Preparing for SLIG

Now that the holidays are over, I realize that time is short to prepare for SLIG (Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy). I have been looking forward to Dr. Tom Jones’ course “Advanced Genealogical Methods” for a long time even though I know it will be a challenge.

The class lists for each track can be found on the Utah Genealogical Society website. In addition to Tom Jones, Claire Bettag and Rick Sayre will conduct some of the classes. It will be great to meet Claire, who was the mentor for my ProGen Group. We  all appreciated her contributions to our group.

A Genealogist’s Christmas

This genealogist appreciates her understanding and generous family. Their eyes don’t always glaze over when I mention cemeteries (I even got my sister to join me on a cemetery search last July when the temperature 105), and they always include genealogy gifts from Santa.

This year they were especially generous. My gifts included a 3T external hard drive and a plane ticket to SLIG. YAHOO! Of course, right up there on my list was the family trip to see Les Miserables, which I highly recommend.

On the giving side two examples stand out this year. The first  was finally getting computers set up so that my legally blind mother, who now lives in West Virginia,  could “see” and talk to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Oregon. Everyone was delighted and I believe she could hear us better using Skype than on the telephone. It requires some scheduling but we plan to make it a regular means of communication with her.

The second was the scrapbooks I made for my brother and sister. Each June I travel to West Virginia for a family reunion, then stay several weeks to visit and research in the surrounding states. It has become a tradition for my mother, sister, and me to take a trip each year. Sometimes my brother, who lives in Hilton Head, South Carolina, will join us, or plan a separate trip. So my gift to them was a scrapbook of our trips. Maybe someday a descendant will be pouring over the scrapbook, wondering why we moved so much! I’m delighted to say my brother said it was one of the best gifts he has ever received.

Hurricane Katrina

August 1995. I couldn’t take my eyes off the television screen, watching the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. I wavered between tears for the death and devastation I was watching and anger for the lack aid for the victims. “Someone needs to do something,” I was thinking. My personal philosophy that I should do something about the things I feel strongly about has led me to some of the best and worst experiences of my life. So, I called the Red Cross and volunteered. And it did lead  to one of the  best and a worst experiences of my life.  Many other Oregonians felt the same way. An expedited fast track training program was quickly organized to certify volunteers in Disaster Resources. I took an intense crash course in Red Cross procedures and policies in accordance with my chosen track, family services, which is direct client casework. I chose this route because of my experience working with people in crisis. According to  a letter I received from the Red Cross, this disaster was “the largest series of disasters the Red Cross has faced in its 124 year history.” The training I took part in was the first local mass training ever. (Local Red Cross organizations provide volunteers to the American Red Cross for large scale disasters.) The Oregon Trail Chapter of the Red Cross deployed 300 people for Hurricane Katrina relief.

Grindstone-Time Tracking Software

Being able to track your time is an essential tool for genealogists, whether working for a client, doing personal research or developing a new presentation. For those of us who tend to go down the rabbit hole, it’s a real eye opener to see how much time you are spending doing just that. Or how much time it actually takes to write an article or a research report.

Slave Markers at Eastham Cemetery, Boyd County, Kentucky

 

Copyright 2012 Judith Beaman Scott

On a recent visit to Boyd County, Kentucky, I visited as I usually do, the Eastham-Fields Cemetery. The cemetery is the burial place of Christiana Eastham (1777-1852), wife of Edward (1771-1828), the first family of this line to settle in Kentucky, as well as other family members and associated families. I was alerted to changes last winter, when my sister called me from the cemetery asking if I knew anything about some new markers placed there. I did not, and as I discovered, neither did many local genealogists.

It has long been rumored, as it is with many old cemeteries, that the rocks peeking out of the ground in the old part of the cemetery are the graves of slaves. I don't know of  any evidence to support this theory, but neither do I have reason to refute the claim.

However, even if these are slave graves, no one knows who is buried there. But someone decided to place markers near the protruding rocks, with slave names on them. How did they decide what names to place there? Please understand I have no problem with marking graves in a cemetery, provided of course that you have permission to do so-this is a private cemetery. I do have some concerns about marking a grave as if it were, in fact, the burial place of a particular person, when there is no way of knowing that. Those markers will remain there after we are gone, and some day descendants will visit that cemetery and believe that is the grave of their ancestor.



The names listed on the markers in the cemetery are:

Ploce, George, Thomas, Jenny, Jacob, David, Sarah, Isaac, Juda
Nathan, James, Margarett, Charles, George.

Unfortunately, the names of the slaves listed here belonged to Eastham families that  are not represented in this cemetery. 

The land where the cemetery is once belonged to Hartwell Chandler Eastham and his wife Isabella McGuire. Hartwell is the son of Edward Eastham  and Christiana Chandler, both born in Virginia. Christiana is buried in this cemetery but her husband Edward, who died years before her, is buried in McCormick Cemetery. The crypt at the back of the cemetery is that of the Eastham family. Most of the tombstones are broken or gone. Buried near Christiana are at least three of her children, Hartwell, James T. and Elizabeth. Her daughter Mary Ann Fields and husband James Fields are buried in another area of the cemetery.

The slave names listed here, for the most part, were not associated with the family members buried in this Eastham cemetery. All the slave names listed are easily located online. Several names  were from a civil suit regarding the estate of another Edward Eastham, this one the son of Edward and Christiana and brother to Hartwell.

Civil Suits Greenup County
Robert W. Eastham vs Noah Payne , & others , May 1860
W.L. Geiger , Vincent Calvin and Asa Bellew appointed commissioners to divide
the slaves of Edward Eastham , deceased, among his heirs : Robert W. Eastham ,
Cynthia Payne wife of Hiram Payne. Henrietta Eastham , Mary Ann Eastham and
Hartwell S.S. Eastham. Slaves were Juda, David, Nathan, Jenny, Sarah, Jacob
and Isaac.

KYCARTER-L Archives, message dated 3/21/1999, pdrrl@eastky.net .http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/KYCARTER/1999-03/0922080693
Citing Eastern Kentucky References by Evelyn Jackson and William Talley

Several more names are from the 1860 census and can be found at Ancestry.com.

1860 U.S. census, slave schedule, Boyd County, Kentucky, page 2.

Robert Eastham, 2 slaves
Judy 60
Nathan 23
This may be the Robert W. from above with two slaves listed in the civil suit.

Same page:
Robert Eastham, 2 slaves
Thomas 23
Charles 21
This is probably the son of Hartwell and Christiana.

Page 3:
J. H. Eastham, 3 slaves
Margaret 22
George 12
James 2
This is likely John, the son of Edward and Christiana. John, his wife, and other family members are buried in an another Eastham Cemetery on Trace Creek in Boyd County.

Lawrence County: Ploce Eastham - b. April 2, 1857; owner H. E. Eastham; Notes: female, mulatto.

From USGenWeb Archives Project, Lawrence Co., KY Birth Index

Lawrence County, Kentucky Births-1857

 http://www.usgwarchives.org/ky/lawrence/birth.htm 

A comparison of the list of names from the records above and the list from the cemetery is a match, with the exception of minor spelling changes and the duplication of the two names explained above.
 

Records List			Cemetery List
	Judy		Juda
	David		David
	Nathan		Nathan
	Jenny		Jenny
	Sarah		Sarah
	Jacob		Jacob
	Issac		Isaac
	Judy		Duplicate?
	Nathan		Duplicate?
	Thomas		Thomas
	Charles		Charles
	Margaret		Margarett
	George		George
	James		James
	Ploce		Ploce

Are there slaves buried in this cemetery? Possibly. But it is not likely that the graves of the slaves named on the cemetery markers are in this cemetery. First, the names on the markers were not connected to the people buried in this cemetery. Another important consideration is the dates. These slaves were all alive in 1860 and probably still alive in 1865 when they were legally free. They would not be buried as slaves after that time.
 

Note: Tomorrow, September 22, is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a warning to the southern states to end the war and abolish slavery on their own within 100 days, or he would free the slaves himself, although five slave-holding border states, including Kentucky, were not included. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863 which declared all slaves in the rebel state are free. It wasn't until the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on 6 December 1865 (without Kentucky) that Kentucky slaves were legally free.

My Serendipity Moment

My friend Susan LeBlanc frequently writes about serendipity moments for her blog, Gopher Genealogy. I experienced a serendipity moment myself recently. In a previous post “Just One Thing” I wrote about how learning one last name led to an abundance of information about the family of Sally Maud Minton Beaman, a family I have been researching for years. I thought Maud’s mother, Susan Alice Farrington, must have died some time after the 1910 Rockingham County, North Carolina, census as I was unable to find any more references to her.

To Mingo We Come Creeping

To Mingo We Come Creeping

The Redneck War on Blair Mountain

On a hot summer day in 1921 Clyde Herbert Eastham kissed his young wife and children goodbye and marched out the door of his cramped coal camp cabin to join thousands of other West Virginia miners in a strike that had the attention of the entire country. All day the men walked, bound together by a common cause. “Every drop of blood and every dollar of the union will be spent in the attempt to lift martial law in Mingo County”, swore Frank Keeney, district president of United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).1 The rag-tag miners’ army swelled to as many as 15,000 men as they marched on, spread eight miles along Lens Creek, ready to march through Logan to Mingo County and avenge the death of Sid Hatfield.2

Southern Appalachian Speech

Originally published April 2012
This past Saturday, my local genealogy society, the Genealogical Forum of Oregon, was fortunate to have J. Mark Lowe as the speaker for our spring seminar. He is a talented and engaging speaker and we all enjoyed his presentations. It makes for a great day when you can laugh as you learn.

After the seminar several of our group had dinner with Mark, and we shared a delightful evening. We talked shop, of course, and he entertained us with many of his family stories. I come from a family of southern storytellers so I especially enjoyed his.

At one point during the evening, the conversation turned to the speech of the Southern Appalachian region. I said something like “they were just piddlin’ around” which Mark caught right away. We talked about other terms we used or were familiar with like you all, y’all and you-uns. Mark explained you-uns was used in a section of Eastern Tennessee and was of Scots-Irish origin. We discussed the fact that the local dialects are being lost, especially with the advent of television and the internet, and unfortunately, because people poke fun at us hill folk.