Mother's Day Rainbow and More

May in Christian County, KY

I saw this beautiful, full rainbow on Mother's Day about

6:30 pm. On the left side, a double rainbow is slightly visible.

The farm buildings here (and those in the rainbow photo)

are Mennonite-built. Their distinctive, consistent

building style is easy to recognize, once you know it.

This crow was perched on one of the big lights in the

mall parking lot in Hopkinsville. If this photo had

sound effects, you'd quickly turn down the volume.

 He was very noisy! When he saw me paying
 attention to him, he flew over to the highest point

of the mall's roofline and sat there -- still cawing!

Sweet peas in a cemetery fence row, and

overhead, branches and cones of Virginia pine.

I took this photo of our neighbor's field in early May.

Now, many wheatfields are nearly ready for harvest.

We are happy for recent rains because we've had a dry.

spring. But heavy storms right now could lay the wheat

plants down, making harvest difficult and reducing yield.

Most of our wild roses are pink, but this one is very white.

There might be a very slight hint of pink in the buds.

"O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green..."

--Thomas Dekker (c. 1572 – 1632))

Old Movies for Me!

How a man I never knew changed my life forever

When I was a little kid, Brent was my dad's best friend. Mom will tell you that Brent was Dad's best friend many years before I came along, and that he is the one who introduced them to each other. Mom will also tell you that I met Brent, but I was too little to remember.

Even though I don't remember meeting him, I know that Brent loved movies -- especially old movies. He was an aficionado. He knew why a movie was unique, or what crazy stuff had happened during shooting. He knew what actors and actresses liked each other and which ones didn't.

Brent knew that Isaac's and my education in the great classic movies was being neglected. When I was about 10, he started sending us movies that he thought we should see, that were appropriate for kids. I remember being so excited to get Brent's boxes. Isaac and I would look up all of the new movies in Dad's movie books to see what they were about. Even though I never watch VHS anymore, I still have all of the movies he sent us, because they bring back such happy memories.

I watched those videos hundreds of times over the next ten years. I can recite huge swaths of several of them. Our favorites were the "Road to..." movies, and the Marx Brothers. I still have to restrain myself from quoting them to people who will have no idea what I'm talking about. I've even gone so far as to infect my husband with my old movie love. He still swears that he doesn't like black and white movies, but he loved Harvey.

Brent is the reason that I sing Marx brothers songs. He's the reason that when all of the other little girls in my class had a crush on a member of Hansen or Leonardo Dicaprio, I had a crush on Errol Flynn. And the reason that I view the new Flight of the Phoenix movie with much skepticism. How can you replace Jimmy Stewart? All of these years later, I still don't like modern horror movies. Give me Vincent Price or Boris Karloff any day over these movies with all of their blood and gore.

Brent passed away when I was in high school. Mom tells me that we're his legacy, because he was the last of his line. He passed on his love of those movies to both me and my brother. He also passed on the knowledge that the truly great stories never get old.

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Thank you, Keely. Here's Brent  in about 1979, in the kitchen of the first apartment Dennis and I had after we were married. I can't believe it, but he appears to be washing dishes!

Brent has a starring role in many funny, happy memories of our college and newly-wed years in Warrensburg, Missouri. He had juvenile (Type 1) diabetes, and he died at the young age of 38.  G.L.N.

Down in the Ditch

Where the mower doesn't go

Our Mennonite neighbor has several small businesses and dealerships in addition to his farming operations. Along the highway beside our two mailboxes, he has several signs advertising these enterprises.

Every Saturday, one of his sons mows both sides of our shared lane, from their house, past our house, down to the highway, around the mailboxes and signs, and along the highway for fifty feet or more in both directions. One of our neighbor's sidelines is lawn mower repair, so he probably thinks that keeping the grass cut short is a good business practice.

But down by the mailbox, on the banks of the ditch, where the lawn mower doesn't go, all the plants are growing wildly. I enjoy seeing them.

And I like the little pool of water that stands in the ditch in the springtime. It's interesting. When I stop to get the mail or go for a walk down our road, I stand at the end of the culvert and peer down into the shady depths. Sometimes I see a frog or a turtle or a crawdad enjoying the water.

But even when I see something interesting, I don't go any closer. I like to look at all that vegetation on the ditch banks, but I don't want to wade through it.  There's too much poison ivy!

Five-year-old Fruit Cake and Other Delicacies

Dinner Party Menu, 1892

On January 4, 1892, Mr. and Mrs. Sam E. Stegar of Trenton, Kentucky, had a Leap Year dinner party, Fifteen unmarried couples and a few extra guys attended the event. The party was such a social success that it even made the news in Hopkinsville, a few train stops west of Trenton.

The entire four-course menu of the Stegar's party was included in the article that appeared in the Hopkinsville Kentuckian. It was interesting. I've presented it below with some links to recipes and other background information from the period.

First Course

Florida Oranges
Bananas
Figs
Pears
Malaga, Concord, and Catawba Grapes

Second Course

Turkey and Ham
Sauce
Roast Mallard Ducks
Oyster, Egg and Chicken Salad
Oysters
Salmon
Sardines

A careless typesetter may have changed "Oyster, Egg and Chicken Salads" to "Oyster, Egg and Chicken Salad." The salmon, sardines, and oysters could have been fresh, brought by refrigerated railroad car to Trenton.

Celery (a palate cleanser after the meat course)


Third Course

Cream
Vanilla Sherbert
Lemon Pudding
Bisque
Fruit Cake, 5 years old and layered  with lemon icing. One layer was citron with vanilla, another layer was chocolate. (This fruit cake was the most interesting thing in the entire menu!)

Fourth Course

Cheese
Doughnuts
PretzelettesChocolata (Menier and Van Houten's Cocoa)
Coffee

After this feast, the guests "engaged in original wit and humor and all the latest games of fascination, until the late hour of 1 o'clock, when the weather becoming very inclement, the party adjourned." Since it was a Leap Year party, the young ladies escorted the young gentlemen safely to their homes, before heading for home themselves.

Source: Hopkinsville Kentuckian, January 1, 1892, page 2.

Abigail Willoughby, 1822-1880

An incomplete story with a sad ending

Abigail Willoughby (b. 1822, Pennsylvania) appears as one of my great-great-great grandmothers in every family tree related to me that I've seen online. She was married to my great-great-great grandfather, James C. Vining (b. 1812, New York). James and Abigail are on my dad's side of the family. They were my paternal grandfather's maternal great-grandparents, to be exact. (I know it's confusing!)

Vague and missing info

Abigail Willoughby and James Vining are "brick walls," as family-tree researchers often say. Their branch of the family tree ends with them, because no one yet has learned the names of any of their parents. Abigail told an 1880 census taker that her parents were born in Massachusetts.

I like the sound of "Abigail Willoughby" -- it's almost poetic. But I don't know if Willoughby was really her maiden name or not. Most family trees say that Abigail Willoughby was born on 15 Feb 1821 in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, and that she married James C. Vining in 1838 in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. But where did my fellow researchers get that information? Was it in a family Bible or passed down in family letters? Or was it just an estimate and a guess, copied from one family tree to another? I haven't found any birth or marriage records at all.

Fairly reliable data

Here are some things I do know about James and Abigail:

• James Vining was living in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, at the time of the 1840 census with a total of three people in his household. The exact date of the census is not given, and only the head-of-household is named. 

• My great-great grandmother Martha Almeda Vining was born in 1839 in Pennsylvania.  Her sister Abigail Christine Vining was born in 1840 in Pennsylvania. They gave this information on multiple census records.

• In September 1850, the James C.Vining family was living in Henry County, Illinois. James was married to Abigail, and they had a new baby boy, Robert Henry (b. 1848, Illinois). 

• James and Abigail had six more children between 1850 and 1868 in Illinois. Then between 1868 and 1870, they moved to Cloud County, Kansas, where they were some of the earliest settlers.

•  James Vining died soon after they moved to Kansas. The 1875 Kansas census shows Abigail widowed and living with four of the children on a farm in Cloud County. 

• Before 1880, Abigail married Silas Zenus Waters. He was a farmer,  ten years older than her. The 1880 census shows them living in Norton County, Kansas, (about 150 miles west of Cloud County). Two of Abigail's children were still with her, listed as stepchildren of Silas Waters. One of Abigail's sons (James W. Vining) was the Norton County sheriff from 1879-1883.

• Family trees say that Abigail died in 1880. The date usually cited is December 4, 1880..

Willoughbys and more Willoughbys

I've been especially curious about Abigail Willoughby because of a series of marriages that took place in Illinois before the family moved to Kansas. The two oldest Vining girls, Martha and Abigail, married Mapes brothers. And a William H. Willoughby married a Mapes sister. Were William H. Willoughby and Abigail Willoughby related? They probably were, but I haven't been able to prove it.

I've looked at a zillion census records and family trees and I still don't know how Abigail Willoughby fits into the Willoughbys who lived in or near Tioga County, Pennsylvania, where supposedly she was born. The generations aren't right. She's either too old or too young for those families.

I've entertained a weird theory that maybe Abigail's real father died and then her mother married a Willoughby, so Abigail wasn't really a Willoughby by blood. And I've explored an alternative (but similar) theory that maybe Abigail was married to a Willoughby before she married James Vining, and that her real maiden name wasn't Willoughby at all.

Most recently, I've begun to think that she might be the daughter of Elijah Willoughby who appears in the 1850 census in Delmar, Tioga County, Pennsylvania, living with his daughter Laura and her family.  Elijah was born in Massachusetts, so that matches. Elijah's mother's name was Abigail -- hmmm. And Abigail Willoughby (my Abigail, not Elijah's mother) named one of her daughter's Laura -- possibly after her older sister?

Betsy Who?

Lately, I've renewed my research efforts, and I've turned up two pieces of information about Abigail that I haven't seen on anyone else's family tree or read in their notes. Both of them shocked me.

First, it turns out that Abigail may not be a blood relative to me. A brief family history (on the middle of p. 202, Genealogy of the Hannum Family by H. F. Temple, 1911, West Chester, PA ) that I found for Louisa V. Mapes (my great-grand-aunt,) states that her grandparents were James Vining and Betsy Ann Murphey, of New York State.

James Vining and Betsy Ann Murphey? I had to think about that! But upon examination, it makes sense. Maybe James was married to Betsy, had two daughters, became a widower, and then married Abigail several years later. That would explain why no children were born for about eight years after the first two girls.

Also, Louisa Mapes was 53 years old and in her right mind in 1911 when that family history was printed.  Surely she was the one who provided the facts about her family. She was 22 years old when Abigail died. She would have remembered Abigail clearly, but she didn't name Abigail as her grandmother!

Abigail's death

My other discovery is very sad. Last week, I learned that Abigail Willoughby committed suicide. This tragedy was mentioned in a short biography of James W. Vining, (p. 172, The History of the Early Settlement of Norton County, Kansas by F.M. Lockard, 1894, Norton, Kansas), who was one of James C. Vining's and Abigail Willoughby's sons.

[J. W. Vining's] father died in Cloud County in 1868. His mother married S. G. Waters in 1874; they came to Norton county in 1876 and settled near Edmond, their domestic life was unhappy which caused Mrs. Waters to commit suicide. Her remains were taken to Clyde [in Cloud County, Kansas] and buried beside her former husband. Mr. Waters died in 1889.

The county history where this account appears is criticized for containing gossip, but there are two unhappy facts here, whether or not they are related: (1) Abigail's marriage to Silas Waters was thought to be miserable, and (2) she killed herself.

There is nothing new under the sun -- didn't Solomon say that? I suppose that unhappy marriages have been around ever since marriage was invented. And I've seen dozens of stories in old newspapers about people committing suicide. I just didn't expect to find such a happening in my own family tree.

About fifteen years ago, a member of my husband's family committed suicide. I know how deeply we grieved about that. I also know how I grieved when my parents died. Abigail's children must have been devastated.

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This article was written by Genevieve L. Netz and originally published as a blog post at http://prairiebluestem.blogspot.com/2012/04/abigail-willoughby-1822-1880.html. Copyright 2012 Genevieve L. Netz. All rights reserved. Permission is granted for attaching this article to Vining and Willoughby family trees as long as this entire notice is included. Any other use requires written permission. gnetz51@gmail.com