Tribute!

I was so lucky to know my recent ancestors personally.  My kids had 3 great grandmas and 1 great grandfather.  This was the last of them.  At the age of 58 I now have no grandparents left alive.  How lucky I have been!!!

Grandma went home to be with the Lord 11/8/2014 at the age of 102! She was an amazing woman and an inspiring one as well. She said she never didn't eat what she wanted and she was well known for never uttering a word of gossip. She painted and quilted, cooked and farmed, if the tin on the barn roof was blown off she got up there and repaired it-she was amazing. She loved all of us, her family, unconditionally and never saw our faults. We will miss her but I am so glad she is finally home and finally reunited with grandad. Thank you grandma - for all of it - walks and talks and spray painted macaroni covered cigar boxes!  So happy that she was able to be home til the end and that I got to see her recently and spend some more time with her.  It is never enough is it?

This was her official Obituary.  She was Awesome!!

Nellie Corine Medlin
(September 20, 1912 - November 8, 2014)

Nellie Medlin

Nellie Corine (Quint) Medlin left this world behind and went to her heavenly home on November 8, 2014. She was 102 years old and was able to live at her home under the loving care of her daughters until her passing.

Nellie was born September 20, 1912 in Sullivan County, MO to Walter and Charlotte (Hamilton) Quint, the seventh of nine children. On April 8, 1931 she married George William Medlin. To this union three daughters were born: Irma, Evelyn, and Ramah. They lived on a farm southeast of Unionville before moving in 1943 to their farm north of Omaha. They enjoyed 53 years together before George’s passing. Nellie then moved to Unionville, MO.

Nellie spent her life serving others. She worked side by side on the farm with George, raised very large gardens, sewed clothes for her family, played music with her family at local churches, taught Sunday School and VBS at the Mount Hermon Church and Omaha Baptist Church, played the accordion at church and at nursing homes, made quilts and paintings for family members, and shared her many talents with others. Nellie was a self-taught natural musician and could play the accordion, piano, guitar, banjo, and mandolin. She was always willing to try new things and proved that age was not going to hold her back. She started oil painting at the age of 69, went white water rafting at 80, traveled to Alaska at 85, rode an ultra-light glider at 90, shot a crossbow at 95, and learned to Skype at 100.

Nellie was a Christian example to everyone she met, being kind and compassionate, forgiving, slow to anger, joyful always, and giving thanks in all circumstances. The lessons she taught her family and the memories she created will be greatly cherished.

Nellie was preceded in death by her parents, her husband, two son-in-laws, Niel Kiehn and Richard Morgan, one grandson, Courtney Dean Morgan, six brothers (Carl, Ross, Victor, Alva, Harry, and Glen Quint) and two sisters, Carmoleta Minear and Pauline Lewis.

Nellie is survived by her daughters Irma Kiehn of Exeter, CA; Evelyn Morgan of Pollock, MO; and Ramah (Richard) Dias of Hollister, CA. She is also survived by nine grandchildren: Kathy (Dave) Gates, Shawn (Edna) Kiehn, Rhonda (Steve) Rios, Nancy (R.G.) Lowry, Tonja (Ronnie) Wessel, Kym Jones, Chris Dias, Terry Jackson, and Shelly (Gary) Mort, 20 great-grandchildren, and 14 great-great-grandchildren. She is also survived by two sister-in-laws, Uarda Quint and Mary Pickett. 

 

She doesn't look 100!

Catching Up On The Paperwork!

I am not doing any fun genealogy in September!  Well not much anyway, see my favorite thing is the gathering of information.  I also like to put the information into a manageable format, like family tree sheets.  What I don't like to do is data entry!  I do realize that if I collect the info and then never put it out there it does no good.   I just don't like it, it may be the typing thing, it is more likely the repetitive nature of it.  So I am going to work on getting all the stuff I collated for the sharing with family onto my web site and then go through all of my find a grave memorials and make the connections that I know of.  I have been very lax about the adding of connections and need to improve.

Having now confessed my shortcomings I am going to share just a couple more pictures from my time in Missouri.  I joined the Putnam County Genealogical Society and the meetings are held in the museum, which is very full of all kinds of things.  (including family histories) This is the old Comstock funeral home horse drawn hearse, several of my relatives were carried in this.  That's Aunt Evelyn in the photo.

One afternoon we went for a drive with my cousin and myself, grandma, my mom and my aunt.  Those 3 women had lived in Putnam County for most of their lives (except for my mom the gypsy).  What a good time we had driving around the old roads just going where their memories would lead us and every corner we went around had a story of a family or friends that had lived there years ago.  One of the places we drove past was the Mt Herman Church north of Omaha Missouri (current pop. 2) where my mom and dad got married on the hottest July 30th anyone could remember!

It did not hinder the relationship at all, they were married 54 years and were together till death parted them, 6 years ago.  The man who married them was a seminary student and my dad's best friend from his hometown who had convinced him to go to school at the Evangelical United Brethren college in Lemars Iowa where he met my mom.  He had not graduated yet and so got a special license from the state of MO to do the ceremony - it was his first.  54 years later he did the funeral for my dad and it was his last official function, he came out of retirement to perform it, not long before he passed away himself.  Westmar college no longer exists but it is now the home of Blue Bunny Ice Cream!

Putnam County is full of memories and the history of my family, I'm sure I will visit it again!

The Best Kind of Genealogy Research

Since August 6th I have been in Missouri with my mother - helping her with my grandmother.  Grandma is nearly 102 (Sept 20th if she makes it) and she is failing.  She has had several strokes and a heart attack, but like the energizer bunny she somehow keeps on going.  She needs help to move around but on her good days her mind is fairly reliable.  She retains her sense of humor - when I asked her how she felt she replied "with my fingers"!  We are trying to make her comfortable and help her to have a little variety in her days.   The goal is to keep her at home until the end.

She has always loved to take drives so we have devised a way to get her out of her 'home with many steps' and into the car and driven to some of 'her places'.  We have gone to the place where she was born, and even though the house is no longer there (it was 102 years after all) it is fun to see the area and I have the memory of the house which was still there when I was a kid.  When she was a kid it looked like this-

Her father (Walter) helped to make all the bricks that were used to build the house.  The man who built the house was  William Quint son of Frederich and husband of Amanda Jane Meals.  His son (Grandmas Father) was Walter Hymes Quint married to Charlotte Hamilton.

William built the big house where they all lived, he sold the house and later Walter bought the house back.   He raised registered Hereford cattle and farmed. Walter needed help to keep going in the early 20's and the bank refused to loan the money and he lost the house and the 2000 acres he owned, the family has often wondered, since the 20's were easy money for banks, who ended up with the property and if there were some hanky panky with the deed after the foreclosure.

Whatever happened then, the family had to move.  On our drive Grandma told the story of how she at the age of 12 had to drive one of the wagons all the way from Greencastle, MO to Elko, MO (about 20 miles on today's roads, they would have cut across some places) She said it took all day and the boy cousins that were driving the other 2 wagons would get down and go to the bathroom in the timber and maybe walk around.  She had such a big responsibility and she didn't really know what to do so she stayed on the wagon the whole time and didn't get to go potty until she got to the new house!  She said it was getting dark when they got there so she had been on the road all day.  She was almost sick with having to go.  I told her I felt bad for the little girl she was!

I will be going home in September so this month will be my genealogy in Missouri.  I have already trimmed the 'Find a Grave' photo requests in the Unionville Cemetery (a block from her house) from 101 to 40!  Hope to do a couple more of the local cemeteries while I'm here.  Hopefully I will have a few posts about the things I find here in the old family stomping grounds!

Of course then we took her to another favorite place KFC!  She and 2 of her 3 girls.

More Idaho "Guffeys"

Well after some more research I discovered that I had some more Guffeys in the local area cemeteries so I called my trusty (up for anything, when are we leaving) traveling companion Anita and we headed out to find the elusive pioneer era cemetery and we did find it, the cemetery and the area had interesting history and we were able to enjoy quite a bit of both!

Thomas Henry Guffey (son of Richard Guffey and Phoebe Adams) married Serena Emeline Roberts 1/16/1868 in Unionville MO.  Thomas was born in Clinton county KY on 1/7/1838 and was part of the huge migration from Kentucky to Northern Missouri in the 1840's and 1850's.  It seems that even the wild frontier that was Missouri at the time was too tame and Thomas moved to Idaho in 1891, the year after statehood.  In his local obituary he was hailed as one of the pioneers of the area and farmed in the Payette River valley the rest of his life.  He and his wife came west with the Callie Burt family from Exline Iowa and one of his daughters married a 'Burt'.  They came in a covered wagon and would have followed the Oregon trail to Boise and then swung a little north to get to this valley.  His obituary also describes him as over 6 feet tall and broad shouldered.  He passed away at the age of 90.

I knew that Thomas and Serena were at this cemetery but was surprised to find as well a daughter Anna Guffey Duggan.  Anna is their daughter, Anna Adelle, and Duggan is a 2nd (at least) husbands name, her first husband was I believe David Nickles and he is buried in eastern Idaho.  She is listed in the census records in 1930 as

'married' living in Boise as a lodger.  What fun for me, a bonus grave (is that too awful to say?). 

This is a real pioneer type cemetery western style as there is no grass and all the graves were covered with rocks, bricks or cement.  (to keep the varmints from digging them up - no really!)

There are Stuarts here and the name is actually listed on the sign as the Stuart-Falk Cemetery.  The town of Falk no longer exists but it was on the corner of SR 52 and SR 72 now known as Hamilton Corners.  If you put Falk cemetery, Idaho into google maps it does take you to the correct location. 

This area is what is known as 'high desert'  Elevation about 2500 ft and semi arid, average less than 10 inches of rain or moisture in a year.  All of the farming is and was dependent on irrigation.  In this area they dug a canal, it took from about 1896 to 1905 to make a go of the canal and 2 different companies went bankrupt trying to get it done, but finally the Noble Ditch Company got it done including being lined with canvas as the soil was so sandy!  To get the water out of the ditch and into the fields they used water wheels, some of which are still in use today in the nearby New Plymouth area.  This seemed like a natural progression on our trip and off we went. 

These things are awesome!

We found 3 of the remaining water wheels turning away, easily accessible, one is on a private road and another appears to have been pulled out of the canal and is laying on the side of the banks.  What an interesting thing to see, this is not what I would have considered "water wheel " country, I would think Mississippi river for that!

Leaving the area and stopping for a bathroom/drink break at Fruitland, we decided to take the side roads home and not the freeway, so we meandered through Parma and Notus.  In Notus we stopped to take a picture of the historic marker which gave us information we had never known.  Hard to believe this "reddest state in the country" was once a Southern Democrat stronghold!  What a fun day of history and genealogy we had!

Click on the photo to get a larger view!

Happy 4th of July!

I think that the 4th is more meaningful to me these days since I really got back to the immigrants on most of the branches of the family tree.  I was thinking of this last night and realized that knowing my relatives were there, knowing who they were, made a huge difference in my viewpoint, my feelings about the date!  This is true of all of the history of this great country for me these days but most of all for the 4th. 

I have a list of the Medlins who had land granted to them in Kentucky for their Revolutionary War service, the Hamiltons who were in the Pennsylvania Line and probably met George Washington.  The Guffeys and the Woodsons, the Carders and the Days, the Adams and the Harrisons.  I have yet to find a relative who wished to  go back to England or who fought for the English side, and within 30 years of the Revolutionary War all of my ancestors were part of the great westward migration. 

It is the story of America written in my own DNA!  My ancestors pushed west and settled in the vast open spaces, some made it as far as California, some went to Alaska and Hawaii.  They lived and died in the Gold rushes, they built in areas they had to fight for, they served their country in every branch of the military, the blood that runs through my veins is the same blood that stained the prairies and the mountains of America.  One hundred and thirty years later the other side of my family would come to this country fleeing tyranny and finding freedom.  The newcomers also fought, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East. 

Yes I definitely think that knowing who your family were at certain periods of time makes history come alive, I am not sure whether my love of history made me more interested in genealogy, or if the genealogy made me love history more but on a day like today when we remember the beginnings of our great nation, it just makes me proud!!

Research....Ok it was fun!

So my friend and I were going to take some photos in outlying cemeteries, you know pioneer type cemeteries, boot hill sorts of cemeteries - fun cemeteries!  If that sounds creepy you may have found this blog by accident!  :)  We were going to fulfill some photo requests from find-a-grave.com and have a fun day in the process.  We went to look up the requests and FAG was not responding, we checked to make sure it wasn't just us and the site is down for some reason.  So this meant we needed a fall back plan, a Plan B, so to speak!  We had to go somewhere, we had a cooler full of food and snacks!

The new plan then was chosen, we would go to Marsing to the new quilt shop "Sleepy Hollow", (had awesome fun looking at all the cool stuff and the quilts hanging on the walls), spent a little money since I found a fabric that is perfect for something for my oldest son.  (Don't know for sure what but it is perfect) Then we went south to Murphy to go through the museum they have there and on the way we went past a sign that said Guffey Ln.  We went to the museum, ate our picnic lunch (feast since Anita packed it!).  Enjoyed the glorious Idaho sky, and stopped on our way back and took pictures of the lane and the beautiful sky, and the snake river.

Guffey Lane looking toward the Snake River

Guffey Bridge taken on our visit to Celebration park over a year ago.

I had forgotten that there was a bridge over the Snake River called the Guffey Bridge, how you ask did I forget this, oh it was a couple of years ago, I wasn't researching Guffeys then and I am aging and could forget most anything at the drop of a hat (that last one is really unnerving I must say).  Our visit to the museum in Murphy reminded me and I had to come home and find out if this was one of my Guffeys that came to Idaho.  The answer is no....thought maybe we had found the rich uncle but no such luck.  Colonel James McClurg Guffey was the owner of Guffey Oil Co. and at one time the largest private oil, gas and coal producer in the country.  He was an investor in the Boise, Nampa, Owyhee rail line and president of the Trade Dollar Consolidated Mining Company in Silver City Idaho.  J.M. Guffey is in the line that I labeled as Line 4 in my May 15 post on the lines of Guffeys in the US.  According to the biography of him written when he was still alive, he was the son of Alexander and the descendant of William who came to this country in 1738 and fought against the French at Fort Duquesne, and settled on  Loyalhanna Creek and helped to start the first English settlement in Westmoreland county PA.  But alas not one of my relatives unless I find the connection in Scotland somewhere that will bring all of these lines together!  (hope springs eternal)

Looking south - awesome skies

Any day that includes this kind of beauty is a success in my book!

If I read the map right this is Guffey Butte

You never know - maybe I will find a connection to this famous Guffey, but until then the search continues for my Idaho Guffeys.  Next stop is Melba Idaho cemetery, I think some of them are there. 








So I will continue on in my search for the elusive...what?...too dramatic?...sigh..onward and upward!

Grandma Jo

I first met Grandma Jo Gates when my husband and I were dating.  She was an interesting person, I was this 'hick' from Wyoming who had just moved to California and was going through a sort of culture shock, she shared with me that she had moved to California with Grandpa Mel from Nebraska and that she had been born in Iowa.  I was born in Iowa and this made us instant 'kin'!  :)

I think she was already working on the genealogy back then in 1980, but I didn't talk to her about it until she started sending out questionnaires and then browbeating each of us till we turned them back in!  Maybe the appearance of great grandchildren spurred her on, whatever it was she was focused on getting as much as possible done before she died.  Born 6/26/1907 she was already pushing 80 when I met her and by the time she had great grands she was talking about getting things done before she died.  She ended up living to be 100 years old and in the last 20 years of her life she learned to use the computer, published a monthly family newsletter, compiled and edited her brothers diary, and researched the family tree back quite a few generations, went to Europe (amongst other trips) and served on the complaint board at the assisted living facility! 

Knowing her - none of the above listed accomplishments are really a surprise.  I will never forget the first time I saw her dance!  We had taken a houseboat trip, David and I, his parents and Grandma Jo, on the river delta near Stockton.  We had a wonderful trip and one night we stopped at a restaurant on the river that had a band that played big band era music and she and her son, my father in law (whom I knew as the very staid Rockwell engineer) 'cut a rug'!  They looked like 'Fred and Ginger', and I heard the story about how she had taught dance lessons to help earn money for her young family, and how her boys learned to dance from her. 

She worked as a telephone operator in North Platte Nebraska when she married Grandpa Mel.  When they moved to California he worked in markets and eventually had his own market.  She gave birth to 3 boys, was widowed at age 62 and left a lasting legacy. 

I wanted to introduce Grandma Jo because so much of the Gates side of the genealogy has been begun or worked on by her and she got most of the DAR paperwork ready for those who follow along behind her.  She and I had many discussions about family histories and I got to hear the stories from her directly.  What a gift!  In the next few weeks I will introduce some of the members of each of these 4 main families who told the family stories that got me interested in the history of these relatives as well as the names and birth dates of the ancestors!

Francis Josephine Kline Gates
1/26/1907 Malvern, Mills IA - 2/5/2008 Scottsdale, Maricopa, AZ

Grandma Jo 1987 with Wm Niel