It's chilly on the back porch this morning. I'm running an electric heater about 18" from my chair so that it blows under the table. My feet and legs are warm, but my hands are FREEZING. I shall power through it for a while, as it is a lovely, sunny day and I don't want to go inside. Yesterday, The Husband baited the compost pile with an ear of corn that Granddaughter #2 found in the field behind the house. (No, it's not deer bait; the farmer grew corn this year.) I'm watching to see what new visitors might show up on the pile. The camera didn't catch a critter last night, but birds were working the pile before sunset.
Now that I think about it, corn is probably nothing new to the local animals. There's probably corn scattered all over the field since the harvest.
Oh, well.
* * * * * * * *
Each morning, I spend about 30 minutes doing genealogy research. There are two women in my lineage - one on my father's side, one on my mother's side - that fascinate me.
Mary (my father's side) was born in South Carolina around 1805. Her family was in Alabama by 1820, during the "Alabama Fever" land rush. Her father was a blacksmith and, as far as I can tell, never owned an inch of land in Alabama. I figure he was something like a sharecropper, working and living from farm to farm as new settlers arrived.
(A flock of birds just landed in my yard. Little bitty ones, pecking around in the grass. I don't know what they are. There's one up in a tree squeaking its head off, calling the flock, I guess.)
Anyway . . . .
Mary had at least three children, all out of wedlock. The youngest two were fathered by one of Mary's neighbors, a married man whose wife the censuses labeled "insane." In 1850, Mary and her younger two children were listed in this man's household. The man died three years later, at which time Mary produced a deed for 160 acres left to them by their father. The man's one legitimate child, a son, contested the deed in a lawsuit that lasted 10 years and went to the Alabama Supreme Court. The court record paints Mary as a straight-up foul-mouthed hussy, an accusation that Mary's witnesses apparently did not deny. I laughed when I read that she used foul language. Daddy and his siblings are world-class cussers. Is it nature or nurture?
The other woman (my mother's side) was Oma P. She was born in Mississippi about the time Mary was having "illicit intercourse" in Alabama. She married a man from Alabama (she probably married him IN Alabama) and had two sons with him. He died of war injuries in 1866, I believe, and she re-married and had three more children. They were in Lee County, Mississippi by 1880. By 1891, all of her children were in the county where I now live. All of these children, and some of their children and grandchildren, died fairly young of tuberculosis. They left few descendants. It is kind of a heart-breaking story. I spoke with one distant relative whose mother and brother died of tuberculosis. He caught it and escaped it only because drugs to treat it became available.
I read a book about Elvis Presley's genealogy and was surprised to learn that tuberculosis was rampant in his family, too. They lived in/around Tupelo, in Lee County, MS. I can't help but wonder if my ancestors and his had contact with each other, or if there was just an area-wide epidemic spread by soldiers returning home from the Civil War.
Oma shows up on the 1880 Lee County federal census as "O.M." She signed a document (with an "X") as "O.P." The MS State Census for 1880 lists her as "Oma P." I do not know her maiden name, and it's driving me crazy. The courthouse in the county where she lived with her first husband has burned twice since the 1860s, and all the records before that time are gone. I have searched online records for every Oma who ever lived in a five-state radius and cannot find one that I believe is my Oma. Of course, "Oma" might not have even been her real name. It could be a nickname from Naiomi, Salome, or some other "oma-ish" name.
A couple of weeks ago, Family Search dot org suddenly added "Pinassa" as her middle name. No explanation.
And I was like, "What the HELL?" (hat-tip to Mary). ;)
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