Text message in a bottle

Matilda "Tillie" Esper (b. 1893) and her friend Selina J. Pramstaller (b. 1898) were enjoying June 30, 1915, at Tashmoo Park, a popular amusement park on Harsens Island in Michigan. At one point during the day, they penciled the message “Having a good time at Tashmoo,” placed it inside a corked bottle, and tossed it from the ferry into the waters of the St. Clair River. Instead of riding the waves, the bottle sank to the riverbed only to be discovered nearly a century later by David Leander, owner of Great Lakes Divecenter in Shelby Township. With the help of the local historical society, a fellow diver, and a little publicity about the discovery, Leander traced the descendents of one of the notewriters. “I couldn’t believe it. A part of me said, ‘There’s the old-school way of doing a text message.’ I thought it was pretty impressive,” said Tillie's 59-year-old grandson Eric Schiebold about the serendipitous look into the teenage life of their grandmother, who died in 1984. Tillie's granddaughter Janet Baccanari, 46, commented, “It’s like she came back to life. It’s exciting stuff....It just gave me goose bumps.”

Posted with Blogsy

Tomb of the known soldier

Last summer, I mentioned the collection of daguerreotypes donated to the Library of Congress by the Liljenquist Family (on-line catalog here). Many of the names of the nearly 700 Civil War soldiers depicted are unknown. Well, thanks to the wife of a descendant, one young man has his identity back. A week ago, Karen Thatcher of Martinsburg, West Virginia, recognized his photo (2nd image) as matching a crayon enlargement (see it in slideshow here) - a 19th c. technique of making a larger colored portrait from a photo - that had been handed down in the family of her husband Larry. Now that it has been pieced together, here is the soldier's story:

David M. Thatcher was just 17 when he enlisted in the Confederate Army on April 19, 1861. The War Between the States had broken out only the week before. Thatcher left his family's farm in Martinsburg to join Company B, Berkeley Troop, of the First Virginia Cavalry. Before he went to war, the teenager sat for an ambrotype. He posed proudly in his uniform, armed with a revolver and a saber. Across his chest was braided frogging and at his waist was a belt buckle bearing the Virginia state seal. Thatcher was under the command of General J.E.B. Stuart in the Battle of Buckland Mills when he was wounded Oct. 19, 1863. The Confederacy prevailed, but Thatcher died the next day. His parents collected his body from the battlefield near Warrenton, Virgina, and brought him home in a horse and wagon. They buried him in the cemetery of their local Tuscarora Presbyterian Church, where his gravemarker (1st image) still stands. "When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, be not afraid of them, for the Lord thy God is with thee," it reads.

According to Library of Congress curator Carol Johnson, Thatcher may have given the photo to his girlfriend before he left for the war and his family may have had it reproduced to hang on the wall after he was killed. The story of the young soldier - a brother of her husband’s great-grandfather - is tragic, but reuniting him with his biography is remarkable. “I’m just awestruck," exclaims the collector. "This anonymous young boy has gotten his life back.” The Thatchers add, “We’re just tickled to death...that we’re able to put a name to that face.”

Historic family farms

In a recent article about the sale of the oldest continuously-operated family-owned farm in the U.S. being put up for sale, there was mention of a competing claim (the oldest family-owned business in North America) by a plantation. Let's compare histories:

Tuttle Family Farm, Dover, New Hampshire, est. 1635

John Tuttle's ship from England wrecked off the Maine coast, so he used a small land grant from King Charles I to start a farm nearby in 1632. The farm was passed down from father to son, with the 6th-generation represented by Joseph Tuttle (1st image). William Penn Tuttle (9th generation), increased the original 20-acre parcel to about 200 acres, and began a thriving wholesale business. Hugh Tuttle (10th generation), who was profiled in 1971 by Life magazine (5th image, hauling produce to his roadside store, known as Tuttle's Red Barn) as the last of a dying breed, developed irrigation ponds. Current owners, Will Tuttle (2nd image) and his sister Lucy, have run the farm for the last 40 years after changing its business model, but have discouraged their children from becoming the 12th generation because of the difficulty - physical and financial - of keeping the family farm in business. Will Tuttle says he has no regrets about the end of a legacy. "I'm not a museum curator, I'm a farmer."

Shirley Plantation, Charles City, Virginia, est. 1613
Shirley Plantation was also established through a grant from the Crown, only 6 years after the establishment of Jamestown, the 1st permanent English settlement in the American colonies. It was in 1638 that the family succession began when a 450-acre portion of the land was granted to Edward Hill. It passed from him to Edward Hill II, then III, then IV, who left no heirs. The plantation reverted to Eward Hill III's youngest daughter, whose husband John Carter built the "Great House" (3rd image, as it appeared after the Civil War, and 4th image, as it looks today). The house has been occupied by 8 generations of the Hill Carter family since 1738, and the working plantation is currently owned, operated, and lived in by direct descendants of Edward Hill I. Shirley Plantation was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971 and is open for tours.

It seems like a tie that will end with the transfer of the $3.35 million Tuttle property to new owners...

A few branches of the Quigley family tree

My Dad has been visiting for a week and, at my request, brought all his genealogy information, which includes some old photographs. He has fond memories of Grandpa Hatfield, his paternal grandmother's 2nd husband, and is shown above as a young boy at the workbench Grandpa built for him (1st image) and at the railyard where Grandpa worked (2nd image). My Dad's parents (3rd image) are James Ross Quigley (1920-1976) and Ruby Cecil Fancher (1914-1988). Ruby is pictured as a child (4th image) and her mother Laura Rilla Mathis (1871-1928) is pictured (5th image) holding one of more than dozen children from 2 marriages (Ruby, Blondina, Thelma, Mary, Arminta, Emerson, Clifford, Eliot, Harry, Fred, Ed, James, Sidney, Viola, or Effie). My paternal grandfather, known as Ross, is the smaller child on the right in the next photo (6th image), and a portrait of his maternal grandparents James Newton Horn (1870-1945) and Belle Dora Arnold (1874-1953) follows (7th image). Ross's parents Grover Randall Quigley (1886-1962) and Mary Coda Horn (1892-1950) are depicted below (8th image), but Grover is persona non grata in the Quigley family. He wed Mary in 1914 (marriage certificate, 9th image), but was the cause of their divorce in 1935. Of their 4 children who survived infancy (Eugene, Ross, Kenneth, and Doris), 2 of them (Kenny and my grandfather Ross - who would have been 15 at the time of the split) wouldn't have anything to do with him. Grover (on the left, 10th image) ran the pool hall, confectionery, and ice cream parlor on Main St. in Agency, Missouri, for many years, and Ross would point him out to his young son when they would see Grover selling his wares at wrestling matches, warning, "Stay away from that man." It wasn't until years later that my Dad realized that Grover was his biological grandfather, and he never fully learned why Grover's character was suspect. He never remarried (see his calling card, 11th image) and older relatives only divulged to Dad that he was "weird," in addition to being a supposed kleptomaniac. Grover was also epileptic and is remembered to have had a siezure at his ex-wife's funeral. Doris and Gene placed him in a nursing home on County Farm and when he died he was buried in Agency Cemetery next to his infant son Grover Roy, who had died in 1915.