The bride and groom--Mary Beth Lane and Richard Lee married in September 2014 to become Mr. and Mrs. Lee.
September 2014
Mama Sherry's baby girl Mary Beth Lane is getting married at the end of September 2014...everyone's very busy with all the last minute stuff that needs doing. Mary Beth is marrying Richard Lee (also of Fairfield, CT). Sometime before the holidays this year we will post some Bride's choice wedding photographs in the Quilt.
And we'll have some update pics of the littles who are growing like weeds!
--Lara Lynn Lane
Thanksgiving 2013
Digitalizing some of our older pictures...just in time, some of them are starting to fade.
Mama Sherry's baby girl Mary Beth Lane is getting married at the end of September 2014...everyone's very busy with all the last minute stuff that needs doing. Mary Beth is marrying Richard Lee (also of Fairfield, CT). Sometime before the holidays this year we will post some Bride's choice wedding photographs in the Quilt.
And we'll have some update pics of the littles who are growing like weeds!
--Lara Lynn Lane
Thanksgiving 2013
Digitalizing some of our older pictures...just in time, some of them are starting to fade.
This webpage has become more of a "cue" however you spell that...where things are getting ready to be placed in the right place in the Quilt. To travel to the other webpages in our web cluster click on one of the links below.
Basically, we need to get caught up on some reading esp. regarding Germanic-speaking ancestors and so we're doing that now (late June 2013). Soon enough we'll be back to working on the websites.
We were excited to hear about Hasenclever's ironworks in New Jersey, famous and long-lived...this brought hundreds of skilled German workers to 50,000 acres in the Ramapo Mountains. And of course, there were the glassmakers using the fine Jersey sand in Southern Jersey cranking out "Wistarware." But the dates of these ventures alone do not make this a sure connection with our German Foxes. We still have plenty of information gathering to do about them as Americans before we can gander some guesses on why they came here.
We're reading A GENEALOGIST'S GUIDE TO DISCOVERING YOUR GERMANIC ANCESTORS which'll put some hair on your chest so to speak. The authors, Anderson and Thode are relentlessly measured in their encouragement and can sound downright strict about not following any fantasy. Pragmatism and time-efficiency are the hallmarks of the research they are demanding. Expelling common and false stereotypes about "Dutch" and "Germans" is definitely central to their mission and this works for us since we are not meandering some countryside savoring brews and snacks. We're on a mission too, with a budget smaller than copy costs. Tribes to kirchensprengel, electors to inheritance, causes of emigration to counter-reformation...we're surveying the landscape so that we can prove to be educated as well as motivated here in Mama's Quilt.
Yes...Tunkers or tinkers, we're open to finding out of our Fuchs.
Meanwhile we've been trying to collect what we can of Grandmother Matilda.
The simple story...
IN the 1850 US Census for Perry Township we find John and Metilda Delana with Elizabeth (21), Pishna (18), and Margaret (17) in a household with William and Elizabeth Fox. John, Metilda, and Elizabeth cannot read or write. John's a farmer but he has no savings/investments that add up to "personal estate value." On the next page of the Census we find more Delana in that household (dwelling #67, family#67)...Thomas (14), Meriah (13), Sarah (11 and "dumb"/could've been a speech impediment or some vocal chord damage), William (9), John (7), Jane (3) and Isaac is the one year old. That seven year old John is OUR John Jr. who grows up and marries Rebecca BLAKER. Thomas, Meriah, Sarah, William and John Jr. are attending school. All were born in Pennsylvania.
We heard from the John Conklin Papers (he was a grandson of John and Matilda that the Calverts (Matilda's biological family) came to Green County from Maryland.
We find John and Matilda in July of 1870 over in Wayne Township (also in Greene County). With them in #258/282 is only Malissa Delany. John Delany is aged 60 and a laborer. His personal worth is $300. Matilda is keeping house and Malissa is only 15. All were born in Pennsylvania and all are literate. They have no parentage of foreign birth so we should be able to find their folks as we step back further a generation.
In 1874, John Delaney, Sr. (Matilda's husband) dies over in West Virginia. It's his son (Isaac) who reports the death but the day and month of 1874 has only a marking in it. Same with the entry for his parents, no names but it indicates they were born in Pennsylvania.
There are, apparently, civilian Confederate papers recorded under both the names Dulany and Calvert (which we believe is Matilda's maiden name per Conklin's vertical file information). But we can't see too much about those papers via familysearch.
Certainly the John Delany who died in 1874, Monongalia County, is the age of the John married to Matilda and Matilda is listed as his "consort of."
Also, his death in 1874 would be the reason why we find Matilda as head of house in Battelle Township (US Census 1880) with son Isaac (age 28) and daughter Malissa (age 23) and grand-daughter Adda J. (our grandmother Ida Mae's sister).
Son John Dulany (Jr.) at that point (1880) is with wife Rebecca and children Thomas A. and Ida M., ages four and two.
John and Matilda seem to have been more mobile than a lot of our other ancestors at that time.
Basically, we need to get caught up on some reading esp. regarding Germanic-speaking ancestors and so we're doing that now (late June 2013). Soon enough we'll be back to working on the websites.
We were excited to hear about Hasenclever's ironworks in New Jersey, famous and long-lived...this brought hundreds of skilled German workers to 50,000 acres in the Ramapo Mountains. And of course, there were the glassmakers using the fine Jersey sand in Southern Jersey cranking out "Wistarware." But the dates of these ventures alone do not make this a sure connection with our German Foxes. We still have plenty of information gathering to do about them as Americans before we can gander some guesses on why they came here.
We're reading A GENEALOGIST'S GUIDE TO DISCOVERING YOUR GERMANIC ANCESTORS which'll put some hair on your chest so to speak. The authors, Anderson and Thode are relentlessly measured in their encouragement and can sound downright strict about not following any fantasy. Pragmatism and time-efficiency are the hallmarks of the research they are demanding. Expelling common and false stereotypes about "Dutch" and "Germans" is definitely central to their mission and this works for us since we are not meandering some countryside savoring brews and snacks. We're on a mission too, with a budget smaller than copy costs. Tribes to kirchensprengel, electors to inheritance, causes of emigration to counter-reformation...we're surveying the landscape so that we can prove to be educated as well as motivated here in Mama's Quilt.
Yes...Tunkers or tinkers, we're open to finding out of our Fuchs.
Meanwhile we've been trying to collect what we can of Grandmother Matilda.
The simple story...
IN the 1850 US Census for Perry Township we find John and Metilda Delana with Elizabeth (21), Pishna (18), and Margaret (17) in a household with William and Elizabeth Fox. John, Metilda, and Elizabeth cannot read or write. John's a farmer but he has no savings/investments that add up to "personal estate value." On the next page of the Census we find more Delana in that household (dwelling #67, family#67)...Thomas (14), Meriah (13), Sarah (11 and "dumb"/could've been a speech impediment or some vocal chord damage), William (9), John (7), Jane (3) and Isaac is the one year old. That seven year old John is OUR John Jr. who grows up and marries Rebecca BLAKER. Thomas, Meriah, Sarah, William and John Jr. are attending school. All were born in Pennsylvania.
We heard from the John Conklin Papers (he was a grandson of John and Matilda that the Calverts (Matilda's biological family) came to Green County from Maryland.
We find John and Matilda in July of 1870 over in Wayne Township (also in Greene County). With them in #258/282 is only Malissa Delany. John Delany is aged 60 and a laborer. His personal worth is $300. Matilda is keeping house and Malissa is only 15. All were born in Pennsylvania and all are literate. They have no parentage of foreign birth so we should be able to find their folks as we step back further a generation.
In 1874, John Delaney, Sr. (Matilda's husband) dies over in West Virginia. It's his son (Isaac) who reports the death but the day and month of 1874 has only a marking in it. Same with the entry for his parents, no names but it indicates they were born in Pennsylvania.
There are, apparently, civilian Confederate papers recorded under both the names Dulany and Calvert (which we believe is Matilda's maiden name per Conklin's vertical file information). But we can't see too much about those papers via familysearch.
Certainly the John Delany who died in 1874, Monongalia County, is the age of the John married to Matilda and Matilda is listed as his "consort of."
Also, his death in 1874 would be the reason why we find Matilda as head of house in Battelle Township (US Census 1880) with son Isaac (age 28) and daughter Malissa (age 23) and grand-daughter Adda J. (our grandmother Ida Mae's sister).
Son John Dulany (Jr.) at that point (1880) is with wife Rebecca and children Thomas A. and Ida M., ages four and two.
John and Matilda seem to have been more mobile than a lot of our other ancestors at that time.
Reunions...a great opportunity to gather long lost memories and family tree stuff.
Perfect timing for me since I was starting to gather (click) for the latest piece of mama's quilt.
Me? I was virtually up in Minnesota. Now I'm off to Illinois. Despite Baldwin's Candee Genealogy giving us a few references to Illinois (mainly Peoria and Farmington) we know there were Candee/Candy in Stephenson County. Some in the villages of Buck Eye, Dakota, and Rock Grove.
So we're isolating records in order to sort cluster.
It does appear that based on US Census records for a Samuel Candy that these Candy moved from Pennsylvania to the freshly surveyed and plotted up township of Buck Eye sometime around 1848. This is a deduction on the evidence that Samuel and Polly's youngest in the batch of children in their household was two years old and the only one born in Illinois. The Census of 1850 did not record relationship however so we need to do some further research and development of our case.
A commonality shows up in our searching. Living and farming with Samuel Candy is a man by the name of George Emerisk. If we switchover to the Census of 1850 for Walker, Centre, Pennsylvania we find a Levi Candy married to a Catharine Emerisk! We know that Catharine was an Emerisk because if we flash forward to 1936 we find the death record of a John Andrew Candy whose parents were Levi Candy and Catharine Emerisk. On the PA Census of 1850, there's that John as a newborn. House #1857, Family #1884.
I'll be writing to the Stephenson County Historical Society and the Stephenson County Genealogical Society in effort to obtain potential vertical files or any other clues and bits of story we might glean from them. Buck Eye and Dakota villages/townships were right next to each other on a map in Tilden's History of the county. And Rock Grove is just the slightest bit north of them. Rock Grove, you'll recall, is where we found our George Augustus Candy as a thirteen year old--before he joined his people in Iowa.
They say that 1840 was a "golden year of Buck Eye Township" (536 Tilden). And that by 1849 there was a Methodist Church in nearby Cedarville. There was a Methodist Congregation in Dakota and the minister served both groups of people. Tilden's compilation of 1880 was accomplished with the help of a historical company and the locals of course. And his work is rolled over into Fulwider's History of Stephenson County in 1910. By 1910, however, the heydays of a golden Buck Eye were long since past. Fulwider writes, "hardly a village in the strict sense of the word since the removal of the post office. At that time the main highly functioning manufacture was to be found in the Maple Spring Dairy. Whereas earlier in its history the area was host to a "booming" carriage business.
The first white settler (as opposed to "Indian camps" consisting of "Pottawatomies" and "Winnebagoes") was John Goddard who "came to the regions" in 1835. 1835ish, that's a milestone marker for this place and represented incursion into the Northwest Territory. More families came in 1837 and "settlement" began to evolve from parish-style family organization into a real farming locale. Previous to 1840 it was "hard to make a living" (Fulwider, 341) and the settlers were mainly foraging and hunting and so changing the landscape of the natural world around them. But after 1840 people were established enough to mill and farm and this created a more sustainable environment.
By 1910 the once flourishing Evangelical community within the Stephenson County region was, sadly, "abandoned and dilapidated" if we can judge a people by its buildings. There were, at that time, some 3000 inhabitants still in Buck Eye's 36 square miles and most of them lived on farms.
Two years before Samuel and Polly moved to Buck Eye "subscriptions were made for the organization of a school"...the building to be located near the "burying-ground" (539 Tilden). And indeed, on the Census of 1850Samuel and Polly's list of children include three "attending school within the year." Catharine (age 12), Sophia (ten), and John who is seven years old.
That John was obviously born before 1850. So we can compare him to the John Candy in the Household of Levi Candy in the US Census of 1880 for Dakota, Stephenson, Illinois. He's 30 and single. But he's the son to the head of the household there. His parents: Levi and Catharine Candy.
Up in Illinois another significant fluctuation in research happens. We start to see more and more "Kennedys" as opposed to "Candys." And some of these are connected to an increasing variation of surnames in other families.
Well, there's plenty to do. I'll keep you posted.
--Lara
Perfect timing for me since I was starting to gather (click) for the latest piece of mama's quilt.
Me? I was virtually up in Minnesota. Now I'm off to Illinois. Despite Baldwin's Candee Genealogy giving us a few references to Illinois (mainly Peoria and Farmington) we know there were Candee/Candy in Stephenson County. Some in the villages of Buck Eye, Dakota, and Rock Grove.
So we're isolating records in order to sort cluster.
It does appear that based on US Census records for a Samuel Candy that these Candy moved from Pennsylvania to the freshly surveyed and plotted up township of Buck Eye sometime around 1848. This is a deduction on the evidence that Samuel and Polly's youngest in the batch of children in their household was two years old and the only one born in Illinois. The Census of 1850 did not record relationship however so we need to do some further research and development of our case.
A commonality shows up in our searching. Living and farming with Samuel Candy is a man by the name of George Emerisk. If we switchover to the Census of 1850 for Walker, Centre, Pennsylvania we find a Levi Candy married to a Catharine Emerisk! We know that Catharine was an Emerisk because if we flash forward to 1936 we find the death record of a John Andrew Candy whose parents were Levi Candy and Catharine Emerisk. On the PA Census of 1850, there's that John as a newborn. House #1857, Family #1884.
I'll be writing to the Stephenson County Historical Society and the Stephenson County Genealogical Society in effort to obtain potential vertical files or any other clues and bits of story we might glean from them. Buck Eye and Dakota villages/townships were right next to each other on a map in Tilden's History of the county. And Rock Grove is just the slightest bit north of them. Rock Grove, you'll recall, is where we found our George Augustus Candy as a thirteen year old--before he joined his people in Iowa.
They say that 1840 was a "golden year of Buck Eye Township" (536 Tilden). And that by 1849 there was a Methodist Church in nearby Cedarville. There was a Methodist Congregation in Dakota and the minister served both groups of people. Tilden's compilation of 1880 was accomplished with the help of a historical company and the locals of course. And his work is rolled over into Fulwider's History of Stephenson County in 1910. By 1910, however, the heydays of a golden Buck Eye were long since past. Fulwider writes, "hardly a village in the strict sense of the word since the removal of the post office. At that time the main highly functioning manufacture was to be found in the Maple Spring Dairy. Whereas earlier in its history the area was host to a "booming" carriage business.
The first white settler (as opposed to "Indian camps" consisting of "Pottawatomies" and "Winnebagoes") was John Goddard who "came to the regions" in 1835. 1835ish, that's a milestone marker for this place and represented incursion into the Northwest Territory. More families came in 1837 and "settlement" began to evolve from parish-style family organization into a real farming locale. Previous to 1840 it was "hard to make a living" (Fulwider, 341) and the settlers were mainly foraging and hunting and so changing the landscape of the natural world around them. But after 1840 people were established enough to mill and farm and this created a more sustainable environment.
By 1910 the once flourishing Evangelical community within the Stephenson County region was, sadly, "abandoned and dilapidated" if we can judge a people by its buildings. There were, at that time, some 3000 inhabitants still in Buck Eye's 36 square miles and most of them lived on farms.
Two years before Samuel and Polly moved to Buck Eye "subscriptions were made for the organization of a school"...the building to be located near the "burying-ground" (539 Tilden). And indeed, on the Census of 1850Samuel and Polly's list of children include three "attending school within the year." Catharine (age 12), Sophia (ten), and John who is seven years old.
That John was obviously born before 1850. So we can compare him to the John Candy in the Household of Levi Candy in the US Census of 1880 for Dakota, Stephenson, Illinois. He's 30 and single. But he's the son to the head of the household there. His parents: Levi and Catharine Candy.
Up in Illinois another significant fluctuation in research happens. We start to see more and more "Kennedys" as opposed to "Candys." And some of these are connected to an increasing variation of surnames in other families.
Well, there's plenty to do. I'll keep you posted.
--Lara
very un-fun part here...tons of old files to merge and pics to wade through...organization of the hulk of material...turning all that old draft stuff into something that charts the journey and finding a good balance between rough and polished. it's taking a couple days.
Ayep, making progress little by little. The Quilt's pretty much just a foundation for doing the deeper research on microfilms and in collections.
I'm using the opportunity to re-fresh on all the genealogy basics which I learned about piecemeal over the years in between other studies. It always feels good to dive into a field of research and acquaint and re-famililiarize self with established landmarks like a particular worker in the field or the signposts indicating where the work's been done already. So one thing I am doing along the way on this trip is comparing Croom's Genealogist's Companion and Sourcebook to what's available online about fifteen years after her magnanimous work came out in print--for just twenty bucks! Can you imagine? Twenty bucks for a motherlode of how to, what worked, organizing disparate and far-flung, and probably a lifetime of compilation. I don't have twenty bucks so I was fortunate to rent this one from the public library. Speaking of which, in our town it really cramps the researcher that all the local history and genealogical stuff has been rounded up and put in the history museum. Oh man, can't win for trying!
Seems like, to me, massive fires which have blotted out entire chunks of evidence of our peoples should be enough of a reason to split up and duplicate research not round it up and limit access to it. Of course, legitimacy has thus far meant in culture deeming something "special" so, for instance not everybody can hand out marriage certificates, or, you can't get a driver's license at a car dealership. And yet, academically, much expansion of education and understanding has happened since the widening open of "the canon."
There is, there's metaphor in there for whatever this is that we are all going through as a society regarding standards. Some things are better because people turn away from forced canon in literature (for example) or when people widen open the prescribed canons. And some things mean lowering standards. In the fluctuations between what's typically called high and low culture is volatile standard. And this can create an immense pressure on an individual to keep up, stand firm, or otherwise relate.
And you thought us library types don't have relationships. I myself have a fierce love of the hunt and gathering. A great fondness for some works and a confounding dislike of others. And all my life I've been in relationship with the state of scholarship in America which sometimes merely whispers and sometimes screams and begs for people to entreat. Very often scholarship is the grounding rod between atmospheres of politics and governance, art and madness, etc. And usually it is where enough safety (through checks and balances, community, and focused solitude) can be forged for societies to make it through anything from apples to war.
I wouldn't feel right about loading up all of Croom's goodies onto mama's quilt but feel free to contact me if you need some assistance getting unstuck or if you want an update on where we need to look next. Where possible I'll be re-adding some of the correspondence and such that shows us who is working on what. Now that we don't need to take the whole damn thing down every time there are changes to work station here, we should make better progress. But I have too much other work to do to do much more than add a tidbit a day.
We need to post little blurbs about each of us contemporaries...consider sending me something so I don't make up anything stupid. Tay?!
Bit of a mish mosh at the start of anything. Should be in much better shape by Christmas. Above are some of the components in the West Virginia panel. Obviously we don't want to spend time on textile arts creating any false information so the simple rule is not to work on that part of the project unless we've done a thorough job on our research. Speaking of which we've caught a mistake we made in our research about Grandmother Nellie Lake Candy Belden that got out on a family sheet online. It's on our list of things to do by next Monday to make effort to correct the misinformation! We also caught some confusion about family tree on Find A Grave and we'll make an effort to remedy that as well. That had us pouring over more established sources of information today which we can now cite anywhere in the Quilt where we copied and/or repeated that information.
I have a hard time working with electronic information, like I get overwhelmed between reading virtual and not just copying and pasting but recording all the information on my written maps. Digitization can help us find stuff faster but it definitely also adds steps to the laborious old school work. I love doing it, not complaining, but en masse information hunting and gathering put together with any kind of production can be depressing. Personally, I have to get more in art-making mode to do the blog of the e-quilt. Like it's a different phase of project development...which is why big companies and organizations might call this type of project Research and Development. Whether we are creating paragraphs or business reports we move along step by step compiling and presenting. Each tidbit of research and presentation develops "the case" and/or "the cause."
Sometimes writers feel more stressed about factual writing and sometimes they feel more stressed about fiction writing. Either way the writer has to collect nuggets, polish each, and string together in some fashion.
Ayep, making progress little by little. The Quilt's pretty much just a foundation for doing the deeper research on microfilms and in collections.
I'm using the opportunity to re-fresh on all the genealogy basics which I learned about piecemeal over the years in between other studies. It always feels good to dive into a field of research and acquaint and re-famililiarize self with established landmarks like a particular worker in the field or the signposts indicating where the work's been done already. So one thing I am doing along the way on this trip is comparing Croom's Genealogist's Companion and Sourcebook to what's available online about fifteen years after her magnanimous work came out in print--for just twenty bucks! Can you imagine? Twenty bucks for a motherlode of how to, what worked, organizing disparate and far-flung, and probably a lifetime of compilation. I don't have twenty bucks so I was fortunate to rent this one from the public library. Speaking of which, in our town it really cramps the researcher that all the local history and genealogical stuff has been rounded up and put in the history museum. Oh man, can't win for trying!
I have a hard time working with electronic information, like I get overwhelmed between reading virtual and not just copying and pasting but recording all the information on my written maps. Digitization can help us find stuff faster but it definitely also adds steps to the laborious old school work. I love doing it, not complaining, but en masse information hunting and gathering put together with any kind of production can be depressing. Personally, I have to get more in art-making mode to do the blog of the e-quilt. Like it's a different phase of project development...which is why big companies and organizations might call this type of project Research and Development. Whether we are creating paragraphs or business reports we move along step by step compiling and presenting. Each tidbit of research and presentation develops "the case" and/or "the cause."
Sometimes writers feel more stressed about factual writing and sometimes they feel more stressed about fiction writing. Either way the writer has to collect nuggets, polish each, and string together in some fashion.
A Starlight Is Born--Betty June
Many times, Pearl had told the story of how little, teeny-tiny, her daughter--Betty June was when she was born.
Her head was so small it fit inside a tea cup.
Great Grandma Pearl held out a leathery hand and flipped the whiter side into the sunshine to show us kids that Grandma Betty was so tiny when she was born she fit in Pearl's hand!
Whole Grandma? Whole Grandma fit in your hand? We cocked our faces and tried to scrutinize the truth out of her with scrunched up eyebrows and nonblinking eyes.
Betty June was always petite.
Some people in the family think that Betty June was born a twin.
Betty herself always told her daughter Sherry that she believed she was a twin But...
Grandma Pearl wouldn't budge on talking about that because it "broke her heart," Mama says.
So "Betty never really knew," Sherry explains shaking her head indicating that it's a shame--such an in-need-of-mending quilt.
We try and work out the what-we've-heard with the factual evidence.
The twin died either by swallowing a button (which is what Pearl told Betty) or by "crib death" (another way Pearl put it, as Betty recalled later in her life).
So, we're looking for factual evidence from around the year 1927 (when Betty was born).
The US CENSUS 1930 paints a pale picture in this matter. In that year we find Pearl (age 26) and Ben is 32 years old. Two children are listed: Louise D and Betty J, ages 9 and 2
Official place of residence, Mannington, Marion, West Virginia
On paper, Pearl and Ben are still married.
As they are in another census account of themselves that same year, 1930.
US CENSUS 1930, Union, Kanawha, West Virginia
Household:
Head B C Wilson, male, 33 years old, born West Virginia
Wife Pearl Wilson, female, 26 years old, born West Virginia
No children listed on that account.
Her head was so small it fit inside a tea cup.
Great Grandma Pearl held out a leathery hand and flipped the whiter side into the sunshine to show us kids that Grandma Betty was so tiny when she was born she fit in Pearl's hand!
Whole Grandma? Whole Grandma fit in your hand? We cocked our faces and tried to scrutinize the truth out of her with scrunched up eyebrows and nonblinking eyes.
Betty June was always petite.
Some people in the family think that Betty June was born a twin.
Betty herself always told her daughter Sherry that she believed she was a twin But...
Grandma Pearl wouldn't budge on talking about that because it "broke her heart," Mama says.
So "Betty never really knew," Sherry explains shaking her head indicating that it's a shame--such an in-need-of-mending quilt.
We try and work out the what-we've-heard with the factual evidence.
The twin died either by swallowing a button (which is what Pearl told Betty) or by "crib death" (another way Pearl put it, as Betty recalled later in her life).
So, we're looking for factual evidence from around the year 1927 (when Betty was born).
The US CENSUS 1930 paints a pale picture in this matter. In that year we find Pearl (age 26) and Ben is 32 years old. Two children are listed: Louise D and Betty J, ages 9 and 2
Official place of residence, Mannington, Marion, West Virginia
On paper, Pearl and Ben are still married.
As they are in another census account of themselves that same year, 1930.
US CENSUS 1930, Union, Kanawha, West Virginia
Household:
Head B C Wilson, male, 33 years old, born West Virginia
Wife Pearl Wilson, female, 26 years old, born West Virginia
The beginning of this project…
At the beginning of this project I spent three days glued to the computer. It was after I'd started interviewing Mama. I was transcribing the tapes when I decided to search engine some of the names in the stories.
It was like being dropped into a thick mountain side area and being totally lost!
I'd be jotting down notes of possible connections and following maybes and then stop dead in my tracks and think...how am I going to get to know about my family like this?
Which brought up another question: Why don't we already know everything about our family?
Distance, is one reason why there is more unknowing about our family than there is knowing. On both "sides" of my family tree (my maternal and paternal) there "was always" considerable distance between us. Part of that ties in with the story of many Americans advancing through time...although there are settlements, there has also been an awful lot of scattering.
I re-entered the few place names I'd "got" and stared at the maps trying to "place" the names that Mama remembered IN the locations I'd just heard about. This began a journey through time and space. This journey was more virtual than physical at this point in the research. And we set up the website to reflect the enormity of space to cover. Whereas a distance of some hundred miles in physical terms could be covered with one click of the mouse, we still had lots of traveling to do to gather all the information about our family!
We found ourselves running around between records and also between keepers of records in the different places. Some were official places of records-keeping and some were like stations in the terrain of genealogical research--men and women devoted to sustaining ancestry and history planted firmly in the landscape of archives and the world going digital.
As a literary journalist I am no stranger to traveling to witness history unfolding and to gather information from different sources, but I am not in a financial position to fund this project so I've had to rally and collect as much "free" information as possible and compare tidbits to tidbits, fitting each piece into the bigger puzzle of Mama's quilt.
Although I have traveled fairly extensively throughout the United States and "lived" in more than a couple dozen places along the way, I wasn't near any of the old root sources when I knew of any family history so I missed out on the chance to do in-person research before now. When I was in graduate school in Vermont I had the opportunity to take a seminar in which we began to think about mapping our families. Just recording the places we've lived compared to the places where our ancestors lived proved, in general, an acceleration in the pace of moving around. Of course, these were artists and writers in this seminar and most of us found ourselves even more mobile than our distant relatives were. My own map showed me with very active feet due to my vocation of journalism and the choice to live in many places rather than sit on the porch at the homestead! My parents had lived in far fewer places, "And they have lived in more places than their parents is the general rule when we do these kinds of maps," a teacher explained. It was my first introduction to applying trends to historical research.
Our movement, both physically and in spirit, ties many American families into larger trends in our country.
Distance...is what I feel when I look at place on the maps on the computer.
The distance in physical space compacts the not knowing about things for sure. It's more difficult to weigh facts against hearsay and it can be impossible to break through walls in research without connecting with cousins and other relations who've preserved the ancestral treasure chests.
The largest patch of green on the map near Moundsville is the Marshall County Fairgrounds.
I had been told that Moundsville was called that because of the waste piles of coal.
I cruise into a Moundsville information site via the computer and find out that the name claims to have origins older than that...the area is home to the Adena Indian burial grounds...the mounds like resting giants...the mounds like mounds of other civilizations...the mounds like...
Something all the people talk about when they talk about this place.
The mounds like beacons on this journey of trying to understand where we came from...And trying to "write" this story in the 21st century.
In the beginning of this project I had no small amount of challenge in finding the right voice to convey all this information. There was the little kid me, shocked and awed to discover the tiniest tidbots of real in our story, and, struggling to carve out some podium from which to share the stage with all these other historians who were doing this before me.
There was the almost forty-something year old woman grasping the emotional life of the characters in the story. In this I did a lot of crying because, of course, dipping into legend always proves that the characters were just as human as their contemporaries.
There was the forager me. Tip-toeing and stumbling in the dark and rushing backwards and forwards eager to tell Mama what I was finding. Sometimes I'd get too excited and make mistakes. Mistakes weren't difficult to make because it takes a great deal of patience and perseverance to GO SLOW and record pockets of information carefully and then verify all the data by comparison and to official records. Mistakes can also come about because sometimes there is quite a difference between the family stories and real life.
I had scant information to work with in the beginning of this project. Well, I have a ton of things learned about my country, and I had scraps from family stories but I have never had many factual details about my family and my roots.
It seems odd that at this time in my life when I'm personally wondering how to move forward, I find myself trying to find out where we've been. This is, I think, part middle age landing and part of a global movement that seems to suggest that if enough of us get back in touch with the reality of where we've come from, we can work on where we're going in the present and for the sake of the future.
Staring at the virtual maps--zooming in and out--making lists of the place names as if they might whisper to me what I am looking for, I determine that although I don't, as yet, know exactly where my people came from, by all accounts we seem to have come from that part of West Virginia where another State--Pennsylvania--makes a box imprint on the map. I half wonder if it looks like that in reality. I know it doesn't because over the years I have driven all through America...searching for something, like the something that might be inside of a box and I can't see it from over here. Have to go in and learn.
A lot of boundaries in America are more abstract than they are concrete like state lines crossed on highways. As a writer of this family history I am having to get good about detecting boundaries between people too. No small amount of professionalism is required to talk to people about formally private matters!
Days pass and I get an email back from reaching out to a distant relative. The little bit of information jumps out as if from the trunk...a word, a name...and I find that this helps me get more precise about something.
My Great Grandma Pearl grew up in a place called Miracle Run.
I "googled it" and find...
There's a Blue Goose Road.
I flick between screens on the computer and see which roads have been there for a long time, maybe long enough to have been the same roads my ancestors traveled, and, reading local histories.
As a lifelong scholar I know that it's been the trial of the millennium to get all the hardcopy materials of the world loaded into the Internet and I get excited because though there isn't a ton of information on the computer there is most likely tangible evidence and leads out there and I just need to find them.
Blue Goose, Miracle Run Road...
And I found a bunch of early American history about the area--online! The Quilt for Mama project was suddenly taking on dimensions. I needed to figure out how best to log and relate all this research, credit the work that wasn't mine, and PRESENT it all on the Quilt blogsite.
Doing a cluster of websites with a blogsite as headquarters was my offering to my mother, Sherry Candy Lane, who had at my age made an all out effort to travel and meet whatever family we knew of. And it was my chance to work up enough material to write a book similar in genre to John O'Brien's AT HOME IN THE HEART OF APPALACHIA. I found a copy at my local library ongoing booksale and was ecstatic because I'd been so busy working on an interdisciplinary arts degree I'd gotten away from my own studies of literary journalism. O'Brien's book was a beacon in the landscape of literary journalism and reminded me that genealogy and historical nonfiction had been pooling in a queue of my studies. Back in the 1990s we'd hit a collective questioning of distinctions between genres of writing, rather than get stuck in the quagmire I marched out of strictly academic argument space and went to work WRITING literary journalism. One of my first projects was about five contemporary women who were doing various kinds of art. Artists being attached to real life despite the sometimes reputation for flying free in artdoing, come with their own family stories, so that project (the RECKONING project) wasn't all that different from other contemporary works which include history in their purview.
Reading O'Brien was like a homecoming for me as a writer. But I didn't believe that this kind of work was actual "literary journalism" until I read Joan Didion's WHERE I WAS FROM. Since I had studied Joan's work and could see how WHERE I WAS FROM fit into a whole body of work which was very often literary journalism, I felt that I wouldn't trading my title of literary journalist for some other role as a writer. This may sound silly, but as a serious student of writing and specifically of nonfiction writing and journalism, I can report that distinctions between types of writing similar to distinctions between fact and non-fact are a big damn deal in a world where narrative and action are so closely intertwined. Just this much back into considering a new project had me ALSO needing to reckon with my graduate studies. To do some version of all that learning on the Internet, for free, or to hold out until I could get a teaching position somewhere bubbled to the top of the tar pit.
Distractedly I kept reading whatever I could find online during the evenings after some long days of transcribing audio tapes and setting up an archive of Lane Family History. And brainstorming on best etiquette in producing the blogsite.
Stuck in West Virginia, trying to get my mind around the vast task of learning for myself how America developed as a place alongside all our people living in America...
At the time a man named Blacksville after his family name--Black and made a "town" out of a settlement (which sprouted out of land plots and a tangled history of pre-Revolutionary land claiming and forging)...there were land owners and "squattors."
At my desk I wrestled with the either/or scenarios. And I thought long and hard about placing my ancestors in the picture either way. Whether they were the ones on the deeds or the "squattors"...they FIT!
They were there.
Due South of what is called Brave, Pennsylvania--my people journeyed through Miracle Run.
To learn a bit more about this drawing and Scottish pearls, look for the book THE HARVEST OF THE SEA posted on ElectricScotland.com
Don't forget to come back to the Quilt sometime and learn more about OUR Pearl.
Don't forget to come back to the Quilt sometime and learn more about OUR Pearl.
I found a picture of little Mama around the time she went to visit Mammy and Pappy Fox.
 |
| Sherry Lynn Candy, 1954 |
She remembers going to the "big house" and seeing Mammy, Ida Mae (Delaney) Fox without any shoes on just like in the stories.
 | |||
| The old homestead in Miracle Run, West Virginia. The home of Elias and Ida Mae Fox. |
Sherry was very insistent about not getting adopted because she had a father and someday he would come back to West Branch. And when Sherry moved in with her grandparents, Jesse and Pearl Bohlinger, Grover would visit her there. We've set up a few websites to help us explain the different chapters of this story and you can click on the photograph below to get to the farm!
 |
| Sherry Candy in between her father Grover Candy and her grandfather Jesse Bohlinger. West Branch, Michigan. |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)