Shakin' the Family Tree

My maternal grandfather...





Jo Duffie Williams, age 6 months

No matter how "busy" I get with other lines of descent in the family tree, I always come back to her.

Even some of her historic "facts" are open to debate, as far as I am concerned. I made myself a little chronology of what I know about Mary.

Date of Birth: 5 Jan 1849
Source information for this date includes her death certificate, census records, obituary, gravestone, and family lore

Place of Birth: Georgia
Source information for this location includes census records, her death certificate and family lore

Parents: Unknown
I cannot find a single document that gives the identity of Mary's parents. For almost two months, I chased little girls named Mary Dunn across the United States of America, and never found her. However, I can tell you the parentage and location of just about every other Mary Dunn my g-g-grandmother's age.

And there's a story there - something that was a closely guarded secret. Since she was underage to contract for marriage, Mary's first marriage record had this to say about her parents:

...Mary C Dunn aged 17 years...her having no father and the consent of her mother made her home with another family in their presents (sic) was the sight (sic) for porfomace (sic)...

Her death certificate, for which her son Rubin Ned was the informant, was equally tantilizing for its seemingly deliberate omission of her parents' identities. On it, Ned said Mary's father's name was Mr. Dunn. He did not know what her mother's name was.

I don't believe that.

Religion: Baptist, member of Bethel Union (later DeGray) Baptist Church, DeGray, Clark County, AR
Source information for this includes Conference Meeting minutes of Bethel Union Baptist Church, DeGray, Clark County, AR and her obituary.

Date of Marriage: 8 Sep 1866 to Allen Mason Lowery Callaway, in Clark County, AR
Source information for this marriage includes the marriage bond and license, and her obituary

Date of Marriage: 13 Jul 1878 to David Andrew Williams, in Clark County, AR
Source information for this marriage includes the marriage bond and license, and her obituary

Children: Marriage 1: Julia Ann Callaway, born 19 Jun 1873, in Clark County, AR
Marriage 2: Rubin Ned Williams, born 14 Nov 1881, in Clark County, AR; and
William Andrew Williams, born 13 Nov 1882 in Clark County, AR
Source information for children includes census records, Mary's obituary, her children's obituaries, and family lore

Date of Death: 9 Apr 1929 in DeGray, Clark Co., AR
Source information for this date includes her death certificate, obituary, gravestone and family lore

Cause of Death: Noxemia, i.e., insufficient oxygen in the blood
Source information derived from her death certificate

Burial: DeGray Baptist Church Cemetery, DeGray, Clark County, AR
Source information for this location includes her death certificate and gravestone.

Family lore about Mary is about as sketchy as historic documents. There's a photo of Mary and a man I have been told was Bob Dunn, who came to see her from Texas. I don't know if the photo was taken while she was married to Mace Callaway or David Williams. She certainly doesn't look as old as she was in another undated photo of her with her daughter and adult grandson.

And Dunn - aha! A family member?



Brother, cousin, father? I chased Robert/Bob Dunns around the country in census records. I have no idea which, if any, is him in the sub-folders I have on Robert Dunn. I can't put the two together in any context, even though I feel sure he was related to her. He just doesn't look old enough (to me) to be her father.

My paternal grandmother, who was Mary's granddaughter, always told me and other members of the family that Mary was her "Indian grandmother." Several in our family did not believe that.

A few months ago, we laid that one to rest when one of my aunts took a mtDNA test. Grandma was right. If, as my father and I suspect, Mary was illegitimate and a man named Dunn was her father, then she may have been half native.

And if she was born in Georgia, it doesn't necessarily mean she was Cherokee. There were a multitude of native tribes whose homeland was Georgia.

So I stand, once more, in front of her photo, and ask her to give me a sign.

As I have researched the people in my family tree, my heart has gone out to quite a few of them. But probably none more so than David Andrew Williams.

I am not even related to him by blood. He was the second (and final) husband of my g-g-grandmother, Mary C Dunn.

I'm not going to pretend David was an angel. There's a fair amount of evidence that he wasn't.

But whether you call it fate, destiny, karma, or just plain bad luck, it seems to me that the deck was stacked against him. I have to wonder how much of it came from Momma, since my impression of her (*not* confirmed by anyone or any document) was that she was an iron willed woman who ran roughshod over anyone she could, and wrote her own version of family history to suit her own sense of self-righteous importance.

David was born in Hardin County, TN to Wright Williams and Lucinda H Clem on 28 Sep 1845. He was the middle kid of three, having an older brother, William H, and younger sister, Lucinda, who was born on 24 Apr 1847.

His dad died in 1847 - I don't know whether it was before or after Lucinda Jr was born. But Lucinda Sr did not remain a widow for long.

In 1848, she hitched her wagon to Lorenzo Hitchcock, a self-made man and a widower 23 years her senior. By 1860, they moved to Clark County, AR from Hardin County, TN., and Lorenzo continued his trade of metal work, employing his wife's oldest son in his shop. Several of Lucinda's family members, including her parents and younger brother, James Mason Clem, lived in nearby Hot Spring County.

By 1870, the clan moved to Arkadelphia, the largest town in and county seat of Clark County. Additionally, provision was made for Lucinda's sons to also have homes, conveniently located next door to Momma and step-dad, as both William and David were married.

It was not David Andrew Williams' first marriage.

---

On 24 Apr 1865, tragedy struck Lucinda Hitchcock's extended family, as it had so many other families of the era. Her brother, James Mason Clem, died of disease at the end of his Civil War service in Little Rock, Pulaski County, AR. He left a widow, Delilah (Gibbs) Clem, and at least four minor children. (James and Delilah had eight children together before his death.)

Obviously, Lucinda's widowed sister-in-law needed some help. Now who would be a suitable husband for her?

Enter David Andrew Williams.

In 1867, 22 year-old David Andrew Williams married his maternal aunt, 42 year-old Delilah (Gibbs) Clem, and became an instant father to his cousins, the oldest of whom was two years younger than he was.

I am not customarily a person who gets squicky about the family tree stuff. I blithely enter all those marriages of cousins, usually muttering under my breath the reminder that in those days, statistics showed people rarely married people farther than a five mile radius from home, and that was likely to be kin.

But this one just had ick written all over it for me.

And it may well have for David, too. He and Aunt Delilah were married long enough for her to bear him a son, William Wright Clem Williams, born 16 Dec 1867 in Hot Spring County, AR.

She sued him for divorce in Hot Spring County Court, which was granted 11 Mar 1869, on the grounds of "violence and drunkenness." Delilah had custody of their son.

I don't know about violence, but I think I mighta gotten drunk, too.

Why do I see Momma's hand in this, from the marriage all the way to the name of the grandchild?

---

Violence and drunkenness aside, it was a really fast courtship for David and wife #2, Martha L Dunn. She and David married on 27 Jun 1869 in Clark County, and by the June 1870 census, they had a one year-old daughter, Marietta Williams.

That was a weird census to puzzle through. Aside from David and his brother William living in the two houses next to their mother, the census showed David and William living together, and their wives, Martha and Sallie, living next to them with Marietta.

I finally got some help from one of David's direct descendants.

Martha Williams had consumption. She may have been quarantined in one of the houses, with Sallie Williams going back and forth.

Martha Dunn Williams died on 2 Nov 1876 of tuberculosis. Marietta either escaped the illness, or was treated successfully.

In any event, David Andrew Williams was now a widower with a six year-old daughter.

---

I don't know how David met my g-g-grandmother. All the records show that they lived in two different townships, and had two completely different lifestyles.

Mary Callaway was Baptist, David's family was Methodist. Mary was country - David was a city boy. (In the 1870 census, he did say he was a farmer, which was another oddity...I cannot figure out where in Arkadelphia *town* he was doing any farming.)

They did have one thing in common. Each of them had been widowed - David in 1876, and Mary in 1877 - and each had a young daughter.

They married on 13 Jul 1878 in Clark County. The 1880 census shows them living in Greenville Township in Clark County, and David is a famer. Both their daughters, Marietta Williams and Julia Ann Callaway, are listed in the household, as well as a 17 year-old farmhand named Cicero Smith.

They added two sons to their family - Ruben Ned Williams, born 14 Nov 1881, and William Andrew Williams, born 13 Nov 1882.

It looked like things were turning around for David Andrew Williams.

---

In 1884, David was slowly struck with some sort of creeping paralysis. According to his obituary, it began in his hands.

Reading the obit, it sounds to me like polio. But apparently, no one else got it. Maybe ALS?

Here is the obituary, published in the Southern Standard on 10 Feb 1888.

Williams, David Andrew, was born in Hardin Co. Tenn. Sept 28,1845. He was married to Mary C. Callaway July 13, 1878. His affliction was paralysis. In 1884 it began in his hands and gradually diffused itself through his whole system. His long affliction and the peculiarity of his case might have been much profit to the medical fraternity had it watched the stages of his disease. His affliction was four years and five months standing. His flesh all virtually perished away. The last two years of his illness he was entirely helpless. In the year 1855 he professed religion and joined the Methodist Church, and died in peace January 23, 1888 aged 43 years, 4 months and 15 days. He was the son of Mrs. Lucinda Hitchcock.

Okay, say I am perseverating, but I see Momma in this one, too.

Where is any mention of his kids? Or his step-daughter, who lived in the home until her marriage in 1891?

He had *four* kids, all living at the time of his death.

His wife gets a mention, but his mother wraps it up.

And...his mother carted his earthly remains over two townships to bury him in the Methodist cemetery, rather than lay him to rest 1/2 mile down the road from his home, where his widow and one of his sons, along with grandchildren, later would be buried.

In those days, traveling that distance for a burial wasn't easy.

---

My g-g-grandmother was 39 and a widow for the second time. She died 41 years later, still the widow of David Andrew Williams.

Maybe she didn't want to risk becoming a widow again.

Or maybe, she didn't want to risk another mother-in-law from hell...

---

Looking forward to meeting you on the other side, David.

When my mother died a few years ago, I inherited a multiple leaf dining table from her. It had been my grandma's table and had been in her dining room as long as I could remember.

Grandma and I had a shared love of plants and gardening. When she died, my mother, my sisters and I, and our cousins gathered at her house to divide up the things that had not already been promised to a specific person. I asked for, and was gladly given, her gardening hand tools. Everyone else looked at me like I had lost what was left of my mind - after all, there were Oriental rugs, solid silver flatware, gold rimmed china, and solid wood pieces of furniture, ornately carved, still up for grabs. Why would I pick a bunch of hand trowels, shears and those weird looking wire hands when I could choose my share of that other stuff? (The wire hands are just neater than snuff - they have a crook at the end of each of them for hanging on your clothesline after you've stretched your wet gloves to dry over their wire fingers.)

My mother took the table, and for several years afterward, she dropped both end leaves, stored the two center leaves, and used the table as a sort of telephone desk in a corner of her dining room. She already had a large table with matching chairs in there.

And now I have the table. In Grandma's house, I remember it always being covered with a tablecloth, and candlebra in the middle of it. Around here, that would last as long as it took for me to leave the room. Four cats would make hash of that. So at my house, the table sits nude in the kitchen, with the end leaves dropped and the center leaves in.

At Grandma's house, you knew you had "arrived," and had stepped over the threshold from child to young adult when you were allowed to eat your meal at the table in the dining room, instead of the kids' table in the kitchen.

I was talking the other night with a woman who knew my mother and was friends with her since they both had been in their early teens. I asked her if she remembered the table. She did.

She said one of the first times she recalled eating at the table was at my mother's 14th birthday dinner in 1951. She was pretty sure Grandma had gotten the table for her brand new dining room in her brand new home in 1949.

Over the years, it has acquired some scars. Some are deeper than others, and I can feel them through the soft cloth I use to apply lemon oil to it every couple of weeks. Grandma probably would wince slightly at some of them, but I think overall, she knew that the journey through life brings with it the scars of experience.

Here in my own kitchen, I sit at the table and contemplate the journey as I suspect my grandmother also did on occasion. There is a feeling of groundedness in that old wood that provides a sense of connection, not only with Grandma, but with an ancient life force and spirit that imparts wisdom along the way.

Born on 9 Jul 1907, in Pulaski County, AR to Victor Claude and Hattie Belle (Chapin) Balding, the third of seven children, she lived in Little Rock all her life. She died here on 18 Jan 1998, and refused to go until her last grandchild arrived by plane from New York.

She was my maternal grandmother.

---

Grandma Dee, we called her.

She loved making things with her hands. She began to sew as a young girl, and added gardening to her crafting. She had a green thumb that just didn't quit, although as she aged and hired a gardener to do the heavy lifting, she had to content herself with following him around, and in later years, sitting on the terrace or a chair in the front driveway, giving instruction in the way only she could.

---

Grandma married Jo Duffie Williams on Halloween in 1926. They eloped.

That's why it was so funny to find this among her papers after her death. It's the *official* Marriage Service of the Presbyterian Church.



Look closely. They eloped.



That's why Rev Hay Watson Smith penned the word not into the text...were not united by me in the bonds of marriage...

I had to laugh.

That juxtaposition of what you were supposed to do as opposed to what you wanted to do was so like her, and made her so unique.

---

Grandma was a young bride during the Great Depression. Those years shaped her financial world view for the rest of her life. She was an economist in every sense of the word. But when she cut loose with some money, she bought quality.

She and my grandfather lived in a small rental home not far from her parents while they saved money to build their home in central Little Rock. They moved into it in 1949, when my mother, their youngest child, was 12.

They built it for cash. It never had a mortgage on it as long as my grandmother lived there. When my grandfather died, he left her financially secure, and she enlisted the help of her banker to stay that way.

When I was grown, and moved back to Arkansas, I'd go to see her.

Arkansas summers can be brutal. Grandma would rise in the morning, get her bath and dress and go downstairs where she stayed for the rest of the day, with the windows open. She rarely ran the air conditioning until the summer drought crashed into the brutal and unrelenting heat of August. She kept the windows open and fans going.

I teased her about that - she could well afford to run her AC. "How do you think," she would ask me indignantly, "that we made it through the Great Depression?"

She said the same thing about the paper towels. I'd go into the kitchen and see a paper towel spread out to dry on the counter next to the sink. When I reminded her paper towels were about 79 cents a roll, she'd roll her eyes and tell me there was nothing wrong with that one, she had dried her hands on it. It wasn't soiled, it was damp.

It was perfectly suitable for continued use.

---

Grandma had more than her fair share of health problems all her life. She had tuberculosis when my mother was about 4 years old, and spent time in the TB sanitorium at Booneville in Logan County. Once she told me the smell of cooked cabbage reminded her of Booneville for the rest of her life.

Later, she had a thyroidectomy. As was the custom in the 1950s and 60s, she had a complete hysterectomy.

It wasn't until after my grandfather died in 1970 that she began to have heart problems. Before she died, she had two major heart surgeries - by-passes each time.

Those took a lot out of her, but I never heard her complain about them, or the radical mastectomies she had exactly one year apart when she was in her 70s.

She even managed to joke about that. She called herself the titless wonder.

---

One Saturday morning, I was putzing around the cottage when she called.

Are you doing anything special today?

Not particularly, why? Do you need me to take you somewhere?

Well, yes. I'd like to go to Barbara Graves Intimate Fashions.

Now, I was intrigued. What did my 87 year-old grandmother need from a lingerie shop?

Titties.

She explained.

Her breast prostheses were heavy and hot. But more than that, these are 20 year old titties, they are too perky, and they look ridiculous on an 80 year old body. I need something with some sag in it.

The socks she had been rolling up to put in her bra when she went out in public weren't cutting it, and the Barbara Graves saleswoman said she could fix her right up.

So off we went. After we purchased her new titties, we went to her favorite place for lunch.

Wendy's. She always had the same thing, with a Frosty for dessert.

And then surreptiously raked all the unused condiment packets off the table into her purse before we left.

How do you think we made it through the Great Depression?

---

After she died, my sisters, cousins and I gathered at her home to divide the household furnishings and personal contents not covered by her will, and pack the house up for sale.

We divided up the rooms and got to work.

I had her bedroom, one of three on the second floor. We had devised a loose system of organization, and it was working well for me until I opened the bottom drawer of one of her bureaus.

Stacked neatly inside were probably at least a dozen Russell Stover candy boxes. At first, I thought they were probably empties she couldn't bear to part with (remember the Great Depression...), but when I picked a couple of them up, they were heavy.

Holy shit, I thought...how much chocolate could one old woman eat? I took the top off.

And discovered her music cassette tapes. Each box contained a different genre of music.

All these years, we had wracked our brains on her birthday and Christmas, trying to figure out what to get the woman who had everything.

And she was storing her music tapes in Russell Stover candy boxes.

---

One category of "things" that started stacking up real fast in those three days was papers. All kinds of papers. We designated a place in the den to locate those. Stuff like battered shoeboxes and dog-eared, coffee stained manila envelopes full of papers, some handwritten and some typed on what you can tell was one of the original manual typewriters. Loose photos, wedding invitations, baptismal announcements, and obituaries and funeral notices. Newspaper articles, touting the feats and accomplishments of various ones of my forebears. None with the name of the newspaper or the date, though - we were not so famous as to rate headlines where that information might have survived the shears.

Other than for historic purposes, we collectively did not figure anyone would have interest in the warranty and operating instructions for the first electric percolator Papa bought for Grandma, and which had long since bit the dust.

It was easy to cull through all that - but not quick. At times, there'd be four or five of us, sitting cross legged on the floor in the den, looking through all that and we would find ourselves reading those instructions - out loud, to each other.

And at the end, we consolidated quite a bit of it.

I don't remember who first asked, "So what are we going to do with this stuff?"

All heads swiveled in my direction.

I adopted my best rendition of the left-eyebrow-arched-oh-no-you-don't look, and said, "I don't think so."

The cottage has the least amount of space of any of our dwellings. And I am not the oldest grandchild, I am third. Why me?

The out of state cousins immediately began to talk about shipping costs. They had all flown in for the funeral and the week after, and had no way to wag packing boxes back with them on the plane(s) - at least not without considerable expense.

Everyone turned and looked at me.

So I got all of that - and the family photo album and dictionary.

Yeah, a family dictionary. (We couldn't find a family Bible, but it didn't tear any of us up.) But we had a family dictionary - a Webster's unabridged with a ribbon marker from decades ago that sat on a little lectern in the den. Papa kept it there along with a little magnifying glass. A kid had to stand on a stool so Papa could show her the dictionary.

And there was a lot of family information in all those papers.

And so began my journey into my family's past.

I believe Grandma would approve.

---

Doris B Williams in her garden, 1972

See you on the other side, Grandma.

Left to right: Hattie (Chapin) Balding, Jo Carleton "Buddy" Williams, Sue (Keene) Williams, Russell Ellington "Linky" Balding, Judith Ann (Williams) Burris Neumann, Jo Duffie Williams, Lucille Balding.

Sadly, only one of those folks is still alive.

It happens every time I open the Williams family photo album.

More dry rot, and more photos falling out. It's to be expected from a photograph album that's soon to be 125 years old.

So I dutifully scan.

And mutter under my breath cuss out loud as I do it.

Because Maxie hardly ever labeled a thing.

I get a work out researching photographers and when they were in operation.

( Click here to amble through anonymity with me... )

The Williams family photo album is falling apart now. It was given to my great-grandparents, Jo Desha and Maxie Leah (Meek) Williams for Christmas in 1885, probably as an engagement present prior to their marriage on 11 Feb 1886.

This one fell out.



I have no idea who she is. She could have been one of Maxie's friends, since I have found other photos of Maxie's friends in the album.

It was taken between 1871 and 1878, according to my research on the photographer.

Then, there is the daguerreotype - equally mysterious.



I've taken it apart one time to get all the information I could about it.

In the interest of historic accuracy, I really think this is an ambrotype, placed in a daguerreotype case made by Litchfield, Parsons and Co. The tag inside the back of the piece says the case is a Union case, with embracing riveted hinge, patented by LP&C on October 14, 1856 and April 21, 1857. By the late 1860s, the ambrotype was replaced by the tintype.

So I have a date range for my heirloom photograph of roughly 1856 through 1865.

And no clue as to the identity of my ancestresses.

I will update this entry from time to time as I run across all the marriage indices I've collected over the years from various Arkansas counties. The letter and number combination at the end of each record is the marriage book volume and page number.

( Click for long list of counties and names... )

I love talking to other genealogists. I prefer amateurs like myself.

But I always get irritated when the discussion takes a turn I simply cannot understand. I'm talking about a fairly widely held belief that when our ancestors' children died, they did not feel their grief as deeply as do parents today who lose a child.

I'm calling bullshit on that one.

Yes, I realize that generally speaking, our ancestors had many more children than we do these days, particularly before latex condoms became widely available in the 1920s in the United States. I am also aware that rural farming communities required child labor that is illegal today.

But I do not believe that our ancestors loved their children less, or differently, than we do. Losing a child was no less tragic for them - one child could not "replace" another.


Katharine Leah Williams, 18 Jul 1899 - 8 Dec 1904

Katharine was the fourth child of my great-grandparents, Jo Desha and Maxie Leah (Meek) Williams. I don't know the exact cause of her death, but I know it was illness rather than an accident.

And it hit her parents hard - very hard. The monument erected to her memory provides a glimpse of their grief.



The Williams family plot in Oakland Cemetery at Russellville was a living memorial to her - a rose garden where her parents could go and sit quietly to grieve.


Oakland Cemetery, circa 1910

By 1920, my great-grandfather's grocery business had gone belly-up, and the family moved to Little Rock. Their hearts must have broken all over again when they had to sell that family plot at Oakland, and leave their Katharine behind.