Castle Cousins

My grandmother, Fannie Castle, moved to Oklahoma in the summer of 1907. She was 10 years old. Much to the regret of my brother and me, she never got to return to Kentucky. Life moved on in Oklahoma, she met and married my grandfather, had twin boys, taught school for 43 years, raised my brother and me after our mother died, and helped raise her great-grandson, my son Jason. But she never forgot Kentucky. I mean, really, she didn't. She had an amazing memory.

In her 70's and 80's she began writing about her life in Kentucky. I have handwritten descriptions of her Castle grandparents' house and farm and even a map she drew of the area she remembered from her childhood. As many of us do as we get older, she became nostalgic for old places and old friends. She took out a subscription to her hometown Kentucky newspaper, The Licking Valley Courier, and she began to write to the cousins who still lived back there.

My grandmother's map of her home in Kentucky,
drawn about 75 years after she left there

She was so excited to get letters from them, and I guess that is why I remember them as well. I read their letters and saw the photos of their children and grandchildren. She heard from Virgil and Nettie Castle, Effie Castle Walters, Hattie Day Egelston, Mearl McGuire, Ida Frances Castle Elam, and even more often from Ida's daughter, Irene Downing. Nowadays they would all be Facebook friends, but back then they wrote long newsy letters and sent real photographs. 

I knew the names of all these people, but it might be surprising to find out that I didn't know exactly how they were related to my grandmother. Since meeting Virgil Castle's granddaughter, Jeneen, I have decided that I need to do a little research and document the connections between all these Castle cousins.

All of the connections go back to my grandmother's grandparents, Goldman Davidson Castle and his wife, Rachel Sargent Castle. They married September 1, 1844, and had at least seven documented children over 24 years. They were: William Henderson Castle, born 1846; James Harvey Castle, born 1852; John Castle, born 1854; Lilburn Castle, born 1857; Sarah Francis (later known as Aunt Sis) Castle, born 1862; George Turner Castle, my great-grandfather, born 1863; and Nancy Anne Castle, born 1868.

The 1850 census of Pulaski County shows one child of Goldman and Rachel Castle, William, age 4. The 1860 census of Morgan County enumerates children William, 14; James, 8; John, 4; and Lilburn, 1. Morgan County death records show that John and Lilburn both died in October of 1861 from scarlet fever. The 1870 census of Morgan County shows children, James, 17; Frances, 9; George, 7; and Anne, 2. In 1880 Sarah F., age 18; George T., age 16; and Nancy A., age 11, were still living at home.

1870 Morgan County census

William H. Castle married Nancy Jane Wells in Morgan County on November 3, 1867. Census records from 1870, 1880, and 1900 document these children: John Seymour, Elizabeth Ann, Lou Rittie, Eliza, Goldman Davidson, George Barnes, Rachel Florida, and Effie Lee. Some other family trees show another son, James Mize. William Henderson Castle and George Turner Castle were brothers. That means that Effie, with whom my grandmother had a long and affectionate correspondence, was her first cousin. Rachel Florida would also have been my grandmother's first cousin. Her son Mearl McGuire wrote to my grandmother. They would have been first cousins, once removed.

Effie Castle Walters

Mearl McGuire

James Harvey Castle married Elizabeth Nickell (sister of George Turner Castle's first wife, Frances.) Their children were Lula Catherine, Preston, John Smith, Lonis Sterling, Dora Alice, Caledonia, Ida Frances, Nora, Betty, Essa Mae, Goldman, Cleveland and Hendricks (twins). Caledonia died at age 16; Nora, Betty, and Goldman died young; and the twins died as infants. James, Elizabeth, and their children, Caledonia, Nora, and Goldman, are all buried in the Castle plot we recently visited.

James H. Castle family, 1890's?

Ida Frances Castle Elam and her daughter Irene corresponded with my grandmother. Ida would also have been my grandmother's first cousin. 

Ida Castle Elam (1st row, far left) and her children
Irene is 2nd row on the right

Her sister Lula Catherine would have been almost 15 years older than my grandmother and died in 1966, long before my grandmother began corresponding with her cousins. However, I recently saw a picture of her posted on Family Search and was amazed at how much she resembled my grandmother!

Lula Catherine Castle Lewis

Fannie Castle Smith

John Smith Castle, son of James and Elizabeth, and brother of Ida and Lula, married Bytha Engle. Their son Virgil and his wife Hettie also corresponded with my grandmother. John Smith would have been my grandmother's first cousin, so Virgil was her first cousin, once removed, although I noticed that Hettie called her "Aunt Fannie," as most everybody did. Jeneen is Virgil's granddaughter, so that makes Jeneen and me third cousins, once removed. Just today I became Facebook friends with another of Virgil's granddaughters, Kathy. 

Another of my grandmother's correspondents was Hattie Day Egelston. Until I did this research, I assumed she was a cousin on the Day side, which she is, but she is also a Castle. Her mother was Nancy Anne, George Turner Castle's youngest sister. On her father's side she was related to my great-grandmother, Sarah Florida Day. She is what my grandmother proudly called a "double cousin." She would have been another first cousin on the Castle side; I'm not even going to try to figure what she was on the Day side. She wrote often about her sister Edna, who would also have been my grandmother's double cousin.

Hattie Day Egelston

Edna Day Long and husband

My grandmother was so proud of her Castle ancestry. Her dad had been a county court clerk in Morgan County, a job with prestige, and her grandfather Castle had been postmaster. Nothing was more important to her than family, and her correspondence with her cousins meant so much to her. I believe it did to them, as well. She would be so proud to know that we are still making connections with our Castle cousins.

Linda and Becky's Excellent Adventure, Part 2: The Castles

We got up on Sunday morning with plans to find a popular breakfast buffet in Berea. It was not to be. My car wouldn't start. We called Triple A and waited about an hour for someone to come jump the car. He suggested we drive for a while to build up the battery, so we headed out of town. I can't imagine that the buffet in Berea would have been any better than the brunch buffet we found in Winchester, Kentucky. I think it's the best fried chicken I've ever had. The car started just fine after we rolled our full selves out of the restaurant.

After about an hour and a half through fairly scenic highway, we arrived in West Liberty. Now you have to give me a break here, because I was never the driver when we visited West Liberty before. I was a little lost, and it didn't help that there was a major tornado there in 2012, and a lot of the town doesn't look the same. After wandering around a while, I finally found the road out of town and then the turn on Centerville Road to the cemetery.

Linda was thrilled to see the same sign that thrilled my brother and me--the one that says "Day Branch Road." 

Again, I knew that "our" cemetery was up a hill off of this dead end road. I just couldn't find the right place. I had the right hill in my mind's eye, but there were at least three hills that could have been it. (I wrote about our first attempt to find the cemetery in the post, "My Old Kentucky Home." Our successful second attempt was described in the post, "Genealogy on the Road: West Liberty, Kentucky.") We drove until I knew I had passed the place I was looking for, and I turned around and drove back up the road. At the exact moment that we drove by a house, a man and woman walked out of it and started to get into their car. 

I stopped the car, and Linda leaned out to shout, "Could we ask you a question?" We all got out of our cars and met in the driveway. Linda asked, "Would you happen to know where the Castle cemetery is?" The woman replied, "I think I do. I'm a Castle." In two previous trips to West Liberty, my brother and I had never met a Castle. A lot of people we talked to remembered Virgil Castle, but he had passed away long before. On our first trip we talked to Linville Castle on the phone, but I had heard that he had since passed away. We had no idea that any Castles were still living in West Liberty, and here was one standing in front of us! What were the chances that at the exact moment we passed her mother's house, our cousin Jeneen would be getting into her car??

Becky, Linda Castle Hess, Jeneen Castle Roach

Jeneen and her husband Tommy were helping her mother move that day. We visited for a few minutes, trying to find our family connections. (Our common ancestors, we determined, were Goldman Davidson and Rachel Sargent Castle. My great-grandfather, George Turner Castle, and Jeneen's 2nd great-grandfather, James Harvey Castle, were brothers. Virgil Castle was Jeneen's grandfather.) Tommy took our picture, we exchanged addresses and emails, and then we followed Jeneen and Tommy up the road, so that Jeneen could point out her window at the right road to the cemetery. 

We turned the car up the road, and I thought almost right away that this was the wrong road. It was only the width of the car but still far more accessible than the path to the cemetery that I remembered. Still, we kept driving to the top, where we found an abandoned house. Now I knew it was the wrong road. 

We got out of the car and looked around, just to be sure, surprising a cute little family of deer that seemed almost tame. I was positive we were in the wrong place, so we got back in the car. It wouldn't start. We were down a country road, up a hill where no-one lived, and we were stuck. But we didn't even have time to panic, because a car drove up behind us, honking its horn. It was Jeneen and Tommy to the rescue! She had realized it was the wrong road and had come back to tell us. 

We now had help but still didn't know how we were going to get the car started. We eliminated ideas one by one: no jumper cables; a car couldn't get close enough to jump us anyway; automatic, so we couldn't just put it in neutral and back down; the closest Triple A serviceman was a couple of hours away. Tommy and Jeneen's friend John came up on his four-wheeler, and he had tools. Of course, I couldn't have a battery that was easy to get out, but the guys finally removed it. Our only option was to drive back into West Liberty and buy a new battery, which we did. 

Now this might sound like a bad thing, but having car trouble turned out to be a blessing in disguise. We got to spend a lot more time with Jeneen and talked a lot more about the Castles; we learned things, and so did she. She wasn't even certain who was buried in the little Castle cemetery plot on the hill. Four of the headstones were for her 3rd great-grandparents, Goldman Davidson Castle and Rachel Sargent Castle, and her 2nd great-grandparents, James Harvey Castle and Elizabeth Nickell Castle. She didn't even know about Donia's foot! (See "Genealogy on the Road: West Liberty, Kentucky").

In turn, she pointed out the original home place of her grandparents, Virgil and Net Castle, and her mother's home on original Castle land. 

Eventually we said our good-byes again, and Jeneen pointed us to the right road to the cemetery. "Path" is a better word. We had to park the car on Centerville Road and walk up the hill to look for the headstones. They were not easy to find. Linda and I peered through the little pine forest in several places before we finally saw the stones. Of course, the little family plot was more overgrown than the last time I was there, and Linda spent several minutes cutting thorny vines away from the fallen stones while I cleared moss from Grandma Castle's marker. The shade of the tall trees surrounding the plot made it hard to even take photos of the stones, but we did the best we could.

We finally left West Liberty and started our 12-hour drive home to Oklahoma. We were glad to see this sign on our way out of town. 

Today had definitely been an excellent adventure.

The Castle coincidences don't end there. I came home and looked through a box of my grandmother's things, looking for a map she had drawn of the West Liberty area 75 years after she lived there.  I've known about the map since before the last time my brother and I were there, but I don't know why I keep forgetting to take it with me to Kentucky. I found the map, but I also found a letter to my grandmother from Virgil Castle's wife, Net, dated March 8, 1982. Virgil had been sick, and Net had been doing a lot of the farm work. Then she wrote this: "Aunt Fannie, watch in the next week's paper (The Licking Valley Courier, to which my grandmother subscribed). My granddaughter's picture will be in the paper. She won 2 big trophies for speech making and her picture is in the paper. She is a real smart little girl. She is 12 years old." Guess who she was talking about? Jeneen!

Happy Blogiversary to Me

Today is the first anniversary of the day my blog appeared on Geneabloggers. In reality, it's been about a year and two weeks since I started writing Becky's Bridge to the Past. I've written 65 posts and had over 7,000 pageviews. I've been contacted by a couple of cousins and gotten some encouragement from other bloggers. I can say that it's been very helpful to put my genealogical notes in narrative form and has totally been worth the hours I've spent trying to get my words and images just right.

The post that has gotten the most hits is "Genealogy on the Road: Waterloo, Alabama," about the trip my brother and I took to the town our great-grandparents lived in before they came to Oklahoma in 1894. I have a feeling that has more to do with motorcycle riders researching their rally route than with anybody trying to find out about my rather unexciting (but enjoyable) trip to Alabama. I always wonder at someone's reaction when they Google something and get my little blog as a result.

I started the year by listing what I knew about the four branches of my family--my two paternal grandparents and my two maternal grandparents and their ancestors. This is information I have collected in over 25 years of doing genealogy--first by visiting genealogical libraries in Oklahoma and then by using Ancestry.com and the free research tools I could find online. Recently, my posts have been all about using DNA to search for ancestors and some of the new cousins I have found through this medium.

In just the last month I have identified two of my DNA matches--one on each side of my family. The common ancestor of Leo Pentney Gaines and myself is our great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Simmons, which would make us 3rd cousins. Herbert Archie Miller has been my biggest match on FTDNA (aside from my brother) since I first got my results, but I finally got some help in identifying him as a Ming cousin.

We haven't been successful YET, but a number of Huff cousins have been working hard this year trying to untangle the family relationships in Jackson County, Tennessee. My new cousin Barbara and I are still related, although we now know through DNA testing that our great-great-grandmothers Elzina and Ellender Huff were not sisters. I found out that I somehow have a previously undocumented connection to the Pharris family of Jackson County. And to make things more complicated, in the last month we have discovered that we are also related to the Broyles, Wilhoite, and Blankenbaker families of the 1717 Germanna Colony of Virginia. Hopefully, the solution to that puzzle will help us find the parents of our 3rd great-grandmother, Mrs. Susannah Huff.

In the past year I have visited ancestral homelands in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama with my brother. We finally found the graves of our Castle great-great grandparents in West Liberty, KY, and saw the town in Virginia named for our ancestor, Jacob Castle.

What are my goals for the coming year? I hope to find more cousins through DNA testing and solve the Huff and Germanna puzzles. DNA has brought us closer in the last year than 20 previous years of chasing the paper trail. In the last week I have been contacted by a Smith cousin who found me through DNA testing from Ancestry.com. I so hope we can collaborate to find out more about the ancestors of our great-grandfather Stephen Albert Smith. This summer my brother and I will visit North Carolina and Virginia. I hope by the time we visit Germanna, I will know how I am connected there.

Keepsakes

I was "on the hunt" this weekend, as my grandmother used to call it. As a kid, my family was always looking for a piece of paper, a piece of clothing, somebody's car keys. This weekend it was something I knew I had had in my hand within the past couple of years, but there were several places I could have put it. The object was a small paperback book, almost a pamphlet, of responsive readings from the I AM meetings that my great-grandmother used to attend. (See my last post, "Big Mom.") I had planned to write a post about the I AM movement, and I really needed that little book. However, now I'm going to hold off on that for a bit, while I describe some of the other treasures I found this weekend.

Keepsakes are like mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mother to daughter. In my grandmother's case, she inherited her mother's keepsakes, collected a mighty number of them herself, and kindly preserved a few of my mother's. When, in her last few years she began a project to create scrapbooks for her sisters, her remaining brother, nieces and nephews, and her grandchildren, I remember being confused about why I was angry with her over this magnanimous gesture. I still don't know if I was mad that she was giving our family history away or if I knew that she was disposing of an excess of memorabilia because she was nearing the end of her life. I shouldn't have worried about all the stuff she gave away. Lord knows there were plenty of photos, clippings, and keepsakes to go around, with plenty left over for me. In fact, they have been in two big storage bins that I have lugged around with me to the 7 or 8 houses I have lived in since my grandmother died in 1992.

I kept thinking I would go through them, but I just never got around to it. This weekend was it. It started out as a hunt for Big Mom's little I AM book, but it became a whole afternoon of laughter and tears. 

I found:

• The original clipping from the Tulsa World that declared my dad and his brother as the first twins born in Tulsa in 1928
• My grandmother's original application for teacher's retirement when it went into effect in 1942. It listed every teaching job she had had up until then, including how much she was paid. Her first teaching job in 1915-16 was in Owasso, and she was paid $250 for 5 months of work.
• A short sketch she had written, describing what she and grandpa wore at their wedding and what their first years together were like.
• Newspaper and magazine articles about her innovative teaching techniques, including having her class measure 1 acre on the school grounds and re-enact the Land Run
• A map she had drawn from memory of West Liberty, KY, and the surrounding area, including the names of residents that she remembered from her childhood. On a few sheets of old stationery she had listed all the residents of Red Fork that she could remember from the years when the Castle family first lived there.
• Postcards, letters, and greeting cards from as far back as the 1930s. Letters from her aunts Emma and Retta Lee in California backed up what I thought to be true--that they were the original I AM members and had encouraged their sister Florida to join the group.
• A list of my grandfather's kind gestures and funny sayings that my grandmother had written down after he passed away. I had forgotten that he was always looking for his "goood hat."
• The tag from my brother's hospital crib that read "Smith boy"
• A note that my mother wrote to her mother when she was still in the hospital after giving birth to me. I don't know why my dad's mother had this little note, but it meant a lot to me to get this glimpse of my early days with my mother. I was breast feeding just fine, thank you very much, and was gaining weight every day. Story of my life.

I could go on and on. It was amazing how much I found that would have enhanced the blog posts I've written this year, not to mention my vacation to West Liberty. I knew there was a clipping from the paper about the twins' birth but I hadn't seen it in years. When my brother worked at the Tulsa Public Schools' Service Center, I asked him to look up Mom's teaching records but they don't keep them. In my own garage I had the information I was looking for, and I didn't know it. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote that I didn't know what my grandmother wore at her wedding, and I possessed a description of her dress in her own handwriting! It just goes to show that the suggestion from veteran genealogists about searching for records in your own home is true. I don't think I found any new genealogical information, but if I didn't know anything, these two bins of memorabilia would be a gold mine. 

The Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a keepsake as "something that you keep to help you remember a person, place, or event." My grandmother's keepsakes certainly were meant to do that.