To be Cherokee or not to be, & a bank robbery foiled

Happenings of a momentous nature have transpired since last I endeavored to write something for this blog, ostensibly of a family history nature.  Since I am clearly back to it, perhaps that means that healing of sorts is occurring.  My hope & intention when I ventured into this blog, apart from my Ritasjourneys.blogspot.com was two-fold.  

Firstly, I wanted to and still do desire to share the family history that the señor & I have assembled, and this seems a way to impart some of the more personal aspects of not only the history, but of the search process itself.  It has been a labor of love over these years.

Secondly, it is my hope that the generation coming up behind us will use this as a springboard for their own explorations, and most importantly to me - to get to know each other and their elders still on the planet via questions & comments to me and to each other.  Our family connections are of paramount importance to us.

So . . . as I begin to test the waters herein once again after an extended hiatus, I offer two tales that might fall into the family lore category - my theme for the week (with thanks to AmyJohnsonCrow.com for this suggestion/impetus, and for the 51 weeks to follow).

First up is our search for our Cherokee ancestry . . .

In my family, we grew up being told that we had a Cherokee ancestor via my grandfather Zack Kelley, specifically that his grandmother was full Cherokee.  I remember that in discussions, we enjoyed doing some mental figuring about how that translated down to us: Grandpa was one-quarter; Dad was one-eighth and each of us was one-sixteenth Cherokee.

I don’t actually remember Dad talking about it.  Had he told my older brother Frank, who then told us?  These are how the memories fade and/or transform themselves when one is writing about events from 70 years previous.

At any rate, we knew we were part Cherokee and we knew why . . . or thought we did.  Decades later, I become interested enough in my family history to enroll in every genealogy class offered at Yavapai College, eventually doing extensive research by mail, on-site around the country & later via internet for both my family and Chris’, even turning it into a part-time business and researching many other folks’ families and/or finding a few adoptees’ biological families.

When we finally submitted our DNA to ancestry.com, we were “found” by the previously-unknown-to-any-of-us daughter of Chris’ first cousin, but I digress, as usual.

Fast forward to our search for our Cherokee ancestor: hmmm, it wasn’t Zack’s grandmother, after all.  In fact, we learned a great deal about his grandmother - Eliza Amelia (Means) Kelley - and her forebears, and there wasn’t a Cherokee in the midst of them that we could find - and no native American DNA was indicated, either.

We even have in our possession a rudimentary unsigned family tree that lists her as Cherokee.  Are we missing something or is it a case of family lore?  We did discover that Amelia & her husband resided in Cherokee, Texas: could that possibly be whence the story came?  That seems so unlikely to me, but what other explanation?

In fact, Chris & I located James & Amelia Kelley's abode there by trespassing on private property (virtually all of Texas is private and posted).  When we were there in the 1990s, the house walls of rock were still standing - empty and sturdy - but roofless.  It appeared to consist of one room; considering that they had five children, it must have been tight quarters.  Perhaps it had been divided into two rooms.  I remember that we surmised they must have had a kitchen separate from the main house, not unusual for the time & place - 1840s-1870s.

And now about that bank robbery . . .

The Wuehrmann family has a story that I have witnessed morph over time.  I will relate it the best that my recall allows and mention how I’ve seen it waver back & forth with the test of time.

The last time I heard the story told was just last night by Chris; his version coincided in part with my original memory, but at one point, Mom Wuehrmann offered a slightly different take on it.

To begin at the beginning: Grandpa Wuehrmann, Johann Frederich Heinrich (Hans) by name, although he went by Fred, determined at some time in his young adult years to embark with a friend on an around-the-world journey.  That would have been in the very early 20th century.

The pair sailed over the Pacific to Hawaii.  While there, one or both of them ran through his available funds, so they both decided to get jobs.  Fred went to work in a bank, either as a custodian or as a clerk (depending on which version of the story you’re getting).  I know we were told the custodian version early on, but when we mentioned that to Mom after Dad’s passing, she became upset and said he was never a custodian - neither version matters to the tale, however.

The crux of the story is that Fred was present in the bank when a man came in to hold it up.  While the robber was demanding money from the teller, Fred snuck up behind him and clonked him on the head with a heavy object - a marble ashtray or a paperweight, Dad said - and knocked him unconscious, thus foiling the bank robbery.

As an addendum, Grandfather was joined there afterward by his fiancee, Johanna Teresa (Jennie) Dalk, and they married there 6 Sept. 1911, remaining until after the birth of their first child, Agnes Margaret, in 1912, returning to Chicago by 1915.  Evidently, banking was good to him: he eventually became president of a bank in Chicago.

Names stand for something or someone . . .

 . . . well, not always, as illustrated by all the Monopoly-property-named streets in our subdivision, but oftentimes, place names reflect folks who came that way at some point.

A recent subject at the New England Genealogical & Historical Society asked about landmarks, towns and sites named for our ancestors got me to listing such instances, and realizing we have many.  Here I will mention only some that the señor & I discovered in a visit to north Louisiana.

In Louisiana’s Catahoula Parish, Wallace Ridge, Wallace Lake & Means Lake are named for my 4-greats grandfather, James Wallace & my Means ancestors, James & Zachariah Means.  We have been to that locale a couple of times.  The first time we drove into Harrisonburg, we had no idea what to expect.  As we motored down the main street, we saw a restaurant called O’Kellys, and opined that it would be funny if we were related, of course thinking that was pretty improbable.  Unfortunately, the eatery was closed at the time, so we couldn’t pursue the matter.

As it turned out, we are indeed related - far-fetched though it may be.  As the governmental center of Catahoula Parish, Harrisonburg was our destination to do research in the parish records.  It was not long after querying staff there that we discovered O’Kelly’s proprietor was Jana Kelly, daughter of James Kelly and his wife Renae.  To say James was well known thereabouts would be an understatement: he was the Parish sheriff, and we were quickly put in touch with him.

We were soon invited to visit the Kellys at their home, and found them to be entertaining and easy to be with.  After all, we are kin, distant but family will out.  

The lineage from our host, James Glen Kelly continues to his father James Clinton Kelly, and on through John Routon Kelly, James Franklin Kelly, John Kelly to James Kelly (1794-1849) & his probable wife, Sarah Courtney (we haven’t proven her Courtney name yet), and they are our and the sheriff’s mutual ancestor.

Before I backtrack down our descendancy from James & Sarah, I will mention the alternate spelling of the moniker.  I used the “missing e” form for James’ ancestry because that is how they spell it.  Seems that somewhere in the past, someone now long gone got into a tiff with someone else now long gone and determined to distance himself by kicking out the “e”.

Our line down from James & Sarah is thus: James McGinneasy Kelley (1828-1920) & Eliza Amelia Means (1835-1887), John Frank Kelley (1854-1926) & Julia Travis Winans (1869-1957), James Zack Kelley (1890-1985) and my father, Ira Frank Kelley (1914-2009).

Since that first Louisiana sojourn, we’ve visited James & Renae a couple of times, and have greatly enjoyed our time with them.  James plays the guitar and Renae the piano, so it was a given that shared music would be part of our time with them.

There are volumes more I could write about our Kelley ancestors, but this post was ostensibly to be concerned about landmarks being named for our folks, so back to that.

James & Renae live right on the shore of a large body of water, a cut-off meander of the Ouachita River.  It is Wallace Lake, so called for our ancestors and kin who settled in that region: Amelia Wallace (ca. 1800-bef 1843) my three-greats grandmother, who married Zachariah Means (ca. 1796-bef. 1850), and her probable father James Wallace.  Zachariah Means was in Catahoula Parish as early as 1818.  

The cousins’ home is located on Wallace Ridge, a rise of land mere inches above the surrounding countryside and a community of the same name.  That “elevation” makes all the difference in that region that is scarcely above waterline.  Amelia’s father, James Wallace (1775ish-bef 1842), seems to have been there shortly after the turn of the 19th century.

I asked cousin James if he swam in that lake; after all, that was my immediate inclination.  With his usual humorous countenance, he replied, “I used to . . . until I saw an alligator in it”.

Not too far distant is another lake (water is far more common thereabouts than terra firma) called Means Lake, the third Catahoula landmark named for our ancestors.

Now about that water: those swampy lowlands are host to swarms of mosquitoes the like of which I have never seen.  That wouldn’t be the worst thing ever except that of course we wanted to survey the local burying ground.  Not only was our kin there, but so were seemingly generations of mosquitoes so thick you could cut through the hordes with a knife.  Needless to say, we did what we could clearing and photographing as fast as humanly possible.

A note completely off the subject: when we run across gravestones that are illegible, a common occurrence for old weathered ones, we have devised a way that seemingly miraculously reveals the lettering in most cases.  An example is in the next two photos.

We sprayed the stone lightly with shaving cream, then used a squeegie to wipe it down - ta da!  The words become clear so they can be photographed and preserved; we make sure to wash the stone afterward.

What an odd coincidence that both James Kelly, the Louisiana cousin, and James Kelley, my g.g. grandfather were both sheriffs — Catahoula Parish and San Saba County, Texas.  We own a photograph that we think may be our James Kelley (1828-1920), but are still working to prove or disprove that.  Surely someone somewhere must have an identified picture of him, but I have yet to locate it.

This is him . . . or it isn't.