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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, Bloomington.

 A to Z blogging challenge.

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.

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.