Church when I was growing up

I remember when the congregation I grew up in moved to its new sanctuary in 1954, but at age six, all that was imparted was a sense of excitement. The adjoining classrooms and social spaces came later. In the interim, we’d have to walk a city block each week between Sunday school and the worship service. Actually, there were two services, but that’s another matter – my family went to the second one.

Still, trying to conceive of this kind of gathering for worship is mindboggling in what’s unfortunately been described as a post-Christian America.

Not only is the sanctuary packed, but look at all those women wearing hats. Does anyone today, female or male, wear a hat – well, except for those baseball caps that have become ubiquitous, even at funerals? May I say, tacky baseball hats? Even those inscribed with Vietnam conflict participation? Instead, everyone looks ever so proper!

Or look at all those ushers! They not only have they committed themselves each week to greeting people and escorting them to seats, but later in each weekly service they had to collect the offering. Think about that. Expecting for cash, however wordlessly.

The photo seems so foreign to me from the America I see today.

And yet, more powerfully, what I feel we need to reconnect to comes way before this.

 

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Makes me wonder

In doing online sweeps for unresolved, related threads of this genealogy, one thing always makes me do a doubletake. That’s when I find that this blog pops up, often seeming to have most of the available information about a certain person or even place.

Why aren’t other sources showing up?

Actually, I find it a bit disconcerting.  Especially when individuals have simply vanished from sight, even mine.

The twins

The twins Ruth Anna and Ruby Althea were born February 21, 1903, to Joshua and Alice McSherry Hodson. Ruby became the grandmother of Vivian Meek Bibler, who provided these baby portraits.

I was curious about how one girl had all the hair – including the hereditary Hodson curls that never made it down to me – while the other had only the fuzz.

The question prompted this response:

“Grandma Ruby is the little one – she always said her sister took up so much space she had to be small.  Grandma was 76 pounds and 4′-8” in her 90s .  We were shopping in the little girls department for her clothes. Ruth is the taller one.  It makes me laugh that they were dressed so alike!

“Ruth has all the hair – she was always the taller and larger one.  It almost looks like a wig!”

Do we file this under Sibling Rivalry?

A teaching certificate and more

Alice McSherry’s teaching certificate introduces more insights into her life.

One of the areas of expertise she wasn’t proficient in is German grammar. Much of the region was settled by Germans.  The certificate was dated in Celina, the county seat. 

Note that the envelope it was mailed in has no address other than Shanes Crossing. Yes, in a small town, everyone was known, right?

A bit more digging led me to a brief history of Shanes Crossing, originally a trading village with Natives. It was renamed Rockford in 1890, in part by the postal service to avoid confusion. An earlier Orphan George blog post has a photo of her parents’ jewelry and millinery store in Rockford.

Mercer County sits along the Indiana border, as does Van Wert County, just to the north. Both figure prominently in the genealogy around Joshua Hodson’s arrival and his activity as a young father.

Both counties are north of Montgomery County, where much of the action eventually shifts.

For now, I’m uncertain exactly where she taught, although she did board for a while at the home of Joshua Hodson’s future first wife, Josephine Jones, one of her best friends.

Death following a second childbirth then thickened the plot.

Certificate and envelope, courtesy of Vivian Meek Bibler.

How does she strike you? Serious? Stern?

One of the photos Vivian Meek Bibler sent along was of our great-grandmother, Alice McSherry, as a young woman. Vivian said her family also thought Alice looked rather forbidding or at least not what we’d call happy. Well, she was a schoolteacher at one point. They do have to carry some authority, don’t they? (I expect to be scolded on that aside. Vivian is a retired teacher herself.)

I would lay some of the expression to the reality of having to hold a pose for several seconds without moving or even blinking.

You choose which interpretation you want, or even suggest another.

This is a portrait I hadn’t previously seen.

As for the elaborate dress, we should remember that her mother and one sister were milliners, a leap away from Joshua’s roots in Quaker plainness.

Well, the  times were changing, even for that Quaker discipline.

These connections keep adding up

Sometimes the best part of a blog is found in the comments posted by its readers, an exchange that has a special twist in a genealogy venture like this one. The twist is in the joy of meeting “new” kin, some closer on the chart to me than others, but always a delight. Better yet is when they, too, add to the content, as Michael Hodgson did most recently with the stories leading us across the frontier to the Pacific Northwest.

More recently, it’s led to delightful conversation with Vivian Meek Bibler, a second cousin from the “Indiana side” of my Hodson line. If we had ever met, it would have been a few times, at most, as children.

My own project has, in effect, had two centers of focus. The first, the starting point, was Joshua Francis Hodson, who moved to Indiana and Ohio from North Carolina after the Civil War. The second was George Hodgson, the boy who arrived in America as an orphan and eventually moved from Pennsylvania to North Carolina before the Revolutionary War. Connecting them was an exciting breakthrough.

Vivian and I both descend from Joshua and his second wife, Alice McSherry, and we both have memories of family reunions that included descendants from his first wife, Josephine Jones, who died of complications after the birth of their second child, who died shortly after.

Vivian’s grandmother – and my great-aunt – was Ruby Althea Meek.

In revisiting my materials, I was startled by her middle name. It’s one I thought I was encountering for the first time only in the past decade, where it’s the first name of some delightful Greek Orthodox women in New Hampshire.

But to back up, as I now see, looking at the charts, I’d dutifully typed it long ago, where Alice apparently drew the name from her sister-in-law, Althea Bayler McSherry. Naming patterns, as I’ve remarked in previous posts, can be very helpful in doing genealogy, especially when traditional patterns are maintained. In this case, I’m supposing Alice had a special fondness for her sister-in-law.

The charts for Alice’s generation also remind me of a number of holes and even hint at a few scandals. I’ll leave those for others to pursue and report on.

Vivian has graciously sent along materials I hadn’t seen but that we’ll be sharing here in the coming months.

She also has me vaguely recalling family reunions at the farm in Indiana, even a feeling of the flowered wallpaper in the farmhouse and an introduction to some of the animals beside the barn – just don’t ask me if they were cows, sheep, or horses, my only surviving impression is that they were big. Also, I was scarred of a man who must have been gentle great-uncle Samuel, with his Amish-like beard and clothing.

That said, I still hope to hear from Hodgson kin who settled around Wilmington, Ohio, or in Indiana before Joshua joined in their migration. There’s much more of the Orphan George story to uncover. My, when I started this, I didn’t even know they existed.

Genealogy research is never done … you’re welcome to pitch in

The Orphan George Chronicles detail my long quest to discover where my Hodson line came from, beginning somewhere in the dimness of late 1800s southwest Ohio.

I hope you find the results posted on this blog informative and interesting, all the way back to mid-1500s Cumbria, England.

I thought I was finished, but a realization flashed through my head around the time of my father’s funeral.  In my desire to unearth the unknown, I had leapt over my grandparents in the project, people who had been right in front of me in my earlier years, They were also people who were no longer living, to be pressed for answers.

So I turned to the last living member of my dad’s nuclear family to see what I could glean from her memories, leading to invaluable insights in what I present as the latest postings on this blog.

Especially her quip at the airport – “You know your grandfather’s slogan, used on all of his advertising, was ‘Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber’?” – this clue, told by the last of the family who would have remembered, instead becomes the key to my finally knowing both grandparents, years after their deaths.

What emerges is a profile of a generation that left not just farming but other traditions that had been practiced in this country for the previous two centuries, as they moved instead to the city and its new ways.

Just who are grandparents, anyway? And what is their role? What is discovered may be far from what is expected, as this personal exploration reveals.

And from there, we start going back … and back much further.

~*~

Let me also repeat my invitation to my wider kin. If you have photos, letters, memories, or other materials about any of the families discussed on this blog, I’d love to share them, if you’re willing.

As always, your comments are important. I look forward to hearing from you.

Grandpa and his crew

Grandpa hired a photographer and scheduled this shot in the park with his crew and trucks. It was used in his promotional materials, often with the slogan, Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber.

 

Here he poses, right, with his foreman and nephew, Delbert Hodson.

Triggered by a ’50s Christmas like theirs

As we step across the hallway from an 18^th century parlor into a mid-20^th century living room decked out for Christmas, I freeze in mid-stride. Not simply because of the contrast between the dimly lit, austere Puritan chamber we’ve just left, where Christmas would have had no place, and the gaudy materialism of post-World War II America we’re entering. This self-guided museum tour is supposed to be a re-creation of history in a neighborhood of Colonial and Victorian houses and stores in seacoast New Hampshire. How is it that Candlelight Stroll, this panorama of New England antiquity, so unexpectedly drops me into my grandparents’ living room in Ohio, 872 miles west-southwest, a half-century before?

On that dressed blue spruce has bubbling colored glass lights the shape of small candles identical to theirs, as is the television, with its black-and-white program. “Howdy-Doody,” as I recall or perhaps imagine afterward.

Now that I think of it, Grandpa and Grandma were the first we knew to replace theirs with a color TV set, but that would have been a few years later than this display from the heart of the Eisenhower presidency. As would their aluminum Christmas tree, seemingly all tinsel, illuminated by the revolving plastic disc of colors in front of a light bulb; who knows what happened to the old bubbling decorations after that?

Circling slowly in the room, I keep repeating to my wife and daughters as much as to myself, I’m not that old. I’m not historic. This scene mirrors my own childhood, tinsel and ribbons and all, my own lifetime. History is what comes before us, at least after the last of a generation is buried and preferably much earlier.

In reality, Grandpa and Grandma have both been dead a quarter-century by this time, and that house sold after her death and his remarriage.

What I don’t voice as we pass through the room is my vague, underlying apprehension. No sense of warmth is stirred by encountering these objects from my childhood – no, “Oh, look!” accompanied by memories of comfort or affection, much less any impressions of individuals brought vividly back to life. If anything, that room represents something I’ve spent most of my adult life dodging.

But what, exactly, prompts this reaction?

As I’ve discovered, genealogy research leads to far more than names, dates, and places.  It connects bone and blood over centuries.

Into the Great Black Swamp

Grandpa’s funeral struck the first crack in my assumptions of his background. His obituary said he was born in Van Wert, Ohio. I stared at the entry. I thought he had told me he was born just northwest of Dayton, “on a farm where Wolf Creek originates.” Only after my dad’s funeral would I realize that farm must have been where Dad was born, instead. And when Grandpa had nodded, over there, maybe he didn’t actually mean the farm in immediate view on that road north of Brookville, but rather a farm somewhere on its far side.

Still, this was the first clue I had that Grandpa hadn’t originated in Montgomery County, but four counties to the north, in the heart of what had been the Great Black Swamp. By now, I had already lived a couple of years in another corner of the swamp’s former expanse – some of America’s richest farmland, once it was drained in the late 1800s. Settled nearly three-quarters of a century after the land around Dayton, this was a place long prone to malaria – and then, to an oil boom, like those of Oklahoma and Texas. When Grandpa was born, it was still newly developing country – much of it only a generation or so – rather than long settled.

But how did he begin there? To understand that requires uncovering something of his grandparents, which I explain in depth in earlier posts on this blog.

In brief, the lives of both of my grandpa and grandma’s paternal grandparents would have centered on distinctive religious communities – for the Hodsons, the Quakers, formally known as the Society of Friends as well as just Friends; for the Ehrstines, it was the Dunkers, or German Baptist Brethren, before their branch emerged as the Church of the Brethren. Other strands would include the Brethren Church and the Grace Brethren – but not the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (generally known simply as United Brethren) and the River Brethren, or Brethren in Christ, which also play significant roles in the family history. Again, you’ll find these detailed in earlier posts.

I knew none of this at the time of Grandpa’s funeral. We were simply homogenous Midwesterners, awash in the middle class of America. Only later would I see how the very practice of simplicity and humility was a distinctive tradition now obscured by its very essence. Unconsciously, I was mourning the loss that accompanied their assimilation – the blackout of two legacies of focused living that had spanned nearly two centuries on this continent.

Even before Grandpa’s funeral, the large family Bible – later re-enforced by Grandma’s notes – had provided a few more clues about the Hodsons. Grandpa’s parents were Joshua and Alice McSherry Hodson, and Joshua was the son of Pleasant and Eunice Osban Hodson. But that was as far as it went, and there were no locations – no hint, especially, of the Tar Heel generations.

Alice, meanwhile, was Joshua’s second wife. His first, Josephine Jones Hodson, had died of complications after the birth of their second son, Kyle. Only their first son, Samuel, survived.