. . . 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.
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