Shakin' the Family Tree

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

Sun, 20 May 2012 13:12:21 GMT

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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We'll take a closer look at it, then...

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 01:47:37 GMT

Apparently my post about what I believe to be the very old Freeman homeplace has caused a bit of a stir with some folks.

One being my cousin-in-law, who is almost sure it isn't, and said as much to the two Freeman descendants who came to look at it up close and in person this past weekend.

He has his reasons - which he and I discussed by phone earlier this evening.

One of them being that it is not a dogtrot house, since they were usually two cabins, each with its own fireplace, with a breezeway in the middle.

And he's right about that - it isn't a dogtrot.

And I didn't say it was.

I said it is a shotgun house which was very popular with poor people, and very easily added on to, as we see in the homestead I *still* believe is the Freeman place.

My reasons are more mundane. There's that matter of the nearby creek, which isn't where it needs to be in the southwest part of Section 11 cousin-in-law says the house is in, but is there in Section 14, where I say it is.

So we'll be looking at some more plat books...

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Random musings...

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 16:13:16 GMT

I got a contact about my post on the very old Freeman place from a descendant of William Aflred Freeman.

She was excited to see the photos, which I invited her to copy for her own use. And she also gave me some more information about Freeman descendants.

Which I have dutifully researched and added to my GEDCOM.

We aren't cousins, but I keep up with the ones who married into my family anyway.

Because you just never can tell when someone might need some information.

I've spent some time this morning working on another family tree I manage for a dear friend.

Right now, I'm messing with Joseph Wesley Roach, born 16 Dec 1884 in Missouri and died 4 Jan 1978 in Randolph Co., AR.

My friend's mother is a Randolph County Roach. I know Joseph Wesley figures into her line of Roaches somehow - there were quite a few who stopped off in Missouri on their way south from Illinois to Randolph County. He named his sons some of the favored male Roach names - Jesse, James, Arthur.

I just can't find his parents.

Yet.

I'd love to be graving.

But it is just too fricking hot.

Every day, I get my Weather Channel text advising of dangerous heat indices. Not that I need the official notice.

We have reached that time in Arkansas summer where you can step outside your front door and feel that the air has mass from the combination of temperature and humidity. The cottage has not received any measurable rainfall since June 28.

I've been looking back at the family photos I have of ancestral homeplaces. Thinking about how it was that they tried to beat the heat of Arkansas summers before the days of air conditioning.

Like the Williams' home in Russellville.

Or the Herrington homeplace in Clark County.

In the two photos above, you can see 1) the shed behind the house, and 2) part of the covered front porch of the house.

The Williams home also had covered porches.

Did they sleep on them in the summertime?

More things that make me say, hmmmm...

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