Back in Time

To be or not to be?

I considered just beginning a new blog for all the other assorted branches of my mother's side of my family tree--one for the Alawines, one for the Tolberts, you know. But you see that, instead, I just changed the blog description a little, because if you go back far enough with ancestors who stayed in the same area for two or three generations, everybody's related, anyway. Why go to another page for a different tree?

So, although the blog STARTED with Alawines, we're going to be inclusive now.

The last post I wrote was about my grandmother, Lillian Luke, and my grandfather, Henry Tolbert. Refresh your memory with another glance at the family chart:

Tolberts, Culbertsons, Lukes, Claughtons and others

These people tended to move around a little less than my Alawine ancestors. Over half of them were born in Mississippi beginning around 1844. Once they were in Kemper, Lauderdale, Neshoba Counties, they more or less stayed there, until we descendants got our own case of itchy feet and started rambling ourselves.

So, in a way, they were easier to trace back than Daddy's family.

 Let's start with a photo of the Tolberts taken in 1917:

Tolberts 1917

Here's a "key" to who's who.

A couple of things: Lucilla Tolbert Powell was Charles Wesley's sister. She's sitting at Eliza's left, and her children (except Hettie, at the far left side of the photo) are near her.

I've always felt kind of sorry for my great-grandmother Elizabeth "Eliza" Culbertson Tolbert. She's holding Nellie Grace (my great-aunt "Jim") on her lap; beside her is Ellie Mae ("Peg"); and right behind her is Mary, her oldest child, who was 28. In other words, she was having babies for about 24 years or so.

(My grandmother Alawine beat that, though. She had babies for 27 years.)

I've often wondered about that name--Charles Wesley. In 1880 he's listed on the census as "Charly Wesley" (the "Charly" of which could have been--as usual--just a mistake). But his father was Henry R. Tolbert, a Baptist minister. You just gotta have some questions about why that famous Methodist name was given to the son!
  
Here are a couple of other photos I have--one of Charles W. and Eliza, the other just of her; it looks as if she's feeding the chickens. Or maybe they think she's going to. I believe that's Lou Tolbert in the background, grinning.

Charles Wesley Tolbert, Eliza Culbertson Tolbert

Eliza Culbertson Tolbert and (probably) Lou in back

Neither of the photos had dates on them. Given that Eliza died in 1934 and Lou appears to have been at least 16 or 17, the pictures could have been taken about 1921.

Charles has shaved off his beard since the big group photo. Wonder why?
  
In the years before my daughters were born, and in the summers when I wasn't teaching, Mother and Daddy and I would sometimes roam around East Mississippi, going back to the old places, long unvisited, where they had grown up. On one of those rambles, we went to Edinburg, where I was able to get some snapshots OF large portraits of my Tolbert ancestors back beyond Charles Wesley. That day--due to circumstances I won't go into on this blog--I had to climb up on a chair and focus on portraits framed under heavy glass and hanging a good foot or more over my head. Oh, well--what you do for history!

Henry R. Tolbert (date? 1880?)

Mary Amanda A. Mott (date?)

Here are Henry R. and Mary Ann Amanda Mott. Her portrait had been damaged--it seems maybe with water--but you can get a fair idea of what she looked like.

Now, as I said, Henry R. was a Baptist preacher. He apparently had strong ideas about his ministry, if you go by the poem below, which, when she gave me this copy, Lou Tolbert Munn said he wrote.

Henry R. was also in the Civil War.

One of the most poignant things I've found in the archive papers is the requisition below in which Henry asked for "1 pr shoes" and "1 pr drawers." The quartermaster evidently denied (and crossed out) a petition for a pair of pants (I think it's that) and a shirt. Under the listed items, someone wrote, "For the use of them/ Sick and being in need of Same." They were eventually distributed to him, it seems, on or after April 3rd, 1863--probably after, since this is just the paperwork. Or maybe he never got them at all: supplies were always low.

Again, another wonderful thing (for me) is seeing his signature at the bottom.

When they're not messed up with errors, censuses can be revealing things. The 1880 census for Neshoba County shows J. H. Tolbert (this would be John "Jack" Holliday Tolbert, or Talbert), Henry's father, and Hester ("Molly"), his wife, with several grown children under their roof, including Mary Wilson and two grandchildren. Why were the Wilsons there with Jack and Molly?

Well, it turns out that Mary's husband Tom had been killed at the battle of Perryville, KY, on October 8, 1862.

She hadn't married since he died, and she was living with her father and mother again, raising her two children. Tom had served in the same regiment as Henry R., his brother-in-law, as records show. (Compare to Henry's,
above.)

Either Lou Munn or my mother told me that he was very near Henry when he was killed; I don't know about that part.
  
But in March of 1863 Mary presented herself before a justice of the peace in Lauderdale County, MS, to petition for his back pay. With her were Henry Alexander and Sherwood Wilson, Tom's father.

Papers filed in Lauderdale County, MS, 1863, by Mary Tolbert Wilson

Since Tom had died in October, and it was March, Mary may have been pregnant: her daughter Margaret was born that same year. (Or maybe the daughter had already been born by the time Mary saw the judge.) Mary was successful in her petition. She may have already been living with Jack and Molly by then, but if she wasn't, at some point she moved there with her two children, as the 1880 census above shows.
  
There's another story behind all this. Sometimes, when a soldier died, a commanding officer wrote a few lines about him--what he looked like, where he was from, and so on. Captain James Hicks penned this note about Private Wilson. So now, today, though there's no photo of him I've ever seen, we can envision him a little.

"Descriptive Soft" of Thonas Wilson

Transcription

Life was hard in Mississippi in the 1800's. Tom Wilson and Mary Tolbert married at as young an age as her great-nephew William Henry Tolbert and Lillian Luke. In Mary's case, she was the one left with two babies to raise. As a young woman in the 1860's, she probably had only two choices: get married again, or live with relatives. She chose the latter. It's an interesting comment on the times that she had to have two male witnesses to accompany her and vouch for her honesty in requesting Tom's back pay.

Next time: Jack Holliday Tolbert and Hester "Molly" Davidson...the woman with the thick accent!

Ælfwine

Lillian

First things first.

Does anyone know for sure which of the four Alawine brothers this is?

Beth Mullins found and sent it to me, wondering about it.
I say Uncle Roosevelt. But I'm not 100% sure. Put your answer in the Comments.

The rest of this entry is going to be about my grandmother on Mother's side of the family. If you're not particularly interested in this post, I'll forgive your skipping it. But before leaving, you might take a look at the family tree here and see whether you fit into it. 

I never knew grandparents. They were all gone by the time I was born--my father's parents as well as my mother's. It's likely I've more or less idolized my lovely maternal grandmother just by gazing at the portrait of her that hangs on my wall.

Lillian Luke Tolbert

When my daughters were growing up (they are now all older than she was at the time the picture was made), I would wonder what parts of her were passed on to them. 

My mother, Cecile Mae Tolbert, was the daughter of William Henry Tolbert and Lillian Luke. Here's a photo of both of them. They were very young here.

Henry and Lillian Tolbert

I posted Lillian's picture a while back. 

Be warned: This story is a sad one. There's no way to make it happy. 

My mother and father told me that Lillian physically resembled her father, Alanzo Luke, far more than she did her mother Rosa Claughton. She was brown-eyed and had either black or very dark brown hair. In the few pictures I've found of her, her eyes always seem huge and haunting to me.

Henry was the son of Charles Wesley Tolbert and Mary Elizabeth Culbertson. Henry wasn't tall, and he had thick brownish hair and blue eyes. 

Lillian and Henry married at what for us would be a really young age. He was 16 or so; she, only 15. I guess it's possible they knew she'd already contracted tuberculosis, but I suspect they were just doing what young people in the rural South did at that time: they all seemed to get married pretty early. Maybe there wasn't much else to do with life.

Lillian gave birth to Herman, their son, in March of 1914, when she was about 18. Mother was born in November 1916. Lillian, I believe, probably knew she was dying by the time Mother was a year and a half old. 
She and Henry lived near Henry's parents in Neshoba County. 

Mother (center child) with others in front of the Tolbert home

Towards the end of her last summer, Lillian wrote a postcard to Alanzo and Rosa, who lived in Preston, a community you can still find on a map. For us it would be about a 40-minute drive, maybe, but for her it was too far to go for a quick day trip.

Google maps

 


She would've had to ride a horse or go in a wagon, and neither of those items was used for luxuries like visits to your parents; they were needed for the farm. 

Lillian was homesick in 1918 and yearned for the cool well water at her parents' house. She had two young children, she was twenty-two, and she was dying. Henry had had someone helping him dig a well near where they lived, but the man had quit, and water had to be carried from a spring. In the summer, by the time they hauled it to the house, it had gotten hot. 

Maybe she wrote the postcard just to give her parents news...maybe to try to reassure them. Who knows. Someone in the family saved it for Mother.

Card from Lillian 1918

Down below, here's what it says, if you can't read the original (I'm using all the spelling and punctuation that Lillian used).

Postcard from Lillian 1918

When my mother was old enough to ask hard questions about Lillian, Henry's sister Lou Tolbert (Munn) told her how it went, at the end. Lou was about fourteen herself as the fall progressed that year. She remembered that, as the days passed, Lillian grew restless and couldn't sleep. She wanted to talk. She had her family and Henry's sit up with her and talk, talk--about anything, really, Lou said.  
 
She died on December 27, 1918, when my mother was just over two years old. Someone in the community wrote a little obituary about her. I'm going to show what was on the other side, too: advertisements for farm equipment.

Mother only preserved in her mind a vague memory--more of a feeling--of her mother; she was just too young to remember. People saved things for her, though, and she had the picture, too. 

I talked with Lou Tolbert Munn myself in 1979. Lou had a wonderful voice; I loved hearing her tell about Lillian. And I'm indebted to her and my mother for helping Lillian's brief life be remembered. 

All families have a few of these stories; they're not always from long ago, either. We grieve all the time for people. 

But I wish I'd known my grandmother.

Ælfwine

 

Heidelberg. Not Mississippi.

Part of letter from Tommy Alewine, August, 1970

Cousins and others: this post will be brief. It's an update to an ongoing discussion that started years ago and, unfortunately, hasn't yet been decisively ended.

...And may never be.

Before I start, I want to say this: I've never felt inspired to identify myself too intimately with my ancestors. Their lives and troubles are interesting to me, and I like being able to see that line going back as I manage to find another connection. But in my long years of research, one thing has risen up above the clutter of facts, trivia, maps, census records, etc., etc., and it's this: 

You are who YOU are. You are not who your ancestors were.

Recently, a friend of mine began doing research on her own family for the first time. Being from the South, she found several Confederate soldier ancestors, of course, and remarked on being surprised about that. I told her to prepare herself for finding the branch that was slave-holding--there will probably be one, somewhere; there are two or three in my genealogy--but to remember that it doesn't inform who SHE is, now. Just accept it for the history that it is.

So you are who YOU are. That in itself should be intimidating enough and inspire you to do some self-examination!

Some of you are probably amused at the doggedness of my attempt to solve, once and for all, the riddle of the supposed "name change" of our family. I wrote a whole post about it recently, and another earlier last year, so just refer to that page to get yourself up to speed. For me it's an obsession to try to correct false things and to get facts out, instead of just legends. I can't explain any other way why it matters so much to me.

You remember the "telephone game" from school: One kid whispers something one time to another student, who whispers to another, and so on, and by the time the student at the end of the line says what he's heard, there's usually no relation to the original sentence. It's kind of fun. Makes a good lesson on how gossip spreads, too.

But I don't like seeing that on the Internet. As a teacher, I try to train my students not to repeat hearsay and rumors. Go to the source document, I tell them. There's already too much stuff available that only suits your preconceived ideas, and you can fast find yourself in an echo chamber where you're just reading things that affirm what you WANT to believe.

So after seeing all over the place a story that's been repeated for years--that our ancestor was "a professor from Heidelberg University in Germany"--it seemed obvious that the proper way to get to the bottom of this was to go to the source. You know Europe generally has great records. The Germans (and Swiss) are well known for their attention to detail. I figured it might not work but was definitely worth the effort.

So I got in touch with Heidelberg University.

I am posting here the email I received on Thursday evening.

Email received February 1, 2018

 
Read it thoroughly. Be amazed.

Some thoughts:

First, look at the bottom. Ms. Liptak expresses regret that she "could not be of more help in finding a connection between your ancestor and the Universität Heidelberg."

Really. After all the places and years she combed through. 

I was astounded.

Second, I believe this may stop the chatter about John George Alewine's having been a professor. Ms. Liptak looked at things I never would've dreamed of looking at. Who would've thought to check into lists of custodial staff? And she researched way outside the time frame I gave her. And there was nothing.

There were a couple of other things, little minor stuff that struck me as noteworthy. For one, I sent my original email partly in my extremely poor German, assuming that the request might not land with an English speaker. Wrong. You see that Ms. Liptak has excellent English. As a language teacher myself, I should've expected this. In Europe, and throughout the world, people frequently speak multiple languages. In a later note to Ms. Liptak, I apologized for this preconceived idea of mine. I knew better.

For another, she assumed I would be unhappy at having received a negative response. ("I am sorry I could not find a connection...to the Universität Heidelberg.") I, however, was quite content with her answer, because it seems definitive, and it represents truth. Truth...not a legend or wishful thinking. I'd have been glad if she'd found John George on staff there. But I would've been just as happy if she'd told me that his job was sweeping the floors in Heidelberg in 1740.

And I am also happy finding that he apparently wasn't there at all.

You may be into genealogy for a different reason than I've been doing it all this time. Perhaps you're looking for medical reasons--to find out where a genetic trait started. Perhaps you were adopted and want to locate your birth parents.

My reason is simpler and, maybe, more trivial: I just like finding out things about my ancestors' lives. I don't mind discovering an  illiterate person, or one who was disfellowshipped from a church for drunkenness (yes, it happened), or one who filed a pension application that indicated he was "destitute." I enjoy learning about how these people lived--the good and the bad parts--and what they did, where they moved, and so on. If I can find a document they wrote, that takes me into ecstasies.

I don't feel a need to identify with them exactly; I just appreciate discovering that they had problems, joys, challenges--in their own way, in their own milieu--as I do myself. Their challenges were definitely more serious than mine are today. Perhaps, in a way, that brings me some perspective.

One more document I'm waiting to receive from a university collection in the Midwest may help sort out the rest of the problem with the supposed "name change." (Again, see my previous post.)

Or it may not. Either way, it may bring a little more light to bear on events from the 1750's when John George arrived in the United States.

--And, by the way, just for fun, look at this page: http://www.namespedia.com/details/Alavoine

Ælfwine