Shakin' the Family Tree

Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge: C is for Callaway

2013-03-01T02:30:39Z

Mace Callaway to be specific.

He was my great great grandfather.

This is the only known photograph of him that exists in my family.

Allen Mason Lowery Callaway, 3 Jan 1847 - 15 Feb 1877

I know quite a few things about him.

It's the things I don't know that bug me, and even more, that I haven't a clue about how to figure them out.

Like where he's buried.

And if his death at age 30 was related to his service in the Civil War.

And how, since he already knew the man who was to become his widow's second husband as a result of their service in the same CSA cavalry unit - was there some kind of an agreement between the two of them that David Andrew Williams would take care of the young widow, Mary Dunn Callaway, and their daughter (my great grandmother), Julia Ann Callaway?

And why did Mace and Mary only have one child throughout the course of their eleven year marriage before his death?

My C is for Callaway challenge is a challenge in so many ways.

I am taking the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge, albeit starting a few months late.

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Sepia Saturday: Louise Herrington and sister Florence

2012-11-21T16:16:51Z

A photo of my paternal grandmother, Addie Louise Herrington (left) and her sister Florence.

Florence was the only daughter of the five born to Jasper Monroe Herrington and Julia Ann Callaway who *was not* a twin.

Photo circa 1925

This is a Sepia Saturday post. Head over there for a look at other wonderful old photos.

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Matrilineal Monday: Julia Ann Callaway McBrayer Herrington

2012-09-03T03:31:22Z

She died nearly 7 years before I was born, so I never knew my paternal great-grandmother.

According to what my dad and his sister have told me, if I had only known her at the end of her life, I really wouldn't have known her at all. At the end of her life, Julia Ann Callaway McBrayer Herrington lived with her daughter, Addie Louise Herrington Burris, in the house at 8th and Crittenden in Arkadelphia. The place my dad called home.

Seen from the eyes of children, as my dad and aunt were when their grandmother died, Grandma Herrington had changed. Now, she had a sharp tongue and shrill disposition.

Not like the grandmother of their memories when they were younger.

And not like the memories of my grandmother, Louise Herrington Burris.

I don't have Julia Ann's death certificate. The State of Arkansas couldn't find it for me. So I don't know her official cause of death.

I do know that she died on Wednesday, 12 Dec 1951, at her daughter Inez's house, while my grandparents were on an errand. I don't know if her death was expected, but I also don't have the impression that she was on death's door when my grandparents took her to stay with Inez that day.

Maybe Julia decided, as I know of many others who have, to take her leave while the person who cared for her was away.

Maybe she didn't want my grandmother to see her die.

I can only speculate about Julia Ann's early life.

She was the daughter of my primo brick wall ancestors, Mary C Dunn, and Allen Mason Lowery "Mace" Callaway.

According to the historic records I've accumulated, Julia Ann was the only living child that Mary and Mace had in the 11 years of their marriage prior to Mace's death. She was only 4 years old when her father died, so I wonder how much of him she remembered. I wonder if surely, she knew where he was buried. (I haven't found his grave.)

Julia Ann couldn't have known her father as the man he was before he served in the Civil War. Neither could her mother have known *that* man, as Mary and Mace didn't marry until 1866.

In the 1880 census, Julia Ann was living with her mother, new step-father, David Andrew Williams, and her step-sister, Mary Etta Williams in Clark County.

I know nothing about how the two girls - 4 years apart in age, with Mary Etta the eldest - got along.

In 1881, the girls got a new brother, Rubin Ned Williams. Almost a year to the day afterward, they got another baby brother, William Andrew Williams.

A few years after Willie's birth, David Andrew Williams fell ill with an unknown disease that caused wasting of muscles and a great deal of pain. He died on 23 Jan 1888, when Julia Ann was 14 years old, and her little brothers were 6 and 5.

Her mother did not marry again.

On 13 Dec 1891, Julia Ann Callaway married for the first time to Robert Bruce McBrayer.

Robert's family would have been well known to Julia Ann and her mother. They lived in the DeGray community of Clark County, and both families attended the same church.

Julia Ann and Robert McBrayer had 8 children together, including a set of twin daughters and a child who was stillborn. Robert McBrayer died of "kidney trouble" on 1 Jun 1905 at the age of 34, leaving 32 year old Julia Ann with 7 children, the oldest of whom was 13.

I think Julia Ann must have mourned him. She did not remarry for over 2 years.

On 19 Oct 1907, Julia Ann McBrayer married a widower with 5 children. He was Jasper Monroe Herrington, and he and Julia Ann had 6 children together, including two sets of twins, one of whom was my grandmother. They lived in DeGray in what has been described to me as a dog-trot house with three bedrooms.

Altogether, Jasper and Julia Ann had 18 living children. That boggles my mind.

And as I listened to my grandmother, it was clear to me that Jasper and Julia Ann did not do "his" and "hers." All the kids were their kids - no favoritism, and no step-this and half-that.

Julia Ann Callaway and Jasper Monroe Herrington, in one of the only photos I have of her without a child on her lap

From left: Julia Ann, son Larkin Wellington McBrayer, grandson Robert McBrayer, and mother Mary C Dunn Callaway Williams.
Photo circa 1926/27. Julia's mother, Mary, was probably already blind.

Julia Ann's mother, Mary Dunn Callaway Herrington, died at Julia Ann's home on 9 Apr 1929. According to her obituary, Mary Williams had been blind for 7 years before her death, and unable to leave the house for the previous 2 years.

At least 4 of Julia Ann's children were still living at home at the time of Mary's death, including my grandmother. Jasper died in 1943, 8 years before Julia Ann's death.

Julia Ann learned much about loss from a very early age. Perhaps she was responsible - at least in part - for the attitude about death that I saw in my grandmother.

We live, we love, we lose. We remember and reminisce, and we go on.

It's the cycle of life.

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The value of the collateral lines...

2012-09-02T02:37:54Z

I know some folks whose family trees look very neat and tidy, with the names and vitals of only those folks who are their ancestors. I think perhaps they are more interested in pedigree than family history.

You couldn't fit all the people in my family tree on a neat and tidy chart, because I research the collateral lines also.

I care about the lives and times of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and the greats and grands before them.

I also care about the ones they married - the ones to whom I am not related by blood, but whose lives are inextricably interwoven into my family history.

Sometimes I get ragged on about that - from friends as well as family members.

So it was a little gratifying tonight to see why those collateral lines, and the spouses of the people represented by them, are important.

I opened my email and found my monthly Callaway Family Association e-newsletter.

I always look forward to this one. My great-grandmother was a Clark County Callaway, descended from the line of Peter I, who came to this country as an immigrant soon after his birth in 1640. His family settled in Somerset County MD when Maryland was still a colony.

As there usually is in each newsletter, there was a "mystery" Callaway for readers to chew on, to see if we could get a definitive identification.

Only as I read the letters to Cicero Marion Callaway, written in April and May of 1849 from the journey to the fields of the gold rush, I didn't have the same reaction as the newsletter writer.

The letters are real gems - very newsy and chatty - and are signed, "Rueben Son."

CM and Louisa Callaway had a son named Rueben all right - but he was born in 1850, and may not even have been a gleam in CM's eye at the time the letters were written.

So I sent an email to the newsletter writer, asking:
Could the Reuben who wrote to Cicero Callaway about the gold rush have been the brother of CM's wife, Louisa (Son) Callaway?

I got a very prompt reply.
Hi Dee,
I think he was signing it meaning "your son, Reuben". At least that's what it seems like to me.

And to that, I replied:
Okay, I just thought since Louisa had a brother named Rueben who was born in 1826, it was most likely him.

And I still do.

ETA: This evening (9/2), I received an email from the CFA newsletter writer saying she had contacted the Callaway descendant who donated the letters to the University of Mississippi. He confirmed that Rueben Son, who authored the letters to CM Callaway, was the brother of CM's wife, Louisa.

My research has shown that Rueben Son did go to the California gold mines as he told his brother-in-law he would in the 1849 letters. In the 1850 census, he was in a gold mining camp in Placerville, El Dorado Co., CA.

Various family trees say that Reuben Son died in Shasta, Shasta Co., CA two days after Christmas in 1857, at the age of 31.

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Mining the Georgia SAR applications...

2012-08-02T01:07:38Z

For details on my Callaway ancestry.

I need to do my dishes.

And I wanted to watch *all* of a Ken Burns documentary on PBS.

But that will have to wait.

Because I found the identities of three mothers, who previously appeared as Unknowns in my GEDCOM.

And now, they are known!

Not only that, but now I know details about the parents of one of the women.

I love it when that happens.

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The week in review: my cousins help me out...

2012-05-20T13:12:21Z

Geneabloggers who have been blogging for any length of time know this to be true.

If you blog it, they will come.

Cousins you never knew you had will find your blog entries in searches on Google and other search engines.

In the case of several of mine, they will keep coming back.

They cheer me on.

They share photos and other interesting tidbits they discover in their own searches, and keep an eye out for surnames in my tree that aren't even in theirs.

My cup ran over this week.

First was Dixie, a new Balding cousin.

She found my Wedding Wednesday entry on Anson Balding and Ruth Woodrow.

She's a direct descendant. She gave me the names and other data on 5 of the 8 children born to them.

And thoughts about where some of those folks are buried - right here in Little Rock, in two of my favorite cemeteries.

My Callaway cousin, Joe, shared a photo I'd never seen before of Thomas Nathaniel Callaway and Laura Isibelle Holder. (They are his great grandparents.)

Thomas Callaway was the son of Nathaniel C Callaway, whose grave we'd never been able to find until a chance remark made to me at the annual Callaway/Holder family reunion in 2010 made me come home and give Google a real workout.

Joe and I went to Elmwood Cemetery in February last year, and finally placed proper markers on Nathaniel's grave and that of one of his cousins.

And bless her soul...

My Freeman cousin, Jennie, always keeps me in mind in her searches. She and I have deep ancestral roots in Pope Co., AR, and before that, in Tennessee.

My morning email had a note from her wondering if she had located the grave of Anne Parker, wife of William Stout. I had no dates of birth or death for either of them, and did not know where they were buried. Their son, John Wesley Stout, married Martha Jane Ashmore, my first cousin, 3 times removed.

The grave she found at Arkansas Gravestones wasn't the right one, but I did a little searching around and found both William Stout and Anne Parker's graves memorialized in Old Lake Cemetery, just outside Dover.

They were buried on their farm. A memorial plaque for William said he was assassinated at his farm on 4 December 1865.

There were a lot of bushwhackers from both the Union and Confederate sides back then.

So now, I'll wonder...

Did one or more of them surprise 56 year old William Stout as he fed his livestock or mended harness, or any one of many other winter chores?

Or could it have been one of his neighbors? Loyalties were deeply divided in Arkansas about the Civil War...

Keep up with your cousins, folks.

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Now I know where I get it...

2012-04-22T14:34:01Z

Spent some time in the 1940 census yesterday, looking in Clark County, AR for my dad when he was a wee thing...

Found him, there on line 20.

Grandma gave the information to the census enumerator.

Granddaddy worked an average of 48 hours a week as the assistant postmaster, and made $2,000 a year - today's equivalent is $32,770.29.

He was supporting a wife and three kids, and almost exactly a year later, their last child, a daughter, was born.

I also found some Callaways not far from there and was able at last to connect Joe E Callaway to his parents.

Wonder if Grandma knew her second cousin was living a few streets over?

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It's been almost a year...

2012-02-16T16:20:11Z

Since my cousin, Joe, and I made the trip to Memphis to mark our 3rd great grandfather's grave.

I remember how happy we both were to get the photos and how satisfying it was to finally be able to mark his resting place.

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The details make so much difference

2011-07-13T22:07:07Z

Like many other geneabloggers, I have some Google alerts delivered to my inbox in the never-ending quest to find relevant bits of information about my ancestors and collateral kin.

Today, I skimmed through the alerts in my inbox, and found a really interesting one.

The Tri-County Herald had a reprint of an article originally published on 6 Aug 1973, in which Alta Callaway reminisced about her arrival in Outlook, WA with her parents, and the first winter they spent there in 1910-1911.

The details made it so precious.

There were board sidewalks from the depot to the north end of Outlook. "When you stepped off you stepped into ankle deep dust," she said.

"Everyone carried water from the town well. My husband would carry water for me to do the wash before he would go to work," she said.

I cannot imagine having to carry water from town to do the wash.

And sidewalks were truly a necessity, if you were going to keep your skirt out of "ankle deep dust."

I did a little checking on Alta Callaway.

She was the second wife of Luman Callaway, who was descended from the same Callaway patriarch as I, meaning he was some many-times-removed cousin of mine. The Callaway Family Association Rootsweb file on Peter I's descendants has this entry on Luman Callaway.

Most days, the Google alerts get skimmed and deleted.

Today's was a keeper.

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Just never know what you'll find...

2011-07-12T22:15:13Z

While other people gaze longingly at classic works of art in galleries, you can find me searching through old city directories on Ancestry.

Like the 1893-1898 Little Rock city directories, looking for Callaways.

And finding that Julia Estelle Callaway, one of the old maid daughters of Jonathan Wilson Callaway and Ann E Vickers, was a school teacher at Little Rock's Fort Steele School from at least 1895-1898.

So then, I had to look for a photo and information about the school, which I found archived at the Little Rock School District's website.

Ft Steele School, Little Rock, AR

What a hoot.

Wonder if her classroom was up or down?

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John and Amy Callaway's land in Missouri...

2011-06-26T22:36:51Z

This is just fascinating to me - that the records still exist.

I looked back in the blog and saw that I had not provided the survey documents for the land they owned in Louisiana Territory - Ste. Genevieve District, it was at the time.

Even more fascinating to me was their neighbor directly to the north - Jonathan Owsley.

He witnessed their marriage.

And they named their second son, Jonathan Owsley Callaway.

Maybe there were Owsleys on Amy's side of the family.

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Callaway-Holder annual reunion

2011-06-26T22:20:17Z

In the air conditioned arts and crafts building at the Clark County Fairgrounds.

There was plenty to eat.

I understand the head count was 51.

I met some folks I hadn't seen last year, and one of them brought the neatest display, with several photos I did not have.

Clell descends from my 3rd great-granddaddy, Nathaniel, through his youngest son, Thomas Nathaniel.

Thomas N Callaway, 1858-1934

Clell and his wife, Troy, went to Elmwood to photograph Nathaniel and Levi's newly marked graves in March.

If you look closely at Clell's display above, you'll see him posing by Nathaniel's grave in the red sweatshirt.

He found the staff at Elmwood to be just as lovely as (our cousin) Joe and I did when we had the stones set in February.

I was able to share copies of some Civil War service records, marriage records, and land records of John and Amy Stamps Callaway's considerable holdings in Louisiana Territory (now parts of Francois and Bollinger counties in Missouri) with my Callaway kin.

One of our Holder cousins had unearthed a very lengthy 1915 article about John Callaway's move to Arkansas, and it had a huge section in it about our kinship to Daniel Boone.

~sigh~

Apparently, that fable has been reported in Callaway family history for at least a century.

Maybe we'll finally debunk it for good by the end of the second century.

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First, it was the old Callaway place...

2011-06-12T12:45:14Z

The Clark County Historical Association has photos and narratives of what it calls the Trigg place - an old homestead that was moved from its original location closer to the town of Arkadelphia.

For years, my Callaway cousin Joe has been trying to set the record straight.

The old Trigg place was first the old Callaway place. Just like my great grandma Julia Ann Callaway McBrayer Herrington said. (Her father, Mace Callaway, was Nathaniel's oldest son.)

Joe and I wondered when and how Nathaniel Callaway's land passed out of our family into the Trigg family.

Joe found the deed.

...Know all men by these presents that...J W Callaway and S A Callaway his wife and Thomas Callaway and Isabella Callaway his wife and Allen Holder and Caddo Holder his wife of the County of Clark and State of Arkansas for and in consideration of the sum of three hundred dollars to us in hand to be paid by T P Trigg...the following lands lying in the County of Clark and the State of Arkansas, to wit:
...this 4th day of November AD 1881.

A total of just under 200 acres.

They all signed with their marks.

Until I saw the deed, I never knew none of them could write.

One hundred bucks each for Nathaniel's surviving children - John Wingfield, Thomas and Caddo. That's worth $2,176.79 today.

Mace died in 1877, and his daughter, Julia Ann, got nothing. At least as far as we know.

Julia Ann's mother, Mary Dunn, remarried to David Williams in 1878. Did her aunt and uncles decide to disinherit her on the spot?

But Julia Ann knew the house - she knew that the fireplace had the date the home was built carved into it - way up high. According to my cousin Joe, Julia Ann told several of the old-timers about the Callaway homeplace, and that there were family graves out behind it.

Marked with rocks.

When the Triggs moved the home, the graves were forgotten. Over the years, development of the land has covered them up with water.

The Callaway/Holder family reunion is the last Sunday this month.

I've offered to be the traveling electronics roadshow.

I have the scans of the deed given to me by Joe on my computer.

Should make for interesting conversation with our Holder cousin who's an officer in the Clark County Historical Association...

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