On the Way From Jacksonville to Tallahassee

There is a state road—I've read somewhere that it was the old stagecoach route—that once took travelers from Florida's most populous metropolitan center (Jacksonville) to its capital, a route stretching from east to west along the northernmost reaches of the state. Sometimes called the Old Spanish Trail—not to be confused with the route between Santa Fe and Los Angeles in the West—the route was also known as Florida State Road 10 until the 1927 formation of U.S. Route 90.

If you zoom in on a current-day map, close enough to see the details of those spots in the road too small to be called towns, somewhere on that Florida road, between Lake City and Live Oak, you might be able to locate the place known as Wellborn. Now merely called an "unincorporated community," Wellborn belongs to Suwannee County, itself a location called home by barely more than forty thousand people.

While there may not be many people living in Wellborn, it is still a place that is important to me. Why? Though I've never been there, that's where my maternal roots lie—at least on the McClellan side. And that's why we'll be settling in that area—at least, virtually speaking—for the next few days.

We've been following the trail, backwards in time, of my great grandfather, Rupert Charles McClellan, the dentist who once set up his practice in Tampa, Florida, but who, before that, had served not only as dentist but mayor of rural Fort Meade, a small city of now nearly six thousand people, whose municipal well-being experienced the ebb and flow of economic changes over the decades.

Before Tampa, before Fort Meade, and before marriage to his Tennessee bride Sarah Ann Broyles in 1898, Rupert was living in the home of his parents in Wellborn. Second son of William Henry McClellan and Emma Charles, themselves both children of the Suwannee County region, Rupert made his arrival there in Wellborn on July 30, 1871.

His first appearance in the decennial census records was in 1880, where he and his older brother Frank were joined by brothers William Robert, Philip Tyler and just-born baby sister, Asenah Julia—who, for whatever reason, had been entered in the enumeration as "Emily."

Of course, as things went with families of that era, more children were added to the McClellan family beyond that 1880 record. All told, the McClellans welcomed nine children into their household—at least, nine who made it to adulthood. In addition to those I've already mentioned, there were two more daughters followed by two more sons: Fannie Belle, Emily Jesse, George Sterling and Norman Delaney.

While Wellborn was never a boom town, it did have its heyday—between the years of 1890 and 1920, according to Wellborn "lifers" Maurice and Ann Geiger, shared in an interview published in the Suwannee Valley Times. (Maurice, incidentally, claimed descent from my third great grandfather, so contact with this distant McClellan cousin is now going on my genealogy to-do list for upcoming projects.)

Though small and seemingly insignificant, Wellborn has merited its place in at least two recently-published local history books, augmenting the resources to add to my library.

Of course, nothing will replace the chance to travel there, myself. Admittedly, I and family members have discussed this over the years, but never have taken the opportunity. The one chance I've had to travel to Florida, oddly, did not afford me the luxury of making the two hundred forty mile trip farther north to the McClellan property. That trip will have to await another opportunity—and believe me, it won't take place during hurricane season.

Above: 1880 U.S. Census record for the William H. McClellan household in Suwannee County, Florida; courtesy Ancestry.com.

      

On the Trail of the McClellans

Do you ever check census records for the addresses of your relatives of bygone generations so that you can go visit the homes where they once lived?

That's one of the first things I did when preparing to visit Florida last month. After all, we were flying into Tampa, and I already knew that was where my great grandfather had moved his dental practice, once his daughter graduated from high school in rural Fort Meade.

Since my great grandfather, Rupert Charles McClellan, died in 1943, the most recent record of his address would be found in the 1940 census. We snatched that little bit of data right out of the census—2804 Jefferson Street—and ran it through its paces. We checked it out on Google Maps. We zoomed in on Street View. Ever the technology buff, my husband even plugged it into his downloaded version of Google Earth.

There was only one problem with our plan to drive by the place, once we landed in Tampa: there was no 2804 Jefferson Street. Apparently, though the house numbers preceding it and following it can be easily located, all that is left of my great grandparents' home is now a vacant lot.

That is a result over which I should not really be surprised. After all, we tried this same approach on my husband's paternal line when we visited Fort Wayne several years ago—and our route took us, among many other still-standing hundred year old homes, to a vacant lot. It happens.

It's the kind of result that also serves to put the positive discoveries in much clearer focus: for those homes we do manage to find, by all means snap the photo, preserve the memory. That building may not be standing, the next time you pass this way.

That also makes me even more grateful for those architectural angels with the know-how to refurbish those old properties. Without that redemption, who knows what my great grandparents' home in Fort Meade would have looked like—actually, according to the home's last owner, it was an eyesore slated for demolition. And look what a charming place it has become. That property's story will be preserved for at least a little while longer.

Using the decennial census records as a guide, I can tell that Rupert and Sarah McClellan were living in Tampa for the 1930 and 1940 census. Although they appeared in the 1920 census in Fort Meade, its my hunch that they left for Tampa shortly after that point. Again, going back to 1910, they were still in Fort Meade. It wasn't until the 1900 census that their whereabouts became less clear.

I've already mentioned the newlyweds—Rupert and his bride, the former Sarah Ann Broyles of Washington County, Tennessee—had shown up just across the county (and state) line from Sarah' childhood home. The McClellans—including baby Rubie, their oldest child—were boarders in Bristol, Virginia, according to the 1900 census.

A lot can happen in a short time with a young family like the McClellans. Between 1900 and 1910, Rupert and Sarah had two of their three children—William, baby of the family, was not to come along until fifteen years later—and Rupert had enrolled in and graduated from a school of dentistry, possibly at Emory University. In that ten year period before the McClellan family ended up in Fort Meade, there were several blank spots in their history. These are records that I'll need to round up via other resources if I want to know the full story.

Researching before the 1900 census is another challenge—but one that each of us has faced in researching our American families here during the now-missing 1890 census. Though a lot can happen in a young family in ten short years, even more can transpire, no matter the size of the family, in those silent twenty years.

On the other side of that twenty year divide, Rupert showed up as the nine year old son of William Henry and Emma Charles McClellan in Suwannee County, Florida. Likely, he was at the old family home in a little town in the northern part of the state, known as Wellborn.

Fortunately, there is an architectural angel up in Wellborn, as well—someone who has lovingly restored the old McClellan property. While not part of our extended McClellan family, the owner is someone who evidently cares about the meaning of our heritage and local history—someone for whom I am extremely grateful. If it weren't for people like these, where would our historic landmarks and memories be?

It makes me wonder how many of those empty lots out there have an invisible history of their own. 

Copy That?

In cop lingo, someone saying "copy" is basically agreeing: "I got that." In other words, what you said is what I heard. Check. Or, as one resource puts it, "affirmative."

That word doesn't have such a positive spin in every discipline. If you mentioned "copy" to genealogists, for instance, it would raise hackles. Dire warnings would ensue. You might quickly assume that "copy" was a concept frowned upon in genealogical circles.

That attitude might have been rapidly accelerated by the advent of online resources. Ever since the launch of Rootsweb in the 1990s, the ability to build one's tree by cutting and pasting from publicly posted material has also become the focus of ridicule and scorn among those who know better. Why, all you would be doing there is copying the mistakes of others—and perpetuating them.

With that scenario in mind, it constantly amazes to take a look at the other side of the digital divide—that time preceding the advent of online research capabilities—when the era of books reigned supreme. That was the age when scholarly researchers and respected genealogists devoted themselves to publishing family histories based on diligent contact of extended family members. The revered books born of this effort of bygone centuries now fill the shelves of libraries across the land—in some cases, affording their administrators bragging rights to claim they are the largest repository of such records, or the second largest genealogical research center in the nation.

Unlike bits and bytes, books apparently mean something.

What they don't mean, necessarily, is that the information contained between their covers is fail-safe. If you've followed along here at A Family Tapestry for any amount of time, you already know I have a beef with the researchers of that era who published books on the Taliaferro line. It's my contention that they have one of the daughters of the younger Zachariah Taliaferro and his wife, Margaret Chew Carter, listed incorrectly. But what do I know? I'm only an online researcher. Never mind that I have more documentation available at my fingertips than a researcher of a century ago could access in nearly a lifetime of travel.

With that in mind, I enter this new project of researching my McClellan line with some trepidation. I have a lot to gain by mounting this research challenge: this is a pioneer family in the state of Florida, including a direct ancestor who was instrumental in the launch of the new state's government. I want to know more about that history.

Besides that, on a more personal note, I have hundreds of DNA test matches for whom I have no way of connecting them to my family tree. I suspect some loose ends might plug into this line of my family tree which I've neglected for so long. I won't know until I launch into that process of researching all the siblings of those ancestors and then tracing their descendants' lines forward through time.

That's where the problem crops up. Do I use those old books as my trailblazers? Can genealogy books make acceptable family history road maps? Or are they just as fault-laden as the trees we're warned against, now posted in online services? When is it permissible to take a peek?

In my case, I have a hybrid resource for my McClellan research: it's a book, but it wasn't written a hundred years ago. Actually, it was self-published by a distant family in-law in 1994, Bonney McClellan. If I remember correctly from my conversation when I purchased the book Kissin' Cousins from her, she had mentioned she was a former officer of the local genealogical society. When you open the cover of her book and delve into the text, it is apparent that she knew her way around source documents and other archival material. Land grants and plat maps, wills and probate, old photos, newspaper clippings and other material fill the book. The narrative filling the pages of her book sounds just like the lingo you'd expect from a genealogy tome.

But do I copy that?

I certainly still wouldn't advocate a wholesale lifting of her material. But we need to have the liberty, as conscientious researchers, to be able to access the work of others and use it as the guide it was intended to be. The work of others can serve as our trailblazers, whether found in hundred-year-old books, more recently published material, and, yes, even in the works of our fellow citizen genealogists posted online.

However, as the old saying has always warned any window shopper, caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware!

Double Duty

The task of genealogy seems relatively straightforward: for each generation we research, proceeding backwards through time, we double the number of ancestors for whom we must gather data. We start with ourselves, move back a generation and are tasked with documenting the minutiae of two people: our parents. From there, we cover four grandparents. Eight greats. Then the leap to sixteen.

You get the idea.

With my recent trip to Florida and the opportunity to stop by and visit some historic landmarks of the town where my great grandfather, Rupert Charles McClellan, lived one hundred years ago, it occurred to me that I ought to check how the doubling process was doing on my maternal grandmother's side of the family tree. After all, it was she, the daughter of Rupert, whose graduation from Fort Meade's high school so long ago left me some nifty century-old memorabilia.

As it turns out, some of the generational doubling on that McClellan line has been left in the dark.

I need to get busy on that line, and there is no time like the present—especially prompted by our recent trip to the McClellans' home state.

This doubling process is not without its detractors, of course. One cannot simply double each generation's count of ancestors, ad infinitum, without exiting the realm of possibility. Otherwise, at some point—say, the generation of Charlemagne, as one pragmatic blogger once pointed out—you'd be conceptually dealing with a head count much greater than the actual population of the earth at that moment in history.

The answer, of course, is that somebody out there in the distant branches of our family trees must have married a cousin. Or a niece. Or one of those once-removed types.

Apparently, that theoretical doubling of the family tree with each generation doesn't work itself out in real life. So far in this line—my maternal McClellan line—I haven't seen any signs of family marrying family. But then, I haven't progressed farther than my third great grandparents on all sides of that family branch. Who knows what happened in that post-colonial Southern family prior to that point?

I've already seen signs of intermarriage among those in my Taliaferro line—the family of Rupert's father-in-law, Thomas Taliaferro Broyles. And it was quite easy to finger several such lines in my husband's mother's line of pioneer settlers of central Ohio. In fact, though not part of my own family's heritage, such isolated populations as the Acadians who settled in Louisiana and the entire population of Iceland sport trees with eventually decreasing—rather than geometrically ever-increasing—numbers of ancestors.

This "redundancy" resulting in pedigree collapse is neatly outlined in a post by Olive Tree Genealogy's Lorine McGinnis Schulze. By necessity at some point, there must be a decrease in the head count in the generations of our ancestors. Yet the magnitude of numbers can be mind boggling. Take, for instance, Lorine's example posed by demographer Kenneth Wachtel, examining the possible number of ancestors of a "typical" child born in 1947 England. Such theoretical calculations prompt us to realize the interconnectivity of the earth's population. While I'm not sure we can assert that everyone is at least fiftieth cousin with every other earthling, numbers of such magnitude certainly sound convincing. And overwhelming.

If nothing else, they play out in my mind when I wonder, while wandering through places like Disneyland or Tampa as I have in the past month, what the chances might be of crossing paths with an unknown cousin.

A discovery of just that sort, popping up last week, seems so random: that my husband—an Air Force brat growing up in Albuquerque, Colorado Springs and Houston—would end up living well over a thousand miles away in a city where a distant relative once owned property beside a road on which we regularly drive to town.

Though the city in which we live is a place of over three hundred thousand people—possibly increasing such chances—it is not one on everyone's radar. You may have heard of America's next largest city (Pittsburgh) and the next smallest to ours (Anchorage), but who has heard of Stockton? We almost never make national headlines except for local government antics, unusual crime or the rare flood in the midst of this drought-stricken inland valley—my husband's fifteen minutes of fame came while he was acting Public Information Officer for our county's Sheriff's Office when a levee broke and flooded an entire island here—so what are the chances that another cousin from as far away as Ohio would stumble upon this unknown territory?

In fact, every time I run across a relative's name indicating residence in my city or county, it startles me. I don't know why; perhaps residents of our town have an underdog complex. Who would move here? Just from the sheer numbers, though, the possibility shouldn't surprise me. We are surrounded by cousins. Until we delve into the research, though, we remain ignorant of that fact.

Lorine Schulze mentioned that the farther back in her research she presses, the less she becomes surprised at the increased incidence of contacts with distant cousins. That would make sense, as long as those generational numbers keep doubling. That, coupled with the accessibility of "matches" via DNA testing—plus the willingness of a broad swath of our population to pursue genealogical research—give us an unprecedented opportunity to discover all those invisible cousins of which we would otherwise have remained oblivious. 

Realizing Our Own Place in Ongoing History

Today—at least in the United States and Canada—we celebrate Labor Day. If you are like me, the memories you have of that holiday are quite different from those fueling the original intent of the commemoration. Labor Day, for children of our generations, was the bright line separating the wonderful world of summer vacation from the dreary rest of the year.

That, however, is the way it used to be; now, the return to school can be much (more miserably) earlier—reminding me once again that the shift in delineation of "family history" edges ever so much closer to dates I can personally recall.

As you research your family's saga, do you note the occupations listed for your ancestors? In my husband's family tree, there were miners who undoubtedly faced the types of working conditions which unions once protested. My maternal line—as well as my husband's paternal line—included several who made their living working for the railroad. Not just a little ditty sung years ago, that represented a position of grueling labor.

It was the multiplied experiences of those many countless people that prompted formation of unions and propelled the message to the forefront in major cities across the continent. The first American Labor Day parade was organized at Union Square in New York City in 1882. Before that, a parade in support of a fifty eight hour work week was staged as part of the Toronto Typographical Union's strike in December, 1872, and became the inspiration for Canada's first Labour Day commemoration.

By the time of my childhood, Labor Day meant two things to me. First, parades; since my dad was a musician and played the trombone, inevitably our family would all pile in the car and drive with him to the town where he was participating in a Labor Day parade. Second—and so anticlimactic after the excitement of a parade—it meant the passing of summer and the sinking-pit-of-the-stomach realization that everyone must now go back to school.

Of course, the historic significance of the day would be lost upon such a mindset.

On the other hand, even my Labor Day experience would be totally meaningless to the young people of the current decade, who have no idea whatsoever that school wasn't supposed to start in mid-August.

These observations jolt us into a reality check: in addition to diligently assembling the stories of our ancestors, we need to preserve some accounts of our own experiences. We, too, must take a place in our family's history.

I had a student in one of my beginners' genealogy classes do just that. She happened to be much older than I, so at the time she showed me her booklet of personal memories, I had taken it much the same as one would, regarding something unnecessary or far removed from my own circumstances. Much as Laura Ingalls Wilder's dream of preserving the stories of her childhood must have seemed strange and superfluous to her peers—why, everyone knows that!—I had thought keeping a record of the life experiences I remember would be so, well, ordinary. But now, I'm not so sure.

What once seemed commonplace and plain to us is ever so slowly morphing into the way it used to be. And memories have a way of fading over time. While cameras can capture the way things used to look, it is words that we need to help preserve what it felt like to live through the episodes that made up past decades. Those "everyday" occurrences that we thought were so commonplace will someday become forgotten—unless we take these same tools we've put to use in telling our ancestors' stories and apply them to preserving memories of the lifetime we, ourselves, have experienced, too.

Above: Lithograph of America's first Labor Day Parade, held at Union Square in New York City in 1882; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

At a Dead Stand-Still

Sometimes, when progress grinds to a halt, it makes me wonder whether everyone went on summer vacation together. At least, that's the case with our family's DNA test results.

Tracking our progress on how many DNA matches both my husband and I have has not only kept me diligently working on family history research but has made me aware of the ebb and flow of the work stream at the testing company we use, Family Tree DNA. Since I started keeping track of results for my side of the family, for instance, I've gone from 750 autosomal DNA matches to 904. What's interesting, though, is that in the last few weeks, that galloping rate has slowed to a trickle. In my bi-monthly reporting, for instance, while I gained seven matches for the mid August report, nothing happened in the last two weeks until closing in on this weekend, when my numbers edged up a measly three more matches.

Even more so, on my husband's DNA results, everything came to a grinding halt—a particularly difficult thing to see when still awaiting the verdict on a distant cousin's test results. He hadn't received any new matches since August 7—and then, suddenly, in the last few days, something slipped in.

Even though it seemed like it, perhaps it wasn't really a company-wide mandated summer vacation slowing things down. Who knows? Maybe all our potential cousins took a well-deserved summer break. Maybe no one related to any of our fourth great grandparents included DNA testing in their summer plans.

Besides, even we took a week for a summer break to travel to Florida. Vacations may impact business negatively in some areas, but provide a boost in others. After all, I have to have something to do during all that down time, waiting at airports. So I put in a fair amount of time, adding to our family trees.

The numbers even surprised me, when I took the time to tally up progress. Of the two lines on which I'm now focusing, my husband's maternal tree now has 1,928 individuals—an uptick of 476 names. And my maternal tree saw an increase of 203, to land me at a total of 5,133 relatives now documented. Surely somewhere in all those entries is a surname my DNA matches can find to love.

Another funny thing has happened over the last half of August: I've gotten a few emails from people hoping to find a mutual ancestor in one of our trees. Some are from DNA test results, but others are proof that, hey, maybe this blogging "cousin bait" is working, after all. Or perhaps I have summer vacation to thank for all these new connections, as well.

Above: "Florida River Scene, Early Evening after Sunset," oil on canvas, circa 1887, by Martin Johnson Heade; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

The High Cost of Learning

A phone call came in the other day that reminded me of just how much it costs to pursue one's intent of educational improvement. Perhaps they call it "higher education" not so much for the attainment of rarified intellectual prowess, but for the cost involved in clutching and clawing one's way toward the top of the academic ladder.

"Dad," the plaintive voice whined through my husband's cell phone, "Can you help me with something?"

That is often the opener for many questions posed by our daughter. This one happened to come broadcast from inside the college bookstore, where said daughter was facing the price tag posted above the economics textbook she needed to purchase for a class later that same day.

Your undoubtedly sharp memory may have been jostled by that scenario. Wasn't it only last May, you might be wondering, when I mentioned that said daughter was finally graduating from college? With that thought, you would indeed be right—if only she hadn't decided to add yet another minor to her anthropology major and political science minor. After all, to achieve status as an osteoarchaeologist, one may need to have completed a doctorate in the subject. And a political science degree can qualify you to get a swell job at Starbucks.

Clearly, something else was needed as Plan B...just in case.

So we are enduring one "last" semester while our soon-to-be perennial student secures her job insurance, just in case the candidate grows weary before reaching that terminal educational status.

So it was an economics textbook she was staring down at that bookstore display. And she was not liking what she saw: a budget-busting price tag well over one hundred dollars. For a book.

Lest you get carried away with college nostalgia and memories of having to buy door-stopper tomes, let me disabuse you of that notion. The book over which she was suffering sticker shock was a mere paperback of barely three hundred pages—hardly the stuff of volumes rivaling the unabridged Webster's Dictionary. Unfortunately, though her normal frugal shopping method would be to order through the lowest-priced online outlet, she needed the book to complete a class assignment due that day; no chance to wait for online purchases to be shipped home. Our gal at college was a captive audience.

That vignette served to remind us of how expensive a proposition learning can be. The cumulative effect of a college education is to drain the coffers of every diligently-saving parent—and often to mortgage the future of the bright college graduate, too.

But college is not the only type of learning with a price tag. No matter what discipline you choose in which to polish your skill, there will be a cost associated with that goal.

Genealogists-in-training know that all too well. I was reminded of that fact when I saw the "Save the Date" announcement for the Southern California Genealogical Society's Jamboree—the annual conference I attend each June. To attend such an event can become a pricey proposition. But the conference planners bring in some of the country's most respected speakers, the venue is accommodating, and the event pulls in a wide variety of attendees every year. Next year's theme, "Giving to the Future by Preserving the Past," promises to place the 47th annual Jamboree right up there with the many successful events the SCGS has promoted in the past.

When you factor in the cost for registration for each day of the conference—including an extra day's registration if you wish to get educated on the use of DNA testing for genealogy—plus banquets, hotel room and parking fees, travel expenses and incidentals, you are looking at hundreds of dollars.

And that's just one conference. What if you also wish to attend the "big" events like the National Genealogical Society's conference, or the cruise-and-conference recently hosted by the Federation of Genealogical Societies?

It's events like these that put local genealogical society's annual seminars in perspective—perhaps a day spent augmenting genealogical research skills closer to home might be more cost effective. But who can resist a great party? The sparkle and draw of a conference can be mesmerizing. There is sometimes as much to be "learned" outside the classroom as in. Yet every lesson comes with some sort of price tag.

Of course, not every student can call home and ask Dad to foot the bill. Sometimes, those of us who are ever-learning need to pinch our own pennies. Perhaps that's why Thomas MacEntee's offer of a free download—this weekend only—of his latest e-book, The 15 Habits of Highly Frugal Genealogists, caught my eye. Sometimes, we just have to grin and bear it over having to pay the big bucks. But when we can, it's helpful to know how to cut costs and still be able to stay in the genealogical research game.