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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Callaway-Holder annual reunion

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:20:17 GMT

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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Shakin' the Family Tree

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

Callaway-Holder annual reunion