more, but had no luck until I heard from a cousin whose father is a Jehu--Miles Branch's last living cousin on his mother's side.

This man, who is 92, is a son of Albert Jehu (1881-1972), Margaret's younger brother. I spoke to him and his daughter last week, and he had the nicest things to say about Margaret, whom he called Aunt Maggie. He grew up in Sykesville, Pa., about 16 miles from Horatio, where Margaret and George Branch had their farm. He remembers taking the train to visit his aunt and uncle, where he always enjoyed himself. "Every day there was like a party," he said. He remembers Margaret as someone who liked to laugh and who baked bread for him.

At left (click to enlarge): We thought the woman at left in this picture was Margaret Jehu Branch, and her nephew agrees. We don't know who the other people are, but the Jehu cousins think the young woman next to Margaret looks like a Jehu.

He said his Uncle George was good to him, and he remembered playing with his cousin Harry Branch in the mines on the Branch farm. (Miles, 19 years older, had already left home.) He remembers George walking him to the railroad tracks at the end of his visits and waving his lantern to get the train to stop and pick him up.

Now, back to the theater picture, which must have been taken in 1920 or shortly thereafter, since the movie advertised at right is The Kentucky Colonel, which was released in 1920. Our cousin recognized the man standing in the center as being his uncle Jehu Jehu (1867-1935). He said that Jehu owned the theater, and that his father (Jehu's brother) Albert owned a pool hall next door. "All the Jehus were salesmen," he said, adding that Richard Jehu (1846-1919), the father of Jehu, Albert, and Margaret, had been a fishmonger in Wales and, in addition to mining coal, also sold fish in Pennsylvania.

For the record, Richard Jehu and his wife Elizabeth Thomas came from Wales right after the Civil War. Richard's father was also named Jehu Jehu, and his mother was Mary Jervis. After his parents died, Richard and his six living siblings emigrated to America. Most of them settled around Scranton, Pennsylvania, but Richard and Elizabeth went to Sykesville, near Punxsutawney. In addition to Jehu, Margaret, and Albert, they had two more daughters: Mary Jehu (1872-1966), who married William Platt, and Elizabeth Jehu (1879-1965), who married James J. Jeffries.

I won't lie to you--I love accumulating the facts and dates and data about my family. But it doesn't really come alive until you hear memories like those our cousin shared about his Aunt Maggie. That's when you start to be able to paint a picture of those who came before us and how they shaped the people we do remember.

One last picture (click to enlarge): This was taken at George and Margaret Branch's farm, some time in the late 1930s. At least some, if not all, of the kids in the picture are their grandchildren.

Ira's Life on the Outside (Mostly)

2008-01-15T10:05:00.003-05:00

I love this picture (at left; click to make it larger). This is Ira Vermillion, presumably some time after his release from prison in 1914. On the back is a note addressed to his niece, Blanche Vermillion. It says “Dear Little Neice I may be there Xmas. Your Loving Uncle Ira.” So I guess it was some time when Blanche might still have been considered “little”; considering she was born in 1907, I’d guess it was taken before 1920, when Ira turned 39.

What I love about the picture is the symbolism, which seems obvious to me: with Ira standing in front of an open window, doesn’t the picture just shout “freedom”? (There’s not even any glass!) I wonder if Ira chose this scene on purpose to celebrate his freedom, or if it was just one of the photographer’s stock sets that appealed to him for reasons he couldn’t explain.

So what happened to Ira after he was released? His prison file obviously is not nearly as informative about his life on the outside, but it does provide some clues, and a surprise.

The Vermillion family had never been spared tragedy: Ira’s mother died some time in the 1880s, when Ira was still a young boy. His older brother Will died in 1899 at the age of 20. While Ira was in prison, his oldest brother Walter died of tuberculosis (after losing two of his children). By the time he got out, his family consisted of his father, his youngest brother John (who would die before 1920) and his sister Cora.

The first thing we hear post-release is a letter from Ira to a parole officer at Leavenworth dated March 12, 1917, and written from Mesa, Washington, where Cora and her family lived. He is writing to ask for the proper form “to petition the president to have my sitizenship restored.” He goes on: “If I can get my sitizenship restored, I have a good chance to take a home-sted of 640 acres of grass land. . . . I have lived in Washington ever since I left there. The wadges are twice as much here as in Okla. I am working on big wheat ranch getting $45.00 per month and board and room.”

The next we know of Ira is in the 1920 census, when he was recorded as living on a dairy farm in Creighton, Arizona, where he was listed as a laborer. He doesn’t turn up at all in the 1930 census.

In reading about Ira, I had found myself wanting to see him as a good kid who got drunk and made a single, terrible mistake that ruined his life. But that view is hard to square with the news in another document from the prison file: On March 23, 1933, the U.S. Attorney in Tucson, Arizona, wrote to Leavenworth asking for information about Ira, who had been “arrested in this district for counterfeiting.” A similar request came from the Secret Service the next day.

So Ira got himself into trouble again, and again with the Feds! Another slip of paper was later received at Leavenworth indicating that Ira Vermillion was received at the U.S. Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington, on November 21, 1933, to serve a three-year term for counterfeiting. I haven’t yet tried to track down any more about this crime, but I’ll keep you posted.

(At left: the McNeil Island prison in 1937. I’m sure the view was better than Leavenworth.)

After that, I know little, except that Ira evidently ended up in Arizona. Blanche Branch’s younger son remembers her mother stopping to call him while they were driving through Arizona in the 1940s, and her older son visited him in the hotel room where he lived in Tucson in 1960. "I believe I got the address from Mom and she asked me to visit him," he writes. "He was very frail and did not want to talk very much, so I didn't spend much time with him. . . . I knew at the time of the visit he would not live much longer." Social Security records indicate that he died in Arizona in March 1965. As far as I know, he never had a family of his own.

I haven’t hidden very well my excitement at uncovering all this information, but at the same time it saddens me to write about it—partly because it’s dreadful to think that anyone you’re related to could have done such a terrible thing, and partly because Ira ended up so alone, but also because I know how much shame Blanche carried around over what her uncle did. (And remember, the victim was the grandfather of several of her cousins.) Almost 90 years after the murder, she still cried at the thought of her grandchildren finding out about it. But just as sure as we can't live vicariously through the noble or celebrated deeds of our ancestors, we can't bear the burden of all they did wrong, either.

Life in Prison

2008-01-11T14:51:00.002-05:00

In May, 1901, 19-year-old Ira Vermillion (left, click on photo to enlarge) walked into the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, where he had been sentenced to spend the rest of “his natural life at hard labor.” That was too bad for him, obviously, but in a way it was good news for a family historian. As far as I know, my ancestors weren’t avid diarists or record-keepers, and so information about them and their daily lives is pretty thin. But for 13 years, prison authorities kept track of all kinds of things about Ira: when he was sick, what work he did, when he misbehaved, with whom he corresponded. The prison file I requested from the National Archives turned out to be a treasure trove not just about Ira’s life in prison, but also about his family in general. Through correspondence records I can see where various family members lived at different times and narrow down death dates for some of them. And in a couple of cases the correspondence confirmed some family relationships I was unsure about. So before I get back to Ira, here is some general advice for family historians: find your black sheep and check his prison record.

If you’ve read the last two posts, you know that Ira was convicted of the murder of Joseph Nemecek. He was sent to Leavenworth because he was tried in federal court—Indian Territory did not have territorial courts. Leavenworth started out as a military prison and was converted to civilian use in 1895. Starting in 1897 and over the next 20 years, a new prison was being constructed with convict labor. Ira was there during much of the time the new prison was being built, and records show that he worked in the stone sawmill, on a construction crew, and briefly—apparently as a punishment—in the brickyard.

When he was received at the prison on May 11, he was examined by doctors who took a very detailed inventory of his appearance, any distinguishing marks, and his health. We learn from the forms they filled out that he was 5 foot-5, 132 pounds, had medium chestnut hair, violet blue eyes, and a medium fair complexion. He could read and write, identified himself as a Baptist, and acknowledged that he chewed tobacco, drank, and smoked.

(At left: a prison dorm at Leavenworth around 1910. Click on photo to enlarge.) His smoking would be the cause of the little trouble that he got into in prison. The first violation for which he was written up—in October 1901, was for “having a box of matches and cigarettes in his possession.” A more serious offense—making cigarettes—actually caused him to lose nine days “good time.” (Although he was serving a life sentence at the time, the prison still kept track of behavior in terms of days that could be reduced from his sentence. Typically, an inmate could be released after serving two-thirds of his term plus any days he had “lost” for misbehavior.) But mostly, Ira was written up for small offenses: “talking in ranks,” “foolishness on stairway,” “refusing bread crusts and holding hand up for more bread,” “skylarking and talking so that they could be heard from one end of the cellhouse to the other while count was being taken.”

(At left: Prisoners marching to dinner at Leavenworth in 1910. If Ira’s in that picture, he’s probably talking. Or maybe skylarking. Click photo to enlarge.)

The records also tell us something about Ira's health during this time, most notably that he had tuberculosis in 1908 and 1909 and was frequently put on "special mess" because of his condition. I don't know a lot about TB and its treatment at the time, but the fact that he survived seems somewhat remarkable, and a bit ironic. His brother Walter, a father of two living in Indian Territory, had died of the disease in 1907--is it possible that Ira survived because of the superior medical care he received in prison?

The list of letters sent and received shows that Ira did not ever go more than a month without news from home, most often from his father, Wash, who wrote to him nearly 200 times. His sister Cora also wrote frequently. Other letters came from his brother John, his aunt Jane Moore (his late mother's sister) in Aurora, Missouri, and his aunt Mary Burns (his father's sister) in Wyoming.

It's kind of touching to me that after Ira's brother Walter died in 1907, his widow, Mollie, wrote to him about twice a year. Mollie, you'll remember from the first post, was related to Joseph Nemecek, the victim of Ira's crime. But I imagine she felt a sense of familial duty to keep in touch with Ira on her late husband's behalf (though Walter himself had been none too good about writing).

The return addresses on letters from his father reveal approximately when Wash returned to Oklahoma from the state of Washington (1906), when he married again (1911), and when he moved to Oklahoma City, where Blanche Branch said he owned a furniture store (1912). Wash's second wife, whom he had married in 1894, must have died some time around 1903, as that is the last time there was a letter to or from her. [UPDATE, 3/24/09: Turns out I was wrong about this. Despite the lack of correspondence, Susan was still alive--and still married to Wash, as of the 1910 census. I had assumed that their marriage ended when she died, but I've seen online sources that say she didn't die until 1917. More on that in a later post.] Once Wash married Carey in 1911, she wrote to Ira at least once a month. She also wrote at least once on Ira's behalf. On November 30, 1912, she wrote to the warden to ask if, as Ira's pardon attorney had told her, Ira was due to be released right away. "You will pardon us for jumping at the idea—as a drowning man would cling to a straw," she wrote. (It turned out that the attorney was mistaken. He still had nearly two years to go.)

The prison file doesn’t include an account of how and why, but in 1909, President William Howard Taft commuted Ira’s sentence from life to 20 years. (At left: the commutation certificate with Taft’s signature.) I read up and discovered that Taft was unusually generous with pardons and commutations. Ira’s commutation came just a few months after Taft became president—I wonder if his attorney had tried the previous president, Teddy Roosevelt?

Once the sentence was commuted, Ira had every incentive to keep his nose clean, and except for ticking off a guard now and then, he seems to have done so. After working in all sorts of jobs, in 1912 he finally settled into a job at the corral which seems to have suited him, as he kept it for the rest of his term. (The Vermillions may have run a farm, but they seem to have had a lot of cowboy in them. And Ira's brother Walter was a horse trader.)

Near the end of his term, those nine days good time he had lost back in 1905 for making cigarettes must have been haunting him, for in July 1914, the month before he was to be released, the warden wrote to the U.S. attorney general on Ira's behalf. "Vermillion has a splendid record. He has not been reported for any offense whatsoever for more than nine years and his influence upon other prisoners is decidedly good. I respectfully recommend that the nine days lost commutation be restored to him in order that he may be released August 31, 1914."

The request was granted, and Ira was released after more than 13 years in jail.

Next post: what little I know of Ira's last fifty years.

The Vermillion Murder Trial

2008-01-07T09:08:00.001-05:00

(At left, the bridge over Walnut Creek, scene of the murder of Joseph Nemecek, in September 1900.)

In September 1900, 18-year-old Ira “Pete” Vermillion was bound over without bail for the murder of Joseph Nemecek. I’ve found no indication that he was released any time before the trial began in March 1901, so he presumably spent six months in jail waiting for his day in court.

Because the crime took place in Indian Territory, the federal court sitting at Purcell had jurisdiction. Indian Territory had something of a reputation for lawlessness, and the judge’s instructions to the grand jury addressed this in a way that a modern defense lawyer might see as prejudicial. According to the Purcell Register, the judge remarked that “there seems to be in the territory a lawless element, the chief education of which consists in knowing how to carry pistols and to discharge them. The greater number of such people are hanged, said he, the greater would be the number of lives saved.”

Jury selection in the case began on March 19 and was complete by the next day. The trial itself took just two and a half days. Ira had entered a plea of not guilty, his lawyer arguing that all the evidence against him was circumstantial.

Indeed it was, but there was plenty of it. He had been seen in town—drunk and trying to rope people with his lariat—just before the crime took place. And he was last seen heading south toward the scene of the crime. When he was found in a drunken stupor not long after the crime and not far away, he was missing a shoe, which was found in his stirrup nearby. That shoe had a piece missing from its heel, and a piece found at the crime scene was a perfect match.

The case attracted more than local attention: the Dallas Morning News ran three short articles on the trial, noting that "the peculiar circumstances surrounding the case make it especially interesting."

The jury didn’t take long: they returned a guilty verdict, but decided that the crime did not merit capital punishment. Ira was sentenced to life in prison. “The prisoner and his relatives received the verdict very calmly,” wrote the Register, “though it was a severe blow to them, especially to the parents, who stood by their boy during his time of trial.”

And surely standing by their boy had a cost for the family in the community. By the time Ira entered the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth in May, his father Wash, his stepmother Susan, and his brothers and sister were living in the state of Washington. They may have been planning the move anyway, but the timing makes me wonder if they left out of shame.

Next post: Ira’s years in Leavenworth.

What Ira Did

2008-01-02T16:36:00.000-05:00

“On September 15 1900 I became intoxicated and while in that condition I threw my lasso in a spirit of mischif dragging Joseph Nenecles [sic] from the buggy in which he was riding and he was dragged 250 yards receiving injuries from which he died Can give no reason for the crime except drunkeness”

So wrote Ira Monroe Vermillion (above, as seen in his prison mugshot; click on photo to enlarge) around 1910 when he was applying for “trusty prisoner” status at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. He had spent all his adult life in prison as a result of his reckless action, which killed a Czech farmer named Joseph Nemecek. (The spelling error must have been that of the clerk who typed up Ira’s application—surely Ira knew his victim’s name well enough.) In fact, he had been sentenced to life in prison for the crime, but President William Howard Taft commuted his sentence to 20 years in 1909.

I’m going to spend this and perhaps one or two more posts telling you what I’ve learned about Ira, his crime, and his punishment, largely from two useful sources: newspaper accounts reprinted in a volume of family history by a member of the Nemecek family, and Ira’s inmate file from Leavenworth, which I ordered this fall.

First off, though, who was Ira to us? He was Blanche Vermillion Branch’s uncle, a brother to her father Walter. He was the middle of five children born to John Washington (Wash) Vermillion and Martha Burrow. He was born in Lawrence County, Missouri, where both his parents had grown up. When he was still a boy—some time around 1885—his mother died, and around 1889 his father moved the family to the vicinity of Wayne, Indian Territory, and raised his children on a farm there.

(At left is a picture of Wash and his five children; they're not labeled individually, but my guess is that Walter, the oldest, is at far left, Will, the second oldest, is at far right, Ira, the third child, is seated on his father's left, and John, the fourth, is standing behind Ira. Cora, the youngest, is easy enough to spot. Click on photo to enlarge.)

The victim, too, was connected to our family. Joseph Nemecek, who also lived in the Wayne area, was the father of, among others, Andrew and James Nemecek, who each married sisters of Mollie Jicha, Blanche Vermillion’s mother. Before Nemecek’s murder, all these families were apparently on good terms, and Andrew Nemecek was even boarding with the Vermillion family when the crime took place. The family connection would later be a source of pain for Blanche, who grew up with the knowledge that her uncle had killed the grandfather of many of her closest cousins. She rarely if ever spoke about this until late in her life, and even then it was difficult for her—even though it all happened before she was born. I learned from Ira’s prison file that Blanche’s mother Mollie—whose brothers-in-law were sons of the victim—was one of Ira’s frequent correspondents in prison after her husband and Ira’s brother died in 1907.

I can't tell you too much more in terms of setting the stage for what happened. Just imagine Ira, who was nearing his 19th birthday and working as a "farm laborer" according to the census taken a few months earlier. And imagine Joseph Nemecek, a 64-year-old immigrant from Czechoslavakia and the father of eight sons, working a farm in Indian Territory.

(At left, the Vermillion boys a few years later. From left to right: John, Will, and Ira. Click on photo to enlarge.)

On the Saturday afternoon when the murder took place, Ira (who was actually known as Pete, apparently) was seen by several people in downtown Purcell, eight miles north of Wayne. As the Purcell Register put it, "he gave evidence of being strongly under the influence of liquor," and he was "seen swinging his lariat rope quite freely and had struck one man on the head in throwing the rope at him." Meanwhile, Joseph Nemecek was returning home from a visit to his oldest son, Anthon, and his wife and children, who lived on a farm across the river from Purcell near Lexington.

There were no eyewitnesses to exactly what happened next, but around six o'clock, word reached Purcell that a body had been found in Walnut Creek, below the bridge on the road that ran between Purcell and Wayne. Someone recognized the body as being Joseph Nemecek's, and his wagon and mules were found nearby. A coroner's jury determined from looking at the scene and the injuries to the body that Nemecek had been caught by a rope around his right wrist, pulled from his wagon, and dragged for some distance near and on the bridge. The body appeared to have been thrown from the bridge into the creek.

When the body was discovered, a pair of deputies went looking for the perpetrator; they soon found Ira Vermillion asleep by the side of the road, in a "drunken stupor" and missing a shoe. He claimed not to remember what had happened. He was taken to jail in Purcell.

Andrew Nemecek, Joseph's 24-year-old son, got the news about his father by telegram when he was sitting at the supper table of Ira's father and stepmother, where he was a boarder. He and Ira's father Wash jumped into a wagon together and reached the scene at about the time the deputies found Ira.

In reporting on the crime the next week, the Purcell Register said that Wash Vermillion was "well known as an honorable, upright gentleman" and that "the best of feeling existed between the two families." Indeed, no motive besides drunken mischief seems to have been raised during the trial.

In my next post, I'll talk about Ira's trial the following spring.

Did Henry Overholser steal the seal?

2007-11-19T14:54:00.000-05:00

A cousin writes: "Seems there is some story about an Overholser stealing the state charter from Guthrie and moving it (thus the capital) to OKC. You got anything on that?"

My reply: Hmmm, I've never heard anything about an Overholser connection to this story, but Guthrie residents have long maintained that Gov. Haskell "stole" the state seal from the capitol in Guthrie in the dark of night and took it to OKC. But from what I can make out from various sources, the story is exaggerated at best. There was an election to determine whether OKC or Guthrie should be the capital in June of 1910, and OKC won. Gov. Haskell sent his secretary for the seal that night, but the clerk there handed it over willingly. The election and the move were questionable legally, since an earlier law said that the capital could not be moved until 1913, but the courts ruled in OKC's favor.

This Tulsa World story sums it up pretty well.

I'm sure that Henry Overholser was a proponent of moving the capital, as it would have been good for his real estate interests. But there's nothing to suggest that he took the law (or the seal!) into his own hands. . . .

Happy 100th, Oklahoma!

2007-11-16T09:32:00.000-05:00

Although I haven't really lived there for more than 20 years, Oklahoma is still home for me. Besides the fact that I was born and raised there and much of my family is still there, it's the one common denominator in my mongrel lineage. Oklahoma is where the daughter of a Czech immigrant and a French/Scotch-Irish horse trader met the son of English and Welsh coal miners, and it's where an orphaned English/German/Swiss/Scotch-Irish schoolteacher met a bookkeeper from the hills of Arkansas whose ancestors had been in America and inching west for 300 years.

So what parts of our family were in Oklahoma by November 16, 1907?

Clara Paxton was still an 8-year-old girl in Missouri and would not move to Oklahoma for another decade, but her grandfather Lee Overholser had lived there since the time of the Land Run, and her uncle Will and aunt Ella Overholser were living in Oklahoma City at the time. (Her brother Burton, incidentally, was born in Oklahoma City in 1896.)

Cal Jones was a 12-year-old boy whose family was probably living in Boynton, Indian Territory, on the day that it became Oklahoma. His parents Silas and Nannie had left Arkansas four years earlier.

Blanche Vermillion was seven months old, having been born in Wayne, Indian Territory, in April. She was living with her mother in Wayne, and the celebration of the new state must have been muted for them, as her father Walter Vermillion had died in September. Blanche was surrounded by cousins in the area, most of them grandchildren of George and Kate Jicha, who had settled across the river in Oklahoma Territory in the 1889 Land Run. Blanche's one living grandparent, John Washington Vermillion, also lived in the area, where he had settled as far back as '89 also.

Six generations of our family have lived in Oklahoma so far, and Clara's sons' families are on their seventh. It's probably not any kind of record, as a lot of Oklahomans reproduce more rapidly than we do. But considering our earlier family history of heading west every generation or two (always in search of farmland, something that's not so much an issue now), it's a pretty good run.

I wish I could be in Oklahoma today, but I'm there in spirit.

Quite Possibly My Coolest Ancestor

2007-11-13T15:06:00.001-05:00

Okay, so you've heard about various veterans, preachers, and at least one possible con man so far on the blog, but the subject of this post may be my favorite: Martha McFarlane McGee Bell, who tradition tells us was a spy for the patriots in the American Revolution. The stories about Martha are a little vague in some places and sound a little . . . enhanced . . . in others, but the idea that she surreptitiously gathered intelligence about Cornwallis's troops has persisted for two centuries and has made her a heroine of the Revolution in the area where she lived, Randolph County, North Carolina.

Before I get started, though, let me tell you to whom she is related. Martha was Blanche Branch's great-great-great-great-grandmother, one of a succession of Grandmother Marthas: Blanche's own grandmother Martha Burrow Vermillion, her grandmother Martha McGee Burrow, and finally her grandmother Martha Bell, the spy herself. (Martha Bell was also the mother of the revival preachers John and William McGee, who I wrote about a while back.)

Martha McFarlane was born in Alamance County, N.C. in 1735, and we're told she was from a Scottish Presbyterian family. I haven't ever read anything about her family's social or economic position, but she married a well-to-do widower named John McGee and had five children with him before he died in 1773, leaving her "the richest widow anywhere in that region," according to Eli W. Carruthers, whose biographical sketch of her from 1854 is the earliest source for most of the lore about her. Carruthers goes on to say that she was "much sought after, especially by the young widowers and middle-aged bachelors; and it was then said that she was a 'little haughty,' but this probably originated with those who could not succeed in gaining her affections."

She married another wealthy citizen named William Bell in 1779 and moved to his home on Deep River, where he operated a mill and store. (A historian found ruins of the mill a few years ago—see photo above—but the site is now covered by a lake.)

Her biographer Carruthers goes into some detail in trying to describe Martha's looks, personality, and character, obviously walking a tightrope to make her at once boldly heroic yet acceptably feminine. His awkward attempts to justify her assertive and decisive actions suggest how difficult it must have been to reconcile those traits with femininity in the 19th-century South:

"She was not, at any time remarkable for personal beauty nor for the opposite, but was what, in common parlance, is called a good-looking woman.’ There was nothing about her that could be regarded as masculine and nothing in her deportment, ordinarily, that was at all inconsistent with the modesty and delicacy of her sex; but she was a woman of strong mind, ardent in her temperament and remarkably firm and resolute in whatever she undertook, which just fitted her for the trying scenes through which she was called to pass."

And later:

"If this should appear to the reader inconsistent with the modesty and delicacy of her sex, he must recollect that 'circumstances alters cases.' At all times, there may be occasions, and they were of almost daily occurrence at that period, when those qualities, so becoming ordinarily, must be subordinate to the higher principles of self-preservation and the public good. . . . the woman whose energy, prudence and dignified firmness were adequate to any emergency was sure to command a respect which would not be shown to more lovely or attractive qualities."

Carruthers is also curiously reluctant to say it outright, but it appears that Martha was a practicing midwife, albeit one who did not charge for her services until late in her life. He refers to her as "a sort of 'professional character'" who would travel throughout the county to attend to her duty "no matter what hour of the night the call was made"; he also alludes to her "medical skill" and even says she went on one of her spy missions "in the character of a midwife" but never says specifically what her profession was.

At any rate, it was not long after she married William Bell that she earned her fame. The Revolution was on by that time, and in 1781 Lord Cornwallis's British troops were trying to hold onto the Southern colonies, having taken Charleston, South Carolina, in the previous year. The area where Martha lived was divided between Patriots and Tories, and there was a great deal of violence off the battlefield as well as on. William Bell was a well-known business and political figure in the area who was also a prominent patriot. He spent a good deal of time away from home during the war, not as a soldier but under the protection of local militias, as his life was in danger from the local Tories.

In March 1781, Cornwallis and his troops faced the Americans at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, which is seen by history as a costly pyrrhic victory for the British. After the battle, Cornwallis's army sought to regroup and set up camp at Bell's Mill, where Martha Bell—but not William—was living. The locals must have enjoyed the idea of Cornwallis and his Redcoats meeting their match in this"woman of strong mind," for they told all kinds of stories about this brief encounter. The most repeated of these stories was told to Carruthers by a General Gray, who knew Mrs. Bell after the war. Cornwallis, after inquiring about the whereabouts of Mr. Bell, told Martha:

"‘Madam, I must make your house my headquarters, and have the use of your mill for a few days, to grind for my army while I remain here.'

'Sir, you possess the power, and, of course, will do as you please without my consent; but, after using our mill, do you intend to burn it before you leave?’

'Madam, why do you ask that question?'

‘Sir, answer my question first, and then I will answer yours in a short time.’

His lordship then assured her that the mill should not be burnt or injured; but that he must use it to prepare provisions for his army, and further added, that by making her house his head-quarters, he would be a protection to herself, her house, and every thing that was in or about it; for, said he, ‘no soldier of mine will dare to plunder, or commit depredations near my quarters.’

To which she replied: ‘Now, sir, you have done me a favor by giving me a satisfactory answer to my question, and I will answer yours. Had your lordship said that you intended to burn our mill, I had intended to save you the trouble by burning it myself before you derived much benefit from it; but as you assure me that the mill shall not be burned, and that you will be a protection to me, and to the property about the house, I will make no further objections to your using our mill, and making my house your headquarters while you stay, which, I think you said, would be only for a few days.'"

Among the other tales of Cornwallis's two-day occupation of Bell's Mill: Martha had hidden her cash under a rock and had to slip out to the yard to get it right from under the noses of the Redcoats camped there. When the Redcoats were trying to raid her cellar and steal her cider, Martha threw herself in front of the cellar door and dared them to come through her. When a soldier uttered something profane in her presence as he rode by on his horse, she wished for the horse to throw him and break his neck—and he did so only a few minutes later.

The story that made Martha a heroine of the Revolution, however, comes immediately after Cornwallis left Bell's Mill. Writes Carruthers:

In the evening of the day on which the British left her premises, she made a visit to their camp, for the purpose, it is said, of reconnoitering, but under some other pretext. What was her precise object, or what induced her to engage in the enterprise, no definite or reliable information can now be obtained; but the tradition has been so uniform and so well sustained, that there can be no doubt of the fact. . . . her familiarity with every road and every bye-path, with every plantation and hill and dale, in addition to her patriotism and intrepidity, just fitted her for such an enterprise; and she would be in no danger, for Cornwallis, having been so lately sheltered under her roof, could not do otherwise than treat her with courtesy and respect. . . . Equipped and mounted on a first-rate horse, she set off alone and fulfilled her mission with entire success. the object, was to ascertain, as far as possible, the condition of the British army, and especially whether they were receiving any considerable accessions of Tories. Under the pretext of making complaint against the soldiers for depredations committed on her property, which had not become known to her until after they were gone, she went into the camp and hunted up his lordship or requested to be taken to his tent, to whom she made her complaint, but in doing this she had her eye upon everything, and managed so as to get the information she wanted, when she returned home in safety and much pleased with what she had done.

Carruthers goes on to suggest that Martha made another reconnaissance mission by night to check out "an embodiment of Tories which was said to be forming on the other side of the river." On the pretense that she was making a call in the area as a midwife, she went around to various houses asking about the presence of Tories in the area, ostensibly out of concern for her safety. Armed with the information she passed on, Carruthers writes, Colonel "Light Horse Harry" Lee "took them by surprise and broke up the whole concern" the next night.

Martha lived nearly forty more years after the Revolution; she died in 1820 at the age of 85. Carruthers notes that she became a Christian early in the nineteenth century, at about the time the Second Great Awakening was sweeping the country—and her sons William and John McGee were preaching to nearly hysterical revival meetings on the Kentucky-Tennessee frontier.

Martha's fame seems to have a lot to do with Carruthers's recounting of her story. A monument to her (see photo at the top of this post) at the Guilford Courthouse battleground, erected in 1928, reads:

Mrs. Martha McFarland [sic] McGee Bell
1735-1820
Loyal Whig—Enthusiastic Patriot
Revolutionary Heroine

We are indebted to E. W. Caruthers for the eventfull story of her life.

But the Daughters of the American Revolution, which had approved the 1928 monument, was less impressed with Carruthers as a source in 1997, when members of the local chapter wanted to erect a DAR marker at the site of her grave. The national organization at first turned them down, arguing that "no contemporary evidence can be found" to support Carruthers's stories. With a bunch of angry North Carolina Daughters on their hands, the national DAR finally compromised: on the basis of pay vouchers to Bell from the Revolutionary army (for unspecified goods or services) they allowed that she was in fact a patriot, even if Carruthers's tales could not be verified, and they gave her her grave marker (left). (There is also a highway bridge named for Martha just north of Randleman, North Carolina, on U.S. 220.)

More recently, a descendant of Martha's named Jennifer Wellborn wrote a book making the case for Martha's exploits. Unable to find further documentation, she instead took the tack of comparing the other Revolutionary stories in Carruthers's book with other contemporary documents. She argued that Carruthers was a reliable source in these other cases, and thus could be trusted as a source in the case of Martha Bell. She told the Greensboro News & Record that she wasn't surprised by the lack of contemporary evidence about Martha: "As a general rule, men of that era rarely wrote about women's feats of derring-do."

So here's to Carruthers, Wellborn, and especially to Martha Bell!

From the studios of KOP in Detroit, it's C.M. Branch

2007-09-25T15:58:00.000-04:00

As some of you know, Clarence Milo (Miles) Branch (left, in an undated early photo) was already 31 years old by the time he arrived in Oklahoma City and met Blanche Vermillion. So I've often been curious about what he did during his early adulthood. One thing that Blanche always told me was that he was a police dispatcher in Detroit, something that never sounded particularly remarkable to me. But in recent years I've read up and discovered that if he worked with radio in Detroit before 1928, he was a kind of pioneer, as the Detroit police were the first to use radio to communicate with police cars (which were themselves a Detroit police innovation).

How did Miles get there? My time line for his early life is a little spotty. His sister Sarah told me that he left home when he was 16 after a dispute with his father, who denied him the use of the family buggy to go on a date. Just what he did for the next five years is uncertain, but we know that he was in the Navy in 1918-19, when he was 21. He joined just as World War I was ending, and Blanche always said that he was on a ship headed for Europe that turned around when the armistice was signed.

While he was in the Navy, Miles attended the Aircraft Radio School on the campus of Harvard University. World War I, of course, was the beginning of aviation in warfare, and putting radios aboard planes would be the next big advance. An online history of naval aviation says that the curriculum for aircraft radio electricians included "code work, semaphore and blinker study, gunnery, and laboratory work."

It's conceivable that Miles might have learned something about radio or electricity before the navy, but my guess is that his naval experience led him to his career as an electrician.

The next I know of Miles is in the 1920 census, when he was working in a rubber factory in Akron, Ohio. It must have been after that he went to Detroit.

He was not alone. Many people, including some of his siblings and cousins, left the coal mines of central Pennsylvania for industrial jobs in places like Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Ohio, and especially Detroit. With the auto industry exploding in the 1920s, I imagine Detroit to have been something like Silicon Valley has been in the last few years--a place brimming with money, energy, and the excitement of new technology.

While I have not found any written sources that mention Miles's involvement with the Detroit police, their early experience with radio is well documented. This article by Kenneth Dobson from the Detroit News describes how the city's police department was an early adopter of technology.

In 1909, for example, the Detroit police acquired their first patrol car, a Packard that the commissioner bought himself, as the city fathers were reluctant to fund such a radical idea. The idea caught on, especially as criminals increasingly had access to cars of their own. Police officers would wait at heated telephone booths around the city for calls from a dispatcher at police headquarters, then jump in their cars to pursue as many as five or six assignments at a time.

The system was far from perfect, needless to say, and radio provided some solutions. Writes Dobson:

In 1921, Detroit Police Commissioner William P. Rutledge began experimenting with patrol vehicles equipped with radios. Rutledge was "convinced that the automobile had given the criminal an advantage in speed that could not be overcome by police cars controlled by telephone. Gangsters could make their getaway while the booth patrol was still awaiting a telephone call.

Rutledge had a radio transmitter installed at police headquarters and in 1922 the Federal Radio Commission, the forerunner of the Federal Communications Commission, issued Detroit the first provisional commercial radio license, KOP.

But there were obstacles to be overcome before the radios could be made mobile. The vacuum tubes, which comprised the internal workings of the radio receiver, were fragile and required extensive cushioning. The electrical systems of the automobiles were not powerful enough to operate the radios, so six-volt batteries had to be mounted on the running boards. The battery was only good for four hours before it had to be replaced.

Other obstacles were less technical but just as formidable. Several times the Federal Radio Commission refused to renew the department's radio license because it failed to live up to requirements. One of these insisted that KOP broadcast "entertainment during regular hours, with police calls interspersed as required."

After one such refusal to renew , Commissioner Rutledge wryly asked: "Do we have to play a violin solo before we dispatch the police to catch a criminal?"

But the kinks got worked out, and by 1924 the Detroit News was calling for more radio-dispatched cars:

"The motor car has been a big asset to criminals, because it permitted a quick getaway. But the radio is swifter than any motor vehicle ever invented. By its use a well equipped police department can bar every city exit as soon as a description of the suspects can be obtained.... The police department now has three radio equipped flyers. It should have more. The motorized bandits would soon learn that Detroit had become a trap for them and they would move on to some town with less modern ideas."

A complete radio-dispatched patrol program was rolled out in April 1928. It was not until 1933, though, that another department, in Bayonne, New Jersey, installed the first two-way radio communication between dispatchers and patrol cars.

So where did Miles Branch (he probably called himself Clarence at the time, actually) figure into all this? I don't know. I imagine that he found his way to Detroit like so many others seeking work in the economic boom there and discovered a use for his background in radio. Perhaps there are records somewhere in Detroit that could confirm his employment with the department, but I haven't had time to go down that road yet. Whatever his involvement, it must have ended before or soon after the full-scale radio car program began in April 1928. By November of that year, he was in Oklahoma City and had married Blanche.

Below: Police radio operator B.D. Fitzgerald at the controls of the Detroit police radio dispatch equipment in 1925. Did Miles Branch sit at the same desk?

Next Time You're in Staindrop . . .

2007-09-21T16:49:00.000-04:00

. . . stop and pay your respects at the graves of George and Sarah Branch, our English forebears. (Click on the photo to enlarge.)They are the parents of Lancelot Branch, who emigrated to America in 1867 and began our line. Staindrop is a village in Durham in the north of England; a fourth cousin in England found this stone in the churchyard a couple of years ago and kindly sent me a copy.

The inscription reads:
"IN
MEMORY OF
GEORGE BRANCH,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE SEP. 7, 1880
AGED 87 YEARS,
ALSO OF SARAH HIS WIFE
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE OCT. 31, 1874
AGED 77 YEARS.
WE ALL FADE AS A LEAFE."

The quote at the end is from the book of Isaiah--kind of poignant for a couple who both died in the general vicinity of autumn.

When Cal Went to War

2007-09-21T16:36:00.000-04:00

Here's something I found a while back and have been meaning to post: it's Cal Jones's World War I draft registration card. (Click to enlarge.) No great surprises--I did learn what he was doing for a living in 1917, as he's listed as an oil pumper with a company called Corbin and Bradstreet (which I Googled to no avail). He enlisted on June 5, 1917, two months after the U.S. entered the war. For some reason, he (or whoever filled out the form) put down the wrong birth year--he was born in 1895, not 1896. But his age is listed correctly as 21.

I found this in an archive at Ancestry.com while I was taking advantage of a free trial there. Pretty cool. I'll try to post more documents and photos as I think of it; it's hard to find time for the longer, more encyclopedic entries, but I do like to put something up here from time to time.

Clara's Cotton Buyer

2007-08-29T12:14:00.000-04:00

After Clara Paxton's mother and father died, she lived with a succession of relatives: her grandmother in Independence, Missouri, her uncle Charley and aunt Sue Overholser in Valley Falls, Kansas, and her uncle Will and aunt Ella Overholser in Oklahoma City. She lived with the Overholsers in the 1918-1919 school year, when she seems to have been taking courses at Central High School--probably to get some college preparation that her high school in Valley Falls had not provided. In 1919-20 she was at Hollins College in Virginia with Mary Overholser, and in 1920-21 she was back in Oklahoma City and earning her teaching certificate from what is now the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. Because the Overholsers were part of what passed for society in Oklahoma City in those days (1918-1921), Clara turned up in the newspaper from time to time: hosting a lunch for friends at the Skirvin Plaza Hotel with her cousin Mary Overholser, attending a party here and there. On Sundays, the Oklahoman's society page would feature photos of pretty and prominent young women, apparently just so everyone would know who was who.

On September 26, 1920, it was Clara's turn (see clipping at left--click to make it larger). She was one of five women included that week, and the caption began "Two ambitious students, two charming brides, and an interesting young traveler in foreign lands. Upper left--Miss Clara Paxton, niece of Mr. and Mrs. Will L. Overholser, who is striving for a degree at the Central State normal at Edmond. . . . "

Two days after the picture appeared, a Mr. Sidney Caldwell in Duncan, Oklahoma, wrote her a letter (above--click on the pages to make them bigger). Mr. Caldwell had wisely ruled out the two brides and evidently preferred Clara to the interesting young traveler, who had just returned from Germany, and the other ambitious student, an undergrad at Cornell (unless of course he wrote to them, too.) Here's the letter in its entirety:

Duncan Okla.
Sept. 28--1920
Miss Clara Paxton
Centeral State Normal

My Dear Miss Paxton, I thought I would write you a little love letter to let you know I love you very much. I saw your picture in the Daily Oklahoman Sunday. It said that the college girls loved to receive letters from other towns and I thought I would write you a small letter to let you know I love you. If you will write me I will answer your letters.
I think you are the most beautiful girl in the world, and I don't know what you think about me. If you will send me a picture of your self, and I will send you a picture of myself. If you love cotton buyers that get a salary of $5000 a year you had better tie into me. I'm 19 and a little bit over and you look in the picture about the same age.
Don't forget to write, I must close as a wagon load of cotton is on the street.
Yours truly,
Sidney Caldwell
P.S. Be sure and write me.

I don't know what Clara thought about the letter; my guess is that she kept it because she thought it was funny (and of course a little flattering). What Mr. Caldwell had no way of knowing was that 86 years later, Clara's descendants could use the Internet to do a little fact checking on him. I found him in the 1920 census, and there seems to be some truth--well, truthiness--to what he told Clara. His FATHER is listed as a cotton buyer, but at the time of the census (January 1920), Sidney was still in high school. So perhaps he'd joined his father in business by September of that year.

So what do you think? Did Clara choose the right guy? Maybe if she'd gone with Sidney, we'd all be in the tall cotton now.

Why We're Not Razorbacks, Part III

2007-08-29T10:42:00.000-04:00

So now you've read Cal Jones's story about his father's departure from Arkansas, and his sister Tommy's response disputing some of the details. Now, we'll look at what the Arkansas justice system had to say. Like Bill Clinton and Scooter Libby, Silas appears to have gotten himself in bigger trouble over perjury than whatever he might have done in the first place.

A few years ago, I wrote to the Washington County Courthouse in Fayetteville asking for any records they might have involving Silas Matthew Jones. They came up with one thing: a perjury indictment against Silas from November 6, 1903. The story told in the indictment doesn't directly address the killing of the dog at all, but rather some events in its aftermath.

The events in question—apparently an argument over the killing of the dog—took place on July 19, 1903. According to the sworn testimony of H.L. Robbins—that's Zode Robbins, the neighbor whose dog Silas killed—Silas "made use of violent abusive profane and insulting language towards and about one Della Carter and in her presence and hearing which language in its common acceptation was calculated to arouse to anger the said Della Carter and cause a breach of the peace." The exact words Silas is alleged to have said to Mrs. Carter? "You are a liar. I've got a rock for you. I'll hit you as quick as I would the dog."

The indictment, a hand-written document, says that four days later, Silas was in court having been charged with breach of peace. At that proceeding, under oath, he denied saying those words. The grand jury, apparently relying on the word of witnesses (more on that in a minute), decided that "in truth and fact" Silas did make that statement and that his testimony was "feloniously, willfully and corruptly false."

The cover of the indictment names the case ("State of Arkansas vs. S. M. Jones") and identifies the grand jury foreman and the witnesses. Besides Zode Robbins, the witnesses were Della Carter herself, Arizona Largent, J. Cherry, and Charlie Tunstill. I don't know how Tunstill fits in, but Cherry is identified as the justice of the peace at the original proceeding. As for the others, here's where it gets interesting.

In looking at some genealogy sources, I found out that Arizona Largent was the former Arizona Masters—not a desert golf tournament but a woman in Arkansas. She was the mother of Zode Robbins and Della Carter, who were half-siblings.

But the really funny thing is that Zode was a second cousin to Silas's wife Nannie Shumate—something that neither Cal nor Tommy had mentioned. It's possible they didn't know—or didn't remember it sixty years later. It's not a big coincidence; in their town of Durham in the 1900 census, at least a third of the residents appeared to be related to Silas and Nannie. But when Cal described the bad blood between his mother's and father's families, he wasn't kidding!

Was this indictment the paper that Cal remembered the man on the horse reading to his father? Was this what made him disappear out the back door and leave Arkansas for good? Cal says they left in the fall, which would square with the November date of the indictment.

This is all I have on the subject for now. I should say that Silas's grandchildren remember him fondly, and as a good man. The words he said to his neighbor that day—if he said them—might have been in character, or they might have been the meanest thing he ever said. I just hope that the meanest thing I ever said doesn't wind up on record in a courthouse somewhere!

Samuel Paxton, maybe for sure

2007-07-18T00:28:00.001-04:00

I recently found this photo (click to enlarge) among pictures and papers that belonged to Clara Paxton Jones, and I believe it is probably her grandfather Samuel Paxton (1834-1903), whose farm in Montrose, Missouri, is pictured here.

The photo was taken at Latour Studio in Joplin, Missouri, where Samuel lived the last few years of his life. There is no identification on it, but the subject's age and the photo's presence in Clara's pictures leads me to believe it is Samuel.

I don't know why, but whenever I look at him I can't stop thinking about Wooly Willy.

UPDATE, 7/22/07: A Paxton cousin remembers having a copy of this photo and confirms that it is in fact Samuel Paxton. Thanks, cousin!

Why We're Not Razorbacks, Part II

2007-07-17T23:46:00.000-04:00

In my last post I presented Cal Jones's report on why and how his family left Arkansas. This time, here's some of his sister Tommy's response, from a letter to Cal written just a few days later. Cal and Tommy were the second and third children, respectively, of Silas and Nannie Jones. As you'll see, her account differs in some particulars--it's kind of a hillbilly "Rashomon."

Tommy writes:

Now! While we are correcting and reminiscing let me correct you! First, I don't know who told you that I said Dad ran away from Ark. I did not! Them Zode Robbins' dogs did not attack Dad, but Zode had "sicked 'em" on to a young heifer that Dad had and they tore her to pieces. (I don't remember if she died.) But anyway they had a preliminary hearing (Dad killed the dog) and old Zode and Dad's own cousin Ambrose Clark swore to a bunch of lies so Dad felt that he couldn't get a fair trial and he took out. Mamma told me this a few years ago. But I remember when Dad had some of us kids at Grandma Shumate's one night and someone came to the front door and told Uncle George something and Dad grabbed us kids and we left by the back door and ran through the orchard for home and Dad left immediately. Later he came back and I saw him go into the barn and told Mamma, so she went to the barn and came back and said I was mistaken. I was just old enough to know there was something wrong. And I remember when he met us at a campfire just out of Westville, and somewhere in my things which are stored I have the little leather bag which Grandpa Jones gave him the gold in.

The biggest difference in their accounts is why Silas killed the dog--was it self-defense or retaliation? Tommy also seems to have known more about the legal proceedings, which we'll get to in the next installment.

Why We're Not Razorbacks

2007-07-06T22:37:00.000-04:00

At left: Silas Jones as a young man, in a photo generously provided by a Jones cousin from Arkansas. (Click to make it bigger) I'd guess that this was a little before Silas's run-in with the law, which came when he was in his early 30s.

I've been promising to get around to this post for a while: the story of how Silas Jones and his family left Arkansas. Unlike a lot of the things I've reported on this blog, this story has been part of Jones family lore for years, and Silas's son Cal wrote it all down in a letter to his sister Irma just after their mother died in 1964. I'll start in this post by quoting the relevant parts of Cal's letter. You should know that Irma was much younger than Cal, and all these events took place long before she was born. Their sister Tommy, whom he refers to in the letter, was just a year or so younger than Cal. He begins with some background, some of it touching on things I wrote about in an earlier post about the Joneses and Shumates in the Civil War.

After some initial remarks about their mother's death, Cal writes:

This letter is to set you straight on another matter which I had intended to discuss further with you but I just didn't get around to it. It was a remark you made, quoting Tommy, and I'm sending her a copy of this letter for I certainly want her mind put at ease.

A remark she had made to you about Dad being "run out" of Arkansas. This has been bugging me ever since and I want to let you know this matter just as it was, for I believe from what you said, Tommy has the thing completely out of focus, and to get you straight on this, I must go way back, even before our father was born. As you know, Grandfather Jones fought on the Union side in the Civil War, while Mama's father fought on the side of the Confederacy, both in Arkansas. Jones the Republican, Shumate the Democrat. After the War, Grandfather Jones decided he wanted to settle in Arkansas (he was from Alabama), and how he came to fight on the Union side I do not know, nor for that matter I don't know how he happened to be a Republican. But of course there have always been a few Republicans in all the Southern states.

I'll stop here just to say that Cal had part of this wrong--his Grandfather Jones (Charles Matthew "Matt" Jones) had come to Arkansas with his parents in the 1840s, when he was still a child; his family had settled there long before the War. Cal continues:

Now picture if you can a family of robust young Republican boys (the Jones Boys) growing up in a predominantly Democratic community where just about all the fathers had fought on the losing side, the Confederacy. Being the oldest son and I believe a little closer to our father than the others, I can tell you now that Dad and his brother Will, both excellent boxers and rough-and-tumble fighters, fought their way out, back to back a many a time. He told me that in their youth they usually had to double date, in order to be close together as much as possible.

At left: three of the "robust young Republican boys" in later years, from the same cousin who sent me the photo above. (Click to make it bigger.) Left to right: Will, Silas, and Edgar Jones.

Well, to cap this off, Dad went and married a girl out of a Democratic family, which spelled more trouble. That separated the brothers and they each had to go it alone, and by the way Will married a Shumate too, a cousin of Mama's. But by that time Dad and his brother had pretty well established themselves and didn't have to fight too much, but the old hatreds continued and the first year of married life he had to lick two of Mama's brothers, Johnny and George. After that they more or less left him alone but he was still quite a minority in the community.

That should be enough of the background, and now I will tell you what happened:

Yes, I guess you could say that Dad was "run out" of Arkansas, and when you hear what it was about you may smile a little, but if you have ever entertained the idea that he left because of some criminal act you can set your mind at ease.

Remember what I said about the old, persisting hatreds. Just across the road and 100 yards west of our house, toward Durham which was less than half a mile away, lived a man named Zode Robbins, one of the worst of the haters and a man whom Dad had had to quiet down a couple of times. He had two large ferocious dogs which he had trained to bark at Dad and which I'm sure he had hoped would attack him some time. When Dad went to the store or west on the road he usually rode a horse or drove a wagon, but this time he didn't. Remember I was either 7 or 8 years old, I just can't remember if it was the spring of 1903 or 1904.

I've been able to figure out it was 1903 based on court records. More on that later.

Anyway, Dad had part of his crop in and he and I were making posts for a fence, and he decided he needed a new saw and a hammer, and on the way back these dogs actually did attack him and he killed one of them with the hammer.

The whole community knew about this and there was quite a stir about it. I remember it. I remember it quite well, the conversations he and Mama had about it and naturally opinions were divided. Zode wanted Dad to pay for the dog and he wouldn't do it, so Zode went into Fayetteville and swore out a warrant for Dad's arrest. Of course I was too young to know about that, or what it meant, but I will never forget what followed. Dad and I were putting those posts in the ground when a man rode up on a beautiful chestnut colored horse. He had a fine saddle and I was impressed by that too, for we didn't have a saddle of any kind. I probably wasn't interested in the preliminary remarks, but I remember this manreading a paper to Dad while I was looking at the horse and saddle. I will never forget the last words he read from that paper "and for killing the dog." It was then that I knew Dad was in trouble, and I cut and ran to the house as fast as I could and told Mama about it. I can't remember if she was scared, but I'm sure she was, because law-abiding people are just not used to getting arrested. To cut it short, Dad and the man came on into the house and Dad told the man to wait while he got some things out of the bedroom. Well, he simply went out the back door and so far as I know, the next we heard from him he was working in the state of Washington.

Now you can smile to think how naive Dad was to think he was in real trouble over killing a dog. Even a son of a Union soldier in the deep South couldn't have been hurt too badly over that, but evidently he didn't think that way.

I started out thinking I could get it all on one sheet, but since I couldn't find a stopping place I'll just fill you in on what happened after that.

As I said Dad had started a crop. He was gone and Mama was left alone with six children, Hub was a baby. So it fell to Grand Dad Jones to look after us and see that that crop was tended. How he did it I do not know, but in the fall of 1904 we left Arkansas, and here is how that happened:

Dad had two fine teams of mules and I don't know what else, but Grand Dad Jones fixed up a covered wagon, filled it up with bed clothes, clothing, himself, a mother and six kids, plus a little wood-burning King Heater and we headed west. I remember that trip quite well, in fact I'm sure Tommy and Boy do too. Just before dark every day we would find a promising camp site and as Boy called it, we would "scamp out." Outside of the rough, jolting part of the trip, the one thing that stands out in my mind was that Mama, most of the time, had no milk to cook with. I'll never forget that gravy and those baking powder biscuits. And I remember one treat we had. Grand Dad shot a hawk and then got some milk at a farm house and we had a feast--as far as one hawk would go. I thought that was the best bread and gravy I had ever had. How long it took I don't know, but as covered wagons go, I guess we made pretty good time, alternating those two teams of big mules and most of us walking most of the time.

For the record, Google Maps tells us that by modern highways, the distance from Durham to Westville, their destination, is about 40 miles.

Then one night which seemed no different from the rest, we camped out again. Mother had done the best she could with what she had to do with and we were gathered around the camp fire eating whatever she had prepared. We looked up and there was a man coming out of the shadows. Yeah, you guessed it. It was Dad, and you can imagine what a reunion that was. We were in Indian Territory, and out of the clutches of the law, but into what was another story. I remember Dad letting me sit up with him and Grand Dad after the others had gone to sleep, and another incident was burned into my memory. Grand Dad Jones had bought our farm and he paid Dad for it right there, and I had the privilege of watching them count the money--all in $20 gold pieces, how much I never knew, out of a cloth bag.

Hay, I just thought of something. Where do you suppose you and I would be today if Dad hadn't killed that dog?

So there you have the story as told authoritatively by the eldest son. In the next post, I'll give Tommy's reply--she remembered things slightly differently, but the gist was more or less the same. After that, I'll report on what the Arkansas court records were able to tell us. But nothing else I've learned about this story can measure up to the wonderful details that Cal provided: the chestnut horse and saddle, the hawk dinner, counting out the gold pieces by the fire. I hope it'll inspire all of you to write down some family memories. People will be grateful for decades to come.

Paging Doctor Calaway

2007-07-02T12:00:00.001-04:00

Because parts of Sherman Calaway Jones's name have been passed down to some of his descendants, I've been interested in finding out where his name came from. The name Sherman doesn't appear in the family before his birth, and I've never heard any explanation about how his parents, Silas and Nannie Jones, chose it. But since we know that his father was a Republican and the son of a Union veteran, I am inclined to believe that, despite the fact that they lived in Arkansas, Silas Jones named his first son for General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was loathed by Southerners for his destructive March to the Sea in 1864. It was just this kind of thinking that ultimately got Silas run out of Arkansas. (I'll get around to that story soon.)

So what about Calaway? Cal's daughter remembers being told that the name was in honor of a Dr. Calaway, but I've not been able to find such a person in their part of Arkansas at the end of the 19th century. But there's one other thing worthy of note: Silas Jones's grandmother, whose maiden name was Salina Hash, had a brother whose name was Alvin Calaway Hash; in his case, the name was probably in honor of his and Salina's great-grandmother Ann Calloway, who was of a line of Calloways that came from England to Virginia in the 1600s. So whether or not Silas knew it, Calaway was a family name. I hope I'll figure out where the mysterious Dr. Calaway fits in at some point. I'll let you know.

Me and William McGee

2007-06-28T11:22:00.001-04:00

Well, after dealing with Levi Overholser's shady past, I think it's time to clean things up a little bit on the blog. So let me move over to the other side of the family and tell you about my ancestor the preacher.

The Rev. William McGee (1768–1817) is credited in many works as one of the men who kick-started a huge religious revival that began on the Kentucky-Tennessee frontier and spread across the country at the beginning of the 19th century. (It is known today as the Second Great Awakening.) A series of small revivals that included William and his brother John culminated in the Cane Ridge Revival in 1801--a weekend camp meeting that brought thousands of people to a rural church in Kentucky for what a Vanderbilt University historian has called "arguably . . . the most important religious gathering in all of American history." William McGee is also noted for being one of the founders of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, a denomination that split from the Presbyterians a few years later.

Before I go on, I should tell you how William fits into our family. He was Blanche Vermillion Branch's great-great-great-grandfather, a great-grandfather of her grandmother Martha Burrow. I realize there's a lot of generations between us and William, but over time I'll fill in the gaps. But for now, here's his story:

William McGee was born in 1768 in Guilford County, North Carolina. He was the fifth and youngest child of John and Martha (McFarlane) McGee, Scotch-Irish Prebyterians who were among the wealthiest people in the county. John McGee died in 1773, when William was only five years old, but John left his family well provided for, and his mother later married William Bell, a mill owner who was himself very well off. (Martha McFarlane McGee Bell has a remarkable story of her own connected to Cornwallis's campaign through North Carolina in 1781. I'll get to that story in another post.)

When he was ten years old, William began studying with the Rev. David Caldwell, a local Presbyterian minister and Princeton graduate who ran a well-regarded academy for boys. Caldwell's school was described by a 19th-century historian as "an Academy, a College, and a Theological Seminary" where students studied classical languages and theology. The school trained many of the ministers who would go on to fuel the religious revival. William, intending to become a minister, spent ten years studying with Caldwell and was, it is suggested, impeccably prepared for the ministry by the time he was twenty.

The only trouble was, he didn't feel that he had had the "conversion experience" that he felt was necessary to his Christian life, and was burdened by the spectre of sin. His older brother John later wrote: "His distress was unspeakable, under a conscious sense of the frowns of an angry God which hung over him. This may seem strange to some, when they are informed of the manner of his life prior to this time. I do not believe he ever drank a pint of ardent spirits, or swore a profane oath, in his life. He was the most moral youth I ever saw."

And John, it seems, knew from sin. While William was studying his Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, John--"a wild young man," one source tells us--ran off and bummed around on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. While he was away, he wrote home with a big surprise for his mother and brother: with no formal training at all, John had joined the Methodists and had quickly become a preacher on the traveling circuit.

I should explain that the Methodists and Baptists who were traveling the South after the Revolution were seen as a threat to the Presbyterian domination of the Scotch-Irish. The Methodists and Baptists were preaching a more experiential, less intellectual religion, and a more inclusive gospel that suggested that people could, by embracing Christ and the church, effect their own salvation. This was contrary to the Presbyterian doctrine of predestination--the idea that God had predetermined who would be saved and who would not, and nothing people could do could change their fate. People who had just won a war for the right to govern themselves were receptive to the Baptists and Methodists telling them that they could have a role in their eternal life as well.

Martha Bell so disapproved of her son's new faith that she considered disowning him. When he came home two years later, he wanted to hold prayer with his family. His mother was opposed, but WIlliam persuaded her that they should hear him out. As a historian later said, "they soon began to believe there was a change in him and began to treat him with respect."

John's arrival seems to have helped William sort out his doubts and fears. As one historian put it: "William McGee was chosen by the family to be a preacher, but God made a preacher first of John McGee, and he was God's instrument in the conversion of his brother, who soon began to preach the Gospel."

We don't know when William became a licensed Presbyterian minister, but it was probably around 1795. Not long after that, he and John both went out to the Tennessee frontier to preach. William took charge of a congregation in Sumner County, in the middle of the state's long border with Kentucky, a place where religion was seen to be in decline.

And this is where it gets interesting. The Presbyterians of that day carried on an old Scotch-Irish ritual of holding communion in large groups about four times a year. People would come from long distances and be tested on matters of religious faith and knowledge before they were permitted to take communion. It was at one of these, at Red River Church across the border in Kentucky, in June 1800, that the first stirrings of revival were seen. William McGee was invited to participate, as was his brother John--a sign of Presbyterian-Methodist cooperation on the frontier. I'll let Mike Sublett of Restoration magazine tell it from there:

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday passed quietly and reverently - as these Presbyterian Communions were wont to go. On Monday, though, as one local minister preached, a woman who had long sought assurance for her salvation began shouting and singing. The preacher concluded the sermon, and all the ministers left the church - except for the McGee brothers.

Presbyterian William sat on the floor near the pulpit and began weeping. Soon the congregation was weeping, seeking the full security for salvation. Methodist John rose to preach; a witness said he exhorted people to let "the Lord God omnipotent reign in their hearts, and to submit to him."

People began to cry and shout.

Then the woman who had first started shouting let out a shrill of anguish. Methodist John McGee, seemingly entranced, made his way to comfort her. Someone (probably his Presbyterian brother) reminded him this was a Presbyterian church; the congregation would not condone emotionalism! Later John recalled, "I turned to go back and was near falling; the power of God was strong upon me. I turned again and, losing sight of the fear of man, I went through the house shouting and exhorting with all possible ecstasy and energy, and the floor was soon covered with the slain" - people were falling in ecstasy.

James McGready, the minister who had presided over that meeting, knew he was on to something, and scheduled what is considered the first religious camp meeting a month later at Gaspar River Meeting House, not far from Red River. The results were just like Red River, and William McGee is said to have preached with passion. "Towards the close of the sermon," McGready later wrote, "the cries of the distressed arose almost as loud as his voice."

The revivals continued in other locations that fall, and among those who heard about them was Barton Stone, another Presbyterian minister and former student of David Caldwell, McGee's former teacher. Stone was pastor of a church at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in Bourbon County near Lexington. (He would later be one of the founders of the Restoration movement, out of which the Disciples of Christ and Church of Christ denominations were born.) In the spring of 1801 Stone attended one of the camp meetings he'd been hearing about on the Tennessee-Kentucky border, and he came back with plans for his own, which took place in August 1801. He spread the word that it would be an experience not to be missed, and the turnout was greater than anyone expected. The McGee brothers came to preach, among many other ministers, and many thousands of people descended on the rural spot--far more than the locals could accommodate. I've seen estimates ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 people. One writer has called it "The Religious Woodstock of 1801."

Cane Ridge is as famous for the excesses of enthusiasm that occurred there--a kind of mass hysteria--as is it is for its influence on American religion. Stone himself later described some of the things that went on, which he described as "religious exercises": "falling" (the fainting previously described); "the jerks," a series of spasm-like movements that sometimes affected the head and sometimes the whole body; a beatific kind of dancing; "barking," which was just the jerks accompanied by grunts; an entirely solemn and humorless laughter; and singing.

All this made the traditional Presbyterian authorities uneasy, and their support for the revival movement was tepid. It was this tension that would soon lead to a split between the larger Presbyterian body and the ministers on the Kentucky-Tennessee frontier.

But the presenting issue was not theology or worship style but education. It was hard to get qualified preachers on the frontier, and in McGee's presbytery, they had ordained a number of young men who had not had a formal education in theology and ancient languages. McGee took the side of the "young men," as they were known during the long dispute with the larger church that followed. I imagine he was torn--he himself had been the product of a careful and rigorous education, and yet he had seen the powerful work that his Methodist brother and other untrained ministers had been doing on the frontier.

Beyond the question of education was another one that the revivals brought to the fore: McGee and many of his fellow Presbyterians on the frontier, witnessing the sensational and dramatic conversion experiences of the revival, began to have doubts about the doctrine of predestination. McGee himself is said to have been deeply confused and undecided about this, and his uncertainty kept him from signing on right away when some of his colleagues took steps to separate from the larger church in 1809. But by 1810 he joined the new Cumberland Presbyterian denomination and indeed is considered one of its founders.

McGee continued to preach in frontier churches until his death in Tennessee in 1817. He and his wife Anna King--the sister of one of his ministerial colleagues--had eight children. One of them, named Martha for his mother, married James Burrow and moved to Lawrence County, Missouri. (Most of the McGees moved to a different part of Missouri after William's death.) Among James and Martha's children was a son named William for his preacher grandfather. William Burrow died in the Civil War, fighting for the Union in the battle of Fayetteville. His wife, Frances Stacy, died around the same time, leaving two orphaned daughters-- Artelia Jane and Martha Burrow. Martha later married John Washington Vermillion; they were the parents of Walter Vermillion, Blanche Branch's father.

Blanche, of course, was a Methodist, and whatever pride she might have had in her ancestor (I found all this information and shared it with her late in her life) was probably tempered by the fact that William was not a Methodist. But he came as close as a Presbyterian could--to the point of not being a very good Presbyterian! And one detail I didn't find until recently would surely have pleased her. As some of you know, Francis Asbury was one of the leading lights of Methodism--John Wesley himself appointed Asbury as one of the two first Methodist bishops in America, and he led American Methodism for 32 years, taking time to travel throughout the country preaching. He kept a journal of his travels, and on January 26, 1790, he stopped in on William McGee's family in North Carolina. Here is what he wrote: "Thence we went to Mr. William Bell's, on Deep River, and were received in the kindest manner; before I left the house, I felt persuaded that that family would come to experience the power of religion."

Asbury nailed it.

A Bad Apple on the Family Tree?

2007-06-15T11:36:00.000-04:00

All right, I think all you Overholser descendants had better sit down. This is not easy to say, but there is increasing evidence that Levi Overholser just may have been, well, something of a crook. I was prepared to dismiss his reported willingness to settle disputes with a revolver as just evidence of a colorful character. But now, from the same intrepid historian who turned up the details of Levi's involvement in the railroad business (thanks again!), come these two newspaper items from 1868, when the Overholsers were apparently living in Vincennes, Indiana (which was news to me).

First this one:

The most of our readers have doubtless heard of the failure of Mr. Levi Overholser, of Vincennes, formerly doing business at Palestine. There has been a great deal of gossip as to his real failure, and some suits growing out of the matter in order to test the legality of certain sales of property made by him at about the time of his failure. A week or two ago a suit was instituted in the U. S. District Court, at Indianapolis, to compel him to go into bankruptcy. The following item, which we find in the Indianapolis Journal, would seem to indicate that his failure (?) did not leave him in a penniless condition:
"Mr. L. Overholser, a wealthy citizen of Vincennes, Indiana, lately secreted in his house about $16,000, and contrived to let it become known that he had the money. One night last week the house was entered by burglars, completely ransacked, the money found, and the thieves got safely off with it. The owner would be willing to give $2,000 for the recovery of the money."
--Robinson Argus, April 30, 1868

Then, a week later,

THE OVERHOLSER ROBBERY AT VINCENNES
Last week we copied an item from the Indianapolis Journal in relation to the robbery of Levi Overholser of the sum of $16,000. -- Since then we find in the Journal the following item in a letter from Vincennes. Overholser was charged of having acted dishonestly before the announcement of this theft, and if the money was stolen it but confirms these charges. Mr. O. is very generally believed to be the real owner of some $15,000 worth of real estate in this county, and which he very conveniently has in the name of another party in order to keep his creditors from getting hold of it:
"The Overholser robbery seems to have created more excitement out of Vincennes than in it. The business transactions of Mr. O. have not been of the most creditable character. -- When his creditors desired a settlement he seemed to have no money to pay them, and proclaimed himself a bankrupt, though all the time he has been doing a thriving business. No one here seemed to have any confidence in him or sympathy for him, and when the robbery was proclaimed it produced a smile of doubt rather than tears of sympathy. No headlines announced the robbery in our county papers, while the editorial comments made were anything but flattering to the loser. If Mr. O. had sixteen thousand dollars to lose, he would have had many to sympathize with him for his great loss if he had given any indication that he intended to pay his honest debts."
--Robinson Argus, May 7, 1868

So this looks . . . not so good. But you will notice that both of these items--and the previous one about his pulling a gun on a business associate--come from the same newspaper. I think the only thing we can REALLY conclude is that the Robinson Argus was blatantly anti-Overholser and clearly had it in for Levi. Right? Right?

Or maybe he was just a crook. As I told the historian who found the clips, I'd feel guilty about living off his ill-gotten gains if we still had any.

Levi Overholser's Guide to Business Negotiation

2007-06-12T10:07:00.000-04:00

I used to wonder if the Overholser brothers faced much danger in those chaotic first days of Oklahoma City, when law enforcement was spotty and property disputes could turn ugly very fast. But it looks like Levi Overholser, at least, could hold his own--and wasn't afraid to draw a six-shooter if necessary.

I mentioned below that a railroad historian had found references to Levi's involvement in the building of a narrow-gauge railroad in Illinois before he moved to Kansas and Oklahoma. That historian has very kindly sent me those references, mostly from Illinois and Indiana newspapers between 1878 and 1882. It sems that Levi was one of several businessmen that built a section of this railroad from Switz City, Indiana, to Effingham, Illinois.

The project was financially troubled, and some of the builders went bankrupt. Levi and some others filed a suit against the main construction company in 1878. A volume called "History of Greene and Sullivan Counties" explains that "This proved to be the most fruitful cause for litigation ever in the [county?] and for some time gave almost constant employment to the entire Sullivan bar as well as a number of attorneys from other places, especially Chicago." So in addition to hiring hundreds of men to build the railroad, our Levi was doing his part to create jobs for lawyers, too.

The newspaper clips mainly discuss the progress of the railroad, with frequent mentions of Levi or Lee Overholser and the firm of Overholser and Schafer. At about the time it was finished in 1880, this item appeared in the Argus, a newspaper in Robinson, Illinois, a town along the railroad line and near Palestine, where Levi and his family are known to have lived:

"Monday morning at Palestine some pretty warm words passed between E. Pratt Buell, General Manager of the narrow gauge railroad, and Levi Overholser, late contractor on the road, relative to a sum of money borrowed from Overholser by Buell, which the latter claimed he had repaid. Overholser drew his revolver, and was only prevented from shooting by the prompt interference of bystanders."

As far as the larger financial dispute over the railroad is concerned, Levi appears to have settled not for blood but for 65 cents on the dollar--the amount one of the financiers paid to the main construction company's creditors when he took it over.

Levi bought four shares of the completed railroad in 1882, at which time he is listed as a resident of Newton, Illinois, one county west of Palestine. The family must have moved there after the 1880 census. An item in the "Local Correspondence from Palestine" column in the Robinson Argus from July 12, 1882, supports this: "Mrs. Mary Overholser and Hattie returned to their home in Newton Wednesday."

Levi's Railroad Ties

2007-06-06T23:50:00.000-04:00

I got an e-mail in response to my recent post about Levi Overholser from someone who has researched the Effingham, Springfield, & South Eastern Railroad, a line that ran through Palestine, Illinois. He said that the major subcontractor that built the line (ca. 1878-1881) was the firm of Overholser and Schafer, and that one of the partners in that company was one Levi Overholser, also known as Lee. While we can't be sure it's our Lee, there may well be something to it.

I don't know what excites me more: having another piece of the historical puzzle, or knowing that someone actually read the blog!

Salathiel, Jeroboam, and More

2007-05-29T13:05:00.000-04:00

You can hit a brick wall pretty fast when you try to research a surname as common as Jones. Our Jones line disappears into Jackson County, Alabama, in the 1820s, when our ancestor William "Billy" Jones was born there. We know that Billy's father was born in South Carolina, but we do not know his name. A cousin who has been doing genealogy research for years has tried to track down Billy Jones's father, and while she's not found anything close to definite, she has found some possibilities. My favorite is a man named Salathiel Jones who lived in Jackson County at the right time, was born in South Carolina, and had a son around Billy's age. I'd love to have a Salathiel in the family, wouldn't you?

Thinking about Salathiel reminds me that there a bunch of cool and/or weird names in my family history. Here are a few favorites. Depending on which side of the family you're on, some of these may be in your tree too. Feel free to consider them if you're planning a family:

Jeroboam Howard (b. 1759): an ancestor of George Bailey Paxton on his mother's side. Jeroboam, like Salathiel, is an Old Testament name. (At left is King Jeroboam, from the first book of Kings.) Those were big in the 19th century.

Jehu Jehu: C.M. Branch's great-grandfather. There were at least three generations with this identical first name-last name combination in his mother's Welsh family.

Grizzie Riddle (1826-1876): Billy Jones's wife. The name Grizzie was not all that uncommon among the Scotch-Irish; it derived from Griselde, a name that appears in the Canterbury Tales. Still, I'll give five bucks to anyone who honors the family legacy by naming their daughter Grizzie.

Ferdinando Thayer (1625-1713): an ancestor of Cal Jones via his father's mother, the source of my only New England ancestors. Ferdinando was an early settler of Mendon, Massachusetts, and, it is said, a renowned wrestler. I don't know anything about the origin of the name, but it definitely sticks out amid a bunch of Isaacs and Thomases in the Thayer family.

Argyle Blackstone (b. 1650): also from way back in Cal Jones's grandmother's family, but from a Virginia line. This one always sounded like someone from a romance novel--kind of a Rhett Butler type, maybe.

Charity Grubb (1687-1761): an ancestor of Cal's other grandmother. The name Charity appears many times in this Quaker family, but "Charity Grubb" sounds like a name for a soup kitchen.

Johan Andersson, aka Stalkofta (1627-1685): a distant ancestor of Cal's mother. Johan came to America as part of the Swedish settlement called New Sweden (later Delaware). He became known as "Stalkofta"--or "steel coat"--among the other Swedish settlers, apparently because of his habit of wearing armor when hanging around the fort. He took the name as a surname, and it was gradually anglicized to "Stalcop," a name still seen frequently in the Southern U.S. Any of you who are unsatisfied with your current surname might consider a favorite article of apparel: "Bob Fleecepullover," maybe, or "Karen Haltertop."

Gruffydd Nannau (b. 1568): a Welsh ancestor of Clara Paxton via Levi Overholser's mother. The Welsh names always look like someone was typing with their eyes shut--and sound like something from Star Wars.

Anybody out there know some good ones I left out?

The Other Overholser

2007-05-27T21:25:00.000-04:00

You don't have to look very deep into the history of Oklahoma City to encounter the names of Henry Overholser (1846-1915) and Edward Overholser (1869-1931). Henry came to the city on the day of the 1889 Land Run with six prefabricated wood-frame buildings (above) on railroad cars and quickly became an important real estate and entertainment impresario. The mansion he built in 1903 was for years the city's social center (and is now a house museum operated by the Oklahoma Historical Society).

Edward, Henry's son by his first marriage, inherited some of his father's interests but succeeded where his father had failed: he was elected mayor of Oklahoma City in 1915. (Oklahoma City history blogger Doug Loudenback has written about Henry and Edward on his blog.) It was primarily for Edward but also in part for Henry that the city's reservoir was named Lake Overholser in 1918.

But what does this have to do with my humble origins, you ask? Some of you who are Clara Paxton's descendants or relatives already know that there are Overholsers in our tree: we descend from Henry's older brother Levi (Lee) Overholser (1836–1905), who also came to Oklahoma City in its early days and also did well in business there, though not as spectacularly as his brother. If, as is often said, Henry Overholser was the father of Oklahoma City, that would make our Lee the uncle of Oklahoma City (and me the city's first cousin thrice removed!).

So here's where the Overholser brothers came from: They were born on a farm in Montgomery County, Ohio, near present-day Dayton, sons of John and Elizabeth (Niswonger) Overholser. Their grandfather, Jacob Overholser, was a blacksmith in Pennsylvania before moving to Ohio, and his children were all baptized in the Lutheran-Reformed Church. (The Overholsers of our acquaintance would later be Presbyterians--a close fit theologically with the Calvinism of the Reformed church and probably a concession to the fact that the German Protestant churches were harder to find as they moved southwest.) The Overholser family was German in origin, while Elizabeth Niswonger's forebears (originally Neuenschwangers before they met up with Scotch-Irish attempts to pronounce the name in the hills of Virginia) had come from Switzerland.

Levi and Henry were among 13 children in their family, and it was probably assumed that they, too, would be farmers. The 1850 census shows a 14-year-old Levi on his father's farm, listed as a "laborer." But Levi and Henry both ended up leaving the farm for careers in business--the earliest among any of my ancestors to trade farm life for small-town life.

In the 1860 census, we find Levi living in a hotel in Palestine, Illinois, a town near the Indiana line and about 230 miles from his father's farm. His occupation is "clerk." Also in Palestine in that census is Mary Young, an 18-year-old living with her siblings and widowed mother. (Her father, we know from the previous census, was a shoemaker.) The next year, 1861, Levi and Mary were married. We don't find them in the 1870 census, but we know from other sources that all five of their children who survived into adulthood were born in Palestine between 1863 and 1875. Levi's obituary says that he was "engaged in the general merchandise business and made a success of it" during this period. (They say this happened in Ohio, but the Oklahoman was apparently no less prone to error in 1905 than it is now.) In the 1880 census, no occupation is given for Levi, but he is listed in Palestine with Mary and their five children: "Elley, Charley, Gracey, Hattie M., and William."

Meanwhile, Henry Overholser had left home by 1870. He was living with his wife and two children in Sullivan, Indiana, just 23 miles from Palestine. Probably not coincidentally, he lived next door to Mary Young's brother William, and both were in the dry goods business. There was probably a good deal of collaboration in business among this network of kin.

Some time after 1880, the family left Illinois for southeastern Kansas. We don't know for sure when Levi and Mary moved there, but their oldest child, Ella, married J.C. Haskett in Illinois in 1880 and gave birth to their first child, Frank, in Baxter Springs, Kansas, in 1883.

We don't know why the family moved west, but the usual answer was economic opportunity. It's possible that the Overholsers were already casting their eyes on the Unassigned Lands of Oklahoma, as the Boomer Movement to open those lands had begun as early as 1879. Levi and Mary's oldest son, Charley, spent some time in the territory before the Land Run, according to his 1928 obituary in the Valley Falls (KS) Vindicator: "As a young man Charley had more than the average share of adventure as a cow-boy on the plains of the Indian Territory in the days immediately proceeding [sic] the opening of Oklahoma, when all the bad men from the entire nation seemed to naturally gravitate to this last 'no-man's land.'"

In the meantime, Henry had made his way to Wisconsin, made a fortune, divorced his wife, and was looking toward Oklahoma himself. But unlike so many who came and pitched tents, Henry built some of the city's first "permanent" structures (in quotes because he soon replaced them with brick buildings). And though he's never mentioned in the history books, Levi was there very early on: in an 1889 Oklahoma City directory, Henry is living at 201-1/2 West Grand, on the second floor of one of his buildings, and Levi and his 15-year-old son Will are next door in another of the prefabs at 203-1/2.

According to Levi's obituary, he didn't move to Oklahoma City until 1892 or '93. But I suspect he and perhaps Will spent a lot of time there in the intervening years, waiting until a semblance of order and civility had been established before bringing Mary to the city. (The other children all left home around this time: Grace married George Paxton in 1893 and was living in Joplin, Missouri; Hattie married Bert L. Jones that same year and lived in Columbus, Kansas. Ella and J.C. Haskett remained in Baxter Springs (before moving to Oklahoma City in 1912), and Charley had traded in the adventurous life of a cow-boy for a career in dry goods in Valley Falls, Kansas.)

While Henry Overholser promoted railroads, telephones, an opera house, the state fair, and real estate, Levi dealt in property and insurance in a partnership called Overholser and Avey. In 1893, Levi and Mary traveled to Chicago for the Worlds Fair (as we know from a souvenir handkerchief of Mary's); the fair's gleaming vision of a planned, classical city must have inspired the Overholsers--and shown them what a long way their young city had to go.

When Henry built his mansion in 1903--way out in the cornfields of NW 15th Street--he and Anna (wife #2, his trophy wife) introduced it to society with a big party. The next day, as we read in the Oklahoman society page, was reserved for family: besides Henry's son Edward, they had Levi and Mary, the Hasketts, and Will Overholser and his wife Ella to dinner.

Levi died in 1905; the cause listed in the cemetery records is "stomach trouble." The Oklahoman, under the headline "Prominent Citizen Dead," reported that he left an estate of $100,000. He and Mary lived at the time at 1602 N. Robinson, an address later occupied by J.C. and Ella Haskett when they moved to the city. (Will and Ella Overholser later lived at 1610 N. Robinson. Neither home still stands.)

Mary died two years later in Baxter Springs, presumably while visiting the Hasketts there. Again, the Oklahoman reported (left, click image to enlarge) that the estate was worth about $100,000 (about $2.1 million in 2006 dollars), most of which was in real estate.

Levi and Mary had five children who survived to adulthood (we know from the 1900 census that Mary had also had five children who were no longer living, presumably having died in infancy) and at least 11 grandchildren. Here's a quick rundown:

Ella Overholser (1863–1937) married J.C. Haskett. As I said, they lived in Kansas until 1912 and then moved to Oklahoma City, where all three of their sons ended up living. Their sons were: Frank C. Haskett (1883-1967), Paul E. Haskett (1886-1966), and Clarence R. Haskett (1892-1962).

Charles L. Overholser (1865–1928) married Susan Gardiner. They had no children, but they raised Grace's orphaned daughter Clara Paxton during her teenage years.

Grace E. Overholser (1869–1901) married George Bailey Paxton. They lived in Joplin, Missouri. She died of pneumonia in 1901. George died of Bright's Disease in 1910. They had two children, George Burton Paxton (1896–1948) and Clara Paxton Jones (1899-1971).

Harriet (Hattie) M. Overholser (1873–aft. 1930) married Bert L. Jones. They lived in Columbus, Kansas, and had three children: George Lee Jones (1896–bef. 1928), Clair L. Jones (1898–?), and Helen Jones Winter (1904–?).

William Levi Overholser (1875–1964) married Ella King. They lived in Oklahoma City and had three children: Mary Overholser Meder (1898–1977), William Levi Overholser Jr. (1907–1993), and Charles Kent Overholser (1909–1962).

As always, I wish I had more information and pictures of some of these people. If you have any to share, please e-mail me at familyhistorybites@gmail.com.

UPDATE, 6/12/07: A railroad historian has sent me some newspaper references that suggest that Levi was involved in building a railroad near Palestine. It got rather contentious, and at least once Lee had to pull out his revolver. Details here.

UPDATE, 6/15/07: It gets worse. Levi may have been something of a crook. . . .

Katerina Jicha, Pioneer Woman

2007-04-22T23:08:00.001-04:00

Today is the 118th anniversary of the Oklahoma Land Run, the day that one of my ancestors—and about 50,000 other people—tore into the Unassigned Lands of central Oklahoma in an effort to claim some of the last free land available in the country under the Homestead Act. So while today I want to salute Jiri (George) Jicha, who made the run that day, this post is mainly a tribute to his wife, Katerina (Kate) Jicha, who raised the seven children and ran the farm after George died—just eight months after staking his claim. (Kate and George were the maternal grandparents of Blanche Vermillion Branch.)

Many of you are familiar with the Pioneer Woman statue in Ponca City, a monument to "the heroic character of the women who braved the dangers and endured the hardships incident to daily life of the pioneer and homesteader in this country." There was a competition to create the statue in 1926; the winner was Bryant Baker, who titled his work "Confidence" (above). You'll notice that there is no man in the tableau. The reason for his absence is not specified, but other entries (I saw mockups of all 17 once at Woolaroc) were more explicit: I seem to remember some in which the woman was fending off marauders with her rifle as her husband's body lay nearby.

Anyway, I never gave much thought to the Pioneer Woman until a couple of years ago, when a cousin of a cousin sent me Kate Jicha’s probate file. Reading about her estate and the sequence of events made me realize we had at least one bona fide Pioneer Woman in the family—just surround the statue with six more kids and it could be our Kate.

Katerina Janda was born to Mated Janda and Magdalena Zemanova in 1842 in Zdeslav, a village in the region of Czechoslavakia known as Bohemia. (One of her great-grandsons visited the town in the 1990s.) She married Jiri Jicha sometime before 1872. When he was 41 and she was 39, they joined thousands of other Bohemians in emigrating to America.

I haven't done enough historical reading to know why the large migration happened; does anybody have any insight about it? When I asked Blanche if she knew why they came, she said she remembered her mother telling her something about people being so hungry in Bohemia that a soldier took a bite out of another soldier's arm. Make of that what you will.

With six children, George and Kate sailed for America in 1881. Blanche's mother Mollie Jicha told her that she remembered sticking her hand in the water in New York Harbor when they arrived. (They were a few years too early to see the Statue of Liberty or to be processed at Ellis Island, by the way.) They must have moved out to Nebraska right away, because their seventh child Joseph was born in Nebraska that same year.

George and Kate may have had family connections in America already. Kate's brother Joseph Janda apparently had emigrated to America around 1870.

After six years in Nebraska, the family moved to Indian Territory; I'm not sure where, but I'd guess they were in McClain County, where some of the family lived in later years. On April 22, 1889, the tenth birthday of his daughter Mary, George Jicha lined up to cross the river near Purcell and take part in the Oklahoma Land Run. The territory was opened for settlement at exactly 12 o'clock, and people raced to claim the best land they could. The family story is that George found a fine tract of land but was chased off the claim by a woman with a gun. The implication has always been that the claim was rightfully his (and that perhaps she was a "sooner"—someone who had sneaked into the territory early and squatted on a claim). But perhaps she was just a speedy and determined Pioneer Woman herself.

At any rate, as his grandson Vivian Nemecek told the story, George had to settle for "school land" east of Noble. Whole square-mile sections of Oklahoma Territory and others were set aside to be leased, the income going to fund schools in the territory. If that is indeed what George claimed, he must have bought a farm sooner or later, because the 160 acres that Kate and her family worked belonged to her at her death.

George died on December 23, 1889. He was 50 years old. Their children ranged in age from 8 to 17. They were in a place that had some Czech settlers, though apparently not the large numbers of places like Nebraska—or small pockets like Prague, Oklahoma. Kate must have lived to see her family's customs challenged by the realities of their new world. Although they had been baptized as Catholics, all of her children became Protestants, and they all took anglicized names. And although two of her daughters married fellow Czechs, the three other children who married chose American-born Anglo Saxon Protestants.

Kate only lived to see one of her children married. The match displeased her, though I don’t know why. Her daughter Josie, at age 18, married a 19-year-old farmer named John Black who had taken care of his young sisters since their father had died in 1890. Josie's descendants say that Kate "disowned" her for marrying John. This is not true in a financial sense, as Josie was treated the same as her siblings in Kate's will, but she must have registered disapproval in a way that hurt Josie. Blanche Branch once mentioned an aunt named Josie whose husband "practically kidnapped her," so there is a tale of some kind to be told there. Maybe it'll turn up over time.

Here is a picture of Kate and six of her children. (Click on it to make it larger, if not clearer.) I don't know the date, but it was probably after 1893 (when Josie married, as she is not in the picture) and before Kate died in 1897. Seated left to right are Jim, Kate, and Mollie. Standing are Mary, Joseph, Jennie, and John.

If Kate didn't like Josie's marriage, one wonders what she would have thought of her daughter Mollie's choice of husband. A few years after Kate died, the 28-year-old Mollie married 24-year-old Walter "Whit" Vermillion. Whit was a horse trader whose brother, Ira, was in the federal prison at Leavenworth for roping an old Czech farmer named Joseph Nemecek (whose sons later became Mollie's brothers-in-law) and dragging him to his death. I'll tell this story in greater detail in a later post.

Kate wrote a will (left) on May 26, 1897; she died 21 days later. She left her estate in equal shares to her seven children, but stipulated that the farm should not be sold until her youngest children, Mary and Joseph, reached 21 years old. She intended that they have the farm as a place to live until then.

The probate file includes inventories and receipts that give a glimpse into farm life at the time. In the summer of Kate’s death, the Jichas had 50 acres of corn and 14 acres of cotton, and had also raised wheat and oats. They had 8 horses, 3 mules, 12 head of cattle, 2 pigs, and assorted plows, cultivators, and wagons. When all these were sold five years later, the most expensive item was a mule that brought $100.25. (A blind mare went for $5.)

For the five years before Kate’s son Joseph reached 21, her executor, a local Czech named Joseph Valouch, had to keep track of what was bought or sold. In the meantime, the children began to leave home. In 1898, the third daughter, Johanna (Jennie), married Jim Nemecek, another native of Bohemia. By the 1900 census, only John, the second son, and Mollie, the oldest daughter, were living on the farm. Mollie left for Washington state around 1901 to marry Walter Vermillion, whose family was homesteading out there. (They would return within a few years.)

The estate was settled on August 30, 1902, the farm having been sold for $3500 to Joseph Nemecek, a brother to Jim Nemecek. Receipts in the probate file show that all Kate’s children received their share of the estate—$540.75 apiece—on August 30, except for Mollie, who received her share in Washington state a month later. (An online “inflation calculator” says that that amount would be the same as about $12,500 in 2006 dollars.)

Getting all this down, I find that I’ve learned only enough about the Jichas to realize how much I don’t know. But this is an ongoing process, and I hope I’ll have more information and insights as time goes on. In the meantime, just for the record, here are Kate and George's children and grandchildren:

1. Jim Jicha (1872–1946). He apparently had mental problems of some kind, and was institutionalized at one point. Blanche Branch remembered him fondly and viewed him as a kind of seer or psychic who predicted events in Europe like the Russian Revolution. She remembered that he called her "bobule" which I have since learned means "berry" in Czech. He did not marry.

2. Margaret (Mollie) Jicha (1873–1931). I've mentioned her marriage to Walter Vermillion. After returning from Washington, they lived in Wayne, Oklahoma. They had two children who died young, Fay and Louis. Their other two children were Blanche Vermillion (Branch) and John Walter Vermillion. Walter died in 1907, just a few months after Blanche was born. Mollie married again then divorced, after which she and Blanche moved to Oklahoma City.

3. Josefa (Josie) Jicha (1875–1912). I mentioned her marriage to John Black. They had four sons: Hugh Black, John Black, Homer Black, and Clyde Black. [UPDATE: A cousin tells me I missed John and Josie's daughter Mary. Duly noted.]

4. John C. Jicha (1876–1959). He married Emma Evatt in 1909. John ran a store in Wayne. They had five children: Evatt Jicha, John Curtis Jicha, William Paul Jicha, Doris Jicha (Lamar), and Mary Evelyn Jicha (Russell).

5. Johanna (Jennie) Jicha (1878–1966). She married Vaclav (Jim) Nemecek in 1898. They had five children: George Nemecek, Mary Katherine (Katie) Nemecek (Long), Thomas Nemecek, Margaret Nemecek (Barton), and Kenneth Nemecek.

6. Mary (Marie) Jicha (1879–1935). She married Andrew Nemecek, brother of Jim Nemecek, in 1903. They had six children: Joe Talmadge Nemecek, Murel Andrew Nemecek, Vivian Nemecek, Genevieve Josephine Nemecek (Mote), Mary Frances Nemecek, and Helen R. Nemecek.

7. Joseph Jicha (1881–?). I lose track of Joseph at 21, when he receives his share of the estate. He doesn’t appear in a census after that, and Blanche Branch never mentioned him when telling about her aunts and uncles. My assumption is that he died while still a young man.

As always, I’d love to hear from anyone who has information or just memories to share about these families. You can add to the comments below or e-mail me at familyhistorybites@gmail.com.

Paxtons Slept Here

2007-04-19T15:54:00.000-04:00

I have been on deadline at work and not able to finish my latest encyclopedic post, but in the meantime, here are some pictures from an intrepid Paxton cousin who recently visited Montrose, Missouri.

You'll recall (won't you?) from my post about George Bailey Paxton that he grew up in Montrose, Missouri, and that his father had a farm adjacent to the town with a grain elevator. Well, the farm (above) is still there, untouched by Montrose's urban sprawl, complete with the grain elevator and a house that apparently was built by George's parents Samuel and Amanda Paxton.

Within view of the farm is the cemetery where Samuel, his mother, and a daughter who died in childhood are buried. Samuel's grave marker (left) notes his Civil War service and his Masonic affiliation.

Thanks, cousin, for the pictures!

UPDATE, 7/22/07: If you want a face to go with the name, I turned up a photo of Samuel Paxton on a recent trip home.

Happy 100th, Mimi

2007-04-05T09:14:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow would have been Blanche Branch's 100th birthday. She made it to 96, which is nothing to sneeze at, but I still miss her. She was born to Walter Edward Vermillion and Mollie (Jicha) Vermillion on April 6, 1907, in Wayne, Indian Territory. I used to love to tell people that she was older than Oklahoma, if only by seven months.

I'll be thinking about her this weekend, not just because of her birthday but also because Easter was her favorite holiday. Wherever she is now, I'll bet she gets to hide the eggs on Sunday.

A Ramblin' Post

2007-04-04T15:49:00.000-04:00

Speaking of Paxtons, here's another fellow with that surname, courtesy of YouTube. Does 1965 count as history yet?

The Joneses' Civil War

2007-03-31T21:53:00.000-04:00

At left: Charles Matthew "Matt" Jones at age 19. You can't tell from this reproduction, but he is wearing four pistols.

When I started looking into my family history, all that I knew about our family and the Civil War was that Cal Jones's grandfathers in Arkansas had fought on opposite sides. The idea of a Union soldier from Arkansas sounded so unusual that I imagined he must have been very brave or quite contrary. But the more I've read both about our family's history and the nation's, the more I've learned that the Civil War was not simply a binary, black-and-white (or Blue-and-Gray) conflict. In the mountain regions that Cal's family came from—Appalachian Virginia, Alabama, and Kentucky, Ozark Arkansas—the locals tended to be caught in the middle: possessed of none of the abolitionist zeal of the North, and yet not culturally or economically invested in the institution of slavery. (Put more plainly: Cal's people did not for the most part have slaves, but that was mostly because they couldn't afford them.)

Sherman Calaway Jones was born in 1895 near Durham, a town in Washington County, Arkansas, near Fayetteville. The area began to be settled in the 1830s by white farmers from Tennessee and Kentucky. Cal had a large extended family in the area: his four grandparents, his eight great-grandparents, and 11 of his 16 great-great-grandparents had lived in Washington County or in an adjacent county. In the 1900 census for Durham, about a third of the 700 or so residents were apparently his relatives.

Though the national origin of Cal's ancestors was varied, including England, Ireland, The Netherlands, France, Sweden, and Germany, they had assimilated into the "Scotch-Irish" culture of 18th-century immigrants from Northern Ireland and Scotland. (Some people prefer the terms "Scots-Irish" or "Ulster Scots" to "Scotch-Irish," but I use the last just because it's the most common.) The Scotch-Irish had a long history of life on the border: they had lived on the frontier between the English and the Highland Scots for centuries, their homes frequently destroyed as borders moved according to the fortunes of conflict. They learned to work both sides to their advantage and became a violent warrior culture of family clans that shifted alliances and fought among themselves. (Family feuds like the Hatfields and McCoys weren't an American invention; the Scotch-Irish brought such behavior with them.)

So when the Civil War broke out, sentiment in these mountainous border regions was divided. Although slavery was not widespread in Washington County, we are told that Cal's great-grandfather, William Shumate, had slaves that worked his 300-acre farm. (The Shumates had come from Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1837; William’s father Balis came three years later, bringing slaves with him.) Not coincidentally, it was William's son Bennett Shumate who was Cal's Confederate grandfather: he served in a Confederate Cavalry unit from 1862 to 1865. Two of Bennett’s brothers, James and William Jr., died in the war.

Cal's other grandfather, Charles Matthew (Matt) Jones, fought for the Union as a Private in Company B of the First Arkansas Cavalry Volunteers, as we know from his Civil War pension file. He enlisted on October 1, 1862, near Springfield, Missouri. He was injured in August 1863,: his horse was shot out from under him, and he himself was shot in the right side, the arm, and the right leg, probably in action north of Fayetteville.

A family legend holds that when Matt was wounded, he was brought to the home of Ambrose Clark to recover. While there, he met Ambrose's raven-haired daughter Esther, whom he would later come back and marry in May 1865, a few months before his discharge. Ambrose Clark was a native of Ohio, and his parents came from Vermont. He later identified himself as a Republican, so it is likely that he was a Union supporter.

Matt’s own family appear to have been Union supporters. He and his parents had come from the hills of northern Alabama in the 1840s. Matt’s brother John, who also fought for the Union, was killed while trying to escape after having been captured in battle. Their father, William Jones, must have at least been a strong Union supporter after the fact: his second marriage, nearly 20 years after the war, broke up because his wife was a Confederate sympathizer.

But Matt may not have been as ideologically motivated as we’d like to think: Another family legend holds that he first signed on with the Confederates and then, when the tide of the war was turning in Arkansas, he switched sides.

The guerilla violence that swept through the border regions throughout the war did not just affect soldiers. One victim, Seth Mills, an 80-year-old Quaker great-great-grandfather of Cal's, was assaulted in his home by Southern "bushwhackers" who demanded his money. When he refused, they tortured him by burning and breaking his feet. (He survived the ordeal and lived to the age of 94.)

Bennett Shumate died in 1884; it has been said that he never fully recovered from war injuries. Matt Jones lived until 1922.

For years after the war, old resentments continued, and the Union-Confederacy dispute was played out in the political arena by Republicans and Democrats. So when Bennett Shumate's daughter Nancy (known as Nannie) married Matt Jones's son Silas in 1892, the Shumates, at least, were not happy about it. As Cal Jones would later write:

“Now picture if you can a family of robust young Republican boys (the Jones boys) growing up in a predominantly Democratic community where just about all the fathers had fought on the losing side, the Confederacy. . . . I can tell you now that Dad and his brother Will [Matt Jones’s sons], both excellent boxers and rough-and-tumble fighters, fought their way out back to back many a time. . . . To cap this all off, Dad went and married a girl out of a Democratic family, which spelled more trouble. . . . By that time Dad and his brother had pretty well established themselves and didn’t have to fight too much, but the old hatreds continued and the first year of married life he had to lick two of Mama’s brothers, Johnny and George. After that they more or less left him alone, but he was still quite a minority on the community.”

Those resentments would later lead to Silas and his family leaving Arkansas after a dispute with some of Nannie's relatives over a dead dog—but that's a subject for another post. [UPDATE, 8/30/07: The story of the dog and the exodus from Arkansas is told here, here, and here.]

A word on my sources: A history of Washington County published by the Shiloh Museum in 1989 has lots of details about people in Cal's extended family. The letter of Cal's that I quote above gave me the basics of the story. And a cousin who is related on both the Shumate and Jones sides has worked for decades on family history; her impressive work filled in a lot of details and color. Finally, I learned about the cultural history of the Scotch-Irish from a terrific book called "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer. Fischer breaks down the immigration from the British Isles to America into four distinct cultural groups and paints a detailed portrait of each group, providing a lens for understanding American history. It's helped me understand our family history better, too.

Ask and ye shall receive

2007-03-27T09:43:00.000-04:00

A Paxton cousin has kindly sent me a picture of George Bailey Paxton. This appeared in a Paxton family history called "We Are One," published in 1903 by William McClung Paxton. Anybody see a family resemblance?

Lancelot Branch, 1836-1907

2007-03-26T13:55:00.000-04:00

Having a name like Branch in your family tree—well, I've made my point already. There are only so many "tree-branch" jokes you can handle. Anyway, for this second blog piece, I'm going to talk about what I know about Lancelot Branch, the immigrant ancestor of the Branch line of our ancestors.

I was told about Lancelot years ago, but didn't have anything on paper about his existence. I had begun to despair when I discovered online, at about the same time, a relative who had information from his death certificate in Pennsylvania and a baptism record from an English church that appeared to be the same person. Since then, largely thanks to the efforts of more diligent relatives in the U.S. and England who have tracked down old documents, I've learned enough to make the barest sketch of Lancelot's life.

The story starts in the village of Staindrop, County Durham, in the north of England, where Lancelot Branch was born to George and Sarah Branch on March 22, 1836. He was baptized on April 17 of that year, according to parish records. (At left is the parish church in Staindrop.) We as yet know little about his parents. His father was listed in parish records as a "husbandman" and sometimes as a "laborer." George Branch's family appears to have come from nearby Yorkshire, and there are other Lancelot Branches in previous generations that we might assume are relatives.

For some reason, Lancelot doesn't show up with his parents and siblings in the 1841 census, when he would have been five years old. Nor does he ten years later, but the 1851 census also tells us why: at the age of 15, Lancelot was working as a farm laborer in Morton Palms, some 20 miles away. This confirms something his granddaughter Sarah Ball once told me—that Lancelot had a "falling out" with his father and left home at an early age.

The next we know of Lancelot is not until December 1866, when his marriage to Elizabeth Charlton—a coal miner's daughter—was recorded in Tynemouth, near Newcastle. Lancelot's occupation is also listed as coal miner, the job that would soon take him and his family to America.

Lancelot and Elizabeth's first child, Sarah Jane, was born just under nine months later and recorded in Tynemouth. She may have been named for Lancelot's mother. We know he was fond of the name—when his eldest son John George Branch had a daughter many years later, Lancelot came to the house, put a five-dollar bill in the infant's hand, and told her parents "Her name is going to be Sarah Jane." (And it was—the aforementioned Sarah Ball.)

Two years later, in 1869, Lancelot arrived in the United States without his wife and child, according to a ship manifest. In the 1870 census, he was found in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, living in what must have been a rooming house for coal miners.

In my experience, most such migrations in families in the 19th-century were part of larger family moves, accompanied by parents, siblings, and/or in-laws. But Lancelot seems to have moved on his own; none of his siblings or their familes moved to America. So although the name Branch is not all that uncommon in the U.S., it is not likely that most Branches you meet are closely related to our line.

In March, 1871, the same year that Lancelot filed his request for U.S. citizenship, Elizabeth and Sarah Jane arrived at the Port of New York aboard the S.S. Minnesota. (This was before Ellis Island, so they would have been processed at Castle Garden at the tip of Manhattan.) A year later, Lancelot and Sarah had their second child, John George Branch. He was presumably named for his two grandfathers, John Charlton and George Branch, but he was always known as George.

It would appear that Lancelot and Elizabeth spent all of their American years in Pennsylvania, except for one quirky fact: in four successive censuses (1900—1930), John George Branch's state of birth is listed as Indiana. Other sources, including his death certificate, say he was born in Pennsylvania, but someone in his household insisted otherwise. So it's possible that the family moved briefly to Indiana after Elizabeth and Sarah arrived in America. (There was coal mining in that state by the 1870s.)

[UPDATE 11/16/07: By the way, I have considered the possibility that George was in fact born in the town or county of Indiana, Pennsylvania, which is in the coal mining region, but it's hard to imagine the same misunderstanding happening between householder and census taker four decades in a row.]

Lancelot became an American citizen in Somerset Co., Pennsylvania in the centennial year of 1876.

Lancelot and Elizabeth had at least four more children: Thomas James, born in 1875, Elizabeth, born about 1876, Maggie, born about 1879, and Joseph, born about 1883.

By 1880, the family was living in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, where Lancelot bought a farm in an area called Horatio, not far from Punxsutawney. Elizabeth died some time in the 1880s, and Lancelot married again, to a woman named Rachel, in about 1887.

Lancelot died of pneumonia on December 7, 1907 at the age of 71. He was buried on his farm.

About Lancelot's children: I know that John George Branch—possessed of none of his father's wanderlust—stayed on in Horatio, took over his father's farm, and lived there until he died in 1940. He and his wife, the former Margaret Jehu, had seven children and fourteen grandchildren. Thomas James Branch married Annie Haddick; they had 12 children. Thomas was a mining superintendent in southwest Pennsylvania. I am in contact with some of Thomas's descendants, but I have yet to find out any more about the three daughters or about Joseph. (If you know something, contact me via the comments.)

I don't know much about England in Lancelot's time, but it strikes me that he achieved the American Dream that many immigrants sought at the time. He did not become rich, but after years in the mines, he was able to get a piece of property for himself and his family—something that perhaps wouldn't have been possible in England for the uneducated son of a farm laborer. With so little to go on in terms of information about Lancelot, it's kind of touching that after so many years of hard work, the occupation on his death certificate said "farmer."

George Bailey Paxton, 1862-1910

2007-03-25T22:03:00.000-04:00

I'm going to start this new blog with a short biography of George Bailey Paxton. He had kind of an interesting life, as my forebears go, and it's possible to piece together a little bit about his life from family sources, census, old newspapers, and other surprising sources (a book on the history of zinc mining, a 1912 history of New Mexico). So here goes. I recognize that some of these pieces will be a little long for blog entries, but I mainly just want to get them out there for family to see and for others to find via Google.

George Bailey Paxton was born on September 12, 1862, presumably on his parents' farm in Deepwater Township in Henry County, Missouri. He entered the world at a tumultuous time, both locally and nationally. The Civil War had been on for more than a year, and guerilla fighting in Kansas and Missouri was bloody. His mother, Amanda Bailey Paxton, had lost her father and a brother at the start of the war, when a band of "Southern guerillas" (as a later family history referred to them) took them from their home and shot them because of their Union sympathies. His father, Samuel, would soon join the local militia, which later became part of the Missouri State Militia Cavalry. The war disrupted the lives of both the Bailey and Paxton families. (I learned about this from a paper by historian Toby Terrar--a Bailey cousin--that focused on the Baileys in the pre-war and war years.)

Both families were new arrivals to Henry County. George's grandfather William Paxton had left the family home in Virginia, first going to what is now West Virginia, where Samuel Paxton was born in 1834, then to Cooper County, Missouri. Samuel acquired 320 acres in Henry County in 1857. He was one of the first settlers of Deepwater Township. George's other grandfather, George Bailey (the Civil War casualty for whom he was named), came from Kentucky to Illinois, where Amanda was born in 1840. They came to Henry County in 1856.

We don't know much about George's early life on his family's farm, but by the time he was a young man, the family must have been at least moderately comfortable. A railroad was laid near the farm just after the war, and the town of Montrose was laid out adjacent to the farm in 1871. A biography of Samuel from 1883 describes a prosperous farmer/businessman:

"Soon after Montrose was laid out Mr. Paxton built the Montrose Steam Elevator, and has since been engaged in buying and handling grain. This elevator has a capacity of 2,000 bushels per day, with a corn sheller and a corn grinding burr. He is doing a large shipping business which will compare favorably with any in Henry County. He still owns his fine farm adjacent to the town, which consists of 115 acres, all in good cultivation with comfortable out buildings, etc., and an orchard of 400 bearing apple trees of select varieties."

The biography also identifies Samuel, Amanda, and their daughter Mary as members of the local Baptist church. The Paxtons must have taken their religion seriously: George's younger brother, Frank Lawler Paxton, was named for a long-time Baptist preacher in the area. (Frank, who went on to be a miner and one of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the Spanish American War, would later complain that he had been "churched to death" as a child.)

The census for 1880 finds George, at age 17, living with his parents; the note for occupation says "works on farm."

That fall, George entered William Jewell College, a Baptist institution in Liberty, Missouri. The school has no record of his graduation, but he was enrolled in a liberal arts curriculum there for at least two years, 1880-81 and 1881-82.

After that, I lose track of him for a while. There is an item in a biography of a doctor in Montrose, Richard B. Fewel, that may refer to him. It says the doctor “had the first telephone line in Montrose running from his drug store to his residence, over a quarter of a mile, put up by George Paxton in 1884.” Although we can't know for sure that it was our George, I like to think it was the kind of thing a young engineering-minded man (who later would promote the first electric line in Joplin) might have done with his free time.

What else he did is a subject for speculation. I will assume that it didn't take him long to get into the mining business, because by the turn of the century he was a highly regarded authority on zinc mining in the Joplin area, which was one of the world's major suppliers of zinc at the time. It was probably while working in that area that he met Grace Overholser, whom he married in St. Louis on November 30, 1893. (I don't know why they were married in St. Louis; it suggests a possible elopement.)

Grace, born in 1869, was the daughter of Levi and Mary (Young) Overholser, who had come from Palestine, Illinois, to Baxter Springs, Kansas, in the 1880s. (Baxter Springs was just across the line from Missouri in southeast Kansas; the mining district was known as the "tri-state area" encompassing parts of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma.) Levi Overholser, also known as Lee, was a dry goods merchant in Illinois and presumably engaged in some sort of business in Baxter Springs until the family moved to Oklahoma City in 1893. Levi's brother Henry had arrived in Oklahoma City on the day of the great 1889 Oklahoma Land Run and established himself in real estate and other businesses, and Levi joined him soon after. But the family must have stayed in Baxter Springs long enough for George and Grace to meet.

[UPDATE, 8/30/07: See this post, and these two, for more about Levi Overholser and his family.]

George and Grace had two children: George Burton Paxton, born February 22, 1896, in Oklahoma City (It's not clear whether the Paxtons might have lived there at the time, or if Grace went to be with her parents while she had the baby. George apparently traveled a lot in the West for his mining work.) and Clara Paxton, born October 9, 1899, in Joplin.

By the late 1890s, we begin to see references to George Paxton in newspapers related to his work. A Dallas Morning News item from 1897 lists him as a director of the newly formed Winifred Mining Company in Oklahoma City. An advertisement in the Chicago Tribune from 1899 touting the prospects of the Continental Zinc Co. (for which George was a consulting engineer) identifies him as secretary of the Missouri-Kansas Zinc Miners' Association and "one of the highest zinc authorities in America." Around this time, he also developed something called the Paxton Scale for determining the price of ore.

In June of 1900, the family was found by a census taker at 626 Wall Street in Joplin. His occupation was listed as “mining engineer.” His wife Grace is listed as having borne three children, two of whom are living. This was the only evidence I have found for a third child of George and Grace; he or she must have died in infancy.

While I think George had worked further west before, in September 1900 we hear from a Taos newspaper that he has been hired as superintendent for the Anaconda Copper Co. there. Eventually, George would move permanently to Red River, New Mexico, and the copper mining business.

On March 26, 1901, Grace died of pneumonia. Two years later, George married Susan Botsford, a 24-year-old native of Ohio. It's not clear just where Burton and Clara lived during the decade after their mother's death, but they probably spent most of their time with George's mother Amanda. The elder Paxtons had moved to Joplin in the 1890s, and Samuel died there in 1903. Amanda later moved to Independence, Missouri, where her daughter Mary Paxton Victor (she had married a Baptist preacher) was living.

George and Susan had a child of their own on October 24, 1908, a daughter they called Elizabeth. She was born in Red River.

George got increasingly involved in his New Mexico interests over the decade, as clips from the New Mexican indicate. He operated a property near Red River that was at various times referred to as the Anaconda mine, the Copper King Mine, and the Paxton Mine.

Somewhere along the way, he also got involved with the effort to secure statehood for New Mexico. I have found no documentation of just what his involvement was--his daughter Clara described him as a lobbyist--but it was significant enough for him to spend several months in Washington, D.C., in 1910 as the statehood bill was working its way through Congress. He apparently took up residence at the Riggs House Hotel there around January.

At some point around this time, his son Burton had found a golden eagle feather at Red River. His father took it to a jeweler in Kansas City (Clara remembered going with him) to have it made into a quill pen with a band of Taos County gold and the inscription "State of New Mexico." George had either been charged or had appointed himself with the task of supplying a ceremonial pen with which the President of the United States would sign the statehood act.

George must have known by this time that he was ill with Bright's Disease, a kidney ailment. He had suffered from the chronic form of the disease for 12 years, according to his death certificate. It finally killed him on June 17, 1910, the day that the House of Representatives passed the statehood bill. President Taft signed it into law three days later, using the eagle-quill pen. The essentials of this story are confirmed by a contemporary book called A Concise History of New Mexico (1912):

"The President said a few words of congratulation, and then proposed to affix his official signature. The postmaster general presented a gold pen with the request that it should be used, and Delegate Andrews produced the unique gold-banded quill taken from the great American eagle captured in Taos, and furnished for the occasion, in its beautiful case, as a patriotic service by George B. Paxton, when he had no thought that death would forbid his presence at the ceremony. The President wrote half of the signature with the former and the remainder with the latter, returning the pens to the donors as mementoes of this great historic occasion."

George was 47 years old. His body was returned to Joplin for burial. Among his other achievements, it turns out that he was, in the words of the local newspaper, "the father of Scottish Rite Masonry in the valley of Joplin." He had an elaborate funeral at the Scottish Rite cathedral.

This is about what I know at this point. I'd welcome any information, anecdotes, and especially pictures that anyone might have of George.

I've got a few other ideas for posts; let me know if you have any questions about family history. For those of you who don't count George as an ancestor, rest assured that I'll be posting about the Branches, Jehus, Vermillions, Jichas, Joneses, Shumates, and Overholsers as time wears on. . . .

UPDATE, 3/27/07: A cousin kindly sent me a photo of George. Thanks, cousin!

UPDATE, 4/19/07: Another cousin visited Montrose and sent along pictures of the old Paxton farm in Montrose.

UPDATE, 6/14/07: Cousin #1 saw something I missed in the 1910 census, in which George was recorded in April at the Riggs House in Washington. I had thought that he was there alone, but just below George on the census roll are his wife Susan and one-year-old daughter, listed as "Helen E." (Elizabeth must have been her middle name.) So it seems likely that they were with him in Washington when he died two months later.