Is There a Doctor in the House?

#52ancestors—week 35
 Back-to-School

Is There a Doctor in the House?

 By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018 

Dr. James Monroe Vanderpool (1859-1916) was what the family called a “country doctor” — in the traditional sense of being a small-town, old-fashioned doctor. The family also called him by his middle name, but most records show him as James M. 

He was born near the tiny town of Jasper (county seat of Newton County) Arkansas in the autumn of 1859. His family, part of the pro-Union faction in the Ozarks, removed to northern Missouri during the Civil War to escape bushwhackers, Confederate raids and the general violence of that time. His father, Capt. James R. Vanderpool, was a Union Army officer. The family returned to Newton County after the war. 

Monroe married young, when he was about 18, to Cumi Palestine Johnson, and in 1880, when his parents died a few months apart, he became the guardian of his baby brother, Levi Franklin Vanderpool, who was born 16 August 1880. Initially, I wondered why Monroe was named, since he was the third-eldest child of the family. However, a closer look at the 1880 census reveals that the two older children of the family — William (my ancestor) and Sarah (wife of William Treat) already had three and four children, respectively. Monroe and Cumi only had a two-year-old son at the time. Without any other evidence, it appears guardianship and care of the baby brother went to Monroe and his wife, probably because of economic and perhaps space factors. The other underage children of Capt. James R. Vanderpool were taken in by various family members, and they had a court-appointed guardian for their portions of the estate. 

Dr. James Monroe Vanderpool

So how did Monroe become a doctor? Obviously, he needed education and/or an apprenticeship, if such was the custom in those days. The medical education requirements of the 19th century are a bit murky and vary from place to place. Possibly he used the small inheritance from his parents to finance his education. 

However, the 20-year-gap between the 10th and 12th federal censuses (1880 and 1900) creates problems for research of this sort. In 1880, Monroe and his family are in Arkansas; in 1900, they are enumerated in the Creek Nation of Indian Territory, and he is listed as a physician. In 1910, he and his family resided in the small town of Calvin in Hughes County, Oklahoma. At the time of his death, his residence was given as Wetumka (Hughes County), Oklahoma. 

His 1916 obituary in the Checotah [McIntosh County, Oklahoma] Times does not mention his education, but indicates he and his family were in the process of removing to California. 

A search at Ancestry.com in the “Directory of Deceased American Physicians, 1804-1929,” provided some answers: Death Date: 29 July 1916 in Wellington, (Sumner County) Kansas. Type Practice: Allopath. Medical School: Barnes Medical College, St. Louis, 1899, (G) Education: Common school, Jasper, Arkansas; Academy, Yellville (Marion County), Arkansas; and Fayetteville State University, Arkansas (probably meaning the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville). Licenses: Arkansas, 1888; Oklahoma, 1899; and last listed was 19 September 1913 in Calvin, (Hughes County) Oklahoma. 

Armed with this educational information, perhaps I will find additional records, even photographs, of Dr. James Monroe Vanderpool. Just what I need — another project for my copious spare time. 

Filling in the Blanks

#52ancestors Week 34, Aug. 20-26 

Filling in the Blanks: Non-population schedules 

By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018 

It’s easy to overlook certain records, like Mortality Schedules, but a mistake to do so, I’ve learned. My ancestor, James R. Vanderpool, died in 1880, and I had found his 1879 will and also located his widow and children in the 1880 census. Plus, I had compiled a great deal of information about him. 

Capt. James Vanderpool, Anna and 6 of their children, Arkansas, ca 1878

He had been a Union officer in a Confederate State and was a local hero in Newton County, Arkansas, for among other things, his role in leading a wagon train of civilians out of the Ozarks to northern Missouri to escape the bushwhackers and Confederates. According to the county’s history, on that trip he shot a Confederate lady’s cow that had had the audacity to “moo” at their wagon train, and the Union families ate the beef for dinner. 

His military service and pension records are rich in details and historical notes. He served in the Arkansas State Legislature briefly during Reconstruction. Then he returned to Newton County, ran a mercantile store, farmed, and once was sued for illegal imprisonment. I obtained copies of his Homestead papers wherein he explained why he had not lived on that property since 1 September 1875: "I was compelled to remove to Yellville, Arkansas to carry on a daily mail contract which was awarded to me in 1875 from Yellville to Fayetteville, Ark."

 Additionally, family letters revealed that his wife Anna (née Henderson) and her sister, Sarah, got into a fight over something pertaining to their children and Sarah slapped Anna. Then Capt. James and Sarah's husband (Greenberry Kelley) got into a fight and Capt. James threatened to shoot him. Sarah and her husband left Arkansas for California shortly thereafter and the two sisters never saw each other again. 

I knew when and where Capt. James Vanderpool died and was buried and as a result almost overlooked checking the 1880 Mortality Schedule for Arkansas. Because of the lack of state or county death records for Arkansas before 1914, this schedule can be an important genealogical document. 

While there are several errors in it pertaining to my ancestor, I learned that he died from Bright’s Disease (nephritis) — inflammation of the kidney — something I never knew until I found this schedule. 

For those who are working on one-name databases, a check of the 1850-1880 Mortality Schedules may be the records that will provide some answers as to whatever happened to those “lost” ancestors and enable you to untangle the three or four Johns and Marys. Of course, you run the risk of finding someone whose place in the family tree is a big mystery and then you’ll have another project to work on. 

Ah, such is the joy of genealogy.

Dusting off family legends

#52ancestors Week 33
Aug. 13-19 Family Legend

Dusting off family legends

 By Myra Vanderpool Gormley ©2018 

One of the favorite American genealogy legends — 3 brothers came to America — is not found in my family. At least I’ve never heard it. I suspect that is because our multi-ethnic family has been in this country longer than our family’s memories about who the gateway ancestors were. 

There are no “stowaways” or “they changed our name at Ellis Island” tales either. Since Ellis Island didn’t open until 1892 and all of our known ancestors arrived in the 1600s and early 1700s, that legend would have been easy to disprove. However, like so many American families, ours has its shares of the popular genealogical legends, which include:

 • Horse thief

 • Indian heritage

 • Fortune left in “old country”

 • Name “change” (because of family disagreement)

 • Claim to fame via Daniel Boone, Jesse James, etc.

 • Wrong ethnic background 

Proving the horse thief was fairly easy since I started out knowing his name (Cole Shoemake), where he lived (Oklahoma) and the time period (early 20th century). It helped that his escapades were written up in several newspapers and that the Leavenworth, Kansas prison had records (and a picture) of him. It took a bit of digging to figure out the exact relationship, which turned out to be half 1C2R. Half first cousins are still family, of course. Does that mean I have a half black sheep relative? 

The Cherokee legends were handed down in several different lines — just to confuse us, I think. Great-grandpa’s Guion Miller application is so higgledy-piggledy that I wonder if the old Baptist preacher might have been imbibing when he filled it out. A number of family tales fell apart in the cold daylight of historical accuracies and basic genealogical research, but one line did prove to be Cherokee, but it was not among any of the passed-along legends. It was found almost by accident. 

My maternal grandfather believed the “inheritance in the old country” story and I never determined how he learned about it, but suspect it might have been one of those 1920s or 1930s inheritance scams stories that often appeared in U.S. newspapers. What threw cold water on this legend for me was the claim that the family fortune was in England. My grandfather’s family were primarily Swiss, German and Irish. If there’s any English in his line, it must be back in the 1500s and not yet identified. 

This family also has the proverbial family dispute tale in which two brothers had a disagreement and split up their business (and what that was varies from storyteller to storyteller) and one of them “changed” their name from Fricks to Frix. Changing the spelling doesn’t change the name, but you can’t tell my family that. Many years of research into this Southern line has failed to turn up the feuding brothers and the nearest I’ve come to finding anything is when my great-grandaunt Julia Fricks married her first cousin once removed (1C1R) Alexander Frix, but they both descend from the same ancestor of a Rowan County, North Carolina Germanic Swiss Fricks (Frick) family — no matter how they spell it. 

Many Jesse James (the outlaw) stories and kinship tales to him abound in families, especially those with roots in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas. I was able to disprove one of the legends about our grandfather catching Jesse James burying train robber loot on his Oklahoma farm with just one trip to the library (this, of course, was many years before Wikipedia). Jesse James was killed on 2 April 1882 in Missouri. My grandpa was an 8.5-year-old boy in Georgia when that happened — long before he removed to Oklahoma and purchased a farm. Nevertheless, I have some cousins who can’t see the flaw in this legend and are passing it on to their grandchildren. 

Oops. Wrong ethnic group. When I was growing up I wondered why dad always emphasized that we were “Holland Dutch.” Didn’t all Dutch come from Holland (or more properly, The Netherlands)? Evidently this is how his ethnic origins had been related to him, along with the family legend of coming from New York. Apparently Holland Dutch was to distinguish them from the German Dutch (Deutsche). 

My maternal grandmother would rattle off the various ethnic combinations in her family as French, Black Dutch, Irish, Scotch-Irish, Welsh and English — way back there (whatever that meant). She didn’t know what Black Dutch meant either, but that’s another story. Eventually, I learned the distinction between Irish and Scotch-Irish (the latter is an Americanism). 

My paternal grandmother wasn’t sure what ethnicity her family roots were and it took years to discover her mother’s maiden name (Lee). However, her paternal line, with a very English-sounding surname (Kimbro/Kimbrough), turned out to be German. According to family legend, our Kelly line was “originally O’Kelly” and Irish. Appears this legend may bite the dust also as research continues. Another purportedly English line turned out to be Swedish (Bankston); and the jury is still out on whether the Andersons on the family tree are Scottish, Swedish or Norwegian. My numerous lines known as Pennsylvania Dutch are not Dutch at all. They are German. 

I am such a mixed bag of ethnic mixtures and I have learned to keep an open mind about the validity of any of my family legends. Recently, I found a potential ancestor of yet another ethnic group to add to the mixture — she’s Italian. Mama Mia.

Youngest Twig

#52ancestors
Week 32 Aug. 6-12
Youngest

Exploring Ancestry of Youngest Twig

 By Myra Vanderpool Gormley ©2018 

You know you’re getting old when the grandchildren start marrying and are threatening to make you great-grandparents. 

During a recent visit with the youngest grandson and his bride, the conversation turned to my favorite subject — genealogy. I whipped out some blank charts and began getting information about the newest member of the family’s ancestors. She was able to provide some names, dates and places, and after a few chats with her mother, via phone, added more and some critical details.

 “I’m half Polish,” she told us. 

After the young people headed back to their Midwest home, I began to do some research. I’m faced with a brand-new world to explore. My husband and I descend from old American families — back to the early Colonial period. Our newest family addition brings much more recent lines into the mix. It appears that her families emigrated from Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany in the late 19th century and early 20th, and I’ve just scratched the surface.

Public Domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/

 I have no idea where this genealogical adventure is going to take me, but I probably will need to dust off several language guides and locate maps showing the complex and changing borders of those European countries. I stashed them around here — somewhere. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve read ship passenger lists and looked for naturalization papers. This will be fun and a challenge. 

I can hear the accordions playing polkas already. 

Oldest Mother

#52ancestors Week 31 — Oldest

Oldest Mother in my Family Tree

 By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018

 Genealogy is filled with conundrums. Sometimes just when you think you’ve wrapped up the research on a particular branch of your family, you discover a glaring improbability that sends you back to dig some more. 

One I’ve encountered a few times is what I call the “old” mothers problem — women having children way past their child-bearing years. I have seen many of them in online trees. The task is figuring out whether the basic birth and marriage information about the mother is incorrect, or is without valid evidence, or if there are just plain old typing or transcription problems. 

However, not only are the “old” mothers a problem, but the number of the children it is claimed they produced always turns on the alert signal for me. Did my Polly really have 16 children over a span of 32 years? Were they all single births? Might some of them have been her grandchildren? Where did any and all of the information come from about her and these children? Ah, that is where the basic problems usually lie. The information may all be from secondary sources or has been gathered from references unknown, unverified, uncited, and thus is unreliable. 

My Polly Price purportedly married Thomas Connally, about 1765, but as I searched through old notes, I discovered several conflicting places for this marriage — none of which I can verify. Was it in Virginia or North Carolina? Older genealogies (compiled by her descendants in the early 1900s) give both places. But they vary on the date. So far, I have not found a marriage record in either place. If, and that’s always the big IF, their eldest child was John William Connally, and if he was born 5 December 1765 in North Carolina, then an estimate of his parents’ marriage of 1764 or early 1765 is logical, but . . .

 Thomas Connally, the father, was bp. 12 September 1738 in Richmond County, Virginia (“Registers of North Farnham Parish [Virginia] 1663-1814 and Lunenburg Parish, 1783-1814”), but we don’t know when or where Polly was born. If she was born ca, 1740 (say, a couple of years younger than her husband), then she would have been about 57 years old when she had her 16th child in 1797. I don’t think so. 

In order to be the mother of 16 children as everyone claims, she would have had to been having children for 30 or more years, unless there were some multiple births, which none has been claimed, so a birthdate for the youngest child of this couple might well have been ca 1797 as determined from censuses. But Polly, must have been a young bride of about 14, because even stretching her age to be 45 when she had the youngest child, she must have been born ca 1752, not ca 1740, and thus would have been about 14 years younger than her husband. That’s possible, of course. But, I have no proof. 

My ancestor, David Connally, was No. 8 — the middle child of Tom and Polly. He was born 31 October 1776 and died 17 June 1848. His birth and date deaths are from his tombstone in East Point, (now Fulton County) Georgia and were recorded by Atlanta historian, Franklin M. Garrett, on 4 November 1930. In attempting to ascertain the birth years of the other 15 children, I’ve also searched for their final resting places in hopes their tombstones would provide additional information. Most members of this large family died before the 1850 census, which adds to the difficulty of sifting out all the Connallys, especially in northern Georgia. It appears that only Abner, William L., Christopher “Kit,” and Samuel W. Connally lived long enough to be enumerated in 1850 and thus provide estimations of their ages.

As best I can determine with the meager records found so far, Polly was having children for 32 years, starting in 1765 and ending in 1797. I find no indication that any of them were multiple births. Another possibility raises its head — maybe she is the second or even third wife and these 16 children are not all hers? However, no other wives for Thomas Connally have been claimed. If Thomas was married previously, that record has not been uncovered by researchers.

 Polly may be the oldest mother in my family tree, but I can’t accept the premise that she was having children in her 50s and as late as age 57 — not in the late 18th century. The only logical answer to this puzzle is that she married at a much younger age than has been assumed. 

If all 16 children are hers, as it appears they are, she certainly was a remarkable and obviously a strong woman. Yet, we know little about her — only the name of her husband, names of her parents (John Edward Price and Jane Prescott) and her children, and approximately when she died in Georgia (early 1820s). But when and where she is buried is not known. 

How sad. Polly, my 4-great-grandmother, I hardly know you.