Looking Back at 52 Weeks, 52 Ancestors: "You"

52 Weeks, 52 Ancestors Prompt: You

            I am so grateful to Amy Johnson Crow for setting up the 52 Weeks, 52 Ancestors program. It challenged me to start writing about the fascinating stories I was uncovering as I worked on my family tree. Oh sure, I’d gush about some weird little discovery to my husband, or to my son and daughter on the phone, and they’d be pleased for me but probably found it hard to really feel interested, especially when it was difficult for me to even explain how these people were related to me, and to them.

           I also discovered that I tended to forget last week’s fun discovery when I unearthed a new one. I would remember the gist of the story—the guy who dropped dead on the sidewalk out west somewhere, the baby left on the doorstep, the guy who married two sisters and their cousin—but as the months passed, I no longer remember which branch of the family tree they were located on, much less the name of the ancestor. I was forgetting all the fun stuff—it was buried under the minutiae of research.

           My local genealogy society chapter had given a talk recommending starting a genealogy blog as a way to connect with others who were researching your ancestors and as a way to share your discoveries with other family members. It sounded like a good idea, but I just never got around to doing it. That is, until 52 Weeks, 52 Ancestors came along.

            I set up my blog on Blogger, and started writing short essays in response to the prompts. The first few posts were just text. But I started looking at what other 52 Weeks participants were doing, and loved how most of them illustrated their posts with photos or maps or images of census forms and marriage certificates. The photos brought the stories to life. I’m a visual person, and I realized my posts could be way more interesting if I included visuals.

            So my posts got better. I started planning ahead more—when I found something “blogworthy” in my research, I made a note of it, and made it fit one of the prompts down the road. 

           But most significantly, I started to make a photo book on Shutterfly of my best blog posts. It wasn’t easy, and I wasn’t sure how it would turn out—would the text font be too small? Would the font color show up against that background? Were the photos and document jpegs I was uploading look good or would they be too fuzzy? Yes, I made some mistakes. But I completed a book telling and illustrating stories about over 30 of my ancestors—a book I shared with my son and his wife over the holidays, and that I will share with my daughter in a few months.

                                              My photo book

            So thank you, Amy Johnson Crow! Thank you for motivating me to bring my research to life and create something that can be shared with family in years to come! I’m taking the challenge again in 2020. I may not get a post done every week (I confess I’ve missed a couple this year, but only a couple), but I will still be creating something way more significant than a family tree on Ancestry—I’ll be telling my ancestor’s stories and honoring their contributions to their families and communities.

Nora Hoffman Macbeth: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Craft"

Nora Hoffman Macbeth: November 17, 1899-April 7, 1994

Combining Beauty and Practicality Through the Craft of Sewing

My maternal grandmother, Nora Hoffman Macbeth, was a talented craftswoman with the needle. She married in 1926, and had my mother in 1928, just a year before the stock market crash that plunged the country into the Great Depression. She and my grandfather, Ivan Macbeth, like nearly everyone in their area, struggled to hold onto their farm and earn enough to survive. Nothing was wasted—everything was put to multiple uses. My grandmother was very practical, but she also had an eye for beauty and tried to make her surroundings pretty.

She and her sisters would buy plain cotton pillowcases, and use their embroidery skills to make the hems bloom with violets, roses and apple blossoms. Flour came in big fabric bags, and Nora would make dresses for my mother from the flour sacks. She would use scraps to sew clothes for my mom’s dolls as well. 

                                  Pillowcase embroidered and edged by my Grandma Nora


Clothes that were worn out were never thrown away—they found a new home in the “rag bag”, a burlap sack hung in the basement. Buttons would be cut off first for re-use, and saved in the “Button Box”, which I loved to dig through as a child, sifting the different colors and shapes, loving the big, heavy coat buttons the most.

The rag bag clothes would be cut up, either to be re-sewn into clothes for my mother and uncle when they were young, or cut into pieces for a quilt. Grandma made some lovely quilts—I remember a Double Wedding Ring one, as well as Tumbling Blocks and a Crazy Quilt. She would point to the fabric shapes and tell you whose clothing it had been—“That was a summer dress I had—it was lovely with short puffed sleeves. And that was a shirt Ivan wore for years...” 

I still have a lovely little doll quilt she sewed, featuring charming applique tulips made from fabric scraps and sewn on a creamy white background.

Doll quilt about 18x28 inches

I also have a larger baby quilt featuring applique animals that I believe she originally sewed for my mother, Ione, but was also used in my crib when I was young. The animals are charming, with some embroidered details, like the chicken below.

                       


When I was a child, my grandmother had a sewing machine in a charming sewing table that once held a Singer treadle machine before my grandfather adapted it to hold a modern electric machine. The table had four tiny drawers stuffed with spools of brightly colored thread, tiny scissors, pins and needles. I loved to watch her sew, bathed in the sunlight from the narrow window at the top of the stairwell where the machine sat. She sat on an old round swivel piano stool painted a glossy white to match the sewing table. I wish when they sold her house furnishings at auction that I’d taken that table and stool—so many regrets!


                 These vintage items are similar to my grandmother's--she painted hers white.

At least I still have a few examples of her needlework to save for my children and to help me remember that she was a bit of an artist with needle, thread, and fabric.

                               Last sample of Grandma Nora's embroidery--flannel baby blanket

DS: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Thief"

DS: Thief and Escape Artist

Note: DS is still living, as is his ex-wife, my cousin. Therefore I am not including their names in this blog post.

                It’s rather ironic that my Uncle J, the police officer for our tiny town, would have two criminals in his immediate family. The worst by far was his son-in-law DS. He not only had a long rap sheet, but was a repeated prison escapee!

                I’ve been unable to find any birth record for DS. His birth date according to the Kansas prison system is February 1-, 1937, and he seems to have spent some of his early years in Amboy, Minnesota. He first appears in the newspapers at 16, when he attempted to break out of the Blue Earth County Jail with another teen prisoner. The boys were in custody because they had broken out of the reform school in Red Wing, Minnesota and had been captured near DS’s home in Amboy. The pathetic thing was that DS attempted this escape just two days before his scheduled release date. What an idiot! He’d already broken out of the Red Wing facility four times over a two year period, so at 16 he'd broken out of jail five times already.

                                

During the jail break, the boys beat two other prisoners, leaving one with broken ribs and internal injuries, and took the second guy hostage using razor blades, threatening to slash his throat if the guards didn’t release them. The guards tackled the boys, stripped them, and locked them back up. Presumably they got some hard time after this incident.          

DS must have been out of jail by the beginning of 1967, as that is when he met my cousin JO, whose father was police officer J, and whose mother was my dad’s sister. JO and DS were married on May 25, 1967. Their only son, DGS, was born a year later on May 16, 1968.

Unfortunately, marriage didn’t reform DS. According to the stories I heard whispered as a child, DS dragged JO along in his car on a burglary spree, breaking into a brick ranch home outside Mankato—a house we always drove past on our way to visit our grandparents. He was caught and sent back to prison. I am not sure of the date of that arrest—I couldn’t find the newspaper article. However, there was an article dated July 17, 1969 reporting that DS, then 26, had broken out of the prison in Stillwater, Minnesota with another burglary convict, 44-year-old Jay Burnett. The state police had fifty officers searching the heavily wooded area where the pair were first sighted. Burnett was eventually recaptured in Dickenson North Dakota on July 20. I’m not sure when DS was recaptured.

                    Stillwater Prison, Stillwater MN

The next newspaper article featuring the break-out artist was dated February 13, 1980. DS, now 42, was recaptured in Garden City, Kansas following yet another escape from a minimum security facility in Minnesota. He was sent back to Minnesota to serve the rest of his sentence.

JO divorced DS after he was caught burglarizing the Mankato property. Their son, DGS, had developmental delays and died young, on November 29, 1998 at age thirty.

DS must have grown attached to Kansas during his days on the lam there, for now, in his 80s, he is living in Wichita. A website that provides info on convicts included this photo of him. I hope by now his burglary and prison break days are behind him. He apparently had the ability to charm women, as records indicate he remarried several times over the years.

                                     

James Corbin: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Soldier"

James Corbin: 1702-1759

A Soldier’s Brutal Death

            James Corbin is my 6^th great-grandfather, the father of my 5^th great-grandmother Sarah Corbin. She married Nathaniel Mills, who were the parents of one of the Dane family wives. James was born February 24, 1702 in Woodstock, Connecticutt to parents James Corbin and Hannah Eastman Corbin. He came from a large family and had five brothers and three sisters.

On June 19, 1728, he married Susannah Bacon. He was 26 years old, and she was two years older. The couple had a daughter, Abigail, who was born in 1729, and another daughter Susannah who was born in 1731. By that time, the couple no longer seemed to be living in Woodstock; the baptism records show the minister baptized the girls in “Kickamochoag” which seems to be a corruption of the Native American name for the river Coginchaug, near the town of Durham.

            By 1732, the family had moved to Massachusetts, settling in the town of Dudley in Worcester County.  There are no records explaining the move, or indicating James’ profession. Presumably he was a farmer. The couple went on to have eight more children; my fifth great-grandmother was the fifth child, born in 1739.  

            At some point, James became a soldier for the British in the French and Indian War. The Massachusetts colony raised a large number of troops for the effort. The war used both militia men, who were unpaid volunteers, and provincial troops, who were paid by the colonial government for a specific amount of service time, usually a single campaign season. As Wikipedia notes, “Offering money induced propertyless men to enlist.” The Wikipedia article also noted that while other colonies tended to send only the very young, unmarried men. the Massachusetts troops came from a broader swathe of the population.

            The war officially began in 1756. James was not the typical enlistee, since he had land, ten children, and was far from young—he was well into his fifties. He must have been desperate for the colonial government salary, which may have included an enlistment bonus.

            I have found no records regarding his service in the war—the battles he participated in, his date of enlistment, his commanding officer, etc. However, in 1758 or 1759, he returned to his home in Dudley. According to Rev. Harvey M Lawson, author of History and Genealogy of the Descendants of Clement Corbin of Muddy River (Brooklin) Mass. And Woodstock Conn.,

“He came home, claiming that his term of service was up, stoutly resisted arrest, was tied to his horse and taken to Springfield, Mass., where he died from rough handling in 1758.  His widow and son James were appointed administrators on his estate, appraised at £497 14s. 6d.”

            From other sources I have read, the soldiers were very aware of the length of their term of service. Warfare in those days was difficult and dangerous. Food was scarce, shelter limited, and illness was rampant. Men looked forward to the end of their service and would, like poor James, be eager to return home. I suspect the British treatment of James—basically treating him as a deserter—was meant to set an example to other soldiers that it was still up to the British officers to determine when your service was complete—you couldn’t just head home when you knew your time was up.

British military discipline was extremely brutal. One colonial officer’s account of his service describes his horror at witnessing a flogging—two men given 500 lashes apiece. While the men remained alive at the end of the flogging, the officer believed they would soon die as the skin on their backs hung in strips and infection would have set in.

I can only imagine James’ family’s horror when the British arrested him. They must have been terrified as he was tied to his horse and led away. Learning that he had died at his jailors’ hands would have been devastating. I suspect the family was forced to retrieve the body. I wonder what that benign phrase “rough handling” actually comprised. Was James flogged with a whip, or was he beaten with fists or weapons? His body was buried at the Dudley Cemetery. He shares a headstone with his wife Susannah, who lived until 1794 when she was 94 years old.

            I am surprised that his estate was valued at 497 pounds—that would indicate he wasn’t destitute. Perhaps that value was mostly in land and buildings, and that money for daily existence was lacking, motivating his enlistment.

            At the time of his death, my 5^th great-grandmother was 19 years old. His other children ranged in age from five to thirty. His two oldest sons, James, age 24, and Ephraim, age 20, seem to have taken over the farm and the support of the family.

            James Corbin’s tragic death shows that 18^th century soldiers faced hazards and perils far beyond the obvious risks of injury and death in battle.  

Source: History and Genealogy of the Desecendants of Clement Corbin of Muddy River (Brooklin), Mass. and Woodstock, Conn Compiled by Rev. Harvey M Lawson, PH.B, B.D.

Daniel Poor: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Poor Man"

Daniel Poor: 1624-1689

The prompt for this week was “Poor Man”.  I wanted to write about one of my distant ancestors who died in the county poor house, but I couldn’t remember which branch of my family he was in or what his name was, so I needed to take a different approach. I turned to the literal: one of my 8^th Great-grandfathers was Daniel Poor—a truly “Poor” man!

Daniel Poor was born around 1623 or 1624 in Wiltshire, England and emigrated to the colonies in 1638 at age 14. He traveled on the ship Bevis from Southhampton, and was listed on the ship’s register as “Dayell Poor, 14, servant”. He married my 8^th Great Grandmother Mary Farnum in Boston on October 20, 1650, and their marriage was one of the first recorded in Essex County Massachusetts. They settled in Andover, Massachusetts, home of Francis Dane, another one of my 8^th great-grandfathers.

Daniel’s occupation in area records was listed as “husbandman”, which was the 17^th century term for farmer. He seems to have been successful, and was obviously well respected in the community, as he served multiple roles in the governance of Andover. He was appointed surveyor in 1673, and served on the Andover Board of Selectmen in 1674, 1675, 1677, 1683, 1684, 1686 and 1687, and as the Grandjuryman in 1681.

By the time of his death in 1689, he had amassed a substantial estate, including hundreds of acres of land, herds of cattle, sheep, swine and horses, and a long list of household items. The will was filed with an inventory listing the value of his holdings and property—the total valuation was over 756 pounds, a large sum for that era. The herds of animals alone were valued at over 61 pounds.

Daniel allowed a garrison house to be built on one of his outlying properties—this was a fortified house that used to protect the community from Indian attacks. An example of a garrison house is pictured below. 

The other photo shows the Benjamin Abbott house, an old Andover house built in 1685 near the time of Daniel’s death, providing an idea of what Daniel’s house might have looked like.

Daniel's will divided his property between his widow and his eleven surviving children—two sons and nine daughters, a large number of children to reach adulthood in that era! My direct ancestor Hannah Poor Dane had already received her portion, apparently at her marriage, so she received nothing at his death. My other direct ancestor, daughter Priscilla Poor Mooar, fared better. The will states: “I give to my daughter Priscilla my meadow on the west side of Shawshin River commonly called the Pond Meadow.” According to the inventory, the meadow land on the west side was worth 40 pounds.

Despite Daniel’s wealth, he apparently was not completely literate—probably not surprising since he was working as a servant at age 14 when he emigrated. His will was signed with “his mark”, shakily drawn initials “D” and “P”.

There is no record of his burial site. Presumably he was laid to rest in the older of Andover’s two burial grounds, but we cannot be sure. Despite Daniel’s surname, he was rich in family and property. His descendants still lived in the area in 1830, when the map below was drawn.

Hoffman Sister Photos: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Trick or Treat"

A Real Treat: Tricky Photos of the Hoffman Girls
Nora Hoffman Macbeth: 1899-1994

                My brother and I were looking through family photos from our maternal grandmother’s family, the children of William and Lena Funk Hoffman. We were surprised at the number of goofy photos featuring our grandmother. Grandma Nora Hoffman Macbeth never seemed the type of person to have clowned around as a young woman. We tended to imagine her working hard during the daytime, and spending evenings sewing and reading serious literature. So ridiculous!

                So for my Trick or Treat prompt, I’m featuring two photos that show my grandmother’s funny side. In the first photo, she and her eldest sister Grace are clowning around with a huge two-person saw, miming being lumberjacks. They probably had used the saw or at least tried to at some point, but in this shot it looks like they were just posing for laughs. The tree they are pretending to saw looks far too healthy and shade-providing to be the target for removal.

                The second photo is even sillier. Nora is perched on a fallen tree (not the one in the first photo, mind you!) with three of her siblings: her brother Elmer at the left, then Nora, then younger sisters Jennie and Edna on the right. Both Elmer and Jennie are sporting fake mustaches. Elmer has a crazy cap on and is pretending to smoke a pipe. Jennie is dressed entirely in men’s clothes, right down to a suit and tie and a spiffy hat.

                Why the costumes? The snow on the ground ensures it was long after Halloween. Amateur theatrics? Just family horseplay? Sadly, Grandma Nora is no longer around to answer the questions we have about the photo, but it certainly provoked some chuckles.

                Tricks and some treats for Grandma’s descendants! I’m sure she’d be pleased to know she can still surprise us!

Lena Funk Hoffman and Billy: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Transportation"

Billy: The Original "Horsepower"

            Looking back through family photos, I am struck by how rapidly means of transportation changed. In the span of a single century, people transitioned from the original “horse power”—a horse pulling a wagon or carriage—to the roaring horsepower of high-performance engines. Most of the photos feature men with horse teams or at the wheel of cars—Model Ts, Model A’s and then the growing variety of cars, trucks and tractors. So when I found a photo of my great-grandmother, Lena Funk Hoffman, holding the reins of a carriage, I was reminded that transportation wasn’t just the province of my male ancestors.

                Lena Hellena Funk was born in Blue Earth County Minnesota on February 12, 1869 to parents Charles Funk and Catherina Grentz. Lena had three half-siblings from her mother’s first marriage, and two full siblings.

                Lena married my great-grandfather William Henry Hoffman on January 31, 1889 at age nineteen. William took over Lena’s father’s farm just outside Mankato, and they had six daughters and one son, including my grandmother Nora Hoffman.

                Lena was obviously an active partner on the farm, so would have been comfortable around horses. I am sure she could harness the horses, hook up wagons and carriages, and handle farm equipment. From my grandmother’s stories, the whole family loved their horses—they were more than just a means of transportation.

                By the time gas-powered cars and tractors came along, Lena was quite elderly. She probably never learned how to drive a car, but even in her later years, she was still getting around by horse and buggy. This charming photo was labeled by my grandmother Nora, and read “Ma and Billy”.  I am guessing that the photo was taken between 1915 and 1921, based on Lena’s appearance and clothing. The family had huge draft horses to pull the farm equipment, but Billy was a smaller horse used for lighter work.

I love that the family horses all had human names like “Billy” (Mom talked about Joe and Daisy as well). I also love how comfortable Lena looks with the reins in her hands. While she may have been limited to vehicles powered by a mere one or two horsepower during her lifetime, Lena was a competent, confident traveler.