The Mail Order Bride

I recently encountered an interesting family history story concerning Martha Ann Goss (1832-1895).   She is not an ancestor of mine, but was the mother of Malinda Barton (1852-1918) who married one of my great grand uncles, William Robinson.  I had always wondered how William Robinson came to know Malinda Barton and what had brought her to Tippecanoe County from Georgia but I do not normally do deep research into those families that marry into my own families and so I had never looked into the Barton family beyond knowing that Malinda Barton was born in Georgia and the "facts" of her life after she married into the Robinson family.  When all you look at are the "facts" you can easily miss some great stories, and that was certainly the case with Malinda Barton Robinson.

History is really nothing more than a series of stories from the past, usually arranged in chronological order.  Some are more meaningful or important than others and some are more interesting than others.  Family history is essentially the same thing except the stories are more directly connected to our own past.  In the days before written language history, including family history,  was passed by word of mouth from generation to generation.  Often today family history is still passed from one generation to the next in the same way...word of mouth, from parent or grandparent to child. The problem with passing information by word of mouth from one generation to the next, is that by the time it has passed through two or three generations a story told might have little in common with the story as it was first told.  Memories fade, stories become twisted, embellishments happen, critical details are left out. That seems to be the case with some of the remembered stories passed along to descendants of William and Malinda Robinson.

One of William's descendants once asked me what I knew about part of the family having Native American roots. It was something she had heard from a family member many years before.    I had never heard that and told her I doubted it was true. Certainly there was nothing in the Robinson family that would have pointed in that direction. More on that question below.  

Recently a descendant of Malinda Barton's brother contacted me and asked if I had a photo of Malinda, which I did, and which I shared with him.  I also asked him if he had any idea what had brought the Bartons to Tippecanoe County and learned the same question had been on his mind.  That prompted me to take a closer look at the Barton family and to again ponder what had brought them to Tippecanoe County.   What soon became clear was that Malinda's family were war refugees.  Martha Ann Goss was married to John Wesley Barton in Cass County Georgia in 1848.  I found that John was a small farmer, owning no land or slaves according to both the 1850 and 1860 census returns.  By 1860 John and Martha had six children, another son was born in 1861 about the time John enlisted in Company K, 18th Georgia Infantry Regiment along with many of his neighbors. 

John Barton is believed to have died during the second day of fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1863.   His name appeared in an Atlanta paper as a casualty soon after. 

Cass county, renamed Bartow County in 1861,  was profoundly affected by the Civil War, setting it back economically for many decades. During the War Bartow County was occupied by William Tecumseh Sherman in May, 1864 during the Atlanta Campaign. While no major battles occurred in the county a number of minor ones did and a major one would have happened if corps commander John Bell Hood had not been concerned about reports coming into his headquarters of Yankees to his rear at Cassville. 

After the Atlanta Campaign but before the March to the Sea, Hood again returned to Bartow County, this time as commander of the Army of Georgia. Sherman was effectively using the Western and Atlantic Railroad to supply his troops from the railhead in Chattanooga, Tennessee and fattening his cattle in Bartow County's fields before moving them south to feed his troops. Hood's men, ill-fed and poorly supplied could use the stores in the warehouses so the commander sent Samuel French to fill Allatoona Pass and deplete the stores near the Allatoona Depot. 

In the Battle of Allatoona Pass, the largest battle to occur in Bartow County, French surrounded federal general John Corse in a star fort overlooking the pass but was forced to retreat when he received reports of a significant Union force approaching. This was backed up by a communication from Sherman to Corse intercepted by French that Sherman was "near" although Sherman never left his Kennesaw Mountain stronghold. 

To ensure that Georgia did not have the means to rebuild, as Sherman left for Savannah he removed the railroad track from Dalton to Allatoona Pass and destroyed the track south of Allatoona Pass by having his men twist them into Sherman's Neckties. His last communication with the north occurred in Cartersville on November 12, 1864 and Sherman destroyed Cassville (Bartow County seat at the time) and portions of Kingston and Carterville. As a result the winter of 1864-65 was one of the hardest for Bartow's citizens and saw many citizens leave. In 1867 the county decided to move the county seat to Cartersville. 

It's impossible to know exactly what was happening to the Barton family during the war. It couldn't have been good and the outlook for a widow such as Martha, with children, was grim.    It is possible that Martha and her children  remained on the same ground she and her husband had been working prior to the war.  She might have moved in with relatives, or she might have fled the immediate area to someplace where she felt safer.   

What we do know about Martha is that on 27 October 1865 Martha was married to Johnson Graves in Tippecanoe County Indiana.  Now this was a puzzle.  She had no known relatives living in Tippecanoe County at the time, at least  nothing obvious appeared in searches of local census records and Johnson Graves had no apparent connections with Georgia.   Still I felt certain that her arrival in Tippecanoe County was not random, she would have had many other options if all she was seeking was a safer place.  

I thought there had to be some specific reason Martha and her seven children ended up in Tippecanoe County rather than any other place.   I wondered if perhaps some local relief organization might have been working to bring war refugees to safer locations so I asked someone who has studied the Civil War and that era in much greater depth than I.  I asked if there were any relief organizations that he knew of doing such work.   His response was both surprising and enlightening.  In short he explained that there were some organizations around the country during and after the war that helped war refugees, some small church groups and right after the war the U.S. Christian Commission, but they usually raised money for food, clothing, medical needs and blankets, not relocation.  He posited that she was quite likely a "mail order bride".  A widow such as her, with children, in a destroyed Georgia had little prospects beyond begging for food from the occupying Federal forces.  It was common to see women her age marrying men who were 20, 30, or even 40 years their senior. It was the only way to ensure their survival and the well being of their children.  They would contract an "agent" who would then place adds in papers all around the West and Midwest and the suiter would pay the Agent's fees and the travel expenses for the widow and her children. 

In the end there is no way to verify if she was a mail order bride, but the circumstantial evidence seems pretty strong.  In researching the life and times of Martha Goss Barton I uncovered one other interesting fact that goes back to the question from one of William Robinson's descendants about Native American roots.  Based on prior research done by others in the Barton family Martha Goss's mother was most likely a Cherokee Indian.  While I did not attempt to dig deeper into that question the family legend had certainly been passed along by at least some of the Grandchildren of William Robinson.  





  

Silence is Golden

Under the heading of "More of What This Country Needs" I would add the idea that we need more silence.  The hum of "civilization" is no longer a hum.   Instead it's become a long and painfully loud crescendo with no end in sight. It's gotten to the point where we can't hear ourselves think. In a sense we have lost ourselves in the din.

 The hum of civilization isn't just that which we can measure in decibels, it's also those other things that compete for our attention from the time we open our eyes in the morning until we shut them at night.  We are under a constant barrage of competing things wanting our attention. We rush from place to place and from thing to thing.  It's like being pecked to death by chickens.  Alarm clocks, family, jobs, friends, Facebook updates, email, Television, smart phones, music, ...those are some of the obvious things screaming for our attention. Politics is another source of unpleasant noise, especially this year.

It's easy to lose yourself among all those things competing for your attention. We are seldom left alone to just think, daydream, and figure out who we are and how we fit into this whole creation.  It requires some silence to think about big things like "What is the meaning of life?", "What is the meaning of my life?" or "What gives my life meaning?" 

The silence we need is more than simply the lack of noise. It is also the silence of not letting a thousand thoughts compete in your mind.  I've experienced "silence" while being surrounded by noise.   Driving a tractor, plowing corn in the middle of an 80 acre field for example.  On the tractor, in the field but miles from there too. You might call it zoning out...but not in the sense that I started plowing out rows of corn...more like my mind was just open and thoughts flowing without much exterior distraction.  In a way the noise actually sort of helped with that process.

Sitting on the porch swing with my grandmother on a warm summer afternoon was another kind of silence. She was talking, I was listening, sometimes asking questions, but it was a quiet sitting, quiet talking, non interrupted talking and listening.  I remember sometimes hearing the sound of a car moving down the road in front of the house...gravel crunching under the tires.  You could see the dust rising behind the car before you heard it. But it didn't compete with what was going on.  How different from today.   I like to sleep with open windows whenever I can but we live next to a busy street.  Opening a window today just lets in a more or less constant roar of passing traffic.  Where are all those people going at this time of night?  Eventually you just get numb to the sound and don't really hear it any more...still the same amount of traffic moving down the street, but I've managed to push it far into the background, especially late at night while I'm sitting here at my computer working.

What this country needs is less noise in a lot of places...television needs less noise.  When did we decide news reporting was better when you had two or three panelists talking about the news...all at the same time.  Financial news networks are especially terrible about that sort of thing. Three or four guys sitting around a table debating what's going to happen in the markets or arguing because they don't agree, that's the kind of too much noise I can do without.

We need less noise and more substance from our politicians.  Political debates are not debates...they are junior high school shouting matches, it's pathetic. I've seen enough of those to last me until I die.

I'm thinking it might be a good idea to take up fishing...being out on a boat, away from people, traffic, TV, phones, and all the other trappings of "civilization" sounds pretty good. Just me and the dog.

What do Terry Bradshaw, Glenn Beck, James Carville, Thomas Edison, Howie Mandel and I have in common?

This is, after all, a blog of Random Thoughts and the following is just about as random as I've gotten.  Maybe it should be called rambling thoughts from the heartland because there isn't a strong continuity of subject matter in any of my subjects. From Travel, to photography, to family history and politics.  Holy Cow, this is beginning to sound like the ramblings of someone with ADHD or ADD.  

And there you have it, the lead-in to my thoughts on ADD.  Why? Because I'm probably the poster child for un-diagnosed ADHD as both a child and an adult.  

An interesting article appeared in the Washington Post recently. Written by Valerie Strauss: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/02/07/adhd-in-kids-what-many-parents-and-teachers-dont-understand-but-need-to-know/

Reading through the article dredged up some painful memories of my school days and reminded me of issues that haunted me through much my adult life,  but at the same time the article offered up some positive thoughts on the subject. From Dr. Ned Hallowell, one of the country’s foremost experts on ADHD: "Too often, teachers and parents (and bosses) jump to what I call “the moral diagnosis,” and ascribe the underachievement to lack of effort or laziness, which leads to lectures, punishments, and a gradual infection of the spirit with the viruses of shame and diminished sense of self.  In fact, the correct diagnosis is of a brain difference, not a brain deficit, and certainly not a moral failing."   I can't even begin to count the number of times teachers wrote on my report card "not working up to potential",  implying of course that I was a smart kid who could do a lot better but who instead was goofing off, not working hard enough. None of that was said because they wanted to be unkind. On the contrary.  My teachers wanted me to succeed.   My parents loved me and wanted the best for me.  As an adult, as a parent and grandparent that much is very clear to me now...it wasn't quite so clear 50 years ago.  

My failing to "work up to potential" was probably especially difficult for my father to deal with or to understand.  Dad was what I might call a "natural scholar", he had excelled in school both as a student and athlete. Success in school or athletics evaded me.   Failure was foreign to him and clearly there was a difference between what he expected of his children, based on his own experiences, and how I was performing.  I really feel bad that he had to suffer through that without understanding the problem. I wish we had learned all this years ago, it would have been so much better for both of us.  

I'm not going to go into the symptoms or treatment of ADHA in children but I thought some of the information on Adult ADD was worth talking about.   

Some of the often cited symptoms of Adult ADD or ADHA are: 
Trouble concentrating and staying focused.  
Hyper Focus....oddly the opposite of the first but can also be problematic. 
Disorganization
Subcategories of Disorganization are:   

• poor organizational skills (home, office, desk, or car is extremely messy and cluttered) 
• tendency to procrastinate
• trouble starting and finishing projects
• chronic lateness
• frequently forgetting appointments, commitments, and deadlines
• constantly losing or misplacing things (keys, wallet, phone, documents, bills)
• underestimating the time it will take you to complete tasks

 Oh....crap, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty and guilty!  
These things have haunted me my entire adult life.  My chronic lateness at work became a department joke. My desk, is just about a picture perfect example of poor organizaional skill.   

There are several other typical and often cited symptoms and they are pretty easy to find online if you are interested. The article in the Post did include a bit of good news.   First the problem is much better understood now than it was when I was a child and many studies have been done. Treatments are for the most part successful, books have been written and children suffering this diagnosis are much more likely to be treated today than children were 50 years ago.

In my case, which is the norm for most people, I  learned to compensate for many of the symptoms so that in many ways you probably would never suspect I ever had such a problem. Oddly it seemed to me, I mentioned this to my sister today and she seemed truly surprised that I thought I had ADD, but my wife said she had suspected such a thing for a long time, of course she's lived with me for almost 50 years and has experienced much of this.  My case remains "un-diagnosed" or only self-diagnosed but I may talk my my physician about this on my next visit.   

Dr. Hallowell noted in the article "In fact, what we call ADD (a terrible term, as it is not a deficit of attention but rather a wandering of attention, and it is not a disorder in my opinion but rather a trait; if you manage it properly it can turn you into a phenomenal success, but if you don’t it can ruin your life, which makes it unique and fascinating) is really a type of mind, genetically transmitted, and composed of a wide array of complex and often contradictory tendencies." 

"On the positive side, which people rarely discuss, people with ADD are the people who founded this country.  They tend to be visionaries, dreamers, explorers, inventors (Edison was a classic), path-finders, discoverers, entrepreneurs (almost all entrepreneurs have ADD), creative types, original thinkers, paradigm breakers, trend-setters, free thinkers, as well as being big-hearted, trusting, generous, and fun."

It is a relief to know I am in good company and I'm thankful that I escaped any great lasting harm. Still it did create issues and some pain along the way.  On the other hand it is part of what made me who I am.   It is interesting to know this was genetically transmitted...I wonder where that came from?  I have no doubt believing dad would have thought it didn't come from his side of the family. This was an eye opening read but I found additional good material at  http://www.helpguide.org/home-pages/add-adhd.htm 

OUR LOVE HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH SOCIAL MEDIA.

I am the unofficial family historian with a membership at Ancestry.com and a regular visitor to several websites related to family history and or history in general.  One place I pay for a membership is NewspaperArchive.com.   There are several good websites with newspaper collections from around the country and around the world.   Some states are better represented in their collection than others.    Indiana newspapers are well represented in their collection and that was one reason I selected them over some of the others.

As I've learned so often there really is nothing new under the sun. While the the mechanics of delivering social media has changed over the last century the message remains the same..."Here I am, look at me, I made this, I did that, join me in my happy, sad, or meaningful endeavors, I am!"

The other evening I did a search for articles containing the name of my Great grandmother Olive Robinson and discovered that she and her family were frequently mentioned in stories from the Monticello Herald. In those days the Monticello paper was a weekly and every week they included "reports" from all the little communities around the county.  Almost always the reports were of mundane, everyday events.  Who went to visit who, who had guests from out of town, who visited someone out of town, who got engaged or got married, funerals attended.....in short they were almost always just reports of neighborhood social events.  As I was reading the items it occurred to me "Oh my God.....these sound just like what I read at Facebook"  It became quite clear to me...our ancestors were every bit as hooked on social media as some of us are today.  The only difference I could see was that they didn't have the option of including a photo of the group gathered for the dinner party they were reporting about, or a picture of their new car.    Three randomly selected articles are shown below as the sort of Social Media our ancestors enjoyed.

I am confident that had "Facebook" existed in 1915 my great grandmother would have been a power user of the app.

WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE, AND WHY DID GRANDMA SAVE THIS PICTURE?

Cooper-Best Family Reunion Circa 1904

There are 75 individuals in this picture.   It was given to me about 1987 by my grandfather Robinson's first cousin Harry Klepinger.  I easily recognized my great great grandfather, David Cooper sitting in the first row off the ground...what I've since come to call Patriarch row. Harry told me that it was a picture of a Cooper & Best Family reunion.  His parents are on the far right side and two of his older siblings are standing high in the back row but he didn't remember who many of the others were and he didn't have any idea what the location was or the occasion, other than a "reunion". David Cooper was Harry's maternal grandfather.  The only identification on the picture was written on the reverse indicating the names of the two families involved.  Coopers and Bests.  David Cooper was married to Amanda Best and she had died before this picture was taken.  In a closer examination with a magnifying glass I realized that three of David Cooper's children were also present, William P. Cooper, Kate Klepinger, and Mary Schoonover.  My own great grandmother and any of her family seemed to be missing.  Everyone else was a mystery.      This might have remained a mostly unidentified picture but for two reasons.   Collaboration, and the internet.  For several years this remained in a folder of other Cooper family pictures and data.

A few years later I connected with Cheryl Hipp, a great great granddaughter of Isaac Newton Best and we exchanged some family data. Isaac was the brother of Amanda Best Coooper.   I had started scanning my old family photographs and I sent Cheryl a copy of this image telling her the names of those I knew and asking if she recognized anyone else in the picture based on the old family photographs she had in her possession.  Imagine my surprise when she wrote back and told me that she also had that very picture in her own collection and that she knew which was her great grandfather and grandfather.  

If descendants of both Amanda and Isaac had copies there must have been many copies of the image given to others who were in attendance that day and while we are still waiting for another copy to turn up we have been able to identify several other family members based on other photographs posted to various family trees at Ancestry.com and others by simply going through our own collections.

One of the first chores we accomplished was figuring out the year it was taken.   Since Amanda was not in the picture we knew it was taken after her death in 1896.   We also realized that William P. Cooper's wife, Lottie was standing next to him and she died in June 1905.  So there we had our brackets.   Fashions are ever changing, and because of that change it is often possible to date an image with a fair amount of accuracy based only on the clothing being worn in the picture, and this picture is loaded with fashion hints all of which point to the first decade of the 20th Century.

Cheryl sent copies of the picture to several other Best family researchers she was exchanging information with asking for them to look for anyone they might recognize. We made a low resolution copy of the image and numbered each person then Cheryl made a spread sheet and we plugged in the names next to the numbers of those we knew.  That led us to thinking more about the image in a couple of different ways.   First....what event was this?  Was it just a run of the mill family reunion or was something else going on?  Had the family gathered for a celebration of a birthday or wedding anniversary, or maybe even a funeral?   Cheryl and I had both started out calling it a picture of a Cooper/Best family Reunion...and then we started thinking about family reunions and other family gatherings.  In our experience two large families might come together for a funeral or wedding, but usually other gatherings involve one side of your family or the other, not usually both.   David Cooper was married to Amada Best, and her brother Isaac N Best was married to David's sister Rebecca....so there was more than the average mixing between those two families, but still it seemed to me that if it were a family reunion it was probably for one famil or the other, not both, except those that intermarried.  Keeping that in mind it's probably safe to assume the majority of the others are going to be members of that family.

The presence of Henry Best, older brother of Amanda and Isaac N in the photo along with some of his children seem to tip the balance toward this being a Best family reunion picture.   Also present was David and Rebecca's brother Benjamin Cooper, but his presence at a Best family function is easily explained because he was making his home with his sister Rebecca and her family at this time. Henry Best, on the other hand had lived in Iowa for many years indicating a trip back to Indiana required a sort of special effort and his presence at a Cooper family reunion would seem less likely. 

Two additional spreadsheet pages were created to help us evaluate the image and those who might have been present.  One was a list of the various Best family members who might have attended and their ages and known residences in 1900.  The other was for the Cooper family members who might have attended along with ages and residences.     We have assumed that those in attendance were probably all descendants of Isaac and Jane Best, early pioneers of Tippecanoe County, along with those members of the Cooper family who had married into the Best family.   Isaac and Jane had ten children, but by 1905 only three remained, Isaac N, Henry, and Samuel who died in July of that year.  However, many of Isaac and Jane's grandchildren and great grandchildren were alive in 1905.  It is possible that the invitation extended beyond the families of the children of Isaac and Jane and perhaps some cousins might have shown up also.

We now have positive or nearly positive identifications of 23 of the faces in this picture, but neither of us are ready to throw in the towel.  Though not yet half done, both Cheryl and I feel there is hope that we might eventually figure out as many as half of these people, or maybe somewhere in a box someone has another copy of this picture on which the original owner wrote the names of everyone. Wouldn't that be nice!

Just because you don't know everyone in your old family pictures doesn't mean they can't be figured out with some effort and help from others and a bit of luck.  There are some good books devoted to working with your old family photographs.  Well worth the cost if you are serious about working with the old photos.