I don’t know when I first heard my mother utter the words, “You know, Aunt Vickie gave those boys away,” but it was a phrase I heard repeated throughout my life. The image of two boys, just 4 and 2 years old, being given away would haunt my family for nearly 90 years. It especially haunted Great-aunt Helen, who, at age 7, had seen it happen.
When deCODE, the pioneering Icelandic genetics research and drug discovery firm, gave me the opportunity to try out their new deCODEme test to get a look at my ancestry—I’m always a sucker for that—along with my risks for gene-related disease, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. But my wife, Judi, a believer in letting sleeping dogs lie, wanted me to do just that.
In the rush to homestead the West, there simply wasn’t enough good land and there weren’t enough available women to meet the demand. But Charlie found a way around all that.
My granny, Ida Mae, met Charlie, her future husband, at a barn dance in Indian Territory soon after her family moved there in 1894 from northeast Alabama.
Free Dirt Homesteading, settlement, and the legacy left by America’s $18 dream
THE PUBLIC DOMAIN of the United States is almost boundless. Its unsold acres, exclusive of Alaska, number nearly 1,500 millions, as yet covered only with the primeval forest, or the wild and wanton vegetation of the prairies, “wherewith the mower filleth not his hand, nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom.
My Missouri ancestors used a number of creative home remedies. My great-grandmother blew smoke from her corncob pipe into her granddaughter’s ear to cure an earache. Another dear old soul made cough medicine from rock candy, whiskey, and cherry bark.
The case started as cases normally do, with me selecting a rescue prospect. Marilyn Traylor Syx’s submission about an 11-pound family Bible caught my eye immediately:
I came into possession of this Bible when my aunt died in 1990 at age 95.
You’ve done the work—but what will become of it? When no one in the family decides to pick up where you’re leaving off, consider donating it instead.
“The first, best step is to identify the local historical society in the area where the artifacts are from,” says Curt Witcher, manager of the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library.
Up to your elbows in dirt and weeds? Take a break from gardening, gather your family together, and create personalized stepping stones that will remind you of family all year long.
Supplies:
Bag of quick-setting concrete. A 50 lb. bag makes seven 10″ stones. Consider a box of concrete tint for colors besides gray.
Stepping stone molds like plastic plant saucers or foil pie tins.
In 1880, 5-year-old Eugene Hamp was in the Fulton County, Ohio, county home. He must have made quite an impression on the home’s administrators considering they wrote the following about him:
This boy is the child of Frank Hamp said to have been hung by a mob in the state of Missouri for horse stealing and was abandoned by his mother who is now leading a disreputable life.
For urban families, city directories can be a gold mine of information on the changing circumstances and household composition of families between federal census years.
Facts about Susan Sloane are on her gravestone in Cathedral Cemetery in Wilmington, Delaware. She was born in 1854, died in 1904, and was the wife of Frank A. Sloane.
