Excuses from the old Gas bag

Just  a line or two to let you know I'm still among the living. Cranky as all get out, but still here. Genie, my wonderful wife, is about to sweep me out the door to get me moving. I'm in a terrible slump and grouchy. Summers are suppose to be spent in such wonderful---and cool--places as Yellowstone Park, or thereabouts, where sneaky trout are hiding in wonderfully cool and inviting streams.  Or maybe wandering around in some weedy, long ago abandoned grave yard looking for an ancestor whose name I have just found in some moldy old records. You know, exciting things like that.
   
 Even my Memoir writing has been suffering from neglect. Speaking of my memoir, I've decided to break it up into two and maybe three items, it's right at 170 pages now. Gassy old bugger--but slow. I've been working on it, off and on, for the last fifteen years.  You read that correctly, fifteen years. You weren't aware that my middle name is Procrastination were you? Well you are now.

 

Wanted Posters errr!!!!! Pictures of the old folks

 My own collection of old family pictures has many, many holes that I would like to fill. I'm talking about pictures of our nineteenth and twentieth century ancestors as well as their children, siblings and homes. What I would like to do is amass a photo gallery of as many of our collective ancestors, both sides, right down the line from as old as we can get right up to today and make them available to their descendants--you.

I would want to restrict their availability to only family. Disseminating the pictures widely within the individual families would help preserve absolutely irreplaceable images of our familial past. I'm sure, many many, wonderful images of our families historical past have already been lost.

I have been able to acquire a  few pictures of several of my nineteenth century ancestors and relatives and a bit more of my twentieth century close relatives. My father, John Holt, left  a wonderful legacy to his children. He was always taking pictures of family and friends, unfortunately, there are not as many pictures of him as I would like. But I have lots and lots of  pictures of family and friends he took over the years that I am forever thankful to him for.

I Would Like Stories and Pictures of the "Oldtimers" that we can share

Visitors to the blog have declined precipitously over the summer primarily, I believe, because of my absence and it is understandable. I hope to make up for the absence in the coming months. Genie and I traveled many, many miles in the five weeks we were gone. We visited many family sites on the trip, her's and mine.

Genealogy is a marvelous hobby but it does require a lot of work and travel. Some folks try to do it all on the Internet but that's really not possible. There is so much more data and information available on site where your ancestors lived and died than can ever be accessed on just Internet sources. And sometimes, in your actual visits to family sites, you can even see and touch things they saw and touched. There is really no comparison. Both, working on the records and visiting, are valuable and necessary. Pictures can help to some extent and in many cases are all we have. So I would like all of us, through this blog, to share that part of our families that we each own, records and above all, family stories and pictures.

Rod and Johnny the Pig

The stories need not be great histories, just stories of family incidents that have been preserved within your family. Stories can be tales of hardships, tragedies, moves, family members participating in wars, or as mundane as one that I put in my memoir about one of my brothers, Rodney, raising a 4-H pig. He named it Johnny and fed it all spring, summer and fall. It was in the family orchard and Rod moved its pen all over the orchard so it could get fresh feed and dropped apples. In the late fall when it came time to butcher the pig, no one could kill it. We're talking about a farm family that over the years had raised and killed and butchered dozens of pigs for family use. Finally a neighbor did the deed and helped butcher it. But no one in the family could eat Johnny. So the meat was given away that Thanksgiving and Christmas to needy folks in the community.

Any story that has been passed down through your family is also my family history. I want t hear it, so do all those who are related to you. So lets have the stories and pictures of the folks, your folks, their places and their time here on this old planet. I want this to be "our family blog."

Need Help finding Harold N. Davis/ Jock A Davis Missing since 1924

          Harold Newton Davis, son of Albert Hooker Davis and his wife, Jessie Virginia Thornhill, my Grandparents, was born in January of 1900 in New Brighton, Beaver County, Pennsylvania. He lived there until he ran off from home in 1917 after a shouting match between him and his mother. Sadly, he never returned. He did write letters home occasionally and always maintained that he was coming home soon. Several letters are said to have been from Wichita Falls, Texas but  the last two that I have which are the last known letters written by him to his parents, are from Okemah and Three Sands, Oklahoma. In both letters he signed his name as Jock A. Davis. The Okemah, Oklahoma letter is dated April 26, 1924. Okemah is 40-some miles due east of Oklahoma City. The last letter ever received fom him was ten days later from Three Sands, Oklahoma, dated May 6, 1924. Three Sands is 30 or 40 miles due north of Oklahoma City and is located between present day Tonkawa and Blackwell. According to the Tulsa, OK marriage certificate that I have, Harold N. Davis 21, of Rochester, Beaver County, Pennsylvania married Emma Sherrill, 19, of Heavener, LeForte County, Oklahoma on October 19, 1920. 

     Three Sands, Oklahoma, from all I can find, was a wild and woolly oil boom town in 1924 with a population of some 8,000 intrepid, fortune-hunting souls. It was cited on top of what is known today as one of the largest oil pools in continental United States.  Unfortunately, Three Sands must have been too wild and woolly for it no longer exists, having made its last gasp of life in 1957.

      Harold's letter of May 6, 1924 was the last my grandparents ever heard from him or his family. His wife, Emma, never contacted the family either before or after he died. His death, I believe, would have occurred sometime within two years of the date from his last letter home on May 6, 1924. By then he had been gone from home over seven years.  However, he always wrote home even if a little sporadically.  It's not known whether they had any children.  If they did they would now be in their late eighties or early nineties.  Their children's children would now be in their sixties or seventies. If you think you might be related, I would be delighted to communicate with you. Any and all help in this search will be greatly appreciated.

Gonzales, Texas--Honoring the Alamo Defenders

     One of the places Genie and I visited on our holiday last month was Gonzales, Texas, the town from which many of the Alamo defenders marched from to help  in that defense. From the little information I have it appears that both William Dearduff and James George, one a Thornhill descendant and the other the spouse of a Thornhill were part of that rescue effort. (see blog post July 1, 2010)

  

   Many years ago the community of Gonzales erected a large museum and commemorative honoring those 32 brave men led by Major Williamson of their town who marched past the huge invading force of over 7,000 Mexican soldiers led by Mexican General Santa Ana to join the roughly 150 defenders already in the Alamo. There is very little question in my mind that those brave men knew, as they marched by Santa Ana's huge force, that they were marching to their death. Such courage is almost unimaginable.

     Here are several photographs of the museum and commemorative plaques.

                                                           

Idea Time--I need your help

  The number of hits on my blog has dropped dramatically the last few months, with good reason; I haven't been as diligent as I should have been in keeping new things posted. I've discovered that it isn't as easy as it seems to keep cranking out family historical items that interest a large spectrum of readers. For instance, the people in my father's line couldn't care less about the folks in my mother's line and vice versa.

I recently perused the various blogs I have written over the year or so I've been publishing and it started me to thinking about how to make it not only more interesting, but how to make it interesting to everyone who visits the blog. Going down family lines as I have done in the past is okay, if the particular blog happens to be your family line. If it isn't, bye bye, and justifiably so. After a few such visits, you won’t bother coming back and I understand. I don't want that to happen, I want you to find something interesting in each and every new post I make. But how to do that and still be exploring and writing about family history is a real challenge. After all, going back just three generations produces sixteen different family lines. It makes you realize your related to a huge chunk of the world’s population but that there is an even more enormous group out there that couldn't care less about half of those ancestors you are writing about.

I don't know whether I can keep it up but I have decided to try and write and publish two blogs a week, one on each family line. Unfortunately, I'm going to be out of circulation for the next month. Genie and I are heading back across the country to visit family on both sides and to collect as much family history as we can by visiting areas we know where long ago family members lived. I am dedicated to finding and recording as much family history as I can in the time I have remaining. Genie's computer is portable so I'll try to publish a bit now and then as we go along. So, I hope you will stay with me on the journey through our families past.

As an aside, I'm writing about my own life's happenings and find it very difficult not only to keep it on track but to make it interesting reading. Very difficult indeed. So far, I've written 175 pages single spaced. One week ago the program I was using, an old version of Word Perfect, crashed and I thought for sure all was lost. I've been working on the project on and off for eight or nine years. Talk about devastated, I could have crawled under a snake’s belly wearing with a tall silk hat. My wonderful wife, Genie, came to my rescue and has been able to salvage most of that work. For that I will be forever grateful.

 
 

Thornhills at the Battle of the "Cowpens."

The American Revolutionary War was hotly contested from the first battle in 1776 until its final major engagement at Yorktown in 1781 when British General Lord Cornwallis was defeated by General Washington. The conflict, in the late stage of the war, was being fought mostly in the south. American General Horatio Gates attacked the British Army that was ravaging the southern landscape led by General Cornwallis at Camden, South Carolina and was soundly defeated. Gates was relieved of command and replaced by General Nathanael Greene, nicknamed the "Carolina Swamp Fox." At this same time, a ragged band of American militia trapped and defeated a small contingent of Tories at Kings Mountain. The war had now dragged on for over five years but was still being fought with vigor in the South. The British, though, were growing weary of both the fight and the expense. To make matters worse, the French had openly begun assisting the rebellious Colonists and had an Army coming to the aid of General Greene's forces in the South.

On his march south to engage Cornwallis, Greene recruited fighting men wherever he could find them. It was while going through southern Virginia that William Thornhill and his oldest son William joined Green's forces. William Sr. must have impressed General Greene, for he soon advanced him to the rank of Ensign and then Lieutenant. William Jr., after a few months, was promoted to the officer's rank of Ensign.

General Greene soon moved his forces south from Virgina into South Carolina. He purposely avoided any major head-on confrontation with the much larger and better trained British force. He divided his forces  between himself and General Daniel Morgan and the two contingents raided independently   throughout the countryside as they advanced. It must be remembered that much of the South was loyal to the British so Generals Greene and Morgan had their jobs cut out for them.

The Thornhills served under General Morgan and on January 17, 1781, in South Carolina, General Morgan's troops fought and won a significant battle against a large contingent of General Cornwallis's forces. That battle comes down to us in history as the battle of  the "Cowpens"  because it was fought, literally, in a large clearing made for livestock grazing, with an extensive set of cow holding pens.

Serving with the British force was a Colonel Banistre Tarleton, one of Cornwallis's best fighting officers. In an earlier engagement, which Tarleton's forces had won, 120 Continental soldiers had been captured and disarmed. When asked what should be done with the prisoners, Tarleton ordered that they be shot on the spot. No wonder those serving in the American armies hated the British. Unfortunately, Colonel Tarleton was treated much more humanely by General Morgan and survived the Revolution and was able to return to his family in England when the war was over.

The two William Thornhills served on for a few more months under Generals Greene and Morgan. After their agreed upon term of service was  completed they returned home much to the great delight of their families I am sure. William Sr. lived another seven years, dying in September of 1788. William Jr., easily the longest lived Thornhill I can find, indeed the longest lived male in my entire genealogy, lived to the amazing age of 98.  He died in Breckenridge County, Kentucky on December 3, 1855.