Shakin' the Family Tree

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."

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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.

I love this photo.

It's my dad with his grand Uncle Jeff and grand Aunt Margaret.




William Jefferson "Jeff" Burris, my dad, Margaret Jane Burris Moore

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I figure that photo was taken when Dad was about 4, so it was probably very shortly before Uncle Jeff died in January 1941.

Margaret lived until 1944.

George and Louise Burris must have made a trip from Arkadelphia back to Russellville with my aunts and my dad.

Like my grandparents, we had generational Burris photos in our scrapbooks for many years, too. Photos of me and my sisters at our grand Aunt Emma's house when our family camped not far from the original James Littleton and Adeline Burris homestead in Pope County.

A lot of those photos were lost in a 100 year flood in December 1982, when a freak tornado ripped through Arkansas and dumped a deluge of water across my ancestral homeplace.

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We camped on the homestead over 100 years after James and Adeline must have camped on the homestead while they were building their home.

As a kid, I couldn't appreciate that full circle of family history. I enjoyed fishing off the spillway for perch that Dad used to bait his yo-yos and trotlines, and I loved digging for worms beside Aunt Emma's chicken coop. Dad took me through fields that our ancestors had cleared long ago for planting and I was enthralled by the low stacked stone walls they built as they removed the rocks and loosened the soil for planting.

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A new cousin found me this week. We aren't sure yet exactly how close our kinship is, but as we compare notes and sources from our family trees, she is prompting memories.

Thank you, Shirley. I need to remember, and pass it on.

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The journey is good.

This is a Sepia Saturday post.

My grandfather, Jo Duffie Williams, died on 5 Jul 1970. I was a young adult when my grandmother, Doris Geneva Balding, decided to marry again.

It must have been the late 1970s or early 1980s.

It caught the entire family by surprise. Grandma had not indicated she was interested in a man, let alone contemplating marriage.

Regretfully, I do not recall the man's name. He was a widower who lived across the street from my grandmother.

I expect his descendants are glad I've forgotten his name. It's not often that a marriage is destroyed by toilet tissue.

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He moved into her house after the quickie marriage.

Things started going south almost immediately.

She had her routine - he was disrupting it by being underfoot.

He questioned her judgement in just about everything. It was very frustrating to her, as she had been the queen for quite a while.

But then, he dared to question her choice of toilet tissue. Why on earth was she spending good money on Northern toilet tissue?

Even today, I can hear the indignation in her voice...

How dare he? She had been using tissue from Northern Paper Mills ever since she had been in charge of running a household. The next thing we knew, he'd probably have a problem with snack and soda crackers from the National Biscuit Company. (Grandma always referred to products with an accompanying credit to the company that manufactured them - and none of that Nabsico twaddle for her...)

There was only one solution.

Annulment.

Promptly.

She phoned her attorney and the deed was done.

And as I had seen her do with every other piece of luck life handed her, she squared her shoulders, and soldiered on...

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Of course, when we started to tease her about the marriage destroyed by toilet paper, she always reminded us that an annulment means it never was.

Missing you, Grandma...

In May 2008, central Arkansas was hit hard by tornadoes.

I had a daily reminder of them as I took a shortcut to work through a Little Rock neighborhood that was devastated by those storms.

Trees that are easily older than I were ripped out of the ground and tossed into the street, or onto a neighbor's house. The hop-skip-jump pattern of the tornado was easy to detect by the number of homes that have been torn completely down, and new (replacement) homes built on old foundations. Even three months later in August.

There was one house in particular that I was watching. The owners elected to tear down and start from scratch and they chose a new facade for the new home. It was almost complete, and sat on a corner lot right where I stopped each day, waiting for construction traffic to pass.

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Back in the olden days when I was in grade school, one of my friends lived in that house. Her family hosted many a sleep-over there and her older brother used to scare the shit out of us when we "camped out" in the backyard. As I watched the rebuilding process, I wondered if her family still lived there. When we were in the third grade, her older brother died of leukemia in his fifth grade year. It was the first time I had known someone my age who had to deal with the death of a sibling. It made me look a little differently at my own sisters.

On a late August day as I made my way to work and approached the corner, I saw an old man getting out of a truck parked in front of the house. He reached into the bed of the truck and awkwardly heaved out what looked like a board wrapped up in some plastic trash bags. It was raining lightly, and he just stood there in the drizzle, looking at the house. The closer I got to the corner and the stop sign, the more familiar he looked.

So I stopped and parked behind his truck.

Telling myself I was going to scare an old man and make a fool of myself, I got out anyway. I stood a respectful distance away from him, and said what I hoped was his name. When I was a kid, we called all adults Mr. or Mrs. Last Name, and I did the same then.

He looked at me. Didn't recognize me. (It had only been 40 years.) I walked a little closer and told him who I was - at least who I was then.

His eyes lit up and he extended his hand to shake mine. He said, "I'd hug you but I'd have to put this down and I don't want it to get wet."

"This" turned out to be a piece of the kitchen doorframe. When I was a kid, just about every one of my friend's houses had the same one. So did mine.

The one where our parents had us stand up with our backs against it while they marked our height with lines - "My god, how you've grown!" - and put our initials and the date on it. My dad used a carpenter's pencil.

He said there was no choice but to tear the house down and start over. But not completely over.

Because the kitchen doorframe - the side where he marked my friend's changing height, as well as the height of the son he buried at age 11 - had survived the tornado.

So we went down the driveway still covered in sand and construction muck into the unfinished garage. He unwrapped the piece of the doorframe and showed it to me. And took me inside to show me where it would be placed by the carpenters that morning.

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I got my hug, and left to go to work. But not before I sat in my car for a few moments with tears running down my face, and gave thanks for daddies who cherish the lines on the doorframe.