Inspired by Nolichucky Roots photos of two generations of sisters I decided to do the same.
Sisters
Category Archives: Grahams
Awards
In the past several months I have received several awards for my blogs. (I used to have two blogs, one for my maternal line and one for my paternal line. I combined them awhile ago.) I put off posting them because I am supposed to pass them on to 10 or 15 other bloggers and it seemed like almost everybody I follow already has received the awards, some multiple times.
Today I was determined to find ten bloggers to pass the awards on to and to be able to post my awards. I spent 
several hours going from blog to blog and it started to be funny to me because I found that bloggers were receiving the Ancestor Approved Award just before I got there. In one case two people passed on the award right behind each other! I don’t quite know how to handle this. I have decided that I will fulfill the other requirements and not pass on the awards at this time. If someone reading this has not yet received the Ancestor Approved Award, email me! I’ve got to post so people will stop thinking I haven’t received the award 
and keep sending them to me! So here goes…
Dionne Ford of Finding Josephine gave Finding Eliza two awards some months ago, The “Versatile Blogger Award” and “One Lovely Blog Award”. I apologize for taking so long to respond. I have to list seven things about myself and link back to Finding Josephine.
1. I can milk a goat.
2. I swam across Lake Idlewild and back when I was in my 40’s.
3. My third daughter, Ayanna, was born at home.
4. I home schooled my four youngest children.
5. I studied Spanish, French, Norweigian and Arabic with varying degrees of success.
6. I recently began strength training with my sister.
7. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 29.
I received the Ancestor Approved Award at My Cleages and Reeds (Now combined with Finding Eliza.) from Nolichucky Roots, Bill West of West in New England and Nancy at My Ancestors and Me On Finding Eliza I received the Ancestor Approved Award from Nolichucky Roots and Missy of Fables and Endless Genealogies. I must admit to fiddling around with the award in Photoshop and adding my own ancestors, photographs.
This award was created by Leslie Ann Ballou at Ancestors Live Here. Leslie asks that recipients list ten things they’ve learned about any of their ancestors that have surprised, humbled, or enlightened them and pass the award on to ten other bloggers who are doing their ancestors proud. Here are my ten things. I’ve linked to those I blogged about.
1. I was enlightened to learn that the story my mother told about Eliza was true but not exactly in the way she told it. Eliza’s story is here. There are 3 parts to the story and a chart.
2. I was surprised to find that Annie Belle and her brass band ended up in Detroit after living in Florida and Tennessee.
3. I was saddened to learn that my great grandmother’s sister, Willie Allen Tulane had lost two of her three children in infancy.
4. I was enlightened and humbled to find that my great great grandfather Dock Allen tried to escape slavery by running and so met my great great grandmother Eliza and gained his freedom.
5. I was moved to tears when I found my grandmother Fannie Turner Graham’s father with his parents and siblings in the 1870 census and was able to take the family back a generation.
6. I was thrilled to receive copies of records from the Cleage plantation where my ancestors were slaves.
7. I was surprised when I found my grandmother Pearl Reed Cleage had a singing double.
8. I was enlightened but frustrated to trace Jacob Graham’s little Bible to it’s first owners and to find his death certificate but I was still unable to connect Jacob with my grandfather Mershell Graham.
9. I was ecstatic to find photographs of my first cousin once removed, Naomi Tulane Vincent and her husband using Google.
10. I was overjoyed when I was contacted by my husband’s cousin who took us back a generation or two on this mother’s side and shared photographs, stories, places… whoo hooo!
Missing Christmas Carols 1944
Christmas 1944 was my parents second Christmas together. My father, Albert B. Cleage Jr (Toddy) had taken a year off from the ministry to take classes in film making at UCLA. He planned to use it later in the church. My mother, Doris Graham, was working as a social worker and apparently taking a class too. They were living in Los Angeles, Ca, missing Detroit and their families. In the montage we have in the top/center my mother, below her is my father. The house my mother grew up in is the big photo of the house on Theodore, below is their Los Angeles apt. The last photo is my mother’s parents Mershell (Poppy) and Fannie (Nannie) Graham. This is a letter my mother wrote home Dec. 17, 1944.
December 17, 1944
Dear Folks,
Just a line to let you know we’re ok. Hope you all are well
It’s almost midnight and we are both (as usual) trying to get some school work done that we left until the last minute. Toddy has a paper due – and I have a book report.
Here it is – almost Christmas, but it doesn’t seem like it at all. No snow – no cold weather – no nothing. People out here don’t even sing Christmas carols on radio church services or anything. We heard you all have lots of snow. Well – guess I’d better go back to my book.
Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year.
Love,
Toddy + Doris
Related Posts
Christmas Day 1944 – Part 1
Christmas Day 1944 – Part 2
Christmas Day 1944 – Part 3
My Mother, Doris Graham Cleage – 1952
My mother, Doris Graham Cleage at my Cleage grandparents house on Atkinson in Detroit, MI. I don’t know what the occasion was. My uncle Henry probably took the photo.
For more Sepia Saturday offerings CLICK.
Christmas Cards
Card made by me long, long ago
My family did not send out Christmas cards when I was growing up. Probably because all the relatives lived in Detroit and we saw them during the holidays. We usually had a good number of cards to display across the mantle though because my mother was a teacher and she brought home all the cards her students gave her. I did make some cards in elementary school that I found in my mother’s things. My grandparents aka Nanny and Poppy received cards from friends they kept in touch with from the days they lived in Montgomery. Often these were photograph cards. Because they kept the past years cards in a brass Chinese bowl on a table in the front room, under the table actually, I watched some stranger kids grow up from year to year.
When I grew up and moved out of Detroit I started sending and receiving cards. When we didn’t have a mantle we displayed them across the top of the bookcase that ran across one side of the living room. The years two of my daughters had paper routes we had lots of cards. For some reason I’ve saved these along with the family and friend cards. Every year when I go through them I think I should glean these but I don’t.
For five or six years when we were homeschooling our family put out a monthly newsletter. It gave the kids a chance to use their writing skills and gave the family and friends a chance to see that they weren’t growing up illiterate. We would add a Christmas message on the back page. That is about as close to a Christmas letter as I got.
The most meaningful card I’ve saved over the years is the last one my mother-in-law, Theola Davenport Williams, sent me the Christmas before she died. It included a letter on the inside. I re-read it every holiday season. I wish we had traveled to St. Louis that season to visit but we didn’t.
Poppy Could Fix Anything
I have never participated in a carnival of genealogy before. I thought about it but never took the plunge. After reading Jasia’s contribution about her tinkering father I started thinking about the handy men in my family. On my father’s side his brother Hugh Cleage was called on when things needed to be fixed. My husband’s father was famous for building things and taking them apart. He could build and he could fix, he just didn’t seem to have enough time to finish. Sometimes he would get ideas for how he could do it better and change up in the middle of a big project multiple times.
The one I’m going to write about is my mother’s father, Poppy. I’ve written about him before, about his notebook with projects started and completed. See that here. Poppy had a workshop in his basement. It was in the old coal room. He had a workbench, a tool chest, and a bin full of small pieces of wood. He had filled up an old treadle sewing machine with a stone to sharpen knives and tools. Outside of the workshop in the main basement was a long workbench. There were short pieces of wood stored underneath. Against the wall were longer pieces. The workshop had a special smell of machine oil and wood and basement.
Poppy made furniture sometimes. Not fine pieces but basic, useful pieces. A rocking chair that sat in the upstairs hall when my mother was growing up where it was used to rock fussy babies and sick children. I remember it next his bedroom window where you could sit and rock and look out over the backyard. He made a small table that sat on the landing for the telephone. The phone had a long cord so it reached upstairs at night and downstairs during the day. He built me a wonderful two-sided dollhouse when I was about 8 and described one I had seen at a friend’s house. I was the envy of my cousin and sister. I still have it.
During the summer he set up a homemade slide when we came over. The wood was planed and sanded smooth and then waxed regularly with the ends of candles. I don’t remember any splinters. It wasn’t a very long slide and eventually it served more as a support for our tents.
Poppy built flower boxes for his back porch and the back yard as well as for his daughter’s porch. He could be seen coming up the walk to repair things with his toolbox, like a doctor coming to see a patient. I remember Saturday afternoon spent at Plymouth Congregational Church while he fixed something; often it was the temperamental furnace. Both of my grandparent’s sons died as young children so my mother spent a lot of time with her father fixing things.
My grandfather was in his eighties when things in his neighborhood became very dangerous. It was around 1968. Someone shot into the house. A man walked in to the open side door, went upstairs and went through my great, great Aunt Abbie’s things and stole some. She thought it was odd but didn’t try to stop him. Luckily he came in and out of the house without running into my grandfather. Eventually someone came to the door with a gun. Poppy slammed the door shut and fell to the floor. After this he and my parents decided to sell their houses and buy a two family flat together. They bought one out by the University of Detroit. Poppy set up his basement workshop again. He and my mother planted corn and green beans and tomatoes in every spare space in the small yard. Some days he would take a wagon and collect useful or interesting items people had thrown out around the neighborhood. It was my last year of college and I was ready to leave home. I wish now I had taken the time to sit and talk to my grandparents. Maybe they were ready to tell some of those stories I wonder about if I had just asked.
Memorial Day and the Fourth of July 1950’s
On most Saturdays and all holidays my mother, my sister and I would drive the two blocks down Calvert on Detroit’s west side to pick up my aunt and her three daughters for the ride over to my grandparent’s house on the East side. We four oldest would sit in the back while the youngest sat up front between the adults.
Poppy, my mother’s father set up a table in the yard for holiday meals. He made it from boards set up on saw horses. There were chairs at each end of the table.. On each side of the table were benches made by setting planks on wooden boxes.
A wooden fence ran around three sides of the yard and separated us from the alley. The block was laid out with two long sides with a lot houses and two short sides with only two houses. Poppy and Nanny’s house was on a short side. The alley cut behind the houses and makes an “H”. If it hadn’t been for the wooden fence, we would have been sitting in the alley, as it was we had complete privacy. That’s how it seemed to me at the time anyway. Above the fence we could see the backs of the houses and tenements and garages that ran along one long side.
Looking at the photographs the only thing I can make out on the table is the white enamel pitcher which would have held the Hawaiian punch, our picnic drink, which was usually served in red, green and gold metal “glasses’.
After the meal it was time to clean up. The grownups would do it while we played in the yard. This was in contrast to real life during the week when we did the clean up and the dishes. I think this gave them time to talk while they worked and as I now know, doing the dishes is no big deal.
Then we’d have the long drive back home to the west side through all those interesting neighborhoods where I’d imagine what life would be like if I lived … there. And we’d sing songs and play car games. I wonder how long it really took. An hour? We didn’t take the expressway, all through neighborhoods. No urban renewal yet, or not on our route, and the neighborhoods were always full of people on porches and kids in the street.
More Visitors in the yard
Another in the series of photographs taken in my maternal grandparents yard in Detroit. Shell was my grandfather. John Wesley was my grandmother’s first cousin who was visiting from Chicago. This photo was taken the same day as the fourth photo down on the linked page, dated September 21, 1961. On the back of the photo it says “Our backyard 9-21-1961 (right to left) John Wesley, John Bishops son, Ernest and Shell”
Cradle Roll Certificate Plymouth Congregational Church 1921
This is a certificate for my mother’s oldest sister, Mary V. that her mother filled out. She also wrote information on the back.
Transcription:
Cradle Roll Certificate
To be given by the Cradle Roll Superintendent to the mother of the child and carefully kept until the child is grown.
This is to certify that Mary Virginia Graham
was enrolled as a member of The Cradle Roll
of the Plymouth Congregational Sunday School
at 2141 St. Aubin, Detroit, State of Mich.
on the 27th day of March 1921 born on
the 3rd day of April 1920 at Detroit State of Michigan. Parents Names: Father Mershell – Mother Fannie Graham
Signed Pastor Harold M. Kingsley
S.S. Supt. Mrs. S. I. Barnette
Cradle Roll Superintendent Mrs. E.E. Scott
Jesus said “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, forbid them not, for to such belongeth the Kingdom of God.” Mark – 10 – 14.
Reverse:
Mershell and Fannie Turner Graham were married June 15 – 191(9) at Montgomery, AL– were the first couple to marry after Plymouth was founded – and Mary Virginia was the first baby to be born into the new church, organized by about a dozen Montgom(ery__)
4 children were born to this union – 2 girls and 2 boys
Mary Virginia Graham – (Elkins) — April 3, 1920 — married Nov 9 19(41)
Mershell C. Graham Jr — June 10 – 1921 — Killed at 6 yrs aut(o)
Doris J. Graham —- Feb. 12 – 1923 — Wayne University
Howard Graham —-Sept. 7 – 1928 –died – scarlet fever Mar – 4 – 193(2)
Doris Diane Elkins – M.V.’s 1st and our 1st grand baby — Sept 7, 1943.
Grandmother Clock
Several years ago I made a picture to place on a clock face by printing photographs of my grandmother Fannie on a piece of acetate and cutting it to fit on a clock. I removed the plastic cover, took the hands off and lay the photo on top of the face. The numbers showed through. I replaced the hands and cover and it was a fully working clock.