52 Ancestors 2024 Week 1: Family Lore

We're starting a new year with Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors challenge!  I'm starting the new year with my second round of COVID, so I'm confined to quarters for the moment which seems like a good opportunity to ruminate on the ancestors.  The first topic is Family Lore which is a little skimpy in our case, but not totally nonexistent.

 As I've said a number of times in these posts, my parents were extraordinarily tight-lipped about their families of origin.  We were not estranged from them by any means:  in fact, we were very close to my maternal grandmother (who didn't talk either) and my mother's siblings (who did talk a bit more), and we did visit with my paternal grandfather and my dad's two brothers, though there was far less contact with them.  But little bits did get through every now and then, some of which have proven to be true and others which have not.  I'll try to sort a few of them out.

I'll start with my father's side.  Dad did talk some about his own youth.  He had a half-sister, Ione Keeton (spelled Kettion in one census), who he claimed to loathe but I did find that Ione was a witness when my parents applied for a marriage license in 1941 so what was that about, eh Dad?  What I know for sure is that she was the product of my grandmother's first marriage (no word on how that marriage ended except it was not death).  In any event, I never met Ione so I guess whatever happened he held it against her for the rest of his life.  

My father's mother is part of another mystery.  My mother told me she was hit by a car.  My father told me she died of the flu.  Her death certificate says she died of cerebral hemorrhage.  She died in 1942, after the war had started and Dad was almost certainly not present so there are a number of possibilities but I suspect I'll never find the answer to that one.

There are other stories from my father, but I think those are the ones that make me wonder the most.

My mother's side had a story of a Civil War soldier, thought to be dead, returning one Christmas Eve (unlikely in my judgment), the story of my grandparents being introduced by the boarding house owner in the small town where my grandmother was the teacher in a one room schoolhouse (this one is true), a reference to my grandmother, named Grace Belknap, living in Olympia, Washington, corresponding with another Grace Belknap who lived in Michigan (also true).  Now, who this second Grace might have been was never explained to me but once I started doing genealogy, even in my somewhat lackadaisical way, I found that she was the wife of my grandfather's half-brother.  Wait, what?  No one ever mentioned a half-brother.  He surfaced when I found a copy of the probate records for my great-grandfather:  half-brother Webb, much older than my grandfather, was well-established in Michigan and did not want or need any portion of the quarter-section of farmland that my great-grandfather left in Eastern Washington in 1906.

You can see how these little nuggets can send you down a rabbit hole in the blink of an eye!  In fact, family lore can point out a research direction that may take you to a totally unexpected destination.  I only have a little to work with but it has been fruitful to pursue these stories to their origins.