Find a Grave : Parelle Canaday

Early, in their genealogic travels the Search Sisters were surprised to learn that they could take a virtual walk through most every cemetery in North America on Find-a-Grave.com. There are photos of headstones, lists of residents, and sometimes short bios compiled by volunteers who love spending their free time with tombs.          

Miz Emma’s grave was listed on the roster of Arp’s Mason Cemetery on the Find-a-Grave website.  Looking deeper I was surprised to find our Aunt and Uncle, Ernest Homer Allison and Daisy Bell. (Daisy had won my eight-year-old heart on that Texas trip by offering us cake for breakfast.) Could there be others relatives on this cemetery’s roster?

  Parelle Canaday 1859 is carved in stone on great grandma's grave.  Who decided on this peculiar spelling?  Likely some kinfolk  preserving her tradition of never spelling Paralee the same way twice.  

What the heck I thought, maybe the Cannadays were there.   SURE ENOUGH. I found PARELLE CANADY!!!!! Great grandma's grave!! Hiding in plain sight in Arp. Stella and I had been looking for great grandma Paralee ever since we started this ancestor hunt in 2012.

Paralee was our dad’s earliest known kin. She was the important link between the known and unknown relatives in our family history. Our dad, Lewis Allison, recalled Grandma Paralee vividly and liked to impersonate her way of talking with her piney woods-country twang.

Of course she would be buried in the piney woods neighborhood of her kinfolk, a place like Arp. What is remarkable is how long it took to locate her. It never occurred to us to look for someone named “Parelle Canaday".  Spelling was the barrier.  Apparently Paralee never spelled her name the same way twice.

Miz Emma : Emma Jane Simmons Arnold Allison

In June 2014 I decided to look into Emma Jane Simmons Arnold Allison, stepmother to our dad Lewis Allison and his brother Harry. Their papa, Harry Craig Allison, had remarried after his first wife Stella Cannaday died in 1924.  

Miz Emma was on her second husband when she took on the Allison boys around 1930.  According to Lewis “Miz Emma” was stern and “favored” her own boys over her stepsons. I have a dim memory of meeting Miz Emma Arnold when I was eight years old on our one-and-only family trip to east Texas in 1957.

She lived in a wood farmhouse on a country road surrounded by deep woods. Miz. Emma welcomed Lewis and his “youngins”. She invited us to have something to “drank”, which turned out to be well water. We all walked around the house to the backyard. She pulled up the bucket of well water and we all sipped out of the same ladle. I remember our California Mom, stranger to east Texas ways, remarking later how “unsanitary” this was.

The next time I encountered Miss Emma Arnold, was finding her on a list of people buried in the cemetery in Arp, Texas. Arp is a tiny town in Smith County. The town’s population is less than a thousand living folks, but the cemetery’s population is twice that.  The cemetery also held some secrets for the Search Sisters. 

Emma J Allison Arnold @ findagrave.com

Note: The banner image at the top of the page is the Search Sisters

 with their dad Lewis visiting in Arp's Mason Cemetary.