A to Z Blogging Challenge: Whatever! B is for Bloomington

My family, paternal and maternal, keeps coming up with ties to Bloomington, Illinois.  

My sister and her husband used to live in Champaign, which is just a few miles southeast of Bloomington. 

My paternal grandfather Walter Hetherington Packard was born in Normal, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump north of Bloomington, and appears to have been swallowed up by the Bloomington municipality, looking at it on Google Earth.

My  great-great grandfather Mathew Hale Packard and several of his siblings settled in Bloomington both before and after the Civil War.  Mathew Hale Packard died there. They had all come down from Canada.  Some went first to Massachusetts, others to New York, before all settled in the Illinois city.  Some of these Packard family members were in Bloomington by 1855; others did not arrive until ten years or so later, after the Civil War.

Mathew's brothers whom he joined in Bloomington were Charles R., Major Wellman, William B., Thadeus Bullock, and Francis A. (“Frank”).  Two of his sisters were also in Bloomington: Mary Frances, married to Joseph Munroe, and Emeline, married to Joseph Munroe's brother George.

My mother's side also has ties to Bloomington, in the person of Nathaniel Strong Sunderland, widely known as N. S. Sunderland.  He provides a bridge between my maternal and paternal lines, being related to both.  He is mentioned by his brother-in-law, Major Wellman Packard, in a letter Wellman wrote to a fellow Illinois lawyer, Abraham Lincoln.  N. S. was the uncle of Sarah Ann Sunderland, my maternal great-great grandmother.

N. S. Sunderland had a farm somewhere between Towanda and Bloomington.  Towanda lies just a few miles northeast of Bloomington.  His farm was prosperous.  His livestock was valued at $1,200, which in 2023 dollars, would be $21,837.89.  His farm, exclusive of livestock or crops, was valued at $11,000, or $200,180.65 in 2023 dollars.

Not all of these branches on the Packard and Reed family trees remained in Bloomington.  N. S. Sunderland later moved to Larned, Kansas, where he served several terms as a popular mayor.  Oscar Merry Packard, son of Mathew Hale Packard, moved to southern California, where he prospered in his occupation as a real estate agent.

 They all left their mark on Bloomington.  Major Wellman Packard even had a street named for him.  Bloomington also left its mark on the family, with both branches experiencing many events there.

Thanks, Bloomington.

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 13: Home Sweet Home

Time for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.  This week's theme: Home Sweet Home.

My parents' "home, sweet home" was rented as long as my father, Arden Packard (1911-1954) was alive.  When I got serious about genealogy, more than 30 years ago, I read about how wonderful land and property records can be.  I tried to apply that evaluation to my parents, and came up baffled.  I couldn't  find one property record in their names.  I remember Mom talking about a particular house in Jacksonville, Florida, where I grew up, that she and Dad had rented during World War II.  Rented.  Oh, boy.

 The 1940 census does have them living in a rented house in Coronado, California.  I do remember that one of the houses we occupied in Pensacola in the early 1950s -- about 1951 -- was rented; then we moved into another rented house.  My father did not stay in one place very long, even within the same county.  That could explain why he and Mom never owned a house.  The first house my mother lived in after marrying Dad was the house she bought after he died in 1954, when she took me and my brother and sister -- and my brother's bird -- back to Florida.  

To find where my mother and father were in any particular year before my own recollections begin, I depended on censuses and city directories.  City directories can be marvels, and for me, they helped to solve a mystery.  For years, I had heard my mom and dad and my grandma talk about a certain gentlemen that I never met.  At least, I don't remember ever having met him.  In one city directory for Jacksonville, from about 1953, there is a full page ad for an insurance company my father worked for.  And there, in the list of agents of the company, was this man's name.  

My husband and I rented in the first years of our marriage.  He was in the Coast Guard on active duty, stationed in St. Petersburg, Florida, and we actually tried to buy a house, but the mortgage company made a blatant error.  We told them they were wrong, but they were unable, unwilling, or both, to correct the error.  I hold grudges like my mother did, and that mortgage company and the owner thereof landed on my permanent excrement list.  So we ended up renting.  We ended up living next door to the unfortunate real estate agent we had worked with in trying to buy a house in St. Petersburg.  Mind you, she was as baffled and disgusted at that mortgage company as we were, and had done a terrific but, alas, fruitless job of trying to get the company to admit their error.  She was a wonderful neighbor and friend, and gave us free run of her citrus trees, which were bearing enough fruit to have fed our entire block.  When we returned to Jacksonville, where my husband was born and raised, we rented until we could find a house to buy.

Well, home sweet home is just that, whether owned or rented.  Each location generates memories and stories.

 

A to Z blogging challenge: A is for Absent

Today is the first day of the A to Z blogging challenge.  This fun challenge invites people across the blogosphere, whatever their subject matter, to blog every day for 26 days (or fewer, if you just can't come up with something for the letter X).  

I have a lot of people absent from my life:  my father, my mother, my brother, the aunt who helped raise me, my grandparents (none of whom I knew), the grand-aunt who served as my grandmother by her and her husband's adoption of my mother within the family, my best friend in high school, my in-laws, favorite uncles and aunts, cousins, and more.  Our younger daughter, who is 53 years old, has cancer.  She is in remission for now, but it's probably inevitable that she will predecease me and my husband.  So many losses . . . so many memories.

In the Simon & Garfunkel song "Old Friends," songwriter Paul Simon reminds us:  ". . . Preserve your memories; they're all that's left you."

Photographs are a fine way to preserve our memories.   Like this one of me and our younger daughter giving our dog Diamond a bath back in the 1980s.  Unfortunately, our daughter's head is behind the dog!  Not only does this spark a great memory of our younger daughter and our wonderful dog, but also of the house where we lived at the time, a house we loved, and lost in the economic disaster that befell us in the 1980s.  Another loss . . .

In doing genealogy, we document and lend permanence to memories.  My father died when I had just turned seven years old, and it is through genealogy that I have come to know him better.  Researching his Navy career, and his activities after he got out of the Navy after World War II, has given me a great deal of knowledge about his life.  

Family stories give us access to memories, too -- the memories of other people that are given to us in stories.  In our retelling of them, we claim them as memories.  They're not direct memories of our own experience, but we remember our family by these stories.  They connect us to our ancestors.

Preserve your memories; they're all that's left you.

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 12 -- Historic Event

It's time for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.  I'm catching up with Week 12, and may do some of this catching up out of order.  I'm mostly out of order these days, anyway.  The theme for Week 12 is "Historic Event," in which we may blog about an ancestor who was involved in or witnessed a historic event, or about one we were involved in or witnessed.

In the summer of 2013, I was working on my master's thesis at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.  The subject was marriage in St. Augustine, Florida between 1784 and 1803 under a certain royal proclamation.  I was doing research at the Library of Congress, in the Manuscript Division.  I took the bus from my lodgings in my nephew's condo to a couple blocks from the LOC, a jaunt that took me past the Supreme Court building.

It was 26 June 2013.  As I approached the Supreme Court building, I could  see that there was a massive crowd gathered in front of the edifice.  As I came closer, a massive cheer went up from the crowd.  Proceeding into the crowd, I found a news team and ask them what had just happened.  A cameraman told me that the inaptly named "Defense of Marriage" Act, which invalidated gay and lesbian marriages, had been overturned by the Court.  I'm straight but not narrow, a woman married to a man, but I happen to believe that people in love who wish to make a commitment to each other should be able to marry if they so choose, no matter who they are. 

 Why shouldn't they have an opportunity to be just as miserable as the rest of us?  A comedian asked that question.  I see the other side:  why shouldn't they have the opportunity to be happy or at least content, as so many of us are.  In the case of my husband and me, it's been 54 years.

Nearby in the crowd at the Supreme Court was a couple of young women beaming and hugging each other.  I looked at them and smiled, and they told me they had just been married in a state where gay marriage was legal.  I told them, "Congratulations -- and congratulations," on their marriage and on that law inimical to their happiness having just been overturned.  Having witnessed this small slice of history, I proceeded on my way to the LOC and had a fine day of research.