Did Your Ancestor Know Isaac?

As much fun as researching Isaac has been, researching his neighbors so that I can bring to life the entire community in which Isaac lived has also been interesting.  Some of the surnames were familiar to me, whether because I had heard someone speak of them or because their descendants remain in the community.  Others were unknown, left for me to identify through research.  This post shares some of the remaining riddles I'd love to solve!

William M. Campbell, born in 1846 in Indiana, served in the Civil War before coming to Kansas, and lived in the southwest quarter of section 27 in Albano Township, about half a mile from Isaac.  A member of the Kansas House of Representatives for three terms, first for the Union Labor Party and then for the People's Party, he was asked to run for State Senator and for Governor.  However, the death of his wife Eliza, and eleven months later the death of his baby daughter Jennie, forced him to decline running for further political office in order to turn his attention to his family.  At the time of Eliza's death, there were three children still living at home, along with the infant Jennie.  A few years later, William married a woman named Orpha, and he served as a commissioner on the Kansas Railroad Commission in Topeka.  He and Isaac were neighbors and friends, especially sharing an interest in Populist politics.  Campbell's articles and legislative reports appeared frequently in the County Capital published in St. John.  However, I have failed to locate a picture of this prominent man or learn much about him later in his life.  Surely there are clues I haven't discovered.

Another mystery I am anxious to solve involves Isaac's house.  After his death, Isaac's homestead was sold by his heirs to Jacob A. Degarmo and his wife Addie.  There is a photo post card of my great aunt, Abbie Hall Boylan, with two other young ladies, standing in a tree grove in front of a 2-story clapboard house.  On the back of the picture is written, "Abbie and the Degarmo girls."  From a photograph in the Gray Studio Collection, I have determined that the girls with Abbie are daughters of Jacob and Addie.  The house in the background is not Abbie's home, but it fits the description of Isaac's house as he described it at various places in his journal, and it seems very likely that it is a picture of the Degarmo house which was first Isaac's home.  All I need is someone who remembers that house or someone with other pictures of the Degarmo house to confirm what I believe.  The abandoned house was still on the land when I was a child, but I simply don't remember it.  However, some of Jacob and Addie's children--Ethel Lee, Clyde Francis, Archie Glenn, Jennie May, George D., Annie Myrtle, Iva, and Roe--remained in the general area and raised their own children nearby.  I continue to hope I can connect with a Degarmo descendant or former neighbor who will help me confirm the identity of this house, or, perhaps, provide a better picture of Isaac's home and tree groves.

Immediately surrounding Isaac's homestead and timber claim were families with names like Henn, Curtis, Frazee, Ross, Vosburgh, Shattuc, Gereke, Clouse, Green and Bentley.  Only a mile or two further were Shoop, Farwell, Bonsall, Mayes, Rowe, Loftiss, Frack, Stimatze, Carnahan, Webber, Doc Dix, Hall and Beck.  Further away were Kachelman, Cornett, Tousley, Toland, Tanner, Garvin, Wilson, Dr. Willcox and Searls.  In nearby Pratt County were Goodwin, Moore, Carr, Blake, Eggleston, Brown, Lattimore, Stringfield and Logan.  In St. John were businessmen, lawyers, and bankers--Swartz, Hilmes, Gloyd, Rohr, Burr, Shale, Dixon, Gillmore and Miss Shira, while in Pratt Center were the Blaine brothers, photographer Logan, and horse dealer Sam Jones.  All of these names, and so many more, appear in Isaac's Journal.  My research has been more successful with some than with others, and I have paid my respects to many of them in local cemeteries.  Quite a few gave up on their Kansas farms in hard times and decided to start fresh in the Oklahoma and Washington Territories, and one family settled in Salt Lake City.  Women are especially hard to trace, as they disappear behind a new married name.

I have found names on grave stones, census and courthouse records, and newspaper pages, and I have searched through the Gray Studio Collection, occasionally finding pictures of the young farmers Isaac knew, photographed a decade or two later as distinguished looking elders.  I know there must be old photo albums and scrap books with mementoes pressed between the pages long ago, and as I write the book about Isaac it is hard for me to be satisfied with what I have found, trying to bring each person alive again for just a moment on paper.  American writer, Harlan Ellison, wrote:  "Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike."  That may be so, but Isaac and the people in his life, struggling to build something on the open prairie where they settled, deserve to be remembered a while longer.

If you recognize names among those Isaac mentioned in his journal or have ancestors who lived in that area during the late 1800s, please click on the "comment" box below this post and tell me about them. 

If you have never left a comment, you may visit my post of Feb. 8, 2012 to learn how it is done.  A hint about deciphering the letters to permit you to share your comments--focus slowly on one letter at a time and do not try to make a word of the letters.  Most are only letters that do not make a word, and if you focus on each letter, the black & white shapes within the letter are less confusing.  Good luck!

...And May I Add?

Spring has arrived in Kansas, and with a couple of days of rain, the wheat is growing, leaves on the trees are opening, and everything seems to be eager to crowd the season a bit. The sand hill plum blossoms opened earlier than usual, and like Isaac and his friends, we all have our fingers crossed that a late frost won't spoil the plum crop again this year. I opened our last jar of sand hill plum jelly a few days ago, and I need to restock the shelves this summer.

I'm not complaining, but the rain knocked some of the petals off before I got outside with my camera to take pictures, but for those of you who read my post of March 1, 2012 titled "Sand Hill Plums" and are interested in seeing what blooming plum bushes look like, I'm posting two pictures taken yesterday as we returned from Stafford. (You can click on the photographs to enlarge them, and if you look closely, you may be able to see the thorns.)

My husband and I were returning from the Stafford County Historical & Genealogical Society where we had hosted friends who spent the afternoon cleaning and cataloguing some of the glass plate negatives from the Gray Studio Collection. You may read my January 6, 2012 post about the "Stafford County Museum" collection by going to the blog archives. I bribed my friends a little by planning a tea party as an excuse for gathering at the museum, but it was really their spirit of volunteerism that caused them to accept my invitation.

The Gray Studio Glass Plate Negative Collection may be seen at http://www.contentcat.fhsu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/stafford.

Small town museums--Stafford County Historical Society

The Stafford County Historical & Genealogical Society is building poor. So many landmark buildings along the Main Street of Stafford have been gifted to the Society, that much of their budget is spent maintaining what they have received. It is another case of generous donors, unpaid volunteers, and a hard working Executive Secretary rescuing and preserving the history of the community for future generations. During the past two years, I have spent many days doing research at this museum.

The Stafford County Historical Society acquired a real treasure several years ago. For two generations, the Gray family operated a photography studio at 116 N. Main in St. John. Begun by W.R. Gray in 1905, the studio building also contained the family home. A son, Royal, followed his father's profession, operating a studio in Ulysses, Kansas, and another son, Dr. Arzy Gray, worked as a chemist for Eastman Kodak. After attending what is now UCLA, daughter Jessie became her father's business partner in 1940, assuming the business seven years later when her father died. When Jessie retired in 1981 she donated an estimated 29,000 glass plate negatives to the Stafford County Museum. The museum curator believes it is the largest glass negative collection in the country specific to one location. Imagine standing at a window and watching a parade of people representing nearly eight decades of one community's citizens, together with a backdrop of businesses, farms, sporting events, festivals, and other moments captured by the photographers. The people you observe are mute, frozen in their own times, and you cannot call out to them the questions you would like to ask, but they tell a story of their particular period in their clothing, hairstyles, and poses. Volunteers continue to labor cleaning the negatives and documenting the subjects portrayed, a time-consuming task.

In an arrangement with Fort Hays Kansas State University, the photographs are available for viewing online at http://contentcat.fhsu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/stafford where you can see hundreds of turn-of-the-century images, with more appearing periodically as the glass plates are cleaned. Unfortunately for me, Gray's Studio did not exist until after Isaac's death, and although I know he sat for studio portraits in both St. John and Pratt, I have not been able to locate those pictures.

Most of my time at the museum has been spent looking at old newspapers, so much better than doing that research with microfilm. It is quite incredible to handle the actual old newspapers, yellowed and brittle with age, but filled with news of the times--local, national and international, as well as gossipy community reports about new babies, neighborhood illnesses, crops, community feuds, and all sorts of things. After many days of standing at a raised table, carefully turning the fragile pages, and reading about what was happening in the world in which Isaac lived, I sometimes felt I had been there.

An amazing discovery for me was finding how often Isaac's own writing was published in the County Capital. He authored articles about his experiments with different varieties of potatoes, as well as his carefully documented experiments with corn, planting different varieties and recording dates of planting, as well as depths of sowing the seeds and distances for spacing the rows. I also found Isaac's name listed as an officer of several farmers' organizations, and articles authored by him related to his participation in those groups.

Michael Hathaway, the Stafford Historical Society's Curator and Executive Secretary, was a great help to me as I spent many days of research at the museum. Returning to read newspapers over a century old, I became a sporadic "regular" at the morning coffee sessions, joining a dependable crew of volunteers who donate their time to keep the museum going for little compensation other than a few cups of coffee.

(For some reason the link to the Gray Studio site is not working, but the address is correct, if you will enter it yourself. It is worth the visit!)