Finding Buster's Cemetery

Bing Images

Deserted tombstones,

Bleak and cold,

Who knows what stories

Could be told

Of people now so long removed .
Only hints and whispers  fold

Around us as we think,

“So old,   so old,    so old.”

                             Shirley Taylor

Our Genealogy Group in Belmont has taken an interest in a deserted cemetery in Gaston County, NC.  One of our members, I’ll call him “Buster,” found this deserted cemetery after years of investigating among his family members, and much searching out places around the county.  Some people would remember it being “somewhere near . . . ,” or maybe “over by . . . ,” etc., but never an exact site. 

In the process, as he explored around the county, he found many old deserted cemeteries which were in deplorable condition, really, really sad condition.  He found one cemetery where there were many open graves, big holes in the ground!  Certainly there had been things taken.  He was told by the person showing him around that there were groups of people in the area involved in devil worship and such who desecrated these places for bones and tombstones.  He found where a campfire had been made close by, probably used in some ceremony.  It was sickening to think that the remains of someone’s relatives had been subjected to this horror.

Bing Images

But, finally, at a reunion,  he found a very old aunt who remembered going to a funeral many years ago, at an old cemetery above Dallas, NC, on old route 321, and he went searching.  After much tromping around in high weeds and thick brush, over rutted ground, picking up beggerlice, and ticks, he found the site.  It was completely overgrown, but there was a small stone wall surrounding it.  He found broken headstones belonging to his great grand uncle (a brother to his great grandfather,) his wife and two small children who had not lived long.  The headstones were broken and he had to piece them back together to find the names and dates.  He is certain that there are many others of his family also buried there – it is not a tiny cemetery. 

He came back to our group excited about his find.  He tried to tell

us where it was, there were no obvious entrances or drive way, and it was not visible from the road.   “It was in a field, behind a farmhouse, up a hill,  just a little beyond Little Long Creek,.”  On old Hiwy 321. 

This was all we had to work with but we jumped right in.  I found it on Genwebnc.  It was a recorded cemetery with the proper  name.   The cemetery was named for his family.  But even when it had been abstracted and listed years ago in 1985,  only a couple of stones besides our four were recorded.  It must have been rejected by the public a long time ago.  It was recorded that a small trailer park had once been nearby, and it was thought those children had played there, destroying the stones.  This listing on Genweb had the same directions to get there that we were working with.  One and a half miles north of Dallas, 165 yards beyond Little Long Creek, up a hill, to the right, behind a farm house.  We had our cemetery!

At our meeting Jim pulled up the site from Genweb for our group to get all this information, and we began brainstorming on what to do and how to do it.   Our brainstorming sessions can really become. . . shall I use the word “energetic” to say the least . . .and we do

Richard's Map

really have FUN!   Richard went to the GIS maps and located it.  He layered over several different grids and was able to find the correct property lines, and he enclosed it with a bright red border line, with the cemetery plotted and the land owner noted.   I emailed Robert Carpenter (see the note below about Robert’s September class) who knows EVERYTHING about Lincoln and Gaston County history, and he went to a friend of his who works on abstracting abandoned cemeteries and is an expert in this area, and he went to a friend in the County Tax Department  (I told you it was a GOOD thing to network!), and he came back to us with the present land owner who lives in this area.  It verified the name Richard had found.

Buster is Thrilled!  After his years of searching, we accomplished this for him in two weeks.  He will be contacting this person to get permission to go on the land.  He has gathered up all this information to take to a family reunion which is coming up this fall.  He wants to organize the whole family to join his project to clean up this cemetery and give it back the dignity it deserves.  He is thinking about what kind of sign or marker should go there to recognize the history of this place.  With permission from the County Commissioners, it is possible to remove the stones to another cemetery where a lot of his family is buried, but if the land cleans up nicely he might just leave the gravestones there.  I'll keep you updated.

Bing Images

I told in my blog  We Came From The West  how, when I began working in genealogy so many years ago, my cousin Sandy took me all over Union County finding all the graves.  My great grandfather Ambrose Pinckney House, his wife and family, were all buried at Old Bethel Methodist Church Cemetery in Union County, just above Monroe, NC, on Hiwy 74.  It is not right on the highway, you must go up a short road to find it.  The church had long been moved to another site, leaving the cemetery there by itself, looking forlorn and lonely.  When I first saw it, it was completely grown over with brambles.  We could hardly find the stones.  It was awful and sad.  I didn’t live there, so I couldn’t do anything.  But looking at my deserted, grown-over great grandfather's site, I was ashamed.   Later my sister sent me a newspaper clipping with a picture and an article about a woman who had cleaned up the place (it looked better, but still not GOOD,) it was too big a job for her alone and she was asking for help in keeping it trimmed.  Now I see on Find A Grave a picture of the cemetery cleaned and neat and wonderful looking.  A sign notes that now two people are responsible for keeping up the cemetery  – Doug and

Old Bethel
Find A Grave  images

Andy House – they would be cousins of mine.  It makes me proud to know someone has taken up the duty to respect our ancestors.  If I lived nearby I would help.

Think about this matter.  Go find your deserted ones.  Clean up their place.  Give them the dignity they deserve.  And you will receive good karma.

Remember

NOTES:  Thanks to Robert and Terry and Karen for all their HELP.  In the article above notice how we used our GENEALOGY TECHNOLOGY and our networking to get the job done.  Use everything you have.

I found a wonderful website which gives all the official rules and regulations for dealing with old deserted graves in North Carolina.  It is from the website of the Olde Mecklenburg Genealogical Society   

(http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ncomgs/).

Find the tombstone article at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ncomgs/tombstone.pdf

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Everything is now working smoothly with the blog.  You will find all  postings listed in the "archive" section above.  Still pondering the mysteries we all pursue in our research, meandering through my mind where whispers of long passed relatives reach out to me, and finally getting down to the "nitty-gritty" hard work involved in this endeavor called GENEALOGY.  Hope you find it interesting and come back to me if you have comments on these subjects or find some connection in my family lines.  See My Family Lines tab at the top.

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Robert Carpenter has announced his annual class for Beginning Genealogy at Gaston College in Dallas.  Starting Thursday Sept. 19 through Nov. 21, 2013 (10 sessions) from 7 - 9 p.m. on Thursday nights.  WHO SHOULD SIGN UP?  Any person interested in learning about genealogical research regardless of your level of experience.  Emphasis will involve research strategies, introducing students to various sources, deciphering documents, and will conclude with a trip to the State Archives in Raleigh.  Anyone with questions about signing up should contact Robert  by email at  rcarpenter2@charter.net.  As one who has been there, I can tell you this is a marvelous class for beginners and intermediates.  Robert is considered to be one of the foremost historians for Lincoln and Gaston Counties, and his head is full of wonderful genealogical "stuff!"  He is currently a professor of history at Belmont Abbey College.

SIGN UP by contacting Gaston College at 704-922-6251 or 704-922-6353 or Email Beth Hollars at hollars.beth@gaston.edu.  They are busy running all over the school so be persistent in calling.  If you leave your number, they will come back to you.

Robert has an Advanced Genealogy Class for 10 sessions starting late in January each year.  This class is so popular that previous students state that "they have failed the class" so that they can return each year, and there is a bunch who return each season to  experience the class again.  Take if from one who has "failed" over and over in order to take the class again.  And I’ll be there again in January 2014!

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You can see we have great FUN in our genealogy forum every Tuesday in Belmont, NC.  If you live nearby, come join us from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., at the J.Paul Ford Recreation Center at 37 E. Woodrow Ave.  We will be taking a summer break for the months of August and September, but will be back in October.  Each week we explore a different aspect of genealogy research including storage possibilities, story telling/sharing, genealogy technology, brickwall help, etc .     You can find us at: http://belmontgenealogyclub.blogspot.com/ .  Of course, when a member in the group needs help like Buster, or if someone new comes along with a problem, a "brickwall" or such, we drop what we are doing and all jump in  to explore with them.  

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Genealogy Group  in Gastonia, NC.  Meets the first Thursday of the month in the NC History Room, second floor, at the main Gaston Public Library on Garrison Street in Gastonia.  Meeting time 7:00 - 8:30.  Linda Klocker who has had previous groups in Belmont and in Mountain Island Lake will be leading this new venture.  Whether you are a beginner or an experienced searcher, come meet the group.

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“WE CAME FROM THE WEST”

When you are talking family history, especially with your relatives, there will always be legends, rumors, whispers of old bits of information that no one knows is really true or not.  Some people are emphatic that the story is “real.” Others are certain that it is not.  What do you do?

Well, you file it away in a small storage room you carry with you in your brain.  Don’t throw it out, it may come in handy one day, it may prove a point.  After you have traced all the possibilities with no results, just file it away for a while.

Google Images

As I said in my Butterfly Whisperings blog, I do not come from a line of story tellers.  They were not hiding anything, it was just that the people before them didn’t know anything.  Like Sgt. Schultz in the old TV show Hogan’s Heroes, they “knew nothing  . . .nothing!”  When I asked my dad about his HAYWOOD line, the best he could do was “they said we came from the west!”  THE WEST?  WHERE!  Colorado, Nevada, Idaho?  Maybe a little closer: Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky?  At that point in time people were GOING west, not coming FROM the west!

I did my searching.  I followed every path I could find.  There was a whole county named HAYWOOD  over on the North Carolina/-Tennessee Line.  It must be full of Haywoods since they named the county that, and it was to the West.  Maybe that was it.  It turned out that HAYWOOD County, NC (founded in 1808) and also HAYWOOD Co in Tennessee were both named in honor of a retiring Judge John Haywood who had been the Treasurer of NC for 20 years (1787 to 1827).  He came from a large family of HAYWOODs settled around Raleigh and Wake Co, NC.  His ancestor John H. HAYWOOD (1684 – 1758) had sailed from Barbados into New Bern harbor in the mid 1700s and they had settled from Edgecombe County on the coast across the state leaving GREAT MEN in their path to situate at Raleigh.  I call them “The Society Haywoods.”  They were wealthy; doctors, judges, lawyers, and professors, and I can find NO connection between them and my family.  None of them would ever have been found plowing a mule to feed himself and clothe his children.  And it also turned out back then there were hardly any HAYWOODs in Haywood Co. after all, except for the Judge’s family who had moved with him.  So that blew that theory!

Then my attention turned to a clan of HAYWOODs settled in Montgomery Co, NC near Rockingham.  There is a grand restored home there close to Mt. Gilead called HAYWOOD HOUSE which had been the site of a large plantation with a huge number of slaves.  There is a wonderful culture which has grown up around HAYWOOD HOUSE, and many black people today have built their genealogical tree from that point in time and go by the name of HAYWOOD.  But alas, I couldn’t connect to HAYWOOD HOUSE, finding it had been founded by a Byrd HAYWOOD who had come down from coastal Brunswick Virginia in 1778.  And besides, that was to the EAST!

These two HAYWOOD families were the only ones in North Carolina before the early 1830s.  They are the ones showing on the 1790 census.  There were no HAYWOODS in Union, Mecklenburg, Gaston, Lincoln, or Anson Counties before 1830.  So if there were none anywhere for us to come from, where the “heck” did we come from!

As I told in the Whisperings blog, I was working with my Cousin Peggy on her HAYWOOD book.  One day I had the brilliant thought, that Dad was not talking about the HAYWOODs, he must be talking about his great grandmother’s line – the WENTZs.  I told you in Whisperings all about Catherine Wentz (1805 – abt. 1890) who I searched for and finally proved was mine.  Since Josiah HAYWOOD, Catherine’s son had never come home from the Civil War, there wouldn’t have been a lot of HAYWOOD men around telling their stories.  Catherine and her sons Josiah, John Franklin, and James Madison went to church with her family the WENTZs at Morningstar Lutheran in Mecklenburg Co.  They lived close together and would have interacted a lot.  Those were the men these boys would have grown up around.  And the WENTZs were one of my German families who had come down The Great Wagon Road in 1751.  The Wagon Road had left Lancaster Pennsylvania and gone west coming down by the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains until it veered back east towards Salisbury and then Charlotte.  I called Peggy!  It was not their tale the HAYWOODs were telling, I shouted into the phone, but the WENTZ’s story.  She agreed.  So it was settled in my mind and I filed away this bit of information, back into the little storage room in my head and I mostly forgot about it.

I described in Whisperings how Peggy and I traced our lines back to Catherine.  We knew she was the mother.  But we thought the father must have been an older Josiah, and my Josiah was the son, along with John Franklin.  We found some deeds where the HAYWOODs were shuffling land around between themselves (in Mecklenburg County after the 1840’s) and “Josiah” had given some land to John Franklin, so we decided he must have been the father.  Peggy got ready to publish THE BOOK!  It was finally finished.  She was ready to send it to the printers.

I came up to visit my sister in Wilmington for the Christmas holidays, and decided to do a little investigating since I was in North Carolina.  I found what the history library in Wilmington had to offer, then I took off to Monroe to see what I could find in Union (was Mecklenburg) County.  I met my HAYWOOD cousin Sandy (you find all kinds of new cousins when you get into genealogy) who lives right there in the center of our HAYWOODS in Union Co, and she took me all around, finding the old cemeteries, the old homeplace (a piece of land within the larger acreage which was always called The Katy Haywood Homeplace  in all the later records and deeds, preserving her original homeplace.  A HAYWOOD lives on that piece of land to this day!  Sandy had grown up in all of this and knew who was kin to whom and where they all lived.  She was a treasure of knowledge!

We finally made our way to the Morningstar Lutheran Church near Providence Road.  Johann Andreas Wentz who had arrived in 1751 was a founder of that church, providing the lumber to build the original old wooden church building.  This is where Catherine had gone to church with her children all those years.  And they had kept such good records.  They had a great ledger, one of the big ones, every page had been laminated to protect it, and it went back to the beginning.  All the births and baptisms, all the church business, who had transgressed and then repented, all the minutes of the meetings they had on a regular basis, and who had attended.  It was beyond value!

I saw where Josiah and John Franklin had been present as children along with Catherine, and then later as men had taken part in the proceedings.  It always listed Catherine as present, but nothing about her husband.

I turned page by page, scanning for familiar names.  I found all sorts of interesting information which I will tell you about in future blogs.  I got back to earlier and earlier times.  And then I turned the page, looked down the left hand side, and my eyes fell on the following words:  Benton Haywood and his wife Catherine brought his sons John Franklin and James Madison to be baptized.  It gave their birth dates and the baptism date!

BENTON!  Who was Benton?  But there he was as Catherine’s husband!  I rushed back to my motel and called Peggy.  STOP THE PRESSES!  DON’T GIVE THE BOOK TO THE PRINTERS I shouted into the phone.  And I then told her what I had found.  She was astounded!  We made arrangements for me to stop with her in South Carolina on my way back to Florida, and we spent a day at her house working on the book, changing every time “Josiah” was mentioned as the father to  “BENTON!”  And that was a lot of times!

So we had found Catherine’s husband.  When I could look him up – there he was – as plain as day in the 1830 census, in LINCOLN COUNTY, NC.  (How he, being in Lincoln Co, and Catherine, being in Union Co, would have gotten together is another story)  He had the right number of boys within the right age groups for Josiah and John F., and he had a wife whose age fitted Catherine.  They had moved to Mecklenburg Co. (near the WENTZs) by 1832 when James Madison was born.  And they founded all the many HAYWOODS ever after in Mecklenburg/Union Counties.

And where was Lincoln County you ask?  Well, right across the Catawba River on the WEST side of what is now Charlotte!  THEY HAD COME FROM THE WEST!  Granted it wasn’t far – all they had to do is cross the river and come less than 15 miles across Mecklenburg County to what is now the Stallings vicinity, near Monroe.  The WENTZs lived at nearby Hemby Bridge, which is near the Providence Road area in eastern Mecklenburg County.

My dad would have loved to know that he had been right.  THEY HAD COME FROM THE WEST!  So never throw away those little bits of information; keep them for the future, safely store them away.  They may come handy someday.

Happy Hunting

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Exciting things always happening in my little Genealogy world.  I restarted my blog to straighten out some kinks.  Everything seems to be working smoothly now.  You will find all  postings listed in the "archive" section above.  In future writings I will ponder the mysteries we all pursue in research, meander through my mind where whispers of long passed relatives reach out to me, and get down to the "nitty-gritty" hard work involved in this endeavor called GENEALOGY.  Hope you find it interesting and come back to me if you have comments on these subjects or find some connection in my family lines.  See My Family Lines tab at the top.

____________________________________________________________

We have a genealogy forum every Tuesday in Belmont, NC.  If you live nearby, come join us from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., at the J.Paul Ford Recreation Center at 37 E. Woodrow Ave.  Each week we explore a different aspect of genealogy research including storage possibilities, story telling/sharing, genealogy technology, brick wall help, etc. You can find us at: http://belmontgenealogyclub.blogspot.com/.    Of course, when a member in the group needs help, or if someone new comes along with a problem, a "brickwall" or such, we drop what we are doing and all jump in  to explore with them.  Lots of fun.

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There is also a Genealogy Group formed in Gastonia, NC.  They meet the first Thursday of the month in the NC History Room, second floor, at the main Gaston Public Library on Garrison Street in Gastonia.  Meeting time 7:00 - 8:30.   Linda Klocker who has had previous groups in Belmont and in Mountain Island Lake will be leading this new venture.  Whether you are a beginner or an experienced searcher, come meet the group.

____________________________________________________________

Robert Carpenter’s annual class for Beginning Genealogy at Gaston College in Dallas.   Starts Thursday Sept. 19 through Nov. 21, 2013 (10 sessions) from 7 - 9 p.m. on Thursday nights.  WHO SHOULD SIGN UP?  Any person interested in learning about genealogical research regardless of your level of experience.  Emphasis will involve research strategies, introducing students to various sources, deciphering documents, and will conclude with a trip to the State Archives in Raleigh.  Anyone with questions about signing up should contact Robert  by email at  rcarpenter2@charter.net.  As one who has been there, I can tell you this is a marvelous class for beginners and intermediates.   Robert is considered to be one of the foremost historians for Lincoln and Gaston Counties, and his head is full of wonderful genealogical "stuff!"  He is currently a professor of history at Belmont Abbey College.

SIGN UP by contacting Gaston College at 704-922-6251 or 704-922-6353 or Email Beth Hollars at hollars.beth@gaston.edu.  They are busy running all over the school so be persistent in calling.  If you leave your number, they will come back to you.

Robert has an Advanced Genealogy Class for 10 sessions starting late in January each year.  This class is so popular that previous students state that "they have failed the class" so that they can return each year, and there is a bunch who return each season to  experience the class again.  Take if from one who has "failed" over and over in order to take the class again.  And I’ll be there again in January 2014!

  

GENEALOGY TECHNOLOGY

Those of us who work in genealogy live in the past.  Like those mediums on television who “talk to the dead,” we also communicate with the dead, but more on an intellectual level than in actuality.  Our thoughts dwell in old streets, ancient houses, and tragic battlefields.

GOOGLE IMAGE

But we also live in a modern techno world, where everything is fast, electronic, out there in space somewhere, on a “cloud” for heaven’s sake!  The ability of the new phones is unbelievable.  Cameras are everywhere, recording everything.  Information can be captured by all sorts of devices and inserted in ways unthinkable just a few years ago.

My friend Jim Antley is a man who works with all kinds of technology.  He is an artist, he designs graphics, and he makes videos for people in the professional world to promote their art, their businesses, whatever.  As I noted in the announcements at the bottom of my previous blogs, Jim is our guru at our weekly genealogy group meeting in Belmont, NC.  Recently we ventured into a new field for most of us.  Jim is teaching us how to make short videos to use in our genealogy work.

Jim has a massive body of work on his ancestors, spread over North and South Carolina.  He catalogs and films cemeteries and individual gravestones, contributing them to Find A Grave.  He is in the process of getting GPS coordinates for all his grave sites.  This is a marvelous thing when you have one grave in an enormous cemetery with thousands of sites.  With the GPS coordinate you can bring up Google Maps, change to satellite image, put in the numbers and it will pinpoint on that map exactly where your grave site is in that massive cemetery.  What a change from having to trudge up and down all the rows searching for a particular name. 

Using Google Maps, he has also made his own virtual map with every one of his cemeteries pinpointed by that little blob thing they use.  Then when you want to find a certain cemetery, you click on the list provided and you will see exactly where it is in the state.  Or reversely, you can click on one of the little blobs and see which cemetery that one is, and the directions to get there.

But my point is – Jim is into technology.  In explaining the reason for making the videos in our  meetings, he said “One day I realized that my great grandchildren, and some of my grandchildren will never know me.  They might see a photo of me, but to hear and see me speak would be a completely different thing from a one dimensional picture.  In making little short videos on different subjects, or telling family stories, I can talk to them; tell them what I think about things.  They can get to know me.”

This is a wonderful idea.  These little videos can be inserted onto your facebook page, into a blog, or even on your tree at Ancestry.com.  But it is a tricky thing trying to get a video into a tree at Ancestry.  If you click on the “media” button on one of your Family Pages, say the page for Grandpa, there will only be the option to film yourself with your computer cam to make a short video.  As you know, these cams do not make the highest quality pictures, but that is all they offer.  We believe that we have discovered how to get a better film on to your tree.  After brainstorming at one of our meetings in Belmont, we worked out what you need to do.  With your camera or cam-corder, you make a good film of whatever you want; pictures, collages, scenery/landscape, or a person telling a story.  This is a really  good idea – having a live person tell a story about the family.  Then you upload this film to YouTube.  Now in WORD, write a very short “story” explaining what your video is about.  And you tell the reader that to see the video, they must go to the place on the Family Page, on the lower right, below all the citations, to a place called “Web Links.”  Here is where you insert the URL for your film on YouTube.  Then you upload your information  “story” onto the family sheet.  So now, just like you import photos and documents to your family sheet, you can now put information to bring up a video about that person or family.  We think that is marvelous and lots of fun.

You will notice in my writings I am always bringing up the notion of “FUN!”  You must get out of your research/computer/typing place and meet people who will bring new ideas to your work.  That is fun.  New people = new ideas = FUN!

So as much as we love to rummage through the attics of the sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen hundreds, we must now and then join the modern world and rummage through the 21^st century “cloud!”

Happy rummaging!

________________________________________________________

Exciting things always happening in my little Genealogy world.  Had to restart my blog to straighten out some kinks.  I think everything is now working correctly.  You will find all  postings listed in the "archive" section above.  In future writings I will ponder the mysteries we all pursue in research, meander through my mind where whispers of long passed relatives reach out to me, and get down to the "nitty-gritty" hard work involved in this endeavor called GENEALOGY.  Hope you find it interesting and come back to me if you have comments on these subjects or find some connection in my family lines.  See My Family Lines tab at the top.

________________________________________________________________

We have a genealogy forum every Tuesday in Belmont, NC.  If you live nearby, come join us from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., at the J.Paul Ford Recreation Center at 37 E. Woodrow Ave.  Each week we explore a different aspect of genealogy including research, storage possibilities, story telling/sharing, genealogy technology, brick wall help, etc. You can find us at: http://belmontgenealogyclub.blogspot.com/.  Of course, when a member in the group needs help, or if someone new comes along with a problem, a "brickwall" or such, we drop what we are doing and all jump in  to explore with them.  Lots of fun!

 _____________________________________________________________

 The new Genealogy Group formed in Gastonia, NC, is coming right along.  Two good meetings so far.  They meet the first Thursday of the month in the NC History Room, second floor, at the main Gaston Public Library on Garrison Street in Gastonia.  Meeting time 7:00 - 8:30. Linda Klocker who has had previous groups in Belmont and in Mountain Island Lake will be leading this new venture.  Whether you are a beginner or an experienced searcher, come meet the group.

________________________________________________________

Robert Carpenter has announced his annual class for Beginning Genealogy at Gaston College in Dallas.  Starting Thursday Sept. 19 through Nov. 21, 2013 (10 sessions) from 7 - 9 p.m. on Thursday nights.  WHO SHOULD SIGN UP?  Any person interested in learning about genealogical research regardless of your level of experience.  Emphasis will involve research strategies, introducing students to various sources, deciphering documents, and will conclude with a trip to the State Archives in Raleigh.  Anyone with questions about signing up should contact Robert  by email at  rcarpenter2@charter.net.  As one who has been there, I can tell you this is a marvelous class for beginners and intermediates.  Robert is considered to be one of the foremost historians for Lincoln and Gaston Counties, and his head is full of wonderful genealogical "stuff!"  He is currently a professor of history at Belmont Abbey College.

SIGN UP by contacting Gaston College at 704-922-6251 or 704-922-6353 or Email Beth Hollars at hollars.beth@gaston.edu.  They are busy running all over the school so be persistent in calling.  If you leave your number, they will come back to you.

Robert has an Advanced Genealogy Class for 10 sessions starting late in January each year.  This class is so popular that previous students state that "they have failed the class" so that they can return each year, and there is a bunch who return each season to  experience the class again.  Take if from one who has "failed" over and over in order to take the class again.  And I’ll be there again in January 2014!

_____________________________________________________________________ 

IN PRAISE OF WOMEN              

(This would have made a great blog for Mother’s Day,but I wasn't blogging then. Maybe next year.)

Spring has sprung as they say.  Summer began on June 21^st.  We are in the warm section of our  calendar year.  We live inside our air-conditioned houses, we run for our air-conditioned cars, we shop in air-conditioned malls with big icy drinks in our hands.  With modern technology we have made a comfortable world for ourselves during the hot months of summer.

But as I work on my genealogy, I see the faces of the past.  I see various pictures of my women ancestors.  They look out at me from a sepia-toned world.  They could all be twins they look so much alike.  Of course your pictures could be different perhaps, of sophisticated town-dwelling women, well dressed, ensconced in city houses, waited on by servants.  Fresh looking, cool looking, nice looking. 

These are NOT my women.

Mary Elizabeth

My women live in small rural towns, or on the frontier backwoods, or on red dirt farms throughout the south.  They live in little wooden cabins, or perhaps later in wood clapboard farmhouses  There was probably a large brick chimney at either end of the house.  Ah, you say.  That will keep them warm in the winter.  But, I say, think about what it will do for them in the SUMMER!   In earlier times that chimney was where they cooked.  There would be a large pot hanging over the fire with a chicken stewing, or perhaps turnip greens simmering with salted pork.  There would be large black-iron skillets sitting in the hot ash, full of baking biscuits or cornbread made with freshly ground corn.  Maybe there would be a large skillet full of frying pork chops.  There would be wonderful smells emanating from that kitchen – but think of the Heat!  And there was no avoiding it.  Bread had to be baked every single day.  The family had to be fed along with any farmhands present at any given time.  There was nowhere to send for carryout! 

Later on there probably would have been a “new-fangled” wood stove in that kitchen.  Perhaps

it was better to get the food up off the floor, better on backs and arms.  Better not to get your long skirt caught on fire or your baby falling in.  But that stove had a wood fire, just the same, just as hot, with the smoke funneled up a stovepipe and out a flue in the wall, exuding heat as it went.  

These women were enduring all this heat with so many layers of clothes on that I feel like fainting just thinking about it.  They themselves or someone close by probably wove the cloth they used for clothing.  Oh yes, they made all the clothes they wore, their children wore, and their men wore.  How would you like to be faced with the prospect of having a piece of valuable material in front of you and knowing you had to make your husband a pair of trousers!  The fabric was valuable not because of what it was made of, but rather because of how much effort had gone into procuring the cotton, or flax, or wool, or leather, or whatever else they had to work with.  The crop had to be produced, or the animals maintained.  The fiber had to be cleaned, spun on a wheel into thread, and woven on a loom; or the leather had to be procured, tanned, and prepared for use.  When you read the inventory lists of old estates, almost every home had a spinning wheel and/or a loom.  If you didn’t, then a relative or a nearby neighbor (read possibly 10 miles) did and you could barter with them for some material.

Mary Margaret

To be proper a women had to be well covered, from head to toe.  Thus there were under garments, corsets, shifts, petticoats, scarfs or bonnets tied under the chin.  They wouldn’t have worn corsets regularly, but if they dressed for “going out” (their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes) there would have been corsets.  They were needed to pull in the tiny waists so desired then.  Then there were the heavy duty shoes and stockings which were more like our socks.  No sandals for these ladies and no going bare legged.

While wearing all these clothes they were also out in their garden growing all the food the family would eat.  While the husband and older boys were working the farm, growing the grain to feed the animals, growing the corn and wheat for the bread they ate, growing the cash crop which they sold for money to buy the things  they couldn’t grow like coffee and sugar, the women were in charge of what  today  would be called the kitchen garden.  But it would not be the small neat squares we are used to; it would be a plot of land like a small farm in itself.  There would be arbors with apples and pears and grapes.  There would be nut trees with walnuts and pecans. She and any available children were responsible for all the food that would keep the family alive and then preserving all they could to get them through the winter.  In that era winters were harsher with more snow than now.  There were no crops growing.  If they had no food, they starved.  They preserved what they could by drying, canning, salting, sugaring, or storing in the root cellar.  There is a story in the FOXFIRE books* about “Leather britches beans.”  They strung greenbeans on a string and hung them across the rafters until they were completely dry and then put them in sacks to save through the winter.  Of course they would be dry and probably tough, and would require lots of boiling.  But they had greenbeans on a cold snowy January day

If there were no older children yet, and no way to pay a farmhand, the woman would be out in the field with her husband some of the time, helping him:  leading the mule, directing the plow, sprinkling seeds in the

Addie

furrows behind the plow, bringing him water or his lunch.

And then, there were the animals.  There were chickens to feed, eggs to gather, droppings to be collected for fertilizer.  There were pigs further away from the house in their pen, who needed to be slopped (fed with the house food garbage, grains and corn.)  Or perhaps they were loose to forage in the woods for roots and acorns.  There was the cow to feed and milk, butter and cheese to be made.  At certain times, any of these animals might have to be slaughtered and the meat preserved and the fat rendered and stored as lard to use for cooking.

Are you tired yet!  Well there’s more.  There were the CHILDREN.  Always the children, child after child, after child!  Imagine this:  This woman is doing all the work noted above while she is pregnant!  She had to have been pregnant most of the time.  After all usually there was a child every 1½ to 2 years apart for years and years, and years - until there might be 12 to 15 or more children.  I have one family who had 21 children by the same wife!  These women were baby machines, producing the labor needed on that farm.  Sometimes they might have had some help.  Sometimes the widowed mother or mother-in-law lived in the home, often a spinster aunt, but not always.  Sometimes you see a strange person on a census with a different name, a young girl, who could be a relative who needed to be taken in, or who may have come purposely to help with the children and the household for her room and board.  If you see that, express a sigh of relief for the poor exhausted woman of that house.

Susan

The fresh-faced farm girls who became those harried farm wives must have been pretty once.  After all they were so young, usually between 13 and 18 years old when they married.  Of course, they would have worked in their own homes, they knew the hard work. They had always done hard work.  But now they had it all by themselves, taking care of their own entire house and farm and family.  They became the gaunt, exhausted, hollowed eyed, wornout women we see in the photos.  They probably wouldn’t have thought they deserved our pity.  After all what they did was what every woman did.  It was just the way it was.  It was their normal.

So let’s don’t pity them!  Let’s give them the honor they deserve.  Let’s look at those photos and see strong, courageous, capable women, keeping their homes, raising their food, caring for their children, supporting their men, and living their lives with honor.

They deserve PRAISE.  I give it to them.

*FOXFIRE BOOKS: (Edited by Eliot Wigginton. Published by Anchor Press, the first editions in 1972, 1973 and 1975)  In the early 1970s a high school in Rabun Gap, Georgia, right in the heart of the high mountain counties of Macon (NC) Habersham and Rabun (SC) decided that all the mountain lore of that region, all the knowledge of how to exist in that extreme environment, which was stored in the brains of the old inhabitants of that land, needed to be captured before they were all gone.  And the current young people needed to know what had gone before them.  So for years, they assigned the students the job of interviewing those old mountain people, starting out with their own families.  They went up into the hills searching out what people knew and writing it down.  Sometimes they used audio media to capture the sound of these folks telling their own stories.  Eventually there were 12 books.  It is a marvelous set of books, stories about the ones who came before us.  You might find one in your library.  I see them still available on EBay and Amazon.

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Exciting things happening in my little Genealogy world.  Still "blogging" away.   In future writings I will ponder the mysteries we all pursue in research, meander through my mind where whispers of long passed relatives reach out to me, and get down to the "nitty-gritty" hard work involved in this endeavor called GENEALOGY.  Hope you find it interesting and come back to me if you have comments on these subjects or find some connection in my family lines.  See My Family Lines tab at the top.

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We have a genealogy forum every Tuesday in Belmont, NC.  If you live nearby, come join us from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., at the J.Paul Ford Recreation Center at 37 E. Woodrow Ave.  Right now, once a month our meeting is devoted to learning to make short personal videos to be inserted into family trees, facebook postings, blogs, YouTube, etc. Our resident guru Jim Antley is teaching us loads of new talents.  During other meetings we explore all aspects of genealogy research including storage possibilities, story telling/sharing, genealogy technology, brickwall help, etc .    Find us at:  http://belmontgenealogyclub.blogspot.com/.  Of course, when a member in the group needs help, or if someone new comes along with a problem, a "brickwall" or such, we drop what we are doing and all jump in  to explore with them.  Lots of fun!

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There is also a new Genealogy Group formed in Gastonia, NC.  They meet the first Thursday of the month in the NC History Room, second floor, at the main Gaston Public Library on Garrison Street in Gastonia.  Meeting time 7:00 - 8:30.  Linda Klocker who has had previous groups in Belmont and in Mountain Island Lake will be leading this new venture.  Whether you are a beginner or an experienced searcher, come meet the group.

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Were you chosen to receive the new thing at Ancestry.com?  They have offered to some of their customers, as a test, their new "story" feature.  When you are researching, and have pulled up a family data sheet on a person, up by where you can "edit" the person, it offers you a "STORY" button.  Ancestry then puts all the information into a story line containing all your documents.  To read more about this, click on this link from Ancestry Insider.  http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com/2013/06/ancestrycom-new-story-view.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AncestryInsider+%28The+Ancestry+Insider%29