REMEMBERING OUR ANCESTORS–AND HOW TO HANDLE WHAT WE KNOW–(AND A GIVEAWAY!) by Cheryl Pierson

42 thoughts on “REMEMBERING OUR ANCESTORS–AND HOW TO HANDLE WHAT WE KNOW–(AND A GIVEAWAY!) by Cheryl Pierson”

1. I haven’t learned any family secrets. I have copies of love letters from my great-grandparents. They died during the Spanish Flu. Their 11 living children were orphaned,but they managed to stay in touch, having annual family reunions.

   • Denise, that’s a story in itself! So many people died in that flu. My granddad’s younger sister (I think she was 17 or so) went to a funeral of one of her best friends and caught it and died. My mom told me that story so many times. She died of it. That’s so sad about your gr grandparents leaving so many kids. That probably happened more than we can ever imagine. At least they were able to keep connected, and I’m sure that was hard to do. Thanks for stopping by!

2. My great grandmother first name was Cinderella and she was buried under maiden name. I’m not sure why, although she was married 5 times. She divorced her husbands and this happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s.i was fascinated knowing that as a child. I enjoy finding out interesting information on ancestors.

   • WOW, Karijean! That really is amazing considering the time period, to have had so many divorces. Don’t you wish you could know what was going through her mind? There is a good story in that, too. Sure does make you wonder. I love that she was named Cinderella! Good to see you today!

3. Hey Cheryl! Interesting article on your family tree! I also wish to know what happened to Ike. So sad about your father’s family. Well, yes, I do have something interesting. Back in those days no one traveled far unless, you were adventurous and traveled west. Keep that in mind. My mother’s family grew up in Stantenville, GA. Her father contracted Parkinson’s and the doctor recommended to move further south. To me, Stantenville is not all that far to Live Oak, FL, but they ended up on a farm there when my mother was 9.

   Years later, my mother’s sister picked up the genealogy bug. And gathered a lot of information before everything was on line. While my daughter was in college, she did research on my father’s side, and learned and found a good bit of information. My aunt combined my daughter’s information with hers.

   Now, I will tell you about my aunts, my mother’s sisters. They all said they were glad to leave Georgia, so they wouldn’t end up marrying kin. It’s been a family joke for years. I’ve heard them many times comment on it.

   My father’s mother’s maiden name was Lanier. It is French. Her grandfather married a Cherokee. That is pretty neat. Wish I had met her. The things I would have asked. Anyway, what did my Aunt find out when she combined my daughter’s information on my father’s side to my mother’s side? My father’s 5 great grandfather and my mother’s 4 great grandfather was John Lanier. That’s right. Is that secret enough? I have to grin, although my father had already passed when we learned of this, would have grinned too. However, my mother didn’t. She didn’t find it “funny” at all. But, we all know that this has probably happened a lot. How could it not? Am I worried about it? Five and fourth generations? Ummm…..no, not really. But, my aunts worried about. There were 6 girls and three boys. My mother is the oldest living now. Three of the oldest has passed including my genealogy aunt. My mother is 88. My grandmother (Grandma Tom)lived to be 94.

   Sorry this was so long! LOL Almost as long as your article Cheryl! Many blessings to you and your family! Your book looks interesting! I find I like the short stories these days instead of a novel.

   • Hi Tracy! Don’t ever be sorry about a long post! They are always so interesting and I love them! I LOVE THIS STORY about your family! OH WOW. What are the odds? That is just amazing! I think it’s funny, too. I wouldn’t be worried about it at all with the generations that have passed now. Just remember how first cousins used to marry each other. That is just a wonderful discovery. I love stuff like that. Thanks so much for stopping by and telling us this tale–you know what it made me think of right off was the story of a young girl who came over from Italy and was so scared at Ellis Island. She didn’t know anyone, she was all alone. She sat down on a bench just wondering what to do. In a bit a young man came up to her and asked her what was wrong. He was a older than she was by a few years, but he spoke Italian. As they talked they realized they were both from the same little village in Italy–now just think of the chances of that–but as the conversation went on, they also discovered they were distantly related. They ended up getting married. I had a Life magazine that had that story in it from MANY years ago–I read it when I was a youngster and thought how romantic that was and how amazing that it happened that way, because just imagine how BUSY Ellis Island was back then and what a chance meeting that was. And a little closer to home, (and Iaughed when I read the part of your post about them talking about not wanting to end up marrying a relative, because that was how it was for my family too, down in SE Oklahoma–both sides of my parents’ families lived in that same area and so I had cousins on both sides that went to school together but were not related to each other since some were on my mom’s side and some on my dad’s side), the story about my sister, Karen, who went to college in SE Oklahoma in this area I was talking about and one day, she and my mom were on the phone talking and she was telling Mom about this new boy she’d met and how cute he was and how she really liked him. They were going on a date the next night. Mom asked his name and she told her. Mom said, “OH…honey… he’s your second cousin.” LOLLOL Well, we didn’t live down there in that area, so they didn’t know each other, but he was the son of my mom’s first cousin that she was really close to, so she knew his name, etc. SIGH. Talk about star-crossed, because he’d evidently gone home and raved about the “new girl” he’d met to his mom, too. LOL And she told him the same thing my mom told Karen.

     I’m so glad you stopped by today. I love all these things that happen by chance. Have a wonderful week, Tracy!

4. I really don’t know any family secrets here. I know I had a cousin that was checking our family ancestry but she pasted away and never finished it. I am not sure what happened to her info. This was on my father’s side of the family and he had 11 brother’s and sisters. So it was a large family. My mother only had one twin brother so her family was pretty small.

   • Quilt Lady, if you are on Ancestry, there’s a way you can access some of that from other members of the family, I believe. I am not really very computer savvy, and a lot of what I do on there is hit or miss, but I need to sit down and take time to learn what I’m doing better. I know my aunt had a LOT of our genealogy completed, but I don’t know how to go to her information and get it all. I kind of like doing it for myself, but it would be nice to have that that she did to check against and be sure. The aunt I mentioned was one of the youngest of my mom’s siblings–there were 11 of them, too. My dad’s family was small–just him, his sister JoAnne, and his younger brother, Kay.

     I’ve found a lot of interesting stuff on both sides of my family and would love to just sit and work on finding it all and piecing it together all day. So glad you came by today!

5. I have never gone back and looked. I wanted to. I know a match came up for my uncle but he was listed as a half brother. There is a story there.

   • Oh, goodness, Debra. Yes, you’re right. There is a fabulous story there, I’m sure. I worked with a woman, Elizabeth, several years back who talked about being raised as the younger sister of a woman she learned later was really her mother. She’s had her VERY young and couldn’t care for her alone, of course, so that was the solution, but Elizabeth was told this only after she was grown. They loved each other dearly and I don’t guess anything changed much, but I’m sure it was a shock to find that out, anyhow.

6. Good morning, Cheryl. I am enthralled with geneology, but have not paid for a membership to have all I DO NOT know available to me. Occasionally they give hints, but not enough. The farthest back I recall is my Great Grandfather, on my mother’s side, was in the Civil War under General Sherman. I also saw the other day, on my mother’s side, there was some aristocracy, such as a duke/duchess, but without paying for the info, I could not get any further. I have created a family tree in My Heritage.com. If money were not an issue, I would definitely delve deeper, much deeper. My great grandparents came over from Germany, to Ellis Island and New York, then later moved westward and ended up in Iowa.

   Your story of your father’s family is quite intriguing. I see why you want more.

   • Judy, you’re in the same boat I am. I have kind of just told myself for now I need to find out what I can with the tools I can pay for, which is the basic membership, and once I go as far as a I can with that, then I will pay for another level and be able to access other things. I want to find out about further back–this is kind of a little story about amazing coincidences, but when I had my son, Casey, we had pretty much already decided to name him Derrick. I liked both names but still was undecided. But just before he was born, I told my husband I really liked Casey better–I couldn’t explain why. So we named him Casey. When he was about 3 and my daughter about 6 we were at a family reunion. One of the older women there, El;oise, a first cousin to my dad, said, “I’m so glad you named him Casey. That’s a good family name.” I didn’t know what she was talking about. She went on to explain that we had ancestors from Ireland with the last name of Casey. My aunt mailed me a copy of a ship’s manifest that showed James Casey on board the ship that docked in either NY or Pennsylvania, I can’t remember. Also, there was some kind of marriage paper that listed him being married to an “Indian woman” named Horseshoe. That’s something I really really would love to research. But I still get chills when I think of that coincidence–I don’t think it was a coincidence. I think it was a connection that I never knew about, and I’m so glad that Eloise said what she did at the reunion or I never would have known.

     Honestly, when I am able to get it all sorted on Ancestry, I’m going to sit down with a huge chart and write on it, all the people, names and dates, and make notes about them if there are any notable things to put down. I do a lot better with the physical-ness of paper to look at rather than the computer. LOL So glad you stopped by, Judy! it’s frustrating, isn’t it, to not be able to go on down the rabbit hole when you want to.

7. I did Ancestry.com and was totally expecting to find half-siblings in Korea. My father was sent to Korea when he was only 17 and I’ve seen all the movies about soldiers in the Korean war. I was surprised when I didn’t find any. My father has been dead many years now and he never spoke of the war.

   • You made me laugh, Rhonda! LOL Yes, I would have expected that, too. My husband spent time in Vietnam (before we ever met) in the Navy, and I have thought of that same scenario many times. It would not be anything uncommon to have a relative, whether a half-sibling or a son or daughter appear on the doorstep, even, wanting to connect. But my husband has said many times about how the military impresses on you WHAT CAN HAPPEN if you do have relations in a foreign place and what the repercussions can be, more physcially with the diseases than anything else. So I think he must have listened. LOL It’s too bad your dad couldn’t talk about the war, but many many soldiers can’t. It’s got to be so horrible, and something I think they feel could turn people away from them if they knew what they’d seen, and what they’d felt or done. We’ve talked some about Vietnam, but I know there is a lot he has never told me and never will.

     Thanks for commenting, Rhonda! Have a great week!

8. Cheryl, I did genealogy research for over twenty years trying to find my great-great-grandparents on my father’s side. My grandfather swore we had Native American blood, but I never found out. My great-grandfather and a brother show up in Missouri in 1850 in the census for that year they both say they don’t know where their parents were born. I have accumulated a lot of information about him. I visited Missouri and stood on the land he once farmed. But I never learned who his parents were. The two brothers were born in NY and doing genealogy in NY is difficult to impossible, I’ve heard. I even had my DNA done and it shows no Native American blood. The odd things is that in researching Native American records I found a family with my surname – Birt. Unfortunately it was around the turn of the century, not my great-grandfather’s time. But isn’t that interesting that there was a Native American family in Indian Territory named Birt? How I wish I could research their line to find where they got that surname. Genealogy is fascinating. It’s like finding little mysteries and then trying to solve them. Someday, new records will come to light. I’m just not sure I’ll still be around to learn of them.

   • I learned something about those DNA tests, Charlene. Did you know that DNA can be different for SIBLINGS born of the same parents? Some can show more of one type of ethnicity than others even from the siblings. I had no idea. I have one I ordered from Ancestry, but I misplaced it. When I find it, I will do it and send it off to see what it has to say. My sister did one with 23 and Me. I wouldn’t put any faith in it because they ended up pretty much having to shut down because of the inconsistencies of their results over the years. But anyhow, her DNA showed Egyptian. LOLLOL OMG, we have laughed so hard over that. And not saying it “can’t” be true. Anything is possible. I used to tease her by walking like an Egyptian when we were together. LOLLOL

     That’s really interesting about Birt being a surname in the NA records you found. But you know, there had to be someone else that came before your grandfather with his last name, so it could have been his great grandfather, or another ancestor. I love genealogy. And I love it no matter what I find in it–there are sure some fascinating surprises! Glad you came over!

9. Wow so interesting! I haven’t done a genealogy research for my family but heard lots of stories of my parent growing up, and how my grandparents grew up as well. There was talk that my dad had another daughter with some woman a few years back but nothing really come of it, Dad has denied it.

   • Laura, my mom told me so many, many stories. I was the youngest in my family, and how I wish I had listened better to everything she told me. She was like Aunt Pittypat in Gone With the Wind. She actually remembered a lot of the people I of coruse never met–her grandparents lived very close to her family’s house when she was growing up, and she was the oldest of 11 siblings, so she carried a LOT of responsiibility. She knew how everyone was related, and she knew all the family stories. But a lot of that didn’t interest me because I was young and had other things to think about and I didn’t evern know “those people” anyhow. NOW, how I wish I’d written it down while she talked about it.

     There are always stories about people having a secret child and so on, but you just have to remember a lot of that is jealousy, wishful thinking, and wanting to cause problems. I would take your dad at his word. It’s probably not true.

     Have a fabulous week, Laura. Spring is on the way!

10. I don’t really know of any “secrets,” though I did find out from what a cousin has found, that my however many gr grandfather on my maternal grandmother’s side that a however many gr uncle actually owned slaves. My direct lineage did not, and my however many gr grandfather fought on the side of the Confederacy only because he knew the fighting would take place in the South, and he fought to protect his land. I know that supposedly the last name on my paternal side was changed because of something, but no one knew exactly why, and the family Bible that had that info in it has been lost.

    • Trudy, I found out that my grandfather was (for a short time) a member of the KKK. But how shameful is that! Good lord. I had however many “greats” grandfathers that fought on both sides in the Civil War. My husband’s family broke into two factions a few generations back and the original spelling of their last name was Pearson, but when that divide happened (and no one remembers why now) the side of the family he was in changed their spelling to Pierson. That’s one thing that makes genealogy so hard to work on, just stuff like that. Our family (my mom’s side) owned a beautiful plantation in either Georgia or SC, I can’t remember which. This was way back before the Civil War happened, so I’m certain they had slaves. I would like to go see if there’s anything left of it but I’m sure it’s long gone.
      Have a great week, Trudy!

11. I wish I would have recorded my dad’s cowboy stories. He went to work on a ranch at 13 years old to support his family after his dad was diagnosed with cancer. The ranch owner, Mrs. Montgomery, would make him come in the house when he got off the bus and do his homework before she would let him go to work, and she paid him for that time. She was determined he would graduate high school, and he did. He was still working on the ranch when he met my mom, but took a regular job after they got married. On my mom’s side of the family, there’s a mystery surrounding the death of my great-grandfather that I would love to uncover. My aunt claims that he was arrested and then sent to an insane asylum because he was an alcoholic and would have been in withdrawal, which was reason to be committed in those days. She said he died down there and my aunt is supposed to have went and got his body and buried it in the family cemetery, but my aunt doesn’t think there’s a body in his grave. She thinks his wife wouldn’t have had the money to go get him. I would like to know the real story, maybe someday I’ll have time to dig into it.

    • Oh wow. That would be so fascinating to find out, and with all the technological advances of today, there might be a way to solve that mystery! Back then, you could commit people for all kinds of crazy reasons. Especially women, but I know you could for men, too, if a person had enemies. Best of luck on your sleuthing, Kim! That sounds so intriguing. Glad you stopped by!

12. don’t know any

    • Thanks for stopping by!

13. Cheryl, tracing family roots is addictive. If I wasn’t a writer, I’d be a genealogist. There are MANY hidden secrets in my family. I discovered my grandmother (age 40), already with 5 pretty grown children plus pregnant with my mom, ran off with a 21 year old neighbor and I’ve always wanted to know what happened. Did her husband beat her and the neighbor wanted to get her out of there? She looked even older than 40, so tired and washed out in the pictures with a big goiter on her neck. So, she wasn’t attractive at all. Maybe she was kind. My mom was devoted to her. My grandpa Ben brought my grandma to Texas and stayed with her until she died in 1942 and they had one child together. She was 64 when she died. She never divorced John Ellis or went back to him. All the people who knew the story have since passed so I’ll never get the answer. There are other secrets also that I uncovered in my research. Genealogy is fascinating. A wonderful post, my Filly Sister.

    • Linda, I’m so glad you enjoyed this. I know I’ve written about my genealogy before, but this time I wanted to write about what if something unpleasant turns up in our findings. LOL I’m sure I will come across MORE than I have so far. A funny story. My aunt Marilyn, who did all the genealogy research on Mom’s side of the family, was so excited to tell Mom that she’d discovered that we are related to Lyndon Bains Johnson. Mom was a staunch Republican back in that day, and she was horrified! She said, “Oh, Marilyn, please don’t tell anyone. We would never want that to get out!” LOLLOL There is just no telling what you’ll find if you look long enough! I still laugh out loud when I remember that scene, and the look on Mom’s face, as if that were the very worst thing that anyone could even find out about our family. I wish I had days on end to just immerse myself in the genealogy stuff and study it. It really is addictive, and is something that really does hold my interest. Thanks for your kind words! Love you!

14. My dad’s cousin did our family tree, its goes back to the 1600’s in Ireland. I know there are a few skeletons in the closet on my dad’s side and a few on my mom’s side. She was Campbell and her family like my dad’s came from Scotland and a few from Ireland too. I know a bit of the family history, but as you open those closets, you have to be ready for what falls out and I really don’t need anymore drama in my family….lol

    • Kathleen, you made me laugh. Well, I don’t need anymore drama either, but at this point there’s really no one who would care that much on either side of my family, so I am someday just going to sit down and have a field day with it. And I’m going to try to remember all the things Mom told me so I can write them down and pass them on to my kids, if they care. If they don’t, maybe there’ll be someone later on who WILL, I don’t know, but at least I know I will have ‘done my part’ . My ancestors, some of them, also came from Ireland and Scotland. I want to research those records, too, but those cost extra so I’m trying to get my research here in the USA done as far as I can go before I move on to that next level. Thanks so much for stopping by today!

15. I have tried doing family history but never come up with anything like what you found. I use the Family Search website. Maybe Ancestry is better. Is there a trick to discovering these stories? All I find mostly are census records, wedding and divorce records and Find A Grave. I must be doing something wrong. lol I did learn something about one of my uncles that I had never known before, my daddy’s older brother. My daddy was born in 1899, the youngest of eleven children. Three of them died in childhood. This one uncle of mine lived to be around 12 I think. The story I was told by a cousin is that he and his sister, my aunt, were playing in the attic one day and found a gun in a trunk there. He somehow accidentally shot himself in the stomach. He was a deaf mute and convinced his sister not to tell their mother. She had just had another child. She and my granddaddy did not find out about it until too late to save him. Tragic!

    • Oh wow, Sarah! That is VERY sad, isn’t it? What he must have gone through being shot in the stomach! And that sister probably lived with guilt for her entire life. On Ancestry, I did discover that there will be a notation somtimes of a written history or a story, or something like that, I can’t remember exactly what it’s called. BUT, those are pretty fascinating because those are things that people have written about what they remember or knew about that ancestor. And it’s okay to say, “It was said that she was a full-blood Cherokee and her name was White Swan, but that has never been proven” or something like that, just so you can include the things that MIGHT provide a clue to someone else in the family who might also have heard a version of that story and be able to add more to it. My aunt wrote some of those kinds of things when talking about her mom and dad, my grandparents, and that was nice to read. But the census records can be really telling, and I also found some military records where my gr gr gr grandma applied for her husband’s military pension from the Civil War when he died. SHE was a lot younger than HE was, so she got that pension for a good long while. But it was not much by today’s standards. Seems like it was around $12/month. Still, these are ways to prove how your ancestors figured in to the military structure and it was how my aunt Marilyn found the proof that we could use (if we’d been so inclined) to apply to join the Daughters of the American Revolution when she found something like that for one of our ancestors in the Revolutionary War.I wish I knew more. I wish I had been in a position to join Ancestry when my aunt was still living and working on all that and she could have just sent it all to me. Sigh.

16. One of my cousins researched our grandmothers family back to the 1500’s in Holland. Fortunately he printed copies for each of the seven siblings in my mom’s family and I have my mom’s copy. One of my husband’s cousins on his mother’s side wrote a book of the genealogy of their greatgrandfather whose surname was Longbottom. That actually has pictures of the original home in England because several family members including my daughters have connected with a cousin who grew up there and her family is still in England. One son moved to New Zealand, another to Montana, and the other to Iowa and eventually to Washington State. The book is primarily about the Washington family but has lots of background history.

    I have done some research on my father-in-law’s family but like others I have not paid the subscription fee so have been limited in what I found. I had good luck with “Find a Grave” except some of the information I found was incorrect according to the historical paperwork in our possession including the travel papers from when they came to Ohio from Switzerland in 1844. Since I was not a paying customer I could not make corrections. That was several years ago and I haven’t done anything more on my research. I did make notebooks with the information I found for our daughters, nephew, and my husband’s cousin on that side of the family.

    It really can lead you down the rabbit hole with all the fascinating things you learn as you research family.:)

    • YES, Alice! And what I need is more time to go down that rabbit hole! LOL It sounds like you have a good start on a lot of it, and a good foundation for others to take up where you left off even if you never get back to it again. I think it’s all just so fascinating, and makes you realize these were real people, not just an “ancestor” but someone who had an interesting life–even if it might have seemed mundane to them at the time. Thanks for stopping by!

17. Unfortunately, genealogy research can be expensive so I can’t indulge in that hobby. However, through stories and from Gr Grandma on her deathbed, she came from a very, very rich French/German family. She lost all her ties to them when she ran away to marry a poor gardener. She changed the spelling of her maiden name so no one could find her. She brought with her a disabled son from her marriage that she never ended because their family were strict Catholics! She gave us the spelling before she died but I can’t remember it. It was French.

    • Carrie, you are right about the expense. I limit myself to subscribing to Ancestry every six months. It’s $119 every 6 months, and I figure I get that much entertainment out of it, as it boils down to about $20 per month, and it’s well worth that to me. But that’s also why I have not subscribed to the higher levels of Ancestry like being able to access overseas records and a lot of the newspaper articles and so on. The newspaper articles will be my next splurge once I do more on this basic level. That is really interesting about your gr grandmother! oh, they must have been so in love for her to have given up everything like that and gone with him. What a love story! So glad you stopped by today!

18. Sort of once my family and I did our side of the family family tree and found a lot intermarried and even had royalty in my family tree it Queen Elizabeth the one before the last Queen Elizabeth 1

    • Crystal, isn’t that fascinating? I haven’t gone back to England/Scotland/Ireland yet, but my gr grandmother’s maiden name was Stewart, spelled just like yours. My sister Karen has told me the story many times of when my mom was pregnant with me, and my sisters, Karen and Annette were 10 and 12 when I was born. Karen still laughs about how she and Annette prayed every single night that I would be a girl because if I’d been a boy, they were planning to name me Stewart since it was a family name. LOLLOL Well, thank goodness their prayers were answered. LOL I do wonder if, when I start working on that part of the research, I will learn that we are somehow connected to the royal Stewarts. I didn’t know this for a long time, but the Tudor Stuarts first spelled their name “Stewart” and changed it later. So there are possibilities! LOL Thanks for coming by!

19. I’ve done some genealogy on Ancestry and another one Family tree DNA. It wasn’t through those sites, but my parents eventually told us, when I was 46 that my Dad was not my biological Dad. I asked his name but that’s all I had to go on. I eventually moved back to CA where I grew up and having done some research I found the last name in a phone book, there were 2. I called one and left a message, and then the other who turned out to be my uncle. The other was a brother I never knew I had, actually the uncle told me I had 3 half siblings. 2 brothers and a sister, and I had 2 sisters. Mine was very convoluted, and because it had been a secret in our family no one wanted to talk about it. My 2 sisters didn’t talk to me for 3 months because I found my siblings, met my bio dad, and started somewhat of a relationship with them. I since retired to Colorado so I don’t see any of them, except when I visit my family, which hasn’t been to often, due to costs.

    • Carol, I think almost any person who found out something like that would want to know their bio parent and siblings, or half-siblings. That’s only natural, in my opinion. There’s a story in my husband’s family about something similar, about some of his half siblings being in disagreement about meeting up with their bio dad when he asked–after they were grown adults and he hadn’t seen them since they were tiny children. Two of the four wanted to do it, one was not in the area, and the other one didn’t want anythign to do with him. I think it should be up to each person to satisfy their own soul as to what they choose to do. I’m sorry your sisters acted like that to you about your decision, and i’m glad you went ahead and met your bio dad and half-siblings. If you hadn’t, you might have always wondered. That took a lot of courage on your part.

20. Hi Cheryl,
    I’ve done quite a bit of genealogy that turned up no surprises, although a cousin finally found the link to my GGGrandfather’s parents which allowed us to follow the family back to Edward who was Samuel Hopkins manservant and a party to quite a few lawsuits and legal proceedings after Plymouth Colony was established.
    I got an Ancestry DNA test a few years back which disproved the family legend that my GGrandmother Bledsoe was Cherokee/Osage. I have no Native American DNA.

    The most intriguing bit of family history I’d like to resolve is regarding my dad’s older brother, Lionel. Lionel was a pretty boy and spent a lot of his youth in Hollywood as a model and wannabe actor. He enlisted in the Army in WWII, trained in Texas, where he did well and was promoted. He also wrote to his mother that he’d met a girl from a fine family. Then was sent for further training in Georgia with the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment in 1943. Midway through that year, he apparently got in trouble and was arrested and held until December when he was discharged. Instead of going home, he went to Atlanta to “look for work”. In late January, he was killed. The police report stated “by a security guard while trying to rob a warehouse”. A couple of things don’t jibe. First, he received nearly $400 in back pay when he was discharged (I have his pay records), so why would he be involved in a robbery less than 2 months later? Also, he was stitched across the chest with .45 caliber slugs from a Thompson. At the time, only the military, law enforcement, and gangsters had Thompsons. Not something a security guard would have had access to.
    The police reports from that era were warehoused and destroyed years ago, and his military service record was one of those destroyed in the fire at the archives.
    So, as near as I can researchguess, someone in his unit learned that he was gay, which resulted in confinement and eventual discharge. Someone, probably from his unit, wasn’t satisfied with that outcome, followed him to Atlanta and lured him to the warehouse where he was murdered. I’ve pulled all the threads, and the records are simply no longer available either due to age or mishap.
    The only way I know about the Thompson, is that my grandfather let that slip on one of the rare occasions he would say anything about Lionel. He travelled from L.A. to Atlanta and brought the body home for burial in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles.

    • Dennis, that is just fascinating, and I feel your pain at not being able to adequately resolve what happened to him. These people from our past become real and we feel they need some closure of some kind, and of course, with all your sleuthing into Lionel’s case and the loose threads that can never be tied up, there can be no resolution, especially as the years pass and everyone who might have said anything pass on. I don’t know how a parent could live with having to go pick up the body of a murdered son or daughter. That would just tear my heart out. There are so many injustices in this world that will never be righted, even if we KNOW what really happened NOW. No way to ever go back and fix anything at this point.

      I’m so glad you came over and read and commented! We need some male opinions over here! Don’t be a stranger, Dennis!

21. Sorry I missed this post. I have lots of stories my brother dug up when he got into researching family history and even teaching classes on how to do it. I wish I had lived close enough to take them. He wrote several books on the different ranches of the family. There were some surprises and things I need to follow up on for him. One of these days if you do another post on family histories, I’ll mention a few. It is always so interesting to hear family stories. Like you, I wish I had written down some of the stories I heard the grandparents and great aunts and uncles talking about. I do remember asking my maternal grandfather about the past once and he just said “why do you want to know about all that old stuff?” and that was the end of it. After what my brother discovered it is no wonder he wanted to keep quiet. Just a tidbit. – his family home straddled the Canadian New York border, During Prohibition, they would bring booze into the kitchen which was in Canada and legal. They would take it out the front door in New York State where it was illegal and make a run for the speakeasies in New York City. I know he did ditch a car with a full load into the lake when he was being chased by the police.

    • Patricia, those classes are what I NEED! I just know the very basics and I want to learn how to access everything and KNOW WHAT I’M DOING. LOL My grandparents never spoke of memories or happenings in the past, neither my mom’s parents or my dad’s. The only thing that my dad’s mom would do sometimes (and this just scared the fool out of me when I was little) was just out of the blue sometimes we’d all be sitting there and she’d just pop up with, “Luther killed our baby…” Uh….well talk about a toe-tapper conversation starter! I think though she seemed normal in most things that the death of her child in that car wreck did something to her mind and there were times she’d just blurt that out. When she did, one of the adults would just say, “Boy, I sure hope we get some rain…” or something like that and steer the conversation to other things and it would just be forgotten–by everyone except ME who didn’t know that story and wondered if he actually KILLED one of their kids. That was pretty awful.

      That’s a great story about what your grandfather did about Prohibition–that would make something good to include in a story sometime, wouldn’t it? I love those kinds of things! Glad you came by, Patricia!

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