Namesakes

What is in a Name?

A name is the first thing in life most of us receive that stays with us forever. Often times it has been a carefully selected after hours of deliberation by at least one parent and sometimes even larger groups of relatives. Siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents all have suggestions when a new baby is born.

Genealogists get the rare opportunity to see how deep some names go in our families by looking at the broader family landscape. For instance, I have a cousin that is my Grandmother’s namesake. In the bigger picture, however her name is a much older family name. My Grandmother is her own Grandmother’s namesake. The earliest Sarah in that naming streak was born in 1861 and the latest in 1997, 136 years apart.

Carrie

I am a namesake for my mother’s paternal aunt, Carrie Jamison. She was the wife of my Grandfather’s half-brother. She lived in West Virginia where my Grandfather’s family lived in a rural mountain community and I only had a few opportunities to meet her as a young child. She passed away at the age of 76. I was 9 years old at the time. Despite the fact that Aunt Carrie and I shared no actual genetic material the fact that she gave me her name has made her a topic of research interest for me.

Carrie was an interesting research project before I even looked for a single record. The few stories told about her typically present more questions than answers. Her early history seemed shrouded in mystery and shadowed heavily by whispered “scandal” even while I was a child. All these years later, she still presents many unanswered questions.

Origins Unknown

Carrie was born to Lula Lawson on 7 February 1912. Lula was a nineteen-year-old woman, recently divorced, living in Prince, Fayette County, West Virginia at the time of Carrie’s birth. Carrie was Lula’s first and only known child. The birth was more than a year after Lula’s separation from her previous spouse, David Brantley, and prior to her marriage to her second husband, Burk Adkins, by more than two years. Carrie’s biological father is currently unknown.

Chasing Records

Carrie with a nephew (Bo) est late 1940’s

Census records show Carrie, using the last name of Adkins, living with her mother and stepfather in 1920. She was living in Fayette County, West Virginia. Her stepfather worked on the railroad.

The census record for 1930 still eludes me but by 1940, she was again in the household of her mother and stepfather in Fayette County, West Virginia and she is claiming a marital status of divorced. A marriage license registered in Raleigh County, West Virginia in 1935 records her marriage to a cousin on her mother’s side, Fred Lawson.

 

 

Myth Meets Research

The 1940 census entry seems like a good time to broach the topic of whispered scandal. When I was growing up it was common knowledge that Aunt Carrie had been married before our Uncle and that she had children. According to family stories, Aunt Carrie’s own mother had assisted in her losing custody of her children. The details of the situation so long ago are murky.

The 1940 census shows Carrie living with Burk and Lula, a divorced woman at the time. She shows no children living in the household. I located a death record for a Vern L Lawson, son of Fred Lawson and Carrie Atkins, who was born 2 February 1934 in Fayette County, West Virginia. Vern died in Los Angeles, California on 29 April 1993. I am still seeking Vern’s location on the 1940 census. I hope to learn what family raised him and to identify the names of more of Carrie’s children if they are in the home with their brother. I believe she had at least one daughter and two sons.

Rumor has it she managed to reunite with at least one of her children but I am unsure who the child was and when in life they reconnected. By all accounts, the loss of her children was something that caused her heartache until her death and she collected dolls to help fill the void.

Carrie and Steward

I do not know at what age Carrie met my Grandfather’s half-brother, James Steward Jamison. I can only wonder if the fact that both of them grew up raised by a stepfather was one thing that drew them together. Whatever the case may be they were together as early as the late 1940’s and in 1973 they officially married in Alleghany, Virginia. The two never had children together. They are buried side by side in the P.A. Shuck Cemetery in Fayette County, West Virginia.

Headstone of Steward and Carrie Jamison in PA Shuck Cemetery Photo Credit of FAG contributed by Judy

 

 

 

 

 

Was Grandma a Nazi?

Tracing a Legacy

Genealogy for me is more than just hunting up vital records and putting together a list of names and dates to show the passing generations of a family. It is something spiritual, a labor of love, often for people who came and went long before I existed. Eternal life to me is defined by how the world remembers you long after you are gone. That is our legacy.

Not everyone leaves a good legacy but we all leave a legacy. It is not dictated by wealth or power, both the poor and the emperors of the world leave a legacy. Genealogy is about discovering the forgotten legacy of people who can no longer tell their own story.

I am the storyteller. I breathe life back into names that exist only on records and cold stones in cemeteries. I give them eternal life by preserving those legacies no matter how simple. Sometimes it is a struggle to reconcile personal feelings with the obligation to tell the story of our ancestors as it is told by historic proof. That relative you liked as a child may later be revealed to be a convicted criminal in earlier life. The drunk uncle you disliked as a child may have once saved kids from a burning building when he was younger. As a genealogist, I feel it is my obligation to tell the story as the records tell it to me and when information conflicts with what I want to think of that person, I force myself to face that bias head on.

My Great Grandparents

I write often about my Great Grandmother Lillie Mae Weatherspoon. She was probably my favorite female elder growing up and my house contains several items that she owned or made during her long lifetime. For me she was that rock. The person that I always felt I could run to for a safe place.

I was aware that not everyone thoughts she was as great as I did. She would often refuse to tell me too much about her early life with statements that “if anyone knew all the things she had done no one would like her.” We never had large family functions on my paternal side of the family and it was the world’s worst kept secret that my grandmother and my great grandmother did not like each other

In all my childhood years, I am not aware of one memory of both my grandmother and her mother in law in the same place at the same time. They both spent a lot of time with me growing up. Neither ever talked bad about the other in my presence. I was always aware of that quiet dislike between them lurking beneath the surface of my life. None of that mattered to me. I cannot fathom anything that would change the way I fell about the part she played in my life. The person she was to me as a child vanquished any skeletons that danced in her closet.

She has been gone a long time. I still miss her often and when I miss her, I delve into a world of records and work on preserving the legacy she left behind even the ugly parts. I started out with more missing links than I did concrete facts because of her hesitation to share information.

Grandma’s Skeleton in the Bottom of a Jewelry Box

Often the documents I do find confirm the scant facts she shared while expanding on a complicated life she tried to leave behind. Last year I discussed some of her early family life in my blog about the strange tale in Ripley County. Since that blog I have also managed to discover that when she married her second husband she used and alias…no doubt to hide the fact that she had failed to secure a divorce from her first husband. In her defense, her first husband was abusive and she did eventually get divorced. The details of her early life slowly reveal themselves over time and research and not one single thing has altered my perception of her legacy. However, she has presented me with my first heirloom conundrum.

When she died, she left her estate to the church and the church allowed family members to go through the house to collect sentimental items. I collected many items from her house that day. Plants, nick-knacks, old glassware, handmade afghans, and one old wooden jewelry box full of costume jewelry that looked like a pirate’s chest were all carefully selected not for monetary value but because they reminded me of her.

After the rawness of her loss passed, I finally went through some of those items in that old jewelry box. Buried under piles of beaded necklaces and clip-on earrings was an odd tarnished coin type medallion I had never seen before. The language was not in English but it was not hard to recognize the names on the medallion. Of all the things I have discovered in my research, of all the things I have learned about the history she wanted to forget that medallion has caused me the most distress.

I have no clue how my great grandmother came to be in possession of a piece of early Hitler memorabilia. Her husband at the time did not serve in WW2; he worked in the automobile factories in Flint, Michigan during that period. Her only child, a son, was not old enough for the military when the war ended.

Germany was on the other side of the world from Michigan. What did this medallion mean? She was never overtly racist from my recollection. I never heard anyone express anti Jewish sentiments in my family. Was my beloved Grandma Hon a closet Nazi sympathizer?

She has been gone for decades. I was a new Mom when she passed; today I am a grandmother in my own right. I have moved that medallion, buried in the bottom of a jewelry box out of sight but always in the back of my mind, from house to house and state to state. It felt wrong to get rid of it and buried in that box I could at least refrain from explaining it to others.

Still it haunted me. For all her flaws she may have had, this just did not ring true to her character. I have spent countless hours of my life wondering about that medallion.

Another Page out of History

Fast forward to today. I still have that medallion buried in a jewelry box. I came across it just the other day. While the pitter-patter of my own grandchild’s feet ring though my house. His father is from a Jewish family. I do not want him to wonder the same things I had to contemplate about my own beloved grandmother. More than that, it renewed my search for how my Grandmother came into possession of that dreaded heirloom.

In a moment of what some might call strange serendipity I discovered a blog about POW camps in Michigan during WWII. Indeed, it was a “gift basket from Michigan” as the url of the blog proclaimed. I grew up in Michigan. Michigan history is a major source of pride for locals and even small town communities get in on the local historic pride with annual festivals. Yet somehow, I had no clue the state once housed thousands of German POW’s during WWII.

It seemed more plausible that my Great Grandparents may have known someone who worked at a POW camp than it did that they were closet Nazi sympathizers. I decided to dig further to see if there may have been one located near where they lived. 30 miles from their home on Niagara Street in Flint to what is the present day Owosso Speedway was Camp Owosso. Camp Owosso housed hundreds of German POW’s.

I do not have definitive proof that my Great Grandmother was not a closet Nazi Sympathizer but it seems even less likely in the face of this new evidence. The proximity of the POW camp seems too much to dismiss. She was much closer to Owosso than she was to Germany…or even knowing German to understand what the medallion was commemorating. Discovering this odd chapter of local history added a new more rational reason behind the medallion.

I still do not know the story behind this medallion. I likely never will but now I have a story to put with it about how my home state, so far removed from the battlefields of Europe, served such a major role in the war effort.

By The Numbers:

• Michigan had 32 POW camps by the end of WW2
• An estimated 8000 German POWs were in Michigan by the end of 1945
• The last camp closed in June 1946.
• The POWs filled the shortages in local workforces while American men fought overseas.

 

Sources

http://www.lakeshoreguardian.com/site/news/283/The-Pioneer-Spirit-The-Beginning-of-the-Croswell-Pioneer-Sugar-Company—Part-3#.WgBmu3ZrzIU

Camp Freeland Prisoner Of War Camp

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2017/02/german_pow_camp_near_owosso_he.html

All Things Michigan The German POW camps of Michigan During WWII

Baker

What’s in a surname?

I grew up with a surname I hated.  It was unpleasant to the ears, hard to spell, and easy for school children to mock.  I was eager to get married in life if for no reason more than I wanted to change my last name.

I think I was about 14 the first time I realized in talking to my Great Grandmother that it was only a twist of fate that gave me that much disliked name and that biologically I had zero connection to it.  In a different world, under better circumstances, I would have been born with the last name Baker.  The countless hours I wasted in my life spelling my maiden name could have all been saved if not for that one adoption.

A Dark Page in Family History

My Great Grandmother, Lillie Weatherspoon, was in her early teens when she married her first husband.  His name was Willie Baker and they had one child together, my grandfather Jay Dee.  In the tale shared with me by my Great Grandmother her first husband was a mean tempered man who liked to drink a lot and become physically abusive.  According to the story shared with me while sitting on the front porch of her house on Niagra Street in Flint, Michigan some 60 years later the last night she spent living with Willie was around the year 1930 and they lived near Paragould, Arkansas.  My Grandfather was just a baby at the time.  Willie had gone out for a typical night of drinking.  Lillie said she had reached her breaking point and resolved to not be beaten when he returned home and spent hours wandering the house armed with a knife before finally going to sleep.  She said by some miracle he never came home that night.

Willie did return the next morning.  While sitting at the breakfast table he spilled hot coffee on the baby.  That was the final straw and Lillie laid him out with a cast iron pan to the head, grabbed the baby and started running.   She didn’t stop until she reached Iowa.

The next decade of my Great Grandmother’s life was a dark period that she didn’t like to discuss.  Somehow over that time she managed to make it from Iowa to Michigan and meet and marry the man I would know as my Great Grandfather.  Moman Harold Fulkerson was a childless widower several years older than Lillie who adopted my Grandfather and raised him as his own child, including changing his last name from Baker.

Digging Up Old Skeletons

Willie and the surname Baker became a closed chapter that was more or less forgotten.  Growing up I never realized my Great Grandfather wasn’t truly my Great Grandfather.   It was only by chance that I sat down with my Great Grandmother that one afternoon and started prying into her past.  When I talked to my Father about it I was surprised to learn that he too was aware of the family history but beyond that the topic was laid to rest again.

It would take another 20 years before I would research information about the mysterious Willie Baker.  All my great Grandparents, my grandparents, even my Father were deceased before I decided to dig into the forgotten biological Baker branch.  Relying on hazy memories of that afternoon so long ago I decided to see what I could find out about him.

The Puzzle Pieces

A marriage license from September 24, 1926 in Lake City, Arkansas was my first hit.  Lillie Weatherspoon married W.D. Baker.  I had confirmation that the name I recalled was likely correct.  It was time to hunt up more.  I found the 1930 census for Greene County, Arkansas with William Baker, wife Lillie, and son J.D. living on a farm.  Their divorce was recorded Greene County, Arkansas in 1938.  The 1940 census finds a divorced William Baker still living in Greene County, Arkansas as a lodger and working as a timber cutter.  The last record for Willie Baker is a simple tombstone in the New Friendship Cemetery in Greene County, Arkansas with a death date of 1950.  He never remarried and fathered no other children.

I have managed to find a few details about Willie’s family but nothing extensive so far.  His parents, James Baker and Viola Morgan, were both from Crockett County, Tennessee and brought their small family to Greene County, Arkansas sometime between 1901 and 1908.  Tragedy struck the family and both James and Viola died within months of each other, James in October of 1915, Viola in February of 1916.  I haven’t found a cause of death yet but both pneumonia and malaria was prevalent in the area at the time, Viola received several doctor’s visits in the last couple days of her life.

James and Viola left 5 orphaned children when they died.  The children were split up and boarded out to various different people.  A receipt included in Viola’s estate documents show George Ferguson of Greene County, Arkansas receiving payment for the boarding of Willie; likely the same George Ferguson that is present in the 1930 household of Willie, Lillie, and their son.   Willie would have been about 16 when his parents passed away.  By the time of the 1920 census he had moved on from the Ferguson farm, I’m currently unsure where he was located at that time although records indicate he probably wasn’t far from the area he spent his entire life in.

Questions Remain

In all my research so far I haven’t located much that would reveal the character of that mysterious Great Grandfather that never was.  I can only wonder if the tragedies that befell his early life with the death of his parents and the subsequent experience of being an orphan in rough region led him to become the person my Great Grandmother described.  I haven’t located any indication that Willie Baker ever had any legal troubles during his life.  There was no indication he ever harassed my Great Grandmother after she left him so perhaps Willie recovered from his drinking problem after the loss of his family.  He appears to have lived an uneventful life.

 

 

Oral Traditions and Family Lore

Who Knew?  It Turns Out Grandma Did!

Recently I became aware of a familial connection to a Mayflower Pilgrim.  Apparently Great (times 10) Grandpa, George Soule, way back in the line was an indentured servant on the ship when it made that legendary landing at Plymouth Rock.

It seems ironic to me that I grew up in a family that celebrated those adventurous pilgrims each year with elaborate dinners and big family gatherings yet most of us, myself included, were unaware of how close to home that celebration truly was.  Never once, not a single solitary time, was it ever mentioned to me growing up that we were Mayflower descendants.  It seems this interesting tidbit of family lore was deemed unimportant somewhere along the way and no one talked about it until the information was in danger of being lost.

The Value of Asking Questions and Sharing Stories

When asked about it, my Grandmother, the Mayflower descendant, admitted that she had heard of the information growing up.  It was no big surprise to her.  She was aware of the information all along.  Here she was in her late eighties sitting on this interesting piece of family lore.

This instance makes it painfully obvious how important it is for each generation to make an effort to preserve and share the information on our heritage for future generations.  We need to lay stones in our wake for our own descendants to eventually trace and follow.  We need to tell the stories and share the knowledge so that it’s not lost.

Researching into the ancestors in this forgotten family line has led to many discoveries and connections.  I have found connections to Lizzie Borden, and Abraham Lincoln.  I located ancestors who founded towns, served in government, and built buildings that still stand hundreds of years later.  One line turned up the lost heirs to an English estate.  All these discoveries were a breath away from being lost and had already been basically forgotten in my family line.

Grandma Buried Her Skeletons

Occasionally brick walls are built by our ancestors on purpose, that was the case with one of my paternal Great Grandmothers.  She lived until I reached adulthood and I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time asking about her past.  To say she was not forthcoming is to make an understatement.  Her opinion was if everyone knew all the things she had done in her past no one would like her.  I would pry; she would hesitantly provide little details, but it was like pulling teeth.  It took me years to crack some of the brick walls in her family.

My Great Grandmother had escaped an abusive husband early in life.  According to her she smacked him in the head with a skillet, snatched up the baby, and didn’t quit running till she hit Iowa…from Arkansas.  She remarried, her husband adopted her only child, and her ex husband never gave her any problems after that but I’m sure she had a rough time surviving during those years as a single mother.  I have to assume because she was unwilling to discuss it.  I have heard family rumors she resorted to prostitution, there are whispers of running alcohol during the prohibition years, but she was unwilling to tell so large periods of her life will likely forever remain a mystery.  Whatever dark secrets she had Grandma took to the grave with her.