100 years ago today, “Somewhere in France”

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Exactly one hundred years ago today, my great-uncle William Alonzo Bailey (the boy in the header photo above) wrote the following letter home to his mother, Ellen Caroline (“Carrie”) Severson Bailey (the older woman in the header photo above).

Will was serving in the U.S. Army in France during World War I. The Dorothy he mentions is his sister, Dorothy Mary Bailey, from whom I inherited this and dozens of other letters from World War I. The Cambrai he refers to is the Battle of Cambrai in France at the end of November to early December 1917. Continue reading →

Merry Christmas!

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Merry Christmas to family and friends near and far! Today’s post is a selection of Christmas cards (actually Christmas postcards and one Christmas telegram) that were received or sent by ancestors and relatives from the early 1900s until the mid-1940s.

I wish you all a joyous Christmas—hearts filled with good cheer, bellies filled with good food, homes filled with family, and a future filled with hope and good tidings for everyone.

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Dot’s last letter from her father

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While Christmas is often the happiest time of the year in our family, it can also sometimes be one of the saddest times. While today’s post is about one of those sad times, I promise that a more upbeat Christmas post is coming after this one.

This week has been a sad one for our family, so when I came across this letter, written 94 years ago today, it seemed an appropriate subject for today’s post. My great-aunt Dot (Dorothy Mary Bailey) had just married Clarence Humphrey Bailey in Fort Collins, Colorado, just two days before this letter was written.

Dot’s father (my great-great-grandfather) William Noble Bailey was suffering from diabetes and was too ill to travel to see his youngest daughter get married. In fact, he was so ill that he died just a week after writing this letter, on December 31, 1923, at his daughter Lucinda (Bailey) McMurry’s house in Olympia, Washington. Continue reading →

Goodbye Grandma Prettyman

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My dear, sweet grandmother, Harriet Eva (Askew) Prettyman, passed away at 9:00 pm tonight, December 14, 2017. It was not unexpected, as she was 95 and had a rough last few years, but her loss leaves an empty hole in the hearts of all those who knew and loved her.

I’ll share more of her life story and our memories of her in the coming days and weeks, but for now I just wanted to share a few photos of her as part of my way of saying goodbye. Continue reading →

George Faulkner McMurry, part I

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Today’s post will be my first look into the life story of George Faulkner McMurry, one of the two brothers adopted by James Miller McMurry and his wife Grace Aitken. My cousin Crystal turned me on to this story, and if you haven’t read her post on George, you should go read it now!

Crystal learned that George and his brother Douglas survived a shipwreck that killed their parents. The brothers were then adopted by James and Grace McMurry in Port Townsend, Washington. She also learned that George was married briefly, and that he was murdered in San Francisco in June, 1945. All tantalizing stuff!

In addition to this story having a lot to recommend it on its own, I suspect that the story of George and his brother may shed light on Grace Aitken’s family in New York, and that it may help explain why widower James McMurry moved in his later years to Sutter County, California, where he apparently had no family. Continue reading →

The first American decade of John Prettiman I (1610–1688)

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My tenth-great-grandfather John Prettiman (1610–1688) was an immigrant to the English colonies in the New World. While the connections between him and his American descendants are relatively solid and well-researched, the connection between him and his English birthparents has so far been impossible to definitively prove. I can only hope that some day a document might come to light that resolves this lack of certainty. Until then, as my cousin Pat Coonan stated in his 2005 work Minnesota Prettymans, 

…a process of elimination must be used to speculate on who the actual ancestor must be. Probabilities indicate that the John Prettiman that came to America is the son of Robert Prattyman and Dorothie Goddard.

I had originally intended this post to be a summary of all that we know of John Prettiman, but before too long I was astonished to discover all of the information that survives about John Prettiman after his arrival in Maryland. Accordingly, I’ll limit this post to just the events of John Prettiman’s first decade or so in the New World, from his arrival in Maryland in the mid 1630s to his departure for Virginia in 1643. Continue reading →

Vernon’s WWII family photo wallet

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For this Veteran’s Day post, I’ll be looking at an artifact that illuminates the early relationship between two veterans in my family—one who served during WWII, and one who was still two decades away from serving and was too young to understand the sacrifices his father and his family were making.

This post is about a wallet of loose photos that my grandfather, Vernon C. Black, carried with him during World War II to remind him of his family back home. My grandmother, Dorothy R. (McMurry) Black, took the photos, captioned them, and mailed them in letters she sent almost daily (most of which still survive and will undoubtedly be the topic of a series of blog posts in the future). She also cared for the wallet and photos for decades and thoughtfully left a note giving a brief history of the wallet.

This photo wallet was carried by Vernon Curtis Black with these pictures in it during WWII (carried in his right hip pocket.) —Dorothy R. Black

Continue reading →

James McMurry’s letter to the “grands”

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Today’s post is about a letter that James Miller McMurry wrote to his “Grands”—presumably his grandnephew Arthur (Art) and Art’s wife Ezelpha. I received a photocopy of this letter from my grandmother, Dorothy Ruth McMurry Black—Arthur’s first cousin. I saw the original letter in 1990 when visiting Art, and I’m hoping someone in the family still has this letter.

I hadn’t read this letter in over 25 years, and upon re-reading it I discovered a bounty of new information: I learned of another two relatives who fought in the Civil War, including one who possibly died at Shiloh. I realized that the recipient was my cousin Arthur Edgar McMurry, not my great-great-grandfather Arthur Webster McMurry. I learned a bit about James McMurry’s wife Grace Aitken and her life before she and James met. I learned a bit more about the timing of the McMurry’s move to Arkansas, and the location of their land there. I got a bit of description of the area around James’ last home, in Sutter County, California. I also learned a bit more about James’ adopted son and his latest sailing voyage. Continue reading →

Mo’ land, mo’ taxes

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I found another few interesting tidbits about my third-great-grandfather and everyone’s favorite Minnesota Askew family patriarch, Joseph Askew (1840–1911). I was scouring a new Wadena newspaper title I ran across recently, and I discovered that Joseph Askew owned two additional parcels of land I hadn’t previously known about. Each of the two parcels was 40 acres, so this was a total of 80 additional acres of land.

Below I present a portion of a supplement included in the Thursday, July 24th, 1884, edition of The Northern Pacific Farmer, a short-lived paper that was published in Wadena, Minnesota, between 1878 and 1885. The supplement was entitled “Delinquent Tax List.” Uh oh. Continue reading →

Thank you, Hiram Scott (part 3)

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In the first installment of this series, I introduced my fourth-great-grandfather, Hiram Scott, who died in New Orleans while serving the Union Army in the U.S. Civil War. On observation of this past Memorial Day, I wanted to honor his memory by learning as much as I can about him, with a eye towards uncovering his birth family and his early life. If you haven’t yet read the first and second posts in this series, you should read them (here and here) before continuing with this post.

In today’s post, I’ll be laying out what I know about Hiram Scott’s military service during the U.S. Civil War. I haven’t yet been able to find his Civil War Compiled Service Record, so I’ll be relying on inferences I can draw from his personal history and from the regimental history of the 95th Illinois Volunteers. Continue reading →