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Arkansas: Nana and the Aunts | Episode 94 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:08
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:11
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 0:22
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:31
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 0:38
  Crista Cowan: Early in my career at Ancestry, I was attending a genealogy conference, one of the first that I had been to as an employee and a genealogist and not just a student.
• 0:50
  Crista Cowan: And this woman came up to me to ask me some questions about her family history.
• 0:55
  Crista Cowan: And she was particularly interested in her father's line of the family tree.
• 1:00
  Crista Cowan: She wanted to know more about her surname and her dad and his dad and his dad.
• 1:04
  Crista Cowan: And she had hit a brick wall.
• 1:06
  Crista Cowan: And as she started talking to me, I was giving her suggestions for how to get around or over or under that particular brick wall by researching who the women were in the lives of those men.
• 1:19
  Crista Cowan: Because when you can't differentiate two men by the same name apart, look at who their wives were, look at who their children were, look at look at the relationships around them.
• 1:31
  Crista Cowan: Well, her immediate response to me when I made that simple suggestion was, I don't care about the women.
• 1:36
  Crista Cowan: I only want to know about the men who had my surname.
• 1:41
  Crista Cowan: She was so narrowly, narrowly focused on that.
• 1:43
  Crista Cowan: And I was so baffled by that for a multitude of reasons, and have continued to be baffled by that when people are just so focused on one very tiny sliver of a branch of their family tree, and particularly when they're focused only on the men.
• 2:00
  Crista Cowan: Now, I know women can be hard to find in family history records, which is one of the reasons why it's easier sometimes to focus on the men.
• 2:09
  Crista Cowan: But the women's stories need to be told too.
• 2:13
  Crista Cowan: Now, this episode is airing nowhere near Mother's Day, but I thought I would tell you a little bit about the mothers in my family tree.
• 2:22
  Crista Cowan: Because while some people focus on the male line, I want to focus today on the female line of my family tree.
• 2:30
  Crista Cowan: My mother was born in Long Beach, California.
• 2:34
  Crista Cowan: But I grew up my entire life hearing about how her parents were both born in northwest Arkansas.
• 2:42
  Crista Cowan: My grandfather in a little town that is now under a lake called Montana in Benton County, and my grandmother in a town called Green Forest in Carroll County, Arkansas.
• 2:54
  Crista Cowan: And all I ever heard about from my grandma and her sisters, who we lovingly called Nana and the Ants, was about their deep, deep Arkansas roots.
• 3:06
  Crista Cowan: And I loved hearing about it from them because my grandma, even though she lived in Southern California from World War II until she died, she had the lightest little Arkansas lil to her voice.
• 3:20
  Crista Cowan: And every time I visit Arkansas and hear people who talk like my Nana, it feels a little bit like home.
• 3:27
  Crista Cowan: The very first time I went to Arkansas, I was, I think, 12, maybe 13 that summer.
• 3:34
  Crista Cowan: My family decided to go to a family reunion for my mom's family.
• 3:38
  Crista Cowan: Now, typically we had those reunions in Southern California because most of my Nana and her siblings all migrated there during the war.
• 3:47
  Crista Cowan: But some of the siblings' cousins had made their way back to Arkansas.
• 3:53
  Crista Cowan: Some had stayed in Arkansas and never left.
• 3:55
  Crista Cowan: And so there was a family reunion planned.
• 3:58
  Crista Cowan: And my dad had a business trip planned that same summer, but it was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
• 4:03
  Crista Cowan: So we decided to put ourselves into the family van, myself, my parents, the twins who were just younger than me.
• 4:10
  Crista Cowan: We left the two younger boys in LA with my grandparents and we set off on a cross-country two-week vacation.
• 4:17
  Crista Cowan: We went across the country up to Milwaukee and then from Milwaukee down to Arkansas just in time for the family reunion.
• 4:25
  Crista Cowan: Now, at the time, I knew my Nana and I knew the ants, but I didn't know most of the cousins.
• 4:33
  Crista Cowan: And so this reunion in Arkansas was the first chance that I had to meet a lot of them.
• 4:40
  Crista Cowan: Luckily, my grandma's baby brother, my uncle Corky, he took me around and introduced me to some of the cousins who were my age.
• 4:49
  Crista Cowan: And we were able to very quickly, as only children can, strike up a friendship over a game of volleyball and found our way down to the creek where we could take off our socks and shoes and dip our feet in the creek.
• 5:03
  Crista Cowan: And I just love that every time I visited Arkansas, even if I visited for work or for some other reason, it has always been ultimately about reconnecting with those roots there in that place.
• 5:21
  Crista Cowan: And that even now I can walk down the main street of Green Forest, Arkansas, and see a family name on a building, a local insurance company, for example, and walk in and say, Hi, um, I am the granddaughter of Lenore Lawrence.
• 5:40
  Crista Cowan: And she married Albert Jefferson Kerr.
• 5:43
  Crista Cowan: And they will immediately know who I am and how I'm related to them.
• 5:47
  Crista Cowan: My Nana was Jessie Lee Kerr when she was born.
• 5:52
  Crista Cowan: And her mother was a woman named Lenore Algerine Lawrence.
• 5:59
  Crista Cowan: Um, the grandkids used to call her Tangerine because they never had heard the name Algerine before.
• 6:06
  Crista Cowan: My great-grandpa called her Allie, but she was Granny Tangerine to her grandkids.
• 6:12
  Crista Cowan: And she was born in Green Forest, Carroll County, Arkansas.
• 6:17
  Crista Cowan: Her mother was a woman named Charity Ann Shipman.
• 6:23
  Crista Cowan: Charity Ann was born in 1843, so 20 years before the Civil War in Green Forest, Arkansas.
• 6:32
  Crista Cowan: Here's what I didn't realize when I was growing up.
• 6:36
  Crista Cowan: My mom always talked about how her parents were from Arkansas and they had deep Arkansas roots.
• 6:42
  Crista Cowan: And I just assumed that meant on all branches of her family tree.
• 6:47
  Crista Cowan: What I didn't realize was that it was just this female line all the way back.
• 6:55
  Crista Cowan: Lenore's husband was born in Missouri.
• 6:57
  Crista Cowan: Charity's husband was born in Georgia.
• 7:00
  Crista Cowan: But these women were all from Arkansas, and not just from Arkansas, but from that one little community right up against the Missouri border in northwest Arkansas.
• 7:12
  Crista Cowan: Now, Charity, she married a young man by the last name of Cox, and he went off to serve in the Civil War and died, leaving her with an infant.
• 7:24
  Crista Cowan: And so when she remarried my great-great-grandfather, um, they ended up having, I think, nine children together.
• 7:32
  Crista Cowan: And so there are a lot, a lot of Lawrence cousins all over Northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri, even today.
• 7:43
  Crista Cowan: And so every time I go to Arkansas and drive down the street and see the name Lawrence or any of the other names of the family members that married into that family, I'm just always amazed at how many people, how many cousins I have in that little part of the world.
• 8:03
  Crista Cowan: I'm also so just amazed at the beauty of it.
• 8:08
  Crista Cowan: I had the opportunity to visit Arkansas with my mom several years ago.
• 8:13
  Crista Cowan: I think my dad was with us, and we went driving out a little tiny country road.
• 8:20
  Crista Cowan: I think, you know, down a holler, the dirt or the road turned into dirt.
• 8:25
  Crista Cowan: What we were looking for was a cemetery.
• 8:28
  Crista Cowan: Because Charity Ann Shipman's mother, her name was Mary Ann Dunlap.
• 8:35
  Crista Cowan: And Mary Ann Dunlap was born in 1822 in not Green Forest, Arkansas.
• 8:41
  Crista Cowan: She was born in Henry County, Tennessee.
• 8:44
  Crista Cowan: And she, with her parents, Jonathan and Ann, migrated from Tennessee to Arkansas, and they came in the 1830s, and they settled in Carroll County in Green Forest.
• 9:02
  Crista Cowan: And this little cemetery out this hilly dirt road that my mom and I were looking for was where Marianne Dunlap and her parents are buried.
• 9:15
  Crista Cowan: And so we went looking for her, and we found her in a corner of a very tiny cemetery with overgrown weeds and sunken um craters practically in the ground.
• 9:30
  Crista Cowan: I think my mom fell at one point walking across what should have been level ground.
• 9:35
  Crista Cowan: Um, but we found her and we were so excited to learn more about her and about her family.
• 9:41
  Crista Cowan: And so that started this journey for me of uncovering more about this particular family, the Dunlap family.
• 9:50
  Crista Cowan: Now, Jonathan Dunlap and Anne Sears, he was from South Carolina, she was from Virginia.
• 9:58
  Crista Cowan: Both of their families migrated to Tennessee right around the time of the New Madrid earthquakes.
• 10:06
  Crista Cowan: I don't know if you know about the New Madrid earthquakes, but they took place in Kentucky.
• 10:10
  Crista Cowan: There was a series of about three or four earthquakes over the course of a few weeks in 18, the winter of 1812, 1813.
• 10:19
  Crista Cowan: And those earthquakes, so out of place for that particular location, upset so many people that they moved.
• 10:29
  Crista Cowan: A lot of people started moving because they were afraid.
• 10:32
  Crista Cowan: They didn't understand earthquakes.
• 10:34
  Crista Cowan: They didn't understand, like that wasn't something they had experienced before.
• 10:38
  Crista Cowan: And so I think the Dunlap family was affected by this.
• 10:41
  Crista Cowan: And they kept kind of looking for a place to settle.
• 10:45
  Crista Cowan: And so they ended up in uh in Henry County, Tennessee for a little period of time.
• 10:49
  Crista Cowan: And that's where Marianne was born.
• 10:52
  Crista Cowan: And then eventually they made their way across Tennessee and then across Arkansas up to Carroll County, where they settled.
• 11:01
  Crista Cowan: Now, when they settled in Carroll County, Tennessee in the 1830s, I was so excited to learn that the family had been there for that long when I started looking at the dates and comparing information and trying to track their migration.
• 11:15
  Crista Cowan: But as I dove into the records of Carroll County, here's what I uncovered.
• 11:20
  Crista Cowan: There was a courthouse fire in 1863.
• 11:25
  Crista Cowan: And so all of the records, all of the marriage records, all of the probate records, all of the deeds, everything that had been in that courthouse that had been there from 1831 when the county was established until 1863, when that courthouse fire happened, had all been destroyed.
• 11:44
  Crista Cowan: And so I don't have marriage records or property records or probate records for any of the family that lived there for those three decades before the new courthouse was built and new records started being kept.
• 12:01
  Crista Cowan: And that was devastating to me because I wanted so much to know more about their story.
• 12:07
  Crista Cowan: So this goal that I've set for myself, and I set it years ago when my mom and I were traipsing our way through that cemetery, continues to be a goal because I continue to work at solving this problem in the absence of records from that burned county.
• 12:23
  Crista Cowan: The is to identify all of the children of Jonathan Dunlap and Anne Sears.
• 12:30
  Crista Cowan: Because there's a lot of rumors and stories and family trees floating around with different numbers of children for them.
• 12:38
  Crista Cowan: And I want to make sure that I know exactly who their children were, that I know who Mary Ann's brothers and sisters were.
• 12:45
  Crista Cowan: And I also want to see if, like her daughter who married the Lawrence and have made themselves abundantly evident in those counties of northwest Arkansas, did the Dunlaps do the same thing?
• 12:59
  Crista Cowan: Have I identified all of their children?
• 13:02
  Crista Cowan: Do I know who their daughters married and so what other surnames came into the family?
• 13:07
  Crista Cowan: And so it's become something of a mission for me, not just to trace the men in my family tree, but to also make sure that I trace the women and that their stories get told in whatever way they can be told.
• 13:21
  Crista Cowan: Here's what I've learned about Marianne so far.
• 13:24
  Crista Cowan: So Marianne Dunlat, born in Tennessee in 1822, came with her parents in the 1830s to northwest Arkansas.
• 13:32
  Crista Cowan: And there she married a man named Jacob Shipman.
• 13:36
  Crista Cowan: And Jacob and Marianne had two children.
• 13:41
  Crista Cowan: And then Jacob died.
• 13:44
  Crista Cowan: He died in 1865, right at the end of the Civil War.
• 13:50
  Crista Cowan: I haven't looked too much into his death, but I suspect, because I know what was happening in Carroll County at the time, that he may have been killed.
• 14:00
  Crista Cowan: There was a lot of conflict in that particular part of the country at the time, not just because of the Civil War, but because in that particular part of Arkansas, there were both Union and Confederate sympathizers.
• 14:14
  Crista Cowan: My Lawrence family that had come from Georgia into Arkansas, they had left Georgia specifically over the issue of slavery and come to Arkansas.
• 14:25
  Crista Cowan: But there were families already well established in Arkansas who had come from Virginia and South Carolina and Tennessee earlier who were slave-holding families and who were Confederate sympathizers.
• 14:37
  Crista Cowan: And so the conflicts that were happening in that part of the country in the 1860s were massive.
• 14:44
  Crista Cowan: It was Charity Ann's father-in-law, who was the subject of a letter written by one of his nieces that I shared way back in season one in an episode about a letter written by a woman who experienced the conflicts in that part of Arkansas during the Civil War.
• 15:06
  Crista Cowan: So all of these families, they're intermarrying, and yet there's still this conflict in families that is being fought, much like what's being fought at a national level during the Civil War.
• 15:20
  Crista Cowan: And so at the end of the Civil War, Marianne loses her husband, and her daughter Charity also loses her husband, both as part of that conflict.
• 15:32
  Crista Cowan: Now, Charity quickly remarries.
• 15:34
  Crista Cowan: It takes Marianne a couple more years, but she ends up marrying a man named Owen Maybry.
• 15:40
  Crista Cowan: And Owen Maybry is a local preacher.
• 15:44
  Crista Cowan: And he's a local preacher who is very much a union sympathizer and very much in the business of helping the country heal after the Civil War.
• 15:59
  Crista Cowan: And so as he went around preaching, um, preaching messages of repentance, preaching messages of forgiveness, preaching messages of reconciliation and reconstruction, he stirred up some animosity in the community as well.
• 16:16
  Crista Cowan: And from everything we can tell, Marianne not only stood by his side, but supported him in that message and did so for the rest of their lives.
• 16:28
  Crista Cowan: So as my mom and I stood there in that cemetery in northwest Arkansas, tucked back in the corner amongst the overgrowth of brush, it's a raised bench monument to Marianne and her second husband, the Reverend O.A.
• 16:47
  Crista Cowan: Mabry.
• 16:48
  Crista Cowan: And I thought a lot about her and what she had to go through and how he gets talked about a whole lot in newspaper articles and local histories.
• 17:00
  Crista Cowan: But that when I dug a little deeper, I was able to find her story and clues about where her loyalties lay, and clues about what kind of a mother she was, and clues about what kind of a wife she was.
• 17:15
  Crista Cowan: And I've been able to piece together the story of her strength and her resilience.
• 17:21
  Crista Cowan: And I've seen how it was passed on to her daughters, including my great-great-grandmother, Charity Ann Shipman, who in turn passed that on to her daughter, Lenore Algerine Lawrence, who was a granny that I knew.
• 17:40
  Crista Cowan: She was my great-grandmother.
• 17:42
  Crista Cowan: I I don't have any memories of her.
• 17:44
  Crista Cowan: She died when I was too little, but I have pictures of myself with her.
• 17:48
  Crista Cowan: And I have stories about her from my mom and from Nana and the ants, as they talked about what a feisty, faithful woman their mother was.
• 18:02
  Crista Cowan: When my Nana got to the end of her life, we moved her from her home in Fountain Valley, California into a care facility in Huntington Beach.
• 18:11
  Crista Cowan: And as we were cleaning out her things, she had labeled certain things to go to each of us.
• 18:17
  Crista Cowan: And she knew my love of family and of family history.
• 18:21
  Crista Cowan: And so one of the things that she shared with me, which is one of my most treasured possessions now, was a letter that her mother Lenore had written her at the end of her life.
• 18:33
  Crista Cowan: And this letter, written from Lenore, she apparently wrote one to each of her children, given to my nana, Jessie, and then given to me, is Lenore's testimony of Jesus Christ.
• 18:47
  Crista Cowan: It's her testimony about the Bible.
• 18:50
  Crista Cowan: It's her testimony about an afterlife.
• 18:53
  Crista Cowan: And it is so beautiful from this tiny, feisty Southern Baptist woman who was raised by a mother and a grandmother who had seen horrific things and survived them and created really beautiful families out of that hard, hard things that had happened to them.
• 19:14
  Crista Cowan: And so now I have this and was able to talk to my Nana about it.
• 19:22
  Crista Cowan: And it's been interesting now with my mom as I've watched her and her sister navigate their relationships and their lives after the loss of their mother.
• 19:35
  Crista Cowan: This year for Christmas, my mom asked me to put together a family tree.
• 19:41
  Crista Cowan: So family chartmasters.
• 19:43
  Crista Cowan: We can build family trees and create any work of art out of the data that you have and the photos that you have.
• 19:51
  Crista Cowan: And so I went diving into my family photos to make sure that I had enough to fill this family tree that my mom wanted us to create.
• 19:59
  Crista Cowan: For my aunt.
• 20:01
  Crista Cowan: And one of the things that I discovered that surprised me was that I have pictures of every one of these women.
• 20:10
  Crista Cowan: And I can look at my family tree, and I don't have an unbroken group of pictures on any branch of my family tree but this one.
• 20:18
  Crista Cowan: And I can follow it from myself to my mom, from my mom to my nana Jesse, from Jesse to Granny Lenore, from Lenore to Charity, and from Charity to Marianne.
• 20:33
  Crista Cowan: And I can stare into the faces of those women.
• 20:36
  Crista Cowan: So as we were putting this chart together for my mom to gift her sister for Christmas, I decided that I wanted to create a little something special that represents that matrilineal line of my family tree.
• 20:52
  Crista Cowan: And so I created a little band of pictures of these women lined up.
• 20:58
  Crista Cowan: And I created one for myself and one for my sister and one for my mom and one for my aunt and one for my cousin.
• 21:08
  Crista Cowan: Because I want all of them to remember that even though the stories of men are the stories that most often get told, that the stories of women deserve to be told as well.
• 21:21
  Crista Cowan: And we've got some amazing women in our family tree.
• 21:25
  Crista Cowan: And that particular branch of my family tree just happens to be deeply rooted in that little corner of Northwest Arkansas.
• 21:35
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.