Mom's DAR adventure: It will take a village

I always thought it a great big sad shame that Mom was never able to make application to the DAR. It's not like she didn't have an ancestor who was already recognized and accepted by them as one of their Patriots, because she did. He's one of our Wonderful Whetstones and you can see my Surname Saturday post about Capt. Jacob Whetstone (1738 - 1833) and the entire line here. Problem is that a family genealogy book was put out by an interested party stating that Jacob Whetstone's line took a turn at Somerset County and then headed west. In fact, there were two Jacob Whetstones in the area at the time! Our guy was the one who got the Military Lots:) That ought to tell ya' right there that he's the one who served.

But let's set that can of Whetstone worms aside and get back to this business that Mom had not had an ancestor who was officially approved by the DAR and recognized as one of its Patriots. Until right now. (I'm all but giddy!)

Got an email from Cousin Rich who informed me that he just checked the DAR web site and looked for our ancestor to see that he is now listed, and approved!! Giddy, I tell you:) I congratulated him and his wife as well because they were the ones who readied and submitted the application. Man, I thought, that's got to feel great, to have a brand new patriot officially listed! That was some super good genealogy work on Rich's part because, well, you know, it's West Virginia where court houses burn down every other Halloween, or at least that's how it seems.

Cousin Rich really worked hard on this one, but he was helped by Mom in a major way that put all the pieces together. Without the document she found, which we've come to call the "friendly lawsuit", there might have been no proof of our connection to this new Patriot.

After the dust settled a bit and the congratulations were flung around and emailed back and forth, I had a moment to think and realize what this meant. Mom now had her Patriot under which she could finally make application to the DAR! Wow! It could finally happen for her.

I'd recently read that the usual application processing time which can take more than a year is fast tracked for those over 90. Mom qualifies at 96 years old. Maybe we could actually get this done:) I emailed Cousin Rich and explained what I wanted to do and he replied instantly that he'd love to help get Mom in the DAR. Now I had my team in place to work up the application for Mom's lineage and  to show the Patriot's service. See the ducks? Look at them getting into a tidy little row.

Time is always of the essence but especially when the prospective member is 96. So wish us all luck, and may the wind be at our backs. I so want Mom to be a DAR member at long last. I haven't told her yet. Shh, this is just between us. I'll keep you posted:)

Mom at less than a year with her parents, Cambria "Camey" Williams (1897 - 1960) and Emma Susan (Whetstone) Williams (1897 - 1956). Mom's patriot is on her mother's line.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/09/moms-dar-adventure-it-will-take-village.html

Wow! The Lonaconing Journal! Who knew?

Mom and I had talked about the "Lonaconing Journals" a couple of times and we even thumbed through her copy on one trip back east from here in San Diego where I live to the little mountain town of Frostburg in Western Maryland where our ancestor lived and Mom still lives. One of the great sagas of our family that carried through the generation of the 1800s and into the 1900s is that of the coal miner. Mining was the occupation put on many a census for the men of the family from that first wonderfully descriptive census in 1850 down to about 1940. That's over 100 years of the hard, crippling and low paid work of mining.

"The Lonaconing Journals" is by a woman who really knows her way around the coal mines of Allegany County Maryland, and that's Katherine A. Harvey. The proper and full title of this work is "The Lonaconing Journals: The funding of a coal and iron community, 1837 - 1840". Published in 1977 by The American Philosophical Society, it was I've been told, a master's degree thesis. This work along with Ms. Harvey's PhD dissertation, "Best-dressed Miners: Life and labour in the Maryland coal region, 1835 - 1920", Cornell University Press, 1970, is all you'd ever need when trying to imagine your coal miner ancestors, especially if the come from Western Maryland. Of all that I've ever read about coal mining and coal miner's families in the area, these two are the very best!

Here's how Harvey describes the facts of the Lonaconing Journals:
The Lonaconing journals, kept by the super-intendents of the George's Creek Coal and Iron Company, cover the period 1837-1840. Their setting is the recent Appalachian frontier, and their subject is the building of an experimental iron furnace and the development of its adjacent company town in western Maryland. The principal figure in these activities was John Henry Alexander (1812-1867), topographical engineer for the state of Maryland, professor of mining and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the founders of the National Academy of Science, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and author and editor of works on many topics.
Harvey states on this same page, page one, that the Journal chronicling the earliest days of the company miraculously survived all moves and destructions of other company documents, files, and papers! It is a window into a point in local history not otherwise available.

It paints the picture of an area in the first days of a boom time. The lives of the miners here - mostly immigrants from Wales, Ireland, England and Scotland with a few from Germany - were better than miners elsewhere and they were more prosperous too. When they moved into the area back then, miners brought the entire family and the area had as a result a much more stable population, unlike other mining town where the miners were almost always single men. This was a relatively peaceful and prosperous mining community.

Don't want to paint too idyllic a picture of it all. There were wage disputes, attempts at unionizing that met with management's resistance and dirty dealing, and awful strikes. The ill or injured miners and their families were sometimes summarily evicted from their cottages because they could no longer work. It was a hard life by today's standards but a pretty good deal for the miners of the day and much better than they were going to get in Pennsylvania to the north and West Virginia to the south.

Mom's ancestors along her father's line, the Williams family,  were almost exclusively coal miners in the George's Creek Mine Field in Allegany County, Maryland until the 1920s. The Williams family's patriarch, Daniel, came from Wales from a line of coal miners, and all worked in the Western Maryland mines from about 1841 to the time of the Roaring Twenties. Mom's father, Camey or more formally Cambria and given the very traditional name for Wales, was brought to the mines to work at a young age. His father, Daniel Williams, immigrated to work there and became a supervisor. He eventually got the fever of owning a mine during the boom times of WWI and purchased one in Mt. Savage near his home place in Ocean, Maryland where he worked for the Consolidation Coal Company. He then bought another mine over in West Virginia. The West Virginia mine, as best Mom and Aunt Betty can figure out, was rich in tin. After he passed it was eventually lost for unpaid taxes. The Mt. Savage mine property is still in the hands of one of Daniel's descendants.

Daniel and his progeny weren't the only miners who came from Wales on Mom's side. The most famous is Benjamin Thomas and his family. Below is the ships' passenger list for the Barque Tiberius where his family is listed. You can see that Benjamin and four of his sons are listed as "colliers" or coal miners.  My great great grandmother, Diana, is just 6 years old!

 

 



 

 Benjamin Thomas and family were recruited in Wales by the Consolidation Coal Company and as such their passage was paid for by the Company and they arrived at the Port of Baltimore in July of 1837. The Company had been busy with their engineers and workers building out the mine and iron works. All was ready for the miners to get to work making a profit, and they did in the fall of that year. And their plans were BIG! Once the whole operation got going, there were was a superintendent, four managers, numerous clerks, and 400 mine workers working under them. Periodically the Journals noted that a couple more families from the Tiberius had arrived, found lodging and were ready to work.

The passages included in Harvey's book are excerpts from the complete set of Journals. She admits to leaving out much of the technical details. Included are some passages from the actual journals kept by John H. Alexander from 1837 to 1840 with a lot of technical description about how the furnace was built as well as some of the more innovational aspects of the entire projects. But the day-to-day stuff about the miners is the real fascinating material.

A post office is established. Local clay gets turned into bricks and those bricks get put to work on many projects and were even used as floors in the dirt floor "shantees" or very modest cottages purchased from farmers nearby. Blacksmiths were hired. Blacksmiths up and quit, likely hired away by mines in neighboring states. Boarding houses popped up for the few single men but mostly housed families until they could find a proper house or cottage. Roads got built, men were injured.

The activity continued at a fast pace until the usual harsh Western Maryland winters gave the whole project a reason to slow down.
February 21.-Mercury stands at -1 at 7 A.M. The mornings have been so cold for several days past that the stonecutters at the hearth could only work in the afternoons.
February 22.-Thermometer at 7 A.M. stands at --9. It is so cold that a number of hands could not work out of doors. Carpenters again stopped working at the molding house in consequence of the severe cold.

Some newly hired workers just don't work out.
February 23.-John Thomas, who has been here since October last and was intended for a furnace keeper, will persist in getting drunk and has been discharged.
I have no idea if this John Thomas was the son of our Benjamin Thomas, listed on the Tiberius manifest above.

And more accidents happen. Snow comes in March and again in April finally making a last appearance in May. Talk about harsh weather!

In Volume 2 of the Journals, the details of the lives of the miners working for The Consolidation Coal Company were recorded. This is the very best description of the terms of employment and daily life under the Company I've ever had the great pleasure to read!  Rules like no dogs being kept in the heart of the winter without the specific approval of the superintendent are noted and a directive that  houses must be kept clean and tidy, making a pleasant appearance. It was set out in writing that the miners must work from sunrise to sunset all days of the year except Christmas and Sundays. And most importantly, no distilled spirits and no drunkenness. Ever. At all. And if the rule was violated, people were fired.

On page 46 I read this.
February 19.-The night passes off quietly. The revelers at Buskirk's pass the sentinels by keeping high up the hill. Benjamin Thomas, miner, and wife stopped by sentinels in a state of intoxication.
WOW! That's our Benjamin Thomas! He and Hanna (Evans) his wife were drunk. Now that's well worth knowing! So the story is that they and others would scamper up the hillside and move as quietly as possible through the woods to get to the home of the Buskirk's where liquor was served. Everyone knew about it and most found their way, often on a Saturday night. And of course the mining company knew. It was no problem at all for them to wait in hiding for intoxicated miners and their wives as they loudly stumbled home.

It always amazes me how such juicy details are hidden and waiting for us to find them, deep in an obscure record. If Mom hadn't been so curious about the life and times of her ancestors she might have skipped the "Lonaconing Journals" in search of some index or listing with less of a beating heart. But she didn't. She found it in a local library and copied out the pages. Her notes from this time when she first read the Journals are a treasure to me. It's like she's right here with me, and we're finding it all over again!

Daniel Williams (1852-1920).

 

 

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Computer crashed. Need I say more?

Yeah, that's what happened. It was ugly and got even uglier before the dust cleared. Final score: lost no data, all files are recovered. Programs did have to be reloaded, no big deal really. Now I'm just rearranging the furniture and hanging a few pictures to make it feel like home again.

I want to thank my external hard drive and Carbonite who both made me feel more secure while the storm raged. Also need to thank the guys at the Geek Squad who really know what they're doing, even though at one point they might have been part of the problem. Maybe. But no finger pointing because it all worked out.

I missed the little guy, this laptop of mine, while it was gone. But we're back together again. I bask once more in the warm glow of my laptop screen. All is well:)

Have a very good Labor Day weekend!

An old grainy picture of my Mom on the left, her father, and her sister Dot.
Virginia (Williams) Kelly, Cambria "Camey" Williams (1897-1960), Dorothy "Dot" (Williams) Conrad (1920-2007).

 

 

 

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/08/computer-crashed-need-i-say-more.html



Summer vacations at the river

Summer on the South Branch of the Potomac River.
As I post this today, July 7, 2014, Mom, Brother and his wife are off on a road trip to the river.
That's just about 100 years of river fun for our family!

In the summertime thoughts turn to vacation memories. Last week I saw Randy Seaver's "Saturday Night Genealogy Fun" post on his always informative blog, Genea-Musings, which you can read here. This time he challenges us to get those memories out of our heads and down for others to see. I like that idea and so I thought it was high time I wrote about our summer vacations down on the Potomac River. Mom has summer river memories and you can read about that here. It's only now later in life that I truly appreciate how Mom and Dad helped make memories for us kids. So here's what I remember, except for the yucky parts which get left out but you'll be able to guess at.

We lived in Cleveland in the 1950s which was about a four hour drive from little Frostburg, the small town in the mountains of Western Maryland where all of my relatives lived and where Mom and Dad grew up and Mom still lives. Dad would take a vacation week from work and we'd pack up the car with a load of stuff, and I do mean a load! I now wish I had a photo of that car. We'd drive to Frostburg and stay with Grandma and Grandpop Kelly for one night before leaving in the morning for the river.

"The river" was a section of the South Branch of the Potomac River in West Virginia where Aunt Dotty and Uncle Harold had a cabin. That's where we'd stay with Mom's sister and her family. It was right next to the cabin of Aunt Peetie and Uncle Camey, Mom's brother and his family. Both families had two boys each to play with so that was a lot of fun right there.

And the food was great! Mom and the two aunts knew just what kids and Dad's loved to eat. Roasted corn on the cob, burgers or hot dogs, baked beans and some sort of salad like potato or macaroni. Then a desert. I still remember Aunt Dotty's pineapple upside-down cake and her coconut cake and Mom's German chocolate cake. There were old fashioned jell-o molds in gem-like colors with fruit magically floating inside and something called ambrosia with pineapple chunks, whipped cream and coconut. No one went hungry down at the river!

The facilities were adequate but hardly luxurious. The modest cabin stood on stilts about eight to ten feet off the ground. That was to save it from the annual spring floods that would wipe out cabins with a lower profile. Eventually, one very bad and rainy spring the torrent that was the flooded river destroyed all cabins on this stretch. Now wiser people bring in their RVs at the start of the summer season. It had taken both uncles years of hard work to build those sturdy little cabins but they were destroyed in just a few hours that spring.

Each cabin had an outhouse. Yes, we all used the outhouse with the sliver of a moon cut into the door. Ours was a two-seater. You had to be awfully close to the other person to make use of that feature. For me, the outhouse was a bit scary... because of the spiders and snakes. OK, I really don't know how many spiders and snakes there were but the cousin boys talked up a good game to scare their city girl relative. Typical boys!

The cabin was a basic affair with two bedroom with curtains serving as doors. There was a potbelly stove positioned at the middle of the room and at the other end was the space that served as kitchen and dining area. The furniture was old and a bit beat-up but it was real comfortable. There was a big screened in porch running the full length of the back of the house that looked out through the trees at the river. A big family-sized table, and a bunch of chairs and a glider for two decorated the porch. It was my favorite place to be on a hot summer afternoon. If you got tired out playing on the river you could find a cozy spot inside or on the porch and find a book to read there. Aunt Dot was an elementary school teacher and knew exactly what to bring to encourage reading. It was a house of people who loved to read so now I can see that it was brilliant to have the house stocked with books and not piled high with the usual assortment of toys. Nice going, Aunt Dot!

But the headline act was right down the muddy bank and on the river. So what's your favorite river activity? Boating?

Aunt Petie and Uncle  Camey and the boys loading up the boat for a nice float down river.

 

 

Or would you like to go fishing? How does that sound?

Grandpop Williams, Mom's father, fishing down on the river.

Mom fishing, about 1938.

 

 

Or would you like to take a swim? Or float down the river on an inner tube? Dive off a big rock out in the river? What's your preference?

 

 

Our rock used for diving, or chilling.
Photo taken by Cousin J. C. 

Mom and her family and friends sitting on one of the big rocks in the Potomac River about 1930.



Mom tells of one summer camping on the river when her mother, Emma, assigned her the task of watching her infant brother, Camey, who was napping in a straw basket. Mom had a book, as usual, and was so engrossed in it that she didn't notice the cow who wandered over and started nibbling on the straw basket. Emma came up from her swim about that time and Mom got a severe scolding!

Thinking back on it all, I remember the corn as the best I've ever had and the peaches the largest, freshest, juiciest, and most delicious ever. There was personal freedom to be had like no other time in life. You could do as you pleased, go where you wished and swim as much as you liked. Sleep as late as you wanted. But everyone had to help if your mother asked you to do a chore. And everyone had to help clean up after dinner while the moms relaxed on the porch and got thanked profusely.

There was a big flood in 1936. A nasty spring flood that whipped out everything. Mom remembers that one. And then there was a later one that took out the aunts and uncles cabins. Maybe that was in the 1960s, but I can't remember the year exactly. I do remember being sad about it, but not as sad as I feel now thinking that it put an end to our summer river memories.



The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/07/summer-vacations-at-river.html

It was a small project, at the start, or so I thought

I've posted before about how it came to be that I got all wrapped up in getting Mom's stories put up in book form and you can read about that here. Last October I finally had a rough draft which I showed to Mom when we all met up in Cleveland. Since then I've been fine tuning and adding more photos and refining the layout. Now, it's finished and off I go to the corner copy place to get a bunch done and bound.  Whew, that's a load off:)

But wait! I sent it by email in PDF form to my good friend and artist, Kathy. I asked her to look at it for it's graphic qualities and give a critique. Her reaction was interesting. Here's a link to Kathy's artwork online. Go ahead and take a look and you'll see why I asked her to look at the book. Kathy has a major eye for the old and precious and story-telling! Here's one of Kathy's works just so you can see.


Kathy Miller
Atlas of TimeEncaustic and mixed media
35 x 221/4 x 91/4 inches, 2007


So the thing is that Kathy liked it and just enjoyed reading Mom's stories even though she'd never been to Frostburg, Maryland, and never met Mom. Fascinating. For the first time, after talking to Kathy, I came to think that there might be a wider audience for Mom's stories than just the family. With that in mind I went off to think about this project and widen my vision.

What I knew right away that this was a project with the end product as a real book that you can hold in your hand. It was not an online project. And it was apparent to me that we needed a way to have the book printed without me having to run to the printers all the time. It should be automatic and on demand. And I sure didn't want to be shipping them either. We also needed to charge something for them and it should be enough to cover printing costs, at least. Maybe the project could generate some small change for one of Mom's favorite charities. That would be nice.

Then I remembered about CreateSpace by Amazon. And off I went to check it out. Signed up for an account and then jumped in. Made a cover first so that the project was easier to visualize. That exercise showed me that we needed some synopsis text for the back cover, and here's what that looked like.

It’s small town America of the 1920s and 1930s and The Great Depression is causing hardships for just about everyone in the Western Maryland mountain coal mining area. WWI has ended and with it the demand for coal just about vanished. Miners are out of work, unions try to organize with limited success, but it’s all background to a little girl and her family and friends. The joys of the seasons, the sheer pleasure in getting lost in a book by the light of a streetlamp, and gentle grandparents are what matters.

"We didn't know we were poor," Virginia W. Kelly says of childhood, "because everyone was poor. We had what everyone had. And somehow we were all very happy too."

What to do about the cover design? There were of course choices. I downloaded the cover design template in which you can build all the elements of your cover by hand and might go back to that later, but set it aside for now because it looked time consuming and maybe even challenging. Then found Cover Creator and the ready-to-go cover designs. That took just a few moments to work out and it was easy and fun. Just select the design you want to play with, plug in title, sub-title, authors name and photo, and synopsis text. I'd like at this point to show you what the cover looks like but somehow it doesn't allow a "copy" or a screen shot. Too bad.

Next I got assigned an ISBN number for the book. Wow! It's own ISBN number! Am remembering a time when just one ISBN number for a self-publishing project would cost about $100. But this is free.

Next was the interior layout. Had already chosen the size as 6 inches by 9 inches because it is the most popular paperback size. Now I had two choices: copy and paste or upload from Word and work online, or use the template offline. Maybe working offline would be better.  I downloaded the template for the interior of a 6 x 9 book. When it's finished all that would be left is to upload the full template.

In the meantime I was anxious to see how much of problem this was going to be, converting the 8.5 x 11 inch original size to 6 x 9, so in Word just changed the page size to 6 by 9 inches with narrow margins and saved that copy with a notation about the new size. Then I took a look. Yikes, there are a lot of adjustments to be made! Page breaks sometimes made no sense, photos were probably too large for the smaller page, and the like. And, the photos couldn't be too small because, well, people really like looking at the photos and the audience will probably be older folks and we like larger print and larger images.

So that's where I am at the moment, and working on the interior text, making it fit, adding yet more pictures, and still adjusting the contrast on all of them. I think I know how it goes on these print projects because I've seen others. Photos go dark and lose contrast. I hate that.

This is gonna take a while!

Grandpa Williams, Mom's dad, with a fish.

Cambria Williams (1807 - 1960.

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My Williams Grandparents: How They Died

OK, that's not a fun topic, I know, but bear with me here, will you? This business of how and why they died started because I was sprucing up Mom's Big Tree on Ancestry.com and trimming a few shaky leaves, and then slowed down a mite to take a look at the photos of Mom's parents and see if there should be more and if so which, when I noticed how old Grandma Williams was when she died. She was 58. Only 58. Younger than I am now.

I was shocked! I sure knew what year she died - 1956 - and even remember clearly when Mom picked me up from school and told me that she died, and that we'd be leaving our suburban house in Maple Heights, Ohio, and traveling to the funeral in Frostburg, Maryland. Remember like it was yesterday.

Mom was very concerned that I'd be upset, and of course I was. But being only 10 years old at the time my understanding of death and dying was limited. I think, looking back on it, that I was more concerned that Mom was upset.

But when we drove the four hours from outside Cleveland to the little mountain town in Western Maryland where all my grandparents lived, and I saw the relatives and my Grandfather Williams, I got it. Death was serious business. But what I didn't get then was that she was what we'd now consider young when she died. She was, as I said before, just 58.

When I saw the Ancestry.com page for Grandmother Williams, her life formed up a different picture.

Wow! She was only 58! Sorry to repeat so much but I just can't get over it. So I called Mom and we spoke about it. Mom filled in the spaces for me. Grandmother had a stroke because she had high blood pressure. It was untreated then because there were no blood pressure meds as there are now. Then she had a second stroke on the heels of the first one and that was it.

You know how it is for us with grandparents: they are always "old" in our youngster's eyes. If I had to guess before knowing, I'd have said I guessed she was in her mid-70s. Then I checked Grandfather Williams and saw that he died when he was 63. Geeezzz! I'm 67.

I just love it how some overlooked fact can jump out at you and suddenly you have a whole new view of things surrounding your family. This experience made me realize that we are fortunate to live in time when some ailment like high blood pressure doesn't have to be fatal. We can, with care, plan for longer lives than those of our ancestors. And of course, more time to work on genealogy.

Aunt Betty is good at keeping track of who died of what. It's all there in her GEDCOM. But I'm going to call and chat with her about it too.

Cambria "Camey" Williams 1897 - 1960 and Emma Susan (Whetstone) Williams 1897 - 1956.

Don't they look happy and sweet?

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/01/my-williams-grandparents-how-they-died.html

Thank you, Randy Seaver and Genea-Musings

I'm coming to see that I'm a sort of odd ball genealogist. It's on again and off again because of how my life is, and I'm still a learning amateur, and totally embrace it. My document filing is sporadic, my file names need a good clean up, and my methodology is patchwork because I learned on the fly. I'm probably not alone in that regard:)

I'm a second generation genealogist and am working off a tree Mom built and is still working on now and again. Mom is 95, in case you haven't met her! She has about 70,000 names on that tree and they mostly were born, resided and died in the area around Western Maryland, the adjoining state of West Virginia, and south west Pennsylvania. I consider my genealogy research skills, such as they are, to be half-assed at best. I only do what I do because I'm perched on Mom's tall shoulders. Besides, it's the stories I love.

Because I'm so ragged around the edges and always trying to do better I was pretty much shocked out of my PJs and fuzzy pink bedroom slippers this morning when I read Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings blog post entitled "Best of the Genea-Blogs for 2013" and found this blog sharing number 16! Can that be right??!! Yup, it's what he said.
Wow. Just wow. Thanks Randy. I mean it, thanks so much.

Randy and I are two very different kinda folks, I gotta say. He's a real numbers guy and I love that about Randy. And me, I'm so very, very not. Look at this post by Randy on Genealogy Industry Benchmarks. I have a feeling that Randy gets goose bumps compiling this stuff because he's so excited about it. Look at what he did there.

And here's a Randy post that blew me away: 52 Ancestors Friday: Frank Walton Seaver (1852-1922). See what he did there? That's pure Randy. I scrolled down, impressed, looking at all the data he's collected about his ancestor and great grandfather, and honestly my mind sort of froze up along the way, until I came upon this:
Family stories about Frank Seaver include that he was a dapper, handsome man, and had black curly hair and brown eyes, and looked like his mother, Lucretia Smith.  He was about 5'10" tall.  He was jolly and full of fun, but liked to drink beer, and smoked a pipe.

There he did it! He got me right there and an image of Frank Walton Seaver formed in my head. Did they call him Frank, I wondered as I read it? Yeah, I bet they did. A dapper jolly man who liked his beer and smoked a pipe would be called Frank. Good ol' Frank, they'd have said about him.

See, that's me all over. I collect the data and record it dutifully. But I long for the story and the photo, especially the candid one. Can't help it. Just my nature.

Seeing my name and blog listed in Randy's blog post is gold plated encouragement. Guess that if Randy mentioned this blog 6 times last year I should stick with it. Thanks, Randy:)

My Grandfather, Cambria "Camey" Williams (1997-1960) and one of him favorite hunting dogs.

Me. Never met a dog I didn't like.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/01/thank-you-randy-seaver-and-genea-musings.html

I Just Love This Photo!

I'm busy working on a long blog post with the story of the Whetstone family but miss posting here, so thought that this might be a good time to share some of my favorite family pictures. You've see a lot of them but my thought is to select just one and then write everything I know about it and make some observations too. Might just make a game of it and play, What Do You See?

So here goes and the first one is a picture of my great grandfather's house. He was Daniel Williams and a recent blog post was the story of that family.

The Williams home, built about 1899, in Ocean Allegany, Maryland.

Pictured are:

Back row, left to right: William Williams (1884-1964 ), his wife Lillian "Lillie" (Merbaugh) (1884-1964 ), Tom Williams (1890-1951 ), and Jane (Price) Williams (1862-1939),

Front row, left to right: Cambria "Camey" Williams (1897-1960) my Grandfather, Joseph "Joe" Williams (1895-1948), Charles Williams (1899-1979) and Aunt Betty's father, a neighbor, and "Blackie" the dog on the fence post.

So there it is, and I dearly love this picture. Aunt Betty and Mom both have copies, and now I have this electronic copy. Aunty Betty says that the house was built by Daniel and Jane (James) Williams about 1899. Charles, Aunt Betty's father was the only child of Daniel and Jane born here, but many of the family lived there from time to time and so the next generation was also born there.

I see here a two story frame house with balanced and even architecture, painted to emphasize the trim and make the overall impression more decorative and appealing. There is pride even today when Mom and Aunt Betty talk about this old home place. And notice the contrasting painted brick-a-brack on the top of the porch posts. Someone took care with how this home presented itself.

I also like the front fence and the rambling garden with trees and perhaps climbing roses festooning the porch. If you click on the picture to enlarge it you'll see what might be some type of crisscross wire making a structure for the climbers growing up the front porch. And is that a fruit tree on the right side? It looks tidy and well kept. Aunt Betty's note on the file says that a street car ran right in front of the house. How proud the family must have been to ride it and see their house as it was undoubtedly admired by riders.

Aunt Betty tells an interesting story of life in this house. You see in these parts the mineral rights were not sold with the land so the mining company could dig a mine right under your home. Even today this practice continues. Some days, Aunt Betty said, you could hear the miners right below the house, talking, and digging away. At one point the activity was so energetic that it moved the house right off the foundation! Imagine!

Mom says that there was an outhouse down and the end of the yard but by the time she was a very little girl, about 1920, there was a regular bathroom in the house on the first floor. Her Grandfather Williams was very ill near the end of his life right about then and we speculated that perhaps the bathroom was added on the first floor to make it easier for him.

There was a natural cold spring that came out of the ground in the back yard. There were a lot of them then, Mom says. The water was cold the year round so the family kept butter and milk in the indentation in the earth where the spring came out. In the house between the dining room and kitchen was what we might call a pantry, a short hallway with shelves, That was where Mom went to check to see if there were any pies available.

Every time I go see Mom it's my intention to drive the short distance from Frostburg to what's left of the once prosperous coal mining community that was Ocean. Next time, for sure. I wonder where it got that name, because believe me, it's no where near any Ocean!


The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/12/i-just-love-this-photo.html

Stories from Mom and Aunt Betty: Part 4, He bought two mines

This story was told to me in part by Mom and in greater detail by Aunt Betty. I just hope I get it all right but I'm sure that eventually I'll be corrected if need be. On one visit back east to see the family, I stopped by Aunt Betty's and we got to talking about the ancestors. "Daniel Williams, your great grandfather, owned two mines, a coal mine in Mt. Savage and a tin or silver mine in West Virginia," she said casually. WHAA? Oh, yes it's true, but the visions of him as a coal (or tin or silver) baron vanished when I learned the rest of the story. So here goes, and I'm going to give you the whole enchilada because it's a tasty one.

It all starts with my great grandfather, Daniel Williams (1852-1920) who was born in Wales to a coal miner father, Thomas Williams (1815-1868). Daniel's brothers are also listed as coal miners in the Wales Census records. Presumably, these men knew what they were doing when mining coal. They were multi-generational miners and learned from father to son and brother to brother. And none were lost in a mining disaster.

They lived for who knows how many generations in Strata Florida, near Tregaron, in the county of Ceredigion or Cardiganshire in Wales. There were tin mines in the area and we wonder if the Williams men once worked there. Mining skills are relatively similar for the various materials taken in Wales so it would have been no problem for them to be mining tin and then move to coal and end up in shale, which were all plentiful in Wales at the time.

Mom went there and stood in the ruins of the big Abbey at Strata Florida soaking in what was left of the memories and dust of the ancestors. Buried there is Dafydd ap Gwilym (c. 1315/1320 – c. 1350/1370), which might be translated into present day English as David Williams, who was one of the leading poets of the Middle Ages, certainly of Wales and all of Europe. He possibly died of the Black Death. Mom claims him as our own, baring solid evidence to the contrary, which we're hoping we never find.

Strata Florida Abbey

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Old Thomas who was born about 1815, married Jane James in 1841, and his sons started arriving right after. By then, even the once bountiful southern coal fields in Wales were starting to get mined out. There was too little work for too many men so wages were on a downward slide. (The Academy Award winning film "How Green Was My Valley" depicts a typical Welsh mining town and it's trails, and is worth a viewing if this interests you.)

Old Thomas died around 1868 in Tregeron, and afterward his family moved from Cardiganshire to Breckonshire. Just about that time the Consolidation Coal Company, with offices in Baltimore, Maryland and London, had its eye on the Western Maryland coal fields with their rich and mostly untouched big veins, began recruiting in Wales. Daniel Williams must have been ready to jump at a new opportunity because that's just what he did. Sometime about 1872 or 1873 (I'm confused about this) he sailed to America.

At the Consolidation Mine Company in Ocean, Allegany, Maryland he put down roots, and married Miss Jane Price (1862-1939) of Wellersburg, Pennsylvania on 28 October, 1878. In the 1880 US Census Daniel is listed as working as a coal miner, with wife Jane and son James just a year old. And so family life began in earnest.

Jane (Price) Williams and Daniel Williams.

Possibly their wedding portrait.

He built a career working for the mining company and was a solid member of the community and a home owner. Here's what Aunt Betty has to say about him from her notes:

Notes on Daniel Williams

As far as we know, Daniel lived in Midland and Ocean, MD after he arrived in the United States. He was Foreman of Mine No. 16, Consolidation Coal Company. He was a member of the George’s Creek Valley Lodge of Masons in Lonanconing, Maryland. He was selected to take a large lump of coal from Ocean Mines, Maryland to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. He was elected as a Trustee in the Ocean School District #18 on June 22, 1907.

I see two sentences and glean some further information about Daniel from Aunt Betty's write up. He was an Ocean School District Trustee. I knew that he valued education and was willing to save and pay for it because he paid for his son Joe Williams to attend the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore. So I'm guessing he was also a saver.

And then there's the trip to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 to take the large lump of coal to be displayed. I keep searching the Frostburg Mining Journal, a true treasure trove if you have ancestors in the area, but as of yet not met with luck: there are a lot of pages and the text is small. That must have been quite an honor for him and surely covered by the local weekly newspaper that loved to trumpet about the accomplishments of its citizenry. I need to keep looking for that article!

One by one, his seven sons grew and had the opportunity to go work in the mine with him. Joe went to study music. Jimmy, the oldest, was a minor league baseball player and ended up in Texas. My Grandfather Camey disliked working in the mines and made his career elsewhere. The rest of the boys worked in the Ocean Mine Number 16 if they wanted. It was one of the safer mines and the "black car" visited there much less often than it did to the mine in Lonaconing where it went just about every day to remove a body to the undertaker.

Aunt Betty and her parents, Charles and Bronwyn, lived with her grandparents, Daniel and Jane, in their home in Ocean, which is about a 10 - 15 minute drive from Frostburg. After Daniel died in 1920 and Jane followed him in 1939, Aunt Betty and her parents continued to reside in the home.

From Aunt Betty's photo collection.

So Aunt Betty and I are sitting in her cozy living room chatting about Daniel and his life and times and she wonders out loud where he got all the money to purchase the land and coal mine in Mount Savage (which is near Frostburg) and the property in West Virginia that contained the tin or silver mine. Indeed, where did he get that money?

Let's start with the Mount Savage property because I just realized something about it. Aunt  Betty is a good researcher and an excellent organizer. Below, is the text of her transcription of the ownership of the Mt. Savage lots which she took from the deeds, and I'll point out two things after.

WILLIAMS  FARM, MT SAVAGE, MARYLAND

DEED: December 11, 1854

By and between FRANCE HENRY KRIEGBAUM , Executor of FRANCIS DEAN to MARTIN CLARK.

DEED: June 8, 1869

By and between MARTIN CLARK and TIM CLARK

DEED: December 9, 1893

By and between WILLIAM J. CRUMP and GEORGE CRUMP of Allegany County, Maryland for the sum of Fifteen Hundred dollars ($1,500.00) land known as the CRUMP FARM containing 75 acres.

DEED: March 20, 1912
By and between GEORGE CRUMP and ANNIE MARGARET CRUMP his wife to HENRY WESLOW and JULIA WESLOW, his wife by deed in the land records of Allegany County, Maryland.

DEED: October 12, 1914

By and between JULIA WESLOW of Allegany County, Maryland and DANIEL WILLIAMS AND JANE WILLIAMS, his wife for the sum of Two Thousand Dollars ($2,000.00) the land known as the “CRUMP FARM” composed of lots No. 3369 and No. 3370 containing 75 acres more or less.

DANIEL WILLIAMS predeceased his wife leaving the title to the above described property to JANE WILLIAMS, his wife and JANE WILLIAMS having died in February of 1939 and devised the aforesaid property unto CHARLES WILLIAMS, WILLIAM D. WILLIAMS, THOMAS WILLIAMS, CAMBRIA WILLIAMS and JOSEPH WILLIAMS by will probated February 21, 1939, and recorded in the Orphans Court for Allegany County, Maryland.

To have and to hold the above described property unto the said WILLIAM D. WILLIAMS and LILLIAN WILLIAMS, his wife, as tenants of the entireties, their heirs and assigns, in fee simple forever.

DEED: November 13, 1941

By and between JOSEPH WILLIAMS and HELEN G. WILLIAMS, his wife to WILLIAM  D. WILLIAMS and LILLIAN WILLIAMS, his wife for the sum of Ten Dollars ($10.00) the land known as the “CRUMP FARM” composed of lots No. 3369 and No. 3370.

DEED: November 13, 1941

By and between CHARLES WILLIAMS and BRONWYN WILLIAMS, his wife, THOMAS D. WILLIAMS and ISABELLA R. WILLIAMS, his wife, CAMBRIA WILLIAMS and EMMA WILLIAMS, his wife for the sum of Ten Dollars ($10.00) the land known as the “CRUMP FARM”
composed of lots No. 3369 and No. 3370.

 

Well, look at that will ya?! My own grandfather, Cambria Williams (1897-1960) was mentioned twice in these transactions, first as part of the estate of Jane, his mother, in which the property was transferred to all the boys, and then in 1941 when his share in the title was sold for $10. But that's not the eye-popper.

When Aunt Betty and I were chatting about this, we were wondering exactly where the property was. She had a pretty good idea about it's general location but the area had become overgrown and now it was practically impossible to determine any boundaries, at least by us. Then I noticed that the property was continually referred to as the Crump Farm and Lots No. 3369 and 3370. I got super excited. Off to check the Military Lots map put out by the Evergreen Heritage Center and Frostburg State University!

You can see below a section of that map and now it's pretty easy to find the location of lots 3369 and 3370. This land was awarded to Andrew Bruce for service in the Revolutionary War. We know where this is and it's right down the hill from Mom's house! I just love this map because it thoughtfully includes present day landmarks and roads. Mom lives on Route 36.

The land in West Virginia was not as exciting to me as this property. Oh, sure, it held promise of tin and silver but after Daniel's death, the family lost it to back taxes during the Great Depression. I don't find any evidence that Daniel and the boys actually worked the West Virginia property.

The Mt. Savage property was another story. Daniel and the boys possibly had hopes of a big pay day as they watched coal prices rise to new heights due to the demand for coal during WWI. Notice that Daniel purchased the property in October of 1914 and the war began in July. They felt that there was coal on that land, no doubt, and did something there, but exactly what we don't know. It's said in the family that he wanted to mine with his sons, all accomplished coal miners (except my Grandfather Camey) and most likely thought of this as his legacy to them. Theoretically, if the mine hit a big vein the boys would all be rich beyond measure. Today some of that same property is still owned by a descendant of Daniel Williams.

When I think of the great narrative saga of Daniel William's life, from the coal mines of Wales and unfortunate times to taking a chance on a better future, then to a Western Maryland home and land ownership, I can't help but be impressed. Daniel's vision for mineral wealth seems unbound, even though it was unfulfilled, but is admirable to me. Everyone needs a big dream. It is, after all, the American way.

And where did he get the money to buy all that land? He earned it.

Now I can't help but wonder if this photo was taken on his own land and was to document the start of a mining adventure. It was taken in 1915, the year after he purchased the land in Mt. Savage.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/12/stories-from-mom-and-aunt-betty-part-4.html

 

Stories from Mom: Part 10, The Potomac River

The Potomac River.
This photo was taken by my nephew, JC Williams in the spring of 2012.

The location is right in the area where we liked to camp.

By Virginia Williams Kelly

I have had a lifetime love affair with the Potomac River. The happiest childhood memories, by far, are the summer vacations we spent on the Potomac River. Each year around the middle of July our family took a week’s vacation and it was always spent on the river. Dad had an old Ford with a running board and as we left Frostburg we were loaded down with all the essentials needed for a week of camping on the river. One summer we had an unfortunate thing happen to us. We had a flat tire and since a lot of our stuff was on the running board, including our extra tire my Dad had to unload everything to get to the tire and it made for a very uncomfortable time for a while.

We had tents that were set up on the river banks and as soon as we got there and as the tents were up we were allowed to go into them and get into our bathing suits and head for the river. Oh how happy we were as the river met our bodies and even though it was cold we never realized it because we were that happy to be there. After we stayed in the river until we were really cold we headed for the tents and what a blessed feeling it was to enter that ever so hot tent and let it warm ourselves. Just lying on our towels was ‘heaven on earth’.

In the meantime Dad was fishing for our dinner and since he was an expert at fishing we always had a nice fish dinner in the evening. Sometimes he would go ‘gigging’ for frogs and then we would have a nice mess of frog legs for our dinner. I know that this does not seem very appetizing to many today but to us it was a veritable feast.

Since it was summer and they had many orchards in West Virginia our parents always bought us a bushel of ripe peaches and we always thought they were the largest most juicy peaches ever.

Since we were allowed to eat as many of them as we wanted I think the families had a few children complaining of a stomach ache. We also had our fill of fresh corn on the cob and we could buy fresh country butter for it, which was always a great treat since we could not afford it at home. There we only had margarine which we called Oleo, and we had to color it with a yellow dye which always came with it. You worked it in the margarine with your hands, and that was a mess, I always thought. I hated that job and I disliked it with a passion.

We always went with another family, the Conrad’s, namely Pete, Elsie his wife and Max, Mae, Betty and Harold. Harold was my sister’s one and only love and they were married later on and lived a very happy life with their two sons Harold Jr. called Butch and Stephan. These two families got along very well and spent many years together on vacations. 

One episode I can remember I call the “cigarette caper” was when the girls, all early teen-agers, decided to smoke a cigarette. Because Pete was the only smoker we raided his pack of Lucky Strikes and tried our luck at smoking. We were four girls all about the same age, give a year or two apart. We walked up the road a little way from the camp and lit up our cigarette with each trying to take a puff or two. No one got sick because we didn’t inhale. We finally put it out and then got the bright idea of saving it until next year so we buried the stub in some leaves and walked home. Talk about naïve, stupid young girls: that was us.

We also had inner tubes from old cars which we inflated and we would walk with them up the river as far as we could go and then float down the river and do this exercise many times a day. Oh, how great it was to drift along, with not a care in the world and dream, dream, dream. At least that is what I did.

 

We vacationed along that river for many, many years and as our families grew and we got married we had another generation to introduce to the river and they fell in love with it as much as we did. My sister Dot and Harold and their family bought a cottage on the river and that is where my children spent their vacations. We lived in Cleveland, Ohio and it was great to have the river to go to each year with our children and they all learned to love it. My son had bad allergies and he also loved to sit around the camp fire at night but the night air was very conducive to bringing on the worst of his allergies. Since he was only two years old, the only way we could get him to bed was to put him in the car and drive him around until he fell asleep, so that is what my sister and I did each night.

Our older three children were all close in age, cousins, and they were teen agers together. There was a very large rock on the other side of the river where it was very deep so they would swim over to it climb up the back side of it and sun themselves and then when they got too warm dive into the river to cool off. They spent many, many hours on that rock. Today they still talk about what a wonderful time they had there.

But as time has a way of moving on the children grew up, married and had families of their own. And then we had several storms so severe that the cottage was washed away, never to be built again.

Today we still go to the river and still see the old rock and watch the people that now camp where we used to. They have mobile campers so that when the rains come they can move their homes away from the storms until it gets nice again.

There's Dad fishing. We all loved to fish!

Cambria "Camey" Williams (1897-1960).

 

That's me fishing. My brother took this picture. I was about 18.

 

 That's Dad and the truck that took us to the river. The running boards were always loaded.

 

 

Here's another photo taken by JC of the river near where we camped. 

 

And here's the big rock everyone lounged on and dove off.

 

That's Mama on the left with me and Dot. Possibly Elsie Conrad on the right.

 

Here's our family with the Fuller family sitting on the big rock. That's Mama on the upper left and me sitting just to her right, with my brother Camey below. Next to me and to the right is my sister Dot. That's Mrs. Fuller (Helen) on the upper right and Dick hanging on her neck. Sitting in front is Helen's daughter.

 

That's me, the tallest one on the left, with my sister Dot and our little brother Camey. Some other kid, possibly one of the Fullers, is holding the fish up. That's Dad's truck in the background.

 

You can read more of Mom's stories here:

Part 1: Those were the days my friend, we though they'd never end
Part 2: Center Street
Part 3: Summertime on Center Street
Part 4: Mushrooms!
Part 5: Fall and Winter on Center Street
Part 6: Growing up
Part 7: Friends and neighbors, life and death on Center Street
Part 8: Walking and strawberries
Part 9: Brady's Creek.

 

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/11/stories-from-mom-part-10-potomac-river.html