Family Sayings

 My family has a stock of family sayings that date back to the 1890s.  We are a bunch that likes to play with words.

 My great-grandaunt and great-granduncle, Rachel Anna (Sleeth) LeSourd and Levi Curtis LeSourd, would go on buggy rides of a Sunday afternoon in rural Carroll County, Indiana.  Levi was a farmer and Rachel was a farm wife, and they were keen in their observance of Sunday as a day of rest -- after church, of course.  One day, they passed a rural roadside stand.  Among the vegetables on sale there, was a goodly lot of fresh corn.  Rachel looked over the corn, noting the price of two cents an ear.  But she also saw that the ears of corn lay nestled in their green jackets, heavily tasseled with their silk.  She sniffed, "Corn's not shucked!  Drive on!"  This phrase has come to mean, in our family, that something we're considering buying does not meet our standards, and we will continue our search for one that does.

At about the same time, the late 1880s or early 1890s, my great-grandmother Florence Elizabeth (McKee) Reed had made a large pot of oyster stew.  She probably found oysters at a bargain price.  Since no tale of illness upon consuming the stew has come down in my family, I assume the oysters were still fresh.  Anyway, Great-grandma Flo decided she would share some of the copious quantity of the stew with an elderly woman in the neighborhood who had no kin nearby.  You know the one -- the old lady in the slightly unkempt house and yard whom all the kids were sure was a witch.  We had one in our neighborhood in the 1950s when I was a young'un.  Great-grandma corralled a few of her nine boys to carry a tureen of the oyster stew to the old lady.  Filled with trepidation at actually having to interact with the neighborhood witch, they carried out their duty.  They told the woman, when she answered the door, that their mother had made a lot of oyster stew and would like for the woman to have some.  The old lady said with Midwestern directness, "Well, I don't really like oyster stew, but seeing as your mother was so kind as to make it for me, I'll eat it if it pukes me."  The boys ran home, laughing.  So, today, gratitude for a meal or a delivered dish of food is expressed with, "Seeing as you were so kind as to make this for me, I'll eat it if it pukes me."   Inelegant, but it makes its point.

 Sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, a phrase emerged out of the practice of a family member or friend stopping by briefly to return a book, or a pot that had been sent with food in it.  There wasn't even time for the visitor to come into the house.  The phrase, "Come again when you can't stay so long," was born, indicating that the visit was too short, and there was hope of a much longer visit in the near future.

Family sayings can also be alternative names for objects, foods, or even people.  Family sayings can also be hatched any time, anywhere.  One evening in the middle 1980s, our two teenage daughters were a little bored.  The younger one, who did not yet have her driver's license, suggested to her sister that they go out for frozen yogurt.  The older one, who was driving by then, and who is deaf in one ear, got a puzzled look on her face, and said, "Fuzzy donuts?"  Having not been paying full attention, and having her hearing problem, she thought her sister had said, "Let's go get some fuzzy donuts."  From that time on, in our house, frozen yogurt has been called "fuzzy donuts."

 In 2007, I went back to college, at the age of 60.  I was pursuing a double post-baccalaureate major of history and Spanish at the University of North Florida, aiming to make a study of family life in colonial Spanish St. Augustine, Florida, in the Second Spanish Period (1784-1821).  I had training in genealogy, so my approach to this subject was both historical and genealogical.  One day, our older daughter, who worked at the University, and I were sitting in the rather crowded old student union.  We were on high stools at a high table, eating our lunch of sushi.  I was nearly finished, when a boy who had been doing some fancy moves involving a soccer ball and his knees, hit the soccer ball and it ended up on my sushi plate.  Fortunately, it landed away from my two remaining morsels.  The room went quiet.  The young man got a horrified look on his face, leading me to think his train of thought must have been, "All these people here in the room, and I knock the soccer ball in the old lady's plate."  He probably expected to get a tongue-lashing, but I took a different tack.  Relieved at having been distracted from the dismal political discussion my daughter and I were having by this bit of comic relief, I wailed in a child-like voice, "Mommy!  There's a soccer ball in my sushi."  My daughter took up the cue without skipping a beat:  "Don't make a fuss, dear, or everyone will be wanting one."  The relief in the room -- and especially on the face of the young soccer-kicker -- was immediately and strongly palpable.  Laughter broke out.  I fished the soccer ball out of the soy-sauce wet plate, wiped it off, and tossed it back to the fellow.  Since the incident had mercifully changed the subject of our discussion, my daughter and I glommed onto "Soccer ball!" as an expression meaning, "Let's change the subject."

Today, I found another expression for us in a response to a post I made on a social-media forum on a specialized website.  I was bemoaning my extraordinarily frustrating afternoon trying to get hold of someone at the Internal Revenue Service about a letter we received making some outrageous changes to our 2024 tax return.  Their telephone system kept messing up, and the human beings I was talking to made some boo-boos, too.  I insisted that I was going to do no more adulting that day, I was going to turn my back on the world, and was going to go play a computer game.  One reply to my post referred to a children's book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst.  Author Viorst describes young Alexander's awful day, in which he is constantly insisting he is going to move to Australia.  The lad comes to the end of the day reflecting on his mother's having told him that "some days are like that.  Even in Australia."  The respondent praised my tactic: "You moved to your 'Australia.'"  So now, "I'm moving to Australia," will mean that I've reached my limit of frustration and am going to go ignore the world for a while.

What family sayings have grown up in your family?  What expressions did your parents and grandparents donate to the family, and how are they used today?

 

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: January Highlights

This weekend, Randy wants us to comment on what genealogy fun we've had in January, what happenings do we consider the highlights of January, 2026? 

One highlight for me in January was playing around with FamilySearch's "Simple Search."  That gave me hours of fun, as it presented me with a huge fountain of sources for my ancestors.  And I'm not done yet.

Oh, sure, there have been some searches that turned up nothing or next to it, and there have been searches that have turned out to be an exercise in Finagle's Law ("Any port my ship enters is someone else's home port, not mine").  But overall, I have found a huge number of sources to run down, investigate, analyze, and evaluate.  This has brought some of my family lines forward by leaps and bounds.

Another highlight shed a blanket of comfort over a sad occasion:  One of my dearest friends, who has been more a sister to me than my own sister for forty years, died on 4 January.  It was rather sudden, but not truly unexpected.  But I miss her!  The blanket of comfort: she was not just a friend.  It turns out she was kin, my 16th cousin once removed.  So now I have a whole passel of new kin to research.  I'm in contact with this new cousin's sister, another cousin.  We're exchanging genealogical information.  

In light of January having been a particularly tough month for my family, these highlights have been a welcome reservoir of joy to me.

 

That Which Survives

 I was directed to a post on Substack in which this quotation appears:

"One reason I started as far back in the family tree as I did in the 17th and 18th centuries is that no one is left alive who has a personal stake in what I might uncover. That gives me emotional distance, and the freedom to follow the evidence where it leads without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings." -- Arik Hesseldahl, "Turn Every Page," Arik Hesseldahl's Advice on Digging Deep into your Family History, quoted in "The Writethrough," on Substack.

Hesseldahl is a journalist, and recommends digging into family history as a journalist would, to find the facts.  Like journalism or history, he tells us, what we find depends on "what has been saved," the documents and books and diaries and everything else that has managed to survive war, fire, other natural disasters, and retention policies.  It's the same in genealogy.

The quotation does get one thing backwards, though.   In genealogy, we don't start far back, we start with ourselves and work backwards.  For us, a step backwards is progress.  But I do agree that the farther back we go, the more we can reveal, because anyone affected is long dead, and beyond being upset about things.  The emotional distance assists objectivity.  

So, what survives?  I have found that most medical records might survive five to ten years.  The local hospital where my family tends to be treated keeps records only five years.  I can't go back and find, at 78, record of the tonsillectomy I had when I was 18, which had me in the hospital four days right after high school graduation.  Some graduation present.

Government agencies, local, state, and federal, have retention policies that dictate what will be kept, what won't, and where it goes when it goes somewhere else -- such as the state or national archives.  Not everything makes it into the archives.  They're vast, but they're not infinite.  Someone, somewhere, is making decisions on what will be kept and what won't.

Even government archives, stolid as some of their buildings may appear, are not immune to losses.  The fire in 1973 at the National Personnel Records Center that destroyed a large chunk of U.S. military records, is a case in point.  Wherever it's housed, paper has one disadvantage -- it burns.

 These days, a lot of information is being preserved on electronic media.  One problem there is "feature creep," or the advancements in technologies that render older preservation methods and materials obsolete.  And these days, some technologies become obsolete just a few years after being born.  Floppy disks, anyone?  Another problem is that electronic media can be compromised or destroyed by the very thing that gives them life -- electricity.  A random spike or worse can scramble data.  Electronic storage is also subject to attacks by vicious little worms of people who should meet frequently with someone's horsewhip.  I'll volunteer mine.

 So we ferret out that which survives from any period of time.  Having a field of data to do that surviving is another part of the equation.  How good was a particular society at a particular time at record-keeping?  How good was a particular society at indexing, cataloging, or otherwise maintaining records?  I've found, in my study of Spanish colonial Florida between 1513 and 1821 that the Spanish were absolutely anal retentive about creating and keeping records, bless them.  Indiana had marvelously informative marriage license applications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Illinois didn't even record the names of the parents of brides and grooms until 1872.  And, of course, my paternal great-grandparents got married in Illinois in 1871!

 Search on, dear hearts!  Record your searches, document those facts, and write the stories of your family.

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, Week 4: A Theory in Progress

This week, for Amy Johnson Crow's  52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, we are to talk about a genealogical theory we are working on.  This one is not pleasant, but it's been nagging at me.

In the obituary for my granduncle Edmund McKee Reed (1893-1921), who died in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, there is mention of Edmund's brother, my grandfather Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed, who also died in Detroit.(1)

Frank died 20 October 1917, when he was hit by a yard engine in the Wabash Railroad yard in Detroit.(2)

 His death certificate states the cause of death as "crushing injuries to head, run over by steam engine."(3)  The mention of Frank's death in Edmund's obituary states, "It will be remembered that a brother of [the] deceased, Frank Reed, was decapitated in an accident in Detroit about two years ago."

This raises some questions . . . 

Frank Reed was married to Ruth Nave.  They wed 25 November 1913.  Their first child, a son named Donald Francis Reed, was born 19 May 1913.  A tad early.  Donald was followed in making his entry into the world by sisters Margaret Elizabeth in 1914 and Martha Shideler, my mother, in 1916.  There is no way of knowing for sure what their home life was like.  The only photograph I have of my grandmother Ruth is one taken about 1920, with her and Donald and Margaret, Martha having already been taken from Ruth by the Reed family and placed with Frank's oldest brother Perry and his wife Mary LeSourd after Frank's death.  In that photo, Ruth has a very slight smile, but to me her eyes hold a sadness.  My Aunt Margaret, Ruth's other daughter, told me that Ruth had lived a sad life.  There might have been stress in the marriage caused by the rapid arrival of three children, close in age, and all the exhaustion and tension involved in child care.  The possibly unhappy couple had not begun their marriage with time alone to explore their relationship and engage in any family planning. 

 I just wonder if Frank saw no other way out of a stressful and possibly deteriorating situation except suicide.

Is it possible to be partially or totally decapitated when hit by a railroad yard engine while standing up, walking, or running?  Did he cross in front of the engine, badly underestimating its speed and/or distance from him?  Or did he, in a moment of despair and psychic pain, lay his head down on a rail with the engine bearing down on him?

 I want to find out if any records of the Wabash Railroad exist, and if, in those records, there is a report on the incident.  Would the Detroit police department have had any cause to investigate the death?  Where would a report issued by that department on the incident be housed, if it exists?  

I just would like to know.

(1)  "Obit of Edmund M. Reed" Newspapers.com, database with images, The Pharos-Tribune (Logansport, Indiana, United States) 28 Jan 1921, page 6, Imaged: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-pharos-tribune-obit-of-edmund-m-ree/189449669/ (accessed 21 January 2026).

(2) "Engine Kills a Switchman," Newspapers.com, database with images.  The Pharos-Tribune (Logansport, Indiana, United States) 22 October 1917, page 3.  Imaged: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-pharos-tribune-death-notice/95893929/ (Accessed last 26 January 2026).

(3)  State of Michigan, Department of State, Division of Vital Statistics, Transcript of Certificate of Death, Benjamin Franklin Reed.  Verified by Glenn Copeland, State Registrar, Michigan Department of Community Health, Lansing, Michigan, 3 April 2009.  Registered no. 10695. 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2026, Week 1: An Ancestor I Admire

Starting a new Year with Amy Johnson Crow's  52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, she asks us to talk about an ancestor we admire.

I'm going to choose my maternal great-great grandmother Sarah Ann (Sunderland) McKee Rogers (1842-1922).

Sarah was the daughter of Benjamin Sunderland (1813-1890) and Margaret Emeline Weller (1814-1810). She was born in Ohio and died in Allen County, Indiana.  She married my great-great grandfather Nelson Reed McKee (1838-1908) 8 April 1859 in Allen County, Indiana.  They had three children, Florence Elizabeth (1862-1943, my great-grandmother), Benjamin Franklin, called Frank, (1865-1890), and Charles Preston (born in 1873; death date not yet discovered).

 As related in my blog post "The Mystery of Nelson Reed McKee" (https://karenaboutgenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/05/blacksheep-sunday-mystery-of-nelson.html), the family's life changed when Nelson disappeared on the night of 31 May 1879, never to be seen again in Indiana.  The town turned out to search for him.

He turned up later in Beloit, Rock County, Wisconsin.  In Indiana, he had been a jeweler and watch repairman.  He took up the same occupation in Beloit, first under the name Nels R. McCuren, then later under his true name, Nelson R. McKee.  He married Ida Josephine Colby 1 August 1880.  There was a slight problem with that: he was still married to Sarah Ann.  

Here's where her story begins, though not as richly documented as Nelson's.  I see Sarah as holding out hope for a while that Nelson would return or be found.  That hope must have eventually faded, and Sarah sought a divorce from Nelson, which was granted in mid-November of 1882.  The divorce was uncontested, and Sarah was awarded custody of the children.  She was left to raise her three children by herself.  Her 16-year-old daughter, on the cusp of 17 years, went to work as a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse to help support herself and her mother and brothers.  For the same reason, by the 1880 U.S. federal census, Frank, then 15, was earning a living as a wagon driver.

Sarah obtained the divorce to enable her to marry again, which she did 29 October 1884, to a man named Luke Rogers.  She faced the grief and shock of her husband Nelson's disappearance, and later the knowledge that he had abandoned the family.  She had to endure six years of being a single mother, and the strain of seeing two of her three children having to go to work at early ages to help support the family.  One did what one must.

Luke Rogers died in 1915.  I have not found out much about him.  I hope he was a decent man who treated my great-great grandma and her children well.  I hope they had a happy life together.  Sarah deserved it.

 

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Goals for 2026

 Time once again for Randy Seaver's  Saturday Night Genealogy Fun in which we are encouraged to state our genealogy goals for 2026.  My list is rather short. 

1.  Finish my revision of my family history on my father's side, Richards Packard, His Ancestors and Descendants in Direct Line to Arden Packard (1911-1954), Together with Some Notes on Selected Collateral Relatives.  Yes, that's a mouthful.  I am revising it, as I have found a good deal of additional information, and I need to correct some errors in the earlier edition.  I plan to send copies to the Georgeville, Quebec, Historical Society, the Library of Congress, the New England Historic and Genealogical Society, the Southern California Genealogical Society, and to provide a copy to my local genealogical and historical societies. 

2.  Continue filling out my contributions to WikiTree.  

3.  Finish with success the Profile Improvement Project on WikiTree.

4.  Do more in filling out my genealogy on my computer, using Legacy Family Tree.

5.  I bought a copy of Planning a Future for Your Family's Past, by Marian Burk Wood.  As I'm 78 in a family not generally known for long lives, I need to start preparing for preservation of my family history.  WikiTree is part of this planning, for me.  

That about does it, because another goal for 2026, covering my life in general, is to practice the practical art of saying, "No."  I don't have the time or the energy to be overcommitted, as I have had a habit of doing in the past.  

 

How Accurate is That Biography, Anyhow?

In the 1800s and the early to mid 1900s, biographical compilations were published across the United States; there were publishers at the time who specialized in such books.  Some were serious works of biography.  Many were less rigorously assembled, with the entries being written by the subjects themselves, as these books were intended to “pump up” the town in a wave of “boosterism.”  Some of these subjects seem not to have been able to resist the temptation to pad the resume, as we say today.  So, when you find an ancestor listed in one of these compilations, can you put full faith and credit in what is said in the entry?  What pitfalls may await the unwary family historian in such an entry?

             Let’s take a case study.  My grand-uncle Don Francis Reed (1887-1930) has an entry in a compilation titled A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, written and compiled by William E. Connelley (Chicago, Lewis, 1918, five volumes).  I found this particular entry while searching the World Wide Web, and was surprised to find Uncle Don’s information.  At that point, I didn’t have much on the Reed family, my mother’s people, and I was happy to find the information.  I have to say I became a little less happy once I started accumulating other documentation and discovered that the information in Uncle Don’s entry was less than 100% reliable and that there is a source of confusion lurking in the information..

             I will reproduce here a portion of the entry, as it is, then I will discuss the errors and confusion that exist in the text.  Points in the text where these errors occur are marked with a consecutive number in square brackets; each error is discussed at the end of the quoted portion of text, by number.  I suggest reading the text without pausing, first, as the text will give the reader a flavor of the type of biography that appears in these compilations.

             “Don Francis Reed has been identified with Harper, Kansas, successively as a blacksmith, farmer, and lawyer.  Admitted to the bar a little more than two years ago he has won his spurs in his first legal contest and is now well established with a general clientage [sic] drawn from all over Harper County.

             “Mr. Reed was born at Logansport, Indiana, January 10, 1887, and is a member of a family that has three living generations.  He is of Scotch ancestry.  His great-grandfather, Herriman Reed [1], was born in Scotland, came to this country in early times, settling in Philadelphia, and died there.  By trade he was a cooper.

             “The grandfather of the Harper lawyer is Charles Reed, who was born in Jay County, Indiana [2], in 1846 [3], and has spent all his life in that section of Eastern Indiana as a farmer.  He has been identified with the republican party for many years, and saw 3 ½ years of active service with an Indiana regiment of infantry in the Civil war [4].  He was at the second battle of Bull Run [5], where he was shot through the arm [6], and later participated in the Atlanta campaign [7] and was at the battle of Kenesaw Mountain [8] and other engagements.  He married Miss Wright, who was born in Pennsylvania [9] and died in Jay County, Indiana.  Ten of their children are still living, namely:  Sarah, wife of S. C. Milton, a farmer in Jay County, Indiana; F. H. Reed; James J. [10], an oil well driller near Portland, Oregon; William M. [11], who is also in the oil well business in Oregon; Solon M. [12], a merchant at Portland, Indiana; Sallie, wife of Ernest J. Louden, who is agent for the Salt Lake Railroad Company at San Pedro, California; Nellie, wife of Waldo Twiggs, an employee of the Warner Gear Company of Muncie, Indiana; Carrie, unmarried and living at Portland, Indiana; John, agent for the Lake Erie and Western Railway at Anson, Ohio; and Leslie, an oil well driller near Portland, Oregon. [13]

             “F. H. Reed, father of Don Francis, was born in Jay County, Indiana, November 19, 1861 [14], and is still living at Logansport in that state.  He has spent practically all his life in Logansport and is a veteran of the Pennsylvania Railway service, still having a run as passenger conductor out of Logansport, which is one of the division points on that road.  He is a republican, very active in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and one of the church trustees.  He married Florence McKee, who was born in White County, [15] Indiana, November 17, 1861 [16].  They are the parents of a family of eleven children:  Perry W., a resident of Chicago and connected with the Interstate Commerce Commission [17]; Don Francis;  Benjamin Franklin, a passenger conductor [18] with the Wabash Railway Company, living at Detroit, Michigan; Charles C., a lieutenant in the Aviation Corps of the United States Army; Merritt W., a farmer in Cass County, Indiana; Edmund McKee, cashier of the Wabash Railway Company at Detriot, Michigan; William E., a student in the Detroit College of Medicine; Lawrence L., now serving with the United States Cavalry stationed at Louisville, Kentucky; Florence G., living with her parents; Paul P. and John, both students in the high school at Logansport.”

             Now to discuss the errors and confusions in the text.

 [1].  This is one of those traps for the unwary.  Here the term “great-grandfather” is being used loosely.  Uncle Don’s great-grandfather on the Reed side was Harvey Reed, not Herriman (or Harriman; remember, we need to be aware of alternative spellings in our research), and he was born probably in Gallia County, Ohio, according to information developed by a distant cousin, Shirley Reed.  The term “great-grandfather” here may simply mean a distant ancestor, not his actual great-grandfather as we define the term.  There may very well be a Herriman Reed, immigrant from Scotland, back in the ancestry.  So far, searches in such sources as the 1790 census for Philadelphia, ship passenger lists, and other references have turned up no Herriman (or Harriman) Reed.

 [2]  According to Charles Reed’s invalid pension claim, obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration1, Charles Reed was born in Gallia County, Ohio.  His family moved to Jay County, Indiana when he was a youngster.  This is probably one of those instances where the biography’s subject is not certain of his information, but goes ahead anyway because he’s close enough for government work, as we say.  In fact, I doubt that many mistakes such as these which appear in these biographies are intentional, and certainly they’re not malicious, in the main.  They’re simply the result of slips of memory.

 [3]  Charles Reed’s birth year, according to his invalid pension file, was 1840, not 1846.

[4]  Charles Reed’s active service in the Civil War was less than a year.  He enlisted on 13 October 1864 and was mustered out 11 July 1865 (however, he had been invalided home, actually, on 30 June 1865).  His service consisted mainly in being ill with “camp diarrhoea” (probably amoebic dysentery) and “break-bone fever” (the old name for dengue fever).

 [5]  Since 2nd Bull Run (or 2nd Manassas) was fought in 1862 and Charles Reed enlisted on 13 October 1864, this is unlikely, to say the least.

 [6]  Charles Reed’s invalid pension file, which includes a number of reports of medical examinations complete with illustrated body diagram, makes no mention whatsoever of any wounds received in service.  His disability claim was based entirely on bacterial and viral diseases and their complications.

 [7]  According to Charles Reed’s pension file, which includes statements by himself as to his service, as well as reports of service from the War Department, his regiment was nowhere near Atlanta.  The regiment’s service was entirely in Tennessee and North Carolina.  A report on the movements of the regiment, the 140th Indiana Infantry, is found at the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System website, maintained by the National Park Service, located at web address http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/regiments,htm  on which none of these campaigns attributed to Charles Reed by his grandson are mentioned.  Here the case might either be faulty recall, complete ignorance of the facts coupled with a desire to pump up the resume, or remembering tales grandpa spun out of whole cloth because he didn’t care to admit that he spent most of the Civil War in hospital.

 [8]  Again, this campaign is not mentioned in Charles Reed’s pension file nor on the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System as having been engaged by the 140th Indiana Infantry.

 [9]  According to research so far, it appears that “Miss Wright,” (Clarissa Haney Wright) was born in Xenia, Green County, Ohio.

 [10]  Here, Uncle Don has misremembered his uncle’s name.  The middle initial for James is M., not J., for his name was James Marcellus Reed.  Information for these name corrections comes from Charles Reed’s pension file and from a typescript in the family begun by Charles’s son John (John Robinson Reed)2 and continued by another family member after John’s death.

 [11]  This is simply another misremembered name.  Middle initial should be I.; his name was William Irvin Reed.

 [12]  Another misremembered name.  Middle initial should be E.; his name was Solon Ernest Reed.

 [13]  Uncle Don has forgotten that there were twelve living children of Charles Reed at the time he made his entry for this biography.  Mary Catherine didn’t die until 1932, and Lawrence Elbert died in 1942.3

 [14]  F. H. (Francis Harvey, or “Frank”) Reed’s birthdate is November 17, 1862, according to a family genealogy prepared by the children of Frank Reed and Florence McKee Reed on their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1934.4

 [15]  There is a point of confusion here, possibly.  On his application for a marriage license in 1913, Florence Reed’s son Benjamin Franklin Reed gives her birthplace as Warsaw, Indiana,5 which is in Wabash County, not White County.  Florence and Frank Reed were married in White County, and that may be the source for confusion.  Her birthplace will need to be investigated.

 [16]  Florence’s birth date is November 19, 1862.6

 [17]  According to the birth certificate of Perry’s daughter Mary Elizabeth, he was a “traffic manager” (railroad) in 1910.  The answer is provided by my uncle Bob, Perry Reed’s son, in an article in Pensacola History Illustrated7:  “[Perry Reed] was a mathematical whiz, a freight rate expert with a license to practice before the Interstate Commerce Commission.”  So the connection was simply this license, which does not make him an employee of the ICC.  It simply means he could represent his employer, the railroad, in matters brought before the ICC.  By the letters that he wrote to his wife Mary LeSourd between 1907 and 1914 on letter head of various railroads, he worked for the railroads, not for the ICC.  By 1920 he was living in Pensacola and working as the general freight agent for the Gulf, Florida, and Alabama Railway.8

 [18]  According to his obituary in the Logansport, Indiana, Pharos-Reporter, Benjamin Franklin Reed's occupation was as a switchman, not a conductor.9 ( He died in a railway accident 22 October 1917; this book apparently went to press before a correction could be entered noting his death.) 

             It pays to be wary when reading these biographies of our ancestors in compilations such as these.  One probably can rely on the information concerning activities in the geographical area covered by the compilation.  A subject would not be able to get away with padding the resume where there are many fellow citizens who would be likely to say, “That isn’t exactly right, now, is it?” to the subject’s face once the book came out.  But activities which took place away from that region, or information about ancestors, is more suspect, as we see here in this case study.  These biographies can be a useful springboard for further research, but we must beware of the traps they may contain.

 1  Charles Reed, Civil War Pension Application File SO 816,345; SC 697,707; Records of the Veterans Administration, Record Group 15, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

2  John Robinson Reed, and others, “Births and Deaths in the Reed Family to April 1, 1913,” typescript, copy in possession of the author. Added to the list are dates after 1913; those added after 1918, the year John Robinson Reed died, were added by another family member, identity unknown.

3  Ibid.

4  “Reed Family Genealogy,” typescript prepared by Rosanna Jane Breese, granddaughter of Francis Harvey Reed.  In possession of the author.

5  Frank (Benjamin Franklin) Reed and Ruth Nave, marriage applications, license, and certificate, Clerk of Circuit Court, St. Joseph County, South Bend, Indiana, Marriage Book 26, page 88.

6  “Reed Family Genealogy.”

 7  Robert Reed, “Little Man,” Pensacola History Illustrated (Pensacola Historical Society, vol.1 no. 4, Winter 1985) pp. 27-32

8  Letters of Perry Wilmer Reed and Mary LeSourd, 1907-1920.  In possession of the author.

9  “Engine Kills a Switchman,” Logansport, Indiana, Pharos-Reporter, October 22, 1917 (n.p.)

GeniAus's Accentuate the Positive for 2025

 I like Jill Ball's (GeniAus) yearly Accentuate the Positive meme.  This year, it revolves around words.  The instructions:  "For the 2025 challenge, I have decided to move away from prompts that relate to particular situations and resources to a list focusing on our reactions to particular verbs as we reflect on our family history journey."  We are free to eliminate those words that don't relate to us, if any.  I have bolded the words so they stand out. The list:

Remember to Accentuate the Positive

2025 Prompts

1.  I treasured all the wonderful documents I found scanned online -- land records, more censuses, BMD documents, and more.

2. I shared lots of information with other members of WikiTree in building the best biographies we can produce with the best sources to back it all up. 

3. I travelled virtually.  I am no spring chicken, and I can't fly anymore due to my tendency these days to form blood clots in my legs.  I've already experienced having the clots travel to my lungs, and almost didn't survive it.  I really would rather not have a repeat performance of that. 

4. I learnt a whale of a lot about using WikiTree.  There is a lot to learn there, a rather steep learning curve.  Of course, these days, there's no printed manual, so I'm creating my own by printing out the various portions of instructions on this or that aspect of WikiTree, and putting it all in a binder.  It is so much easier for me to have instructions printed out and in my hand than it is to switch from an input screen where I'm trying to post data, to another screen where the instructions for doing this particular action are located, and then switching back again.  By the time I switch back to the input screen, I've totally forgotten what I've just read! 

5. I changed my mind about a few things when I found documentation that proved my assumptions or beliefs about an ancestor wrong.  That's why WikiTree demands and insists that we provide citations to reliable sources! 

6. I received wonderful support from the WikiTree Profile Improvement Project (PIP), which provides guidance to new WikiTree participants.  It's a self-paced way, with expert help, of learning how to use WikiTree most effectively. 

7. I conquered many of the details of WikiTree through the PIP.  It has certainly made learning all this complicated stuff not easy, but less stressful.

8. I found that I'm related to all sorts of well-known people, and have been able to document these relationships:  the actor Leslie Nielsen, one of my favorites; Thomas Jefferson (I already knew I'm related to John Adams); Maybelle Addington Carter and Alvin Pleasant Dulaney (A. P.) Carter of the Carter Family Singers. 

9. I was proud to discover, through the relationship to the Carters, above, that I am also related to a very dear friend of mine.  That was the best discovery of all, and I'm tickled pink!  When I told this friend that we are 22nd cousins, once removed, she said, "I guess that's why we have hit it off so well from the start!"  I guess so.

10.I  read Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone: The Carter Family and their Legacy in American Music, by Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg.  I was about halfway into this collective biography of the Carter family that I found out I am distantly related to them.  That made the reading of the book that much more intriguing to me.Thank you, Jill, for a great meme! 

FamilySearch's Simple Search: Simply Amazing

Earlier today, I read in Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings about FamilySearch's new Simple Search.  He demonstrated it and it looked intriguing.  

I'm now in about my third hour of reading, downloading, sourcing, and getting all sorts of excited about the ton of records this simple search gave me with plain-text brief inquiries.  Asking simply for Oscar Merry Packard, my great-grandfather, in Chautauqua County, New York, gave me his baptism record and other church records, and the same on his sister, some cousins, his parents, aunts and uncles.  Then I asked for information on Joseph Hoyt III in the same location, and found my 3rd great-grandfather and his sons and a daughter, and this led to wills, marriage records, more church records, land records and more.  I found out that only three of the children of Joseph Hoyt IV lived long enough to be remembered in his will.   I have a lot of transcribing and analysis to do.

There is at least three more hours of work for me to do just examining and recording and sourcing more records.  I have at least thirty tabs at the top of Firefox's search bar, just waiting for me to look at them and determine where they fit in my family lines -- or if they do at all.  I've already discarded several that do not relate to my line at all.  And now I have a ton of new information to make that winnowing process be even more accurate.   

The search really is simple.  There's no form to fill out.  There is simply a space into which you just ask a simple question.  You may make it as vague or specific as you want.  Take a look at Randy's explanation here.  I told Randy in a comment on his blog that this is going to keep me off the streets and out of the pool halls for months!

 

They're Everywhere!

 Who are everywhere?  Cousins!

At the age of 60, in 2007, I decided to go back to college.  I wanted to do some genealogy research into the families of St. Augustine, Florida, which is about 36 miles from my house.  I knew my high school Spanish from all those decades ago would not be sufficient to understand and translate the documents I would encounter.  I ended up with a double post-baccalaureate major in Spanish and history.  And in one of those Spanish classes, there was a fine bear of a young man.  He sat on the opposite side of the classroom from me.  

The discussion was about kinship, in a broad sense, and our professor, Dr. Jorge Febles, used an expression that did not translate well in the literal sense into English.  I got the drift, however, and was about to give the English equivalent that Dr. Febles was asking us for:  The apple don't fall far from the tree, a phrase taught to me by a dear friend from the Appalachians.  Before I could say it, the phrase came from the bear of a young man, whose surname was Bowers.  

After class, I said to him, "You're from the Appalachians, aren't you?" 

"Yes, ma'am, I shore am," he said.

I asked him if he had any kin of a certain surname, and he said he didn't think so.   When I got home, I called my friend from the Appalachians, Amanda, thinking young Bowers might be related to her.  I asked her if she had any Bowers people in her lineage.  She didn't think so.

The next week, I received in the mail a book I had been waiting for -- Teter Nave, East Tennessee Pioneer: His Ancestors and Descendants, by Robert T. Nave and Margaret W. Houghland.  I was eager to look for my Nave kin, my mother's line, and I found a great-great grandfather whose name startled me:  John Teter Bowers Nave.  Maybe it wasn't Amanda young Bowers was related to.  Maybe it was me.

 The next class, I told young Bowers about my great-grandfather John Teter Bowers Nave, and he said, "Oh, yeah, we've got Teters and Naves all over the family!"  

Lately, I had found indications that I was related to the famous Carter family of country music, both to Maybelle Addington Carter, the "Mother Maybelle" of the Carter Family Singers, and to her brother-in-law Alvin Pleasant Dulaney (A. P.) Carter, leader of the troupe, country music songwriter, and "song-catcher" of the Appalachian Mountains.  My friend Amanda has connections to that family, and it made me grin at the idea that we might be cousins.

And indeed we are -- 16th cousins once removed.

Next year, it will be forty years I've known Amanda.  Never, until the recent revelations, did I suspect we may be kin.

Tread softly, friends.  You never know.  That stranger sitting next to you in the theater might be your cousin.

 

WikiTree: Poking About with a Purpose

 I've had an account at Ancestry.com for years.  I have also had a tree on FamilySearch.  But I recently got curious about WikiTree and decided to poke about in it.

Yeah, that poking about got me hooked.

I find a lot to like about Ancestry.com.  My tree there is MY tree there.  I decide what gets posted to it.  I demand and exercise the use of reliable sources.  I've had a good deal of training in genealogy, a lot of it emphasizing the need for good source citations.  I don't have to worry about someone lacking any training in genealogy putting misinformation on my Ancestry tree.

I love FamilySearch for its documents and records and its research information and instructive articles.  I don't love constantly having to correct misinformation, usually unsourced, again and again and again, concerning my ancestors.  So I will use the immense number and variety of original and derivative sources on FamilySearch.  I will take advantage of their marvelous research guides and their wonderful wiki.  But I'm not wasting my time anymore on that tree.

Enter WikiTree.  It is also a collaborative tree.  However, it is a lot more likely to be accurate.  For one thing, to use WikiTree, one must sign their Honor Pledge, which states that we will back up every fact with a reliable source or sources.  For another, WikiTree is mainly by genealogists for genealogists, people who have had some training in the field and who understand its requirements.  And finally, the idea behind WikiTree is that we all help grow the best, most reliable, and most accurate tree we can make, so people in the future have a highly useful body of information about their ancestors there on the Web. 

I've wondered how I was going to preserve and pass on my family history.  My daughters and grandson don't have the passion, though my grandson does enjoy hearing family stories.  But they have other concerns taking their attention.  I do plan to leave a lot of documents and research to a genealogy society or societies.  WikiTree now also figures into my plan of how to preserve and pass on my family history.

WikiTree also has a great deal of mentoring.  One of these mentorships is their Profile Improvement Project (PIP).  The profile is the individual entry of information (well-sourced, of course) about an ancestor.  A good profile has as much information as one can gather, representing a "reasonably exhaustive" body of research, and analysis of what it all means.  To show you the results my participation in the Profile Improvement Project has rendered, you are invited to see my profile of my granduncle and adoptive grandfather, Perry W. Reed.  WikiTree has a hugely long learning curve, and the PIP helps a lot in getting through it.

Another handy learning tool is their G2G (Genealogist to Genealogist) communication facility.  There, a user can ask questions about genealogy, about the technology of WikiTree, and about WikiTree's policies.  The policies are set by various functions in WikiTree, and those functions are staffed by members of WikiTree.  WikiTree is very FUBU (For Us, By Us). 

Who was the disruptive ancestor in your family?

Somewhere in the blogosphere, I came across a prompt:  Who was your disruptive ancestor?  I forget where I found this, because I . . .  well, read on and I'll explain. 

I'm using the term "disruptive" to indicate the child in your family who might have been the one bouncing off the walls or the one who was often off in his or her own world; the one who struggled with school, with getting projects done; the one with the explosive temper.  Who was that person in your family?

I want to let my descendants know:  I was your "disruptive" ancestor.

I lost my temper; I felt things deeply, whether that was things that made me mad or things that made me happy.  I struggled to get things done.  Often I did get them done, but at a psychic price, because managing a project is difficult for me.  I was impulsive; I would blurt out comments without thinking first.  Often, I embarrassed myself by doing so, and felt shame.  I had memory problems and difficulty with time management.  If an object fell out of my immediate field of vision, it was instantly forgotten.  My room was a mess.  I was criticized and judged, and elders in my family tried to "fix" what they perceived as my flaws, emotional and physical.  Therefore I developed a flawed and negative self-image.  Despite all these challenges, I excelled in academics because that was all I had on which to build my childhood and teenage identity.  I wasn't pretty; I wasn't popular; I wasn't your typical girl.  I was a tomboy; I'd rather have climbed trees than gone to a dance, where I felt terribly awkward.  I was what was called at the time a "late bloomer."  That academic success did not come easy; there was a psychic price.  Accomplishing anything -- doing homework, doing science projects, writing papers, taking tests -- required an expenditure of energy and effort that was three times that required for most other kids to get done.

The 1950s were not a great time to be a nonconformist.  It wasn't a great time to, by my nature, go against the established norms for behavior of a highly patriarchal society.  It wasn't a good time to be an oddball in a traditional family.  It didn't help that, having read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique at 14, I became a feminist in a family that bought into the patriarchy lock, stock, and barrel.

I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  I have only recently found this out.  I'm 78.  I've had this condition all my life.  Learning about ADHD through online forums and support groups (such as  Attention Deficit Disorder Association), I have found that my life finally makes sense!  

I've read that there's considerable evidence that it runs in families.  I think my father, who died when I had just turned 7, was my ADHD parent.  Mom told me that he had "flunked sandbox."  That is to say, he got kicked out of kindergarten.  That would have been somewhere around 1915.  That was another time when being different was not exactly acceptable.  He probably had no choice but to buckle down and behave as he was expected to; certainly he didn't have a choice during his college experience at the United States Naval Academy.  Discipline in those days was often physical.   

Other nuclear family members either have been diagnosed with ADHD or suspect they may have it.

 ADHD has definite physical elements:  Our brains are wired differently from most folks, referred to as neurotypicals.  Those with ADHD, and others whose brains work differently, are termed "neurodivergent."  We do not see the world as most people see it.  We do not relate to the world as most people do.  We have lower levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine.  These chemicals are vital to what are called the executive functions of organization and planning.  This means those of us with ADHD aren't good at project management.  

ADHD is all-pervasive, influencing nearly every aspect of our existence.  October has been ADHD Awareness Month.  Please become aware; and do a little learning to see if perhaps that "disruptive" relative of yours might have ADHD and might be in need of diagnosis and treatment in order to live their best life.

 

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Baseball

 My husband and I, on a whim, watched the greater part of a baseball game today.  It was the Baltimore Orioles at the New York Yankees.  As a lifelong Dodgers fan dating from their time in Brooklyn (yes, I'm that old), I don't like the Yankees, so I had to cheer on the Orioles.  It was a futile endeavor, I fear, as the score when we left the game was 9-0 Yankees.  Sigh.

Yes, I've been fond of baseball since my childhood in the 1950s.  I was a tomboy; the usual girlish pursuits did not attract me.  I collected baseball cards.  I played "flyers & grounders" with a neighbor boy.  I watched baseball games on TV with my grandma, and I was thrilled when my mother kept me out of school one day and took me to the baseball stadium in our home town of Jacksonville, Florida, where we watched the then-Brooklyn Dodgers play an exhibition game.  I almost caught a fouled baseball, but I was carrying soft drinks back to our seats, and didn't want to drop them.  

And just in the early years of this century, the Dodgers played again at our local stadium, and I got Tommy LaSorda's autograph! That was a big thing for me.

My one regret in my affection for baseball has been that my eyes are not aligned due to a childhood operation to correct severe cross-eye.  I have no depth perception within three feet.  I can't hit a baseball worth beans.

 

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Charles Reed's Timeline

 Charles Reed (1840-1920) was my great-great grandfather on my mother's side.  He was born in Gallia County, Ohio, 28 August 1840.[1]  He died 26 January 1920 in Portland, Jay County, Indiana.[2]  In the year in which he was born, "horsepower" meant the ability of a horse to pull the family buggy.  In the year in which he died, "horsepower" was the power rating of the automobiles coming off Henry Ford's production line.  Charles Reed had served in the Civil War, Company F, 140th Indiana Infantry.[3]  When he died, the world had not long before engaged in a terrible war "to end all wars," which, of course, it did not.  

And when he died, importing, manufacturing, or drinking alcoholic beverages was illegal.

In the year in which he was born, Victoria, Queen of England, married Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Germany.  James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder was a nationwide best-seller.  Born in 1840: Emile Zola, Claude Monet, Thomas Nast, Pierre Auguste Renoir, August Rodin, Peter Ilich Tchiakovsky, and Father Damien, the "leper priest" of Hawaii.[4]

 In the year before Charles Reed died in January of 1920, Theodore Roosevelt died.  Woodrow Wilson presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations.  There was racial strife in Chicago, and the American Steel strike began, ending in January of 1920.  The International Labor Conference endorsed the eight-hour workday.  Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio was published, as was Hugh Lofting's first Dr. Doolittle book, H. L. Mencken's The American Language. and Robert H. Goddard's A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, a seminal work at the beginning of the age of rocketry.[5]  

 All of this information, and the citations below, are in an extensive timeline I did in 2003 on Charles Reed.  It spans 88 pages, with endnotes.  I had read an article extolling the virtues of timelines as a way of placing our ancestors in context.  I used Bernard Grun's The Timetables of History, which is arranged in chronological order, and lists events of political, historical, scientific, and social importance.  I also used various censuses, Charles Reed's Civil War pension file, and other references, to create the timeline.

Not only did I enter the events of national and world importance, I also entered the family events, such as births and deaths of the descendants of Charles Reed and of members of collateral families, mainly the spouses and children of his descendants. 

I am a convinced advocate of timelines. 

[1]  John Robinson Reed (son of Charles Reed), et. al., "Births and Deaths in the Reed Family to April 1st, 1913."  List of the birth and death dates of Charles and Clarissa Reed and their children with additional death dates entered by persons unknown, no date.  Copy of typescript, initialed "J.R.R." (presumably John Robinson Reed).

[2] Charles Reed, Civil War Pension Application File, SO 816,345; SC 697,707: Records of the Veteran's Administration, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bernard Grun, The Timetables of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).  The book is arranged by year; I have not given page numbers because the arrangement by year makes it easy to find the items cited.

 [5] Ibid.

 

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Pi Day and Beyond

Years ago, our older daughter Marti was the receptionist/secretary of the Math and Statistics Department at the University of North Florida (UNF).  Mathy types celebrate their own holiday -- well, it's a working holiday -- on 14 March of each year.  Pi Day, so named because 3.14 are the first three digits of Pi.

So, of course, on Pi Day, what to the mathy types eat?  Pie.

Marti and I made pies for Pi Day and took them in to the department.  I was a student at UNF at the time.

 And to be true to the concept of Pi, I made my pies in a square pan.  With the formula on top, in crust.

Like this cherry pie I made one year:

Marti and I had great fun making these pies, and everyone in the department enjoyed them.  And we still enjoy remembering them.

Marti, being an employee of the university, had the perk of a free class each term.  Being deaf in one ear, she chose American Sign Language (ASL).  When she and her sister were young, they asked for and received a book on ASL.  Little did we parents suspect that we were giving our daughters access to a language which we didn't "speak."  I'm sure that led to all sorts of shenanigans, but they survived all.  So ASL was not new to Marti.

After taking the classes in ASL, Marti enrolled in a "bridge program" offered by Florida State University, my first alma mater.  This program was designed to bring students who had no background in sciences up to speed to then enroll in doctorate programs in audiology, in an effort to make up a shortfall of audiologists.  No surprise to me, considering how loud young people have been playing their music since the 1960s.  Anyway, she then was accepted at the University of Florida's doctoral program in audiology, and now she is a doctor.  She's not the first doctor in the family -- that occurred back in the late 1800s.  She is, however, the first female doctor in the family.  She works with veterans, individuals with whom she feels right at home, since her father and I are both veterans.  She loves the work.

 Our daughter, the doctor!

 

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Hallowe'en 1982

[Alert:  this post has one mildly naughty word in it.] 

It was the season for trick-or-treating in the neighborhood where we lived when our daughters were in middle school.  This photo was taken 1982 at the home of my older daughter's best friend Kim.  In the photo are Marti, our older daughter; me; and our younger daughter, Elizabeth.

I have to say I'm still impressed that I actually made those uniforms.  If you don't recognize the uniforms, they are my best job of the Starfleet uniforms from Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan.  I don't sew, as a rule.  I am not good at it and it's not really something I enjoy.  But even if I do say so myself, I did a doggone good job with them.

 

Marti is Captain Kirk, though with a much fuller head of hair.  She's reading A Tale of Two Cities, the book Spock gives to Kirk as a birthday present in the movie.  Elizabeth is Lieutenant Saavik, Spock's full-Vulcan protege.  I guess having made the uniforms makes me the Starfleet tailor.

Our family had a lot of fun with Star Trek.  We watched the original series in syndication, and we watched the later series offerings, as well.  We went to all the movies.  We went to conventions and sometimes worked on convention staff.  And we played games based on Star Trek.  It has been a part of the glue that kept this family together all these years.

One game we played was a card game, in which, in our explorations, we got into a combat situation, a part of the game that the rules called The Last-Ditch Battle.  Whoever had the most cards won the game.  I was running the game, with Marti and Elizabeth, by that time, both in high school, playing with me.  We went through all the levels and got to that last end-game part, and I announced it:  "Now it's time for the last-bitch dattle."

I don't think we stopped laughing for ten minutes.   

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Story Time

 Jennifer Jones, whom I follow on Substack, has issued a challenge:  Can we make an entry to our genealogy blogs every day for 50 days?  I'm already over-extended, but that's me.  But I can't resist.

I need a goad to get myself to the keyboard and get some stuff done.  So here we go . . . 

 Story time:

My mother was an intra-family adoption.  Her father, Benjamin Franklin Reed, was killed in a railroad accident when Mom was not quite a year old.  According to her sister, my Aunt Margaret, the Reed family "ganged up" on my widowed grandmother and took her two daughters away from her and had two brothers and their wives adopt them.  Mom's brother, the oldest of the three, was 16, and was left with his mother.

My mother was adopted by her uncle, Perry Wilmer Reed, and his wife, Mary LeSourd.  Perry, after a career in railroads working with the rules, rates, and regulations as a general freight agent, became the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Pensacola, Florida, in the late 1920s.  And here's a story, as told to me by Mary Reed when I was a teenager in the 1960s:

Mary LeSourd Reed, as the wife of the head of the Chamber of Commerce, had to maintain a certain lifestyle and appearance, as a member of the Pensacola upper crust.  And part of that appearance, among "decent" women in the 1920s, was long hair.  Hers was down to below her waist.  All that heavy hair caused Mary to have awful headaches, as it must have done to most, if not all, the high-society ladies of Pensacola.  Well, Mary was not one to put up with that which she need not endure.  Aware of the fashion trends of the "Roaring Twenties," she went to the beauty salon and had her hair "bobbed," as they called it in those days -- she got it cut.  Short.  

She went to Perry's office to get his opinion of her new "do."  She marched into his office and asked him how he liked the new look.  Perry's secretary was standing nearby.  "Well, Mary," Perry said, "It looks all right."

Mary stormed out of Perry's office, leaving him totally befuddled as to what his offense may have been.  His secretary let him know, as Perry probably told Mary later:  "Mr. Reed," she said, as if admonishing a recalcitrant student on the fine points of proper behavior.  "You never tell a woman that she looks 'all right.'"

That's not the end of the story.

The next day, the other elite women of Pensacola went to the beauty salon -- and what a banner day it must have been for that establishment's bottom line!  They all had their hair bobbed.  If Mary Reed wasn't going to put up with those horrible headaches any more, neither were they!

 

True Confessions: Cranberry Wine

 It's 1976 or thereabouts.  I'm a fairly new Yeoman Third Class in the Coast Guard Reserve.  It's a Saturday of my drill weekend.  I come home, tired from a busy day and a long commute.  I open the refrigerator to see what I might cobble together for dinner.  The fridge is pretty bare, and there's an empty bottle on one of the shelves.

"If you're going to drink the last of the wine," I say to my husband, "don't put the empty bottle back in the fridge."  There had been about 1/3 of the bottle left, my husband and I having enjoyed the other 2/3 over the course of a couple weeks.

He denies having had any of the wine, a sparkling cranberry wine made by a friend of my father-in-law, Marshall.  Marshall had gotten a few bottles from his friend, and had given us one.

Just then, our four-year-old daughter Elizabeth comes toddling down the hall from the bedroom she shares with her sister, who is six.  She's happy.  Too happy.  REALLY happy.  We look at each other, then back at our daughter.  That explains the missing 1/3.

She's been into the sparkling cranberry wine, and put the empty bottle back into the fridge.  Keys and I laugh, but I also remind him to keep a better eye on the kids when I'm not home.

When the girls are teenagers, we're swapping family stories, and we tell them about Elizabeth's adventure with the cranberry wine.  We all have a good laugh.

48 years later --

Elizabeth has, about a year before, been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood.  She's achieved remission, and her sister Marti has been her morale officer, coming Saturdays to visit, bring lunch, and play video games or watch silly TV shows with her.  Then Elizabeth is feeling up to short road trips and shopping.  So one day they go to a small town where Marti has heard there's a winery, not too far south of where we live.

When they return, they have a gift for us, that astonishes and amuses us no end . . . 

. . . in repayment of a debt of long standing that Elizabeth owes us . . . 

. . . a bottle of cranberry wine!

 

How Did They Meet?

 I am inspired today by the Genealogy Tip of the Day newsletter sent out by Michael John Neill.  What caught my eye was this:

"Determining how your ancestor met their spouse can be an interesting genealogical endeavor. It may not even be possible to do anything other than conjecture about their meeting. But at the very least, researching them with the intention of discovering how they met may result in new information–even if it has nothing to do with their marriage."

I know how my mother and father met, because my mother told me.

Mom was raised in Pensacola, Florida, and graduated from Pensacola High School in 1935.  My father, raised in Pasadena, California, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland in 1934.

Dad had always been interested in flying, having been a member of the "Aero Club" at Pasadena High School/Junior College, a combined educational institution.  After graduation, Dad served on an aircraft carrier, and, in 1937, was chosen for flight school at Pensacola Naval Air Station.  Ah, fate.

My mother could be very determined.  Once she made up her mind to do something, it was going to be done come Hell or high water.  She and her friends, the social elite of Pensacola, would hang out at the Officers' Club at NAS Pensacola to see who they could meet.  My mother told me that she spotted my father across the proverbial crowded room, and decided, "That's the man I'm going to marry."  Dad's fate was sealed.

She most likely introduced herself to him, rather than wait for someone else to arrange an introduction.  And the rest is history.

They were married 16 July 1937.  These wedding pictures are hand-colored and mounted on tiles of porcelain.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 21 -- Military

This week in 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, Amy Johnson Crow asks us to post about the military members in our family history.

Here's a roster of military service in my family:

8x-great-grandfather Samuel Packard served in King Philip's War (1675–1678).

My 4x-great grandfather Richards Packard served in the American Revolution (1775-1783). 

My great-great grandfathers Mathew Hale Packard and Charles Reed served in the Civil War, for the Union (1861-65).

My great-great granduncles Thadeus Bullock Packard and William B. Packard served in the Civil War, too, also for the Union.

My husband's great-grandfather, Daniel McLeod Marshall, served in the Civil War, for the Confederacy.

My father, Arden Packard, served in the U.S. Navy in World War II (1939-1945).

My father-in-law, Leonard Marshall Rhodes, served in the temporary U.S. Coast Guard during World War II.

My husband's grandfather, Andrew Lewis Rhodes, served in the temporary U.S. Coast Guard during World War II.

My brother, Arden "Ned" Packard II, served in the U.S. Marines in the VietNam War (1955-1975).

My husband, Keys Rhodes, and I both served in the U.S. Coast Guard in the Cold War (1945-1991).

 We were surprised to find that my husband's father and grandfather had been in the Coast Guard before he was.  We had thought he was the first in his family to serve in the USCG, but he was actually the third.

I was the first woman in the Packard-Reed family to enter military service. 

We're proud of our service and of our families' military tradition.