The Elephant

The suicide rate of veterans aged 18 to 34 steadily increased from 2006 to 2016, with a jump of more than 10 percent from 2015 to2016. That translates into 45 deaths per 100,000 veterans, the highest of any age group.

From Military Times: In 2016, the most recent data available, the suicide rate for veterans was 1.5 times greater than for Americans who never served in the military. About 20 veterans a day across the country take their own lives, and veterans accounted for 14 percent of all adult suicide deaths in the U.S. in 2016, even though only 8 percent of the country’s population has served in the military.

One summer years ago I hung around a row of graves in one particular part of Pine Forest Cemetery in Lauderdale County. I was between semesters of teaching, and when depression hit me, that’s where I’d go.

That sounds a lot more morbid than it really was, although, yeah, it WAS a little morbid, I guess. I had a reason, such as it was, for being there: My younger brother, with whom I’d been very close both in age and in terms of our relationship, had died unexpectedly. And even knowing “he” wasn’t there (his actual self), still, it brought some peace to me to sit on the ground and think about him.

My parents eventually ended up reposing next to his grave, but that was years down the road. In the meantime, I sat and thought about Jack and looked around at the other graves nearby, wondering idly about some of them.

Long before those days, I’d been told that some of my forebears were laid to rest at Pine Forest, and as it turned out, not far from my brother’s grave; so I read their statistics and noticed that my great-great-grandfather William “Billy” Skinner had died on Christmas Day in 1885 (if you can believe things on grave markers, which is sometimes not the case).

That brought to mind something a relative had mentioned in passing, a bit of information I’d stuffed into my head and had more or less forgotten: “Billy Skinner committed suicide.”

This is a harder-than-usual post to write because of the topic I’m covering. When occasionally you hear of somebody taking his own life, inevitably you also eventually hear, “I just don’t understand how someone could do that.”

I do.

I’m not going to try to explore today an average person’s depths or sources of depression; but as I wrote at the first of this post, there IS one area I’m looking at, and that is the soldier’s life when he comes home. 

I’ve mentioned before that my father was about ten years old when his grandfather Andrew Jackson Alawine died: he lived down the road from him, knew him well, recalled what happened around the time he died, and told me when I was a teenager. (I refer you to my 6th post of this blog, in which I shared what he recounted to me.)

https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html 

My father said his grandfather Andrew never had discussed the time he served in the Civil War, and yet in those last days of his life—after his wife Lucretia died—he relived some of the battles and was out of his head.

My daughters’ grandfather Edwin Thead never told his children or grandchildren anything much about the time he spent in Europe towards the end of World War II. It was a brief period of service for him, but he just wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen.

Like Andrew Jackson Alawine, Billy Skinner had served in the Civil War, as the records below show.

Two of his brothers—Calvin J. and Marion F.—had also served, and Calvin had died on May 22, 1862 in Danville, VA. Billy was “paroled” (i.e., surrendered) at Vicksburg in July 1863. He’d married Susan Kelly in 1854. When she died in about 1872 or so, family tradition says he himself carved her headstone from wood. Being a master carpenter, he would’ve been able to do that.

He married Maggie Petty Mayo Sweeney, my great-great-grandmother, sometime around 1874. Their large extended family included half-siblings and step-siblings; they lived in Kemper County by then, apparently fairly prosperous, as Billy was listed a “mechanic in wood shop” (more than simply “carpenter”) on the 1880 census.

And yet…in 1885 he committed suicide, at a usually joyous time of year.

And then there is this:

(Thanks to Jan Boyles Wilson of Colorado.)

Just to help you recall who this person was: His father James and James’s brother Alexander were in South Alabama and South Mississippi in the early 1840’s. Several of Alex’s sons served in the Civil War, as did James’s. You can review all that history in this post.

http://theadsnotthreads.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-civil-war-and-theads.html

On Alex’s side, two sons—George W. and Columbus (“Lum”)—came home to carry on the Thead name. George lived to be a good old age, but Lum apparently died around 1869 or 1870, shortly after he returned from his own service, during which he spent time in a prison camp known for hard conditions. Lum had been discharged earlier, in 1862, because of “incipient consumption” (i.e., tuberculosis), but he rejoined and was captured, as the above post shows.

On the first-cousin side of the Thead family, over in Clarke County, Mississippi, James’s son Hamilton “Hamp” returned scarred from the Civil War—not so much physically as emotionally. His brothers William Alexander and John (and maybe another brother, Richmond) had died in the war. All three men had been in the same 13th Mississippi Regiment, so it’s possible Hamp was near them when they died. A record shows that he himself was listed as a “good and brave” soldier, but then he also “suffered a prisoner to escape” and served some kind of time in the equivalent of military jail.

He raised a family in Mississippi after the War. And then he committed suicide. He was buried on a hill overlooking the Buccatunna Creek, at the back of his property.

And the newspaper said, “The cause of his rash act is a mystery.”

Today we’d call it PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It doesn’t just affect the military, but we associated it more with soldiers.

There’s no way to make this post light-hearted; I would never even try. Perhaps, instead, looking back at these men who didn’t have the diagnosis of “PTSD” and suffered, sometimes for years, men whose families maybe only knew they were dealing with inner demons unimaginable to the everybody else—perhaps we just need to bear in mind that they have indeed “seen the elephant” where we have not.

Ælfwine

Potter and Clay: A Personal Moment, Please

Take a moment to wonder what’s in the little plastic bag.

Any answer other than “clay” would be incorrect: It is indeed reclaimed (that is, made pliable again) potter’s clay, a small ball of it, only enough to fit nicely in the palm of my hand, because I didn’t want to start with the tubful first and mess it all up. If you will, think of the tiny ball as one small decision to run down to Dollar General for some chips, and the larger bag as a move to, maybe, Italy. (I’ve always wanted to travel there, so I’ll use that country.)

I’m about to reclaim that big tub of clay, now that I know I can do it, having succeeded with the smaller amount, which I wrenched from the larger lump, added water to, kneaded and changed from hardened earth into something I can work with again, something that will (I hope) eventually become, through molding and carving and intense heat, an item of some beauty and meaning.

Not to get too pretentious or to drag out my metaphor too long, I will stop there.

This post will be a personal one, unrelated to genealogy, but as I’m the owner of the page, I can do that! If you find it boring, skip back to another post.

Some of you know already what I’m about to say, though probably not all the reasons, which I’m not going into, anyway, on this blog: I’m going to be teaching mainly art, not Spanish, this fall, and not at the high school where I've been these nine years. I told the principal several years ago that the only way I could’ve stayed in teaching after all this time was that I “took off” once in a while, usually when things at whatever school where I was working got weird and unpredictable. Or when my frustration rose to an unbearable (for me) level over the state’s, or a district’s, approaches to dealing with the education of kids I cared so deeply about.

Some of what follows, I’ve said already, in other posts, but bear with me.

I have ALWAYS known what I was “supposed” to be, since I was around 15 or so, when a high-school teacher asked me and another student or two if we’d like to teach a 20-minute lesson to her Spanish I class, with her guidance, of course. My sister-in-law was Hispanic, a fact that had already made me love the language; and after that short lesson, I was hooked. Add in a couple of inspiring, demanding English instructors in high school and college, and I ended up ultimately with a double major plus a teaching credential. —Which I’ve kept since 1974, when I left Ole Miss to teach my own students who were about a year and a half younger than I: I was eager, I was ready to take it all on, so I’d graduated a lot sooner than most people do.

What they can’t really tell you in college—what you finally have to experience on your own—is the fact that a lot of people regard school, maybe especially high school, as a place for kids of that difficult age to go to be put up with by people other than their parents: Whew, let somebody else deal with them right now. Teenage years can be tough. I know: My four daughters were all teenagers one time.

We try to maintain safe environments for these almost-adults. We’re their counselors; they cry on our shoulders (sometimes, literally). We do our best to elucidate for them topics we hope, we believe, will be important to their future selves. It’s exhausting work, exhausting way past my ability to describe, something people who’ve never taught really can’t understand completely. That sort of bone-deep tiredness has been characterized as “decision fatigue,” a phrase that may be about as accurate as any other term I’ve ever heard: We’re constantly, real-time, making choices about your child’s wellbeing, immediate safety and mental health, and future. And not just your one child, but times about 25 or more per class. Times multiple classes.

Administrators—even if they themselves have taught (and all SHOULD have, and not just for a year or two)—frequently forget this, the same way some childbirth memories are forgotten. Me, I’ve always felt too much—maybe I shouldn’t have started teaching at such a young age, because I wasn’t “grown,” myself, then, and my own emotions were still pretty naked and undisguised. Whatever: I learned early that I don’t have the desired ability just to shut out things I know aren’t going to end well, and stay in my own world and go about my own business indefinitely. I’ve wished sometimes that I had that trait; it lets teachers carry on and do their thing regardless of official chaos. But I didn’t have it, so my solution was to “check out” once in a while. I know not everybody has the luxury I did of taking that time off and finding something different to do for a while, then coming back in a few years, refreshed and ready to have another go at it.

And that’s where my own big tub of clay comes in. I’m about to reclaim, refresh, remold myself.

I always drew, painted, sculpted. We didn’t have money. But I’d buy tempera paints, ink, nice paper, whenever I could as a teenager. Long past the time I should’ve been in bed, I’d sit in my room, lights off, and stare out my window at the night sky, painting it in the dark, rubbing my brush across a sliver of bar soap and then into the paint, to keep my tempera from running all over the paper. In books about art history I’d run across pen-and-ink drawings done in the 1800’s, and I painstakingly copied them with my own nib and bottle of ink, purchased after I’d saved up enough allowance.

When he was forced by poor health to retire early, my father opened a ceramics shop. (I’ve posted about this before.) By then, I’d been teaching for several years. After school was out for the day, I’d sometimes run by his shop, and he’d hand me lumps of clay left over from whatever plates or bowls or pitchers he’d been working on, and I’d turn them into stuff: frogs, mushrooms, unicorns, figures representing family members.

Daddy also hand-made the pegged cedar table.

I think now that maybe Daddy’d been something of a frustrated artist who had to work during the Depression instead of taking his own “time off”: he’d also given me one of my first calligraphy pens that had been given to HIM when he was in high school. He’d never used it.

Look at the sign behind them...and I painted it!

So, back to now: I’m not “retiring” per se. I’m not ready to quit teaching. Some of my energy still comes from working with young people. But I find myself once more caring too much—not caring too much about THEM, because you can't care “too” much about kids, but you can let other things kill your spirit—and so it’s time for a break, and when this one is done, so will I be, at last. This time, I almost feel as if parts of my life have been teaser-trailers for this big final show. I didn’t realize that art I had in high school, that art I took in college (as my advisors tore out their hair and reminded me of required classes I HAD to have), the afternoons I spent with carving tools in Daddy’s shop—all of it seems to have been preparation for this moment, and I am grateful.

I was going to miss speaking Spanish on a daily basis, and I grieved about forgetting it through lack of use. But as it happens, that particular road-not-taken has U-turned in a serendipitous way: I’ll also have one language class! How much better can it be?

This weekend, my big chore is to start turning all that leather-hard potter’s clay back into usable stuff, and I know I can do it, because I took the first step and made a smaller amount soft and pliable again. Just as with myself. I’m not quite irrevocably hardened just yet.

Ælfwine

Tiny bits of clay require tiny creations.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

"Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers. Pretty soon now you're gonna get older..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl3vxEudif8  
The David Bowie song I reference in my title came out in the ’70’s: “Time may change me,/But I can’t trace time.” —Words that take on a completely different meaning when you consider them from different perspectives! My mind goes there today because I have so many things changing in my own life right now...so many, in fact, that it took me this long to put up another post, as I am doing today.

Last thing I mentioned, back in February, had to do with my cousin Bill’s discoveries and research into the Alewine name, and the whole DNA thing again. From the very first, back in 2017, my intention for this blog was just to put out the records I have, as many documents and pictures as I could scan, and let relatives add to the story if they knew other things; and Bill stepped in and contributed to our benefit. So far there’s been a limit to how far back some lines can be traced, on any side, for reasons everybody knows:

...People moved around a lot more than we might think they did.

...There were no copy or fax machines, computers, phones…and, more to the point, many of our ancestors weren’t all that great at writing.

...And my favorite: Paper burns.

The last one accounts for a good many dead-ends when people begin to draw out their family trees. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “Well, that courthouse burned down in 1880—” or some other year, making it nearly impossible to get certain documents I needed from a specific time.

I have about 5 boxes still of Alton Alawine’s papers which he left to me. Most are yellowing notebook scraps, scribbled in his tiny script. They are, in some cases—depressingly—repeats and repeats. I would be happy to trade them for a few really detailed journals of a couple of family lines—but such things don’t exist. William Bradford, the early governor in Massachusetts who kept excruciatingly detailed records in History of Plymouth Plantation, is remembered because he was an exception. Most people were just surviving and didn’t write daily descriptions of their and their neighbors’ lives.

So I again invite any descendants to add to the information I’ve been trying to make available, if you have documents and so on. I’ve attempted to shed any light I can on the Skinner, Mercer, Richards, and Wells lines. On my mother’s side, in other posts, I wrote about the Culbertsons, Claughtons, and Tolberts.

Today it will be the Lukes.

Except for the Claughtons, most of Cecile Tolbert’s ancestors had come early into Mississippi and remained here through several generations, as previous posts have shown. And the same seems to be true of the Lukes. They eventually settled around the Kemper County/Neshoba County area and more or less stayed there. A document prepared years ago by a Luke descendant in Kemper County indicates the basic line.

 

I’m not sure that every single detail in this document is accurate, but I find one thing interesting because it confirms a detail even my father (not related to the Lukes except through his wife Cecile, my mother) knew about her grandfather: Lon (Alanzo), who was born in 1874 in Mississippi, was deeply interested in the Choctaw culture and had friends among the Tribe who'd come by his farm from time to time and stay for a few days to work. Sometimes, according to Mother, Lon would go off on "rambles" with them, to places unknown, returning in a few days. 

Below is a copy of the record of his WWI registration. I'm including it because it has his birthday.

It wasn’t very hard to trace Cecile’s mother, Lillian Luke, back to James M. Luke, for the reason I mention above: the family had been in Mississippi since the 1830’s-40’s. Below are census records from 1860 onward:

1860 Kemper Co., MS

About halfway down the one above, you see James Luke and his children.

1880 Kemper Co. MS

As luck has it, all these census sheets have the Lukes toward the middle, so I'm including the whole page. Above, you see John Luke and his children, including Alanzo. In the next censuses Alanzo (or "Lon") shows up with his wife Rosa. In the 1900 one, the family list continues onto another page, and there are other Luke families shown on these following records.

1900 Kemper Co MS page 1

1900 Kemper Co. MS page 2

1910 Kemper Co. MS

1920 Kemper Co. MS

1930 Neshoba Co. MS

I haven’t been able to find pictures of other Lukes, going back past Alanzo, but here again is a photo of him and his wife Rosa Claughton.

Rosa Claughton Luke and Alanzo "Lon" Luke ca 193o's

Next post: a strange story from my own childhood, and a feeling that all things are kind of connected.

Ælfwine

 

What's in a Name? Part Two

It’s been a while.

I’ve been deeply involved in another project, and then, SCHOOL, of course—a new schedule with one more class per day added, new requirements for lessons, and so on. I’ll be honest, though: When I could have done posts on the weekend, I was busy with the project instead. I try to leave school at school.


In the meantime, however, I’m happy to have made the acquaintance of a distant cousin in Virginia, Bill Alewine, who has some additional information on John (or Johan) George Alewine that he’s graciously told me to pass on. We talked on the phone as I scribbled notes—and “scribbled” is an understatement—so, Bill, if this is inaccurate, do let me know.

Below is a chart he put together for me, to show how his side of the family meshes with “ours.” But if you look all the way to the top, you’ll see our common ancestor who arrived in the United States. Some of this information appeared in one of Alton Alawine’s last documents before his vision deteriorated to the extent that he couldn’t write anymore, but this new chart clarifies the lineage.

I’d known about the ship, and I had the documents showing the Mary Reissinger connection. Mary was John George’s son Michael’s wife; the John in these documents is their son, who married Katharine (“Caty”), and the documents describe a land sale by Mary, John, and Caty to Allen de Graffenreidt. With Bill’s permission, I’m including his scans because they are better than mine. Please note that the name is spelled “Elowine” by this scribe in 1795!

 

Bill and I had a long conversation about the “Gen” (or “Gene”) in front of the “-wyn” of the name you see in the petition for land. Since within a relatively short period of time the name had metamorphosed into “Alarwyn” and “Elwine”, as shown in several land documents that Bill has extensively studied, is it possible that John George altered his maybe French-sounding (“Genewein”) name into a more German one by dropping the “Gen-” and adopting “Ale-”?


Almost exactly a year ago in this post https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-never-ending-story.html, I showed the “Genewyn” variations within ONE DOCUMENT from 1752. Bill has located additional papers showing that by 1768 the name was being recorded as “Geo Elwine” (as Bill remarks, the first spelling of “Alewine/Alawine” anything like what it is today).

In 1771 an additional document prepared by the same surveyor spelled George’s son’s last name “Allarwine.” In 1772 John Pearson (surveyor in South Carolina) referred to “George Genewayer”, indicating that he had paid taxes, and two lines above that, “Adam Allarwine” (who was George’s son).

To understand how this might have worked, allow me to digress for a moment to a gift I gave my daughter this past Christmas: her very own Ancestry DNA test!

To the surprise of no one in this family, the results show she and we are predominantly of Western European extraction.

I’ve traced my mother’s family back far enough to know they were English and Irish, with an occasional Scottish forebear showing up. But Karen’s test also indicates what other Alawine cousins’ tests show: an 8-12% Alsace-Lorraine (that is, German-French) background as well.

(She drew the red circle around that area showing the French-German origin.)

Credit to Britannica Encyclopedia

As Bill points out, John George and his wife were 100% German. Their son Michael and Mary, his wife, were 100%. And he adds:

I’ve learned to rely on documents more than word-of-mouth, so I won’t make any speculations about the name conundrum. Previously I’d wondered if SOMEHOW a pronunciation had been guttural enough to have caused barely-literate clerks to write down only what they were capable of…was THAT how we got from “Genewyn” to “Alewine”? But knowing language as I do (and Bill agrees with this, being a polyglot himself), I don’t think that’s what happened. It would be very hard to get from the “G” name to the “A” name that way.

Unless (or until) someone finds another document unknown to us now, or possibly invents a time machine (and that went through my mind as I watched Back to the Future again last week), I’m leaving this for the time being.

By the way, Bill also sent me these documents, and I include his remarks : “I got them off the SC Dept of Archives and History on-line archives. They are John Alewine's Revolutionary War pay records, and I believe the last page is his request for pay ‘due to me for duty I have done.’ ‘his mark x John Allawine, say Ellwine’.”

Long ago Thomas Alewine, editor and publisher of the Rankin County News, told me:

…and truer words were never spoken!
However, in Karen’s DNA we also note this:

NORWAY. Where did THAT come from? Another post for another day…

Ælfwine