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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Gerald’s dream cabin

While thumbing thru my farm paper of things to trade or sell
you never know what you may find – maybe an old dinner bell.
So page by page I kept turning, not knowing what the next would bring,
when towards the very end I found a very special thing.
Behold a picture of a pond with a cabin at the end.
So I looked and looked at this picture and thought,
what a great place to have some time to spend.
My mind began wandering and dreaming of
warm summer days and eves with a gentle breeze,
trying to forget the winter when the pond was apt to freeze.
Thinking what a quiet and peaceful place to be,
this little pond and cabin, just for you and me.

Gerald Meek

Poem provided by his daughter, Vivian Meek Bibler.

 

Joshua’s letter to daughter Ruby

Examining letters, both for their content and their handwriting, can provide insights into personality, as I’ve contended in two earlier posts.

The outbreak of the Civil War ended Joshua Hodson’s education in North Carolina around the third grade, unlike his second wife, Alice McSherry Hodson, who was certified as a schoolteacher.

I examined one letter from him in a previous post, and later did the same for a letter from Alice.

Seeing a second letter in his hand, thanks to Vivian Meek Bibler, opens more insights. He sent this to Ruby at business school.

Here’s my rough transcription, trying to correct some of the spelling but maintaining as much of the spoken quality as possible, and occasionally guessing at a word. I left the lack of punctuation, feeling it gives a closer flow of his voice:

Spiceland, Ind.

July 20^th, 1923

Dear Ruby I thought I would write you a few lines while my dinner cooks I have a beef roast on and I am cooking potatoes in some of the broth wish you were here to help me eat it. I suppose mom is seeing sister today in the Windy City there isn’t much news to write about they are talking [?] some but I don’t think it will amount to anything the Klan men are going to have a parade tonight at N.C. I think I shall go. Mom said if I wrote to you I should tell you that she could not find any pictures that she thought you wanted your grades are very good I think for the first two weeks I will send them to you. I seen Else H this AM up town but did not talk to her any she had got to staying out with Bob Griffin until one and two in the morning so I am told. I must go and attend to my dinner it is 11:15 and I will finish this PM. Dinner is over. I am not working now Jim Cray came and wanted me to help reroof John [?]’s house but I told him it was too hot for me on a roof I was not going. I imagine you almost roast in the school room these days

I made some inquiry at the PO job it pays $14.00 per month some price isn’t it. I do not know how it will be but I noticed in your last letter you said your work is hard I suppose that will be the case all along but you remember no doubt what you have read that there is no excellency without great labor and that is what we may all expect if we ever reach the goal. So don’t get discouraged but push ahead even if you don’t make as rapid strides as you would like to. You will come out all right in the end. I have written all I can think of so I will close write soon your Father

~*~

In doing genealogy, it’s important to examine all of the facts, positive and negative.

The reference to the Klan march is jarring, especially to modern readers who are unfamiliar with the fact that the organization flourished in the early 1920s through much of the Midwest and West as an advocate of Prohibition, reactionary populism, and right-wing politics that appealed to many Protestant communities. For perspective, the march in question could have been part of a political rally arousing Joshua’s curiosity or entertainment more than his sympathy. By the end of the decade, the Klan rapidly declined.

The mention of a sister-in-law in Chicago is a new twist. Alice had two sisters, Sarah A., a teacher who never married and was buried in Pleasant Hill Cemetery in Brookville in the family plot, and Mary R., a milliner who also apparently never married. I find nothing more on her at this point, so I’ll guess that she had moved to Chicago.

I’m also amused that Joshua’s closure makes no mention that he’s running out of paper, as well.

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.

A final formal portrait

Here’s a studio shot of Grandpa shortly before his death. He looks more relaxed and accepting than anything we see in his earlier pictures. Tomorrow would have been his 120th birthday.

Myrl at the office door

The house sat on a narrow lot, with a dark canyon from the front steps to the plumbing office at the rear.

I wonder if she’s still wearing those black-and-white saddle shoes from last week.

 

Moo

Why I find this cow and calf in the stack of family photos still baffles me. Yes, I’ve already said farming was in Grandpa and Grandma’s blood, even though they had relocated to life in an industrial city.

But I still have no idea where this was taken. It’s too hilly to be the Binkley farm. Ditto for Uncle Samuel and Aunt Grace’s place, I think. Maybe over in Indiana?