February 13, 2010

The Stuff They were Made Of

As I sit here about mid-morning on February 12, 2010, pounding away on my unconnected netbook and, thus, on what is eerily like my last contact with the 21st Century, I let my mind wander back to the lives of my ancestors who lived out their time here in the 19th and earlier centuries without electricity and the electronic devices I have come to depend on for so much in my life.

I am reduced to such thoughts due to the power outage growing out of the seven-inch accumulation of snowfall. Power has been out for and hour and half, and I’m beginning to grow a bit antsy.

I can’t turn on a light switch and get instant light on whatever I am doing. I can’t check my phone machine for missed messages (although a battery backup from the cable company keeps the phone line working at present.) I can’t get cable service due to the need for electricity to power my cable boxes, but that’s not very big considering I need the same electricity to run my television sets anyway. The downside is that my internet service provider is also my cable provider. I am writing this in hopes it will be found by any survivors, and it will be shared with the world.

Toilets are working, and I have running water. That’s very good. On the other hand the refrigerator is now racing against the clock to spoil all the food inside. For our safety, we don’t have natural gas, and they (the anonymous they) try to discourage tanks of liquid gas on the properties here, so no electricity means no heat. Yes, we have a fire place, but it is only a matter of time before we will be breaking up furniture to get some dry wood to burn.

It took me six tries to get my car UP and out of my driveway earlier this morning (with only minimal damage to the car and a nearby tree), so I broke association rules and left it parked on the side of the road. Because of that I can get out and drive over the activity center (about four miles away) for a hot lunch and to use their wireless internet connection. The bad news is that the wife keeps saying she’s not going — something about eating soup and roasting hot dogs at the fireplace.

My ancestors lived in log cabins, no electricity and with just a fireplace for warmth. If they had time to write out something like this, it was most likely with pencil and paper, and they were most likely thankful for having the things I am moaning about having to live with.

Sometimes I wonder about how they made that long trip from eastern Tennessee to eastern Texas before cars, trains, buses, and airlines when I sometimes find myself dreading the 30 mile trip into Tyler in an air-conditioned car.

If I had been the ancestor, I wonder if all the family today might still be living somewhere on the road well short of Texas and nearer Tennessee.

Posted here AFTER the electricity came back on (for the third time, but at least it stayed on this time).

Posted also at http://woodtxgene.com/

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November 24, 2009

Where I’ve Been

Those who take note of such things might wonder why there have been no posts to this blog between the last post in July and the latest in late November.

The blame falls on me and the fact that in July two things happened. (1) I learned that I was to become the editor of the newsletter for the Wood County, Texas Genealogical Society on September 1 of this year. (2) I discovered the website genealogywise and began to be active there with two groups I created. One was a Coffee Klatch for Wood County researchers and the second was to raise the question of how we might help our genealogical societies especially small ones struggling with membership and financial problems.

I was determined to combine the newsletter function of the Wood County Society with a weblog in order to ease communication and to reduce our printing costs for the newsletter. You can see the results of that on-going and on-growing project at http://woodtxgene.com.

I am still working out the genealogical society help site which is called Save Our (Local Genealogical) Societies at genealogywise. You can see it here (http://www.genealogywise.com/group/sos), and suggestions and contributions are solicited.

I have also been active on Facebook, and I have posted a TFTD (Thought For The Day) for friends there every day since I began in March of this year.

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November 24, 2009

The Times of My Life – Part I – WWII

I’ve always wondered. Did Great, Great Grandfather Thomas Hunt look up in the sky from Blount County, Tennessee in 1835 and see that momentous passage, so ballyhooed in that year, of Halley’s Comet? What were his memories of the second war with Britain, the War of 1812, and where was he and what did he think in 1826 when he heard that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died on July 4th of that year?

Of course, I’ll never know, but I determined that at least for one generation my descendants will have such information — just in case some unknown grandchild or great-plus grandchild is interested someday.

I (Deason Hunt) was born in 1943 during the Second World War of the 2oth Century. It was over about the time I turned two years old, so I obviously don’t remember it as a contemporary. I spent lots of time hearing about it as I grew up, and along with playing cowboys and Indians, my friends and I played lots of WWII make-believe. I carried wooden M-1 rifles with fake bayonets, BAR’s, and we sat in foxholes, also make-believe, fired at the Nazis and Japs with our 50-caliber machine guns and tossed an occasional hand grenade. There were army surplus stores where we could walk around and look at all kinds of army gear, and war movies were as popular with young boys as shoot-em-up western movies. There were lots of on-screen war heroes who we tried to imitate, but the greatest of these was John Wayne. Most of our dads served during the war, but, at least in our family, that service was never mentioned. I found most of the details of my Dad’s (Deason Hunt, Sr.) service after his death by papers I inherited and some additional research.

I also was not aware of the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war in the Pacific. I was, however, aware later that it had happened because we lived under the threat that the Soviet Communists would attack us with their atomic weapons. These were felt as real threats to end civilization, and we had duck and cover drills in school (get under the desks and cover your head/neck with your clasped hands). These were also handy for the weather scourge of the areas where I grew up in Texas — tornadoes. People bought and buried and otherwise built underground fallout shelters in their yards, (We were too poor to afford one.) and radio/television had signal tests in case of enemy attack — the test of the emergency alert system. After the fall of the Communist state in the Soviet Union in 1989, we learned they were as worried that we would do the same to them so that we had a world-saving standoff. It turned out that the play-like enemies of our youth, the Japanese and the Germans, became our allies during the cold war, and we actually spent all those years hating/fearing our WWII ally, the Soviet Union. To be continued…. Next, The 1950′s

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July 4, 2009

One of my favorite resources

Since all of my family lines come through southern states — North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi — one of the most valuable background resources I have found for understanding the lives of my 19th Century ancestors is The Dixie Frontier – A Social History of the Southern Frontier from the First Transmontane Beginnings to the Civil War, by Everett Dick, research professor of American History, Union College, Lincoln, Nebraska. (Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). On page 221 of the book, we learn that intermittent fever was another name for malaria. Although girls married young on the frontier (average age 15), the “young maiden” could not “begin to compete with the widow” as a prospective bride (page 135). While a rail splitter did indeed split rails, it was often called mauling rails (p. 313). The book is well documented and offers original sources which can be used for further research.

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July 4, 2009

No ancestor left unremembered

No ancestor left behind! That’s it after 32 years of researching.

I started my trek in genealogy in the late 1970s (my earliest correspondence files dated 1977) after receiving one of those “fill-in-your-family-tree” books for Christmas. I was like most starters just facing an empty 5-generation chart with little more data than my generation and that of my parents. Filling the blanks was the goal that motivated me at first with who and when. Over the years, my goals changed as I got deeper in some areas of research and broadened as I found interesting side paths to wander down.

It finally hit me this morning as I was driving and listening to NPR — No ancestor left unremembered. That’s what drives me three decades later. And I mean it for all my ancestors and all ancestors of everyone interested in genealogy and even those who could care less.

My religion teaches me that immortality has to do with the soul, and I get that. But I think how sad it is that people live out their lives and, one day, they are lost not only to memory but to history itself.

My limited reading in the development of family trees and genealogy leads me to believe that it is only the royal, rich, and famous who history remembers. Yet, don’t all our ancestors who laughed and cried, who passed days and nights of joy and pain, whose blood line and DNA testifies to the fact that they were here — don’t they deserve to be remembered? The common folk worked the fields, marched in the armies, raised the crops, and paid the taxes which allowed the rich and famous to be that and deserve their place in the sun. It is in remembrance and documentation that we save them for now and the future.

I don’t know where I will fit in the far distant future. I doubt that rich, powerful, or famous will ever be used to describe me; however, that doesn’t matter. My time is now with the resources and the stories which could disappear in a few generations. It is my place to provide knowledge of that which has gone before me so that the greater story might be known or written by future generations. Perhaps as we work and preserve names and memories today we set the stage for tomorrow’s more universal enlightenment of the value of all lives which otherwise might disappear into the mists of the past.

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May 19, 2009

Memories too precious to lose

Following a local genealogical society meeting last night, I have been thinking about what is lost forever when another person dies. I feel fine, but I wanted to get down some things of which I am the last keeper. Otherwise, when I go, they go.

The first was a memory of my Dad and namesake, Deason Hunt. As we walked among the tombstones of Hunt Cemetery in eastern Rusk County, Texas, he was telling some of his memories. At the stone of his Aunt Lou Vicey Hunt Ables (1846-1922), Dad recalled her funeral. He was 12-years-old at the time. At the cemetery, the coffin was opened for viewing before burial. It was snowing that cold December day, the 17th of December. It is likely my granddaddy Joseph Lafayette Hunt was there unaware that in an odd circumstance, he would die exactly 27 years later on December 17, 1939. My Daddy remembers as he looked into the coffin, a snow flake fell upon his Aunt’s cheek appearing as if a tear.

Years earlier, Daddy recalled, that, as a child, he was allowed to feel the bullets still carried in his leg from the Civil War by his grandfather, Thomas Edmond “Buck” Fears. This would have happened no later than when Daddy was 5-years-old because that was his age when Buck died in 1915 in the Hunt home. Daddy’s sister, Gladys Jewel Hunt Stewart, remembered in 1978 that Daddy woke up that night and asked “what’s happening.” When told what had happened by his mother, he said that “old Buck wasn’t dead.”

More memories will appear on this blog as time goes by.

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May 15, 2009

My Heroes

I don’t guess it would surprise many people that among the top ten heroes of my life several were teachers.

Like everyone, I suppose, the nature of my heroes changed as I got older. In the 1940′s there was Roy Rogers. That hero worship would later turn to admiration as I followed his life while I was an adult. The “King of the Cowboys” first fascinated us in the movie theater and then on early television. Since I was a child during the last years of WWII and the post-war years, I guess it would also be no surprise that John Wayne playing WWII and old Western (especially U. S. cavalry) roles was a great favorite. We were children of a war era.

In the 1950′s like most kids, “I Like(d) Ike,” first WWII Allied Europe commander and General Dwight D. Eisenhower and then U. S. President. I remember going downtown in Longview to the Republican headquarters and getting “I Like Ike” buttons and wearing to Foster Junior High and passing out extras to friends. Also, in the 1950′s there was Mickey Mantle. In an era before Texas major league baseball teams and even before the Dallas Cowboys, for most kids, the New York Yankees were America’s team. Mickey was the young, talented player most of us could identify with and look up to.

I had a number of teachers in school who I thought were the “bees knees,” but they three I most looked up to and, in many ways, took traits and procedures for my own teaching career were Mr. Glover, Mrs. Bourne, and Mrs. Prejean. To this day I think of them like that, and I would be very uncomfortable calling them by their first names.

Mr. Robert “Bob” Glover was my Tyler, Texas John Tyler High School American history teacher. His class was fascinating. His teaching style separated him from all my other teachers. It was like we were hearing stories and not studying history. After class was over, his students would often talk about what we had learned in class that day. I joined the high school history club mainly because Mr. Glover was sponsor.

Mrs. Mary Bourne was a bit scary. While I was in high school, I dreaded going to her Senior English class. She expected you to be prepared, to participate, and to get it right. She was tough, and I had to step up to the plate in that class. We studied English literature and related English history. For that reason, she was nicknamed “Bloody Mary,” but I know of no one who ever called her that in her presence. When I got to college (and in later years), I was better prepared for college English than many who not had her as a teacher. To this day, I appreciate her as a dedicated teacher who had our best interests at heart.

Mrs. Blanche Prejean was my journalism teacher at Tyler Junior College. She was also tough and a bit scary. She demanded your best preparation and effort. You knew better than to not deliver it. Work habits, diligence in research and writing, accepting that rewriting would be a way of life and path to excellence, and a love for traditional journalism were learned in her classes and labs and as student sports editor.

As a teacher, I never thought of myself as on the same level as these three, but trying to get to that level made me better than I would have been on my own and has kept me trying to improve even to this day. You never saw them on the silver screen or television, but they are forever among those (including my wife and parents) on the pedestals reserved for the special people who have guided me to where I am today. My heroes.

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May 1, 2009

Remembering great grandpa’s firearm

I’m not a hunter. I’ve never fired anything more serious than a BB-gun at any living creature (and I never hit anything alive). One of my prized possessions, however, is a 19th Century black powder rifle.
I came into possession of this firearm sometime after my Dad, also Deason Hunt, died back in the early 1980′s. Mother saw that I got it because it is a Hunt family relic. It belonged to my great grandfather, William “Billy” Marshall Hunt and has been in the family from the time he acquired it.
One of the special family stories about the gun occurred in the late 1930′s when my grandfather, Joseph “Joe” Lafayette Hunt, was terminally ill with cancer. One of his worries (or requests) concerned recovering the gun which he had loaned out to an acquaintance. My Dad took it upon himself to go out and find the individual and recover the gun and return it to his Dad to ease his mind in the matter. I am sure my words do not do justice to the anquish they all felt at that time concerning Granddad Joe Hunt and his condition and the small role the weapon played in their peace of mind.
I know the gun came in the family either during or before the Civil War but not the exact time or manner. Perhaps it was carried when the family moved from Tennessee around 1850. Family tradition in the Joseph Hunt family was that the gun was carried by William when he served as a militia guard form Union prisoners at Camp Ford during the Civil War. This story came most recently from my Dad and his brother William Thomas Hunt, my Uncle Willie. Uncle Willie was old enough before William “Billy” Hunt died to have heard him talk about the weapon and his role in the war. Uncle Willie in correspondence in the 1960′s of hearing the fact of his grandfather serving at Camp Ford spoken many times in his childhood home.
I am a member of the Camp Ford Association in nearby Tyler, Texas as a way to commemorate William Hunt’s service there during the Civil War. A future museum on land on which the prison camp sat is in the planning stages.

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April 19, 2009

Riding to school

I never rode a school bus to school. I know as this is written, most children (and even parents) might wonder why. The rule was school buses only ran outside of the city limits. The rest of us got to school the best way we could. No excuses were accepted for lack of ride, rain, etc. My own children (Michael and Emily) also never rode a school bus to school. Where we lived in Lake Jackson, Texas was within two miles of their schools: A. P. Beutel Elementary, Lake Jackson Intermediate School, and Brazoswood High School (actually across the city limits in neighboring Clute, Texas but still within two miles of our house on Carnation Street. The rule there was busing only beyond two miles from the school.
I don’t know what the rules were in the early 1900′s when my mother, Ozie Mae Moody, also known as Koko to all her grandchildren, was in school. However, much to my surprise when I asked one day about her experiences in school, she recalled that once she was carried to school each day in a covered wagon. You never know what you might miss if you don’t ask.
She describes her wagon experience in this excerpt from my family history, Out of Mississippi, The John Robert Wingate Family of Nacogdoches County, Texasfrom an interview I conducted with her October 19, 1991. Mother at the time of this event was living with her parents , Fred D. Moody and Pamilia Mae Wingate Moody in a logging camp in East Texas.
“Ozie Mae was sent to school even when they lived in the tent camps and outside of towns such as happened at Tucker Lake. ‘Well,

Ozie Mae Moody (Koko) in front and brother Oca Robert in cap in a school group picture perhaps at Caro School, Nacogdoches County, Texas.

Ozie Mae Moody (Koko) in front and brother Oca Robert in cap in a school group picture perhaps at Caro School, Nacogdoches County, Texas.

now when we lived in that river bottom (Oca was still going to school then), the camp hired somebody to drive a wagon, and we went to school at Ashton. That’s down there about eight or ten miles below where Oca and Dena lived (note: near Joaquin, Shelby County, Texas). There’s not a building there now. It’s just woods.
‘We had a hoodlum wagon. They never took the cover off. If it was a pretty day, the cover stayed on. It was covered all the way down. It had hooks on little things on each side of the wagon, those hooks fit down in there, but they never took those hooks off. We never went open. That was what made them call it a hoodlum wagon. It was just a wagon and mules. It was just that group of kids that lived in that bottom, but that hoodlum wagon was full. It had a bow top on it, seats on each side of the wagon that ran the length of the wagon, and a seat down through the middle. That’s way we rode to school, knees to knees. It had two mules. Oca rode his horse, and there was another boy who rode his horse. They didn’t ride them every day. But if the weather was pretty, they rode their horses. If they rode their horses, and it rained, they’d tie their horses to the back of the wagon, and they would ride inside going home.
‘We were our little bunch at school. We were the Tucker Lake bunch. At lunch time, we all went to the wagon and ate together. Oca played basketball. We may have been there a full year. We had three little girls about my age. Most of the kids were older. I was in about the third or the fourth grade because we moved over there from Sandy Creek.’ ”

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March 29, 2009

Teaching roots run deep

It was a great surprise when I discovered just how far back teaching goes in my family especially through my Moody ancestors.
My mother (Ozie Mae Moody Hunt aka Koko) was proud that all three of her children went to college, graduated, and became teachers. Her goal, spoken to us time after time, was that we would go to college “one way or another.” I don’t know if she wished all to be teachers, but she always spoke highly of her cousins who were teachers. After both of my children also entered the teaching profession, I have often thought about about mother’s heritage of producing their her will and efforts a good number of teachers.
It was just this month that cousin Betty Moody Walker shared with me a piece of her research which filled in some details on an early 19th Century common Moody ancestor, my great, great, great, great grandfather (g4 grandfather) Benjamin Moody of Chatham County, North Carolina.
The item was an article/obituary about Benjamin in the Biblical Recorder, the official journal of the North Carolina Baptist Convention in its January 27, 1854 edition. The obituary concluded with this information: “He had been a school teacher for half a century and perhaps has taught more youths than any other man that ever lived in Chatham County, and there are many no doubt in different parts of the county when they read this, whose though (thoughts? dh) will run back to their school boy days when they went to old Mr. Moody.”
Benjamin was born ca 1767 in North Carolina to William Moody. Previously, our research had turned up an abstract of his will dated February 1854 in Chatham County, we had found records of Benjamin being a member of the Rives Chapel Church of the same county, and documents helping us find the names of some of his children and his wife. This obituary, however, added a personal touch about this long-deceased ancestor that makes me a feel a closer kinship today.
The entire obituary from the journal as transcribed by Betty Moody Walker follows.
From the Biblical Recorder—–January 1854
“Died January 5, 1854, Benjamin Moody in the 87th year of his age.
The deceased had been for 20 years a member of the Reeves Chapel Baptist Church. Death did not take him by surprise, but he had anticipated it for some time, and seemed to be fully resigned to meet it, believing that it would be far better to depart and be with Christ, than to remain in this sinful world.
“The writer well remembers the last time he ever saw him at meeting, when he talked to the people about the vanity of earthly things, and the greatness of eternity and eternal things, when he brought the tears from many an eye, but his voice is forever hushed.
“Brother Moody had to pass through many sore trials during his pilgrimage on earth, especially his domestic trials, they were such that try men’s souls, and such as few are called to pass through, but amidst them all he still maintained his ground as a christian and exemplified in his life the power of grace of God to sustain the christian under trials.
“He had been a school teacher for half a century and perhaps has taught more youths than any other man that ever lived in Chatham County, and there are many no doubt in different parts of the county when they read this, whose though will run back to their school boy days when they went to old Mr. Moody.”

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