I Must Be Full

Before we move on, couple of addenda to the posts below:

While I don’t know for sure who Ben’s daddy was in SC, I have narrowed it down.  If we assume Abbeville is his birthplace, there are two possibilities…Isaiah and Stephan.  Both have the appropriate check marks in the 1810 and 1820 censuses (what is the plural of census…censae, censices, censa), both always appear near each other and both are very near Benjamin R when he firsts appears in 1830.  I used to lean toward Isaiah because he was the older of what appears to be brothers or cousins.  I have since read his will from 1831 and he mentions a bunch of kids, none named Benjamin…but here’s the thing that came to me just a few minutes ago.  He does mention a parcel of land he bought either with or from Stephan, the will is witnessed by Stephan Junior and Benjamin, and his executor is William S. Jones, his oldest son.  Thirty years later, when Ben’s oldest son Joel is posting a bond to act as administrator for his dad’s estate he gets his brother Chris to co-sign and a Wm S Jones from Aberdeen.  I never figured out who that guy was…now I have a guess.

Stephan and Isaiah were brothers, living in Abbeville, SC at least as early as 1800.  Two of Stephan’s kids were Benjamin and Stephan Jr.  Isaiah had a bunch of kids, but his oldest was William S.  Wm S and Ben are cousins who are about the same age.  When the Indian lands opened up in Mississippi these two kids decided to move to the frontier, being in their mid-30’s.  My guess is that William was a little better situated than Ben but he got very little land from his dad’s will, most of it going to his mother.

And when I look now at the 1840 census, why yes, there he is on the next page from Ben and his crew.  And if we look at the size of his farm, he’s got 14 slaves, which is quite a few compared to adjoining farms.  Compare to Ben’s who has 3.  William has nine family members (quite a few girls for a farmer) and Ben also has nine but they’re mostly boys.

Which brings me to James Willison, the son mentioned in the bible register, born in 1828 in SC.  I assume James dies before 1840 because all the other boys are accounted for in the 1840 census…2 under five (Stephan and Ben Jr), 3 5-10 yrs (Marshall, Oliver, Chris) and 1 10-15 yrs (Joel).  The only other male tick mark is Ben Sr 40-50.

Next post we’ll do the rest of the Mississippi years.

This is my Great-great Grandfather, Christopher Columbus Jones and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Booker.  Chris, or CC as he was known, was born in South Carolina 19 January 1833.  The family moved to NE Mississippi in 1835 with six kids, the oldest being Joel (10) and the youngest was Chris at two.  Must have been some trip.  Are we there yet?

The Mississippi years are the important one for this family group.  Most of the children grow up and marry, and while father Ben tries to put down roots, by the time the war is over and Reconstruction is underway, a good portion of his family has moved on.

Around 1837-8 Ben purchased land in sections 33 and 34 just east of Smithville (always thought that was ironic…Joneses living in Smithville) and started to build up a good sized farm and by the time 1840 rolled around, two more boys had been born, he had almost a full section counting the land in Itawamba county and three slaves.  While not in the planter class, he and his family were comfortable.  I’ve cross-hatched the Monroe county land on this map just where highway 23 turns and heads north into Itawamba.

By 1846, the family was complete with 11 kids.  They were:

1. Joel Wesley — 9 March 1825
2. Mary Ann — 30 August 1826
3. James Willison — 19 Feb 1828
4. Marshall — 23 Oct 1829
5. Thomas Oliver — 17 Jan 1831
6. Christopher Columbus — 19 Jan 1833
7. Stephan — 19 Mar 1836 (first born in MS)
8. Benjamin — 4 Oct 1838
9. Elender Elizabeth — 20 Jul 1841
10. Robert Calvin — 25 Aug 1844
11. Ira — 1846

By the 1850 census Joel has just married Mary Wilkerson and is living next door to the nuclear family.  Mary has married John Meadow and is living in Pontotoc county.  I assume James Willison has either passed away or moved on because he is unaccounted for and is not mentioned in the probate packet in 1860.  And all the other siblings and Ben and Mary are accounted for.  A big, happy family living the good life in the Hill Country of Northeastern Mississippi.

There’s a book on the history of Smithville by Jessie Pierce, published in 1958.  The book reads like an oral history transcription and she evidently knew my ancestors:

The Jones owned from Mrs. Martha Jane Cowley’s home to the Gene and Holston Elliot home in Itawamba.  They built the house near the family cemetery and Uncle Marshall Jones taught school until he died in manhood.  A part of what was once a fine old home is still standing back of Mr. Albert Stevenson…

Now back to the Jones family.  There were eight of the brothers:  Ira, Benjamin, Christopher, Westley [Joel], Robert, Marshall, Oliver, and Stephen.  Only one east of the Mississippi River bears the Jones name, Buford of Memphis.  The Ben Harmans are the descendants of Benjamin Jones…

Sometime previous to the War a Mr. Merith Meadors owned all the land between the Christopher Jones place (now the Elliot farm) up to Turon church.  He also had dozens of slaves.  He was the grandfather of the Booker family.

Chris eventually marries one of the Booker girls.

Things start to come undone in 1858.  Mary Meadow dies leaving four kids.  At the end of the year, Ben dies (4 Dec).  One month later, Marshall dies (6 Jan 1860).  Ben didn’t leave a will, but oldest son Joel takes charge and files as executor of the estate and asks the court to let him run the farm for the time being because selling it now would cost them a bunch of money.  The court okays that idea and lets them put it off a year, just in time for war to break out.

I’ve been meaning to start these series of posts on my ancestors for quite awhile now.  In fact, it was one of the reasons for starting a blog in the first place…as an avenue for putting down, in narrative form, what I know about each of these folks I’ve been tracking down now for the past 30 years or so.  This way I can have my friends and relatives check my work, so to speak, revise and extend my remarks and limber up the writing muscles that have almost atrophied beyond repair.

A good place to start is with the oldest Jones I know for sure and that would be old Ben here, my great-great-great grandfather.  Benjamin R. Jones was born in South Carolina June 5, 1797.  I don’t know what the ‘R’ stands for but he was pretty consistent with it as an integral part of his name in most documents.  It has helped me distinguish him from a few other Ben Joneses floating around SC at about the same time.

I’m not completely sure where in South Carolina Ben was born.  I think I’ve narrowed it down to the Abbeville area which you can see from this map.  This is actually a cool map to keep around.  Folks from both my mom’s family and more of my dad’s than just Ben seem to have come from the upper left hand corner of the state, right next to the Cherokee lands.  The site is run by Philip Norfleet and you might want to look around at some of the other things there, especially the maps and the SC jury lists.  I digress.  My assumption is that Ben fits here for a couple of reasons…the only Benjamin in the 1830 census that matches for age and children is Benjamin R in Abbeville…he lived in SC from at least 1824 through 1833 because six of his children were born in that time in SC…and I have a bible record that is unverifiable yet matches other aspects of his family that has him marrying Mary Graham on May 11, 1824.  The only Grahams where this would match are those that live in Abbeville.  So until I find other evidence I’m assuming Abbeville. 

Those six kids were Joel Wesley (1825), Mary Ann (1826), James Willison (1828), Marshall (1829), Thomas Oliver (1831) and Christopher Columbus.  Chris, or CC as he was known, was my great-great grandfather and he was born January 19, 1833 in South Carolina (again assuming Abbeville area).

Sometime in 1834/35, for whatever reason, Ben and Mary and the six kids (all under 10) decided to move to Mississippi.  They ended in Monroe County and eventually bought land just outside Smithville right on the Itwamba County line.  On this 1895 railroad map you can see Smithville at the very top of the county.

Ben stayed on that farm just northeast of Smithville until he died December 4, 1858.  Mary passed away August 8, 1891.  Ben and Mary had five more kids in Mississippi:  Stephan (1836), Benjamin (1838), Elender Elizabeth (1841), Robert Calvin (1844) and Ira T. (1846).  In one of the trips I’ve made to the county seat of Aberdeen I found the probate packet for Ben which has a load of info that I’ll share later.  There’s also a decent little genealogy library in Aberdeen, the Evans Memorial Genalogical Collection at the Evans Memorial Library.  And there’s a good blog about the area by Terry Thorton who lives in Fulton (county seat of Itawamba County).

I’m a self-taught, rough-edged woodworker.  I got started because we needed a new bed and couldn’t find any we liked so I built one out of maple, cherry and oak.  It wasn’t bad for a first time out sort of thing and I started making other things, most notably a dining table out of cherry, mahogany and almond.

As often happens when you get over-confident in your skills, you tend to lose respect for the work, for the time it takes to do a good job, for the safe guards against small accidents.  I am meticulous about wearing eye and ear protection.  I make sure to check electrical when there is the smallest chance something could jolt me.  I use push sticks and other aids to protect my hands from blades and bits.  That’s why the accident I had mid-November was such a shock.

My Shop

This is me working in my shop, which is actually the front part of our garage.  That’s a ping pong table I’m using as an assembly table.  You’ll see I have two workbenches, on with my bench top drill press and band saw, one set up as a woodworking bench.  I also have a contractor’s saw that is outfitted with a good fence.

The Saw

This is where stupid starts.  Last cut of the day, a piece of hard maple, about the size you see above.  I was using a push stick and the small cut was caught between the fence and the blade.  That’s the recipe for kick-back.  I could have prevented this easily and in fact I thought about putting a stop block on the fence to keep the cut piece from kicking back.  Or I could have used a longer push plate that would lay on top of the wood.  I did neither and this is what happens…

A broken thumb on top of the gash that took 17 stitches to close.  I’m just now recovering from the break…tendons are tight and range of movement is still restricted…but I’m mostly healed, playing basketball and back to wood work.

So that’s my cautionary tale.  It never takes too long to do it right, even if it is the last cut of the day…in more ways than one.

What did you do on your summer vacation?  I built these bookcases:

I’m the ED for our local Historical Society (you can learn more about us at humboldthistory.org).  We needed new storage for some of our genealogy books.  Wish I had more time to build stuff.

Okay, now that summer’s over maybe we’ll have some time to blog.

I really wanted to do these things more consistently, but looking back, it’s been a month and I haven’t posted anything.  I could make a bunch of excuses but I won’t.  I’ll just promise myself to work a little harder at it.

Since we last spoke, Christel wrote back sending pages from her grandmother’s cousin’s book showing a drawing of the Ekholm farm that came as a pdf and I don’t know how to share that with you.  But she did have some insight into the holm part of Ekholm.

Holm or more right “holme” means a little hill (or a little field) standing alone in its surroundings. The verb “holma” means surround. Nowadays the word stands for a little uninhabited island. 

The noun “holm” exists in English too with the same meaning as in Swedish, but in English the word also can mean “kind of evergreen oak”!

So my next post is going to have to be about my side of the family.  My sister whined about that the other day and we have to keep her happy.

At some point I have to assume people who read this stuff know that the story actually starts below and I shouldn’t continue to direct readers to part one of each post.  So I’ll stop doing that now.

I mentioned earlier that I had discovered the wonder of Swedish Church records, essentially nosy Lutherans looking into your family life.  But how cool to have a record of all the families in an area (parish), when the kids were born, when they went off to America or got married, where they moved…all on a yearly basis.  And you can search all those records for a fee at this cool site: genline.com. (Watch the skills grow as your author learns to insert links)

But those records can only take you so far and as all genealogists know, you run out of information that leads you to the next branch of the family tree.  They even have a phrase for it: hitting the brick wall.  Say that to any genealogist, or genealogy hobbyist, and they’ll know exactly what you mean and will share with you, at considerable length, their own personal brick walls, both broken -through and existing.  I’ve even attended seminars on how to break through your brick walls and I’m happy to say I ended up employing one of the strategies I picked up somewhere along the way.

I found a site that allows folks to post queries regarding Swedish genealogy…scangen.se. So I posted my Ekholm questions and waited.  Waited for several months.  Part of the problem was the site’s in Swedish and I posted my query in English.  And then the most remarkable thing happened.  In the space of a couple a days I got several replies to my query, one in Swedish and the others in English.  It seems Christel Lindstrom had a cousin who did some genealogy work regarding the Ekholm name and she was able to fill me in on a lot of the story in my earlier post.  Better yet, her cousin had compiled a book on the farms in that area and she knew exactly where the farm was.  Now how cool is that.  So Christel is my new Swedish girlfriend because a few days ago she sent pictures of the farm along with a map locating where all this action is taking place.

This has all the key towns we’ll mention in the Ekholm story and this pretty much covers the area all sides of my wife’s family, going back at least to the mid 1700’s, have lived and died.  Right in the middle is Vasta Karup, the parish where the Ekholm’s and the Nilsson’s (Donna’s Grandmother’s maiden name) lived.  At the bottom is Hjarnarp and Forslov, also big in Nilsson stuff.  Keep that in mind as we learn more about them.  But then Christel sent a better picture of where the Ekholm’s actually lived.

And you’ll see on the road, just west of Bastad where she has written Ekholm Farm.  How cool is that.  And then to top it all off, she sent pictures of the farm today.  Compare those with the ones earlier.

The internet is perhaps the greatest creation of mankind.  What a wonderful thing Al Gore has given us.

This will make more sense if you read the next post first.  Go down one, then come back here.

Go now…don’t read anymore.

That was okay, and you can click on the picture to make it quite big.  Let’s see how this works:

Okay, I like that much better.  You can actually see things.

Next up, some real pictures about Sweden.

Let’s see how this works:

This is the Ekholm Farm from the old days.

Let’s see how it posts.

Finally, Super Sunday.  Super Tuesday coming up.  This must be Super Week.

Like most, I think the Pats will win but I’m rooting for the Giants.  Uncle Dave will be here to grill some steaks (post game since ours starts at 3).

Don’t have any plans for Super Monday.