#familyresearch – Grandma's Trunk

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 – Week 3 – Favorite Photo

I have 1000s of photos after 48 years of researching my family. I LOVE pictures. Dates, facts, and events are all wonderful and necessary; without them, there would be no skeleton and no foundation. Pictures bring all the dry and dusty bones to life.

While I have some unusual and beautiful photos, one stands out as special every time I see it. My daddy was never really interested in what I found out about his family. He would listen to my discoveries and then go on about his business. Unlike my momma, he didn’t get excited. Not long before he died, his interest grew, and we started spending more time talking about his side of the family. He shared stories I had never heard, shocked me with some revelations, which is hard to do, and left me with some mysteries to solve.

I printed all the pictures I had found of his relatives, not many compared to Momma’s family, and took them to him after writing on each of them who they were and how they were related to him.

All my life, I’ve heard the words, “You’re James’s little girl; you look just like him!” It’s true that the genes are strong. I didn’t realize how strong they are until I found a picture of my paternal/maternal 4th great-grandmother, Nancy Yarbough.

After I showed this picture to Daddy, he showed it to everyone who came through his door and said,

“This is me before I got my hair cut!”

I’m missing a couple of generations, but I bet it’s pretty safe to say that the resemblance is strong. So, while I have many other pictures that are funnier, more interesting, more “beautiful”, none of them make me smile quite like the one of my Daddy, “before he got his hair cut.”

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52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 – Week 2 – Origins – Shipwreck

“O, brave new world
that has such people in’t!” ― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Sea Venture, the 300-ton flagship of the London Company, was the first purpose-built emigration ship. The hold was built with cabins, and the twenty-four canons were stationed on the main deck. On 02 June 1609, Sea Venture set sail from Plymouth, England, on her maiden voyage, part of the Third Supply mission, as the flagship of a nine-ship fleet destined for Jamestown Colony. Aboard were Edward Waters, a member of the London Company, which was organized for the purpose of colonizing Virginia, and John Graye Proctor.

The usual course was to sail as far south as the Canary Islands; at that latitude, the direction of the wind was from the West, which would have pushed them across the Atlantic. They would have then followed the chain of west indian islands to Florida and then up the Atlantic coast. With the West Indies firmly in the grip of the Spanish Empire, the English fleet turned Northwards into the open Atlantic. The intent was to bypass the Spanish threat and head directly for Virginia.

On 24 July 1609, days from reaching Jamestown, the fleet ran into a strong storm, most likely a hurricane, and became separated. Sea Venture fought the storm for three days. Other ships of comparable size had survived such storms; the critical difference was that Sea Venture’s timbers had not had time to set, and the caulking was forced from between them. Despite the efforts to bail and jettison the ship’s guns to raise her buoyancy, the hold continued to leak, and the water level rose.

Sir George Somers, Admiral of the Company, spied land on the morning of 25 July; the water in the hold had reached a depth of nine feet, and the passengers and crew were past the point of exhaustion. Admiral Somers had the ship driven into the reefs of what proved to be eastern Bermuda, allowing 150 people and one dog to be safely landed.

The survivors, who were disenchanted with this new world, were confined to a prisonlike camp for almost a year while they constructed two new ships, the Deliverance, and the Patience, from local cedar and the salvaged wreckage of the Sea Venture. On May 10, 1610, 142 survivors set sail for Virginia. On reaching Jamestown, less than two weeks later, they discovered that only 60 of the 500 or so who had preceded them to the colony had survived. Everyone boarded the ships to set sail back to England, the settlement of Jamestown being deemed unviable. They were intercepted by a relief fleet and relanded at the colony.

Edward Waters had remained in Bermuda to help hold possession of the island; John Graye Proctor was among the survivors who landed at Jamestown in 1610. Waters would finally reach his original destination in 1618.

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was inspired by accounts of the wreck of the Sea Venture, the shipwreck that saved Jamestown, and ultimately the colonization of America.

While this is an interesting bit of history, how does it relate to the prompt of Origins? Three hundred eighty-eight years after the wreck of Sea Venture, a 10th great-grandson of Edward Waters, Jerrell Blackmon, married a 10th great-granddaughter of John Graye Proctor, Susan Black, in a small town in North Central Texas!

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52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 – Week 1 – Family Lore

lore¹/lôr/ noun

1. a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.

For as long as I have been researching my family, 47 plus years, I’ve heard that we are related to Robert E. Lee on my maternal grandfather’s side. Countless scraps of paper among my notes, charts, photographs, etc., most of them in my Momma’s handwriting, allude to this bit of family lore.

According to Momma’s grandmother on her daddy’s side, her daddy was a cousin to Robert E. Lee by way of his paternal grandmother, Susan Adeline Parks. Now that is clear as mud! No matter how I have gone about it, I have not been able to prove this connection.

However, this past year, I did stumble upon a different connection. My 9th great-grandfather on my paternal grandfather’s side was Robert E. Lee’s 3rd great-grandfather, making him my 4th cousin 6x removed! While researching this connection, I found a more convoluted adoptive tie to George Washington through his wife, Martha (Dandridge) Custis.

Martha Dandridge (1731-1802) first married Colonel Daniel Parke Custis (1711-1757). When their son John Parke Custis died in 1781, just weeks after his son, George Washington Parke “Wash” Custis, was born, Martha and her second husband, General George Washington (1732-1799), adopted Martha’s grandson, G. W. P. “Wash” Custis, who would later become the father-in-law of Robert E. Lee.

So, while you can’t always take the family traditions and stories as fact, you should never completely disregard what “great-aunt Tilly told cousin Jonas” as wrong. There is often a thread of truth or a hint of where you need to look buried in the lore.

Whispers from the Past…..

Susan Black Blackmon – Author

Week 4 – 52 Ancestor Challenge – Invite to Dinner

Around my house, dinner is the noon or mid-day meal. While what you call a particular mealtime isn’t overly important, in this instance it is.

It seems like every Sunday after church, every birthday, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and many times in between, all of our family would gather at Momma’s house for dinner. Some weeks Momma fried chickens other times it was roast. There was always mashed potatoes and gravy and sometimes she would fix “Pineapple Salad” which consisted of a lettuce leaf with a slice of pineapple on it and a dollop of miracle whip in the hole of the pineapple ring. I always told her she was messing up three good things by combining them and fortunately she didn’t make me eat it. There was always sweet tea to drink, she fixed it in an old crock pitcher that belonged to her grandma. When Momma died, her oldest grandson said that he wished he could have one more glass of Grandma’s sweet tea.

My older sister, Becky, and I both liked the chicken’s liver and each time Momma fried chicken, she and I would have to share it. My oldest nephew, Tom, and I would pull the pully-bone or wishbone, as some people call it and every time, he would get the short end. This was always a guaranteed argument because it meant he would get married first and I am eight years older than him. Most weeks we’d have homemade banana puddin’ for dessert. Momma never made it pretty, but it was certainly delicious. To this day my niece will only eat it while it’s still hot because that was how Grandma fixed it. Other times she would fix chocolate puddin’ and before she beat the meringue into it, she’d always take a bowl out for my daddy because he didn’t like “calf slobbers”.

We were a big and boisterous group, often there were 15 of us and we’d pull the table apart and add the extra leaves and then everyone would squeeze in. It always seemed like everyone was talking at once yet we knew what was going on in each conversation. Momma didn’t believe that children should be seen and not heard.

After everyone was full and the kitchen was cleaned up, Momma and Daddy would go into the living room and take a nap in their chairs. The grandkids would head outside to run and play. The adults would congregate in the dining room and play board games like Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble. There was always a lot of laughing and joking and often we would end up in hysterics because Momma and Daddy would be in the next room trying to out snore each other.

Times were so much simpler, kids played outside, the adults sat around and visited and played games, no one was glued to their cell phone or computer.

I would love to be able to go back for just one Sunday afternoon.

Banana Puddin’

1 cup sugar
6 Tbs Flour
2 Cups of Milk
2 Egg Yolks – beaten
Butter
Vanilla Extract
Bananas & Vanilla Wafers

Whisk sugar and flour together
Stir in milk until smooth
Stir in beaten egg yolks
Add butter – about the size of an extra-large egg
Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until thickened
Stir in a splash of vanilla extract
In a large bowl alternate layers of vanilla wafers and sliced bananas (we prefer more cookies than bananas
Pour hot puddin’ over the cookies and bananas (Momma always poked a large spoon down through them to mix the puddin’ in good, like I said, it’s not a pretty dessert

Double or triple recipe as needed

Add 3 Tbs of Cocoa powder if you prefer Chocolate Puddin’, Momma would make meringue (calf slobbers) out of the egg whites and then beat it into the chocolate puddin’

#52ancestors

Whispers from the Past…..