The Elephant

The suicide rate of veterans aged 18 to 34 steadily increased from 2006 to 2016, with a jump of more than 10 percent from 2015 to2016. That translates into 45 deaths per 100,000 veterans, the highest of any age group.

From Military Times: In 2016, the most recent data available, the suicide rate for veterans was 1.5 times greater than for Americans who never served in the military. About 20 veterans a day across the country take their own lives, and veterans accounted for 14 percent of all adult suicide deaths in the U.S. in 2016, even though only 8 percent of the country’s population has served in the military.

One summer years ago I hung around a row of graves in one particular part of Pine Forest Cemetery in Lauderdale County. I was between semesters of teaching, and when depression hit me, that’s where I’d go.

That sounds a lot more morbid than it really was, although, yeah, it WAS a little morbid, I guess. I had a reason, such as it was, for being there: My younger brother, with whom I’d been very close both in age and in terms of our relationship, had died unexpectedly. And even knowing “he” wasn’t there (his actual self), still, it brought some peace to me to sit on the ground and think about him.

My parents eventually ended up reposing next to his grave, but that was years down the road. In the meantime, I sat and thought about Jack and looked around at the other graves nearby, wondering idly about some of them.

Long before those days, I’d been told that some of my forebears were laid to rest at Pine Forest, and as it turned out, not far from my brother’s grave; so I read their statistics and noticed that my great-great-grandfather William “Billy” Skinner had died on Christmas Day in 1885 (if you can believe things on grave markers, which is sometimes not the case).

That brought to mind something a relative had mentioned in passing, a bit of information I’d stuffed into my head and had more or less forgotten: “Billy Skinner committed suicide.”

This is a harder-than-usual post to write because of the topic I’m covering. When occasionally you hear of somebody taking his own life, inevitably you also eventually hear, “I just don’t understand how someone could do that.”

I do.

I’m not going to try to explore today an average person’s depths or sources of depression; but as I wrote at the first of this post, there IS one area I’m looking at, and that is the soldier’s life when he comes home. 

I’ve mentioned before that my father was about ten years old when his grandfather Andrew Jackson Alawine died: he lived down the road from him, knew him well, recalled what happened around the time he died, and told me when I was a teenager. (I refer you to my 6th post of my other family blog, in which I shared what he recounted to me.)

https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html 

My father said his grandfather Andrew never had discussed the time he served in the Civil War, and yet in those last days of his life—after his wife Lucretia died—he relived some of the battles and was out of his head.

My daughters’ grandfather Edwin Thead never told his children or grandchildren anything much about the time he spent in Europe towards the end of World War II. It was a brief period of service for him, but he just wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen.

Like Andrew Jackson Alawine, Billy Skinner had served in the Civil War, as the records below show.

Two of his brothers—Calvin J. and Marion F.—had also served, and Calvin had died on May 22, 1862 in Danville, VA. Billy was “paroled” (i.e., surrendered) at Vicksburg in July 1863. He’d married Susan Kelly in 1854. When she died in about 1872 or so, family tradition says he himself carved her headstone from wood. Being a master carpenter, he would’ve been able to do that.

He married Maggie Petty Mayo Sweeney, my great-great-grandmother, sometime around 1874. Their large extended family included half-siblings and step-siblings; they lived in Kemper County by then, apparently fairly prosperous, as Billy was listed a “mechanic in wood shop” (more than simply “carpenter”) on the 1880 census.

And yet…in 1885 he committed suicide, at a usually joyous time of year.

And then there is this:

(Thanks to Jan Boyles Wilson of Colorado.)

Just to help you recall who this person was: His father James and James’s brother Alexander were in South Alabama and South Mississippi in the early 1840’s. Several of Alex’s sons served in the Civil War, as did James’s. You can review all that history in this post.

http://theadsnotthreads.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-civil-war-and-theads.html

On Alex’s side, two sons—George W. and Columbus (“Lum”)—came home to carry on the Thead name. George lived to be a good old age, but Lum apparently died around 1869 or 1870, shortly after he returned from his own service, during which he spent time in a prison camp known for hard conditions. Lum had been discharged earlier, in 1862, because of “incipient consumption” (i.e., tuberculosis), but he rejoined and was captured, as the above post shows.

On the first-cousin side of the Thead family, over in Clarke County, Mississippi, James’s son Hamilton “Hamp” returned scarred from the Civil War—not so much physically as emotionally. His brothers William Alexander and John (and maybe another brother, Richmond) had died in the war. All three men had been in the same 13th Mississippi Regiment, so it’s possible Hamp was near them when they died. A record shows that he himself was listed as a “good and brave” soldier, but then he also “suffered a prisoner to escape” and served some kind of time in the equivalent of military jail.

He raised a family in Mississippi after the War. And then he committed suicide. He was buried on a hill overlooking the Buccatunna Creek, at the back of his property.

And the newspaper said, “The cause of his rash act is a mystery.”

Today we’d call it PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It doesn’t just affect the military, but we associated it more with soldiers.

There’s no way to make this post light-hearted; I would never even try. Perhaps, instead, looking back at these men who didn’t have the diagnosis of “PTSD” and suffered, sometimes for years, men whose families maybe only knew they were dealing with inner demons unimaginable to the everybody else—perhaps we just need to bear in mind that they have indeed “seen the elephant” where we have not.

Ælfwine

Potter and Clay: A Personal Moment, Please

Take a moment to wonder what’s in the little plastic bag.

Any answer other than “clay” would be incorrect: It is indeed reclaimed (that is, made pliable again) potter’s clay, a small ball of it, only enough to fit nicely in the palm of my hand, because I didn’t want to start with the tubful first and mess it all up. If you will, think of the tiny ball as one small decision to run down to Dollar General for some chips, and the larger bag as a move to, maybe, Italy. (I’ve always wanted to travel there, so I’ll use that country.)

I’m about to reclaim that big tub of clay, now that I know I can do it, having succeeded with the smaller amount, which I wrenched from the larger lump, added water to, kneaded and changed from hardened earth into something I can work with again, something that will (I hope) eventually become, through molding and carving and intense heat, an item of some beauty and meaning.

Not to get too pretentious or to drag out my metaphor too long, I will stop there.

This post will be a personal one, unrelated to genealogy, but as I’m the owner of the page, I can do that! If you find it boring, skip back to another post.

Some of you know already what I’m about to say, though probably not all the reasons, which I’m not going into, anyway, on this blog: I’m going to be teaching mainly art, not Spanish, this fall, and not at the high school where I've been these nine years. I told the principal several years ago that the only way I could’ve stayed in teaching after all this time was that I “took off” once in a while, usually when things at whatever school where I was working got weird and unpredictable. Or when my frustration rose to an unbearable (for me) level over the state’s, or a district’s, approaches to dealing with the education of kids I cared so deeply about.

Some of what follows, I’ve said already, in other posts, but bear with me.

I have ALWAYS known what I was “supposed” to be, since I was around 15 or so, when a high-school teacher asked me and another student or two if we’d like to teach a 20-minute lesson to her Spanish I class, with her guidance, of course. My sister-in-law was Hispanic, a fact that had already made me love the language; and after that short lesson, I was hooked. Add in a couple of inspiring, demanding English instructors in high school and college, and I ended up ultimately with a double major plus a teaching credential. —Which I’ve kept since 1974, when I left Ole Miss to teach my own students who were about a year and a half younger than I: I was eager, I was ready to take it all on, so I’d graduated a lot sooner than most people do.

What they can’t really tell you in college—what you finally have to experience on your own—is the fact that a lot of people regard school, maybe especially high school, as a place for kids of that difficult age to go to be put up with by people other than their parents: Whew, let somebody else deal with them right now. Teenage years can be tough. I know: My four daughters were all teenagers one time.

We try to maintain safe environments for these almost-adults. We’re their counselors; they cry on our shoulders (sometimes, literally). We do our best to elucidate for them topics we hope, we believe, will be important to their future selves. It’s exhausting work, exhausting way past my ability to describe, something people who’ve never taught really can’t understand completely. That sort of bone-deep tiredness has been characterized as “decision fatigue,” a phrase that may be about as accurate as any other term I’ve ever heard: We’re constantly, real-time, making choices about your child’s wellbeing, immediate safety and mental health, and future. And not just your one child, but times about 25 or more per class. Times multiple classes.

Administrators—even if they themselves have taught (and all SHOULD have, and not just for a year or two)—frequently forget this, the same way some childbirth memories are forgotten. Me, I’ve always felt too much—maybe I shouldn’t have started teaching at such a young age, because I wasn’t “grown,” myself, then, and my own emotions were still pretty naked and undisguised. Whatever: I learned early that I don’t have the desired ability just to shut out things I know aren’t going to end well, and stay in my own world and go about my own business indefinitely. I’ve wished sometimes that I had that trait; it lets teachers carry on and do their thing regardless of official chaos. But I didn’t have it, so my solution was to “check out” once in a while. I know not everybody has the luxury I did of taking that time off and finding something different to do for a while, then coming back in a few years, refreshed and ready to have another go at it.

And that’s where my own big tub of clay comes in. I’m about to reclaim, refresh, remold myself.

I always drew, painted, sculpted. We didn’t have money. But I’d buy tempera paints, ink, nice paper, whenever I could as a teenager. Long past the time I should’ve been in bed, I’d sit in my room, lights off, and stare out my window at the night sky, painting it in the dark, rubbing my brush across a sliver of bar soap and then into the paint, to keep my tempera from running all over the paper. In books about art history I’d run across pen-and-ink drawings done in the 1800’s, and I painstakingly copied them with my own nib and bottle of ink, purchased after I’d saved up enough allowance.

When he was forced by poor health to retire early, my father opened a ceramics shop. (I’ve posted about this before.) By then, I’d been teaching for several years. After school was out for the day, I’d sometimes run by his shop, and he’d hand me lumps of clay left over from whatever plates or bowls or pitchers he’d been working on, and I’d turn them into stuff: frogs, mushrooms, unicorns, figures representing family members.

Daddy also hand-made the pegged cedar table.

I think now that maybe Daddy’d been something of a frustrated artist who had to work during the Depression instead of taking his own “time off”: he’d also given me one of my first calligraphy pens that had been given to HIM when he was in high school. He’d never used it.

Look at the sign behind them...and I painted it!

So, back to now: I’m not “retiring” per se. I’m not ready to quit teaching. Some of my energy still comes from working with young people. But I find myself once more caring too much—not caring too much about THEM, because you can't care “too” much about kids, but you can let other things kill your spirit—and so it’s time for a break, and when this one is done, so will I be, at last. This time, I almost feel as if parts of my life have been teaser-trailers for this big final show. I didn’t realize that art I had in high school, that art I took in college (as my advisors tore out their hair and reminded me of required classes I HAD to have), the afternoons I spent with carving tools in Daddy’s shop—all of it seems to have been preparation for this moment, and I am grateful.

I was going to miss speaking Spanish on a daily basis, and I grieved about forgetting it through lack of use. But as it happens, that particular road-not-taken has U-turned in a serendipitous way: I’ll also have one language class! How much better can it be?

This weekend, my big chore is to start turning all that leather-hard potter’s clay back into usable stuff, and I know I can do it, because I took the first step and made a smaller amount soft and pliable again. Just as with myself. I’m not quite irrevocably hardened just yet.

Ælfwine

Tiny bits of clay require tiny creations.

Happy Fourth!

Ah, to sit outside on a big porch dressed in a long white muslin gown on a hot July day!

William Henry Scales House, ca. 1910

It’s July 2, 1910, and if you’re a Northern- or Western-born citizen of Noxubee County, Mississippi, you’re invited to a soiree celebrating the country’s independence. The event will be held at the home of Moses C. Weyburn, a transplant from New York via Illinois. Hungry? Thirsty? Not to fear: The tables will be "loaded down with viands."

An RSVP is not necessary.

So you may wonder who Moses C. Weyburn was and why I’m spending time on him today. Was he related to any of us? Probably not. I took an hour or more chasing him down through history, going backwards from Macon, Mississippi, to Dixon, Illinois, and then to Geneva, New York, where he was born in 1845 to Elizabeth "Elsie" Wooden and Edwin Weyburn, who was a physician.

Here’s what was written about Edwin and Elsie when they died:

Along my journey today I found out that Moses married a woman named Eva and had children Elsie and Florence; and then he married Minnie Weibezahn (her parents were from Germany), and Samuel Edwin, Marie and Robert Oliver came along. Some time after Robert was born, Minnie died, and Moses arrived in Noxubee County, MS.

Why? He’d lived in New York and Illinois, so why Mississippi? I couldn’t answer that one. Maybe it was because his first wife had died, and then the second, and he wanted to escape things that reminded him of them. I just know that by 1910 Moses Weyburn was throwing a party for other people like him who’d landed in Noxubee from distant locations—"foreigners," they’d have been called.

Some time later his son Robert Oliver enlisted for the WWI draft.

Perhaps he didn’t go; I found no record that he did. But one of Robert’s sons—Donald Edward—was 21 when he died in 1943; possibly he served and died in WWII. Robert is buried in Oddfellows Cemetery in Noxubee County, along with Donald, and Robert’s wife Edna.

 

 

The family history of Dr. Edwin Weyburn and Elsie was fascinating enough to me so that I spent another hour tracking down THEIR ancestors, all the way into the 1500’s! Elsie Wooden’s father was named Benjamin; he was also born in New York, in 1787, and he was married to Julia Condit, also from New York, born in 1797.

Now follow along, as this gets interesting, even if, like me, you have no horses in the race.

Julia Condit’s father, born in 1770, was named Moses. (Talk about family monikers being handed down…)

On FindaGrave’s website, someone’s posted this story about the family’s Independence Day celebration, taken from a newspaper I believe isn’t in existence anymore:

The "Condit" name had started out as "Condict," the way Moses’ father Jabez and his wife Phoebe Smith spelled it. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/12179422/jabez-condict 

…And the way HIS father Philip spelled it… https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/12180126/philip-condict  

…And Philip’s father Peter had arrived in the USA in the mid-1600’s. Whew.

I’m including at the bottom of this post a few more links to the family branches if you’d like to go through them. They’re all from FindaGrave.

And none of these people are related to me, so far as I know. Still, let’s "branch out" a little—but keep it all straight:

And, just like that, you have some descendants of early United States citizens showing up in Macon, Mississippi. A traceable part of the line goes all the way back to 1559.

And yet…look at the bottom right of the family chart, where you see Minnie Weibezahn’s parents.

Edward and Martha Weibezahn

They got to the U.S. straight from Germany. I could say we ALL got here from SOMEWHERE, from a long line or a short one—but that would be editorializing, wouldn’t it.

Tomorrow we celebrate the 243rd anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. As you serve up your version of holiday food or do whatever you may do, take a look at a celebration held about 110 years ago in Noxubee County, Mississippi. The article and picture originally appeared in a magazine-style brochure aimed at advertising the many advantages of the county and was published around 1912 or so.

Look at those faces, at the patriotic bunting hung on the house, and read about the welcome these "foreigners" received into the community. By the way, Moses Weyburn is the guy I called "Colonel Sanders" before I figured out who he was. You'll see him at the top of the steps on the left, with one of the posts at his back. He's also on the front porch of the house pictured at the beginning.

I’ll let the article and picture do the rest of the talking for me. The surprise ending is below.

 

The surprise ending? That’s MY house now. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places; here’s a more recent picture of it, with a light snowfall. I have to say, I’m proud to own a home where, so many years ago, non-native Noxubee citizens were considered to be "of Worth, Intelligence and Honor to the County."

And a happy Fourth of July to you!

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/176260600/richard-daniel-harrison

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/176555546/sarah-harrison

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/105627509/john-ward

Ælfwine

 

Times Are A-Changin'

"Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers. Pretty soon now you're gonna get older..." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl3vxEudif8 

The David Bowie song above came out in the ’70’s: “Time may change me,/But I can’t trace time.” —Words that take on a completely different meaning when you consider them from different perspectives! My mind goes there today because I have so many things changing in my own life right now...so many, in fact, that it took me this long to put up another post, which I’m finally doing today.

It’s been a while since my last one. Life tends to get in our way. It was always my intention to put up documents as I could find them, photos, and so on, and for relatives to contribute as they made discoveries.

As I mentioned, though, in the blog I do for my father and mother’s sides of my family, serious problems arise when you get into the mid-1800’s:

…People moved around a lot more than we might think they did.

…There were no copy or fax machines, computers, phones…and, more to the point, many of our ancestors weren’t all that great at writing.

...And my favorite: Paper burns.
The last one accounts for a good many dead-ends when people begin to draw out their family trees. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “Well, that courthouse burned down in 1880—” or some other year, making it nearly impossible to get certain documents I needed from a specific time.

So let’s start the conversation again, with a report from a Thead cousin in another state. (I won’t name him myself but will let him “own” this if he chooses.) Not too long ago he had a DNA test run, as he—like so many of us in the South—had grown up with a family legend about a Native-American ancestor. Here’s the data on his test:

His results pretty well match those of a couple of other Thead relatives', all descended either from James or Alexander. (See my previous post on this.) I gave my own daughter a test kit as part of her Christmas present, and her data came back pretty similar to these other relatives.

In my last post I asked why people in the 20^th century wanted so much to manufacture a Native-American ancestor. Other than the possibilities I posted, I have no other explanation. Anyway, there it is.

I alluded to “changes” at the top of this post, and it seems proper for me to tell about them instead of presenting a “guess-it” moment: I’ll be at a different school in the fall, teaching art, which is scary and exciting at the same time. I have always been an artist and find it interesting that at this time of my life that seems to be the path I’ve been put on.

It comes to my mind sometimes to wonder how many of our ancestors felt the same emotions we do when they left their native countries (Europe, mostly, as I said above), sailed to the United States, then moved around from state to state in many cases, finally settling into one area, perhaps, or maybe continuing to move. They were restless people, searching for…what? Unless we have writings by our predecessors, we’ll never know for sure.

Happy Fourth of July, and my next post will be a digression onto that topic. In the meantime, if you have any information or documents you’d like to share, get in touch with me so we can let everyone have access to them. 
Ælfwine