The First Family

"I want to warn you that this 'business' is just as narcotic and habit-forming as any drugs you might get hold of! And it has as many dead-ends..." —Thomas M. Alewine, 1970

[This entry has a correction: Lucretia Wells died on April 19, not the 29th.]

I'm going to start with two requests:

First, PLEASE share this website with cousins. In the material I've posted so far, I've intended to whet interest and provoke comments. Are there family lines or connections you'd like to see traced out? Let me know in my comment bar.

Second (and this relates to the first), these are my family notebooks and records.

This doesn't include computer records or the four office-type storage boxes. I'd like for everybody to have copies of what they're interested in, but it might be impossible. The best I can do is show the bare-bones outlines and tell a few stories.

Thank goodness for the Internet.

Now, to another of those stories:

In the mid- and late-1960's my mother was working at the hospital, and life for me and Jack in the evenings was quiet, for a while. After supper and before Daddy left to pick Mother up after her shift (she didn't drive), he might watch TV or read, but from time to time he'd start talking about things he remembered about his grandparents and other relatives. I was a younger teen at that time and just beginning to be interested in family history.
This was when I heard about Andrew Jackson Alawine's first family.

Andrew and Lucretia, as I mentioned before, died in 1922--she on April 19 (which her tombstone at Antioch Baptist Church says was also her birthday), and he on May 20. Lucretia's year of birth varies in records, but the 1850 and 1860 censuses both show her having been born in 1838, so let's go with that. I'm pretty sure she was several years older than Andrew, anyway. She was 84 at her death.

This photo (in my last post) was most likely taken during the 1910's, sometime...perhaps no more than two or three years before she died.

 

Daddy was born in 1912. He remembered his grandparents quite well. He lived right down the road from them. In the 1980's he drew a sketch of the floor plan and surrounding area of the house he grew up in, and of Andrew Jackson Alawine's house. I took his rough sketch and redid it with darker ink to make it clearer. I put the two houses in spacial context, and I'm including both drawings here so those of you unfamiliar with that part of Kemper County, Mississippi, can have an idea of where the families lived.

 

Daddy was almost 10 years old, then, when Lucretia died. He recalled clearly the events of her death. He said that, afterwards, his grandfather "kind of went crazy a little." Andrew couldn't seem to sleep, didn't want to eat, talked about long-past things as if they were current events, and even once or twice relived parts of the Civil War.

(He did serve in the Civil War. According to Daddy, Andrew never would talk about it much, or at least never did with him. I've read that many veterans of different wars don't like retelling their experiences. I doubt I'd want to, either.)

As I listened to this sad story, he added, "It was almost as if his will to live just died, too, when she died."

If so, maybe the first family he lost, his experiences in the war, the loss of his daughter Rena in the 1870's, and at last the death of Lucretia now HAD all finally taken the ultimate toll on him. He lived about a month after Lucretia died, you notice, though he was perhaps seven years younger than she'd been, and apparently in fairly decent health.

Now, about that first family:

Some time or other, Daddy told me that Andrew Jackson Alawine had had a small family before he and Lucretia Wells married. Daddy couldn't remember all the details. His own parents (my grandparents) were gone, and it had been almost 50 years since that spring of 1922 when his grandparents had died. He THOUGHT the first family had included a wife and child; he THOUGHT maybe they'd been killed during the siege at Vicksburg, or maybe escaping in a boat or on a raft.

Like a couple of other stories he told me, that one I kept kind of filed in the back of my mind. I've learned not to completely discount family legends. Many times there's some amount of truth in them. But I'd never heard that particular one from anybody else, and years passed before I mentioned it to Alton.

This blog will inevitably have many references to Alton because, as I've said, he and I worked pretty closely on family research for a good while. And I've also pointed out that, in the same way that Daddy was able to recall his grandparents and remember things about them (though they were born some 177 years ago!), Alton's mother was able to fill in many gaps--because she was their daughter-in-law! She herself lived to her mid-90's and had a pretty clear memory for many years.

As he put it in one of the early letters to me:

(By the way, the reference here to "Elisha" actually was meant to be "Elijah." At that point, neither Alton nor I was sure whether Elisha Alewine and Elijah Alewine were the same or different men, as the names appear in records both ways. Later, I found proof that they were two people, and that our ancestor was Elijah.)

So sometime in late 1976 Alton asked her about this earlier family, and here are the details she gave him:

So, one legend, proved to have truth in it.

Genealogical research, as I learned early in life, can be extremely addictive. Back in 1970, I got in touch with Thomas "Tommy" M. Alewine, editor and publisher of the Rankin County News. I really don't remember now how I knew to contact him, but I did. I was a youngster then, but Daddy's stories had really got me obsessed with finding out more about my ancestors, and I'd somehow heard about this newspaper man who might have records.

He was very kind and answered my first note briefly, but also sent me a copy of Andrew Jackson Alawine's Civil War record as an introductory thing to pique my interest further. I answered that letter, and then, on August 2, he mailed this to me:

 

This letter is extremely significant and harks back to the first request I made in this post, about sharing the blog around. Because, within a week after I got that letter, he had died unexpectedly, at the age of 58.

If he hadn't shared the information he did, in that letter, I might have gone many many years without having a good starting point. Short though it may be, it is full of names and references that I was able to expand on; and, later, Alton used the information and did still more research.
I indulged in a crying fit that lasted some time when my parents called to tell me Tommy had died. I was visiting my sister Carol in Mobile; I may even have taken that letter with me, because I was so excited. I was so looking forward to a lengthy acquaintance with the newspaper man, exchanging interesting facts and stories about the family.

We have so much more access to information now than I did at that time, though sometimes lately it seems to be threatened by what looks increasingly to me like governmental and corporate censorship. (I refer to the recent nullification of Internet neutrality.)

So for now, feel free to share, to promote, to save whatever papers and documents I post.

If it hadn't been for Tommy Alewine and his letter to me a week before he died, you might not have so much of it now.

 Ælfwine