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

Can't Deny Your DNA!

The summer is, for me, over, at least the part that lets me jump up and run off whenever and wherever I choose. School’s back in session, and I am back to enseñando el español. I love “my babies,” but my time is much more limited now.

At any rate, on the way to work one morning last week, I started thinking about that new thing some of us have done: the DNA test.

I confess I haven’t had one. I haven’t done the spit just yet. There was a time when, in my own family, I was absolutely certain (as were many of my first cousins) that we were descended from a Cherokee woman named Maggie Petty. Last year I mentioned in another post (https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/sweet-mysteries-of-life.html) that at least three cousins—all descended from Maggie—have taken DNA tests that show no Native American blood in them. By extension, this would mean, in me as well, of course…at least, not through Maggie. That wouldn’t exclude it from other ancestors, but except for one possibility on my mother’s side, I don’t think it’s there.
One of my first cousins on the Alawine side was very surprised about this and asked me how the stories started, how they were extended through the generations, and I don’t have a firm answer for that, only some theories and things I've read. My own father believed his great-grandmother Maggie was Cherokee. I never thought to ask him how this had been passed down, and of course he and all his siblings are gone.

So, how DO these things begin? Well, I think they’re products of a type of 20th-century idealism that’s been around before at different times in history. In the early 1800’s people up North who discovered mounds, relics of Indian culture, and so on, couldn’t reconcile those things with their own opinion of Native Americans as “savages.” The settlers had wrested land from the Indians; earlier, the explorers of the 1500’s had passed on diseases and had decimated some of the Native settlements, leaving desolate remnants of the original populations. By the 1800’s people in the East wondered how these smaller bands of Indians could possibly have created the mounds and the pottery and the cities they found traces of all over the place. Since their current experience with the Natives didn’t indicate the original extent of their civilization, they assumed there must have been a “different” group in earlier centuries that built the mounds and produced the relics, a group of more “noble” Native people that were no longer around. [For a really interesting take on this phenomenon, read Fawn Brodie's 1945 book.]

Settlers just couldn’t reconcile that evidence of a powerful earlier civilization with what they were seeing by that time. And perhaps in the early 1800’s they just didn’t understand how the explorations and first contacts in the late 1400’s and early 1500’s had changed everything.

But why did so many people in the 20th century wistfully want to claim Indian ancestry? I think it goes back to that similar movement in the 1800’s. People wanted to believe they were unique in some way. In the South we are largely from German, Irish-Scottish or English stock. But those dark eyes, that black-brown hair—surely that was different, surely that had to mean Native American blood! No, actually, there are many, many non-Native people with those characteristics.

And another thing to consider is that, no matter what we want to believe now, most of our ancestors were grasping people, in the sense that they took whatever they could from the places they settled…even if that meant displacing groups who’d been there on the land, first. As a studier of human nature, I’ve always found that when you know, inside, that you’re mistreating someone, your conscience tries to make you think it’s their fault, not yours: they brought it on themselves. Human beings have always been good at this kind of thing.

So if our ancestors believed (as most did) that they were justified in taking Native Americans’ land because of their own superiority—and, remember, by the 1800’s, Southerners in most places weren’t seeing many Indians, anyway, and certainly not after the 1830’s when they were shipped out West—why would they have socialized with the Natives to the degree that they’d consider marrying them and having children with them?

The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t have.

My own ancestors were Indian-fighters; I’ve got copies of their service records in various wars and skirmishes. It just doesn’t make any sense that they’d intermarry with people they were trying to drive away. The same is true of the Thead line (and associated branches).

And that’s where I’ve ended up concerning Native American ancestry in the Theads, Harmons, and so on.

In my last post (https://theadsnotthreads.blogspot.com/2018/07/nation-of-immigrants.html) I more or less discussed all this. As it happens, at least one Thead cousin descended from James Denton Thead (who was a grandchild of Alexander Thead, one of the two brothers who were in Southern Alabama near the Choctaw Trading Post in the 1830’s) has had a DNA. I recently asked her if she’d mind sharing the results with me, because if James Denton was 1/8 Indian, it should still show up to SOME extent in this cousin’s genes. I’m giving her anonymity, but here’s her report:

I see the same thing over and over in my own family. And perhaps those of us who are so shocked that our long-cherished hope of having Native American blood has been dashed should do a reality check along the lines of what I wrote above: Our ancestors from the 1800’s did NOT have the same view of the Native population as most of us do today. It may be that we’re just projecting our wishes upon them.

And yet…

Why are these three Thead relatives buried in a Poarch cemetery in Southern Alabama? (The Poarch are a Native American tribe in that area.)

From Findagrave.com

If anyone has an answer, please put it in the “Comments” below.

On the Harmon side of my daughters’ Thead line, there’s another of those puzzles that could easily drive me crazy if I let it. A family member—one of their second cousins—said over the years that she knew that her Harmon ancestor, a couple of generations back, was Native American. (This particular relative was descended from Francis “Fannie” Harmon, who married Will Mixon.) I tried to trace this line back, and, as so often happens, hit a blank wall pretty fast.

Here’s what I have on that side, minus the ancestry of Mary Irene Wilson (I’ll cover that in another post):

It seems pretty straightforward going backwards from Benjamin Franklin Harmon, who was the father of “Pinkey” Harmon and nine other children. Benjamin was the one supposedly part Native American. I easily found him in the census:

1880 Kemper MS

But wait! Look closely at where his family relationship is listed: “Adopted,” along with his sister Francis—the one who married Will Mixon, later. (She's shown as "S. C." or "S. F.") Now, in my research experience, family relationships were recorded pretty accurately during that period of time. If you were a grandchild, a niece, a cousin, that was written down. Right above B.F.’s and Francis’ names is Dorset, and he’s clearly listed as “son.”

So this means that B.F. and Francis may have been orphans who were living with another family. Since their last name was Harmon, perhaps they were related to Robert and Martha. —Or perhaps NOT! In other censuses children living with their mother and a stepfather are sometimes shown as having the stepfather’s last name, instead of their actual father’s. So it’s possible that Benjamin Franklin and Francis may not have actually been named “Harmon” at all.

And they’re shown as Caucasian. That in itself may not mean much, as not everybody from that time gave their race as Indian for the census. But whether they were or weren’t, I can’t prove or disprove it, because of that “Adopted” status. Who knows who their parents were?

So I was inclined to pay attention to the descendant’s story about her Native American blood—until one of HER descendants recently had a DNA test that points to a predominantly Irish background and (again) NO Indian blood! (Once more, I’m not naming the relative, to preserve her privacy.)

So there we are. People who don’t like giving up cherished notions sometimes scoff when I mention DNA. They say, “Well, that’s not always proof.” We all like to believe the legends, because they’re just more interesting than facts, sometimes. But, yes, DNA generally is proof. And, I mean, I’d love to be able to claim Native American kinship, but I can’t find any yet in my own background, and I’m fast arriving at the conclusion there won’t be any. That is sad, but I’m willing to accept it as fact.

Ælfwine