Bless You Virginia Fendrick

Virginia Shannon Fendrick wrote the Revolutionary War Soldiers of Franklin County Pennsylvania published in 1944. She was an historian, a genealogist and a librarian. Her book contains not only biographies of those who were engaged in the Revolutionary War. Information about their kin, their origins, their connections.  She writes about where the bodies are buried with the addition of cemetery information.  She amassed a lot of information. She did this in a time when no digital searches were possible. She must have made made many  trips to the courthouses to read will books, made visits to churches to read records.  Everything done in person or by mail. All notes handwritten or typed. 

Virginia took notes. A lot of them. Her notebooks still exist in the local library in Mercersburg Pennsylvania.  We were excited to discover that  our 4th great grandfather William Allison and his brother Colonel John Allison were mentioned in her book.  We wondered what other Allison hints might be contained in her research.

A trip to Pennsylvania? While visiting libraries is one of my favorite pastimes (go figure) a trip across country to page through 25 dusty volumes of handwritten notes this month was not likely. What to do?  I did what all searchers do: Visit the digital version of the Fendrick LIbrary.  Online I discovered that the Fendrick is housed in a lovely old colonial building. It is small, it is local and it is sited in a house that was built by Captain Robert Parker (1754-1799), a veteran of the Revolutionary War and aide to General George Washington.

Best yet, it has a phone number.

I call. 
Cheryl Custer the cheerful, friendly Fendrick librarian answers the phone. We have a delightful chat. She promises to look up Allisons for me in the Virginia Fendrick notebooks.  But she says, it's Saturday afternoon... and she won't get to until next week. I'm thrilled. 

A week or so later pages of Allison references show up in my email box. This Pennsylvania part of the world appears to be infested with Allisons for more than a century. Its an amazing list. Stella and I sort through all these Allisons. Some are ours, some not...

Virgina Fendricks notes point us to the last testament and wills of our 3rd Great Grand Father William Allison , 4th Great Grand Father William Allison and 5th grandfather John Allison.  We are able to find digitized versions of these handwritten documents. It is a fabulous discovery. 

These wills map the progress of our Allison family who migrated from Northern Ireland and settled on the Pennsylvania frontier. They reveal details about the life and times of a colonial world that existed three hundred years ago... a time the Americas existed but not yet "America" as we have come to call the United States.  

Bless you Cheryl Custer and librarians everywhere who help us glimpse our histories.

Bless you Virgina Fendrick for taking such copious notes.  

Source :  Fendrick, Virginia Shannon.. American Revolutionary soldiers of Franklin County, Pennnsylvania [sic]. Chambersburg, Pa.: Historical Works Committee of the Franklin County Chapter, c1944.

The Fendrick Library Online:  http://fendricklibrary.org/Genealogy.html

Fat Old Histories: Finding Franklin County Pennsylvania

The smell of old books puts some people to sleep. Not me. I love the possibility of opening a musty, fat book that has been gathering a dusty aura for years on a forgotten shelf.Crack the cover and who knows what might fall out?

One of the great vehicles for eavesdropping on the past are finding books written at the time and place.  Many locals in the United States have County Histories that were published around 1875.  Apparently, there was a frenzy of publishing that celebrated the 100 year American centennial. These books are big, quirky volumes that recall the history of a place, generally a county.  They are written in an upbeat, booster tone that celebrates their noble European ancestors. They celebrate the fore bearers that cut the forests, shoved the Indians aside settled in to build a new, improved version of the old country in the Americas. These books also have a liberal sprinkling of biographies of the solid (male) citizens of the day. Often these bios come with engraved portraits. My intuition is that these august men were paying sponsors of the volumes. 

Despite their shortcomings, these old books offer a refreshing historical view of a place from an unvarnished white guy perspective.  A reference librarian can help find local histories. Many of these books can be read in digitized versions if you don't mind missing the musty smell.

Sources of information about Greencastle and the south central Pennsylvania of our Allison kin can be found in books like: 

Historical sketch of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, 1878 

by M'Cauley, I. H; Suesserott, J. L. (Jacob Lewis); Kennedy, D. M

Franklin County One Hundred Years Ago, Alexander Thompson

(an article from The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 8. Historical Sketches of Franklin) 

Good sources of digitized books available for free include:

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machines

googlebooks - Google Search

 Collections: Ancestry and Genealogy | HathiTrust Digital Library
  

Family History Books

Ancestor Fever

Ancestor Fever;  It strikes at times like the flu. 

The eyes get fuzzy, breathing shallow, the body stiff from hours at a key board. Frustration. Stupor. My sensible self is telling my obssesive self,"SNAP OUT OF IT!" 

Sensible Me: Stop. You have stuff to do.

      Obsessed Me: mmmm… Just one more thing.

Sensible Me: Yeah, you said that 20 minutes ago.

      Obsessed Me: I know, I know.  But I gotta do x,y,z, before I forget.

Sensible Me: Time's up!

       Obsessed Me: Gotta file this clue somewhere so I can find it later.

Sensible Me: STOP NOW.

       Obsessed Me: Uh huh…. but its so hard to get rolling and I've got this momentum.

Sensible Me: Sometimes, I think you might be possessed by spirits.

       Obsessed Me: Could be.

Sensible Me: Yeah, well… how come these spirits are not forthcoming with answers?  

Besides,  is chasing dead people around for hours on end how you should be spending your time? 

When my mind goes into this obsessive state, it only wants to focus on the past. It is not a random past, rather a particular past with a particular set of people. It could be the Acadians of Port Royal, or the miners of Rosario in Sinaloa, Mexico, or the Latino immigrants of San Francisco’s North Beach.  

This episode of Ancestor Fever is about the Pennsylvania past. The past of our Great Grandfather John R Allison, his sister Louisa Allison and his mother Sarah Gurley Allison in the village of Greencastle, Pennsylvania circa 1850.

Obsession defined is the  domination of thoughts by a persistent idea.  This time it is, who were the Gurleys? Where did the come from?  Persistence is what it took to locate Sarah Gurley, our great grandmother. Now the question is can we go a generation back into the past to locate her kin?

It is a puzzle, detective problem... The odd thing is I have a lifetime of avoiding puzzles, and no love for detective stories. So this is more like an obsession. Or perhaps it is possession.

Whatever it is, the spirits of the past are pushing to continue the search.
And I seem to comply.

Greencastle, Pennsylvania: It Takes a Village

Sarah Gurley and her origins have stubbornly remained buried in the dust of the past.  She has resisted the head-on search method of shaking all the records that might contain her name.  She has resisted the backdoor method, searching our  DNA connections. We are stuck. Sarah G's origins continue to elude us.

To solve this mystery the Search Sisters decide to go sideways.We aim to meet the people that surrounded our people. To do this we must build the village of Greencastle, Pennsylvania 1855 and populate it with FANS (the friends and neighbors of Sarah G).

We review the names on our Allison tree to locate aunts, uncles, cousins.  We find McLanahans, Boggs, Johnstons. Wilkins. We consider the contemporaries of Sarah Gurley Allison and her children John R. Allison and Mary Louisa Allison.  The employer: George Ziegler. The blacksmith: Charles Hartman. The medic: Doctor Boggs. 

We dig up maps of Franklin County. We discover the county shifts: Franklin was once Lancaster. It was also Cumberland. Before that it was Chester. We peer at the tangled geography of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia.  We study the roads.  We trace creeks and rivers.  

We look at the muster rolls containing the names of the soldiers of Franklin County. We read about of the war of 1812. (What was THAT war about?).  So many questions....

We stalk the library and the internet archives to read the history of Presbyterian churches in the Cumberland Valley. We locate the cemeteries. We collect images. We find portraits and attach them to the family tree.

We build a separate tree called Antrim Greencastle tree that includes everyone in the village for 100 years: McLanahans, Boggs, Johnstons, Wilkins, and Allisons.  

Still no kin of Sarah G.  Where, oh where, can her clan be?

The Will of Sarah Gurley Allison 1859 Transcribed

Sarah didn't write her will. Her wishes were related to the Franklin County, Pa. probate court
by relatives J McLanahan and William Allison.

Sarah Allison died in 1859 leaving two surviving children; John R Allison and Louisa Allison. 

Now we definitely know John R. had a sister Louisa. We thought there was another sister, Mary. She is not mentioned in the will. Perhaps she died. Or perhaps she was Mary Louisa, and we were confused.  John R was only 16. Louisa was also not of age.  Sarah didn't appear to be a wealthy woman, leaving only some bedding, silver, furniture and a watch.  

The witnesses that sign the will are relatives: Jas C McLanahan and William Allison. The executor is a man called Charles Hartman.  Stella's research indicates he may have been the village blacksmith.  

What was his relationship to Sarah G? How exactly were the witnesses related to Sarah?  

The Search Sisters have more mysteries to unravel.

Sarah Gurley Allison

So far the Search Sisters have been unsuccessful at finding kin for our great grandmother Sarah Gurley Allison.  We have looked in Pennsylvania, in Maryland, on ships lists and immigrants records.

Sarah has resisted our search efforts so far. Gurley. Gourley. Gerly. Gourley, so many ways to spell her name.  Sarah G had the bad luck to live in the time where ladies are reduced to a check mark on the census under a husband’s name. Her husband died leaving her alone to raise her children around Greencastle, Pennsylvania . No Gourleys live in Greencastle. Perhaps she was from Virginia?....  She didn’t own property, or at least she doesn't appear to be taxed for her property. 

Stella and I  decided to try again. We sacrificed a sunny Saturday in May in the basement library of the California Genealogical Society in Oakland. Late in the afternoon Stella discovered Sarah Allison’s last will and testament in records of Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

Finally. Something. 
Finding her will is a break through. 

Lillian Zoa Dionne: Our Girl From Kankakee

 Lillian Zoe Diionne 1881 - 1957

Lillian Zoa Dionne was tall, dignified and was given to scolding outbursts in French.  I remember her as someone who wore hats and gloves to church. She favored floral print dresses and did not put up with nonsense. I recall my mother, Marie Ida Maltos Allison, asking her to speak english when her french came fast and furious.  I didn't care what she spoke, because when I first met her I didn't speak anything.  I was zero and Lillian was in her late sixties. Perhaps that was why she seemed so tall. 

My memories of grand mama Lillian are the impressions of a toddler. She was a widow and lived with my family for a number of years and then moved to Utah to live with her other daughter, Juanita Maltos Rogers.   After she moved, I never saw her again.  Still, I was curious about her.

What I knew about Lillian Z. came mostly from the memories of my mother Marie.  I knew Lillian Dionne was French Canadian.  I also knew she was from Kankakee, Illinois.  As a kid I could hold these conflicting facts in my mind. No problem.   I knew she came from a big family. I was told she was related to the Dionne Quintuplets. (I had no idea what a quintuplet was.) She had sisters and cousins in Los Angeles.  

Sometimes mom packed up her little girls and we visited this clan of Dionnes and Lamberts in LA.  These visits required a small girl to be on best behavior for a couple of days. I was deeply bored as I squirmed in Aunt Stella's (Lillian's sister's) formal living room with a grand piano with a bunch of relatives in their church clothes after a long, tedious Sunday lunch.  

I decided then and there I didn't like French Canadians much. Clearly they were too dull for words. Why would anyone spend five minutes with them? They have been last on the Search Sisters genealogical list to explore.   

I was wrong. Very wrong.

Pulling the threads on Lillian Dionne's tree has revealed an amazing, deep history of the French in the Americas. She is from a lineage that includes Quebecois from a very early era, as wells as some of the first families of Port Royal in the Canadian maritime provinces, and families of Cajuns that found their way to Louisiana after they were expelled from Acadia.

Grandmere Lillian Zoa Dionne b. 1881 has opened the door and connected us to a world of history we didn't know was there. Discovering French Canadians and their culture has been fascinating and fun.   

Merci Lillian Z!