Anora—a fresh look

Anora (“Anna”, “Annie”) (Lee) (Horan) Prettyman (1847–1892) was my 3rd-great-grandmother and she has been something of an enigma to all recent researchers—myself included—who have tried to discover who she was and where she came from.

Thanks to new information I’ve gotten from a handful of newly discovered cousins, I think I’ve got a much better handle on Anora. While there are still large gaps and unknowns in her story, I’ve revised so much of her history that a new post is warranted. Most notably, I had the misidentified her parents (there were two girls named Anora/Anna/Annie Lee born in Indiana at the same time, and I was tracking the wrong one) and I got some details of her early years wrong.

I’d like to thank my newly discovered cousins Lorna, Suzette, and Michael for sharing what they know about our shared Prettyman ancestors as well as Anora’s first husband, William Horan. I’d like to give special recognition to Lorna for responsibly caring for, recording, and organizing so much Horan and Prettyman history and photos. Without her and her late father’s impressive memory, many of the details of Anora’s life would have been lost forever. Continue reading

G.I. Prettyman (1887–1977)

George Irvin PrettymanGeorge Irvin Prettyman (or G.I. Prettyman, as my grandfather told me he liked to be called) was my grandfather’s uncle. I recently learned that a cousin was looking for some information on G.I. and his wife Frances, and I discovered that while I had some new information for him, a lot of what I had was contradictory and could use some dedicated research. For instance, my grandfather William Prettyman once told me that his uncle G. I. Prettyman didn’t make it past the fourth grade, as he was needed to help out at home on the farm. However, according to a contemporaneous biography (Minnesota and Its People, 1924, by Joseph Alfred Arner Burnquist),

[G.I.] “was reared and educated in Hewitt, attended the grade and high schools of the town, and then took a course in a commercial college at Little Falls, Minnesota. He was then sixteen years old and after completing his education entered the banking business and continued in it until 1911…”

I’m hoping that relatives reading this summary of what I’ve learned about G.I. Prettyman may be able to contribute considerably more than I’ve presented here. Please leave a comment below if you have additional information or stories about G.I. Prettyman or his family.

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Were Annie Horan and Anora Lee Prettyman the same person?

[NOTE: I recommend you read this revised post on Anora instead: https://blackenedroots.com/blog/anora-a-fresh-look/.]

confusedfamilytreeIn yesterday’s post, I investigated the birth family of my great-great-grandmother Mary Ann Horan. I learned that her parents were William and Anna (“Annie”) Horan. William Horan apparently disappeared (died? divorced?) around 1880. Annie Horan is listed on the federal census of 1880 as being the head of her household, while also marked as being married but not marked as being a widow.

Five years later, in 1885, Annie Horan also appears to have disappeared or died and her children appear to have been adopted a brother-in-law and next-door neighbor of Mary Horan, her husband’s older brother Francis (“Frank”) Marian Prettyman and his wife Anora Lee Prettyman.

When doing further research today into the mystery, I discovered a growing number of similarities between Anna Horan and Anora Lee Prettyman that make me now think that they were quite possibly the same person. If this is true, then my great-great-grandmother’s mother was also her sister-in-law! Continue reading

Alfred Wharton Prettyman (1823–1892)

My 3rd-great-grandfather, Alfred Wharton Prettyman, was the man responsible for bringing the Prettyman family to Minnesota. I haven’t yet written a post about Alfred W. Prettyman, so this will be an overview of his life, to be built upon in future posts.

By the time of Alfred’s birth, seven generations of his Prettyman ancestors had lived their lives on the Delmarva peninsula. The immigrant John Prettyman moved to the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay in 1643 (he actually immigrated from England a few years earlier, first settling on the the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay 1638, in St. Mary’s, Maryland). While the immigrant John died in the Virginia portion of the Delmarva peninsula, his son John and his descendants have lived in and around Sussex County, Delaware, ever since. In fact, this year marks 370 years that Prettymans have lived in Delaware, and 375 years that Prettymans have been in North America.

Alfred Wharton Prettyman was born in Georgetown, Sussex County, Delaware, on December 1, 1823, to Robert Prettyman (1800–1863) and Elizabeth (Pepper) Prettyman (1803–1837). While Alfred would be the last Prettyman of his line to be born in Delaware, it was actually Alfred’s father, Robert Prettyman, who first broke tradition and departed the Prettyman’s ancestral stomping grounds in Delaware for the wilds of West Virginia (then just the western portion of Virginia). According to Edgar Cannon Prettyman’s 1968 work, The Prettyman Family in England and America, 1361–1968, Robert lived most of his life in Woodsfield, Ohio. Woodsfield is just about 15 miles to the west of the Ohio River and the West Virginia border.

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C.A. Prettyman, dairy farmer?

dairy cowsI found a couple of clues today that indicate that my great-grandfather, Charles Austin Prettyman—in addition to being a barber, real estate appraiser, mortgage banker, insurance agent and real estate developer—was also a dairy farmer for a time.

According to the membership list published in the Proceedings of the 34th annual meeting of the Minnesota State Dairyman’s Association, held in Wadena, Minnesota, from January 16–19, 1912, Charles Austin Prettyman (referred to on page 13 simply as “Austin Prettyman,” one of several names he went by) was a member of the Minnesota State Dairyman’s Association in 1912:

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