Before I Forget

          No. I do not know when this photo was taken. You?

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT:  Birth/death years along with birth names and married names of the women pictured above. Birth surnames are in parentheses.

1.  Fannie Elizabeth (Ward) Skinner Burkett, b. 1896 Daviess County, Missouri - 1967 Denver, Colorado; 

2.  Ora Evaline "Evie" (Baker) Childers, b. 1888 Daviess, County, Missouri - 1984 Tulsa, Oklahoma; 

3.  MOTHER:  Matilda Anna (Lee) Baker Ward Price, b. 1864 Carroll County, Missouri - 1933 Sand Springs, Oklahoma; 

4.  Zelma Pearl (Price) Fox Brown, b. 1909 Keystone, Pawnee County, Oklahoma - 1978 Tulsa, Oklahoma; 

5.  Gladys Naomi (Price) Bivens, b. 1905 Cherryvale, Kansas - 1989 Sand Springs, Oklahoma; and 

6.  Zeala Violet (Price) Skinner, b. 1902 Gallatin, Daviess County, Missouri - 1993 Inglis, Levy County, Florida.

          I was so happy to see this photo on Ancestry as shared by my 2nd cousin, Margaret (Bivens) Breeden. Like many of my cousins, this is the only photo I've seen of my paternal 2xGGrandmother Anna and her daughters. 

          Margie was an active family researcher and shared considerable data on Rootsweb, and Ancestry. Her grandmother was born Gladys Price. I miss "seeing" her online. She passed in January of 2017, but her family tree remains public on Ancestry. 

          Years ago, she wrote this "memory" on a Findagrave memorial regarding my paternal Great-Grandfather:

"Sam Childers was my Great Uncle. Evaline (Eva) Baker was my Grandmother's sister. I spent many times with Aunt Eva and Uncle Sam, either at their house or my Grandmother's. They also lived down the road from my Uncle Harry Baker and his family. Uncle Sam was a great guy and I loved his many stories. I was not aware that Pat Anderson had passed. I'm sorry to hear that she did."

          Are you also related to these women?  

My paternal great-grandmother, born Evie Baker, was a first cousin to Elliott Baker. Their fathers married two sisters, Margaret and Matilda Anna Lee, in Daviess County, Missouri. Margaret died in 1886 when only 23. Her husband John remarried Louisa Agness Hoffman in 1892. Their son John was born in November 1895.

I see you nodding off there! Bear with me. 

Look what I found while searching for details on the five (known) children of Louisa and John Baker. Baker is a common name. But dear John appears to have gone by his middle name of Elliott. THAT narrowed the field of Bakers considerably in my "hunt" of Bakers. 

And, bingo! See the right-hand column with the headline misspelling Elliott's name as "EARL?" His given name of Elliott is used correctly in the first sentence:

It made the big city paper, too:


BTW, that top coat went for $67.50. This is during the Depression, mind you. 



News Flash:   His brother did it?  HIS BROTHER!   OMG



From March 27, 1931, the arraignment of the two men charged:





I promise you. I scoured the days in between these last two articles and found nothing else about Who Did What And When. I'm clueless as to why they dropped charges. Let your imagination run wild.

Whaddya' think, crime fighters?


Having nothing to do with the above brutal death of Elliott, I did find a couple of earlier news stories. From February 14, 1910 and March 5, 1925:


Did you read BOTH images above this sentence? The second one depicts a theft.

An egg thief. I am related to an egg thief. 

What's in YOUR family tree?  

From the warmth of our home we watched the televised Veterans Day Parade held in downtown Tulsa. I think the mid-day wind chill was about 28 degrees. Several hundred hearty people appeared to watch the parade in real time. 

Did you ever wonder what your local paper had to say on Armistice Day when The Great War ended?  Me, too. 

And this front page of The Tulsa Daily World is from the next day, November 12, 1918. 



When enlarged the small print is still difficult to read. Here are two articles that share a poor description of how Tulsans made merry shortly after hearing the splendid news of the War's end. Both articles are from the pages shown above:

From The Daily Ardmoreite newspaper, p. 3, January 24, 1919, Ardmore, Oklahoma:

I wonder how often this occurred among families while serving on the front lines in the two World Wars. Brothers, yes. But fathers and sons meeting up?


The other son mentioned who was also in the Marine Corps? That would be Homer Carlisle Hurley. Here Homer appears with his brother, John, on a Marine Corps Muster Roll dated June 12, 1918:

John was discharged October 30, 1919, and Homer on January 27, 1919. 

All three Hurleys made it home safely after The Great War. Homer died 1974 in Oklahoma City. Brother John D, Hurley died 1984 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

Their dad, Oscar Lee Hurley, was born 1867 in Salem, North Carolina to James D. Hurley (1842-1922) and Melissa Emaline Gibson Hurley (1827-1904). When Oscar was three, his parents and sisters left North Carolina and moved to Texas. That must have been quite a journey. 

Oscar married Lula Mangum in 1893, and they had nine (known) children. All born in Texas. It was after World War I that I next find his family living in Ardmore, Oklahoma. The 1920 Federal Census indicates Oscar was employed as a carpenter "for the circus." I hope his younger children got free tickets to the event. 

After Oscar's death outside of Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1942, his widow Lula applied for his military headstone.  

Oscar's half-brothers, George and Caswell, had fought in the Civil War. Caswell died of disease near their North Carolina home in 1862. My 2xGGrandfather George was 17 when he and other Confederates were sent to New York Harbor to a Yankee prison. 

One hundred years ago, it may not have been uncommon for several in a family to enlist and fight in a foreign land. But to this 21st century descendant, it seems odd--strangely odd, to have had brothers who fought in the Civil War and a younger brother who then fought in Europe some 47+ years later.

          Born April 26, 1850, my maternal 2xGGrandmother may not have ever left the county her family had called home for decades if it weren't for the Civil War.

          The daughter of Andrew Smith (1817-1893) and Rebecca "Sadie" Carroll (1823-1900), Nancy and her parents were born in Davidson County, North Carolina. See Nancy's family in the 1850 Federal Census:

          Can't say for certain. I can only speculate why this Nancy and George would want to move far from familiar surroundings. But having learned Nancy's husband, when as a 17 year old Confederate soldier, had been in a Yankee prison at Hart's Island outside of New York City, AND had lost an older brother who had fought near their North Carolina home, might George and Nancy have wanted to leave their battle-scarred state? Start somewhere altogether new? 

          Boy, did they find "new." Wild and woolly Texas certainly was unique. By the 1870s Texas was in full-tilt Reconstruction. Much has been written about that period. Not an easy time for many folk. 

          Nancy Abigail Smith and George Freeman Hurley married the day before Christmas in 1868. She was 18, he was 21. By the next Christmas, they were in Titus, Texas. Did they travel by train, or wagon or how? The 1870 Federal Census has them in Red River County, near Clarksville. In September of that year, my great-grandmother Rebecca was born in Gray Rock in Red River County. 

Source:  Ancestry.com. North Carolina, Marriage Records, 1741-2011 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.  Original data: North Carolina County Registers of Deeds. Microfilm. Record Group 048. North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC.


          By the 1880 Federal Census, the Hurleys were living in Mason County, Texas where Nancy lived the remainder of her life. Cousin Betty Foree told me this was the home they built outside of Katemcy. The cute little squirt on the far right was born in 1894. That gives us an idea of when this photo was taken. Please click once on the image to enlarge it. You just have to see it all! Isn't it a splendid photo.

"After settling in Mason County, TX in the early 1870's, Nancy Hurley had an ash hopper where she made her own lye for homemade soap; she carded the cotton grown on the farm, spun the thread on a hand turned spinning wheel, and knitted stockings for her family of twelve. Melissa Hurley Pirtle can remember the stockings she wore to school the first year.

Like other farm families, the Hurleys raised practically all of their own food: ground their cornmeal, as well as the coffee beans Nancy roasted; made syrup, pickles, hominy, and sauerkraut (ijn a barrel in the chimney corner, and dried the fruits. The men butchered and cured the meat. Nancy carried the water for washing, using a rub board, from the nearby creek or drew it by bucket from the hand-dug well. For supplies they could not raise, the men went in a wagon to Brownwood, staying two nights on the road and spending one night in the wagon yard.

          What I want to know is, are George or Nancy the reason for the red hair gene that is passed down in my family? Nancy's great-granddaughter Elta once told this writer that her father, Art Willhelm, commented on his new granddaughter's hair color. Art said that baby Diane had the same hair that his mother Rebecca had when he was a boy.  #Ginger

          UPDATE on this last Monday of 2019:   Wait. I forgot I had uploaded this back in 2014 from George Freeman Hurley's military file. George was also a ginger when he was a Confederate teenager:

Director Martin Scorsese has been in Oklahoma preparing for his film Killers of the Flower Moon. It will be filmed in Osage Nation. In Osage County. Oklahoma's largest county. Hence the renewed interest in a sad part of Osage history when Pawhuska was labeled America's foremost "murder capitol." Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the book on which Scorsese's film is based? Well, meet Nola Childers in two articles below.

My dad had uncles and cousins in nearby Keystone and Cleveland 100 years ago. Forever grateful for archived newspapers, I searched tonight for articles about my ancestors. I got sidetracked by the news of the day.

The following are items cropped from the front page of the January 18, 1917 Pawhuska Capital.

Colonel W. F. Cody's estate caught my eye. Could it be THE Cody? Yes, Buffalo Bill had just died in Denver.


80 year old Admiral Dewey also died that same week. THE popular hero Admiral Dewey.The paper reported he was "hale and hearty" at work one day. The next day?  He collapsed. Some might call it a "good death." Not prolonged. A neat demise. He was a Navy man after all.



I wonder what became of Nola Childers and her popular allotment? My esteemed employer's office is located on land downtown that was initially called the "Childers Addition." Was it Nola's headright? If so, who was it who decided (on her behalf, of course *snort*) to divide her land into parcels?  Is this article dripping with greed, or what?



Oil, and more oil talk.Then news of Miss Panther spending a tidy sum of money on an eight room house. But does she live there? No. It will be the home of S. M. Clark and wife. What's up with that? Was Mr. Clark the administrator of Louise Panther's Osage allotment? Do you smell a rat? Perhaps Miss Panther had an eye for homes to lease?

I'll leave you to ponder Mr. Tuman's horrific Saturday night on your own.


Next up, Dr. Sam Kennedy. I'm a fan of this Tulsa pioneer. His Kennedy Building in downtown Tulsa is beautiful inside. Did you know it was built on Kennedy's original homestead at 4th and Boston? He was instrumental in the young city of Tulsa growing to the south--rather than developing northwest of town. He had married Agnes Lombard, an Osage Nation allotee, and used her allotment to buy land. A LOT of land. Oil was later found on some of their land in 1913.

[me waving here]  I KNOW, I know what Dr. Sam did with his money. 

Much has been written about Sam Kennedy. But I've seen little about his wife. Yes, his wife. An Osage woman whose allotment helped make them rich(er). She could have been the "little woman" who helped make it possible for him to shine as an astute businessman. But I'd like to see some recognition of her, too. Just who were these pioneer women along side these men who get credit for building a community?

Sam married Miss Agnes Lombard in September 1896. They had seven children before her untimely death in 1912.

Remember. The Osage once lived up north and held vast amounts of land. Americans moved west and pushed them out. Many of them were killed or died from hardships imposed just to get them out of the way of, wait. What's that term some believe makes us more entitled than others? Yeah, Western expansion. We sent the proud and mighty Osage packing. Sent them to an area no one else wanted. Until oil was found. Then the population doubled.Tripled. Boomed. But guess who owned the mineral rights?

Couldn't resist. I looked for earlier articles about Nola Childers. This is from 1910. Seven years earlier:


Four years ago I first wrote about Nola after finding Tulsa news articles on how her allotment was being fought in the courts. I had forgotten her father, William Childers, had been murdered. Check it out:

https://treepig.posthaven.com/childers-in-indian-territory-newspapers

Tonight I was adding sources to my Abshier ancestors and found this little cutie. The photo was taken about 1906, I'm guessing.

Angelina Davis, a Findagrave volunteer/researcher, generously shared Austin Cody Abshier's photo to his memorial page. Isn't it precious?

He was born December 10, 1901 to Hannibal Cameron Abshier (1870-1954) and wife Lillie Inez Palmer (1874-1957) of Liberty County, Texas. His World War II draft card indicates he worked for Gulf Refining Company:

He married Edna DeBlanc in 1920, and they had at least three sons. Austin only lived to see 60 years before his death in Beaumont, Texas in 1962.

For my cousins reading this, Austin was a 1st cousin-once removed to our direct ancestor, Sylvina Abshier. (Which makes him my paternal 2nd cousin--twice removed). 

          To quote BuzzFeed, 'What a month this week was!'  A week that brought Watergate memories to those millions of us who watched that scandal unfold 46 years ago. 

          Addressed to both the US House and Senate on August 12, 2019, the Whistleblower's letter was finally released to Congress. And to the public. It's a whopper:

             “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

20 Oct 2019 Update: Elta and Longfellow in a Napa newspaper published 1952.