Boones in Oregon

Besides my own genealogy, I am working on a project I call "Boones in Oregon." The object is to document those descendants of George and Mary Maugridge Boone who migrated to Oregon. My cousin is a 7GGrandson of George of Mary. From his grandfather Phillip Merwin, his ancestry is Phillip Clark Merwin, Mary E. Boone, Jesse Van Bibber, Alphonso, Jesse Bryan, Daniel M., Squire, George.

Alphonso Boone came to Oregon with all of his living children (excepting only George Luther, who stayed in Missouri) in 1846. They took the southern route, sometimes called the Applegate. When the wagons set out from Missouri, they were a very large group that formed and reformed several times along the trail. Alphonso and his family initially set out with a party of extended family friends, including former Missouri Governor Lilliburn Boggs and his wife, Panthea Boone (Alphonso's sister). Some of the large train were bound for California, such as the Donner party, and some were bound for Oregon.

Apparently the winter that year was unusually early and severe, trapping the Donner party in the mountains even though they were only a few days behind Lilliburn Boggs and his party. Boggs and his companions made it to California, most of the Donner party did not.

Alphonso and his family opted to take the Applegate Trail into southern Oregon. They branched off from the California trail at the Humboldt River and took the route Jesse Applegate and his brothers has blazed earlier. Unfortunately for the large party of pioneers and their wagons, all the Applegate brothers had done was blaze the trail -- marking where a road should be built. The travelers had to build their road in order to travel on it!

Look here for a good depiction of the map of the various Oregon and California trails. If you have ever driven from Ashland, Oregon, up I-5 to Roseburg and then into the Willamette Valley, you will have closely followed the route the pioneers took. The route climbs and dips from mountain summits to river valleys. It was the end of fall as the wagons began this arduous task, and they were soon bogged down in the wild and wet winters that happen in Oregon. Many possessions were either lost or left along the trail. Alphonso and his sons were carrying Daniel Boone’s surveying instruments with them, and left them cached along the trail. They went back later for them, but either misremembered the place or else natives had taken them.

The party arrived in the Willamette Valley at Mary’s River on Christmas day, 1846. Among the people in the train was George Law Curry, destined to court and win the hand of Alphonso’s oldest child, Chloe.

Did you enjoy this? More about Oregon Trail pioneers can be found at Stephanie Flora's award winning site, The Oregon Trail and Its Pioneers.

This and That

First a kind word for Dick Eastman and his Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter: he really gets it right. In a new post, I Have a Complaint, he makes an excellent point about subscription genealogy sites such as Ancestry and Footnote. I urge you to read it.

I had a lot of fun yesterday, at the Genealogical Forum of Oregon (GFO) first and then a trip to Lone Fir Cemetery. This being a holiday weekend in Oregon, it was a slightly cool, overcast day, perfecting for hiking around a cemetery or spending some time indoors.

At GFO I found both the death returns and marriage records I was looking for. It is always a thrill to me to see a part of the past this way. One of the death returns I was looking for was for Chloe (Boone) Curry, wife of Oregon's last Provisional Governor, George Law Curry. The death returns are microfilmed, and somewhat difficult to read, but the date of death was very clear: 10 Feb 1899. Then I went to Lone Fir and found the Curry family marker. I found the full name and dates of birth for some of the family, but as I transcribed the inscriptions I got a huge shock -- Chloe's dates on the stone are given as 1822-1889. That's a ten year difference! Now I need to go back to the GFO library and look in the Portland city directories for 1880 to 1900, and find out when she stops being listed. Drat the fire that destroyed the 1890 census!

That trip will fit perfectly, because Lone Fir is sponsoring a class on how to clean stones safely on Saturday, and I am going to that. Watch next week for tips from the class.

Another post on cemeteries

Saving our past is important to most genealogists. And part of that past is the memorials erected to preserve the memory of those who have gone on before. As we approach Memorial Day, many of us will be going to decorate the resting places of our ancestors, especially those who fought for us and our freedoms.

If you visit a cemetery, take a look around you. Are the grounds well kept? I don't mean park-like, but the blackberries and poison oak should not be threatening to swallow either the living or the dead. Vandalism is unfortunately an all too common experience, but has some effort been made to put grave markers back or repair them? Is there a map posted, with the burial plots marked as to who is where?

If these conditions aren't what you would like to see, what are you doing about it? It costs money and/or time to keep up a cemetery. Ideally it would be fenced to keep out at least some of the vandals, the weeds would be held back, the stones and/or a map would be readable. Each and every one of things is achievable.

Do you live close enough to come over and take a WeedEater (TM) to the margins of the area? If you don't have the physical means to do this, can you contribute a small amount of money to hire some one to do this? Has the cemetery been mapped? Who has the books or other records? Can you borrow or copy them to make a map? Maybe the owner of the records would allow you to post the list of burials on the internet.

Posting on the internet is a very simple process. These links will take you to the USGenWeb pages on cemetery preservation. All of the information on USGenWeb is free to everyone. It is also mostly in a plain text format, so you don't need fancy tools to post it. The Tombstone Transcription Project is explained here and state projects here.

Does your cemetery have an association dedicated to its preservation? Can you join it or support it? Do you need to start a "Friends of the ___ Cemetery" association? Check out this link for state cemetery associations: Tombstones with a View .

Now, on to individual tombstones. Stones are not indestructible, and using the wrong technique to clean them can result in permanent damage. Most of us should not undertake to "clean up" stones or other markers without expert advice. The older the marker, the more hesitant we should be. About.com has a page of links on cleaning stones. In the main, refrain from using anything on the stones that you would not be willing to use on your most sensitive body parts .

To record stones, first write down all of the information on the stone, exactly as it appears. Misspellings and all -- just an exact transcription. For each stone, record its location in the cemetery (from a map if you are lucky enough to have one, otherwise from landmarks like a large family monument). Bring a camera (digital is really best, as you can view the picture and make sure it is clear). DO NOT take rubbings -- these can be quite destructive. The use of shaving cream is also controversial, and I do not recommend it. Instead, bring a large mirror, a battery lantern and a friend, and throw light from the mirror onto the stone to bring out the lettering.

The Texas Historical Commission has produced an excellent e-book on preserving old cemeteries. Some of the laws and regulations are specific to Texas, but the sections on preserving and cleaning stones, and preserving and maintaining cemeteries are applicable almost anywhere. Above all, enjoy the day! Remembering should bring a song to our hearts -- our memories carry the past and its people forward to now -- and beyond!

Lone Fir Cemetery

The link goes to the website of The Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery. Many of the contact links seem to be broken, but this info is still correct as of today: Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery, 503-775-6278 (Portland number). This cemetery is the final resting place of many Oregon Pioneers, including Asa Lovejoy and Gov. George Law Curry. Metro, the Portland regional government, has some of the history of the cemetery here. The Political Graveyard, a very interesting site, lists other politicians who are buried here.

The cemetery will have staff from the Friends of Lone Fir available all Memorial Day weekend to help you find the graves of the famous and ordinary folks buried here. In addition, they hold a midsummer (dates to follow!) event showcasing period reenactments of some of the people who are buried there. If you have relatives resting in Lone Fir, they would love to hear from you about your family stories. My great grand aunt, Lucinda Alnora (Steen) Taylor Wilson Auld (she outlived at least 2 of them ) is buried there.

Cemeteries are great places to learn about and reflect on the history of a place. Careful reading of the stones will tell you about storms, epidemics and other disasters. Curious social facts will come to light. There is a marker in the Franklin Butte Cemetery at Scio, Oregon, that memorializes a husband and wife, both doctors. Woman doctors weren't very common until after the 1950s. What does this say about the society they lived in, and what extraordinary people they must have been?

Older cemeteries are full of tiny graves, some with no marker, some with a small stone bearing just initials, that hold babies. Children died in appalling numbers in the 19th and early 20th century. Mothers and infants both died from the perils of childbirth. Young men died in accidents and from epidemics. We live in historically exceptional times and an exceptional place: in America in the 21st century we don't face starvation every winter and spring, if we break a leg we are unlikely to die from complications, pneumonia is largely preventable and often treatable. Diabetes can be managed, infants with heart defects can be saved by an operation, appendicitis very rarely results in death. Just 100 years ago, this wasn't true.

As we approach Oregon's Sesquicentennial celebration, marking 150 years of statehood in 2009, we should take the time to learn, and yes to teach our children, what it meant to be a pioneer in the 1840s or 1850s. Think about it -- personal sanitation? baths? washing clothes? growing, in some cases killing your own food, and not eating until you had? The list goes on.

So spend some time at your local cemetery this Memorial Day, or if you are camping or even just hanging out at home, talk about the way we used to live.

Mothers' Day -- grandmothers

My maternal grandmother, Luta Marie (Steen) Newton, was born 12 Feb 1883 in Tekoa, Whitman County, Washington. She was the oldest child of the seven children George Leonadas and Virgil Mae (Prettyman) Steen would have in the next 27 years. Her parents lived in a logging camp when she was conceived, and didn't get to town to legalize their relationship until January, 1883. Grandma would never tell her real age, partly because of her embarrassment about this.

Marie (as she was always called) met and married George Sidney Newton in Idaho in 1913. The following year, Virgie Mae died, leaving Ernest, Dova, Alvin, Mildred and Georgia all under 16. Marie and George Newton took them in, and raised them as best they could. In the 1920s, George Steen also came to live them. My mother was a young child then, but she remembered that her Grandpa cheated at cards, and blamed all bad weather or natural disasters on "those Rooshins" (the Russian Revolution occurred in 1917).

Marie never learned to drive, and was dependent on my father all through my childhood to take her places -- both on vacation with us and just everyday chores like shopping -- until my mother got her own car and could take over. My uncle was in the Navy, and seldom home, although I do remember Grandma going to Hawaii one year to spend a month with his family. She brought home ViewMaster slides of the islands that were my delight all during the 1950s. She also had two stereoptican viewers with photographs from the "old days" that amused me for hours on end.

In the 1950s, Grandma's youngest brother Alvin would come and stay with her in the winter. He was a prospector in Idaho most of the year, with a burro and a pack. He left the burro with friends and came to stay in Oregon City when the weather got too cold. He taught me to play cribbage when I was only 4. Of course, in cribbage it is not only legal to cheat, it is your absolute duty to cheat if you can get away with it. I can remember Grandma standing behind me and saying "Alvin! You're cheating that baby! How can you do that?". And Alvin looking up with mild blue eyes and replying, "If she would learn to count, I couldn't cheat her." I grew up counting things in groups of 15, rather than the more usual 10!

In the 1960s, after Grandpa died, both my parents and Leo moved to California. Grandma sold her place and moved in to senior housing near Napa, where Leo lived. Leo died in 1969, and Grandma moved to Hayward, where my parents lived. Alvin came to live with her, and her sister MIldred lived in Santa Cruz, not too far away.

One year at Christmas time, Mom took Grandma to the local shopping mall for Christmas shopping one evening. Grandma got tired, and sat down on a bench to wait for Mom. At some point, she decided she had waited long enough, and called a cab and went home. Poor mom! She had mall security looking everywhere for her fragile 85 year old mother -- and she wasn't to be found. Mom called home, and summoned dad and I to help. But before we left the house, dad called grandma's apartment, and was informed by Alvin that Marie had been home for about an hour, and had just gone to bed.

The taste of fresh raspberries on cold cereal, or tart pie cherries in a pie bring back her memory to me.

Mothers' Day

Mothers' Day is coming this Sunday (May 11). Our mothers are our ancestors, after all.

My mother, Betty Marie Newton, was born in March, 1918, the time the first wave of the "Spanish Flu" started, here in America. Over 50 million people died in the next year as the pandemic swept America, Europe and Asia. (see Center for Disease Control article). So, one life started in a year of death and war -- she was never destined to be great in the world, but certainly great in my life.

She was the first child born into a middle class family. My grandfather was a chef, my grandmother a stay-at-home wife and mother who never learned to drive and never worked outside her home. Two years later her brother Leo was born. There would be no more children.

Growing up in Oregon City, Oregon, in the 1920s was a picture of small town life. At one time Oregon City was the territorial capital of the entire Oregon Territory, it was just a town on the river then. The dramatic horseshoe-shaped falls on the Willamette powered mills for flour, lumber, woolen goods and paper during its history. The electrical power generating plant built in 1888 at the falls was the first time in the United States that electrical power was transmitted long-distance.

Betty and Leo went began school in Oregon City, but in the 1930s the family moved to The Dalles, Oregon, on the Columbia River. Even as a young woman, Betty was showing her determined spirit to be different. In one picture of her, taken at the age of ten, she is sitting posed on a piano bench, with a defiant spit curl plastered in the middle of her forehead. She told me that her mother had forbidden her to wear it, and had combed her hair back that morning. As soon as grandma wasn't looking at the photographer, she redid her curl.

This spirit never left her. The stories she and my father told of the life they led in in the late 1930s, through the war years and even after I was born, attest to their free spirits. My dad was a moonshiner during prohibition, and they met at grange dances where he supplied the liquor. In 1943 they were married in Oregon City, at St. John's Episcopal Church. This church was apparently the only one in Oregon City that would marry a couple if the man was in the service. Their wedding picture shoes my mother in a nice suit, my dad in naval uniform.

Later, they went to San Francisco, then Iowa (the navy sent dad there for diesel engine training), then New York and Virginia. While dad was overseas she lived with friends on the east coast and worked at various jobs, including a pie baker for the (then) famous Toddle House restaurant. She always maintained that it was her own recipe for pecan pie that they used.

After the war dad joined the Operating Engineers Union in Oregon, and Mom worked in the county tax offices. After I was born, she was a stay at home mom until I was in school, then defying every unwritten rule of the 1950s, went back to work as an accountant and left me with a babysitter.

I remember her home cooking -- she and my father both were awesome in the kitchen. In the summers when she wasn't working, we often picked strawberries, raspberries, blackcaps and beans for spending money. Mom would work hard all summer, then spend her money on new furniture or to buy a car. We were one of the first middle class families in Oregon City ato own two cars, one just for the woman of the house.

She camped and fished and hunted, she played cards and drank with the men. She didn't have much use for traditional wives, but in her own way, she was an excellent one by the standards of those times: clean house, sewed my clothes, canned and froze vegetables, fruit and meat. She read widely and voraciously (as did my dad) and started me early on books. As an adult, I never would pick up a murder mystery -- having read all of Erle Stanley Gardner as a second grader, I thought they were children's books.

There are many, many more memories, but I would like to invite you to share yours. For now, Happy Mothers' Day, Mom.