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.

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. 
 

 A Tale of Three Siblings

My mother, Martha Reed, was, like me, the youngest of three.  She was born in 1916, her sister Margaret in 1914, and her brother Donald in 1913.  Their father, Benjamin Franklin Reed, died in a railroad accident in 1917, just two months before my mother's first birthday.  Mom and Aunt Margaret were taken away from their mother, Ruth Ella Nave, by the Reed family and adopted within the family.  Aunt Margaret described it to me as the Reeds having "ganged up on" Ruth Nave and taken the two girls away.  Mom was adopted by the oldest brother, Perry Wilmer Reed, and his wife Mary LeSourd.  Aunt Margaret was adopted by Don Francis Reed and his wife, Grace McElroy.  Mom's brother Donald remained with his mother.

 

Somehow, probably through family connections, the three siblings stayed in touch, and in their middle years, all ended up in Florida.  Uncle Donald was in the Tampa Bay area.  Aunt Margaret was in Orlando.  Mom was in Jacksonville.

 

The photo on top, below, shows my grandmother Ruth Nave with Donald and Margaret, about 1920.  Mom had already been picked up by Perry and Mary Reed, who lived in Pensacola, Florida.  The photo on the bottom is the siblings reunited in the 1950s, in Florida.

 

Ruth Nave with Donald and Margaret, abt. 1920

Martha Reed, Donald Reed, Margaret Reed abt. 1955

     

A to Z Challenge On the Move: D is for Detroit

I have devoted three blog posts in this series to my father's line, so it is time to talk a little about my mother's.

My mom, Martha Shideler Reed, was born in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan.  She and I had something in common:  we each did not like our middle names much.  Family history has reconciled me to mine.  The fact that hers came from the surname of a young social activist in Logansport, Indiana at the turn of the 20th century apparently had no effect on Mom.

Her family was not as peripatetic as my father's.  I have not gone back far enough to discover the family's origin.  The name Reed could be either English, Scots, or Irish.  From some things I know about the Reeds and their attitudes and behavior, I have a sneaking suspicion that they were "lace curtain" Irish.  But as yet, I have no evidence.  I find the family in the United States in the early 1800s, in a slow westward movement that ended up in Ohio and then in Indiana.  In Indiana, towns associated with my Reed line are Monticello, in White County, and Logansport, in Cass County.

There were railroad men in the Reed family.  My great-grandfather Francis Harvey ("Frank") Reed was a conductor.  My grandfather Benjamin Franklin (also called "Frank") was a switchman in a railroad marshaling yard.  My adoptive grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Reed's oldest brother Perry Wilmer Reed, was a freight agent.  

Francis Harvey Reed married Florence Elizabeth McKee 10 September 1884 in Monticello, White County, Indiana.  Francis H. had been raised in Monticello when his family lived there.  His work for the railroad had stationed him in Logansport, and that is where the new bride and groom set up their house.  That was the end of their migrations.  Their children, however, ended up scattered to the four winds, ending up in such places as Washington state, California, and Florida.

Benjamin Franklin Reed married Ruth Ella Nave, who was from South Bend, Indiana.  She worked to support her widowed mother, a situation frowned upon by many whose notion was that "nice" girls did not work, no matter the circumstances.  But eating is preferable to starving, so Ruth became a telephone operator.  Married in November of 1913, the couple had three children by December of 1916.  They got an early start, according to some in the family.  In October of 1917, Benjamin Franklin Reed was killed in a railroad accident in Detroit, where he worked in a railroad yard.  

According to my aunt, my mother's sister, the Reed family was not fond of Ruth Nave, possibly both because she worked for a living, and because the growth of her and their son's family had been, shall we say, rapid beyond the customary.  My aunt said that the Reeds "ganged up" on Ruth Nave, and took her daughters, Margaret, the second child, and Martha, my mother, the youngest.  The oldest, a son named Donald, was 16 by the time all the family rearrangement had taken place in the early 1920s, and he stayed with his mother.  These three siblings were not reuinted until the 1950s, when all had ended up in Florida, scattered among the Tampa Bay area (Uncle Don), Orlando (Aunt Margaret) and Jacksonville (Mom).

My mother was placed with the oldest Reed brother, Perry, and his wife Mary LeSourd, of Sleeth, Carroll County, Indiana.  There is not much left of Sleeth; it's practically a ghost town, so I've been told.  The town was named for Mary Reed's mother's family.  Perry Reed and his family are found in the 1910 census in Chicago, where their daughter, their second child Elizabeth, was born in 1910.  They are missing from the 1920 census. I have looked in Chicago, in various locations in Indiana, and in Pensacola, Florida, where Perry was a railroad freight agent.  My theory is this:  in April of 1920, there is a very small notice in the Logansport Pharos-Reporter to the effect that Mr. Perry W. Reed, of Pensacola, Florida, was visiting relatives in the area.  The visit was to take custody, I'm fairly certain, of four-year-old Martha.  I would imagine Perry's wife Mary was with him, to care for the child on the journey home to Pensacola.  They were on the move from one location to the other, and that is the way they got missed in the census.  The final adoption decree was issued later in 1920 in Pensacola.  My mom's journey to Pensacola was but the first in many migrations, as she married a young Navy officer, Arden Packard, in Pensacola, 16 July 1937.  Their story is told in the first in this series of posts, On the Move: A is for Arden.

Women's History Month: How Did They Meet?

I'm a little late with this, because I wanted to post my reaction to WDYTYA earlier; don't miss it, just before this entry.

The March 5 entry for Lisa Alzo's "Fearless Females" meme for this month is:

March 5 — How did they meet? You’ve documented marriages, now, go back a bit. Do you know the story of how your parents met? Your grandparents?

My mother told me a rather romantic story, eminently demonstrative of her own resourcefulness and determination, about how she and my father met. She grew up in Pensacola, home of the Pensacola Naval Air Station, which in turn is home to one of the Navy's flight schools. She and her friends would date officers, and one night at the Officer's Club at Pensacola Naval Air Station, she spied a young officer who had not long before reported aboard for flight training. She fixed her gaze on his handsome face and said to her companions, "That's the man I'm going to marry."



She was right. That's my father, Arden Packard, in the photo at left, above. This was his wedding picture, and I have this one and the one of my mother, Martha Shideler Reed, at right, framed, sitting on a bookcase. These look very much like they come from the 1930s, which they do. They were married 16 July 1937.

The story ends rather sadly, as they were only together for 16 years, as my father died 25 April 1954. My mother did not remarry.
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Sentimental Sunday: Remembering Elizabeth Reed

My aunt, Elizabeth Reed, pictured second from left in the above photo, was a character. That is said in the best sense of the word -- an original, a standout, someone with a definite sense of humor.

Well, let's back up a bit. She wasn't biologically or genealogically my aunt, she was my second cousin. However, she was always my aunt to me, because my mother was an intra-family adoption. My mother, Martha Reed Packard, is at the right in this picture, in white. My grandmother -- that is, my grandaunt, Mary Reed is at left. My mother's father, Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed, was the brother of Mary Reed's husband, Perry Wilmer Reed. Frank Reed died in a railroad accident in 1917, before my mother's first birthday. The Reed family saw to it that little Martha was placed with Perry and Mary, and the adoption was final in 1920. Mary and Perry raised her as their own, and as far as we were all concerned, "Chollie" (Mary) and "Sissy" (Elizabeth) were grandmother and aunt to my siblings and me.

And Elizabeth Reed did help raise me, very actively. She saw to it, as my godmother, that I went to church. Got me in the choir, encouraged me to join the youth group, Episcopal Young Churchman, which I eventually served as a delegate to the diocesan House of Episcopal Young Churchmen and as treasurer. She was adamant that I go to college, and got in touch with our Congressman, Charles E. Bennett, to see to it that I got Veteran's Administration and Social Security assistance based on my father's service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. She encouraged me to apply to Florida State University, where I was accepted. She got me hooked up with the Southern Scholarship and Research Foundation in Tallahassee so that I was awarded a housing scholarship. She also taught me (and my sister and brother) how to drive.

"Sissy" did not live to see me graduate from Florida State University, nor did she get to see me receive such honors as being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, or get into graduate school for a master's degree in library science. She died in October of 1967, but she went the way she would have wanted to go, with her boots on, attending the national conference of Planned Parenthood in New York. She was the director of the northeast Florida chapter of Planned Parenthood in Jacksonville. And she always did find it a wonder why, when people had questions about sex and parenthood, they always came to an unmarried middle-aged woman!

She had a series of monologues which she would perform for civic groups in Jacksonville and around Florida. She did this in connection with her talks on health and wellness, as Director of Health Information for the then State Board of Health (now the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services) and later as director of the Planned Parenthood chapter. The monologues were funny and poignant, and not a one of them was committed to paper. They were all in her memory, and so were different each time she performed them. They ranged from a hilarious parody of a hospital bedside visitor to variations on the theme of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" (from a country singer to a child in a pageant to a torch singer), to a sober and wonderful tale of a grandmother who pioneered the American west talking to her upset teenage granddaughter.

She definitely was a character, and I have missed her much over the years. I named one of our daughters for her, and I do wish she could have met my daughters. They're characters, too.
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What's in a Name?

The other evening -- well, very early the other morning, like about 2 a.m. -- I finally opened up some of my own family history and did a little more work. I explored a great-great-great grandfather I hadn't done much about, named Francis M. Wright. He is on my mother's side, born in Ohio and lived most of his life in Indiana. I traced him back to his father, whose name was Merritt Wright. And thereby hangs a tale of names.

My great-great grandfather, grandson of Francis M. Wright via his daughter Clarissa, was Francis Harvey Reed. He and his wife, Florence Elizabeth McKee, had ten children, many of whom had interesting names drawn from history and literature and, as I found out the other early morning, family history. One of those children was Merritt Wright Reed. By the way, he died in 2004 at the age of 104 or some such! I did not find this out until a few years after that, and heartily kicked myself for not investigating him earlier, for what information could he have given me about the Reed family?

Thus by investigating this Wright line, I found the origin of the name of Merritt Wright Reed and of the first name of Francis Harvey Reed (called "Frank"), whose middle name derived from his own father, Harvey Reed. Some of the names of Frank H. Reed's sons are rather obvious in their origin: Benjamin Franklin Reed (my grandfather), John Ruskin Reed, and William Ewart Gladstone Reed. That tells me a little about Frank H. Reed's education, as well as that of Florence Elizabeth McKee, who had become a school teacher at the age of 17 to help support her mother and brothers when her father, Nelson Reed McKee, had abandoned the family in 1879.

I have not yet investigated Nelson Reed McKee's lineage, though it intrigues me. Where did the Reed as his middle name come from? An offshoot of the same line that brought forth Frank H. Reed? Or was this another line?

Another thing I ponder about names is: What was going on in the midwest in the 19th century? There were a whole lot of men running around the midwest with the same name! I once was contacted by another researcher looking into her line from a Nelson Reed McKee. We compared dates and locations, and had to conclude that we were not talking about the same Nelson Reed McKee. What was really odd was that each of our N. R. McKees had a son named Charles Preston McKee! I should revisit that, though, and be sure the other investigator had the right dates. I have documentation to back mine up.

Likewise, I have found three or four Francis M. Wrights, and at least two of these (including my g-g-g-grandpa) were named Francis Marion Wright. Francis Marion, of course, was the famed "Swamp Fox" of the American Revolution, who ran the British ragged in South Carolina, being a particular bane to Colonel Banastre Tarleton ("Bloody Ban"). Apparently, the midwesterners liked their history (and literature). There were all these Francis Marions, and there were scores of Benjamin Franklins (including my grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Reed, and including a son of Nelson Reed McKee, Benjamin Franklin McKee).

Also on my mother's side lies the origin of my middle name, LeSueur. The spelling varies through generations. My mother was an intra-family adoption, as I have discussed in a previous blog post. Her father -- the above-named Benjamin Franklin Reed -- was killed in a railroad accident in 1917. The Reed family saw to it, according to my Aunt Margaret, my mother's sister, that my mother was adopted by my grandfather's oldest brother, Perry Wilmer Reed (no idea yet where his name came from) and Perry's wife, Mary LeSourd. That is how she spelled the name that was handed down to me as LeSueur. That name also appears as the middle name of Perry and Mary's ill-fated infant son Wilmer LeSueur Reed, who died in infancy of an acute gastritis in 1909. Spelling of that name has been a bugaboo; it is misspelled on my birth certificate.

My mother was named Martha Shideler Reed -- giving her a middle name she hated. I was not terribly fond of mine, either, as a child, but doing genealogy has reconciled me to it. My mother was named for a young reformer in turn-of-the-century Logansport, Indiana -- Martha Shideler. I have a newspaper clipping from 1908, which is rapidly deteriorating, about this young woman. Apparently, my grandparents found her an admirable namesake.

As for my father, he was named for a dairy. That line's names will be the subject of another blog someday.

Cookin' up your genealogy

Among my mother's papers I went through after she died was a fistful of 3x5 cards and clippings from newspapers and magazines. These are all recipes, some of them I believe must date back at least to World War II. My mother, Martha Shideler Reed (1916-1980) married my father Arden Packard (1911-1954) in 1937 in Pensacola, Florida. My father was taking flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station.

One recipe, for "Savory Casserole," starts out rather unsavory to me -- "brown 1 c. dried luncheon meat in 2 tbsp. fat." Does this sound like a thrifty ration-driven World War II recipe or what? The recipe continues: "add 1/2 c. dried onion, 1 c. celery, 1/4 c. green pepper. Cook until partially tender." Wonder how long that took? By dried luncheon meat, I wonder if that meant dried chipped beef? We had another name for that in the service, but I will not mention it here!

"Blend in -- 1 1/2 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp. pepper, 2 tbsp. flour. Add -- 2 c. canned tomatoes, 1/2 c. drained whole kernel corn. Cook until thickened. Pour into deep casserole & top with biscuits. Bake at 450 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes."

In this recipe is a little clue: my mother must have spent time working as a secretary those many years ago, and indeed she did, so she told me, before getting married. The clue: the word "to" and the word "minutes" in the last sentence in the recipe are in Gregg shorthand. It's a good thing I took shorthand as an elective in high school!

It is also a good thing I am a paleographer -- I can usually puzzle out words which Mom didn't write all that clearly, though her handwriting was usually quite legible.

Another recipe has an ingredient that has me wondering: Her recipe for "Salmon or Tuna Fish Loaf" calls for 2 tbsp. acid. Does that mean vinegar (also known as acetic acid)? Or maybe lemon juice (a form of citric acid)? Could either one be used according to personal taste?

Another bunch of papers contained some recipes of my grandmother, Mary LeSourd (1889-1978). One of them shows economic conditions at the time, which might have been anywhere from the 1920s to the 1940s, and how they differ from today: "Ice Box Pudding -- 1 cup nuts, 2 eggs, 1 stick butter, 1 cup powdered sugar, 1 ten cent bar German sweet chocolate, 3 five cent boxes vanilla wafers."

Five cents' worth of German's sweet chocolate today might fit on the head of a pin, and try to get three boxes of vanilla wafers for fifteen cents!

A handful of little cards, holding clues about my mother's work life and about the economic times my grandmother lived through. These recipes are for more than dishes for our table. These are recipes for family history.