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.

 Chasing the Elusive Uncle Bob Russell

James Marion Russell, my husband's gr-gr-grandfather, died as a result of his wounds or illness on October 3, 1862 at Corinth, Mississippi, during the Civil War. He was a confederate soldier who enlisted in Williamson’s Battalion, Company A, out of Franklin County, Arkansas at the age of thirty-one. He left behind a wife, Nancy, and five small children, John Willard, age twelve, Nancy Elizabeth, eight, William, seven, Robert, four, and George W., two. Unfortunately for all, the mother, Nancy, died within a year of her husband leaving the children orphans.

Although it is possible the children stayed together and were cared for by one family, at least at first, by 1870 when the Federal Census was counted in June, John W. Russell was living as a farm laborer in the household of Richard Hill in Limestone Twp, Franklin County, Arkansas. John’s sister Nancy Elizabeth was living next door with the John McElroy family, relatives of James Marion Russell. The two youngest boys, Robert and George were living in Boston Twp., Franklin Co., with the William H. and Elizabeth Russell family, their uncle and aunt. As for the middle child, William Russell, who would have been fifteen years old in 1870, I find no record.

John Willard Russell married Mariah Tennessee Turner in 1871 and fathered twelve children before they divorced. Their second son, Elias Russell, is our direct ancestor, my husband’s grandfather. About this branch of the family we know much, but John Willard’s younger brother Robert is the uncle I’ve been researching, the relative who shares my husband’s name.

The 1880 Federal Census finds twenty-one year old Robert Russell and his brother George living next door to their Uncle William and Aunt Elizabeth in the household of Craven and Mary Hamm, also relatives of the boys’ father. This is in White Oak Twp, Franklin Co., Arkansas. Robert served as a sheriff in Franklin County for some time as well as proprietor of a clothing store which he operated with his brother George.

On December 2, 1896 Robert Russell married Martha Ellington, a school teacher, at Magazine, Logan County, Arkansas. Martha was twenty-six years old and had lived in Magazine all her life. Their daughter, Roberta Leona Russell, “Bertie Lee”, was born August 28, 1897, in Ozark, Franklin Co., AR. Robert died June 30, 1900, in Kerrville, Kerr County, Texas, at the age of forty-five, just days after the census taker recorded him as being a merchant in Kerrville, the owner of a clothing store according to city directories.

On the fifteenth of April, 1910, the census taker in Revilee Twp, Logan County, AR, found thirty-eight year old, widowed Mattie Russell living with her twelve-year old daughter, Roberta, on the Main Street of Magazine, AR, her occupation listed as “none.” On November 30, 1911 Mattie Russell married William J. George in Magazine, Logan County, Arkansas but the marriage ended in divorce. Mattie died January 7, 1934 and is buried in Magazine, Arkansas.

 

Roberta is rooming with the Charlie and Maude Farthing family on a ranch in Laramie County, Wyoming at the time of 1920 Census. The Farthings are from New York and I have no idea how Roberta came to be a boarder there, but she went on to receive a Masters Degree in Education from the University of Wyoming in Cheyenne.

On April 15, 1925 in Boulder, Colorado, Roberta Leona Russell married Thomas Walter Picard. By 1930 they have relocated to Valparaiso, Indiana where they will live out the rest of their lives, Thomas passing away on December 8, 1976, and Roberta on July 27, 1996, at the age of ninety-eight. Roberta was a school teacher for twenty-one years in Valparaiso and Thomas worked in an office and may have been an electrician. They did not have children. Thus ends the line of Robert Russell, my husband’s gr-gr-uncle and namesake. Interestingly, Roberta Leona “Bertie Lee” Russell had the same birthday, August 28, as does my husband, Robert Doyle Russell, albeit forty-five years apart, and Bertie Lee is the name given to the first born child of Elias Russell, Roberta’s cousin, not a very common name.

Lydia Russell Bean (1726-1788)

 

In tracing the history of our Russell family I’ve realized that the Russell men were most often military men having served our country in the American Revolutionary War and just about every conflict and war since then, but that story will be told another time. This is about one of the Russell women, Lydia, daughter of William Russell, sister of George Russell, my husband’s gr-gr-gr-gr-great grandfather (that is nine generations of Russells between Robert Doyle Russell and William Russell).

Lydia was born in Virginia September 29, 1726, the daughter of William Russell of Virginia whose wife was probably Martha Henley although this has not been proven. In 1741 Lydia married Capt. William “Billy” Bean, his second wife. Bean was an associate of Daniel Boone and considered by many to be the first white settler west of the Alleghenies, building a cabin in 1768 on Boone's creek, a small tributary of the Watauga River in the northeast corner of Tennessee. Russell Bean (1769-1826), the first child of Lydia and William Bean, was the first recorded birth of a white child in Tennessee.

The incident that changed Lydia’s life forever and insured her place in American history is well documented and can be found by googling her name but I will tell it here with the caveat that this is not original research on my part – I too googled her name.

Lydia was tending to her cows near her cabin when…..let me quote John P. Brown’s “Old Frontiers”

"She was captured by the Indians as she rode horseback toward Fort Lee at Watauga and was taken to the Cherokee Camp on Nolichucky River.

She was told that she would be killed. She was questioned . . . [and] taken to a little town along the Little Tennessee River. Mrs. Bean was taken to Toquo and tied to a stake at the top of a large mound. The fire had been lighted around her when the Beloved woman, Nancy Ward, arrived on the scene.

Revolted at the thought that a Cherokee should torture a squaw she hastened to the rescue, scattered the burning brands and cut the bonds which fastened the prisoner.

She took Mrs. Bean to her own house where she was treated kindly.

Lydia Bean in her gratitude instructed Nancy Ward and the other Cherokee women in the art of making butter and cheese.

Due to Mrs. Bean's training Nancy Ward became the first owner of a herd of cattle."

Further reading taught me much about Nancy Ward, a Beloved Woman of the Cherokee, to whom Lydia Russell Bean owed her life when she was saved from being burned at the stake. I believe Nancy was an intelligent, thoughtful woman who brought wisdom to her people and who tried to bridge the two cultures. It seems these two women struck up a friendship or at least a pact for Lydia returned to her home and subsequently took two of her milk cows back to Nancy Ward and taught her how to milk and make use of the dairy products like cream and butter. Lydia is also credited with instructing Nancy Ward in weaving cloth from spun wool fibers.

Lydia is credited with bravery at the time of her capture by the Indians, for she led her captors to believe the garrison at the Watauga settlement was well defended, thus preventing an attack. Although she was saved from certain death in July of 1776, her brother George, our ancestor, was killed by Indians in May of 1797, and Lydia’s daughter Jane was killed by Indians in 1798.

I know very little about Lydia's life after her return to Watauga and her family. I'd like to think it was "normal" but she was already fifty years old when she was captured and probably did not spring back to good health and vitality as she might have if she'd been a younger woman.

William Bean died in May 1782 at German Creek, NC which is now Grainger County, Tennessee, on property awarded him by North Carolina for his participation in the Revolutionary War. Lydia died in 1788 in Northumberland, Virginia, the circumstances of her death unknown.

 

Chloe Belle Callender

Chloe Callender was a quiet, gentle woman with a big heart who took her place in our family in 1919, a year after the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic spirited away our grandmother Nora Jones Smith at the young age of twenty-five. Nora had just given birth to her fourth child, Jennie Frances Smith, in Craig, Colorado, where the flu was particularly virulent and also laid low Nora’s husband, Tom Smith, for several weeks. Had it not been for the constant ministrations of Tom’s mother who changed the steaming onion poultices on his chest throughout his confinement, Tom and Nora’s four children would have been orphans. Instead, mourning the loss of his wife, Tom slowly gained back his strength and continued his job of rural postal mail deliveryman and father to those motherless children.

Two hundred miles east of Craig, Colorado, as the crow flies or longer via the Continental Divide, Chloe Belle Callendar Jones was eking out a living in Purcell, Colorado with her ten-year-old son, Frankie. Chloe was a recent widow after the death of her husband, Ray Jones, cooking for mining crews and anybody else who needed a good cook. Tom Smith’s wife, Nora, was a half sister to Ray Jones so Tom knew Chloe through family ties. He made the trip over east about a year after Nora’s death, married Chloe in Ault, Colorado, and brought her and young Frankie back to Moffat County, to Bare Valley, a scenic but otherwise God forsaken land ninety miles northeast of Craig where homesteaders dotted the barren countryside.

I don’t know what Tom told Chloe about the humble home awaiting her in Bare Valley or about his four children she would soon call her own, but I was told a story about her arrival that makes me believe she accepted that small log cabin nestled into a hillside and won the hearts and respect of those children very quickly. The oldest of the kids was Ola Mae, a headstrong eight-year-old girl who never get along well with her father and was overworked with household chores after her mother died. Someone had altered a dress of Nora’s and was insisting that Ola wear it so she would look her best when introduced to her new mother. Ola was fighting them tooth and toenail saying she would not wear the clothes of a dead person even if it was her mother. When Chloe heard the commotion she quietly told Ola that of course she needn’t wear that dress and before she did anything else to settle in she got out her sewing machine, which Tom had hauled over the mountains for her, and made Ola a new dress. Chloe’s act of kindness and understanding endeared her to Ola for the rest of Ola’s life, and it was she who told me that story of Chloe’s arrival.

Life in Bare Valley was harsh for all the families scattered across the high dry plains north of the Yampa River but it was about to get much worse for the Smith family. On October 5, 1921, Tom’s father, William Franklin “Frank” Smith, and Tom’s younger brother, James Wesley “Jim” Smith, argued with a neighbor over a patch of potatoes and before nightfall the neighbor, A. S. Wilson, shot and killed the two Smith men. It was murder, according to the Smith family but Wilson was cleared of murdering Frank, claiming self defense, and was never tried for the murder of Jim. Neither Frank nor Jim was armed so, to this day, the Smith family feels that justice was not done.

Tom’s youngest child, Frances, had been living with her grandparents since the death of her mother in 1918 but with the violent death of his father and the subsequent breakdown of his mother Tom brought three-year-old Frances home to Chloe to join her three older siblings, ten-year-old Ola, eight-year-old Frank, six-year-old Ollie, and Chloe’s thirteen-year-old son, Frankie. That was a highly emotional time for everybody and the living quarters were cramped and primitive. Somehow Chloe kept them fed, clothed, and loved when in September of 1923 along came a new baby, William Emery Smith, Chloe and Tom’s son, the first of two children they would have together.

During the summer of 1924 the family was struggling with crop failure, spats with neighbors, and lack of income when an incident of theft by some young boys at the only store in the valley led to accusations that sixteen-year-old Frankie was involved. His parents were given a choice, get Frankie out of Bare Valley or he would be charged with theft and have to face the consequences. The little store also housed the U.S. Post Office so Frankie's crime may have been a federal offense. The family packed up their belongings on a couple of covered wagons and despite the deteriorating weather conditions and the onset of winter headed east toward Purcell, Colorado, driving a few cattle and riding horses. That story is posted here: http://www.viewoftherockies.com/CraigtoPurcell1.html

Chloe Smith lived another fifty-five years after the family pulled out of Moffat County and returned to eastern Colorado. She gave birth to her daughter, Marion Lillie Smith, the summer of 1926, a pretty little girl we all came to know and love for her funny and loveable personality. There was another baby after that but she was stillborn and buried in a small homemade box in the yard of the rental house where the family then lived. Then came the awful loss of her son, Frankie, who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four.

Chloe came from a large family of eleven brothers and sisters many of whom lived close by and who supported her with visits and friendship over the years. Her parents, Rosa Belle and Emery, also stayed important in her life until their deaths in 1927 and 1938, respectively.

Tom and Chloe moved to Arvada, Colorado late in life and enjoyed the benefits of “living in town.” She buried Tom in 1960 after more than forty years together, tough years, years of loss and heartache, but you would never guess that if you spent time with Chloe. She had an ever-present smile and conducted herself with grace and serenity. She helped Tom Smith raise his four wild, motherless children to adulthood and I do believe it was Chloe’s loving influence that shaped them, saved them, gave them a foundation. William and Marion loved their mother immensely and helped her survive the loss of her firstborn, Frankie.

Chloe Belle Callender Jones Smith played a very important role in the Smith/Russell family. She was small in stature but there was nothing small about the positive influence she had on our family. I have never heard a single negative thing said about her. What a legacy.

William Calvin Mahaffey, our gr-gr-Grandfather

William Calvin Mahaffey , the second of seven children born to James and Ella Crawford Mahaffey, was born in Tennessee or Kentucky on October 26, 1826.  That year Davy Crockett and Sam Houston were big names on the frontier and serving in Congress from the state of Tennessee. The Mahaffey family apparently was on the move from the Carolinas across Tennessee and into Kentucky where they settled in Owsley County and made their home for many years. I love the names they chose for their children, Silas Harmon, Narcissa Jane, Hiram Pickney, Matilda, Jesse, and Elizabeth and more.

Their son Jesse is our great grandfather. He married his childhood neighbor and sweetheart Elizabeth Alumbaugh and their first born in 1882 was Addie Jane Mahaffey, who, in September of 1900, became the wife of Elias L. Russell of Cass Arkansas. 

But this article is about William Calvin Mahaffey as we follow him from birth to his death at the age of  84, a long life for that time and one full of adventure.

In 1847 when he was twenty-one years old William served with Company F, 3^rd Regiment of Kentucky Volunteers under Colonel Manlius V. Thompson in the Mexican-American War. Until the end of his life William received a pension for this time of service, a pension which, no doubt, helped him through times of hardship and hardscrabble existence.

The 1850 census for Owsley Co., KY finds our twenty-four-year-old William still single and living with the Isaac and Delinia Congleton family as a laborer. The following year he married Joanna Alford Baker, a woman four years his senior and the mother of five children, a ready-made family for William and a source of farm labor. This union produced six more children over the years including our Jesse who was born in 1862.

I don’t know how this family fared during the upheaval of the Civil War years. My father-in-law, Doyle J. Russell, told me that the Mahaffeys were moonshiners when they lived in Madison County and Franklin County, Arkansas. I’ve read that Owsley County, KY was a dry county and still is today, prime territory for an enterprising moonshiner.

In the late 1870s some of the Alumbaugh and Mahaffey clans had moved on to northwestern Arkansas. Jesse and Elizabeth homesteaded 160 acres of land in Madison County, Arkansas, near Saint Paul. The 1900 census finds them living next door to their parents, seventy-three year old William C. and seventy-seven year old Joanna Mahaffey. That area of Madison County is still called Mahaffey Hill.

Joanna passed away October 3, 1905 and is bured in Madison County. William lived out the last four and a half years of his life with his son, Jesse and his family. William died January 23, 1910 after a year of declining health and was buried at the Mahaffey Cemetery near Saint Paul. 

I would love to know more about this interesting man. His photograph reaches out to us, his descendants, with a look that seems to say, "There's a lot more to my story......." If you want to add or correct any of my story please write to me at pamruss@frii.com

Addie Jane and Elias Russell

This wonderful old family photo shows Addie Jane and Elias Russell with their oldest child, Bertie Lee who was born April of 1902. That's their home in the background which Elias built himself and one they added rooms to as more and more children were born, final count four girls and eight boys. They lived in this house near Cass, Arkansas all their lives. Elias cut timber, served as a sheriff's deputy, and did blacksmithing to feed his family. He always had mules and he loved those mules. Addie cooked and cleaned, canned and sewed - I can only try to imagine how difficult it was to raise twelve children without running water or electricity. He lived to be 85, working outside on his last day, and she 88, spry and clearing thinking to the end. These are my husband's paternal grandparents, fine people who raised all twelve of their children to adulthood and instilled in them a strong work ethic, love of country, and faith in God.