Saturday, March 30, 2013

Wishful Wednesday - John de Bostock of Whethamstede - Part 1 - Gard Line


This is the first of three parts.
 
If I could meet with one person on our family tree for an afternoon of conversation, I think it would be John de Bostock of Whethamstede (1383-1464), abbot of St. Albans in England.

For the record, our common ancestor is Sir William de Bostock (b. 1225).  By his first wife, Elizabeth, he had a son named Edward (b. 1245). By his second wife, Amice, he had a son named Gilbert (b. 1255).  We are descended from Edward, while John de Bostock of Whethamstede is descended from Gilbert.  (Gards, take note: the Bostocks are ancestors of Elizabeth Johnson, who married Jeremiah Gard in 1740.)

John de Bostock of Whethamstede’s life provides a window onto many aspects of medieval life: religious, political, military, cultural, and familial.

Part I: A Window on Medieval Family and Religion

Mackeyre's End
Let’s begin with familial.   The Bostocks were a Cheshire family, owning land near Macclesfield 36 miles northeast of Chester.  The John de Bostock who became Abbot John is regularly designated as John Whethamstede because he inherited the Manor of Mackeyre in Whethamstede upon the death of his mother, Margaret Makary. [Spelling was very fluid in this time period.] Whethamstede is in Hertfordshire, and though the Bostocks were Cheshire men, Hugh de Bostock, father of John, seems to have resided at Mackeyre’s End with his wife and children.  Since John Whethamstede’s name is inextricably linked to the history of St. Albans Abbey, it is worthy of note that St. Albans is also in Hertfordshire.

 At this point, the familial thread begins to blend in with the religious. John’s uncle, also called John Whethamstede, was the prior of Tynemouth.  The Priory of Tynemouth, though in Northumberland, was associated with St. Albans Abbey, a religious house much closer to London, because when the priory of Tynemouth had been decimated by the Danes in the tenth and eleventh centuries, William II had transferred monks from St. Albans to re-populate Tynemouth, which has remained in St. Albans’ jurisdiction ever since.  With his uncle as the prior of Tynemouth, then, it is perhaps not surprising that John de Bostock of Whethamstede became a monk of St. Albans sometime after 1401. 

He also became prior of Gloucester College, a Benedictine house at Oxford, where it is believed he eventually received a doctor of divinity degree.  In 1420, John was elected abbot of St. Albans.  As abbot, John broadened his horizons by trips to the continent on church business.  In 1424, he attended what was billed to be the Council of Pavia in Italy, but because the plague was raging there, the site was changed to Siena.  At that council, John spoke out on behalf of the Benedictine abbeys, arguing that they should be allowed to retain their exemption from papal authority.  In this debate, Abbot John was pitted against Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, who was the pope’s man, so to speak.

St. Albans Cathedral
This would not be the only time in John’s career when he had to take a stand.  Though said to be “shy” by some who knew him, he was assertive enough to take on the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, the following year regarding some jurisdictional issues.  When the case was decided ultimately, it turned out to be in Abbot John’s favor.  Another case arose which pitted John against other clerics of the age on behalf of others.  There was a “troublesome quarrel” in 1433 in which he opposed William Alnwick, bishop of Norwich, on behalf of the prior of Bynham, Norfolk, which was one of the St. Albans cells.  The matter finally made its way to the king’s court in the hall of the Blackfriars in London.  The Dictionary of National Biography states that “the result of the trial is not recorded, but the abbot considered that he had been successful in it.”  There were other such disputes throughout John’s time at St. Albans, which gives us some insight into the politics of the religious houses of medieval England.

 We see in these events that John would speak up when necessary, especially when he spoke on behalf of others, but that is not to say that John was attracted to anti-clerical movements that sprang up in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.  He would have been a child when Wycliffe got into a world of trouble for translating the Bible into English, and though he may have heard discussion about Lollardy (a pre-Reformation movement to return Christianity to Biblical standards), he was not attracted by it.  The DNB records, “He held a synod at St. Albans in 1426, before which he cited some persons suspected of heresy, inflicted penance on one man, and caused an [sic] heretical book to be burnt.”  From this, we can only conclude that in these early English challenges to papal authority, John aligned himself with Rome.


Sources:

Alston, George Cyprian. “The Benedictine Order.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton, 1907.  Web.  27 Mar. 2013. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02443a.htm   

Galbraith, Vivian H., ed. The Abbey of St. Albans from 1300 to the Dissolution of the Monasteries: The Stanhope Essay, 1911.  2008.  Web. 29 Mar. 2013.  http://www.archive.org/stream/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich_djvu.txt

Hunt, William. “WHETHAMSTEDE or Bostock, JOHN.” Dictionary of National Biography. 1885-1900. Vol. 60.  31 Aug. 2012.  Web.  30 Mar. 2013.
      http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Whethamstede,_John_(DNB00)

 Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Registra quorundam abbatum monasterii S. Albani, qui saeculo XVmo floruere: Registra Johannis Whethamstede. . . London: Longman, 1878. 15 Jan. 2008.  Web. 30 Mar. 2013. http://books.google.com/books/about/Registra_quorundam_abbatum_monasterii_S.html?id=8RsUAAAAYAAJ
 
Images:
 
John de Bostock of Whethamstede. http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeoithb/st.albans.html
 
Mackeyre's End.
http://mediasvc.ancestry.com/image/a7e1fcaf-1053-4bc0-aa3e-76f473d43b4a.jpg?Client=Trees&NamespaceID=1093

St. Albans Cathedral. 
http://mediasvc.ancestry.com/image/b1040224-1d7f-41ba-b8d0-f8b029a23e61.jpg?Client=Trees&NamespaceID=1093
http://geneabloggers.com

© Eileen Cunningham, 2013

 

John de Bostock of Whethamstede: Part 2 - Gard Line

This is the second of three parts.

If I could meet with one person on our family tree for an afternoon of conversation, I think it would be John de Bostock of Whethamstede (1383-1464), abbot of St. Albans in England.

For the record, our common ancestor is Sir William de Bostock (b. 1225).  By his first wife, Elizabeth, he had a son named Edward (b. 1245). By his second wife, Amice, he had a son named Gilbert (b. 1255).  We are descended from Edward, while John de Bostock of Whethamstede is descended from Gilbert.  (Gards, take note: the Bostocks are ancestors of Elizabeth Johnson, who married Jeremiah Gard in 1740.)

John de Bostock of Whethamstede’s life provides a window onto many aspects of medieval life: religious, political, military, cultural, and familial.

Part II: A Window on Medieval Warfare


Humphrey,
Duke of Gloucester
To the windows on medieval family and religion can be added a window on medieval English warfare—dynastic warfare, to be specific.  As indicated above, the Bostocks were Cheshire men, and as such, had sided with Richard II when he had been challenged by Henry Bolingbroke (later King Henry IV).  However, Abbot John, as a friend of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was more attached to King Henry, who was the father of his friend Humphrey.  The early fifteenth-century dynastic struggles led later to the series of conflicts known as the Wars of the Roses.  The complicated web of alliances and treasons in the fifteenth century are beyond the scope of this narrative, but suffice it to say, that the fortunes of John of Whethamstede rose and fell with those of Duke Humphrey, who fell afoul of Queen Margaret of Anjou in 1441. (Queen Margaret was the wife of King Henry VI and often led her husband’s cause during his bouts of periodic insanity.) 

Now, Humphrey, who would have been in line to be king had Margaret’s son died, fell from favor in 1441 when his wife, Eleanor of Cobham, was convicted of witchcraft and imprisoned.  The DNB indicates that Humphrey’s fall from power might have contributed to Abbot John’s resignation as abbot of St. Alban’s, even though that happened in 1440, a year before the charges were brought against Eleanor.  According to the DNB, “On 26 Nov. 1440 he resigned the abbacy. The reasons alleged for this step are that he was suffering from ill health; that, being of a nervous temperament, he found his work and anxieties too much for him; and that he was painfully bashful.”

Today those symptoms might lead to a diagnosis of agoraphobia, a disorder characterized by reclusiveness and anxiety.  Such a condition could in and of itself lead to a person’s resignation from a somewhat “public” position, and, his friend’s fall from favor—which did certainly happen in 1441—could well have been a contributing factor and might help to explain why the abbot switched from support of the Lancastrian cause to that of the Yorks, who opposed Queen Margaret.

In 1447, Humphrey was arrested and died a few days later, though to this day it is unknown whether he died of a heart attack or stroke brought on by the distress of his captivity—or was murdered by Lancastrians in Queen Margaret’s party. Probably due to his close association with Abbot John, Duke Humphrey was buried at the abbey of St. Albans. (Readers of historical fiction may like to know that Margaret Frazer’s novel The Bastard’s Tale concerns this event, and Abbot John makes a brief appearance in Chapter 25.)

When Whethamstede had retired in 1440, John Stoke had replaced him as abbot; however, upon Stokes’ death in 1451, John Whethamstede was re-elected as abbot and resumed his duties, which meant that he would be in St. Albans where the Wars of the Roses broke out into violence in 1455 at what is called the First Battle of St. Albans, a victory for the Yorkists.  The Lancastrians Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset; Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland; and Thomas, lord Clifford had perished in the struggle, and Abbot John requested permission from the victorious duke of York to bury the three at the abbey.  He was personally affected later on by the Second Battle of St. Albans (1461), which was a defeat for the Yorkists.  The victorious Lancastrian army “plundered the Abbey and horribly ravaged the surrounding country.  The Queen [Margaret of Anjou] even condescended to rob the Abbey of its most precious jewels and treasures.  The result was sheer famine; the convent were dispersed, and the Abbot retired to his native town.  Thus for the only time in its history the continuity of conventual life at St. Albans was broken” (Galbraith).

Sources:

Alston, George Cyprian. “The Benedictine Order.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton, 1907.  Web.  27 Mar. 2013. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02443a.htm  Galbraith, Vivian H., ed. The Abbey of St. Albans from 1300 to the Dissolution of the Monasteries: The Stanhope Essay, 1911.  2008.  Web. 29 Mar. 2013.  http://www.archive.org/stream/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich_djvu.txt

Hunt, William. “WHETHAMSTEDE or Bostock, JOHN.” Dictionary of National Biography. 1885-1900. Vol. 60.  31 Aug. 2012.  Web.  30 Mar. 2013.
      http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Whethamstede,_John_(DNB00)

Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Registra quorundam abbatum monasterii S. Albani, qui saeculo XVmo floruere: Registra Johannis Whethamstede. . . London: Longman, 1878. 15 Jan. 2008.  Web. 30 Mar. 2013. http://books.google.com/books/about/Registra_quorundam_abbatum_monasterii_S.html?id=8RsUAAAAYAAJ
 
Images:
 
Bolton, J. The Second Battle of St. Albans, 1461. http://tuckdb.org/postcards/70596
 


© Eileen Cunningham, 2013

 


John de Bostock of Whethamstede: Part 3 - Gard Line


This is the third of three installments on John of Whethamstede.
 
If I could meet with one person on our family tree for an afternoon of conversation, I think it would be John de Bostock of Whethamstede (1383-1464), abbot of St. Albans in England.

For the record, our common ancestor is Sir William de Bostock (b. 1225).  By his first wife, Elizabeth, he had a son named Edward (b. 1245). By his second wife, Amice, he had a son named Gilbert (b. 1255).  We are descended from Edward, while John de Bostock of Whethamstede is descended from Gilbert.  (Gards, take note: the Bostocks are ancestors of Elizabeth Johnson, who married Jeremiah Gard in 1740.)

John de Bostock of Whethamstede’s life provides a window onto many aspects of medieval life: religious, political, military, cultural, and familial.

Part III: A Window onto Medieval Cultural Life

 In addition, then, to the familial, religious, and military matters of the age, Abbot John’s life is also instructive regarding the cultural life of the times.  The Benedictines were well known for the establishment of libraries, so Duke Humphrey appears in the picture once again.  An avid book collector, Duke Humphrey would eventually bequeath his vast personal library to the University of Oxford, where it is still housed at the Bodleian.  Duke Humphrey made regular visits to St. Albans to meet with the abbot, and over the years helped him to found a substantial library at the abbey.

Education was the province of the monks in the Middle Ages, and during the time that John of Whethamstede was taking his hiatus from the monastic life, the quality of the teaching function of the monastery had sunk to a very low standard.  When John began his second term as abbot, there was virtually no one in the Abbey any longer who could teach grammar [the rudiments of each subject], and at Oxford’s Gloucester Hall there were “hardly any students from St. Albans.”  What is more, it was very slim pickings when it came to finding someone who would take on “the burden of preaching” (Galbraith).  It shows something of Abbot John’s ability and devotion when the DNB reports that the monastery greatly improved once he undertook his second abbacy.

Whethamstede himself was a writer, keeping a chronicle for the period between 1440 and 1460, which still serves today as a source of information for this period.  In his verse, Galbraith reports, “It is impossible not to see in the florid verses of Whethamstede and in his prose (loaded with classical allusion and metaphor) an early appearance of the Renaissance spirit in England. Verse and prose are alike worthless, but show a striving after something better than mediaeval monastic writing. The tendency becomes more marked in his work after his visit to Italy in 1423, where he
was certainly influenced by the early Humanist movement.” The DNB lists the following as writings of Abbot John:
Granarium de viris illustribus (4 vols.)
Palearium Poetarum
Registrum Abbatiae Johannis Whethamstede, Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Albani
     (Register to the seventh year of his abbacy, with various letters)
Super Valerium in Augustinum de Anchona
Super Polycraticum et super Epistolas Petri Blesensis (a commentary on the epistles of Peter)
Cato Commentatus
Cato Glossatus
De situ Terræ Sanctæ
Propinarium
Pabularium Poetarum
Proverbiarium
Letters (“verbose and flowery”) in the Chronicles of St. Albans Abbey
Latin verses for many occasions (“mere doggerel”)
A small book with metres and tables

(Note: Cato Commentatus and the Granarium are probably the two books he presented to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, which Gloucester later donated to the University of Oxford. Others are in the British Museum.)

Whethamstede’s chamberlain at St. Albans, a lay clerk named Richard Fox, was also interested in books and writing and is known for having created an expanded version of the Brut Chronicle and seeing to its printing by William Caxton, who set up the first printing press in England. In addition, Fox wrote an account of the death of the abbot’s friend, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.  

One more aspect of medieval life remains: hospitality.  When one thinks of a medieval abbey, one doesn’t necessarily think of it as a hotel for travelers, but in the Middle Ages abbeys and convents often hosted dignitaries who passed through the area. The boy-king Henry VI and  his mother (Catherine of Valois) are known to have stayed at the abbey in 1428, and, in fact, Henry VI frequently visited the abbey during his reign.  Queen Johanna, the widow of Henry IV, who was Whethamstede’s tenant at nearby Abbots Langley, was hosted by the abbey as were  Henry de Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick, and his wife Cecily Neville, Countess of Warwick.  The fact that the Duke and Duchess of Bedford once arrived with a retinue of three hundred people shows the level of entertaining the abbey was charged with doing.

In summary, then, we can say that the life of John de Bostock Whethamstede provides a window into the world of medieval England in all its array.  Abbot John died at the age of 81 on January 20, 1465, and was buried in the abbey church at St. Albans in a tomb that he had had made for himself years earlier.  Requiescat in pace.


Sources

Alston, George Cyprian. “The Benedictine Order.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton, 1907.  Web.  27 Mar. 2013. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02443a.htm 

Galbraith, Vivian H., ed. The Abbey of St. Albans from 1300 to the Dissolution of the Monasteries: The Stanhope Essay, 1911.  2008.  Web. 29 Mar. 2013.  http://www.archive.org/stream/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich/abbeyofstalbansf00galbrich_djvu.txt

Hunt, William. “WHETHAMSTEDE or Bostock, JOHN.”  Dictionary of National Biography. 1885-1900. Vol. 60.  31 Aug. 2012.  Web.  30 Mar. 2013.

      http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Whethamstede,_John_(DNB00)

Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Registra quorundam abbatum monasterii S. Albani, qui saeculo XVmo floruere: Registra Johannis Whethamstede. . . London: Longman, 1878. 15 Jan. 2008.  Web. 30 Mar. 2013. http://books.google.com/books/about/Registra_quorundam_abbatum_monasterii_S.html?id=8RsUAAAAYAAJ


© Eileen Cunningham, 2013

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Private Charles Duncan, Fort Abercrombie, Dakota Territory, 1864-66 - Gard Line






Charles Duncan’s life is a microcosm of the frontier experience in nineteenth-century America.  Born in Iowa County, Wisconsin, in 1847, to Robert and Rachel (Gard) Duncan, he moved with his family to New Auburn, Minnesota, at a time when Minnesota was still a territory, not a state.  The Sioux Indians (also referred to as the Dakota) were dominant in the area.  Treaties between the Dakota and the United States had sometimes been broken by the government, and finally, roused with anger, the Indians entered upon violent attacks not only on military sites such as Fort Abercrombie, but also on white settlers, including women, children, and even infants.
            Mrs. Justin Kreiger, an eyewitness to some of the violence, told what the settlers were up against:
"Mr. Massipost had two daughters, young ladies, intelligent and accomplished. These the savages murdered most brutally. The head of one of them was afterward found, severed from the body, attached to a fish-hook, and hung upon a nail. His son, a young man of twenty-four years, was also killed. Mr. Massipost and a son of eight years escaped to New Ulm. . . . The daughter of Mr. Schwandt, enceinte [pregnant], was cut open, as was learned afterward, the child taken alive from the mother, and nailed to a tree. The son of Mr. Schwandt, aged thirteen years, who had been beaten by the Indians, until dead, as was supposed, was present, and saw the entire tragedy. He saw the child taken alive from the body of his sister, Mrs. Waltz, and nailed to a tree in the yard. It struggled some time after the nails were driven through it! This occurred in the forenoon of Monday, 18th of August, 1862."
Fortunately, Charles’s father, Robert Duncan, had made friends with some of the Sioux, who warned him to leave the area before the all-out assault began in what would come to be called the Dakota War of 1862.  This allowed Robert to get the family to the relative safety of Fort Snelling in eastern Minnesota and almost certainly saved their lives.  In December, thirty-eight Sioux were hanged at Fort Snelling for rape and murder of settlers.  More than 300 had actually been sentenced to death, but President Lincoln had commuted all the death sentences except for the thirty-eight. 
            About a year later in the fall of 1863, the U.S. soldiers operating out of Fort Abercrombie attacked Little Crow and a band of warriors near the Pembina River, resulting in the surrender of the leader and about 200 of his warriors, who were held at Pembina, a military outpost at the confluence of the Red River and the Pembina River very close to the Canadian border.   Early in 1864, Little Six and Medicine Bottle were also captured and delivered to Pembina, and late in February Major Joseph R. Brown set out with the captive Indians (all except Little Six and Medicine Bottle) for Fort Snelling.          
The records show that at about this same time, on February 27, 1864, still four months shy of his sixteenth birthday, Charles Duncan fudged on his enlistment papers, saying he was seventeen (the required age for military service) and enlisted with the Independent Battalion Volunteers, Cavalry Co. D (Hatch’s Company).  In March, he was mustered into the Army and in August was sent with his company to Fort Abercrombie where they were under orders to patrol the area near Red River (today the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota).  According to Fort Abercrombie’s web site, “Minnesota Volunteer soldiers manned the fort when area settlers sought shelter there. The ‘regular’ U.S. Army soldiers had been withdrawn during the Civil War and had been replaced by the Minnesota Volunteer Infantry.”
Winter conditions in the area were (and are) extremely bitter, and in February 1865, a year after his enlistment, the records show that Charles had to be treated for exposure to the elements.  In November of that year the monthly muster documents show that Charles was assigned to be on “Special Duty” to Fort Abercrombie’s quartermaster, a position he held until April, the same month when President Lincoln was assassinated.
The Civil War over, Charles Duncan, who had initially enlisted for a period of three years, continued to serve at Fort Abercrombie until his honorable discharge in May 1866.  The Fort Abercrombie web site lists the various activities the fort supported.  It “guarded the oxcart trails of the later fur trade era, military supply wagon trains, stagecoach routes, and steamboat traffic on the Red River. It also was a supply base for two major gold-seeking expeditions across Dakota into Minnesota . . . and served as a hub for several major transportation routes through the northern plains.”  The Dakota War and these various activities all typify the America of the 1860s and give us a glimpse, through Charles Duncan’s eyes, of what life was like at those times.  And in those eyes it is possible to catch a glimpse of both the terror and the hope of the times. 

Sources: 

 
“Charles A. Duncan’s Service: Hatch's Independent Battalion, Minnesota Cavalry Dakota Territory, February 1864-June 1866.”  Ancestry.com.  n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. http://o.mfcreative.com/f4/exports/9/9a64eb43-b388-4a5f-a541-8df56de63f16/Charles%20Duncan%20during%20Civil%20Wa.pdf

“Dakota War of 1812.” Wikipedia.  2013.  Web.  21 Mar 2013.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_War
 
Fort Abercrombie State Historic Site. 2013. Web. 21 Mar 2013. http://history.nd.gov/historicsites/abercrombie/index.html

“Fort Abercrombie State Historical Site.”  Wahpeton-Breckenridge Chamber of Commere. n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. http://www.wahpetonbreckenridgechamber.com/visitor_fort.ht
 
“Fort Snelling.”  Wikipedia.  22 Mar. 2013.  Web.  22 Mar. 2013.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Snelling
Hubbard, Lucius Frederick, et al.  “Hatch’s Independent Battalion of Cavalry.” Minnesota in Three Centuries: 1655-1908. Vol. 3. 1908. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. http://archive.org/details/minnesotainthree03hubb 


© Eileen Cunningham, 2013


 



Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Fearless Females - Giving Birth at Sea - Travis Line


William G. Travis was the first in our branch of the Travis family to be born in—well, therein lies the problem.  William was born at sea during his parents’ emigration from the “Old Country" in 1774.   

One can only imagine what childbirth at sea was like for his mother, Mary (maiden name unknown).  Infant mortality and death during childbirth were not altogether uncommon in the late eighteenth century.  Lack of sanitation must certainly have contributed to the death toll even under the best of circumstances.  But what would childbirth on board an eighteenth-century ship have been like? 

·         How available was fresh water?  clean cloths? soap? 

·         Would cloths have been boiled in the ship’s galley kitchen in, say, the middle of the night?

·         Was a midwife available?

·         If not, who would have assisted in the childbirth? 

·         How much privacy did a child-bearing woman have in such close quarters?

·         How sanitary was the bedding after a family had been at sea for weeks?

·         How would a new mother launder the baby’s soiled clothing?

·         If infection set in, how would it have been treated? 

·         Where would the newborn sleep?

In addition to the physical and medical aspects of childbirth at sea, there are questions about the emotional, social, political, and religous aspects of bringing a child into the world.
 
·         How would a baby’s crying have affected other passengers? 

·         Little Will was actually Mary’s fourth child.  Would the children’s father (William A. Travis) have attended to their needs from the time of Will’s mid-Atlantic birth to the arrival of the ship in the New World?

·         How would the parents have seen to religious practices regarding, say, infant baptism (which is practiced by Presbyterians, the religion of Will’s parents)? 

·         Given the fact that sea voyages from the British Isles to America took about three months in that time period, one also wonders what urgency could have prompted the parents to set sail when the mother was relatively close to her “lying in”?

·         Will was born just two years before the American Revolution, and political tensions were already high.  Would full rights of citizenship (including what was called “the king’s protection”) have been extended to British subjects not born on British soil? 

The questions roll on and on.  As a mother and grandmother myself, I have great respect for Mary Travis, my fifth great-grandmother, and all the other women who gave birth during their passage to the New World.
 
 
 
 
© Eileen Cunningham, 2013

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Mappy Monday - Garrison, Kansas? - Gard Line



Woman of the times as
shown in the
University of Colorado
Yearbook, 1920
 
When I was researching my great-aunt, Rena Alice Travis (1893-1972), I had the pleasure of coming across a little gem that I had never heard of before.  In order to understand my "flabberghast-ation," you will first need to know a little about Rena's independence.  Though unusual for her time and era, Rena never married.  She had been engaged as a young woman, but her fiancé drowned in a boating accident.  Having lost the love of her life, she resolved never to marry, which meant, of course, that she needed to find a way to support herself. 
Now, Rena had been born in Reilly, Kansas, which is in Nemaha County—in the northeast quadrant of the state.  Nemaha County is north of and contiguous to Pottawatomie County, where Rena appears in the 1905 Kansas State Census records at the age of 11, residing with her parents in Green Township.  So, as far as I knew, Rena had left her home in Green Township and moved, at some point in time, to Los Angeles, California, where she worked as a bookkeeper for many years.

So, you can imagine how surprised I was when a Google search turned up a Rena Alice Travis at the University of Colorado for summer courses in the academic year 1920-21.  This seemed too amazing for me, and I thought it just had to be someone with the same name.  After all, Pottawatomie County, Kansas, is immediately adjacent to Riley County, where Kansas State University is located.  Why would Rena leave her family and go all the way to Colorado to school when she could live much closer to home by attending classes at at K-State (or, Kansas State Agricultural College, as it was known at the time)?

So, I dug further, and when I reached p. 367 of the University of Colorado Catalogue, 1920-21—lo and behold!—there it was: Rena Alice Travis of Garrison, Kansas.  But where on earth is Garrison, Kansas?  I’ve lived in Kansas all my life and am very familiar with Riley and Pottawatomie Counties (at least, I thought I was); but I had never heard of the town of Garrison.  So, maybe by some statistical improbability there were two Rena Alice Travises in Kansas in 1920, and the other one--from some other, far away county--had gone to CU for the summer.  It could happen, right?

So, I made an Internet search for Garrison, Kansas, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a map of Pottawatomie County, Kansas, showing Garrison as the westernmost town in the county.  A bit more digging turned up this description: "Garrison, a village of Pottawatomie county, is located in Green township. . . . [emphasis mine]."  Well, now we were down to a statistical impossibility.  This was my Rena--and no other! 

Hooray for the great little website, Lost Kansas Communities! They really made my day.

Sources:

Blackmar, Frank, ed. “Garrison.”  Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History. Blue Skyways Library.  May 2002.  Web.  17 Mar. 2013.  <http://skyways.lib.ks.us/genweb/archives/1912/g/garrison.html >

Gent, Frank.  Lost Kansas Communities.  Chapman Center for Rural Studies.  Kansas State University.  2011.  Web. 17 Mar. 2013.  <http://lostkscommunities.omeka.net/items/show/44>
University of Colorado Catalogue, Summer 1920-21, p. 367.  Google Books.  n.d.  Web.  17 Mar.
2013
<http://books.google.com/books?id=YHvOAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA3&dq=University+of+Colorado+Catalogue+1920-1921+%22+%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Yn1GUYTnKqii2AXn_oCQCw&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=University%20of%20Colorado%20Catalogue%201920-1921%20%22%20%22&f=true>



© Eileen Cunningham, 2013


St. Patrick's Day - Out of Ulster - Gard Line

William Gamble was born in 1770 in Ulster. Cavan County was one of three Irish counties which are now in the Republic of Ireland but originally part of Ulster. Ulster was an ancient kingdom now largely coterminous with Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom and a separate country from the Republic of Ireland.

Gamble died in Ohio, USA, in 1845. Is it possible that William Gamble moved his family from Ireland during the political upheaval that occurred there in the late eighteenth century?

The long and troubled history of relations between England and Ireland (bound up inevitably with Protestant and Roman Catholic conflicts) resulted in a number of bloody uprisings against English rule in Ireland, a period known in history as the Rebellion of 1798. These uprisings were inspired by both the American Revolution, begun in 1776, and the French Revolution, begun in 1789.

The English, motivated by a desire to restore order in Ireland and concern over the French involvement in the Irish Rebellion, drove for a closer political union between Ireland and England, resulting in the Act of Union of 1800. Though County Cavan seems not to have been a center of the rebellion, one still must wonder if the turmoil in the country served as the impetus to send the Gambles to America in search of a fresh start.

Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulster_counties.svg

http://geneabloggers.com


© Eileen Cunningham, 2013


Saturday, March 16, 2013

Thriller Thursday - The Roark Massacre - Sanford Line


James Roark was a first-generation American of Irish descent born in Virginia in 1740.  Marrying in about 1764, he and his wife built a log cabin and started their family in Tazewell County, Virginia.  Their home was at the gap of the dividing ridge between the Clinch and Sandy Rivers where Dry Fork Road passes through.  Today this is at the intersection of State Routes 631 and 637 (see link to map below).  This spot came to be called Roark’s Gap, no doubt in memory of what happened to the Roarks on March 18, 1780.

The harsh winter had not yet snapped in the Baptist Valley of southwest Virginia, and the ground was covered with snow.  Indian predations had been halted since the previous summer when the neighboring Evans family had been massacred by the Shawnee, so James had probably become secure in the relative tranquility of the area.  Because of the long, hard winter, even those pioneers who had livestock were finding that little meat was still available, so James was compelled to set out that morning with his two older sons to hunt for their provisions. 

 However, as Robert Burns once wrote, “The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley,” and so it was that Thursday morning.  Upon their return, the three hunters discovered that, contrary to their expectations, the Shawnee were, in fact, on the move again in the area, and the worst imaginable disaster had taken place.  In their attack on the Roark home, the Indians had killed and scalped Mrs. Roark and all of her small children.  The best account of the incident indicates that seven children were killed, though names are not provided.  It was originally stated that the Roarks’ baby girl had survived, but, if so, she is thought to have died soon after as there is no further written record of this child. 
Today we probably cannot even begin to imagine how a man could dig eight graves in frozen mountain ground and bury his family and his hopes.  Too distraught to remain living in the cabin where the massacre had occurred, Roark built another home on a strip of land he owned somewhat nearer the river, but "settling" was really no longer an option for him.   Much like Lewis Wetzel, "Dark Hero of the Ohio" (left), Roark and his oldest son, John, devoted themselves to revenge and involved themselves in a number of fights with the Shawnee and other tribes until they were killed in an encounter at Harman’s Station in Block House Bottom of (then) Floyd County, Kentucky.

The fate of Roark’s eleven-year-old son Timothy is told in a separate narrative entitled “Timothy Roark’s Escape from the Shawnee,” The Kith and Kin Chronicles, 16 March 2013.

http://geneabloggers.com

 Sources:


“Michael K. Hendrix Family.” 27 Mar 2005  Web.  16 Mar. 2013. <http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=mhendrix&id=I02149>

 Pendleton, William Cecil.  History of Tazewell County and Southwest Virginia:1748-1920.  Web. 16 March 2013.  http://books.google.com/books?id=KNEz0vNWJG4C&pg=PA231&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

Truman, Timothy.  Image of Lewis Wetzel, Indian Fighter.  "Lewis Wetzel, Dark Hero of the Ohio." Archiving Early America.  1997.  Web.  17 Mar. 2013.  Used with permission. <http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/spring97/wetzel.html>  

Vanderlyn, John.  The Death of Jane McCrea.  1804.  11 Mar. 2013.  Web.  17 Mar. 2013.  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_McCrea>


© Eileen Cunningham, 2013

Robert Stewart, 1st Earl of Orkney and Lord of Shetland

Robert Stewart (1553-1593) Robert Stewart, Earl of Caithness and Orkney (1553-93),  was a natural son of King James V of Scotland by E...