SHIFTING SHAPE AND NAMING NAMES

 

Scout woke me up around 3-ish by chewing on my face mask. I had to fully rouse to stop her, and when I opened my eyes I saw Margot on the skype screen getting dressed. Was able to turn on the mic and say hello before going back under, Scoutie my chest duvet. Again: Coincidence?

Had upsetting dreams later about playing board games with my brothers (Craig cheated, of course) and discovering a massive black widowish-looking spider in my bedroom which, upon capture under a cup, turned out to be a malignant alien shape shifter who simply lifted the cup with newly-grown tentacles and skittered off behind a bookcase. No Oak in that dream.

Tammi has spoiled Scout unconscionably by holding her in one arm while cooking breakfast and doing other kitchen tasks. Scout is avid and now takes it as her right. When Tammi doesn't pick her up, Scoutie has been leaping onto her back from the nearest counter, twice drawing blood. Tammi is now talking about borrowing a Snugli from her mother...

The AC went on the fritz again, this time needing freon. I had to cancel Monday's PT but we made up for it yesterday in a cool house, with Gil actually arriving on time and my various problem sites healed enough to push into new exercise territory. It was brutal. I was, as M says, knackered afterward, and am sore today. Working HARD.

I have also been surging ahead in fleshing out my family tree. Now have over 12,500 individuals identified. Last night I was greatly entertained by a line living near Memphis where one girl was named Verbel and a later nephew was named Rade Tubal. Can't make up stuff as good as this.

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ELIZA OPHELIA HILL STAFFORD

This is a photo of my great-great-grandmother Eliza Ophelia Hill, born 1858 in a cane-growing region of Florida. She witnessed the Civil War as a child. Her father Jimmy "Cane" Hill fought in the Confederacy and after the war named his youngest son Rebel.

When she was 12, the family sailed from Florida to Galveston and traveled by wagon to North Texas, settling in Montague County. There at age 17 she married George Austin Stafford, a kind and bright man who farmed but also worked as a homespun inventor. He lost his left arm as a boy in a threshing accident, and devised many tools to accommodate his disability, including a combined spoon-knife-fork for the one-handed diner.

Eliza bore 14 children over the next 25 years, including a final set of twins. Four of these children died in infancy or toddlerhood.

George retired in his 60s and they moved to Sour Lake, Texas. Wives and mothers don't get a retirement. Eliza outlived George by 15 years and died at the age of 92 on the Gulf Coast. Just found this photo of her today. I cannot accurately guess her age, considering what she lived through.

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BLENDING IMPOVERISHED LINEAGES

(Birmingham, England silverware factory from Victorian era, photo by David Sillitoe)

Yesterday I had what felt like a real "day off", no extra appointments or obligations, just the usual. Rosemary made me refried beans (MY beans!) with cornbread, then dashed out to a nearby barbecue joint for a pound of hot juicy brisket as well as a slice of "diabetic" lemon meringue pie, the latter her idea. The pie was sugar-free and not especially flavourful; I am demanding about lemon, my favourite dessert option, so though there was no immediate spike in my glucose, I won't repeat the experiment.

But the brisket turned Sunday into MEEEET day for me and Dinah both.

Feeling some slack, and having temporary access to UK census/vital records. I started researching Margot's lineage. All I had was the names of her four grandparents -- one of those wrong, as it turns out -- and her insistence that everybody for generations was from the Midlands and/or Black Country. It was my first serious venture into seeing how England has organized its records, a steep learning curve. At least it was in English, but the cultural priorities were noticeably different from even early American values. For instance, no attempt to gather property values on the English censuses, or suss out what is being farmed.

(Tools used in silverware factory, Birmingham, England; photo by David Sillitoe)


Margot's lineage, as of this morning, now has 185 individuals in it extending back into the 1600s on a couple of branches. She is right that she is from overwhelmingly Midlands stock, though a few Welsh and Yorkshire origins have crept in. Her people are working class, in fact poor, and it seems like everyone is named either William, Rose, Joseph or Emma, a bewildering repetition of nondescript names. Children are at work definitely by 14, often by 10 or 11; families are enormous; and women die early. Education is truncated severely.

This is what birth control changed, plain and simple, this handing on of generational despair and poverty. Right there on the page.

The occupations were industrial and sounded stultifying. When there was an identifiable trade, it was zealously handed on to the sons (and sometimes daughters), a way out of the monotony of factory work. Discovering a publican was a relief; he and his former servant wife owned the Bridge Inn, a beerhouse likely near a canal in Ladywood, Birmingham.

My own ancestors were equally poor and limited, but I kept thinking at least they were on farms, had access to clean air and sunlight and fresh food. I know such comparisons cannot be made using modern values, and I had to stop such projections as they arose in me. Follow the record and get it down without interpretation, not until the history comes naturally to me as it does here.

But already I can see what a change the first World War wrought on this world.

Margot had warned me she was not especially interested in the details of her ancestry, it's not "her thing" nor it is important to her mother. However, as I unroofed generations, they both got a little sucked in. How can you not?

The most significant part of the day came when M and I discussed whether she wanted me listed as her partner, thus linking my massively researched pedigree to hers out there in cyberworld, permanently. Ancestry, despite being a Mormon-owned company, sidely includes the possibility for same-sex alliances in the software, and in fact there is an option to link friends or partners into a family unit. M said to go for it, even though at some point Mother may want to see the online chart. So I linked us as partners, a first for me in all my decades of genealogy.

I am still near tears about it. Major symbolic step, my friends.

My dreams last night were too confusing to sort out, full of her kin and my cousins. She has one great-something-grandfather who lived in Wales and gave his occupation as "naturalist", Thomas Crosse; now there's a man I want to know more about, and he was in my dreams, with a long beard and a ratty hat, roaming about cliffs over the sea. Along with my cousin Barney, a huckster and womanizer whose grin still keeps getting him off the hook out there.

Thank g*d I had all that meat, this kind of digging and synthesizing chews through B vitamins. Ahh, Tammi just announced a fresh batch of cornbread is done, do I want a slice? Must go, my people's grain awaits.

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HANDING ON THE PAST

For my birthday, Amanda Johnston and Allison Sigrist sent me a chunk o'cash, mutiples of my age. These woman already give me $ each month right before rent is due. I was going to use it to pay my phone bill, but then I stopped to think about what these women mean to me, individually and as a couple. Among countless other important realities about who they are and what they do, it was Amanda who introduced me to the internet back in 1995 and trained me to have an online presence. Her marriage to Allison helped spark the writing of Ginny Bates. And their visit last November launched not only the research of Allison's family (i.e., Lavinia) but also Stoundmeal.

So I decided to spend the gift on something other than grim necessity. I could hear each of them in my head saying "Yes!" Consequently, I now have a combo scanner/printer/copier that networks with my new laptop, including the ability to scan from slides and negatives.

During the 1980s, at the height of my genealogical travels, everywhere I went I asked folks I visited if I could copy their family photos. I had a camera with a special lens and stand that made this easy. Most of these photographs were in danger of being lost and did not exist elsewhere, certainly not in negative form. I also photographed places and gravestones, keeping detailed notes. I have hundreds of these negatives safely stored in labeled sleeves.

I was also inspired by JEB, Lynda Koolish, Cathy Cade, Tee Corinne, and many others during the 1970s to document my own life and community. I have dozens of albums stuffed with photographs of the wimmin and events I knew. Few of them have ever been scanned.

So, my goal for the next couple of months is to render all these images to a digital format that can be easily shared and reliably preserved. It's a monumental project, something I think of as part of the heritage I want to leave behind. I will post later on the question of privacy and distribution, asking for your feedback.

This weekend I have embarked on the oldest images, family going back to the first advent of photography. As I scan, I am definitively identifying each photo, running it through editing, and posting it at my online genealogical tree -- instant sharing. I will share a few of these in future posts with stories attached as I write them.

And it frees me up for the brave new world I have embarked on with Margot.

For now, the photo above shows me at age 9 (on the left) with my cousin Sally and little brother Bill in Dilley, Texas, December 1964. This is in our dining room, which was also my only space in the house. I was being abused by Craig though not quite sexually yet. I had just written my first poem and found out I was a lesbian. Sally is my cousin, Mama's sister's (Aunt Sarah) younger daughter, 4 months apart from me in age. The stuffed lion was called Leo. We are sitting on my bed.

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TURNING IT OVER

Samuel Mordecai Turner, circa 1885, Montague County, Texas -- my mother's mother's father

I stayed up til 2:00 despite being very tired, but slept 8 hours. I didn't get done yesterday what I wanted, I got sucked into the genealogy hole, chasing a new approach to getting around an old family brick wall: The Turner/Smith lines.

My cousin Sally (mama's sister's daughter, four months older than me) has also done some genealogy and likewise finds this bunch interesting. She's a convert to Judaism and her theory is that the Turners emigrated from England to near Memphis in part because they were Jews. Family naming tradition and a few photographs make this idea plausible. A single frail record states our great-great-great- grandfather Joseph Turner was from England, and a couple of scanty census records plunk him in Fayette County, Tennessee in 1830 and 1840, where he had a son (Joseph Turner II) before apparently dying just as the 1850 census would have given us some real data on him.


Joseph Turner II married in 1841 to one of the more emotionally powerful women in my lineage, Matilda Clementine Smith. They had two sons before Joseph died, again before that magic 1850 revelation point. Matilda went on to remarry twice, have two more sons, migrate to new land in Arkansas, and establish herself as a solid property owner and community leader. She outlived three husbands and all but one of her sons, extremely rare for a woman in that place and time. She also never owned slaves in constructing her middle class security, again rare for the place and time.

Her sole surviving son, Thomas Joseph "Tom" Turner, married a doormat he bred into an early grave, came back from the CSA with a mean glint in his eye, and had trouble finding one of his many children willing to take him in during old age. He died penniless, but his son Samuel Mordecai Turner (my great-grandfather) was beloved in the community, married a brilliant and outgoing woman, and is part of the "good line" on mama's side.

For a couple of generations, all we knew was Tom Turner's name and his claim that his father had been born in England. Turner is a surname as common as Jones in the South, and it took me a very long time to find him as a fatherless child on the 1850 census, living with widowed young mother Matilda, her father Jabez Smith, and no doubt the next of Matilda's husbands already stopping by for dinner. Adding the surname of Smith to the mix didn't help one iota.

Fayette County, Tennessee is one county over from Memphis and borders Mississippi. It's Delta land, flat, saturated with extreme racial oppression, white class stratification, and not much civic wealth to go around. Records available from a distance were extremely scarce, and remain so even now with the internet because they weren't created in the first place except to document ownership of property.

So, in 1985, I included Fayette County on my family history research tour. It stands out in my memory for how shut down its white inhabitants were (generally, the more a rural place had once relied on slavery, the more hostile its white people were now, I discovered on that trip). I spent one day digging around before fleeing back to Memphis to sleep.

I went to the courthouse first, to find a marriage record for Joseph Turner and Matilda Smith. I was lucky that the courthouse had never been burned -- about half of all Southern courthouses were deliberately torched by Union troops during the civil war as part of community disruption and terrorism. The marriage records didn't begin until 1840, which is common for the South away from the Eastern seaboard: Southern genealogy holds piecemeal records for whites, much less for blacks and natives. But 1840 might be early enough to find Joseph and Matilda, I hoped. The register had never been indexed, so I began looking through the dusty, oversized pages one by one, standing at a corner counter, glared at by the Mary-Kay-aspiring white women who worked as clerks there.

No luck. I went on until 1860, tediously copying all the Smith and Turner marriages into my notebook, but with no hope they'd connect to my line. As I was closing the ledger, I noticed a couple of loose partial pages at the back which had fallen out of the binding. I pulled them out to look at them -- I am thorough -- and there it was: Mr. Joseph Turner to Miss Matilda C. Smith, October 21, 1841 The paper was crumbling but I made a gentle copy, told the clerk about the possible loss of precious data if the pages weren't cared for, and went outside into bright sunshine for an exultant break.

I decided to walk a block away, to an old grocery store within view, for a snack. What happened next is an incident I wrote about almost verbatim in Ginny Bates, an episode of revelatory racism that I failed to address to anything like my satisfaction. [Excerpted at the end of this post.]

When I eventually returned to the courthouse, my connection to my ancestors had been altered. I found no further solid records on my people that day -- they had been tenant farmers, owned nothing, their deaths were not registered, and in a decade everyone migrated westward into stolen Indian lands whose soil was not yet played out. What I got from Fayette County was the marriage scrap and a hint of black/white relations as they must have been when Joseph and Matilda lived there -- all in all, what I most needed to be given.

Thus yesterday, when I found a hint on how I might follow the Smiths despite inadequate records, I was off and running. I did manage to accumulate a fair amount on Matilda's cousins, but in the end this foundation was not a springboard further back. That's what usually happens in this kind of research, you leave nothing undone in retrieval and collating but the bigger mystery remains. So I still don't know where the Smiths came from, beyond "North Carolina", or why the Turners came from England to the Delta in 1830.

I think I have Sam Turner's eyes, though, and his love of community. I have Matilda Smith's perseverance, and if either of them are guiding my curiosity, maybe further glimmers will come my way. Today, however, I'll focus on the 21st century.

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Excerpt from Ginny Bates referred to above. Background: Myra is the main character loosely based on me, a working-class white lesbian. Her partner is Ginny Bates, a middle-class white Jew. Her best friend is Allie, a working-class black lesbian raised in the South. Myra and Allie have gone back to Mississippi to research Allie's ancestry with Myra's genealogical expertise. The location and events in this episode, however, are drawn entirely from my own experience in Fayette County, Tennessee, one county north of Mississippi.

Myra showed Allie the ropes, how things were organized: It was the same for every county in the South, seemed like. Allie wanted to begin with marriage records, which thankfully here had a bride as well as a groom index. But there were separate indexes for whites and "colored" prior to 1960. Allie's lips tightened again. Myra decided to take on the deeds, which tended to be tedious and full of bad handwriting to decipher.

It was peaceful in the basement. Full of lovely old paper and massive bound books, with light from an airwell at the side: Myra began to have fantasies of a study this sequestered and quiet. But, she noticed after using her inhaler a second time, it was also dusty and likely had a high degree of ambient mold.

"Al? I need to go up into the air, get something to drink, I think" she said.

"Is there a break room in the courthouse, you think?"

"Well, on the square near where we parked, by the corner, was a little grocery store -- looked like something from the fifties. I'll walk down there, you want to go with?"

"No. But bring me back some orange juice, and something to snack on" said Allie, her eyes glued to the index on the table in front of her.

Myra told the clerk on her way out "I'm going for a Co-Cola, back in a bit", noticing how she had pronounced the word. There was a cluster of cars near the tax assessor's office, and one in front of a discount store. Otherwise, the square was empty.

The grocery store had high stamped tin ceilings obscured in shadow. All of the dairy cases were behind thick glass doors. She got Allie's juice, then found a case containing chilled soft drinks in real glass bottles, including RC Cola in a bottle shape she hadn't seen in over a decade. She grabbed two.

The candy aisle, disappointingly, did not hold vintage favorites she had hoped for -- no little wax bottles full of colored liquid, or Blo-Pops. She got a bag of Tom's peanuts for herself, roasted cashews for Allie, and headed for the front.

There were only two registers, one empty and one with a teased-hair white woman at the register. Another customer was ahead of her, a frail-looking black man in faded slacks and neatly-pressed tan shirt, buttoned up to the collar and at the cuffs. His hair was a snowy frizz, and when looking at his skin, she instantly remembered the line from Zora Neale Hurston that Allie quoted often: "High yaller, yaller, high brown, vaseline brown, seal brown, low brown, dark brown". Myra would guess him to be seal brown.

He had just done his shopping for at least a week, maybe two weeks. It was the 30th: Just got his Social Security check, she bet. With trembling, knot-knuckled hands he was carefully lifting items from a wire cart to the counter -- no conveyor belts here. A 10-pound bag of white rice, big can of Crisco, smaller can of blackstrap molasses, bag of chicken necks and backs, 5-lb bag of Gold Medal, bottle of light Karo (If he's got a pecan tree, that's a pie, thought Myra), baking soda, can of Maxwell house, quart of sweet milk, two cans of evaporated milk, pound of bacon, box of Spic'n'Span...No veggies or eggs, which means he's got a little bit of land, thought Myra.

She had been standing respectfully back and had apparently not been noticed by the woman at the register. When the old man asked for a can of snuff, however, the woman changed position enough to see Myra.

"Here, now" she called out sharply. "You come on up here, I'll check you out first."

Myra began to protest as the woman shoved aside the old man's last few items, saying "Oh, no, I'm not in a hurry and he's almost done -- "

But the old man shrunk even smaller into his already shrunken frame and stepped back from the counter, pressed into the corner. He didn't look up. Myra froze in horror.

"Give me what you've got there" commanded the woman, her voice not at all friendly. Myra's eyes were on the old man, willing him to make contact with her, as she numbly complied, dropping her bottles onto the counter. The woman voided her register with the push of a button and began punching in Myra's prices.

"I'm sorry" Myra said to the old man. He didn't acknowledge her at all.

"He can wait" said the woman shortly. She took Myra's money, counted out change, and bagged her items in impatient silence. Myra said "thank you" to her and then to the old man, but only the woman responded, saying "You're very welcome" before picking back up the Crisco and starting his checkout again.

Out on the sidewalk, Myra fought the impulse to vomit. She tried to find a way to believe that what had just occurred wasn't what she thought it was. She pulled out one of her RC's, only to discover she needed a churchkey to open the top. Well, she wasn't going back into that store, that's for sure. Maybe the car glovebox would have something to open her bottle.

No luck with the glovebox, but she had a dim memory from her teenage beer-drinking years that led her to find a leverage spot inside the open car door, popping off the cap on the second try. She drank down to the shoulder of the bottle, poured the peanuts into the neck, and sat down inside the car, closing the door as a kind of shield against the square itself. She glanced back at the store: The old man wasn't visible yet.

When he emerged, she could idle up and offer to give him a ride home. But she suspected that would send him into complete panic. She wasn't sure what the rules were, so how to intelligently break them was beyond her. She couldn't believe this was 2004, that his instant subservience could be still happening. If he was in his 70s, then he had been born maybe around 1930 -- well, if he lived through the Depression here, with his parents, that told her a lot.

She took slow sips, crunching a peanut or two with each drag, savoring the mix of syrup and salt. She didn't know how to back in and face Allie. She had a strong urge to see Chris walk up: She could tell Chris about what had just happened, and if Chris chewed her out, got mad at her, it would help ease her guilt.

But that urge made her feel even more guilty. Leaning on one woman of color to deal with her guilt about another woman of color. Nope, she had to deal with this on her own. Well, and with Ginny, when she got that chance.

She finished her drink and put the empty bottle in the back floorboard, along with her second RC. She hid Allie's snack inside her pack and returned to the courthouse.



Copyright 2010 Maggie Jochild.

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MARY JO ATKINS BARNETT, 9 FEBRUARY 1927 -- MY FAMILY LEGACY

(Maggie and Mary Jo Atkins Barnett, December 1956, at the British Embassy Christmas Party in Kolkata, India)

Mama was born on this day in 1927, in a Sears catalogue house built on a parcel of land where I lived when I was in high school. Her mother Hettie was already dying of tuberculosis, a strain which had been handed down to her through the family from my great-great-great grandfather Richard Dickson Armstrong, who contracted it (and died from it) as a Confederate prisoner in the condemned Union Army Prison on an island in the river near Alton, Illinois. That prison had no floors, just mud, and no window glass, just open portals covered with blankets during the long winters. His son, my great-great-grandfather David Mastin Armstrong, was a 17-year-old Confederate soldier when he gave himself up to the Union soldiers so he could accompany his father to prison and look after him.

Released from prison after the South's surrender in 1865, 19-year-old David carried the tuberculosis with him on his long walk back to Arkansas and, not long afterward, his covered wagon migration to the unsettled counties of the Crosstimbers region of Texas. He married Margaret Semmerine Ritchie that year (the ancestor for whom I am named). They had stillborn twin sons and a daughter, Sarah Lee, before David died still a young man in the sod house they built a couple of miles from where my mother was born.

(Margaret, Sarah Lee, and David Mastin Armstrong, taken circa 1895 in Montague County, Texas; David was already dying of tuberculosis in this photo; my great-great grandparents and my great-grandmother)


Margaret raised their daughter alone on the farm. When Sarah married Samuel Mordecai Turner, they renovated the sod house into a two-room dogrun but the TB was already there in both Sarah and Sam's lungs. They had three children in rapid succession, Roy, Hettie, and Effie Lee.

(Samuel Mordecai Turner, 1872-1903, photo taken around 1895 in Bowie, Montague County, Texas; my great-grandfather)

Then, in the space of one year, little Roy plus his parents Sarah and Sam died, leaving Margaret with two small granddaughters. She raised them well, paying for them to start school at age six instead of age eight (at that point in Texas, girls' education was paid for only from 8-14) and for Hettie to go to Texas State Normal School to get her teaching certificate.

(William Rusk "Bill" Atkins and Hettie Alberta Turner Atkins, taken not long after their marriage in 1919, at the "Sears house" in Stoneburg, Montague County, Texas; photo taken by Hettie, who was an amateur photographer, using a bulb syringe in her hand; my mother's parents)

Hettie was in love with a second cousin once removed, Nora Armstrong. But Nora was determined not to stay in that rural area. She went to Fort Worth where she became a "businesswoman", as the family said. Hettie couldn't leave her family. She eventually married Bill Atkins, fresh back from World War I where he'd been mustard-gassed while serving in the medical corps. They had my Aunt Sarah, my Uncle Bill, and Mama before Hettie died. By that time, they were all living with Margaret in the house she'd ordered from Sears, now helping to raise the third generation. But when Hettie died, and Bill began falling apart from grief, Margaret (now in her 70s) said they needed to find another home for the baby until she was older.

(Margaret Semmerine Ritchie Armstrong, 1858-1939, taken during the 1930s in Hogg County, Texas; my great-great-grandmother)

Hettie's surviving sister, Effie, lived in Eastland County, Texas. She too had gotten a college education to become a teacher, and had married another teacher. They had two young sons, and they decided to adopt Mama. But that winter, the winter of 1927-28, the rains never let up and bridges all over Texas were washed out. For weeks on end, they literally could not find a road which would safely take them from where they lived up to Montague County. Instead, Bill Atkin's brother and his wife (Auther and Sook Atkins), whose children were already grown, took in Mama. By the time Effie and her husband wrote they would be able to come get Mama, Auther and Sook were attached to her and wanted to keep her. Since it would mean she could stay near her siblings and father, Bill decided to give Mama temporarily to his brother and sister-in-law instead of Effie's family.

Such is the byway of destiny.

The Depression hit, and Bill died. Margaret, now becoming frail, went to live with Effie. Mama stayed with Auther and Sook, who adopted her and an abandoned grandson, Bobby, raising them as siblings. My Aunt Sarah and Uncle Bill were given away to aunts in Oklahoma, where they suffered profoundly abusive childhoods that scarred Bill Junior for life. Mama's adopted father, Auther, was a Socialist, a voracious reader, and an early feminist. I owe him, and Margaret Ritchie Armstrong, and Effie Turner, almost the entirety of who my mother became and, in turn, what shaped me.

(Mary Jo Atkins, age five in 1932, Stoneburg, Montague County, Texas)

Mama always tested positive for tuberculosis. She must have had it, and recovered from it, as a baby. A few years ago, I watched a show on television about the "ten most haunted places in the United States". I was electrified to hear them proclaim number one as the former Union Army Prison on the river outside Alton, Illinois. The prison no longer stands, but the ground itself and the bricks taken from the old structure carry numerous malignant specters, the show stated.

Mama would be 82 today. I've lived without her 23 years. At her funeral, there were dozens of people whose names we didn't know, folks she'd run across and befriended, standing at the back of the chapel and weeping. I still clearly hear her voice in my head, mostly laughing or commenting on events, people, history. She was probably the most curious person I ever met (well, maybe except for me). I liked her as much as I loved her, which says everything.


To view my mother's family tree, go to this RootsWeb link (the genealogy was done by me).

For other posts about my mother, read here and especially here. To read more about my family and/or ancestry, look in the Labels under "Family Memoir" and browse the 23 entries so far.

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