Pursuing the D.A.R. Paper Trail

Having a Genealogy Angel to walk me through the application process for what, in my mind, is a daunting project—acceptance into the lineage society, Daughters of the American Revolution—is a blessing. Getting to meet with said Genealogy Angel over a cup of coffee is heaven-sent.

That’s the way I spent my morning yesterday. Thankfully, my Genealogy Angel is officially appointed to do just that: assist people through the process of dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts of the paper chain that reaches back from my life to that of a patriot in our country’s war for independence.

I’m learning a lot in the process.

For one thing, I’ve learned that there are some details of my grandmother’s life that I never knew. Facts that perhaps her own daughters never knew. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable to stumble across those details. Sometimes it leads to the realization, “That explains everything,” as another researcher recently observed.

I’m also experiencing a process where these relatives-on-paper are taking on a three dimensional aura like I’ve never noticed before. I’m learning their stories. Learning how to see each one as an individual. Above all, learning to see each name as more than a collection of vital statistics. My ancestors are becoming real people to me.

That is not necessarily an easy task. It takes work finding some of these details. True, the D.A.R. application requires verification of those vital statistics. But in the journey back through time—my time—I’m choosing to adorn those vital dates with as much detail as I can add to the picture. You know me: I need a story to go with those names!

While my maternal grandmother—the Rubie of the last few days’ posts—is still an enigma to me, her mother is starting to come to life through what I’m uncovering. She—the Sarah Ann Broyles of “Jonesboro” in Tennessee who somehow met and eventually married Florida dentist Rupert Charles McClellan—was a relative I never met. Yet, her photograph has been in my life because she was my mother’s beloved grandmother. Through my mother’s stories, her grandmother came to life for me, and ever since my own childhood, those stories allowed me to see much more than just the face in the photograph.

Reconstructing her through the paper trail is only part of the journey, but it is a necessary step. I can find Sarah Ann Broyles in the 1898 record of her marriage in her hometown in Washington County, Tennessee. I can see her tentative first years of marriage—not in her hometown, not in her husband’s, either—in the first census after she married Rupert McClellan. With his name mangled for the 1900 record as “Robert,” he and his young family had settled in Virginia—but not for long. 

Within ten years, he had returned to his home state with his family in tow—not to the homestead of his parents, but a new life for his family and his profession in Fort Meade, Polk County. (Not, however, without having his given name, once again, misrepresented for the record.) And finally, with the 1930 census, choosing to move once again—this time to Tampa, where Rupert and Sarah Ann remained for the rest of their lives.

I find—thanks to a Find a Grave volunteer—photographs of the McClellan grave at the Myrtle Hill Memorial Park in Tampa, the final resting place for Rupert in 1943, and Sarah Ann in 1950. While I have yet to locate any obituaries for them, there is enough of a framework of their life’s stories to help sketch in the details.

And, oh, so much more I want to know than those details that will connect me with a membership in a society that confirms my American heritage. The process of the D.A.R. application, really, serves as the backbone supporting my own quest to delve into the essence of these lives.

I want to know the little details. Really, I want to ask Sarah Ann Broyles so many questions. “How did you meet your future husband? What made you decide to move so far from home? How was life different for you in your new home? Why did you pick the names you chose for your children?”

The list goes on and on. And I may never know the answers. But I know one thing: without asking any questions, I could never begin to make any discoveries.

And, once I’ve begun making those discoveries, I could certainly use a Genealogy Angel to help light the paperwork trail for me.

And a cup of coffee can come in handy in the process.

A Trifling Matter of a Name Change

Ruby or Ruth? That is only the beginning of research woes as I begin to piece together the trail back through my ancestry. The woman whom I called my grandmother evidently had an alias—not for any  sinister reason; she just preferred a more thoroughly modern, perhaps more thoroughly northern, sounding name.

Born to a Floridian father yet arriving in a backwoods Tennessee setting may have complicated the birth records chase. My grandmother’s father, Rupert Charles McClellan, came from a family long resident in Florida. It was her mother, the former Sarah Ann Broyles, who had arrived there from out of state. And when it came time for the arrival of her firstborn, Sarah Ann returned home for the occasion.

In such a situation, young mothers-to-be often wish to be near their own mother during this new life experience. In Sarah Ann’s case, however, her mother had died many years previously. A trip home to be with mother meant reliance on a step-mother, instead.

Or perhaps she chose this circumstance because her own father was a doctor. That might have been enough to inspire confidence in this young mother to exchange the rural setting of the McClellan homestead for the rural setting in which she was raised.

For whatever reason, Sarah Ann Broyles McClellan found herself in a place which, only a year later, was designated in census records not even with any town name, but only as “Civil District 6” of Washington County, Tennessee.

Meanwhile, just down the road a piece—and into the next county—another woman had recently given birth to twins. Martha Cassandra Boothe Davis named them Rovy M. and Roby Jake. Though one died in infancy, the other grew to become my maternal grandfather.

Roby Jake also experienced several iterations of his given name—the one originally inscribed in the Davis family Bible. His middle name, Jake, seemed to become the working name for a while, although Jack later became the preferred substitute. A distant cousin researching the Boothe line once told me he had heard the name to actually be Jackson, though I’ve never seen any evidence of that. He mentioned that he had also seen the name sometimes spelled Robie.

Now there’s a mind bender: Robie ultimately ends up marrying Rubie. That alone would be enough of an incentive to initiate a self-imposed name change!

I’m sure there was more to it, though, than a scenario like that. Perhaps it was wearying, as others in my family have discovered, to exist as a middle-name-is-working-name person in a first-name-functionary’s world. Think of the umpteenth time the census taker insists on “and what is your middle initial” after giving your name as “Jack.” I could see the reversal as an easy capitulation. After all, it’s just for a government functionary. It’s not for life.

And then what happens? Generations and generations of family history researchers dutifully report the gospel truth of his name in perpetuity as “Jack R.”

With help like that, who needs to pay good money to legally arrange a name change?

Who Did I Think She Was?

With apologies to the originators (and sponsors) of the internationally well-known television series, that is the question that comes to mind when I think about researching my grandmother’s genealogy.

If, when considering the word, “grandmother,” the image of a warm, loving, possibly plump matron comes to mind, disabuse yourself of that notion.

While my grandmother did indeed love her family, hers was a world of prim social relationships and proper etiquette gained from her upbringing, life experiences and education. At least, that’s the way I remember her.

And whatever the case, she was definitely not plump.

She is, however, the key standing between me and acceptance into the lineage society known as Daughters of the American Revolution. And yet, how to document this lady’s life?

Even perusing the little wisps of records she left behind, as I page through her Little Brown Book and catch the falling snippets of remembrance, I am already discovering that what I was told may not match up with the way it really was.

For instance, I was told—a revelation shared by my mother, not my grandmother—that the name my grandmother was given at birth was “Ruby.” Of course, hearing that report (rather than reading it), I presumed to spell it in the common way. On finding a delayed certificate of birth for her in an online facsimile of the Tennessee record, thanks to Ancestry.com, I now discover she herself signed the name as “Rubie.” She signed this sworn statement, complete with her middle name and the initial "M" for her maiden name, after her sixtieth birthday.

And yet, the only name I knew her to use was the name, Ruth.

My mother painted it as a case of a person not liking her own name. Woman’s prerogative? How would that stand in a court of law?

I can certainly affirm that the death record found online at FamilySearch.org matches the circumstances, as I remember them, surrounding her death. Including the record of her name as Ruth.

Aha! I thought: I can confirm this through her marriage certificate. Surely that will provide some connection? But no, it doesn’t appear so, for the only record I can find for a marriage between a Ruth McClellan of Florida and a Mr. Davis of Tennessee—his name seemed to vary with the times, just as hers did—was for a date that, if correct, would lead to another set of uncomfortable questions.

My mother—that source of all unwritten secrets—had confided to me on a few occasions that her parents had actually eloped. Part of the circumstances I’ve already alluded to in a post last year. Now I’m beginning to see there may be much more to this story.

I’ve sometimes heard family historians derogatorily referred to as The Family Snoop. I’ve presumed, in those cases, that there were skeletons in someone’s closet—a closet that others might have preferred left undisturbed by intruders. I hardly thought I’d become an intruder in my own family. But in the midst of this genteel ambience, I seem to be sniffing out some skeletons in my own family’s past.

 
Photograph: Rubie—or Ruth—Broyles McClellan, undated portrait from a sitting at Arcade Studio, Tampa, Florida; from the author's private collection.

Return to a Childhood Home

It’s often been said, “You can never go home again.” While people have attributed that saying to various sources, or attached different meanings to the phrase, I think it’s safe to say most people find themselves, at some point, wanting to revisit their childhood home.

Such was the case with my maternal grandmother. As we saw from the news clipping I mentioned yesterday, my grandmother did indeed make that trip late in her life. While it entailed driving from her home in Ohio to Florida after she and my grandfather were well into their retirement years, their journey was, in essence, no different than anyone’s visit to an old hometown might have been. After half a century, things are bound to change.

The difference with this visit was that it inspired some small town newspaper columnist to write a bit about it in the local paper. All it took was a childhood friend’s willingness to clip the mention out of the paper and mail it back to the one who initiated the whole event. And voilà! I have a story preserved by another ancestor who liked to keep records.

That record then touched off a chain reaction. True, for the most part, it lay dormant in the Little Brown Book for decades. But once uncovered, it got me started writing. I wrote a post about my grandmother the very first month I started this blog.

What’s significant about that bit of information is that someone happened to do an online search on my great-grandfather’s name just about the time I finished that post. That post led someone to connect with me who had news I would definitely want to hear: the old McClellan home was being refurbished. The building that narrowly missed being demolished was now to become a bed and breakfast!

Restored to the appearance it once sported in the early 1900s, the McClellan house now has its own entry on Wikipedia as well as a berth on the list of properties included in the Fort Meade Historic District.

While my grandmother never got to really go back home and see the place as it used to be, if I ever get a chance to travel to Florida, I will be able to go back and see her childhood home. In the meantime, evidently, so will everyone else.

Photograph above: The R. C. McClellan house, Fort Meade, Florida; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain through a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Disclaimer: While the old family house has been converted from residential to commercial use, I have no connection to the business nor to the current owner, and received no compensation for this mention. However, don't let that stop you from ignoring that old Florida call to "Come on Down" if you can.

Keeping in Touch With a Childhood Friend

When I opened up the little brown notebook to write about it yesterday, what should fall out but a newspaper clipping?! And that is perhaps the best place to begin exploring this little encyclopedia of family discoveries.

The news article—clipped so closely as to eliminate any clue as to publication or time frame—was brief. Judging from the content, it was from a Fort Meade, Florida, newspaper. The narrative explained that my maternal grandmother had decided to pay a visit to her childhood home.

Based on the clue of her return from Disney World, we can pin some parameters around the publication date. Disney World didn’t open until October, 1971. Since my grandmother most likely wouldn’t attempt such a trip from her home in Ohio without her husband, and since he died in 1988, we at least have a window of time for this report—wide, but a window.

My grandparents had traveled from Ohio to Florida for a vacation, but while there, that call to return home must have seemed all the easier for proximity. Though she hadn’t lived there since the 1920s, an entry in her little book confirmed that she had kept in touch with some childhood friends in Fort Meade.

Reading the newspaper clipping, I pulled out that little book and looked under the heading “C”—and sure enough, there were two Childers entries. One was for a Mrs. Pinson M. Childers—sadly, crossed out, leaving a silent token of another untold story—and the other was for Mrs. R. R. Childers.

It didn’t take long to learn what the “R. R.” stood for: Reuben R. Childers was listed in the 1920 census in his widowed mother’s household, along with his brother Pinson and other siblings. A 1935 Florida state census for Polk County showed newlyweds Reuben and what looks like “Aina P.” Childers still living in that same household. The 1945 state census shows the wife’s name morphing to “Ina P.” A transcription of state marriage records yields a wedding year of 1934 but maddeningly does not reveal that wife’s maiden name.

Whoever “Mrs. R. R. Childers” was, she maintained a friendship with my grandmother from childhood years, through geographic separation after the McClellan family moved out of town, and through adult years and across hundreds of miles. The little address book closed the gap.

            Mrs. Jack Davis of Columbus, Ohio, visited Mrs. R. R. Childers here Monday, after visits to Disney World and to her brother, William McClellan, in Tampa.

            Mrs. Davis is the former Ruby McClellan, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. R. C. McClellan. Dr. McClellan practiced dentistry here, and his daughter attended Fort Meade schools.

            Mrs. Davis tried to find familiar landmarks, but found Fort Meade much changed since the family left here for Tampa in the 1920s. She did find the former home, now the Ed Heath home, and was happy to identify some part of her past.

A Little Brown Book

For years, my grandmother kept track of all sorts of trivial yet important tidbits in a little notebook. I used to call it her “little black book.” That label would work, except for two problems:

          

        One, that term has since taken a decided turn for the worse, and

        Two, it isn’t black; it’s brown.

Though the book was never kept by a man, and though the thing in no way implied untoward behavior of those whose records it contained, it was the repository of names, addresses and details that I’ve since mined countless times for genealogical connections.

My grandmother, a southern lady reigning over a northern household in Columbus, Ohio, kept in touch with far-flung family and social connections through the information stored in this book. She operated in the midst of an era which, though introduced to long distance phone calling, still preferred the old fashioned approach of letter writing. Tucked away beside the addresses were reminders of shirt sizes next to notes of birth dates, or the date of a relative’s surgery for a get-well follow-up. A delightful hodgepodge of newspaper clippings and hand-copied poems rounded out the collection.

I was delighted, years ago, when her daughter—my aunt—decided to pass the tiny family relic on to me. The more I perused the entries enclosed in this magical record, the more I uncovered about the family connections it outlined. Over the years of genealogical research, what once passed (to my uninitiated eyes) as names and addresses of strangers took on the tantalizing form of sought-after relatives.

Now that I’ve finished my last, year-long research project on my husband’s Tully family line and turned my attention to my mother’s maternal line, this little brown book is coming back into position as a key player in my research. This is a handy resource to launch me in the right direction, for it is this specific line—if any in my family—that will yield me an entrance to the lineage society known as Daughters of the American Revolution. My maternal grandmother, known to me as Ruth McClellan Davis, in turn had a maternal grandfather whose ancestry had deep roots in the southern soil of this country.

Of course, it’s the paperwork that will prove the tale. Along with the other goals I’ve outlined yesterday, this project will take my full attention for quite a while to come. I’ll start by describing, step by step, some of the struggles I face as I pursue this goal—the first of which will be to rectify one small detail: that of my grandmother’s real name.

So…What’s Next?

Closing the door on a season was hard, but the next step may be harder: figuring out which project to tackle next.

Right now, I’m looking forward to three possibilities. One of them has a potential deadline as a price tag. One of them is a project I’ve always wanted to jump into, but time and circumstances just haven’t afforded me that luxury. And one of them simply fell in my lap when I wasn’t looking—and is now hollering at me from the shelf where I stuck it after my last vacation.

The first project—or rather, first set of projects—has to do with “First Families” designations. Years ago, I was told by a distant relative (met only through genealogical research) that I should qualify as a Florida Pioneer Descendant, courtesy of my mother’s McClellan line there. Granted, I’ve already known for years that my third great grandfather was a signer of the original Florida constitution. Following the procedure to achieve this designation is a formality that wouldn’t confirm anything I didn’t already know. But it would be a nice formality—as long as I can complete the application before the April 30 deadline.

A “First Families” project I’m more inclined to pursue is First Families of Ohio. This is part of the reason we visited Fort Wayne’s Allen County Public Library last summer. I am struggling with—no, suffering from—one vital but missing link standing in between me and claiming that prize on behalf of my husband’s family. I have been told, unofficially, by someone associated with the program that the piece of squishy documentation that makes me squirm in self-doubt may actually be quite acceptable. But only if I can get my act together before the December 31 deadline.

The second project—a dream for some, anathema to others—is to submit my application to become part of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Thanks once again to my mother’s maternal line, qualifying for this coveted designation is all over but the shouting. It’s just that small issue of completing the paperwork…

From that second project springs a third one. Courtesy of that midsummer stop at Fort Wayne, while desperately searching for that First Families of Ohio pre-1820 smoking gun, we stumbled upon some information that makes it appear that not only can I apply to the D. A. R. on my own behalf, but an ancestor in one of my husband’s lines may qualify, well, not my husband, exactly, but our daughter (once again)—and his sisters.

Ah, paperwork, paperwork!

And, as much as I know how everyone loves paperwork, I’ll be glad to share: I’ll keep all of you updated on my progress completing these three projects. Partly as accountability (please be my cheering section!). And partly in a quest to free the historic data that may be of help to other researchers. But mostly as guinea pig: see, you can do this, too!

Above right: Autumn in North America, 1856 oil on board, Frederic Edwin Church; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.