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As it’s Memorial Day weekend in the US, this week’s 52 Ancestors theme is, not surprisingly, Military. I have chosen this opportunity to highlight a wonderful project at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) that is coming close to completion – the digitization of the Personnel Service Records (PSRs)  of those who served with the Canadian Expeditionary Forceduring World War One. Talk about a…

After a couple of weeks off (the prompts didn’t inspire me, but I may revisit them if I come up with some ideas), I’m back at it. This week’s prompt for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is The Old Homestead.

This photo shows my great-great grandparents, Edward L. and Euphemia (Tracy) Wiseman, and their children outside their home in Crawford County, Illinois. The children from left to right are: Tura, Rollie, Elsie, and Harry. I don’t know an exact date for the photo, but I’d estimate it was taken between 1895 and 1898, based on the age of my great-grandfather, Rollie.

I’ve communicated with my dad and his older brother (my Uncle Larry) this week regarding the photo. This is a beloved family photo and it is usually brought to our annual family reunion for display. We think the home stood on an 18¼-acre parcel located a couple of miles north of Stoy in Section 22 of Township 7N, Range 13W. There’s a possibility, though, that this house was on a 40-acre parcel north and west of Oblong on Section 17 near Kibbie, but the note on the back of the photo says, “near Stoy,” so I’m inclined to think that this was on the land (18 acres) closer to Stoy.

Dad and I spent a bit of time looking at Google Earth this week, and we were able to locate this property, bordered on the west by Onion Creek. On a 1930 plat map online, I found an 18-acre parcel of land with the initials, E.L.W.—Edward Livingston Wiseman, corroborating Dad’s memories. According to the will of Edward’s mother Sarah Wiseman, this 18 ¼-acre parcel was to be divided three ways after her 1894 death—Albert was to inherit 6 1/8 acres on the southern part of this property, James the northern 6 1/8, and Edward was to inherit the middle 6 acres. This is part of the southwest ¼ of the northeast ¼ of Section 22, and the transcribed will names the southeast ¼ of the northeast ¼. I’m assuming this is a transcription error on the part of the clerk.

The 40 acres owned by Sarah was a couple of miles west and approximately one mile north of the 18 acres: SE ¼ of NE ¼ of section 17, Township 7, Range 13W. In Sarah Wiseman’s will, signed on 10 January 1883, she indicates that she was currently living on this parcel of land. She desired for this land to be divided three ways as well, with each son getting 26 and two-thirds rods—Edward, the western third, Albert, the middle third, and James the easternmost third.

I have a suspicion that there was some land swapping going on between the brothers. I looked at an 1898 plat map and noticed that the 40 acres in Section 17 is not divided into three sections, but two. Jas. Wiseman has 20 acres and A. Wiseman has 20 acres. The land parcel in section 22 isn’t divided at all. It has the intitals ELW, and the number 20 (18 acres, rounded up, I presume). It seems that Edward exchanged his third of the 40 acres for his brothers’ shares of the 18 acres—and created the homestead that my dad and uncle remember with mostly fond memories. The 40 acres was owned by an A. M. Wilken in 1930.

An $1100 land sale from W. N. Wilkin to Sarah Wiseman was made on 31 December 1872. The land sale wasn’t recorded until 30 September 1878, in book 29, page 104. In the Description column of the land sale index is the word “described.” I have not had the opportunity to look at the land deed books. Uncle Larry thinks that both the 40-acre parcel and the 18-acre parcel were purchased at the same time.

I’ll now share some of my dad’s and uncle’s memories of the place my dad calls “The Farm.” A flat area east side of Onion Creek and west of the house was tillable. My dad remembered in the 1940s walking alongside a wagon and hand-picking corn here with his dad (Ray Wiseman) and grandpa (Rollie Wiseman). Behind the house, the creek curved, and the land fell off into the swampy bottomland of Big Creek. More tillable land was to the north. Dad remembers following his grandpa and a plow in this field and picking up newly-turned potatoes and putting them in a basket. A nice stand of oak and shagbark hickory stood to the north as well. Dad remembered camping there with his brother Larry, and later, with high school buddies. Between The Farm and the Big Henry Woods to the east was a fence line. Dad remembers a couple of half-buried car bodies there. How did they get there? Were they the family’s old cars? Dad and Uncle Larry remember hunting squirrels and rabbits in this area. Dad remembers his grandpa Rollie taking him back into a swampy area and showing him two large bald cypress trees and telling him that bald cypress trees weren’t too common in that part of Illinois.

Both my dad and uncle remember visiting the house a few times in the early-mid 1940s, when their great-uncle Harry lived there. The house stood on a hill on the south end of the property. It had a dirt floor as you entered but the rest of the home was floored. There was a well in front of the house that had a wooden cover. In later years one had to be very careful to locate the well because the cover was obscured by tall grass. It would’ve been easy to fall through the cover. In my dad’s teenage years, after Uncle Harry moved out of the house, my dad would buy a box of rifle shells for 50 cents and go to The Farm to shoot bottles. The property was littered with old medicine bottles, as Uncle Harry and Aunt Mae were herbalists, and helped many local people improve their health. Uncle Larry thinks that the house was gone by the mid-1950s. After the death of Rollie in 1963, the 18 acres was deeded to his widow (my great-grandmother Martha (Cramer) Wiseman. Shortly afterwards, it was deeded to my great-uncle Donald. After his death, it was sold to a non-family member as timberland.

My dad took me to the remnants of The Farm about fifteen years ago and I remember there was no access road to the property. We parked alongside the road and walked maybe a quarter of a mile through a field, across a small stream, and into some woods.  No buildings stood on the property at that time.  Fortunately, we didn’t encounter the well.

The older gentleman in the photo, my great-great grandfather Edward L. Wiseman, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on 22 January 1839. After his father’s death in 1857, his mother Sarah (Mankey) Wiseman moved with her six living children to Jackson County, Texas. Edward stayed on the Texas ranch during the Civil War to help his widowed mother. He ultimately lost two brothers to the war—one dying in battle and the second after years of imprisonment as a prisoner-of-war. The Texas ‘experiment’ ended in 1867, when the family, reportedly worth nearly $700,000 (in today’s dollars) in the 1860 census, met with financial difficulties and returned to the Midwest.

In 1870 Edward, his mother, and brothers James and Albert lived in Turman township in Sullivan County, Indiana, presumably having moved there to be near Sarah’s sister Lydia A. Secrist. The family’s real estate and personal property value in 1870 was reported as today’s equivalent of $25,000—quite a change from ten years before. Edward had attended medical college in Cincinnati before moving to Texas and was enumerated as a physician in the census. The family also has record of him later practicing medicine in Crawford County as well.

Euphemia Tracy was born in Crawford County on 6 March 1851, the youngest daughter of Loyd and Jane (Kirk) Tracy. Loyd and Jane, along with Loyd’s brother Elijah Tracy and his family, moved from Licking County, Ohio to Crawford County in 1846. In 1850 and 1851, Loyd purchased 160 acres in western Robinson township and eastern Oblong township, northeast of Robinson, from the U.S. government land office located in Palestine. Sadly, Loyd died when Euphemia was about 18 months old.

On 6 October 1878, Edward and Euphemia married in Crawford County. Shortly afterwards, they moved to Richland township, Labette County, Kansas. In the 1880 census, Edward was enumerated there as a farmer. Brother James was farming in adjacent Neosho township in Cherokee County. By 1883, Edward and Euphemia added two children to their family. Daughter Elsie was born on 7 November 1879 and son Harry was born on 8 January 1881. Based on birthplaces and birthdates for children, Edward and James were back in Illinois by the mid-1880s-James in Jasper County and Edward in Crawford County.

Elsie Lee Wiseman and Harry Lamar Kirk Wiseman were born in Labette County, Kansas. Elsie married William Reynolds in 1918, and died in Paris, Edgar County, Illinois in 1945. Older son Harry Lamar Kirk Wiseman was born in 1881. He married Mae Servison in 1909 and died in Crawford County in 1964. Tura Alice Wiseman was born in 1883 in Illinois. She married Henry Tracy in 1906 and died in 1945. My great-grandfather Rollie Mankey Wiseman was born in 1886 in Crawford County. He married Martha Washington Cramer in 1909 and died in 1963 in Stoy. All are buried in Prairie Cemetery in Oblong Township.

Copyright Statement NOTE: Researched surnames are in ALL CAPS, and full names are in boldface type on first use. In a recent text to my friend and fellow genealogist Chris Mosher, I asked him what I should write about next and gave him four options. His reply: “Maybe the John Judge trip. It’s been 4 years, right?” Me: “3.5.” We both laughed. We all know I’m slow. Thanks for rubbing it in,…

One of my more interesting genealogical finds was that of the immigration records for my Kolter family. Back in 1999 a distant cousin on the West Coast sent me a Word document titled, History of the Kolters that gave, among other information, birthdates for my 4-great grandfather Henry (or Heinrich) Kolter, wife Rachel Nicol, and children. It also mentioned that the family emigrated to the United States in about 1837, and that many of the family were born in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria.

These were the early days of Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org and I couldn’t easily find the immigration record. I looked for Kolters in Berchtesgaden and elsewhere in Bavaria. No luck. I looked at Hamburg passenger lists. I finally put the Kolters on the back burner for a while. Then about fifteen years ago, I searched for the Kolters in Germany at FamilySearch.org.  One of my search strategies when looking for a family is to search by the ancestor’s sibling or child with the most unusual given name, to try to narrow down the results. For this search I decided that searching for my 3-great grandfather might be the best idea—his given name was Valentine.

Looking at the German Births and Baptisms database on FamilySearch, I found a Valentin Kolter that was born and baptized in 1821 and had a father called Heinrich. This was interesting, of course, but I was confused, because on this record, Valentin’s mother was named Friederika Profit not Rachel, and the birthplace of Rockenhausen, Pfalz, is clearly not Berchtesgaden. However, this area of (present-day) Germany was, at that time, governed by Bavaria, and Berchtesgaden is in present-day Bavaria (though nowhere near Rockenhausen). I searched for other children of this Heinrich Kolter and Friederika Profit. I was pleased to find the birthdates and baptism dates for Valentine’s siblings! Not surprisingly, some of the siblings had Anglicized their names after arrival in the US—Philippina became Phoebe, Dorothea became Dorothy, and Karl became Charles, for example. But the birth order for the children was consistent, and the birthdates were, in most cases, close to the information I already had. I also found a marriage record for a Johann Henrich Kolter and Friederika Profit in 1814 in the nearby town of Breunigweiler. I had found my Kolter family in Germany! I was still determined to find the Kolter’s immigration records.

In 2011, I searched Ancestry.com for immigration records for Johann Heinrich Kolter and was shown a Jean Henry Colter with a wife Frederica arriving in New York on 22 August 1837. Could it be possible that this was my Kolter family? Why was his name Jean instead of Johann? Upon examination of the record, I learned that the ship, La Fortune, sailed from the French port of Le Havre in northern France. Of course, the French clerk of a French shipping line might record the family names in French! Johan was Jean, Karl was Charles, Peter was Pierre, and so on. I was unable to find an image of La Fortune, but here is perhaps a similar ship.

So to circle back to Henry’s wife Rachel Nichol, where did this name come from? The birth/baptism records of the children in Germany give Friederika’s name as the mother, and Friederika arrived in New York with Henrich. Some people have given Friederika’s name as Friederika Rachel Profit Kolter, but her birth/christening record and marriage record give her name only as Friederika Profit, and in none of the children’s birth/baptism records is her name given as anything other than Friederika.

With roots in Crawford County, it should not be a surprise that I have several ancestors who worked in various aspects of the oil business. Crawford County, Illinois had an oil boom in the early years of the 20th century. This affected nearly every family in Crawford County, in one way or another. You can still see the pumpjacks (I called them grasshoppers when I was a kid) in many rural areas of the county. And I believe my mother still gets an occasional (small) check from a long-ago ancestor’s well.

(Photo from Library of Congress website)

For starters, two of my great-grandfather’s sisters married two brothers of John W. Shire, whose 1906 toss of an old whiskey bottle south of Stoy marked the site of the first oil well in Crawford County, starting the oil boom. The oil boom lead to a construction boom, and those brothers of John Shire and two of their brothers-in-law (my great-grandfather Earnest Bashears and another brother, W.C. “Tuckie” Bashears) were construction workers at this time.

My maternal grandfather C. Scott Bashears was enumerated as a blacksmith for an oil well supply company in the 1940 census and was a tank car repairman in the 1950 census. His younger brother worked in a laboratory at the refinery and one of my grandfather’s sisters married a man who worked in the oil industry and they moved to Wyoming.

My maternal grandmother Dorothy (Marbry) Bashears worked in the office of Lincoln Oil Company before my mom was born. Her family was very involved in the oil business. As a child in the 1910s and 1920s, my grandmother lived in Oklahoma where her father Will Marbry worked as a wildcatter. He traveled throughout the Great Plains drilling for oil in previously unexplored areas. My great-grandmother, Bertha (Hill) Marbry occasionally accompanied him on his expeditions.

From the back of the photo: “ 1st well  ‘the Winkle Man’.  The one with me in the picture is ‘Mrs. Perrin’ the lady that was with us at Dry Creek and one of the drillers and a tool dresser.” My great-grandmother Bertha is on the far right. The Winkleman Dome Oil Field is in Fremont County, Wyoming, about 30 miles from Lander, Wyoming. Winkleman was first drilled in 1917.

After the family returned to Crawford County in the mid-1920s, my great-grandfather Will worked as a machinist at the Ohio Oil Company refinery in Robinson, later Marathon Oil. He and a coworker patented a metering valve in 1930. Two of my grandmother’s brothers, Zeb and Bob, worked at the refinery. Lastly, a favorite cousin (a son of my grandmother’s sister) worked as an engineer, and later in upper management, for Marathon Oil Company.

My paternal family also had ties to the oil industry, starting with my great-grandfather Rollie Wiseman. He grew up a couple of miles north of Stoy and by 1930 was working in the oil fields of Stoy as a roustabout. In fact, while walking home from lunch at a tavern in Stoy in 1963, he felt ill and died near the oil field pump station.

A tantalizing tangent to the oil industry: In early December 1911 the bank at Stoy was blown open with dynamite and robbed of about $1500. No one thought anything of the early morning booms; loud noises were common in the oil fields. Because of something said to my dad by his dad Ray (Rollie’s son) the family story is that Rollie had something to do with the robbery, or had inside information about the robbery. Rollie was, let’s say, an interesting man.

Rollie’s son (my paternal grandfather) Ray Wiseman worked at the Ohio Oil/Marathon refinery for 44 years. In 1950 he was a stillman. My grandfather had two brothers and they both worked in the oil business, too. Donald worked at the refinery in Robinson and Clifford worked elsewhere in Illinois.

The Marathon Oil refinery remains one of Crawford County’s largest employers, employing approximately 650 people with the ability refine up to 253,000 barrels of crude oil per day. I wonder what John W. Shire would think of the legacy of his random whiskey bottle toss today.

I had many ideas for this prompt--Seth Jones, father of Crawford County resident Milton A. Jones, fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. John Bussard of New Hebron fought in the Civil War, and former Prairie Methodist Episcopal Church minister James L. Wallar traveled through Johnstown, Pennsylvania shortly after the famous flood and reported, “the newspapers never exaggerated the desolation wrought there.” Several ancestors lived in Crawford County when Illinois became a state. What was that like? Really, aren’t we all witnesses to history? The story I would like to tell is that of my father, Gary Wiseman. While not exactly a witness in this case, this story is his experience after hearing that the Japanese surrendered, ending World War II.

In 1945 Gary was a seven-year-old boy living in Stoy, Illinois. The house he lived in was built by his uncle Clifford with the help of my grandfather, Ray Wiseman. Soon afterwards, Uncle Clifford took a job in a different town, so Gary’s family moved into the house. This house still stands on the west side of what is now called 600th Street, just north of Washington Street. It was a small, two-bedroom house. Gary slept with his brother Larry in one of the bedrooms, and his parents occupied the other bedroom. There was no indoor plumbing, so the bathroom was converted into a bedroom for Gary and Larry’s older sister Marcia. Behind the kitchen at the back of the house was a covered porch and the family’s well was just beyond the porch. Downhill a bit sat the outhouse and chicken coop. Across the street and a little to the left sat the school, and across the street and a little to the right sat the Stoy Methodist church. The railroad tracks ran about 100 yards southwest of the house.

One late afternoon in August 1945, Gary was in the living room listening to the family’s Philco console radio when President Truman announced the unconditional surrender of Japan. Seven-year-old Gary quickly ran across the gravel road to the church, jumped high on the rope leading up to the church bell, and pulled the rope down, causing the bell to ring. The bell’s wheel pulled Gary up and the bell continued to ring with Gary riding up and down on the rope with each peal.

After Gary’s father Ray returned home from work, the family piled into their old blue Ford and drove the five miles to Robinson. The town square was packed with celebrants, yelling and beating on pans! After celebrating, the family took the Ford to Sam Abel’s filling station and filled up the car with gasoline!

When I was in third grade, my classmates and I were sent home for lunch with the instruction to ask our mothers about our family heritage. Where did my ancestors come from? I got a vague answer that I was part German and part Scots Irish and part French but that was about all that my mother knew. I returned to school and felt left out when many of my classmates reported that their parents escaped the Soviet Union after World War II, or their grandfather was from the Netherlands, or their great-grandparents immigrated from Italy in 1903.

Fast-forward twenty-some years. I was looking at Crawford County, Illinois marriage records on microfilm at a Family History Center and found a second marriage record for my widowed great-great grandmother Elizabeth Jones to Joseph Richey in 1884. This marriage record named her parents, Daniel Sayre and Signor (Sinah) Hayman. It’s always exciting to find a new generation for the family tree! Note: another thirty years later and it's possible to look at the same records online from home!

Crawford Co., IL, Marriage Register Book 1, 1878-1901, page 84

As soon as I got home, I dialed up to CompuServe (this was the early 1990s!) and got on the genealogy forum to ask about the Sayre and Hayman families. With the help of other community members, I was able to trace the Hayman family back to the 17th century on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and the Sayre family to 17th century Long Island. From these families, I subsequently found other early New England and mid-Atlantic families, including many who came in the Great Migration of the 1630s and 1640s, several patriots who fought in the American Revolution, and some families who remained loyal to King George. Elizabeth’s grandfather Daniel Sayre served in the Essex County, New Jersey militia during the American Revolution. The father of Elizabeth’s first husband Milton, a man called Seth Jones, fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill and served in the Hudson Valley in New York. Milton and Elizabeth Jones moved to Crawford County, Illinois in the 1860s and raised many children there. They are buried in Green Hill cemetery, south of Palestine and east of Flat Rock.

It's been a few years since I posted in this blog, but I have some free time right now. I'm participating in the 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks challenge again. Each week we are given a prompt and are asked to write something about our family history using that prompt. My goal is to participate at least once a month. All posts will be somehow related to my Crawford County family, or their ancestors. So here's my first post of 2024--Family Lore.

Every family has stories about their forefathers and relatives, and mine is no exception. And like most family lore, there may be a grain of truth to the story, but the facts get muddled over the years. Most of the family lore I’ve heard is merely a sentence or two. I’ll share a couple of tidbits and then explain if I can confirm or refute that statement.

FAMILY LORE #1:    I grew up believing that I had Native American ancestry. Of course, this is a common bit of lore in many families. I was encouraged to be proud of this nebulous heritage. As I researched, I found other family researchers reported that so-and-so married a Cherokee woman, or this ancestor was a full-blooded Shawnee. So when DNA tests became popular, I jumped on the bandwagon to learn if the Native American story was true. My mother and I have a small amount of non-European DNA but it is so little that the origins of it remain unclear. We also have a smidgen of West African DNA. It's possible that the non-European DNA is from an Indigenous ancestor, or perhaps it is from an ancestor I have yet to discover. One will only have about 1% of any individual ancestor’s DNA after about 6 generations, so the Indigenous ancestor could’ve been quite far back and my mother did not receive that non-European DNA to pass on to me.

We are curious about the West African DNA. I have several enslavers in my ancestry, and we know how enslaved women were often treated. Is our West African DNA from an enslaved person who escaped their enslaver and was light-skinned enough to pass as Native American or white? Did they leave their black family and start a new life as "Native American," telling their children and grandchildren that family lore? I'm not sure I will ever know the answer.

So now this family lore has been modified…the story I will tell my descendants is, that we had an ancestor of West African descent who perhaps chose to pass as Native American (a safer option, perhaps?) and that became their story that was told to their children and grandchildren and great-great-great-great grandchildren.

FAMILY LORE #2:    One of my favorite family stories is that of one of my father’s first cousins. My dad had something close to 50 first cousins on his mother’s side and did not know them all personally. I’ll call this particular cousin “Rebecca,” I’m not going to name her, because she still has living siblings in their 80s and 90s, and possibly children and grandchildren somewhere. Rebecca was 17 years older than my dad and grew up in Kentucky. Rebecca’s mother was an older sister to my paternal grandmother and grew up in Crawford County. My father’s version of Rebecca’s story is, that when Rebecca was 18 years old, she put a dime in her shoe, hitchhiked to Hollywood, and married jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden.

As we should expect, there may be a bit of truth to this family lore. Several years ago, Rebecca popped into my head, and I thought that I’d see what I could learn about her. I Googled her and found that she was a bit of a local celebrity in her town on the west coast, unfortunately because of some crimes committed, complicated with, I suspect, mental illness and/or substance abuse. In an interview with the newspaper Rebecca told many tales about herself, including that she’d been a Vegas show girl and worked on the set of a Richard Burton movie. So, maybe she did make it to Hollywood with that dime in her shoe.

I was more interested in the Jack Teagarden story. I read a biography of Jack Teagarden and did not find Rebecca’s name, nor could I find a marriage record for them on Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org. What I did find, though, was a set of photographs at the Library of Congress of several 1940s jazz greats in a casual situation, including Jack Teagarden accompanied by Rebecca! Later, in another jazz great’s biography, she was referred to as Jack Teagarden’s “girlfriend.” He was married at the time of his involvement with Rebecca, but he and his wife may have been separated. So Rebecca had some sort of relationship with Jack Teagarden- but was most likely not married to him.