52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 35 -- All Mixed Up

This week's blog prompt presented by Amy Johnson Crow, 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, is "All Mixed Up."  We're to blog on which ancestors get confused with other people.  I have a good case, and I have to be blunt and charge FamilySearch.org for being a big cause of this mixup.

My mother was an intra-family adoption.  Her birth parents were Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed (1888-1917) and Ruth Nave (1892-1951).  Frank Reed was killed in a railroad accident when my mother was not quite one year old.  The Reeds had issues with Ruth Nave, and in the words of my mother's birth sister, my aunt Margaret, they "ganged up on her" and took my mother and aunt Margaret away from her and had two of Frank's brothers and their wives adopt the girls.  Their brother, my Uncle Don, the oldest of the three, stayed with his mother, as he was 16 years old.

My mother was adopted by her uncle Perry Wilmer Reed (1885-1937) and his wife Mary LeSourd (a variant spelling) (1889-1978).  And here's where the mixup begins.  Many people have posted to the tree on FamilySearch that Perry and Mary Reed were my mother's actual parents.  This is wrong, and I have mom's birth certificate citing Frank and Ruth Reed as her birth parents, and a copy of the final adoption decree recording mom's adoption by Perry and Mary Reed.

I have tried numerous times to correct this.  I put the correct information with source citations on the FamilySearch tree, and come back only to find that someone has replaced my correct information with the incorrect attribution of my mother's parentage to Perry and Mary Reed, usually without source citations.

I have given up on that FamilySearch tree because I am just mortally tired of correcting misinformation and providing source citations, only to find that someone has put back the wrong information.  I love FamilySearch for the access to documents, and for their wonderful and very instructive wiki.  In those two aspects, it is a fount of information par excellence.

But don't even try to induce me to go back to using their tree.  I'm done with it.

However, I'm not totally down on collaboration.  I am a user of WikiTree, mostly because they do require, encourage, and endorse good source citations on their tree.  But even at that, when I get notices of all sorts of famous people I may be descended from, some of them trace through Perry and Mary Reed rather than my mother's actual parents, Frank and Ruth Reed.  

In the background, for those of you who are Star Wars fans, I hear the voice of Admiral Akbar.

"It's a trap!"

How I Recovered a Stolen Car

Not that it has much to do with my actual family history, but it makes a corker of a family story, and it's all true.  I know because I was there and experienced this stunning bit of serendipity.

It was the fall of 1965; I had graduated from high school in the previous June, and was a freshman at Florida State University.  I went home for my high school's homecoming game, and a friend who was a senior at the high school asked if I would give her a ride to the game.  She then asked if I would also take a friend and classmate of hers.  Of course, I was happy to do both.  More = merrier, right?

As I was getting ready to go, our neighbor across the hall in our two-up-and-two-down apartment building knocked on our back door.  When Mom answered the door, our neighbor, a young single woman, declared frantically that her car had been stolen.  We asked her to describe it; it was, she told us, a dark blue Volkswagen beetle. 

So I went and picked up my friend Martha, and we then headed over to her friend's house, which was only a few blocks from her own house.  When we got there, there was a dark blue Volkswagen beetle sitting in the front yard.  We went into the house, and I asked Martha's friend's parents if the beetle was their car, wondering why it was sitting in the yard instead of the driveway.  No, it wasn't their car.  Then the dime dropped:  "I think I know whose car it is."  Receiving the parents' permission to use their phone (we did not have cell phones in those days), I called Mom and asked her to ask our neighbor for the license number of her car.  I got that, and went out to the VW and checked -- the numbers matched.  After explaining the situation to Martha, her friend, and the friend's parents, I called the county sheriff's office, as the house was located outside the city limits at that time.  I explained the situation and told them where to find both the car and its legal owner.  We all, including the sheriff's deputy I talked to, concluded that some teens had swiped the car and used it for a joyride.  Having run out of gas, they sputtered to a stop in the front yard of Martha's friend's house, and took off on foot.

Then my friend Martha, her friend, and I went to the game and had a great time.  By the time I got home, our neighbor had her car back.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 29: Automobiles - The 1951 Packard

This week's blog prompt presented by Amy Johnson Crow, 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, is "Automobiles."

When I was about four years old, my family all trooped down to the Packard automobile dealership in Pensacola, Florida, where my father bought a brand-new 1951 Packard convertible.  It was turquoise blue, it was large, it was roomy, and it was the last car my father ever bought.  He died in 1954.

The car took us -- my mother, who drove the entire trip, my sister, my brother, myself, and our teenage cousin Rosanna -- from California, where we had been living, to Florida, where mom's mother and sister lived.  Mom needed the support of her family, and wanted to be with them in Florida.  We set out with not only we five humans, but also with my brother's green parakeet, Pete.  Rosanna, about 16 and a great joker, would try to teach the bird, that was not enjoying the trip, to clasp a claw to its forehead and proclaim, "I am not a well bird."  It never sank in to Pete; he was a bird of few words.

My mother had settled everything my father left behind, all the legal and financial fallout of a family member's passing.  She found a new home for our black Cocker Spaniel, Baby, but the man who took her gave me very bad vibes.  Then, as soon as school was out, we embarked upon our journey.  It was not as easy as the trip can be today.  For one thing, the route we took was U.S. 90, which was two lanes, not the four-to-six lane interstate highways we have now.  Rather than zipping along at 65 miles per hour or so, the speed limit was 45.

For another, we had to cross the desert, and the front of the car was decorated with a burlap-covered rubber bag of water decorated with the title Desert Water Bag, in case the radiator overheated.  I remember my brother and sister and me lying on the back seat with our feet out the windows.  We had all the windows down to bring in what breeze was created by the movement of the car.  Cars in those days were not air-conditioned.  We stopped the second night in Phoenix, Arizona, where the temperature that day was 114 degrees F.  The motel room was air-conditioned, fortunately!

In the desert and through much of the southwest, we slept during the day and traveled at night.  In eastern Texas, we passed through some very lonely territory, indeed.  My mother had bought new tires from our neighbor across the street, who ran a tire store.  He swore they were new, but we found out the hard way that they were recaps -- old tires covered with a new tread; he had charged new-car prices for them.  Not a kind thing at all to pull on a new widow.  We saw almost no traffic on U.S. 90 that night, when the car started making a sound that made us think the engine was going to end up on the pavement any minute.  Mom pulled over, shut off the car, and we sat.  Finally, a tanker truck approached, and seeing us sitting on the side of the road, he pulled over and got out to ask us what the problem was.  Mom told him, and that Knight of the Road turned that huge tanker truck around on that two-lane highway with not much shoulder and fences on either side, and headed back to the town of Snyder, Texas, taking time out from his trip to help us.  Finally, a tow truck came and took us into town.

The next day, my mother discovered from the tire man we consulted in Snyder, that the tires were retreads, and that the tread on one of them had come loose and was flapping against the tire well making the Devil's own noise against the metal body of the car.  The rest of the trip passed uneventfully.

The 1951 Packard lasted until the early 1960s.  It took us on many visits to my aunt and uncle in Orlando, and on countless trips to the beach.  One of those trips had consequences for my sister.  She and her high-school best friend were planning on a beach day, and my sister asked Mom for the car.  Mom allowed her to use the car with one strict order: not to take the car onto the beach itself, where salt would attack the undercarriage with corrosion.  A week or two after the beach trip, my sister went to the drug store to pick up her pictures of that day.  In those days, we had to take the film from the camera to a processor -- usually the local pharmacy -- to be developed.  You paid for all the pictures they developed, whether they were any good or not.  My sister was so proud of her pictures, she couldn't wait to show Mom -- but that eagerness got her grounded for something like a month.  There in the pictures was the car . . . sitting right on the salt-filled beach sand.

 

 

This is a painting I commissioned from a childhood friend, Michael Goettee, who is an accomplished artist specializing in cars and the Southwest.  He has won many awards, and his paintings are in the collections of many galleries across the country.  ('51 Packard, by Michael Goettee)

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks -- Catching up Week 21 -- Nickname

I'm catching up on posts for the blogging prompt furnished by Amy Johnson Crow, 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.  The theme for Week 21 (May 20-26) was Nicknames.

My mother's family apparently was big into nicknames.  My Aunt Elizabeth was given, as a child, the nickname "Beffus."  My mother's nickname was "Rid," a play on their surname, Reed.  I don't remember what my uncle's nickname was.

When my father was courting my mother in 1936-37, he probably didn't know what he was getting into.  My mother's family was also big into word play and punning.  My grandfather wrote hymns as a sideline, and occasionally wrote popular songs, as well.  He also would dash off a humorous ditty from time to time.  I call these folks, Perry Wilmer Reed and Mary LeSourd, his wife, my grandparents, but they were actually my grandaunt and granduncle.  Mom was an intra-family adoption after her biological father died in a railroad accident.  And as those things go, it's a long story.

Anyway, Dad was a bit shy around the gregarious and sometimes raucous Reeds.  He wasn't sure how he should address his future mother-in-law.  Should he call her Mrs. Reed, Mother Reed, Mary . . . ?  She defused his confusion and his reticence by stating, "Call me anything!  Call me 'Charlie!'"  That quickly morphed into "Chollie," and that's how she was addressed as long as I knew her and had many visits with her.  

My father attended the U.S. Naval Academy, and to look at the entries in the Academy yearbook for the year he graduated, The Lucky Bag 1934 (the "lucky bag" is the naval services' name for lost-and-found), one would think nicknames were mandatory at the Academy.  My father's nickname was "Smoky," probably because he did indulge cigarettes.  His best friends were Edward "Ned" Worthington ("Playboy") and James Newell ("Sonny").

I was the only one of the three of us children in my immediate family who did not have a nickname -- other than the things my brother called me, like "shrimp."  Not really a nickname.  I adopted the nickname "Blurb" in high school, being of a somewhat literary bent, and like the jacket blurb on a book, I was (and still am) short.  My sister, named Mary Elizabeth, was known as "Betty," after our paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Jane "Betty" [Reynolds] Packard.  My brother's nickname was in honor of our father's Annapolis buddy, "Ned" Worthington, who was killed at Pearl Harbor.

We even give our animals nicknames.  Our present cat, Gabriela, has many, and has earned them.  She is: Gabby, The Baroness von Buttwiggle, Speed Bump, Dances on Bladders, Princess Tail-in-the-Face, and the Maharani of Kittypurr.  She has the best nicknames of all.