All Things Alawine...: July 2019

"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.