Mystery Monday: Christmas Ghosts
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| An old Christmas card found tucked in the photograph album of Ivy Watts Diuguid |
I write this in that in-between time,
after Christmas and before New Years. If there are any ghosts of
Christmas past, they will come to me, having been a family historian for thirty years. And they do seem to
come, as I sit here in the gloom of winter, eating bean and ham soup.
The meal in and of itself brings to mind a memory: I am all of 9 or 10, maybe. We had recently moved from Key West where my father
was stationed while still in the Navy, up to where my maternal
grandparents had chosen to retire in a small community called
Talisman Estates outside of Dade City just north of Lacoochee. (Our
mailing address was Dade City though it was some distance away; I
settled in the third grade at Lacoochee Elementary.) For reasons
unknown to me then or now, my older half-brother on my father's side
came to live with us just after my parents had purchased a lot near
my grandfather's and bought a large double-wide mobile home for us to
live in. My mother once remarked that we moved in on Valentine's Day
which I calculate to have been the year 1977. I had picked out which
room I wanted, but that did not materialize as I was displaced to the
smaller of the two bedrooms so my two brothers could share the larger
one. (These details really have little bearing on the story I'm
trying to tell, but may be the only time they are recorded for
posterity.) We had brought with us on the trip
up from Key West our fishing boat and it was stored in the yard for the time being. My
older brother and I were hanging out in the boat one afternoon when
our father arrived from work and came out to tell us he had
brought home some ham hocks. My brother was excited about that
announcement so I got excited, too. Hammocks is what I thought he was
referring to. In my head I was picturing us hanging out together in them on a
lazy sunny day. Instead, I was introduced to bean and
ham soup at dinnertime that evening. I cannot now recall the actual
partaking of that meal, but I have loved bean and ham soup ever
since. I think it had been a traditional meal for my brother and
father who both grew up in western Kentucky and so they recreated it
as a shared memory together. My brother is so much like my father
that even his eating habits are similar. They are so much alike that
my mother's brothers did a double-take at my father's funeral when
they saw my brother walking up the aisle from the casket. They are so
much alike that even I would think it was my father when I would see my
brother out of the corner of my eye in the days immediately before
and following the funeral when we gathered as a family on the porch
talking and visiting after years and years of hardly seeing each
other at all. My father's spirit was so close in those early days, it
took me a while before I got used to the fact that he was no longer
walking this earth.
And ever since his mother's passing in
1989 when I began researching the family history in earnest, I have
been seemingly led along by ghosts and spirits at times as I bumble
along in my quest to know the story of my ancestors. Just as I picked
up the energy of my father and brother's enthusiasm for a shared
recollection of a traditional family meal and incorporated it as my
own, I am also extra sensitive to the spiritual energy that runs
through the generations of my ancestors and others who have gone
before.
Due to the wonders
of technology, I reconnected with a male cousin of mine last January which I wrote about in this post here. In today's world, technological advances shorten any geographical distance in ways our
ancestors could only dream. Among old family papers and
photographs I have proof of the old ways of keeping connected through
letters and postcards between family members flung across the U.S.
from the east to the west. These I cherish as evidence that family
ties matter both now and then. But this re-connection was a modern-day version that included the technological advancements of DNA testing, email and texting.
Through him and other DNA testing, we discovered
the details of a secret that was never told. I am not sure if any of
the players in this story knew all the details themselves. I have
heard it said that the only one who knows for sure the father of
their child is the mother, but DNA also has a way of spilling those
secrets and sometimes it is just a matter of lining things up to tell
the story.
My grandparents were married in
Montgomery County, Tennessee in September of 1918. It was just across
the state line from where they lived and apparently the “Gretna Green” of the area where people would go to elope at a place that
made getting married easy. My grandmother was all of 16, my
grandfather (called C.B. or Clip) 19. Before his death at age 96, I
can remember him pulling out their original marriage certificate to
show me. It was an important document and he always knew right where
it was. I never got the details of exactly how they met, but a school
photo from 1915 shows they both attended the same one-room
schoolhouse that year. I think my grandmother Amy lived in a
different neighborhood for most of her life, but in May of 1915, her
grandmother died and things were a little topsy-turvy in her
father's household (her mother died before she was even a year
old). You can read more about Amy during that time here. That was probably the last year my grandfather attended school
as most people in that time period only completed about an 8th
grade education. Amy was the same age as Lizzie, Clip's younger
sister, and is shown standing next to her in the photo. I have placed a faint X above my grandfather (he is in the top row towards the left) and also above my grandmother (she is almost right smack in the middle of this photo in the row below by my grandfather):
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| Pisgah School, 1915 Image courtesy of Betty Allen McCorkle |
An earlier
photo of the same one-room school dated 1908 does not have my
grandmother in it, but does show my grandfather Clip (with his shirt half untucked) standing near his sister Lizzie (Lizzie is looking shy and being held still by Eva Ricketts). Also in this
photo behind Clip you can just see his brother Pete (his full name was Willis
Lindsey) and to Clip's left is (Laura) Annice Underwood whom Pete
would later marry. To Pete's right (just behind Eva Ricketts) is a young girl named Fannie
Woosley who was born the year before my grandfather Clip.
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| Pisgah School, Built Ca. 1908 - Picture Made in 1908... Last two names listed are "Annie Woosley, Kate Wright" Image courtesy Betty Allen McCorkle |
I remember hearing the name Woosley
often; in my head I can still hear my grandfather pronouncing the name
in his southern drawl. There were a couple of tombstones of the
Woosley family just across the road from the house my father was born
in and I knew from researching that the Woosley family also hailed
from the same county in Virginia as our Watts family did. These
Woosley neighbors also intermarried with our family: Lizzie married
Charles Terry Woosley (some two months after my grandparents in the
same Tennessee town) and an older Watts sister, Zeffie, married
Burnis Woosley. Terry and Burnis were cousins.
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| An RPPC (real photo post card) of Lizzie Watts and Terry Woosley |
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| A snapshot showing Zeffie Watts with her brother Clip and sister-in-law Amy. |
Though some eight years apart, I remember my grandfather saying he and Zeffie were somewhat close when they were growing up. Zeffie is a most unusual given name, whether male or female.
But let's get back to the Woosleys. Or
at least to when my grandfather was coming of age. Iva or Ivy, the
third child and second daughter of the family, was the first to marry
in 1912. She was courted by Frank Travis Diuguid as early as 1906
when he presented her with a photo album for Christmas (I wrote about that album here). Below are the second and first photos in the album showing Uncle Trav and Aunt Ivy.
Ora
(the oldest daughter) and Kate were the next two to marry, both in
1914. Here's another photo from the album showing Kate with her husband Will Diuguid and their daughter Inez (born in 1915):
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| Ralph Douglas Watts, age 4 mos. |
This only left Zeffie as a daughter of marriageable age in the
intervening years. She and Burnis did not marry until after 1920 as
evidenced by them both being single in their respective parents'
households during the census for that year. Cephas was married by
then of course but living with his wife in his father's household as
well. It would have been late that year that Amy finally conceived.
Cephas and Amy's first son, Ralph Douglas, was born on June 24, 1921.
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| Clip, Amy & Ralph Douglas Watts, ca. 1922. Photograph taken at Sadler homestead. |
A day after that, Fannie Woosley and a young Jessie Blaine Bush
traveled down to Montgomery County, Tennessee themselves and were
quickly married. Within six months, Fannie gave birth to a son who
was named James Ralph Bush on Christmas Eve.
Did Fannie know that the father of her
firstborn son was really my grandfather? Was Jessie aware that Fannie
was pregnant when they married? Did my grandfather ever wonder about
the timing between his apparent dalliance with Fannie and James'
birth? Did James look like a Watts?
I wonder if Fannie had been an early
grade-school sweetheart of my grandfather's before my grandmother
came along? Were there double-dates with the two of them and Zeffie
and Burnis in the early days? I may never know the answer to any of
these questions, but it feels like a ghost story that wants to be
told.
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