Just the Facts, Ma'am--Or, a Quick Review

Alawines, ca. 1902

I am a wuss. 

Hard thing for a longtime teacher to admit, but as I get older, I’m becoming a wuss. It’s really hard for me to go to reunions where so many people are no longer with us. I am just not strong that way.

One of my family-type memories is of a late-night, mournful trip up Highway 19 to the house of one of my aunts when my Aunt Bonnie Fay (Daddy’s younger sister) died unexpectedly. Mother of course was going to be with Daddy, and she took at least us younger sibs along. The car was very quiet as Daddy drove.

Years later, when I was at Ole Miss, he called to tell me his sister Turin (one of the twins) had died. I didn’t know what to say to him. My roommate, a lawyer-to-be, watched me for some time when the phone call was over and at last asked, very solemnly, “OK, what’s wrong? I know something’s wrong.”

…So, a lot of my memories are of people passing on. Four of my own five brothers are gone; my parents, all the aunts and uncles, most of their children—my first cousins...being the youngest of that group, I find it painful to remember the others. And I see time running out on me, too.

I have in my mind pictures of what the reunions were, and—sorry, cousins—they aren’t the same for me anymore. I don’t feel ashamed of this. Once, being really sentimental and nostalgic, I told Daddy I could “just see” all those family members—his, and our own—running around through the woods at Alawine Springs, playing near the spring itself, and he gave me a tolerant look and said, “I don’t. All these woods weren’t here. It was fields, all growing crops.”

Things change.

A few of you have got in touch with me these past two weeks to ask about who’s in some old pictures, so I’m going to summarize in this post all the relevant facts about the family again, and then if you want to delve into other stories beyond just those facts, I’ll steer you to the right place.  

Here’s a chart, prepared by Bill Alewine of Virginia, showing the lineage from the earliest Alewine/Genewein on record. Notice that for whatever reason, the earliest documents from 1752 do show “Genewein” or something like it, sometimes “Genewyn” or “Geneweyr.” By 1786 it was “Ellwine,” and in 1795 it had become “Ellawine” and finally “Alewine,” in 1800. 

https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2019/02/whats-in-name-part-two.html

If you’re interested in figuring out how YOU fit into this, look at these charts, and you’ll see the Wellses, Mercers, Richardses, and others. At the bottom are Samuel Thomas Alawine and Maggie Evalina Skinner, my grandparents.

The photograph at the top of this page, taken about 1902 or ’03, shows the Alawines back to Andrew Jackson Alawine (center, big beard), who’s holding his namesake Andrew Thaggard on his lap. Next to him is his wife Lucretia “Crecie” Wells Alawine. I’ve only identified the adults in this photo, because there would otherwise be too many names cluttering it. However, Ila Dean Alawine is the child with her arms over Andrew’s and Crecie’s knees; Maggie is holding Clara, and Samuel Thomas is holding Creacie; the other assorted children I haven’t ID’d are offspring of either Will and Mattie Alawine or Kate and Will Thaggard. You might call this photograph the "original" reunion picture. 

Here are some photos from the family reunions at Alawine Springs through the years. I’m including only the children of Samuel T. Alawine and his brother James T. Alawine.

By 1986 only six came. Front row: Creacie, Ola Mae, Beatrice. Back: Sammy, Bob, Omera

1977. Front: Sylvia, Pruitt, Creacie, Sammy. Back: Omera, Bob, Beatrice, Ola Mae

1950's. All the siblings (Beatrice is cut off at the left.) 
Front, l-r: Bob, Pruitt, Roosevelt, Sammy
Back, l-r: Bea, Creacie, Omera, Ola Mae, Bonnie, Ila, Turin, Sylvia, Clara, Bessie (Gwen in very back)

1940's, and below. Grandchildren: Don Smith with Billy Perkins; Bob's sons, including one Agnes is holding; Roosevelt's children

In-laws: Mildred (Pruitt); Ernest (Ola Mae); Cecile (Bob); Marcus (Bessie); Artie Mae (Roosevelt)

Sisters, l-r: Ola Mae, Bessie, Bonnie Fay, Beatrice, Omera, Ila Dean

Brothers, l-r: Roosevelt, Sammy, Pruitt, Bob

Here are some quick links:

If you’ve heard the Antioch ghost story and want to read a little more about it, here’s a link to a  post telling about it. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/08/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

If you’ve heard about the Skinners’ carpentry skills, go here. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-carpenters.html

If you want to know about how war has affected your own ancestors who fought, read this. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-elephant.html

Here’s a place to find out about the Wells line. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/01/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

My father told me what it was like to go from Kemper to Meridian back in 1918. Read his story here. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/07/world-changers.html

Some of you have possibly heard about the child who was shot. Same, about the tale of the man who killed his brother-in-law and apparently escaped. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_28.html

Times were rough right after the Civil War. Here’s a take on that. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-story-behind-faces.html

Skinners, anyone? https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-tree-and-revolution.html

Or maybe, the Mercers? https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-mercer-connection.html

If you want to know MY theory about how we have absolutely no Native American DNA in us, and yet everybody grew up thinking we did, read this. http://theadsnotthreads.blogspot.com/2018/08/cant-deny-your-dna.html 

Ælfwine

Walk on the Wild Side

Here’s my first wildflower “lesson” for parents with kids at home this week. Today’s a beautiful, albeit cloudy, spring day, so let’s just take a short walk in the back yard or a little ways down the sidewalk. You can first make a list of these common flowers, have kids take photos of what they find, and go back home to ID them on the Internet; or you could look at my pictures first and see how many of them you can find on your walk. Here's the list: 

Spring beauty

First, these—the ubiquitous spring beauty.
They’re all over my back yard right now, so if I look out at a certain angle I think for a second, “Wait—is that WATER?” because they can appear white from a distance, in a large group.

There’s variation, though, in the color, so if you see really pink ones separated from a group of lighter-colored ones, you might be fooled about what they actually are.

Light-pink and dark-pink spring beauty

A sweet little spring flower that’s just started blooming in easy-to-spot masses—one of my favorites—is the bluet (below, with Spring Beauty behind it). 

It goes by the scientific name Houstonia, and there are several types. It’s tiny, but whenever I start actually seeing bluets, I know spring’s arrived.

Everybody knows how to find dandelions, so I won’t include them; but another yellow wildflower you can see everywhere right now is the butterweed—not to be confused with the bitterweed, which truly lives up to its name, if you’ve ever tried picking them in the summer or fall.

Butterweed

Butterweeds are taller, they don’t seem to stink, and you’ll find them many times in damp places—ditches, for instance, that are sometimes but not always full of water.

Don’t confuse butterweed with buttercup.

Buttercup

You can tell these apart just by noticing that the buttercup is usually closer to the ground, and shiny, as if somebody’s walked around and painted the petals with clear nail polish. It’s around now in a lot of places.

At my old house in Macon—ca. 1892—I’d observed one spring these lovely babies springing up, and it wasn’t until I did some research on them that I found out they’re actually prairie-type flowers (appropriate for the Macon area, of course), and they aren’t really all that common anymore, because of habitat loss.

Carolina anemones, or windflowers

So you probably won’t see them in a town. They’re called Carolina anemones (or Carolina windflowers), and I was overjoyed to find them a couple of years ago at the end of my long driveway. I guess the area where I’m living right now is another one of those (like my Macon back yard) where prairie soil wasn’t completely removed or disturbed too much. Here it is with a clump of purple deadnettle behind it. There's a lot of that coming up right now. It looks something like henbit, on steroids; henbit was blooming a few weeks ago.

Henbit, from the Paducah Sun

Carolina windflower in front, purple deadnettle in back

Look for the windflower and consider yourself lucky if you find it.

But don’t get it mixed up with the next two plants here, the first of which is the common wild garlic.

Wild garlic, middle, and spring beauty, right and front

My dog loves to sniff these little things—and I have no idea why, except maybe that dogs like stinky stuff. And spring beauty is in front of them in this picture; the garlic is the tall, yellow-centered flowers at the back.

This is daisy fleabane.

Daisy fleabane

Sounds like a person's first and last name, right? It’s called “daisy” because, I guess, it resembles that flower, in miniature, but the “fleabane” part comes from an old belief that you could sprinkle the dried flowers in a house to get rid of fleas (thus, the “bane”). Of course, it can’t do that. Its scientific name is Erigeron annuus. By the way, the word "daisy" came from "day's-eye," because the flower opens in the day and closes at night. And second by-the-way: "daisy" is "margarita," in Spanish.

Another little white flower, easily overlooked, is the mouse-ear chickweed.

Mouse-ear chickweed

To ID this one, pay attention to the cleft (split) at the end of each petal in the tiny thing.

This isn't technically a wildflower, but since they're blooming in my yard (from bulbs), I'm going to include them--"snowdrops." They're an old-fashioned flower you don't see just everywhere. Notice there are green dots all around the edges of each flower.

I haven't yet found shepherd's purse. It does look like what its name says it is.

Brittanica

And, speaking of white flowers, don’t overlook the white Dutch clover, which is everywhere now but original to Europe.

People introduced it as forage for food animals, and we find our good luck among its leaves! Or, if you like, you can tie the long stems together and make clover necklaces, bracelets, or—if your patience or skill are lacking—little rings.

There are several other clovers—yellow hop clover,

Yellow hop clover

Persian clover, rabbit’s-foot clover (THAT is fun to find!), the red clover we see along highways—but they don’t seem to be around just yet. Do some research on them so that you can recognize them when they do show up. By the way, once you FEEL rabbit’s-foot clover, you know what you have. It’s kind of very light purplish-pink and so soft, it really IS like a rabbit’s foot.

I took this picture to show you something you’ll start seeing soon: lyre-leaf sage.

Lyre-leaf sage, the purplish stuff

It’s slightly purple, mostly low on the ground right now, no flowers yet. Don’t mix it up with the thistle, which will let you know, unpleasantly, if you do.

Thistles, to the left, to the right!

The sage hasn’t started getting tall yet, so if you reach for a purplish, fuzzy plant that IS getting kind of wide and tall, double-check before you try to touch it. Here’s what the lyre-leaf sage will eventually bloom into:

from Crooked Bear Creek Organics

Like purple deadnettle, lyre-leaf sage is a member of the mint family. How can you tell? Both of them have square stems!

I didn’t get a picture of toadflax; they were already coming up on the coast last week, but I didn’t find them this morning in my neighborhood. You may have them where you live, though. They are SMALL flowers on a TALL stem. Here's a picture from the North American Butterfly Association:

Toadflax

Finally, here are some shots of different wildflowers, several of them in one small area near my house. How many can you identify now? Answers will be in the comment section below this blog post. 

Ælfwine

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

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