There’s Something about the Old Way

It's time for summer vacation! Although I'll be traveling for the next few weeks, Family Sleuther is still hard at work. I'm turning things over to my aunt and mother who have both graciously agreed to share family history gems in my absence. 

This week's post continues a recurring series featuring the reminiscences of my maternal aunt, Diane. A longtime genealogist, her years of family history detective work piqued my own curiosity, which laid the foundation on which Family Sleuther is built. This week, Diane continues her reflections on how things used to be and the joys genealogists of another era found in pre-online research.

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I recently wrote about how I liked the way my Grandpa did it better.

While technological advancements can make our tasks easier and flow more efficiently, I am still drawn to the old way of doing things. While I’m not completely technologically intimidated, there are some things I just prefer to do the old fashioned way. Writing is one of them. I have written a number of pieces over the years and I always handwrite everything on a legal pad before I type it. My thoughts just flow better.

So it is with my family history research. I like the old fashioned way of doing it. 

When I interviewed my grandparents, I brought a voice-activated recorder with me. As I was beginning the interview, Grandpa asked, “What is that gadget?” I told him it was a recorder and I was only using it in case I missed something. Both Grandma and Grandpa were uncomfortable with their voices being recorded. I tried to explain the need for it. 

“Write faster,” was Grandpa’s reply. 

So I did. What a shame that I don’t have their recorded voices. How I would love to hear them and share with my progeny the voices of their great- and great-great-grandparents.

Grandpa and Grandma: Marion and Nevella Lumpkins

Genealogy Research Is Changing

Researching microfilmed documents like courthouse records, vital statistics, family histories, and other county and state records housed onsite in Family History Centers is becoming an increasingly obsolete method of research. You can now almost “get it all” by searching online databases designed for the family historian. I know because I've worked in my local Family History Library.

Many years ago, my method of research was to go directly to courthouses, churches, and local libraries in the county seats in small towns across Kansas and Oklahoma. While the time commitment is greater the reward is so special.

I have sat on the floor with my husband in the vault of a courthouse in Mitchell County, Kansas and searched the bound volumes of vital records from the 1800’s discovering long-forgotten ancestors.

To me there is nothing like sitting (or standing) with a priceless volume that is handwritten. Written in a style of script that is no longer used. I love tracing my fingers over my ancestors’ names and just feel a kinship that I don’t get from an electronic source.

Diane with her published family history, Plainville Library, Kansas

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for advancement and making the search less tedious. But the feeling that comes over me when searching for records in an old, wood-floored courthouse or library and actually touching the document puts me in a place that feels hallowed.

If you’ve not researched in an old courthouse or library before, you should try it. Don’t let the clerk take you to the digitized records. Ask for the original register and prepare to be absorbed in history.

Who knows, you may find something the internet missed.

I Liked The Way Grandpa Did It Better

It's time for summer vacation! Although I'll be traveling for the next few weeks, Family Sleuther is still hard at work. I'm turning things over to my aunt and mother who have both graciously agreed to share family history gems in my absence. 

This week's post continues a recurring series featuring the reminiscences of my maternal aunt, Diane. A longtime genealogist, her years of family history detective work piqued my own curiosity, which laid the foundation on which Family Sleuther is built. This week, Diane takes us back to a time when farming the Kansas prairie was difficult work with few modern conveniences, but work that grandpa loved dearly.

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I grew up in Lakewood, Colorado. My mother's family was from the farming community of Plainville, Kansas.

When I was a child and up through high school, I was able to come to Kansas and stay with my grandparents. It was the highlight of my year. I liked the laid-back small-town. And I really loved my grandparents.

In 1978, when I was 25 years old, I packed up, left Denver and came to live near my grandparents. I didn't think many 25-year-olds still had both of their grandparents living and I wanted to live near them and bask in their love.

Grandma and Grandpa Nevella & Marion Lumpkins

Years later, after I had married, I remember one beautiful day driving east out of Plainville on K-18 Highway. In the field to my right was a really fancy tractor. It had a completely enclosed cab and most likely power steering and an air conditioner. I watched for a few moments and remarked to my husband, "I like the way grandpa did it better."

I have often thought of that day and allowed memories to take me back to a more simple, yet harder time.

In the 1950's grandpa had a green John Deere Tractor. To a little girl and her little sisters, it was massive. There was nothing better than grandpa pulling us up on the deck of the tractor and rolling down the yard a short way. If there was just one of us we were in his lap. I loved everything about that old tractor especially the metal seat.

Grandpa did his farming years before fancy tractors and combines came on the scene. There was no air-conditioned tractor for Grandpa and he didn't have an umbrella to shade him. But he did have a dust-caked straw hat. And he had a Gott aluminum water cooler that he filled and took to the fields with him everyday.

On particularly hot summer days, which is everyday in Kansas, grandma would say, "Let's take your grandpa a drink."

Off to the DQ we would go and bring him either a root beer or lemonade. We would drive several miles east of Plainville and then back north and then east. Grandma would drive down the Country Road until she saw him, pull to the side of the road and give the horn a couple of toots. Then we waited while he turned another row or two of dirt. Grandpa made his way to the window of the car, pushed his straw hat back and with a "whoee" accepted the drink and swallowed thirstily.

Farming was nothing new to grandpa. As a boy and a young man he worked in the fields where his mom and pop farmed. Pop was grandpa's stepfather who always treated him just like his own son. Grandpa met my grandma when he went to work for her dad shucking corn for a dollar a day. He continued farming for the next 40 years. Of course, he advanced from shucking corn to plowing, planting, and harvesting his own crops.

After grandpa quit farming, he focused on his yard and the large garden that he planted. I remember being at his home when grandpa pushed his new Little Red Riding Mower out of the shed. Out it rolled to his low voice saying, "Come here you beautiful baby."

Even retirement couldn't take the farmer out of the farmer.

Grandpa Marion Lumpkins and his "beautiful baby," Plainville, Kansas

Building A Relationship With Dad

This week's post begins a recurring series featuring the reminiscences of my maternal aunt, Diane. A longtime genealogist, her years of family history detective work piqued my own curiosity, which laid the foundation on which everything Family Sleuther is built. This week, Diane takes us on a journey of discovery as she seeks out her father (my grandfather) after a years-long absence following her parents' 1959 divorce, and builds a father-daughter relationship.

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A Telephone Rings In A New Beginning
I met Dad just before my 20th birthday in the summer of 1973. Mom and Dad were divorced when my sister Donna and I were very young, about four and six. We didn’t remember him. Donna learned that Dad lived in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and mailed him her high school graduation announcement. He didn't attend, so we made plans to go to him.

A quick roadside respite on the journey to Oklahoma, 1973

I took a two-week vacation from my job and our odyssey began. We left our Colorado home in a 1963 celery green VW Beetle (with a 260 air conditioner - two windows rolled down at 60 mph!). We stopped in Plainville, Kansas a few days to see our maternal grandparents before heading on to Muskogee.

The night before our departure from Plainville, I called Dad's home. A woman answered (his wife, Dorothy) and I asked to speak to Charles Upton. While inwardly scared senseless, I was grown up and proud of myself as I forthrightly told him, “This is Diane. Donna and I will be there tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he replied.

That brief conversation was the first of many years of catching up and getting to know each other.

An Oklahoma Odyssey
We left Plainville the next morning with the same 1958 road map that Grandma and Grandpa had used when they visited Oklahoma over a decade before. We didn’t know about interstate driving that would have cut our trip considerably. They didn't exist on the map! It took us about ten hours driving small county roads going through many little towns with funny names like Sapulpa.

With many miles and hours before us, Donna and I talked of all we would ask him and wondered why he had stayed out of our lives for so long, not even a phone call. The questions we talked about asking were pointed and somewhat disrespectful, I think. But, as our destination was soon before us, we each lapsed into our own private thoughts and became anxious. Many what ifs.

Diane's first photo of her father Charles Upton

[Author's note: Donna reminded me that our sisters road trip was much more stressful than I remembered. She recalled that we fought like cats and dogs and at one point I pulled over to the side of the highway and told (ordered?) her to get out. She flatly refused.]

We pulled up into the drive of Dad's home. The front door swung open and a ten-year-old boy greeted us with an Oklahoma drawl, "Hi! I got sisters." In that moment, Donna and I learned that we had a half-brother.

Dad was quiet as he hugged us both, and brought us out of the muggy heat into his air conditioned home. He laughed when he saw the outdated map we used to navigate our way from Kansas.

We were in Muskogee among family that had known us when we were very young. Most of our hard questions fell by the wayside as we were swallowed among new family and somewhat new culture (the South, Oklahoma style with fried food three meals a day).

Making Up For Lost Time

Over the course of the next ten years Dad came to visit me in Kansas and Donna in Colorado and we traveled to Oklahoma. Each time I found the questions easier and gleaned more information.

Diane, James Upton "an old man"
and Donna

My first family history question to him was, “Tell me about your Dad.”

His quick somewhat irreverent reply was, “He was an old man that died.”

I asked him if that was what he wanted me to tell his granddaughters about him. He answered as best he could. To be fair, Grandpa James Upton was an old man that died. Grandpa Upton was born in 1877 and my dad was born in 1930. Dad was the first child from the second marriage. So, to him, his dad was an old man that died.

Over the course of the next many years there were a lot of opportunities to visit with dad about family history. He shared what he knew but it often ended with his, “I don’t know.”

The closest Dad and I became was during the last six weeks of his life. He had a five-year battle with cancer and his mortal journey was ending. He was young, only 63.

We had talked about afterlife and our vision of what it would be. He was stubborn in his belief and I was positive in mine. As the time became close he was in his recliner chair (where he’d been for the past eight months) and kept looking up to the corner of the living room ceiling.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“Who?” I replied.

“Up there, all of those people," he answered.

“Dad, that’s your people, all of those I’ve asked you about. You don’t think you’ll go to God without your family gone before to take you to meet Him do you?”

I think it brought him a sense of peace and there were more contemplative moments that last week. For both of us.