Nora Olive Jones Smith - Our Link to mtEve

I've been doing some reading about Mitochondrial DNA, a unique part of the human genetic makeup that is only passed from mother to daughter. My interest was piqued when I had my own DNA tested through the National Geographic Genome project, and being female, my mitochondrial DNA is the line I now have most knowledge about. But all that is only important in this blog to explain why I am thinking about genealogy, genetics, and our Smith/Jones family line.

Nora Olive Jones, the fourth of thirteen children born to James Archibald Jones and Eliza Jane Holcroft Jones, married her longtime neighbor become boyfriend, Thomas Alvin Smith, on August 24, 1910, at the Jones family home in Weatherford, Oklahoma. It was Tom Smith's 21st birthday; Nora was seventeen. Their first child, Ola Mae Smith, was born a year later on August 10, 1911. A son James Franklin Smith followed on May 11, 1913, and a second son, Oliver Thomas Smith, on June 30, 1915. Nora's short life ended on October 23, 1918 in Craig, Colorado, where she had just given birth to her second daughter, Jennie Frances Russell on September 12, 1918. The childbirth weakened her and the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918 took her life. A rift occurred between the Smith and Jones families after Nora's death, specifically, Nora's mother blamed Tom Smith for taking her daughter to that God-forsaken land northwest of Craig, Colorado, and letting her die there, far from her Oklahoma family. Eliza Jane had lost her husband in 1917 so the death of her daughter a year later was particularly cruel. Because the families were estranged Jennie Frances Smith, or Frances as she was called, grew up with scant knowledge of her Jones relatives. It was only as an adult that she made contact with uncles and aunts, learned a little about the mother she never knew. Frances did pass along to us, her children and in-laws, a bit of the history of the Jones family and a few personal stories about her mother but not nearly enough for us to know what Nora was like. Instead we are left with a few sad photographs of an over-worked woman living in a small log house on the sagebrush covered plains of Bare Valley, Colorado. But she left two daughters, Ola Mae and Jennie Frances, and those daughters had daughters and granddaughters and so Nora Smith's mitochondrial DNA lives in the cells of those granddaughters and gr-granddaughters today. Ruth and Emily can trace their mtDNA from their mothers, Nora and Cyndee, to their maternal grandmothers, Irene and Gladys, to their maternal gr-grandmothers Ola and Frances, to Nora. Nora's line continues back through time through her mother, Eliza Jane Holcroft, through Martha B. Robbins in the early 1800s and beyond. Current genetic theory traces us all back to one woman living in Africa about 140,000 years ago, nicknamed Eve, not the Eve of the Bible but the Mitochondrial Eve. As I understand it, the mitochondria is not responsible for traits like hair and skin color or shape of our eyes. In fact, scientists are not sure what traits are passed through the mitochondria but it's a fantastic tool for tracing our ancestry through our mothers. It has been used by geneticists to establish migration routes and time frames. Nora Olive Jones Smith had a short and difficult life but her contribution to our family was significant and her genes live on.

Our Smith Family is Better Known to Us Now

In 2007 Mary Russell Simms, daughter of Doyle Russell and Frances Smith Russell, decided she wanted to host a gathering of her mother's family, the William Franklin Smith descendants. Aware that a few of the Colorado-based Smiths were meeting each summer in Windsor, Colorado, she wanted to expand on that to include all the far-flung relatives across the nation. That huge effort culminated in a family reunion held near Oklahoma City mid-September 2008. Sixty-two attendees made the gathering a wonderful success with cousins united after years of separation. Thanks to Mary's searching out distant kin there were cousins there who had never met one another.

Each year after that Mary coordinated reunions of her Smith family, the most ambitious of which was a gathering in Moffat County, Colorado to visit the home sites in Bear Valley, northwest of Craig, where the Smith family lived in the early 1900s, where Grandpa and Uncle Jim, aka William Franklin Smith and his son James Wesley Smith, were murdered, and where Mary's own grandmother, Nora Jones Smith succumbed to the Spanish Flu of 1918. Only one reunion had to be cancelled and that was last year, 2013, when tornadoes lay waste to areas around Oklahoma City.

This year's reunion is now history. Mary accomplished her goal of erecting a sign on the land her gr-grandfather homesteaded near Noble, Oklahoma in 1894. The attendance this year was very small, an indication that interest has waned, old age has taken its toll, and the bad economy is affecting us all. But we can all be thankful to Mary for bringing us together again, the descendants of William Franklin Smith and his brother John Alvin Smith, for teaching us about their lives and our connection to them. We now know that we are a hardy bunch, healthy, good looking, and prosperous. But we do share a hereditary hearing loss and Mary researched that too, encouraging all family members to share their audiology profiles which culminated in Mary's book "The Smith Family Curse."
I would personally like to thank Mary for all the hard work she put into this study of her mother's family, for bringing us together year after year, and for accomplishing her goals of posting permanent markers on the land and publishing the results of the hearing loss study. Thank you, Mary. You persisted where others would have given up years ago. Great job!

Tom Smith, a Man Difficult to Define

I'll start by saying, I never met the man. Tom Smith died December 29, 1960, twelve years before I became a part of his family. He was my husband's grandpa on his mother's side. Sadly, Bob's grandpa on his father's side, Elias Russell, also died that year, on January 19. Growing up in a farm family closely tied to the land, livestock, and daily chores, Bob had limited contact with either of his grandpas but a little more with Tom Smith as Tom lived in Colorado the last 35 years of his life, within a day's drive of his daughter Frances Smith Russell and her family, which included son Bob. Every summer the Smith clan met at a park in Denver or Greeley for their annual picnic and family reunion and some years that was the only time Bob saw his Grandpa Smith, but it was enough to develop a strong liking for the man. Bob was 18 the year he lost both of his grandfathers so his memories of them are childhood memories.
Thomas Alvin Smith was born August 24, 1889 in Paris, Texas, the first of ten children born to William Franklin Smith, known by most as Frank Smith, and his wife Sarah Frances Buchanan Smith. We know very little about those early, formative years Tom lived with his family in Texas. By 1893 they were in Noble, Oklahoma on a homestead near Frank's only brother John. Family lore has Frank racing in the Oklahoma Land Rush for that parcel of land near Noble. In 1909 the family moved on to Weatherford, Oklahoma where Tom met his wife-to-be, Nora Olive Jones, one of the Jones girls, nearby neighbors. They were married on Tom's twenty-first birthday; Nora was seventeen.

A neighbor and shirt-tail relative of Toms, Robert E. Morris, was a land speculator in Moffat County, Colorado and probably lured Tom and his brother Jim to that far northwestern corner of the state where homesteading was not only encouraged but solicited.

Jim had been married for a short time but Bessie took a look at that forlorn vista in Bear Valley and quickly returned to Oklahoma. Jim filed on a claim about 20 miles northwest of Elk Springs, Colorado in Moffat County, and so did his father. In 1915 Tom's wife and children traveled by train from Oklahoma to Craig, then by buggy out to their new home, a hastily built cabin on the high, dry plains of Bear Valley (some call it Bare Valley). Tom's parents also made the move to the new land and brought their children, cattle and horses on the train.

If Tom had known in 1915 what his future held he probably would have sat down on a stump and cried. In 1918 Tom's wife, Nora, died in the Spanish Flu Epidemic just weeks after giving birth to a daughter, Jennie Frances Smith who would later become Bob Russell's mother. Tom's parents took Frances into their nearby home leaving Tom and Nora's older three children with their dad. Within a year Tom traveled across the Continental Divide to bring home a new mother for his children, the widowed wife of his first wife's brother, Chloe Callender Jones. Three hard years later Tom's father, Frank, and brother, Jim, were shot and killed by a neighbor after arguing about a shared field of potatoes. Tom still tried to hang on to the land in Bear Valley but when his stepson got in trouble with the law and was given the option of leaving town or facing charges the family pulled up stakes and headed east to Purcell, Colorado where they had family. There is more about that trip here Craig to Purcell.

From that time of exodus from Bear Valley until the end of his life in 1960 Tom kept his family fed. The first years in Weld County he rented farms where he grew crops and raised livestock but that country is dry, windy, and prone to hail storms. He and Chloe brought three more children into this world, two who lived and one buried out on the plains. About 1929 Tom bought several pieces of brand new farm equipment but had them repossessed when the Depression hit. Drought and the death of Choe's son, Frankie, added to the family woes. Tom lost 29 head of cattle to starvation the same winter that Frankie died.

In Frances Russell's autobiography she tells that 1936 was Tom Smith's last year to farm. He got a job for the state as a liquor inspector, moved his family to Arvada, and bought himself a brand new Chevrolet car for six hundred dollars. Life got a little easier for Tom and Chloe in Arvada and the memories of their two youngest children, William and Marion, spoke of a kinder, gentler Tom Smith than the man remembered by his older children.

And that brings me back to the reason I wanted to write about Tom Smith, to try to define the man but not pass judgment. When he lived out in Bear Valley he was young and inexperienced,  struggling to survive on land that was only good for growing potatoes after grubbing out acres of tenacious sagebrush using hand tools and reluctant children. Tom had a short temper and little patience with his strong-willed children and ornery horses. Raised by parents who kept their bibles close at hand, Tom disciplined his children harshly "for their own good."

Later in life, long after Tom had passed away, his oldest daughter, Ola, could find very little good to say about her dad but she was like him in so many ways - his mannerisms, speaking voice, penchant for telling a good story, so that I was told, "You want to know what Tom Smith was like...take a look at Ola."

Bob Russell remembers his grandpa as a man who liked to play cards, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and tease the womenfolk. He called his daughters "sister", his granddaughters "daughter" and used colorful language to embarrass them.."your little titty, sister". Tom liked his whiskey and even when times were really lean he usually had a bottle hidden out side the house where he could have a nip or two. No one would ever say Tom handled money wisely or planned well for the future but he and Chloe kept a home where friends and relatives were always welcome to sit at their table, share Chloe's delicious meals, listen to Tom's entertaining stories, and spend the night.

Tom's grandson Kenneth Russell summed up his assessment of his grandpa with these words, "He did the best he could with what he had," and what more can you ask of a man? I think Tom was a much more loving grandfather than he was a father but by the time the grandkids came along Tom didn't have to fight so hard to keep the wolf from the door.

Elias Russell Home Remodeled by Cowan Family in 1991

(photo above taken by Kenneth Russell during his visit there in 1994)

Elias Russell and his wife Addie Jane Mahaffey Russell lived their entire married lives in the house he built near Cass, Arkansas about 1901. I could be off a few years on that date as he may have started the house before he married Addie Jane on September 22, 1900. They reared twelve children there and after Elias died January 19, 1960, Addie continued to live in the house for a few more years before their oldest daughter, Bertie Lee Russell, insisted her mother move to town, a move that Addie was very much against. Addie died December 7, 1970, and I hope she was able to visit her old home often, but I don't know that for sure.
In 1991 the new owners of the property, Bernice and Curtis Cowan, restored all six of the buildings on the place. Elias and Addie's son, Seldon Russell, who lived nearby, visited the property with one of his daughters, Teresa, and took photographs of the buildings in their restored state. He also made a video of his visit, explaining as he walked around how each building was used by his parents. I have posted those photographs on a webpage here http://www.viewoftherockies.com/cass1.html
Seldon passed away in April of 2008 and I believe the Cowans are gone now too. As I write this in 2013 I don't know who currently owns the old Elias Russell place or what condition it is in but I'm eternally grateful to Uncle Seldon for sharing his photographs of the restored homestead with us.

A New-found Russell Cousin!

My blog has reached out through cyberspace and reeled in a new Russell cousin, one Herbert G. Reid, a second-cousin to Bob, one who has great stories to tell of his childhood there in Franklin County, Arkansas. We've exchanged emails and photographs and family connections over these last couple of weeks and that has rekindled my interest in the history of the Russell/Turner family in Franklin County, particularly around Cass, Arkansas.

I say Russell/Turner for there is one amazing lady, Mariah Tennessee Turner, who has sparked my interest for many years. She was my father-in-law's grandmother on his dad's side, so that makes her Bob's gr-grandmother. As those of you who know me already realize I am related to these Arkansasers (or Arkansawers) through marriage only, but they have worked their way into my heart and family they are.

Mariah was the daughter of Elias T. Turner and Sarah Durning Turner, the seventh of nine children born to them. In the spring of 1871 when she was eighteen years old she married John Woodard Russell in Cass. Mariah, known as Tenn, Tennie, and Aunt Tenn later in life, came from a prosperous family with land holdings and a good reputation amongst the neighbors. John Russell had been orphaned early in life with his father dying in Corinth, Mississippi while a confederate soldier in the Civil War. To keep the record straight, James Marion Russell did not die in battle and perhaps not from wounds, more likely from disease and the terrible conditions he was living in. His wife, Nancy Simms Russell, died less than a year later in Franklin County, Arkansas leaving their five children orphaned. Thirteen-year-old John lived with several families in the area, mostly relatives, earning his keep by hard work, I presume, until he married Mariah when he was twenty-one.

My knowledge of their early years together are sketchy but I do know the babies started coming and seventeen years later they had twelve children. I don't know how John made a living for the family, whether it was farming only or cutting timber or working in town. I do know that in 1888 Mariah inherited land from her father and I believe at that time her husband, John, was allowed to purchase an equal amount of land from the estate of Elias T. Turner, giving them about 100 acres of land all told. Nine years later when Mariah was pregnant with their last child, Samuel Henry Russell, she divorced John Russell. The reason for his unlikely event, I've been told, was John's selling off parts of the land Mariah inherited from her father. Divorce was almost a scandalous affair in rural Arkansas in 1897 no matter the reason and a woman with twelve children must have had very good reason to proceed with a divorce. Her grandson, Doyle J. Russell, said she was courageous and he agreed with her reasoning, that you can't live with a man who would sell off your land.

Aunt Tenn raised those children with a lot of help from her older sons and daughters and her extended Turner family as well. Her youngest son, Sam, taught her to read so that she could read the bible and sign her own name. Her second son, Elias L. Russell, lived near his mother all his life and she helped with the birth of all twelve of the babies born to Elias and his wife Addie Jane Mahaffey Russell. Aunt Tenn named all of those grandchildren too. I have to wonder about her skills as a midwife and mother. Did she raise herbs to use for healing or perhaps gather them in the woods? How did she feed those children after John was gone? Did she raise chickens and milk cows? Did she have to continue to sell off her land to support herself and family? I intend to learn as much as I can about this amazing woman, Mariah Tennessee Turner Russell who died in 1937 at the age of 84...eighty-four years of hard living.

What About Those Joneses?

There is an entire branch of our family about which I've not written and that is the Jones family of Oklahoma. James Archibald Jones was born in Kentucky in 1848 and before he died in Choctaw, Oklahoma in 1917 he had fathered twenty-two children with two wives, tired, worn out wives. One of his daughters from his second marriage was my husband's maternal grandmother, Nora Olive Jones Smith. When she died at the young age of twenty-five of the Spanish flu which swept the world in 1918 her family blamed Tom Smith for marrying her and taking her nine hundred miles north of Oklahoma City to that God-forsaken country in Moffat County, Colorado known as Bear Valley, or Bare Valley, which seems more fitting.

There was such a rift in the relationship between the Joneses and Smiths that little Jennie Frances Smith, the child born to Nora just six weeks before she died, was never to know her Grandma Eliza Jane Holcroft Jones even though she lived until Frances was thirty-two years old. But after Grandma Jones passed away several of her children contacted Frances and letters flew back and forth explaining, apologizing, and seeking friendship. Frances savored those letters and devoured all information about the mother she never knew and all the aunts, uncles and cousins, most of whom she would never meet.

Frances favored the Joneses in her looks and mannerisms, a feisty, high-spirited girl with flashing brown eyes and a slender lithesome body. I'm sure the Jones family saw in Frances the sister who moved north and never came home again. When Frances died in 1990 some of the letters and most of the photographs of the Jones family she had collected survived and passed down to her son Bobby, my husband. Now I study the faces and try to connect them to the names jotted on the backs of the photographs trying to determine their relationship to us.

In June 2013 I got an email from a woman who found my genealogy website and told me she is a great-great granddaughter of James Archibald Jones, descended from one of the children of his first marriage to Sarah J. Brammer. She asked if I can confirm the family story that James A. Jones was a traveling evangelist throughout the Choctaw Nation and that Jones is Choctaw. Unfortunately, I could not confirm that but she and I have become Facebook Friends and will continue to share any information we find about the Jones family. Claudia is the first Jones family member I've known and I'm excited to learn more about this branch of our family tree.

Story of an Old Russell Gun

Recently a cousin suggested on facebook that we each tell about our oldest inherited possession and post a photograph. Mine was an old quilt, undated, but probably made in the 1930s by my maternal grandmother.

I asked my husband what his oldest inherited possession was and he didn't hesitate as he told me about his 1826 smooth bore musket and how he came to own it. He said it's not a particularly valuable gun and never was, that its age is its best feature. It was made in Germany, number 8209 of its batch, and fired the Hat cap which was not that common. But the fact it is a Civil War era musket passed down through the family makes it a treasured keepsake.
Bob told the story to me this way....the gun belonged to his grandpa Elias Russell of Cass, Arkansas, but because the gun was missing a crucial piece of the trigger release mechanism and wouldn't fire, Doyle, Elias's son and Bob's father, didn't want the gun, didn't think it worth taking back to Colorado. So Bob's mother, Frances Smith Russell, laid claim to it and took it home.
Years later Frances's brother Ollie was visiting the family and told Doyle that the old musket was worth a kazillion dollars on the Denver gun market so Doyle told him to take it and sell it. Ollie kept the gun for years and finally brought it back, unsold, with the explanation that the market had fallen. Bob was then allowed to keep the old gun in his room. One day he was messing with it, as young boys are wont to do, and tipped the barrel down. Lo and behold, a handful of dimes rolled out of the barrel onto the floor. The next time his Uncle Ollie came to visit Bob told him about the dimes. Ollie said, "Oh yeah, I kept that gun behind the door next to my shotgun and when I'd come in the house at night I'd drop a dime down the barrel of my shotgun. I must have missed a few times and dropped the dime down the barrel of the musket." Bob had to give up his dimes to Uncle Ollie for who could argue with that story? A handful of dimes at that time was a lot of money for a boy to find and then have to part with.