Category Archives: Marshall
It Was Right Under My Nose!!
Gladys Marshall Lowery’s Autograph Book
Recently I’ve seen a couple posts about autograph books. Very cool books indeed and I remembered have my maternal grandmother’s autograph book. My mom gave it to me years and years ago. It’s been safely put away for sometime now. My recent blog readings made me hunt it up.
It took only a few moments to pull out my grandmother’s autograph book. I knew exactly where it was. The cover and pages are in really nice shape, it’s just that the binding is broken. So gently and ever so carefully I turn every page.
My grandmother, Gladys B. Marshall Lowery was born in 1892 in Allen County, Ohio. The earliest message in her book is January 5, 1903. Maybe this album was a Christmas gift. She’d have been 10 years old then and I imagine this was a prized possession.
As I look through the pages some notes are signed “your cousin” with vaguely familiar names.
Nov 29. 1909.
Cousin Gladys,
Love your playmates
Love your toys;
But never never love
the boys.
Your cousin,
Ida Kidd
Later my grandmother wrote Battles after Ida’s last name. Thanks grandma for her married name!!
So I need to check these collateral family members out.
Have you seen my Great Grandfather’s cane?
George S Marshall
George was born in 1868 in Allen County, Ohio. He married my great-grandmother Mary Ellen Williams in 1891. They had three children, my grandmother Gladys was the oldest and they lived on a farm that’s only about 20 minutes from me today.
By all accounts life seemed good for the family. They had three children, were farmers and prospered. I have a couple of pictures of George and Mary Ellen in front of their house and on the farm. It was a happy life until 1908 when my great-grandmother died. Consumption was the cause listed on Mary Ellen’s death certificate. It may as well read “Tragic Ending” because George suddenly became a single father of two teenage girls and a small son.
Thursday Thoughts on Genealogy and Everything Else
Hi genealogy friends! Thursday’s Thoughts here again. Nothing profound, just observations and who knows, maybe something here will spark a conversation or two!
• I have updated Genealogy Circle with a new look and logo! I hope you find it easy to read. I continue to work on the broken photo links on some of the old posts. I am a little more than half finished but will have that completed soon. I also added new family charts to my surname links on the front page. (Again the old links were broken.) Hopefully I’ll have the site update completed in the next week!
• Last week on Thursday Thoughts I mentioned looking through the Roster of Ohio Soldiers 1861-1866. I received a comment on the post from from Debbie Mayes.
Did you know there’s an index there for the Roster of Ohio Soldiers 1861-1866? It’s on microfilm and is called the G.A.R. Index. It’s in alphabetical order by surname so if your ancestor had brothers or other relatives who served, you’ll find all of them listed together in the index. Next to
Family History from my great grandmother’s pen
My great grandmother Mary Ellen Williams (Marshall)
Blogging about transcribing a document in last Saturday’s post reminded me of an essay my great-grandmother wrote. So I dug it out of my pile of papers. I assume she was a student and this was one of her weekly compositions. There wasn’t a date on it but since she was born in 1871 I’d guess it was written in the mid to late 1880s.
As a family history buff some of the contents are eye-popping and I’ll talk about them after you read it.
So here is a transcription of a hand written essay by Mary Ellen Williams
Rainy Days
For my part, I like rainy days, to be sure, one can’t go away from home and is not very liable to receive visits, yet there are many pleasant things which may be done on a rainy day, while if it were sunshiny, one might never think of them. In the first place, if I can get a good book to read I don’t care how it may storm outside for I am oblivious to all around me. But if I can’t get a book my next greatest pleasure is to go up to the attic and rummage among the old things there. I wish you could see some of the queer and ancient things I find. There is a spinning wheel two hundred years old which I don’t doubt has many a time buzzed in the presence of Washington for great-grandmother Williams knew him well. I’ve tried several times to spin with it and such work as I’ve made!! But it’s fun.
What moment in history have you found that changed your ancestors lives?
Susannah Van Meter
So why did all these girls marry “so late in life?” I’ll bet it was the war. With so many men enlisting or eventually being drafted into Civil War service, courtships must have come to a standstill! In our area 2,000 men served which is about 10 percent of the population at that time. In fact my research has our g-g-grandmother seeing her brother and five cousins off to war and I’m not anywhere near finished researching the family yet.
I hadn’t really noticed the trend of this entire family marrying later until my sister pointed it out, but isn’t it another example of learning what events local and nationwide impacted our ancestors?
What moment in history have you found that changed your ancestors lives? It would be neat to see if that same event occurred in our own families. Let me know in the comments, won’t you?
