All posts by Kristin

Fannie Turner Animated

Grahams, Photographs
fannie turner portrait 2 1919-0-Animated

This photograph was taken in Montgomery, Alabama, during my grandparent’s engagement in 1919. I animated it using My Heritage, Deep Nostalgia.

My maternal grandmother, Fannie Mae Turner Graham, was born 133 years ago today. She was born in 1888 in Lowndes County Alabama, the oldest child of Howard and Jennie (Allen) Turner. Here is something my mother wrote about her in about 1980.

Somebody’s Daughter My Mother

By Doris Graham Cleage

            Yes, I’ll tell you, I am somebody’s daughter.  My mother was really SOMEBODY.

            She was the first child of my (who else?) grandmother who was one of seven children born to a woman freed from slavery at seventeen and a free man.  The woman had been trained as a seamstress in the “Big House” and she taught every one of her five daughters to sew.  And so my Grandmother earned her living as a seamstress for white folks in Montgomery, Alabama.

            It was fortunate that she had an independent spirit as well as a skill because she lost her husband when my mother was four years old and a younger sister was two.  While grandmother was out sewing, the two children stayed with their grandparents who were very strict.

            One of my mother’s earliest memories was of a spanking with the flat of a saw by her grandfather because she made footprints across the dirt backyard which he had freshly swept to a marvelous smoothness! 

            She also remembered him complaining often about their behavior to their mother when she came home.  She spanked them too. But mother said she learned early that if they cried loudly, the spanking was shorter and less energetic.  Armed with this knowledge, she and her sister made it through childhood and in due time graduated from Normal school (high school). 

            Mother finished in 1906 and she refused scholarships to college.  She chose instead to clerk in her uncle’s general store and eventually managed it.  I think she valued this and her marriage above all other experiences in her life.  I think they held vastly different meanings for her.  I think one represented what she really wanted to do and to be and the other represented what she thought she ought to want to do and be.

            I never knew her very well.  There never was time to talk to her until she was very ill and I took care of her.  This seems very strange to me.  My mother never worked after she married.  She was always at home taking care of her family.  I lived at home until I married.  When I lived at home in Detroit I saw her at least once a week.  When I lived in other cities, we exchanged letters at least once a week.  For the last seven years of her life we shared a two-family flat.  But I never knew her as a person until she was dying.

            Stereotypes and structures.  Forms and duties.  Oughts and shoulds.  How things are supposed to be.  Never how they are.  Cages and gags and straightjackets.  And we don’t know they’re there.

            When I could see and hear my mother as a person, and not as MY MOTHER, I was delighted and dismayed.  Delighted that we had so much in common and that I liked her.  Dismayed that she was eighty-six and ill and that life had made me wait so long to know her.

            She and my father were happily married for fifty-one years.  They loved and respected each other.  Even in delirium I never heard either one say anything but good and loving things about the other.  Mother spoke with peace and sureness about my father.  But her face lit up, her back straightened, her voice got louder and she was alive when she talked of managing Great Uncle Victor’s general store.  She never tired of telling me about taking inventory, counting money, keeping books, dealing with the help and customers and demanding respect from the drummers. 

            Drummers were white salesmen trying to get orders for their products and you can imagine how difficult it was for a handsome black woman doing a man’s job to get respect from them.  But she knew the power of her ability to give or without orders and she used it without apology.  Her whole tone when she straightened her back and raised her head to tell it was not of asking for respect, but demanding it – and loving the demanding!

            She managed the store for the twelve most satisfying years of her life.  Then she married in 1919.  My father never wanted her to work.  She suggested a small business several times.

            He said, “A MAN supports his family.  I am a man. My wife will never work.”

            She knew he was supposed to be right so she didn’t press it.  She wrote that all a woman needs to be happy is “a baby to rock and a man to please.”  And that’s the way she acted.  She kept the house, cooked the meals, rocked the babies and pleased the man. But she never believed that woman was meant only for this because she raised her two daughters by word and deed to believe that women should be whatever they wanted to be.  I don’t remember her ever saying, “But women can’t be freighter captains, or airplane pilots or doctors or engineers.”  she believed I could be anything and I believed it too.

            How restricted she must have felt doing most of the jobs that go with keeping house and raising babies.

A to Z Challenge Theme REVEAL – 2021

A to Z 2021, Investigations, Montgomery Alabama, One Place Study

Unidentified young women from my grandparent’s photo album. I believe the one on the left is Madeline Abercrombie, based on a newspaper photograph of her several months before her death in 1973. More about that on the A post.

In 2018 I did a series of posts for the A to Z Challenge based on articles taken from The Emancipator, an African American newspaper published by my cousin in Montgomery Alabama around 1920. I mentioned the Edelweiss Club in several posts.

Who were the members of the Edelweiss Club?  Thirty seven women attended the monthly meetings judging from news items that appeared in The Emancipator, starting January 12, 1918 and continuing monthly until  May 3, 1919. Some of the women were members and some were guests and not all were present at every meeting. Thirty of them were teachers. One was a seamstress. Three worked in family businesses.  The other three did not have employment and were relatives of members. Most of the members were single, some married as time went on. Some moved out of town.  A good number never married.

All of them came from literate homes. Most of their parents owned their homes, some free and clear, some mortgaged. Their fathers tended to work for themselves as barbers, carpenters and plasterers. Bertha Loveless’ father was an undertaker. Madge Brown’s father was a farmer. Alberta Boykin’s father was a mail carrier. Several lived with their widowed mother or an aunt.  Most had multiple siblings.

Their parents were born in the mid 1850s to the  1870 so they would have been teenagers when slavery ended or were born during Reconstruction.

There were no more reported meetings after May 3, 1919.

There were 37 young women who attended the club meetings, more than enough for 26 “A to Z” posts. This year I will present the lives of some of those women as my A to Z theme. This will be my ninth year participating in the A to Z Challenge.

Theola Marie Davenport Williams 1920-1982

Williams,

I made this animation from the photo below using My Heritage, Deep Nostalgia.

Theola Maria Davenport Williams

Theola Marie Davenport Williams  was the daughter of Amy Marie Davenport.  She was born March 7, 1920, in Portland, Arkansas, the fifth child of the late James and Amy Davenport. Arkansas was her home for many years, where she attended Dermott High School and Arkansas State University at Pine Bluff. The greater part of her adult life was spent in St. Louis, Missouri where she attended Meramec Community College and Washington University.

Theola married  Chester Arthur Williams on June 20, 1938.  Together they had 12 children – 6 sons and 6 daughters. She was an active member of the Church and Community, which involved the following; Sunday School Teacher, Primary Department, Women’s Missionary Union and was named to the Deaconess Board of Washington Tabernacle Baptist Church; she was a secretary at the Webster Groves High School; an active Top Member and a member of the In Roads Parents Association for the City of St. Louis. 

She was 61 years old when she died September 21, 1981.  I remember her as a very calm, accepting and thoughtful mother-in-law. This is the 101 anniversary of her birth.

Pearl Doris Reed Cleage Animated

Cleages, Kentucky, Photographs, Reeds

My paternal grandmother, Pearl Reed Cleage was born 135 years ago in Lebanon, Kentucky, the youngest of Annie Reed’s 8 children. She married Dr. Albert B. Cleage in Indianapolis, IN in 1910 and they had seven amazing children, including my father, who they raised in Detroit, MI.

She was a small woman who looked sweet as pie and had a backbone of steel. She didn’t begin to run down until she broke her hip in her 80s. In 1982, my grandmother Pearl died of congestive heart failure in Idlewild, Michigan.

I made this animation from the photo below using My Heritage, Deep Nostalgia. It was taken about 1900 when she was 16.

In 2018 I did a series of blog posts based on my grandmother’s letters. You can find the series here Pearl Reed Cleage’s Letters 1903-1905.

Dock and Eliza Animated

Alabama, Allen, Eliza, Montgomery Alabama, One Place Study, Photographs
Eliza Williams Allen

Today I found a new app on My Heritage, Deep Nostalgia. It takes still photographs of faces and animates them. It was a bit strange, who knows if that is how the actual people moved when they were alive and moving. It was interesting to play around with though.

Below is are animated photos of Eliza (who this blog is named for) and Dock Allen, my 2X great grandparents through the maternal line. Click links below to see animations.

ElizaAllen-0-Animated
doc-0-Animated

How many children did Catherine Jones Williams have?

Williams

During the virtual Williams/Butler reunion on Saturday evening, there was some consternation about how many children Catherine Jones Williams gave birth to.

Click to enlarge

On the 1910 Census, Catherine Jones Williams said that she had given birth to 10 children and that six were still living. In the booklet from the Williams/Butler Reunion 1988 that Julia Williams Boyue put together, there were family trees for both the Williams and Butler families.

Children of Samuel and Catherine (Jones) Williams in Blue Book. Click to enlarge.

I put the names into my ancestry.com tree and was able to find information and connections with most of them. Some, I could not find. If they were born after 1880, they would not be in that census. The 1890 census was destroyed. The next census they would have appeared in was 1900. They could easily have been on their own so never appeared in the same household with Catherine Jones Williams or they may have died. Since Arkansas did not begin keeping death records before 1914, there would be none available.

In the same book there are 15 children listed for William and Mattie (Hawkins) Butler. The answer given during the reunion was 18. I am looking forward to finding out the other names!