The origin of the cake recipe…could be my great-gran or even great-great-gran. If it was great-gran, it was a lady named Missouri Duff; and if it was great-great-gran it was Rebecca Morton, of the Mortons and Cages of Cages’ Bend, Tennessee. Cages’ Bend used to be a trading post, I suppose: it was a bend on the river, which is now Old Hickory Lake, near Nashville, so the orginal Cages’ Bend is probably now under water; and Cages’ Bend is now a book, a rock band, and a state park. We don’t know much about Rebecca, except that she married into the family and had my great-grandfather Tolbert Vandeventer, who got out of Tennessee and ended up in pre-statehood Oklahoma with his wife and son.
His wife, now, was Missouri Isabel Duff, born in 1852. It’s possible her original name was Nancy, but Missouri is what’s on her tombstone. She had no family: they all, she said, “were lost in the stream–” , ie, lost in a flatboat accident on either the Mississippi or the Missouri.
Flatboats were how timber got from Illinois and Michigan to New Orleans: enterprising people would build these chancy flatbottomed boats out of finished lumber, families needing to get across or down the Mississippi at its wide part would buy them or hire a flatboatman and put everything they owned aboard, sit atop the pile, and hope it held together long enough to get them across and further down the river.
These boats had no capacity to go upriver. They went further and further south in their careers, and passed from hand to hand, until they finally fetched up in the lower courses of the Mississippi, and became valuable for lumber, which was building the wooden walkways and porches and walls of New Orleans, a former French colony founded to look for pearls (the Louisiana Purchase was sold because no pearls were ever found). New Orleans at the time was a mostly collection of board buildings huddled on high ground in what we now call the French Quarter. The levees did not yet exist. And travelers on the river had to cope with river pirates, who also plied the river attacking boats where they thought they could get away with it: their main port was, yes, New Orleans.
Well, Missouri Duff’s family met some accident—they were all lost but her: as she reported. She got to shore and lived. She was alone, calling herself Missouri, in 1871, when she met and married Tolbert, in Iowa. She had a son in Nebraska, lived in Missouri, having other chidren, and she went with Tolbert to the Oklahoma Territory. She was quite a woman—frontier wife to the hilt. She survived Tolbert by some few years. She’d arrived on houseless, farmless Oklahoma Territory hills where she and Tolbert negotiated a deal with the Kiowa, built a two-room house. Her husband and later her son set to farming; and when she died in a young town in a state only just made, they’d bridged the Mississippi (Eads Bridge, 1874), and she was still active and managing her household.
Ironically, when I was doing research, I came across census records that indicate her mother and one young brother may also have survived the river accident, and settled in Illinois. But she would never have known it.
It’s my suspicion that she was the person with the recipe, since she would never have had an opportunity to know Tolbert’s mother, great-great-gran.
Wow….I can only go back as far as my grandfather on my mother’s side. My father’s side has a little more in-depth, but of my maternal grandfather, all I know is that he was born in Green County, Missouri in or about 1900. His father married a woman from one of the native tribes in Missouri, I don’t know if she was Otoe, Osage, Sac, Kiowa, or anything else about her. I don’t even know the details of how my grandfather came to Ohio. But, if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here. 😉
I don’t have the funds right now to dig deeper into the genealogy of my mother’s side of the family. Either they were not from Ohio, or not from my local area. Searching genealogy records for this county would not work, since both my mother and my grandmother were born outside of my county. In fact, my mother always thought her birthday was May 8, which would coincide with Mother’s Day ever so often, but when she got her birth certificate, it stated she’d been born on May 15. I don’t know if records were haphazardly kept during the 1930s, or if it was just that my grandmother didn’t remember the exact date, but that’s inconsequential now.
Fascinating that so much of our lives depended on a chance fortune.
And a determined kid either snagging a board and floating or swimming to shore!
Ancestry.com most always offers two weeks free use. If you get all the things you think you know about people, and have 2 weeks clear of anything else to do, lay in a supply of chili and coffee and input what you’ve got. Chances are, there’ll be something. Although sometimes you’re just at a dead end. My paternal grandmother is thus far unfindable: she left the family and was here and there for a while, before marrying somebody in Oklahoma City, then dying about ten years later. We know a lot, but not enough. I do know where she’s buried, but the cemetary went abandoned, then was picked up by the town, and is not yet censused. My family in Oklahoma predates statehood, though that lot is not Native American {that input comes much earlier}, and people weren’t born in hospitals—both my parents were born at home, and in the case of my father, probably my gran was the person who delivered the baby. Even after statehood, births tended to be at home, reported to the county seat when somebody finally got there and thought to hike over to the courthouse and do it. Or the doc, if ever called, might do it, when he got around to turning his vital records over that month: it was more important for the doc to record deaths than births, because deaths meant the exchange of property. So recording a birth could even wait until someone died and he had to walk over there.
I feel like such a newcomer when I hear how long other families have been in America. Although my husband’s families came over in the 1600’s, both sides of my family came over in the 1890’s-1910″s. There was no mystery as to my mother’s family – they came over twice in the early 1900’s through Ellis Island. My great grandparents came early in the century and didn’t like it so much so they went back to France. However, my grandmother and her sister hated France and they ended up returning to the same small town in Indiana. Second time was the charm and we have been in the midwest ever since.
It was a different story on my Dad’s side. There was no history at all from my Grandfather concerning the family background from Germany. It was always a huge mystery. All we knew was that the great grandparents came over around the the time of the World’s Fair in Chicago. We always figured that since my Grandmother’s family had a pottery factory in Germany at that time, she came over and stayed, keeping the pottery money and set up a new life here with a new husband. We recently saw pictures of a family grocery store with my Grandfather sitting on the porch as a child and the money had to come from somewhere. I am sure that that was not the original plan for the German pottery money, so the past was kept completely hush, hush. My great grandparents could not have been overly interested in maintaining past history and ties. From all reports Great Grandma was a complete Teutonic battle ax and gave my grandmother a very hard time after she married my grandfather.
However, the biggest scandal was completely hidden until about 10-15 years ago. After the fall of the Berlin wall and reunification of Germany, my brother was contacted by a woman in Germany asking if we knew of a certain German man who had left for America around 1900. We had gotten a bunch of picture and information just prior to that from my grandfather’s brother that he had kept secret from everyone for decades so we were able to assertain that this was the same individual and guess what? That pillar of the church and community had left a wife and child in Germany and never sent for them. We don’t even know if his marriage in the US was valid or he was a bigamist. No wonder there was no family history. I am sure that divorce would not have been allowed at that time, so all of the secrets about the money and family had to be kept and now make sense. It is now a big family joke and makes a great story. I only wish my Gramdmother had lived to know it all. She of all people would have appreciated the irony.
Lord, write that one down and start a family Journal on both sides of the pond! That’s what makes genealogies so much more than ‘begats’! And the family legends have to start somewhere!
My family history is full of murders and mayhem, and a number of narrow escapes—the number of chances I had not to exist is amazing! Some of mine were people you would not want to meet on a dark and stormy night, some narrowly escaped hanging—and a few didn’t, but procreated before they were (hanged, that is.)
My father and mother were introduced by the nephew of the outlaw Cole Younger, an associate of the James Gang, who was then serving time in prison, not too far away. And a married-in cousin’s mother hid Bonnie and Clyde and one of their cars in her garage.
I am, however, amazingly law-abiding!
Anyone who lived through the wild times in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and the Panhandle and passed along genes is pretty much guaranteed to either have formidable dark alley skills or excellent luck!
In my great-grandmother’s time, enumerating your Mayflower ancestors was a popular form of one-upmanship in Chicago society. She responded to one question, “Oh no, my dear, we waited until it was civilized!” The purity of one’s Anglo-Saxon bloodlines was a similar item in my grandmother’s time and she responded, “I have Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French and German, but not one drop of English blood. Thank God!” IMHO, character and ability trump demographics any day; and that is what’s worth bragging about in one’s family tree.
I have a copy of a Wisconsin small town newspaper that claimed my great(n) grandfather Graham had invented the pitman arm which converts shaft power to reciprocating motion [as in the sickle bar that cuts the grain stems in a combine] and won a patent infringement suit against Cyrus McCormick and his reaper. As usual, loudest apparently beat firstest in gaining the historical credit.
I’ve always thought the Mayflower had to be awfully crowded!
It’s rather fun to track back. I curate a DNA database for one of the families, and that takes me back further than we have records in the male line. Grandma claimed to be a Tudor descendent, but we have never been able to confirm it. The other grandparents were, although they didn’t know it. There are a few deep lines, too. One back to Alexander and another to a Jewish family that claimed Davidic ancestry. Probably everyone is descended from them.
I have one line in France that tries to go back to the Middle East, via Spain. I’d love to know if there’s anything in my DNA that actually does go there. My lot is terribly scrambled, most every country involved in the train wreck that is my genetic record.
Missouri Duff! What a great name! Any chance of you novelizing her life story?
Anyone interested in genealogy should check out the Cyndi’s List website. It lists tons of other sites for all kinds of info, organized by (just some examples) name, nationality, births & baptisms, adoptions, orphans, prisoners & outlaws, and loads more categories. I found it fascinating when I first started looking into my family’s history.
We actually have a few records from my maternal grandmother’s family, including the letter from the Red Star Line steamer company, confirming two places on board the ship that brought my great-grandma & my grandma here in 1907. The story goes that my great-grandma was seasick most of the time, so my grandma (age 13) spent the two weeks exploring the ship. She came to no harm and they arrived December 13, 1907 in NY Harbor. Great-grandpa & two sons (grandma’s brothers were already here.
My grandma’s father’s family came from Schippenbiel, up near Konigsberg. I was thrilled to learn that although the city was nearly destroyed in WWII, the vital statistics records had been moved to Berlin & survived. A lady in Berlin who does records searches was able to locate records for me showing that the Jockel family in Schippenbiel goes back at least to the 1600’s. I wish I could afford to travel to these places and learn more!
Oh, also check out the Ellis Island site and the LDS site (the Mormon genealogical records).
Speaking of France: A friend of mine is a descendant of Charlemagne. How cool is that?
A lot of the German records are being read into Ancestry.com, so it may get there yet. Just takes time! (And German-speakers to do it. I’ve done some involving 1700’s Italian.)
I’ve had some real names in my tree—one favorite is Peregrine Smith. Not to forget Thankfull Doak.
Everyone is descended from Charlemagne, and lots and lots of people can prove it. If there are 3 generations a century, going back 10 centuries means you have 2^30 ~ 1,000,000,000 ancestors. See “most recent common ancestor”. You are almost certainly a descendant of Mary and Joseph. They had at least seven children survive to adulthood, and for the first three centuries CE, Jewish Christian bishops had to be their descendants.
However, being descended from my mum and dad is pretty exclusive, there being only two of us. You’re more exclusive close to today, and get less so as you go backward. Jane and I are related several times over, starting in England.
Jane just found some REALLY neat stuff ‘mongst her family pictures: seems one of her not too remote Fitches was reputedly the guy the British were referring to in the Seven Years’ War when they wrote Yankee Doodle. The Americans of course thought it perfectly catchy and the rest is history! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Doodle He was Col. Thomas Fitch Jr., the son of the future Connecticut governor, Thomas Fitch.
And her uncle Guy got a medal for dangerous naval work outside Casablanca, laying down mines in the dark and without of course modern geopositioning. He and his brother, ladies, were also very, very good looking.