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.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks -- Week 28 -- Trains

 First, a note.  I apologize for not keeping up with my blog in recent weeks.  Other matters intervened.  I'm going to post the current 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks and I am also going to try to catch up on the past 8 weeks of this series, as there are some topics Amy Johnson Crow had selected for those "lost" weeks of mine that interest me quite a bit.

Trains also interest me, as my great-grandfather Francis Harvey "Frank" Reed and a few of his 8 sons were railroad men, including my grandfather Benjamin Franklin Reed and my granduncle Perry Wilmer Reed.

Francis Harvey Reed was a conductor for the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis Railway Line.  That name was such a mouthful, apparently, that most people referred to it as the Panhandle Line.  This line was part of the Pennsylvania Railroad, handling the bulk of Pennsy traffic to the west of Pennsylvania.  The name Panhandle was used by the Pennsylvania Railroad to identify a group of its smaller lines, including the one currently under discussion.(1)

Perry Wilmer Reed worked also for the Pennsylvania Railroad, on their Union Line, based in Chicago as a freight agent from about 1907 to about 1920.  He was enrolled to argue cases before the Interstate Commerce Commission, representing his railroad in these matters.(2)  By 1920 he and his wife and their children Robert, Elizabeth, and Martha, had relocated to Pensacola, Florida, where he worked for the Gulf, Florida, and Alabama Railway.(3)

Benjamin Franklin Reed, also known as "Frank," was a switchman on the Wabash Railroad, working in the yard at Detroit, Michigan.(4)  He was killed by being hit by a rail yard donkey engine.  His death certificate cites the cause of death as "crushing injuries to head." (5)

My husband's family also has a railroad connection.  His grandfather, Andrew Lewis Rhodes, was a Pullman conductor.  Andrew Rhodes started his railroad career in 1903 as a clerk-messenger for the United States Express Company.(6)  He worked for them in various offices in the upper Midwest until 1912, when he became a conductor for the Pullman Company.  He relocated to Jacksonville, Florida and worked as a Pullman conductor until he retired in 1952.(7)

(1)  Burns, Adam.  "Pennsylvania, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis Line: 'The Panhandle Route.'" Online: American Rails.com

(2)  Robert Reed, "Little Man," Pensacola History Illustrated, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), 27-32.

(3)  Letter from Perry Reed to his wife Mary, written on Gulf, Florida, and Alabama Railway letterhead with "Perry Reed, General Freight Agent" on it.  Private Papers of M. K. and K.L. Rhodes.

(4) "Engine Kills a Switchman," Logansport (Indiana) Pharos-Reporter, 22 October 1917, 3.

(5)  State of Michigan, Department of State, Division of Vital Statistics.  Death Certificate, Benjamin Franklin Reed, Registered Number 10695.

(6)  "Record of Employee's Prior Service," (Form AA-2P), filed 27 May 1941.  Andrew Lewis Rhodes pension file; Social Security Number [redacted].  National Archives Record Group 184: Records of the Railroad Retirement Board, 1934--; RRB Congressional Inquiry Service, Chicago, Illinois.

(7)  "Application for Employee Annuity Under the Railroad Retirement Act," (Form AA-1), filed 25 July 1952.  Andrew Lewis Rhodes pension file; Social Security Number [redacted].  National Archives Record Group 184: Records of the Railroad Retirement Board, 1934--; RRB Congressional Inquiry Service, Chicago, Illinois.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 20: Taking Care of Business

This week's title phrase can mean a variety of things.  It can literally mean taking care of one's means of supporting self and family.  Here on this blog, I've discussed businessmen and businesswomen in the family:  Emily [Hoyt] Packard, who was a milliner; Nelson Reed McKee, a jeweler and watchmaker; Frank A. Packard, Bloomington, Illinois, merchant; Perry Wilmer Reed, head of the Pensacola, Florida, Chamber of Commerce; my father, Arden Packard, and his brother Jack, advertising agency owners; Oscar Merry Packard, builder and developer; Walter Hetherington Packard, builder and developer, and stockbroker.

The phrase can also mean buckling down and taking care of the serious stuff in life.  Samuel Packard's religious convictions caused him to take his wife and their firstborn, a daughter, on a risky and most probably quite uncomfortable sea voyage in 1638, from their home in Suffolk, England to a hardscrabble new settlement in a wild land called Massachusetts.  There was Richards Packard, who did his part in taking care of a certain dispute with England at the end of the 1700s.  After that was settled, Richards began a northward migration that left him disappointed in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire, on up into Canada, which was practically giving land away and not being terribly picky about who they were giving it to, even to those who had previously taken up arms against His Majesty, George III.  The succeeding three generations of my line were born in Canada.  Mathew Hale Packard, a member of that third generation, took a chance on what I call "retro-migration," going from Canada back to the U.S.  He took care of other grim business from 1860 to 1865, serving in two regiments of New York cavalry.  Farther west, at the same time, Charles Reed did the same in a regiment of Indiana infantry.  My father took care of the business of serving in the U.S. Navy, from his education at the Naval Academy to World War II service.

They all, with their brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and all else, took care of the business of living, as best they could.

Looking for Complexity in all the Wrong Places

That describes my search for the brother-in-law relationship between my paternal great-great granduncle Major Wellman Packard and N. S. (Nathaniel Strong) Sunderland.  I was overthinking, which is something I tend to do.  It turned out to be very simple.

Major Wellman Packard was married to Ellen Harris, verified by their marriage record.  N. S. Sunderland was married to Rachel Harris. verified by their marriage record.  Just a few minutes ago, I found a hint as to who Rachel and Ellen's father may have been, each having that hint in the form of the same suggested father for both of them, on their Ancestry profiles.  One source listed in support of this relationship was the gentleman's will, which specifically mentions Ellen and Rachel, Rachel under the surname Sunderland.  Apparently, Ellen and Wellman Packard had not married at the time of her father's death.

Yes, N. S. Sunderland was indeed Wellman Packard's brother-in-law, and yes, Ellen and Rachel were indeed sisters, as set out plainly in their father's will.  I'm glad someone in our family finally died testate!

Case closed.

Not quite.  Still more sources to gather, especially a second ton of coverage of N. S. Sunderland's life and times.  Lots and lots of newspaper articles to transcribe, comb through for facts and clues, and analyze it all.  Lots of work still to be done.

But with all that ahead of me, I finally have the satisfaction that I am so Midwestern, I'm related to myself.  Hello, cousin self!

I'm so Midwestern . . .

. . . I'm related to myself.  Well, I grew up in the south, so how I have heard this saying is, "I'm so southern, I'm related to myself."  Cracker Barrel even sells t-shirts in this part of the country with that saying on them, in that form.

To rehash it briefly, there is a letter in the Abraham Lincoln Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress to Lincoln in early 1860 from my paternal great-great granduncle Major Wellman Packard.  In it, he mentions his brother-in-law N. S. Sunderland.

Oooo!  Eyes pop wide, a big curiosity arises.  I have a bunch of Sunderlands on my mother's side, back to my fourth-great grandfather, Peter Sunderland, and his wife Nancy Ann Robbins.  Is this N. S. Sunderland, on my father's side, related to the Sunderlands on my mother's side?

Turns out, yep.  N. S. Sunderland -- Nathanial Strong Sunderland, so it turns out -- was the son of Peter Sunderland and Nancy Ann Robbins.  I have found absolute tons of newspaper articles about Nathanial Strong Sunderland, who was often referred to as N. S.  He was born in Ohio, in Centerville, in Montgomery County.  Nathaniel's father, Peter Sunderland, was apparently a pillar of Centerville, becoming established after he arrived there from the east.  His house, the house Nathaniel and his brother and sister grew up in, is quite the historic landmark in Centerville.

In addition to all the newspaper articles, there are also leads to military pension files, which I will order when I scrape up the dough for them.  There is Nathaniel's Civil War draft information.  There are some marriage and death records, but more are missing, especially marriage records.  I'll have to keep looking for them.

N. S. did not stay in Centerville.  He ended up in Bloomington, McLean County, Illinois, where Wellman Packard, known in the family more by his middle name than his military-sounding given name, and many of his siblings had brought their families from Canada. Later, N. S. took his family to Larned, Pawnee County, Kansas.  I have no idea why.  But he became a man of renown in that town, serving multiple terms as mayor, as well as director of the town's school board, and key positions in the local Republican party.

However, in the edition of 8 April 1920 of the Larned, Kansas, Chronoscope, is this brief and puzzling article:


The rest of the article characterizes Herbert Porter as a candidate of "the young man's party" and continues briefly with a list of the other winners on the independent ticket. Those names are familiar as men who served in those offices in Mayor Sunderland's administrations in his terms as mayor.  Is the use of the phrase "passed off very quietly" a clue?  It is a phrase often used (though not always with "off" included) in obituaries.  Was this a tribute?  Or did some citizens of Larned, disgusted with the people who were actually running for these offices, conduct a write-in campaign to express their disdain, and their wish for a true-blue workhorse like Col. N. S. Sunderland, a longing for "the good ol' days."  The reference of Herbert Porter being a candidate of "the young man's party" may argue in favor of this theory.  These questions are legitimate, because the one and only Col. N. S. Sunderland died in 1909.  No junior to carry on the name.  It is a very odd little article.  The Midwestern sense of humor can be a puzzle to others, perhaps.

I still do not have the exact connection of N. S. to Wellman Packard as a brother-in-law.  That is the last piece in the puzzle.  There also now sits before me the duty to transcribe all these newspaper articles, as their presentation on Ancestry, ported over from Newspapers.com, is often totally unreadable!  I have my clippings of them on Newspapers.com, and I can zoom in or out as needed for readability.  Then comes the big step of carefully combing through these articles for all the clues that abound there, and conducting a proper analysis.  But at least I know where N. S. Sunderland plugs in with the rest of my mother's Sunderlands, whether this connection to my paternal side is true or not.  That in itself is a victory.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Descendants of 2nd great-grandparents

One of the genealogy web postings I have always enjoyed appears in Randy Seaver's prompts under the title Saturday Night Genealogy Fun .  I'm a bit late with this one; it's been busy around here!  So, without further ado:

1)  How complete is your family tree?  Do you have information about your cousins  - both close and more distant?  Today's challenge is to take one set of your 2nd great-grandparents and make a Descendants List (using your genealogy management program - e.g., Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, etc.)

2) Tell us about your choice of 2nd great-grandparents, and tell us approximately how many descendants of them that you have in your family tree database. Share your answers, and perhaps a chart, on your own blog or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

 

Here is mine: it's rather long, and I apologize for the fuzziness of the image, but I just spent two hours trying to get it to work at all . . . I have NO talent in the graphic arts.

 

 

 

As you can see, the Reeds were indeed fruitful, and multiplied, until you get down to my grandparents, Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed and Ruth Nave.  They were married in 1913, and Frank was killed in a railroad accident in 1917.  Ruth remarried twice, but had no more children.  I have only 33 Reeds and spouses and children in my database, because I have not been able to work on it for a goodly while.  I have not by a long shot finished delving into all the collateral ancestors here.  I have no idea how many descendants of Charles Reed and Clarissa Haney Wright there may have been, up to the present time.  I have met only a few of my cousins, and very few of my uncles and aunts, and only two grandaunts. 
 

Maybe Sometimes I Should Make an Assumption

 I've been doing a little work on my latest mystery:  the existence of Sunderlands on both sides of my family, and efforts to discover if there is a relationship between these maternal and paternal Sunderlands.

Convinced that it would be wisest to pursue my maternal Sunderlands, I reviewed my documented information on them, going back about four generations.  I had only two little tidbits about N. S. Sunderland, and thought it a safe assumption that it would be futile to look him up anywhere.  But tonight, I thought, "Oh, why not?  Let me see if I can find anything on N. S. Sunderland, the one mentioned on my father's side."  N. S.  Sunderland is mentioned in passing in a letter my great-great-granduncle Major Wellman Packard wrote to his friend and legal colleague Abraham Lincoln early in 1860.  Wellman Packard mentioned that his brother-in-law, Sunderland, had been in Ohio, and recently returned to Illinois, and heard in Ohio some enthusiasm for the idea that Lincoln should run for President.

So I had some location information for N. S. Sunderland -- Ohio and Illinois.  Wellman Packard, and several of his siblings, lived in Bloomington, Illinois.  So I started there, in McLean County, where Bloomington is, with the 1860 census.  And there he was, not in Bloomington, but in Towanda, which is not very far from Bloomington.  I did a general search on Ancestry, and found quite a list of possible sources: a Civil War draft registration record, a marriage record between N. S. and Rachel Harris.  More census records; several of 'em.  An extensive and very informative obituary.  Land purchase records.  With maps.  

N. S. was born in Ohio; I now have the place and the date.  I'm pretty sure this is the N. S. Sunderland mentioned in Wellman Packard's letter.  He is the only N. S. Sunderland in McLean County in 1860.   He had a farm in Towanda, 375 highly productive acres.  He had four horses, four donkeys, 3 milch cows (cows giving milk), 3 other cattle (type unspecified), and 18 swine.  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 bad!

According to the 1860 census agricultural schedule, N. S. grew wheat (1700 bushels in 1860), Indian corn (1000 bushels), Irish potatoes (50 bushels), barley (200 bushels), and 30 tons of hay.  Unfortunately, there is no valuation of these crops.  He was prosperous.

I have the information, and have made notes on legal pad or on forms I use to gather preliminary information on people who may or may not be related.  Now to determine how N. S. Sunderland was Wellman Packard's brother-in-law.  I haven't yet found a sister of Wellman's married to anyone named Sunderland.  I'm going to have to look at Rachel Harris's siblings, providing I find her verifiable in census records.  And I need to bone up on middle-19th-Century notions of what constituted a "brother-in-law.  Was that term used as loosely as "cousin" has been in some regions?  Then to investigate whether there actually is any kinship between N. S. Sunderland's family and my mother's Sunderlands.  My mother's people were from Indiana, so the possibility is there.  And maybe I should make a wild assumption now and then.  Never know what I might find.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 - Week 19 - Preserve

 This week's prompt for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 is Preserve.  What do I preserve?  I preserve paper.  I am from the 20th Century; I spent the first 53 years of my life in the 20th Century.  I believe in paper.  Paper is solid, paper exists, paper can be preserved with archival materials and methods, which I learned in my scrapbooking hobby.  Paper doesn't get evaporated in a computer crash.  Yes, it can be damaged by fire, or water, or insects.  But properly preserved and protected, it can last for decades.

I do have a lot of my paper documents digitized; I am really quite belt-and-suspenders.  But when someone suggests that I digitize everything and toss the paper away, I cringe, my skin crawls, and I stand up and say, "No!"

My dilemma is that my photos for the past couple decades are digital.  I have, from time to time, sent some of my digital photos to Shutterfly to be printed.  I did that a lot when I was scrapbooking, something I hope someday to get back to.  I want at least to finish the ones I had to box away when other matters had to take precedence.  But paper uber alles!

Some preservation I have done has been in storytelling, especially to our grandson who is now 19 and in college.  He has enjoyed tales my husband and I have told him of our experiences in the Coast Guard.  He has enjoyed stories of ancestors' antics.  I should record some of these stories. 

Right now, I am engaged in digitizing a whale of a lot of photos and other documents from my husband's family, a request made by our nephew Paul, who visited recently.  He lives in Australia, and was returning there with some items he retrieved from storage after he left his last U.S. dwelling.  However, he had second thoughts about shipping the photos to Australia in a box with the other items.  He has left them here for me to scan.  On a future visit, he will claim his paper photos.  But I will have my own copy of this digital trove of my husband's family photos and documents to add to my genealogical information on his family.  And I can send some of my digital copies of these to Shutterfly, too.

Finally, a significant part of my ways of preservation involve photos and paper documents and storytelling.  These all find their way into the scrapbooks I have made and those I am hoping to complete when things settle down for us.  In these scrapbooks, preservation is the chief goal, and paper is king.

A to Z Challenge 2024 - All Wrapped Up

 This year I got farther into blogging in the A to Z Challenge than I have ever got before.  Maybe next year, life will have simmered down and I might complete the whole program.  This year,  our daughter's illness has overshadowed everything.  

I wish to thank everyone who read my blog and who commented.  The poor thing has been somewhat neglected in the past several years, and the A to Z Challenge was a great way to rejuvenate it.  All of you helped me in that effort, and you have my gratitude.  What seems funny is that my participation in this challenge has been in the last three presidential-election years!  I won't wait four years before doing it again!

I am also participating in the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge, created and curated by Amy Johnson Crow.  I got into it late, again due to the stressful events mentioned above.  I'll do my best to keep up with it! 

Delving into my ancestors' occupations and professions was an interesting journey, especially the discovery of a female journalist of the early 20th Century in the family.  

So many times, our findings about our ancestors may puzzle us in some of their practices, beliefs, and opinions, and the ways they conducted their lives.  It is wise to remember, as we historians do, that "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."  (L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953))

Thank you again!

A New Detective Story to Track Down

 I have yet another intriguing bit of family history to explore, and to find that, though it may pertain just as equally to other parts of the country, as we say here in the south, "I'm so southern, I'm related to myself."

My maternal great-grandmother Florence Elizabeth McKee's parents were Nelson Reed McKee (1838-1908) and Sarah Ann Sunderland (1848-1922).  Sarah Ann Sunderland's parents were Benjamin Sunderland (1813-1890) and Margaret Emeline Weller (1814-1910).  Her siblings were John Wesley Sunderland (1835-1914), Mary Elizabeth Sunderland (1838-1926), Joseph Robbins Sunderland (1840-1911), Peter Sunderland (1844-1904), and Margaret Emeline Sunderland (1856-1921).

The mystery?  The above is in my mother's line.

The mystery is that a Sunderland shows up also in my father's line.  A great-great-granduncle, Major Wellman Packard (1820-1903), mentions his brother-in-law N. S. Sunderland in a letter to another correspondent.  Major (his first name, not a military rank) Wellman Packard had 12 siblings, including my great-great grandfather, Mathew Hale Packard (1822-1881).  Among those siblings were several who remained in Canada, where they had all been born  A goodly portion of them, with spouses and children, had gone to the United States and ended up in Bloomington, Illinois after the Civil War.  I have not found a Sunderland among them yet, but according to M. W. Packard, there was at least one. 

So far, there is little indication of where the Sunderland connection lies in my father's line.  It is a good bet N. S. Suncerland will be found in the United States rather than among the siblings who stayed in Canada.  Wellman Packard mentions that N. S. had "just returned from Ohio," presumably to Illinois, where Wellman Packard and his correspondent both lived.  I'm chasing my Sunderlands among my mother's ancestors, both collateral and direct.  That's going to take a while, because those Sunderlands were prolific. This could all be a wild-goose chase with no resulting connection between Mom's Sunderlands and the one in Dad's line.  But I'll at least get some more progress on my maternal Sunderlands, if nothing else.  

Sounds like a win to me.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 - Week 18 - Love Story

 My grandmother Ruth Nave Reed Pennington White must have been lucky at cards, because she was unlucky in love.

November 25, 1913, she married Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed in St. Joseph County, Indiana, probably in South Bend, where Ruth lived with her mother.  Frank Reed's family lived in Logansport, in Cass County, Indiana.  They had three children: my uncle Donald Reed, my aunt Margaret Reed, and my mother, Martha Reed.  Frank Reed worked for a railroad as a switchman.  He was killed 22 October 1917 when he was hit by a railroad-yard donkey engine.  He was 29 years old.  Frank Reed and Ruth Nave were my grandparents, my mother's parents.

Sometime after 1920, Ruth Nave married William Walter Pennington.  I don't have their marriage record yet, and haven't found it online.  A cousin of mine lives in Logansport, Indiana, where my grandma and William Pennington lived, and has offered to search for that record in local records the next time he goes downtown.  William Pennington died 4 September 1927 in Logansport.  In an awful irony, he, too, was 29 years old when he died.

14 August 1942, Ruth Pennington and Harold Blaine White took out a marriage license.  I have not yet found their marriage documents.  Harold White was an unstable person, as far as I have been able to find.  He cites himself as having several different jobs, from farming to railroad fireman to telephone cable splicer for the Bell System (AT&T).  In census records and on his World War I and II draft registration forms, his employment is spotty and, on the censuses, his income minimal.  Ruth, his wife, made up to three or four times as much as he did, and she had a fairly steady record when she was working.  She was a telephone operator.  His pattern of job-hopping (if he really held such jobs at all), the periods of unemployment reflected in censuses, and the minimal income he reported, may indicate his mental instability.  He died in 1960, in a mental institution.

Ruth Nave Reed Pennington White died in 1951.  The informant on her death certificate was her husband, Harold White.  One thing he did may have indicated some caring for his wife: she is buried next to my grandfather, her first husband, Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 - Week 17 - War

War!  Huh!  What is it good for?  Absolutely nothing!

Those who were around in the 1960s will recognize that line.

Though rational people would prefer to avoid war, one thing that comes out of it: stories.  At least it is good for stories.  Many of the stories that come out of war are, as one would expect, grim and gruesome.  Some are sad stories, some touching tales of humanity or the lack of it.  And some are just downright funny.

My father, Arden Packard, was in the U.S. Navy in World War II.  He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1934.  Having been fascinated by flight since he was a lad, he applied for flight training, and was so assigned in 1937, at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.  He became a carrier-based naval aviator and his first assignment as a naval aviator was to USS Yorktown.  One story that came out of his days afloat concerned the commanding officer of a destroyer assigned to a carrier group.  One night, after the captain had retired to his cabin for the night, one of the other ships lost control and began to drift into the destroyer's path.  The captain was summoned to the bridge and quickly briefed.  He began to give orders.  "Now, everyone stay calm.  Stay calm, like me," he urged.  Then he barked out this order:  "Two toots on the rudder; right full whistle."  Dad never mentioned whether the ships collided or managed to avoid it.

There were sad stories about friends who never got to see peace restored.  Dad had two best friends at the Academy.  Their names were Edward "Ned" Worthington and James "Jimmy" Newell.  Ned Worthington was killed at Pearl Harbor.  Dad died in April of 1954 of pneumonia.  Jimmy Newell outlived them both, and my mother and I visited him and his wife in Norfolk, Virginia, when I was in high school.  The three Navy buddies had an agreement that they would each be cremated and their ashes scattered from a U.S. Navy aircraft.  Ned Worthington's ashes were scattered off Koko Head in Hawaii.  Dad's were scattered over Glendale, California.  I don't know about Jimmy Newell, who most likely passed on many years ago now.  My father assigned the nickname "Ned" to my brother, in remembrance of his friend.

[This post is a little late.  I'm catching up.]

A to Z Challenge 2024 - Professionally Speaking - P is for Pullman Conductor

I'm jumping in this entry from my family to the family of my husband, Keys Rhodes, to his grandfather Andrew Lewis Rhodes (1882-1966), who began as a Pullman Conductor in June of 1912, and ended that career in retirement in September of  1952.  

He was born 23 September 1882 in Morgantown, Pike County, Ohio, son of Samuel H. Rhoades and Ida May Dewey.  It was during Andrew Rhodes's lifetime that the spelling of the familial surname was changed, for reasons unknown.  Andrew Rhodes spelled the surname both ways in his Railroad Retirement paperwork, finally settling on the spelling we all bear today.  I knew the Rhodes family from church since I was 7 years old, when Keys and I first met.  Andrew Rhodes had a wonderful thick head of pure-white hair in his later years.  He died 12 March 1966, while Keys and I were in college.

He began his railroad career in February of 1903 as a clerk for United States Express Company, a freight delivery company that operated from 1854 to 1914.  He alternated between Clerk and Messenger in Ohio until June of 1912, at which time he signed on with Pullman as a conductor and was assigned to Jacksonville, Florida.  Early on, he served in the Tampa area, and that is where he met Della Mae Marshall of Lakeland.  They were married in Lakeland on October 14, 1918.(1)  A year later, almost to the day, their son L. Marshall Rhodes was born in Tampa.  Their movements can be traced to Jacksonville around 1922 by an Abstract of Title for a period from 3 November 1922 to 26 March 1928.(2)  Their daughter, Della Mae Rhodes, Jr., was born 12 February 1925 in Jacksonville.  The family remained in Jacksonville.

(1) Andrew Lewis Rhodes, Railroad Retirement File. United States of America, Railroad Retirement Board, copy conveyed by letter to M. Keys Rhodes dated 11 July 2006.

(2) Title & Trust of Florida, Abstract of Title, 3 November 1922-26 March 1928, for Andrew Lewis Rhodes.  Original in possession of Karen Packard Rhodes.

A to Z Challenge 2024 - Professionally Speaking - O is for Optician

 I wore glasses from the age of four to the age of sixteen, as my eyesight went from far-sightedness to "normal."  I resumed wearing them a few years later, as my eyesight began to trend toward near-sightedness.  My eye doctor was local, in Jacksonville, Florida, where I grew up, but the professional who made my eyeglasses was in Cleveland, Ohio.

He was my granduncle, Lawrence Leslie Reed (1896-1971), my mother's uncle.  He was an optician.  He was born into the large family of Francis Harvey Reed and Florence Elizabeth McKee on 2 May 1896 in Logansport, Indiana.  No matter the degree, we all just called him Uncle Lawrence.  I never met him, but for years, I wore glasses he made for me.  My aunt Elizabeth Reed would order glasses for me every time I was given a new prescription by my eye doctor.  And when the new pair arrived, I would go around the corner to the next street, where Aunt Elizabeth, whom we all called "Sissy," as she was my mother's adoptive sister, lived with her mother, my grandma Mary Reed, and pick up my new glasses.  My grandma's nickname was "Chollie."  Yes, there's a story there.

I never had a choice of frames, and for some reason -- I guess because I was a young girl -- Uncle Lawrence favored sending me glasses with pink frames.  I never could stand pink.  I was a tomboy, a climber of trees, player of baseball, and rider of my bicycle all over the south side of Jacksonville.  My favorite color has always been blue.  But sometimes, when in my adult years I did pick my own frames, after Uncle Lawrence passed on, I would pick pink.  Maybe it was in tribute to the far-away granduncle who made my glasses and selected my frames so long ago.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 - Week 16 - Step

Step lively, there!

Oh, sometimes lively is not what I am feeling, but I do perk right up when I'm working on genealogy.  It might be mine, it might be my husband's, it might be that of our son-in-law, who has added the lively step of Germany and the Netherlands to our genealogical mix, which has been rather boringly British with just a dash of Swiss.

I say, the more the merrier!

One Step I took a few years ago was to sign up with the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project, in which they took my DNA back much farther than anyone else has done -- about 700,000 years!  They determined that I am 2.1% Neanderthal and 1.1% Denisovan, the latter being another offshoot strain found in the Denisova Caves in Siberia.  A waggish friend said that this revelation means I am "3.2% extinct."  Sometimes I feel like it.

Genealogy will broaden our perspective, as long as we do it correctly, and don't try to either do it lazy by just collecting names whether they belong to us or not, or by using genealogy to press an agenda.  That's been done in the past, from Spanish subjects in the 1400s to 1600s trying to hide disapproved ethnicities from the authorities and the Inquisition, or by some citizens of St. Augustine, Florida, during the 400th anniversary celebration in 1964 to "clean up" their backgrounds.  Other citizens, marginalized by the first lot, knew what these folks were up to, and knew how bogus these scrubbed genealogies were because they were descended from the same people, and could snicker behind politely-held fans.

I've signed up late, because I just found out that Amy Johnson Crow, originator of this series of blogging prompts, is still at it after, what, 10 years?  Nice!  

So Step into my parlor (said the spider to the fly), and let me see if I can entertain you with posts concerning whoever I can dredge up that I have not already blogged to Infinity and Beyond.

A to Z Challenge 2024 - Professionally Speaking - M is for Military

 From the very first English emigrations to the New World, my family has had individuals in it who did military service of one form or another.

As with most men in early colonial times, Samuel Packard, my eighth great-grandfather, served in the militia of his town of residence.  He came to the New World first at Hingham, Massachusetts, shown in some records as New Hingham, named for a town in England.  From there, he moved to Weymouth, and eventually settled in Bridgewater, the part that is now known as Brockton.  A town in New England at that time was centered around the church; and it was the church.  Church membership was required for a man to be considered a "freeman," to be able to vote and hold office.  Now and then, there would be a squabble in a church over something-or-other, and a group would break off and set up another church in another part of town, creating thereby a new town.  Bridgewater eventually split into East Bridgewater, West Bridgewater, and North Bridgewater.  It was in the latter town that Samuel Packard lived, and which later became Brockton.

Samuel's fourth-great-grandson Richards Packard served in the American Revolution.  His name was Richards; he signed several documents, including at least one in his Revolutionary War Pension file, as Richards.  He was probably so named after his mother's maiden name; her name was Mercy Richards.  I have written a booklet on Richards, his ancestors, and his descendants.  In it, I describe his military service:

"Richards Packard’s original enlistment was at Western, Massachusetts, for a term of six months. Western is in Middlesex County, north and west of Bridgewater. Richards mustered in at Springfield, Hampshire County (that part which is now Hampden County), in Captain Wade’s company, Colonel Jackson’s regiment. The company went to West Point, New York; Richards was at Kings Ferry and, as Richards says in his sworn statement, at Haverstraw “when Andre was hung,” referring to the execution of Major John Andre, the British spy who was hanged 2 October 1780 at Tappan, New York. Richards Packard was discharged in the fall of 1780. 

"He enlisted again in February, 1782, at Leverett, Massachusetts and again was at West Point, this time under Captain Smith in Colonel Rufus Putnam’s regiment. During this time, he suffered from smallpox, but apparently recovered. The troops went to Verplank’s Point in the spring of 1783, and were there until fall, when they retired to winter quarters at Newburgh, New York. He was discharged in February of 1783."

I have two direct ancestors who served the Union in the Civil War.  My paternal great-great grandfather, Mathew Hale Packard (not a typo; there was only one "t" in Mathew's name) served in two different regiments of New York Cavalry, the 15th New York Cavalry, and the 2nd Regiment, New York Provisional Cavalry.  My maternal great-great grandfather, Charles Reed, served in the 140th Indiana Infantry.  Both survived, but were disabled by disease.  

My father, Arden Packard, enlisted in the Navy and was admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1930, having passed a competitive exam offered to enlisted personnel.  He graduated from the academy in 1934.  He took flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in 1937, and that is where he met my mother and they got married in July of 1937.  He received exemplary fitness reports, placing him in the top 5% of Naval aviators -- "Top Gun" territory.  But he was grounded due to medical problems, and became a flight instructor.  In that capacity, he was sent by the Navy Department to the Empire Central Flying School, outside of London, England, to learn the tactics the British were using against the Germans.  He brought that knowledge home and taught these tactics to his students, who would be shipping out with the Atlantic Fleet to English waters to fight the Germans.

Inspired by our father's service, my brother enlisted in the U.S. Marines after high school, and I enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve when I saw how much my husband was enjoying his Coast Guard service.  Our family very much has a military tradition.

 

A to Z Challenge 2024 - Professionally Speaking - L is for Lawyer

My great-great granduncle Major Wellman Packard (1820-1903) was not a military officer.  Major was his given name, not a rank. He has been known down the generations in the family as Wellman Packard.  He was a lawyer in Illinois, and was friends with another Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.  In the collections of the Library of Congress is a letter that Wellman wrote to his friend Abe on 22 February 1860.  Lincoln had previously written to Wellman asking him to take care of a matter that Lincoln had somehow overlooked:  he was supposed to have paid the Bloomington, Illinois, property taxes of one William Florville, a Haitian immigrant.  In his letter to Lincoln, Wellman reports that he has done as Lincoln asked and paid the taxes.  Wellman had collected ten dollars from another man who owed it to Lincoln, and used it to pay Florville's taxes of $10.10.  On the balance of ten cents, Wellman dismissed any debt on Lincoln's part, saying, "Bal 10 cts which will be just enough to drink my health with, which please do if it suits you -- but in any event you need not "remit" at the present high rates of exchange!  

Wellman goes on to ask Lincoln about a certain case.  Then a bit of the politics of the day comes in to Wellman's next remark: "My brother-in-law N. S. Sunderland has just returned from Ohio, and he assures me the tide of politics is settling decidedly in favor of 'Old Abe' for President."(1)

 Twenty-five years after Welllman died in 1903, a small book that he had written was printed in a very small edition of only 30.  It was reprinted in 1971, also in a limited edition, but larger, of 500 copies.  I was provided a copy by a cousin.  In this small book, Wellman wrote of a trip he took to California with a party of "forty-niners," people lured by the discovery at Sutter's Mill of gold.  Wellman went on the trip to observe, not to go panning for gold.  One of his observations: "It was indeed providential that the news came to us late in the autumn months of 1848, and the journey overland could not be attempted until the following spring.  Even then very many started without the necessary preparation, and suffered the penalty of their want of foresight in much suffering and unnecessary hardship and privation."

One of the more thrilling events was the day the wagon train in which he was traveling found a tremendous herd of bison bearing down directly on it.  The herd was as has been described of herds that once roamed the plains in the thousands, and it took several brave men on horseback, with their lungs and with firearms fired into the air to turn the herd and save the wagon train.(2)

Major Wellman Packard, a man of law and letters, returned to Bloomington and died there 28 February 1903.

(1) Abraham Lincoln Papers, Series 1.  General Correspondence.  1933-1916: Major W. Packard to Abraham Lincoln, Wednesday, February 22, 1860 (Florville's Taxes), https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.0241700/?st=pdf (accessed 17 April 2024).

(2) Packard, Major Wellman. Early Emigration to California, 1849-1850.  (Reprint: Fairfield, Washington: Ye Galleon Press, 1971).

A to Z Challenge 2024 - Professionally Speaking - J is for Journalist

 I am pleased to find a journalist in the family, and more pleased that this family journalist was a woman.  Helen Augusta "Gussie" [Packard] DuBois, my great-grandaunt, was a feature writer for the Pasadena Star-News in the 1920s and 1930s.(1)   She was born in Chautauqua County, New York in 1851, probably in New Harmony Township.  She died in Los Angeles County, California, in 1941, probably in Pasadena, where she lived for many years.  She married Louis Stanley DuBois in 1880.  He died in 1911 and she never remarried.  

She contributed stories to a number of California newspapers and magazines, and was also known as a poet.  Speaking to her broad range of interests, she also wrote for religious publications, being a member of a Presbyterian congregation, and was known for her celebrity interviews conducted with "skill and tact."(2) 

For the funeral of her friend Nellie M. Russ, head of Pasadena's public library, Gussie DuBois wrote a poem she titled "Friends."

To be a friend, O strong and subtle power

That so demands the best the soul has known.

Life has no greater honor for its dower:

I hold it higher than to win a throne.(3)

 (1)  "Helen Root Wolf New Organist-Director of Local Christian Church," San Pedro (California) News-Pilot, 28 Aug. 1941

(2)  "Mrs. Gussie Packard DuBois Dies at Home," Bloomington (Illinois) Daily Pantograph, 17 Sept. 1941, Page 2.

(3)  "Noted Librarian is Laid to Rest," Pasadena Post, 3 Nov 1927, Page13.