Further Ford Family Findings!

Greetings from Shelter-In-Place!

Hope you are all staying safe and well, and are not going too crazy at home!

At this time, I was supposed to be in Ohio and Kentucky conducting field research. With that trip delayed until after libraries reopen, there has been much to keep me busy at home. Marty's usual work is not happening, but he has found other avenues for utilizing his many talents. We are among the fortunate, in the midst of our current viral pandemic.

I have spent a good deal of time hammering at some walls that have plagued our family tree, with some success. Much of that work has been related to a previous post I made to this weblog nearly a year ago, A DNA Breakthrough and Conference News, in which I discussed the quest to uncover the identity of the man named "Tom Ford" that family members have claimed was the father of my 2nd great-grandfather, John Thomas Romans.

To recap, I was able to pinpoint a young man named Thomas Benton Ford who had grown up in the neighborhood of my 3rd great-grandmother, Angelina "Adeline" Romans, and was close to her age. Through further study of this Tom Ford's family, I was fortunate to find two DNA matches who are descendants of Tom's father, Harbin Hawkins Ford, through Tom's half-sister. I am currently writing an official genealogical proof for this research and will announce on this blog when it is published.

Originally, as stated in the previous blog post noted above, I doubted that Tom Ford's legitimate son, Edwin Elliott Ford (called Elliott), had had children, because he had been only briefly married to Henrietta Taylor before he died tragically of typhoid at age 24. Turns out, I was incorrect about this!

Thanks to newspapers available through MyHeritage.com, I found young Mr Ford's obituary, which provided not only the news that he had a daughter born December of 1910 (same as my Grandpa C.P., mentioned in previous blog entries), but also named the parents of Elliott's wife, Henrietta. Yay!

The Bourbon News, Paris KY, Volume XXX, Number 4, 13 Jan 1911.

My next task was to follow the movements of Henrietta Taylor Ford and hopefully learn the name of Baby Girl Ford. Further poking through The Bourbon News led me to more info about Henrietta, including the name of her daughter (Lelia Jane Ford, called Jane) and Henrietta's brief marriages to Joseph Gay Mitchell and then Forest Reuben Eyer, with whom she and her daughter were living in Lee IA on the 1920 Federal Census. 

Henrietta stayed married to Mr Eyer for some years and still resided with him in Kansas City MO on the 1930 Census, but Jane was no longer in their household, leading me to believe that she may have married. Henrietta's fourth husband appears to have been Charles Hunter Dishman, whose obituary from 1968 states that she was still his wife at the time of his death. At this time, I have no further vital information about Henrietta.

Jane Ford is found in the 1930 Census to be the wife of Bradford Preston Young and living in Pittsburgh PA. In the 1940 Census, the two were still married with a son. This marriage did not last, however. Mr Young remarried in 1961, lived his final years in Arizona, and is buried with his 2nd wife Norma, who died in 1982.

FindAGrave.com, memorial #157339425.

There are as yet no signs that Jane married again. I am still in search of further records for her. She lived into her 90s and is buried in Kansas, with her maiden name on the grave marker.

FindAGrave.com, memorial #75762562, photo by Jaunice Hess.

--Annie

"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other."--Mother Teresa

Remembering Grandpa C.P. On Birthday 109.

Hope you all have been having wonderful Holidays! 

In addition to New Year's Day, we have Old-Calendar Christmas (aka Russian Christmas) coming up on January 7th, which we prefer to call Nativity of the Lord. Eastern Orthodox festivities associated with Nativity are full of old-world, joyful solemnity that is exquisitely beautiful, and yet reflects the poverty of spirit of Christ and his earthly family, as well as the countless generations of poor people over the centuries who have been touched by the Grace and Hope of Christmas. 

Marty and I are very casual about Western, Gregorian-Calendar Christmas on December 25th. Marty has fun wearing a Santa hat and lets his white beard get fluffy, and we like spending time with family, but we don't party or shop very much. The Brenneis family has a tradition of making ravioli. I usually bake pumpkin pies for the family and dairy-free breads (cranberry-orange, zucchini-walnut, banana, and pumpkin) for our home. I make batches of Martha Stewart's recipe for cranberry sauce with cognac. Also try to sneak some fish dishes into the family gatherings.

Speaking of fish, the main subject of this article was an avid fisherman. The day that I am writing this (December 28th) is the birthday of my maternal grandfather, Clarence Everett Pryne, known by friends and family as C.P.. He was born 109 years ago, in Eagle Township, Brown County, Ohio. He passed away in 1985, when I was 24, and I'm grateful for all the years of contact with him. The older I get, the more I identify with Grandpa C.P. In my opinion, I've always resembled him, both physically and in personality, more than any other relative. In a previous post from 2017, Mom's Home Town, and C-SPAN for Genealogy, I related some of my favorite memories of Grandpa C.P.

Here is a picture of Grandpa when he was about 3-1/2 years old. Grandpa's brother, Aaron, had died earlier that year of TB at age 6, so it had to have been a melancholy time in their home. He's dressed so oddly here and could easily be mistaken for a little girl, especially with the bow in his hair. Wish I knew the name of the dog.

Speaking of Grandpa being mistaken for a girl, here I am at age 5, already looking a lot like C.P.!

These days, I look a lot more like his mother, Great-Grandma Lou.

Even in her 50s, she had a mischievous look, didn't she?

Grandpa C.P. was a very dapper, yet fun-loving guy. Here we see him in the late 1930s, standing behind Grandma Dorothy and my mother, Bonnie.

This is a nice picture of C.P.(L) standing near a bright, shiny car with his wife's youngest brother, Elmer. We called Uncle Elmer "Whitey," because he was the only sibling in his family with blond hair.

Here are Grandma and Grandpa playing on the beach, probably shortly after they moved to California in 1951. Love this photo!

Here's a sweet family photo, probably also taken in the early 1950s. Pictured, L-R, are Bonnie (Mom), Grandma Dorothy, Grandpa C.P., and twins Joanie and Jimmy (the only person in this pic still living). Grandpa seems to be having the most fun, once again!

My memory has always associated trout with Grandpa C.P. and Grandma Dorothy (known by the kids as Grandma "Shug," short for "sugar"). They had a hillside get-away in the southern Sierra mountains, near Lake Isabella and the Kern River. Trips to our grandparents's get-away were called "going up the hill." Both nearby bodies of water were great places to fish, and my grandparents loved to go fishing! They had their favorite spots along the Kern, but they were not averse to taking a boat out on the lake to fish. Most of my memories fishing with them were on the river, and river trout has remained my favorite fish to this day.

C.P. "up the hill" in front of their mobile home in 1968,

having laid out the day's catch, by size.

In the early 1970s, Grandpa C.P. and Grandma Dorothy both retired from General Dynamics. They sold their place "up the hill" and bought a place in the Kern River Valley, right next door to Dorothy's older sister Elva. Here's a photo from the valley property, with C.P. apparently taking a rest after sawing some lumber for Aunt Elva, who stands behind him.

Aunt Elva was always one of my favorites, because she was another musician in the family and was always very welcoming to us. Elva had played piano for silent films when she was a teenager and also loved to sing in church. My mother's sister Joanie was a gospel singer, too. Mom could sing, but she was more of a music fan than a performer. Mom loved dance music, like big-band, rock, and country, but she had a set of classical music records and played them quite a bit. Mom got me started listening to Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, and also let me have many years of music lessons. Mom didn't like Elva's piano playing, because she thought Elva "banged" on the keys. I liked playing Aunt Elva's piano because some of its notes were way off kilter, and I would make up tunes based on the worst of Elva's piano keys.

Sadly, Grandma Dorothy died in early 1975, just a few short years after they bought the valley homestead. She was only 58 years old (my age now), when she had a sudden, massive cerebral hemorrhage. She always seemed to be such a tough lady to all of us, but she wasn't taking her blood pressure medicine properly. Losing her was awful, just awful, and Grandpa C.P. spent the remaining 10 years of his life feeling rather lost.

Not long before Grandpa passed away, I talked with him on the phone for a while. I was finishing up four years of active Navy duty in Charleston, South Carolina (a lovely place!). He was not doing well physically and was living with my mother. We usually talked about what was in the news or on TV, as well as family stuff. During that call, Grandpa and I had our final conversation. The last thing I told him was that I loved him. When news of his passing reached me in Charleston, I was so grateful for the way our last conversation ended. 

We all need to end our conversations with expressions of love, because we may not speak to that person again.

A very blessed New Year to all!

Annie

"My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition." -- Indira Gandhi

A DNA Breakthrough and Conference News

Welcome back, Readers!

Summer has not yet arrived on the calendar, but the heat wave we are experiencing in the Bay Area has aided my transition into full Summer mode! With another Midwestern road trip slated for September, lots of on-site research planning is happening at my desk. This year, a perk has been added to my back-east wanderings: my sister Denise and her husband Frank have bought a house in Arkansas! I already miss their former mountain home-base in Bishop, California, but now I have a great place for extended pit-stops on journeys to Cincinnati and beyond, with the added bonus of spending time with my wonderful sister and brother-in-law!

Frank preparing to give Denise "bunny ears." 

They are wonderfully insane. Can't wait to see them again!

Dismantling Some Masonry
One of the proverbial "brick walls" with which I have been contending in recent years involves my 2nd great-grandfather, John Thomas "JT" Romans. According to family legend, in 1858 JT's mother Angelina Romans had a late-teenage tryst with a boy named Tom Ford and found herself to be with child. Soon after his roll in the hay with Angelina, Tom Ford left town, supposedly to visit Europe.

The Romans family had a farm in Owen County, Kentucky at the time, and they had a good many neighbors with the surname Ford, who appear to have been rather well-to-do for the area, based on documents and county histories I have found. Perusal of the Federal Census of 1850 for Owen County showed one person named Thomas Ford, the son of Harbin (misspelled "Harlin") and Anna (spelled "Ann") Ford. One of the Owen County histories mentioned that young Tom, his mother Anna, and his sister Laura moved to Frankfort soon after the 1853 death of Harbin Ford so that Tom could attend a private school there. 

There continued to be a heavy Ford-family presence in Owen County following the relocation of Harbin's household, and those family ties are the basis for my suspicion that the widow and children of Harbin Ford made a number of 20-mile trips back to Owen County in the years following their move to Frankfort. It is possible that one of those visits provided the opportunity for this Tom Ford to get together with Angelina.

Due diligence required that I search for another possible baby-daddy named Tom Ford, so I dissected 1850 and 1860 census records for Owen County looking for clues that could lead to another Tom Ford but found no one else by that name. A search of census records for surrounding counties yielded only our original suspect living in Frankfort with his mother and sister in 1860.

Other neighbors of the Romans clan included the Martin family. They had a son named Elisha who must have been a generous young man, because he married Angelina in 1860, less than a year following the birth of little JT. In the 1860 census, the household of Elisha and Angelina Martin included JT, with the assumed surname of Martin. It may have been Elisha's intent to adopt and help raise JT. I've noticed that distantly related genealogy hobbyists who have included our Romans family in their trees have assumed that Elisha Martin was JT's biological father, but those of us who are JT's direct descendants have not believed that to be the case. 

Thomas B. Ford, left (Register of the KY State Historical Society, vol. 41, p 11)

and John Thomas Romans, right (from a family photo dated 1909)

In 1863, with JT only four years old, Angelina died and Elisha Martin volunteered for the Confederate Army. JT was left in the care of his grandparents, Shelton and Malinda Romans, in whose household he appeared on the 1870 census. When Elisha Martin returned from the war, he married Angelina's younger sister Zilpha and had a number of children with her, including a daughter they named Adeline, which had been Angelina's nickname.

JT's Romans grandparents had passed away by 1880. JT does not appear in the households of either Elisha and Zilpha Martin or Tom Ford in the 1880 census. 
In 1882, JT married his first wife Corinthia in a neighboring county. Corinthia died in 1888 without any surviving children that I have located. In 1889 he married my 2nd great-grandmother, Amanda Petty. 

JT and Amanda remained in northern Kentucky and raised a large family, including my great-grandmother Daisy. Census records state he worked as a farm laborer then later as a carpenter. JT fell victim to a common scourge of his time, tuberculosis, and died in a TB asylum in Texas at age 62. The informant for his death certificate was either Mrs. or Miss Anna Romans (wife Amanda's name might have been mistakenly written as "Anna," and he had a daughter named Anna), who evidently gave the name "Tom" as his father's name, which was written on the certificate as "Tom Romans." His mother's name was given as "Adeline Romans," using Angelina's nickname.

Next, I embarked upon a deeper study of our suspected paternal Tom Ford, whose full name was Thomas Benton Ford. Mr. Ford continued to reside in Frankfort following his schooling and became an attorney. He was also a published author of poetry and prose, as was his sister Laura. Because he was a man of some notoriety, I was able to find an article about him and Laura in a 1943 issue of the Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society, as well as mention of him and his family in a book entitled Owen County, Kentucky: History and Families. From these and a few other sources, I have been able to glean quite a bit of fascinating information about Thomas B. Ford, but no hints that he had left behind an illegitimate child in Owen County. 

The search for DNA evidence of paternity was my next step. Our Tom Ford did marry and by this wife had a son named Ellis, who died as a young adult without leaving any known children behind. Laura Ford married late in life and does not appear to have had any children, either. Tom and Laura were Harbin Ford's children by his second wife. Fortunately, Harbin's daughter Elizabeth by his first wife has had a long string of progeny, the lines of which I have traced down well into the 20th century. Ancestry DNA came to the rescue here, yielding two living cousin matches: One a half 5th cousin (male) and the other a half 4th cousin once removed (female), both descendants of Tom's half-sister Elizabeth!

These DNA matches constitute my first concrete piece of evidence that Thomas Benton Ford may be my 3rd great-grandfather. At the very least, it appears I have located the family of the mysterious Tom Ford. Research continues.

Recent L.A. Jamboree and upcoming Sacramento German Conference
A couple of weeks ago, I made one of my customary treks to the Los Angeles area to visit family and sneak in some research at the L.A. Central Library, one of my favorite haunts (see my article about it in the California Genealogical Society blog: The Genealogy Collection at Los Angeles Central Library). My time was limited, but I had to go check out the feted Genealogy Jamboree that was taking place in Burbank. I signed up for their free sessions on Friday morning, which were terrific, and had a chance to peruse the society and merchant booths.

Besides the free Friday sessions, Jamboree has a free mobile app that is very similar to the one that Roots Tech has. Like the Roots Tech app, you can use the Jamboree app to download all of the handouts from Jamboree sessions, whether or not you paid for or attended any of them! It's important to keep in mind that both Roots Tech and Jamboree make the handouts available for personal use only!

This coming weekend is especially exciting for many of us who do German genealogical research, because we will be enjoying the International German Genealogy Conference, which is being held in Sacramento, only a 2-hour drive from home! Of course, I will be writing about it on this very blog!

Annie

"Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei (Everything has an end, only the sausage has two)." -- German expression

The Pryne Twins at 80, Kentucky Klips, and More!

Happy Spring, Everyone!

The poppies are popping again out here in California. We had much more rain than usual this year, so we are having what they call a super-bloom season. Loving all the color! Wikipedia has posted this fabulous picture of a righteous coating of poppy-Cheeto-Dust on Walker Canyon in Riverside County (photo by Bluesnote):

Kentucky Klips, Plus!
One of the joys of doing genealogy is finding surprises in newspaper archives, and I've mined some real gems in recent weeks. The most important clippings found in this haul provide essential info regarding the month and year of the marriage of my maternal grandparents, Clarence Pryne and Dorothy Marksberry. My immediate family is not in possession of any documentation of their marriage, but on the 1940 U.S. Census my grandparents stated they were living in the same Covington, KY dwelling in 1935, and their first child--my mother Bonnie--was born in 1937. These facts provided the clue that they were married in 1935 or earlier. Their son, my uncle Jimmy, could not recall the date of their anniversary when I asked him recently, but he remembers seeing a photo of his mother in a wedding dress. Fortunately, now I have more clues!

The clip below is from the newspaper The Kentucky Post on March 28, 1934. It advertises a fundraising event for the local volunteer fire department. In the fourth paragraph of the article, my grandmother Miss Dorothy Marksberry and great-grandmother Mrs. Orin Marksberry (her name was Daisy) are listed as participants. The fifth paragraph states that my grandfather Clarence Pryne would be performing a specialty dance (he was known to be good at soft-shoe tap). From this clip, not only do I learn that my grandparents were not yet married in March of 1934, I also learn that my great-grandmother was probably a member of the Women's Auxiliary of the Elsmere Volunteer Fire Department! My great-grandfather and great-uncles may have been volunteer firemen, too.

This next clip from The Kentucky Post dated April 6, 1934 provides the society-column announcement about the Ladies' Auxiliary show in its second through fourth paragraphs. The article states that the show would take place Friday (April 6th was a Friday in 1934) at Lloyd High School, where my grandmother was likely a student. It is distasteful to read in the third paragraph that some men performed in black-face (hopefully Grandpa was not one of them!). Clarence Pryne (Grandpa C.P., as we knew him) is mentioned again as a dancer.

The most exciting find from my search of The Kentucky Post is this marriage announcement dated July 5, 1934. My grandparents are listed third. There is no exact date or place mentioned except for Kenton County, and I've yet to find an official record of their marriage, but my search has been narrowed considerably!

Nearly five years into their marriage, on April 21, 1939, Dorothy would give birth to boy-girl twins, James and Joan. Twins run on both sides of my grandfather's family--his mother Lorena Segondollar had a twin brother, and his father James Prine had a set of boy-girl twins by his second wife Madge. On April 22, 1939, The Kentucky Post printed a photograph of three nurses from St Elizabeth's Hospital holding three sets of twins that had been born there that week. The nurse on the right was holding the Pryne twins.

When I showed this picture to Uncle Jimmy last week, he did not remember seeing it before, and he also claimed he could not tell which baby was him, except to say that he was "the ugly one" (ha-ha!).

As you can tell from the date, Uncle Jimmy just celebrated his 80th birthday, but every year he mourns the loss of his twin Joanie, who died in 2001. Aunt Joanie and I bonded over music, as she was a gifted Gospel singer.

Here's another clip from The Kentucky Post dated June 10, 1950 in which there is a report about a picnic held at the home of my great-grandparents, Orin and Daisy Marksberry. The out-of-town visitors mentioned included Great-Grandma Daisy's brother Dr. Carl Romans and his family, who had come from Colorado. Grandma Dorothy's brother Ernest Marksberry, who was visiting with his wife Margaret, had moved in recent years from Kentucky to El Monte, California. My grandparents, mother Bonnie, and her twin siblings James and Joan (listed in the article after Ernest and wife) moved to California in 1951. Other members of the Marksberry family also would soon make the move to California, including sister Elva Riley and brother Elmer along with their families. Finally, Orin and Daisy would relocate to California in about 1957.

The article below is from the Riverside Independent Enterprise newspaper in California, dated September 22, 1960, and announces the celebration of Orin and Daisy Marksberry's 50th wedding anniversary. The article mistakenly lists the place of their wedding as "Tudlow," when in fact it was Ludlow, Kentucky. In the third paragraph are mentioned Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Pryne, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Schaack (my parents), and Mr. and Mrs. Roy McCullough (Aunt Joan and her husband), stating that they all lived in El Monte (probably not accurate, as I believe my parents lived in San Gabriel in 1960). By the way, Mom was 4 months pregnant with me at this time, and Joanie was 3 months along with my cousin Robin. In the second column of the article, Uncle Jimmy (Airman 2nd Class James Pryne) is noted to have been stationed in Germany with the Air Force. In the third column is listed Mrs. Lou Fugate, my grandfather's mother (the former Lorena Segondollar, now widow of George Fugate), who was living with my grandparents in El Monte.

Speaking of El Monte, California, that suburb of Los Angeles was to become quite an important location for our family. For a number of years, the family of Clarence and Dorothy Pryne resided there, and their children attended El Monte High School. My parents were married in Mom's parents' house in El Monte. My sister Denise and I were born in El Monte Community Hospital. We also lived in South El Monte for about 10 years. 

Any of you who remember the old Dr. Demento radio show may recall the following lovely (a-hem!) ditty about El Monte, performed by a raucous garage band called The Rubber Band and their leader Llyn Foulkes (you can hear it for yourself at this link: "El Monte" on Dr. Demento).

I live in a town in East L.A., it's not very big

but it's got lots of stores with stereos and things like that you dig.

I have a nice apartment, it's got a pretty good view.

I can see three service stations and the Long Beach Freeway, too.

Chorus:

El Monte, El Monte, there ain't no other place like it.

El Monte, El Monte, I tell ya' it ain't worth (honking sounds)!

We got a drive-in movie, it has three shows every night.

There's one playin' now with John Wayne, it's really out-a sight.

My wife likes all the drug stores, they have everything.

That's where I bought my outboard motor and her wedding ring.

(chorus)

Now if you come to East L.A., be sure to give me a call.

There's a couple of bowling alleys, we'll really have a ball.

We're just about a mile from Rosemead and a little bit north of Whittier,

and you might like the City of Industry but our town's a whole lot prettier.

(chorus)

James, Joan, and Bonnie Pryne about 1945

probably in Olive Branch, Mississippi

(I'll check with Jimmy regarding the location)

Christ Is Risen!!! He Is Risen Indeed!!! Alleluia!!!

A Joyous Easter Season to you all!

--Annie

"Don't criticize or judge other people--regard everyone else as an angel, justify their mistakes and weaknesses, and condemn only yourself as the worst sinner. This is step one in any kind of spiritual life." -- Blessed Seraphim of Platina

Mom's Home Town and C-SPAN for Genealogy

It's a drizzly day here in Marin County. The gray clouds above the hills visible from our office window are offset by the crimson and green leaves of a tree in our front yard that evokes the Advent of Christmas soon to come. Mom loved Christmas. 

The last time I saw Mom over the Holidays, I told her that we always appreciated all the efforts she had made over the years to make sure our Holiday celebrations were special. Because she was bed-ridden, I brought in a small pine tree with little "package" decorations on it and placed it on her dresser so she would have the Christmas-tree smell in her room. Uncle Jimmy, her brother, performed some "Linus magic" on the tree and made it look simply gorgeous! Thanks, Jimmy!

While in a grocery store this week, I spotted several elderly ladies shopping carefully for their Thanksgiving cooking, and it made me miss Mom so much that I almost started crying in the store. I told the checkout clerk about it, and we agreed that there is something universally irreplaceable about mothers. I'll always be grateful for the lovely mother I had and for the tremendously wonderful sisters, nieces, nephews, and uncle who miss her just as much as I do.

Seems a good day to delve a bit into the Mom's relationship with her birthplace, Covington, Kentucky.

Mom and the Flood
Bonnie Rae Pryne was born in Covington on the 26th of July 1937, a few months following a devastating flood of the Ohio River that Mom was able to describe to my sisters and I in some detail, despite the fact that she was still in utero when it happened in late January and early February of that year. No doubt, her family talked about the flood quite a bit during the early years of Mom's life. There were likely to have been quite a few areas of flood damage remaining in the neighborhood where Mom would play as a little girl--sights that could have fueled wonder in her young mind, helping her to imagine the horrors of the disaster described by her family. 

In particular, Mom would tell us about the flood waters having washed away topsoil from cemetery plots, exposing and opening a number of coffins and, in a few cases, revealing scratch marks on the insides of coffin lids. The thought of someone awakening from a death-like coma, to discover that they had been buried prematurely, is a terrifying thought to anyone, particularly a little girl, who could very well have had nightmares about suffocating as she tried to scratch her way out of a tomb!

(A photo from the 1937 flood.)

Arrival from One War, Departure for Another
Mom's family had lived in northern Kentucky and southern Ohio, in the region of metropolitan Cincinnati, since the early years following the Revolutionary War. The family of her father, Clarence Everett Prine (later Pryne), farmed mostly in Brown, Union, Adams, and Highland counties in Ohio. The family of Mom's mother, Dorothy Esther Marksberry, were mostly craftspeople, such as tool-and-dye makers, builders, and machinists, although they raised animals and crops, as well, and she had one uncle who was a physician. 

Clarence Pryne, known as "C.P.," decided early in his life that farming was not for him. He loved to draw and paint. He could draw a straight line without a ruler and a perfect circle without a compass. C.P. had only an 8th-grade education, but his mother was a voracious reader whose vocabulary and fund of knowledge were so advanced that she was, according to her granddaughter (my mother), ever in search of crossword puzzles that were difficult enough to challenge her. Lorena May (Segondollar) Prine had left her husband, James Millburn Prine, when Clarence was a small child. Apparently, their marriage was destroyed by the devastating loss of C.P.'s older brother, Aaron, who died at age seven of tuberculosis. This left little C.P. and his mother to look after themselves, but they were both intelligent, hard workers who found ways to get by. 

As yet, I have no evidence of where C.P. and his mother lived immediately after his parents separated, but when C.P. was 13 his mother married a fireman named Frank McMurray in Cincinnati. Clearly, Lorena had chosen to take her son away from rural Ohio, where both her father and ex-husband had farms. By the time of the 1930 Federal Census, 19-year-old C.P. and his mother were living on their own in Bellevue, Kentucky (a suburb southeast of Cincinnati) away from Mr. McMurray, who had remained at his Cincinnati residence. Following another failed marriage, Lorena was waiting tables in a restaurant, and C.P. was pressing clothes for a dry cleaner. 

Their economic situation was likely the cause of C.P.'s limited formal education. The idea of helping his mother financially by starting work as a young teenager probably appealed to C.P. Of course, in those days, many men began full-time work at a younger age than we typically see today. However, C.P. inherited his mother's penchant for mental challenge and was a seeker of knowledge throughout his life. C.P. was always keen to share his knowledge with me as I was growing up and seemed delighted by my curiosity. My grandfather C.P. gave me a slide rule and showed me how to use it, since I showed an interest in mathematics. He would show me blueprints and other drawings he liked to do, and he shared his magazines about history and geography with me (Biblical Archaeological Review was a favorite of his). He did not live to witness his granddaughter's own scholastic pursuits in History and Archaeology, but he deserves great credit for stoking my interests.

It could not have been long before the Great Depression affected the ability of C.P. and his mother to find work. My great-grandmother Lorena told us about a Depression-era job she had sitting overnight with dead bodies in a funeral parlor, making sure no one came in during the night to steal clothing and other valuables from the bodies. She brought books and puzzles with her to pass the time so, despite the interruption of her circadian rhythms, the job was fairly easy. She stated, however, that she never became accustomed to the sudden movements of the bodies as rigor mortis set in because, if the corpses had not been properly secured in their coffins, they would sit straight up suddenly and give poor Lorena quite a start! 

As his mother kept the body-snatchers at bay, C.P. was able to secure a job with the Work Projects Administration (WPA) as a draftsman, so finally he could put his drawing talent to work! By the mid-1930s, C.P. was in love with Dorothy (who was the niece of his mother's cousin's husband--such things we learn through Genealogy!) and ready to start a family. The couple settled in Covington, had my mother in 1937 and boy-girl twins in 1939, and lived there until the World War brought an opportunity for C.P. to work on secret projects for the Department of War as a civilian. This new job took the Pryne family away from the region that had been home to generations of their kin for about a century and a half, as they were called upon to move to different areas of the country during the war years.

(L-R, Lorena, C.P., and Dorothy, mid-1960s)

C-SPAN for Genealogy!
Grandpa C.P. would have loved the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, known as C-SPAN! Although he was still alive during C-SPAN's early years (they began broadcasting in 1979, and C.P. died in 1985), he never had access to cable or satellite television. I imagine that C-SPAN's weekend broadcasts of American History TV and Book TV would have become obsessions of his, as they have become mine.

It has been fun to discover how useful the C-SPAN website can be, not just for following current events, but for researching geographical and historical context for Genealogy! 

The C-SPAN Cities Tour, for example, offers over 2000 video tours of historical and cultural sites in cities all over the U.S. There is a great deal of contextual learning to be found at C-SPAN Classroom, as well. You don't have to be a teacher to find much to appreciate about the thousands of videos they have covering such topics as U.S. History, World History, Comparative Government, and Geography. For primary resources about culture, people, and events of the 20th and 21st centuries, C-SPAN's Reel America features over a thousand historic videos that are sure to spark your own memories!

One way to search C-SPAN for genealogical purposes is to visit their American History TV page and enter the name of a place, historical event, or historical person in the "search" box at the top of the web page, which you can filter by media such as "videos" or "clips." You can also click on the "Filter/Sort Options" to the right of the "search" box to enter more specific criteria for what you seek. For instance, a simple search of "Covington, Kentucky" yielded over 60 videos through which to scroll in order to find something new to learn about Mom's home town. 

Covington and the Bridge

One of the video choices on American History TV for Covington is about the Roebling Suspension Bridge. The video treats us to 6-1/2 minutes of history about this bridge across the Ohio River that links Covington and Cincinnati. It was engineered by a Prussian immigrant named John Roebling, who had arrived in the U.S. in 1832. Roebling invented a method of building suspension bridges by winding metal cables on-site. This method has been used to build many suspension bridges over the years, and Roebling's wire-rope technique is still used today. 

For about 20 years, people in northern Kentucky expressed their desire for a bridge to be built over the river because they wanted to avoid the cost of transporting livestock and other goods across the river by ferry boats into the Cincinnati markets. The State of Kentucky granted a charter to build the bridge in 1845, but the State of Ohio did not grant a charter for their end of the bridge until 1849. The project was further held up by a lack of funding, and construction did not begin until 1856, only to be discontinued in 1858 due to a financial panic. During the Civil War, the need to transport troops across the Ohio River convinced government officials to raise funds and resume the project, and the Roebling Bridge was completed in 1867, the year that work began on another suspension bridge utilizing Roebling's cable method, the Brooklyn Bridge. Sadly, before the Brooklyn Bridge was built, Roebling's foot was badly injured by an arriving ferry boat as he stood on a dock, and he died a few weeks later in Brooklyn Heights of tetanus. 

The Roebling Bridge has been updated a few times and strengthened to handle modern traffic, but it is still essentially the original bridge. The State of Kentucky took full ownership of the bridge in 1953. The original floor of the bridge was made of oak, although later the oak was replaced by a metal grate system. The bridge's metal mesh creates a humming/rumbling sound as vehicles drive over it, so the structure has been given the nickname, "the singing bridge."

Interestingly, a cousin of Mom's home-town Roebling Bridge is the Golden Gate Bridge that opened in 1937, the year Mom was born. I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco at least once a week--a fact that further connects my family to Covington, Roebling, and suspension bridges. But alas, the Golden Gate Bridge is paved and does not sing!

(A statue of Roebling along the Northern Kentucky Riverwalk, with the bridge and the Cincinnati skyline in the distance.)

Annie

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Marcus Tullius Cicero