Romance on the Range

I don't remember John Wayne having romantic scenes on any of his wagon train movies. Maybe they were there but we didn't notice.

My wife has a wagon train romance in her family history. Her great great grandparents met and fell in love on a wagon train from Saline County Missouri to Austin Texas in 1859.

Louisiana English Pennington was only 17 years old, riding in a wagon with her parents Simeon Dudley Pennington and Mary Jane Lynch Pennington when she met William Smith Telford. He had just finished a tour of duty in the US Army and was riding along with the wagon train on horseback.

He was five years older than Lou and according to a November 23, 1929 newspaper article in the Dallas Morning news he fell in love with her on the trip. They weren't married for another six years because he left to join the 4th (Bates) Regiment Texas Volunteers during the Civil War. After the war he came back to Austin and found Lou had waited for him.

They had twelve children and the second oldest was my wife's great grandmother Kate Augusta Telford Longacare.

The Metric System

Probably like most of you, I never bought in to the metric system. I still use my 1965 -25th Anniversary Fulford Fish Company ruler when I need to measure something.

On Ancestry.com I noticed they have a new feature that finds people on other records for you automatically. They list them as 'suggested records" on the right side of the screen.

When you search for someone and then click on the record you found, they run a program in the background they call Ancestry Metrics. It looks for that same person, based on the name and date of birth and then automatically gives you a list of the other records.

This is a really wonderful addition to their service as you can literally find sometimes a half dozen records that are probably the person you are researching.

Bits n' Pieces

Sometimes it can take years to find an answer to a simple question. My great great grandmother's second husband was Elijah Meadows Garner. Hope Foreman Adams married him on January 12, 1882 in Cartetet County after her first husband died. I have wondered what happened to them.

Hope was at least the 4th wife of Elijah. They moved to Manateee County Florida sometime in the late 1880s. Both their children were born in North Carolina and the family story is they both came down with TB after moving to Florida and died within weeks of each other. They said Hope died first and then her husband. Afterwards the children were adopted by Captain John Fogarty in Manatee County.

The problem is that there isn't anyone alive who would know the truth or who had even heard it 2nd hand. I had been trying to find some documentation of their death without any success for 10 years.

Then last week I received an email from the Manatee County Historical Records Librarian with the attached 3x5 card attached. It is an article from the Manatee River Journal dated August 11, 1892 and tells of the death of Elijah Garner the week before. I know it is him as his was the only Garner family in the Palma Sola area, and it only mentions his children surviving him.

So now that I know Hope and Elijah Garner died in the summer of 1892 maybe I can locate where they were buried.

Glenn Tartan

My wife's mother was a Glenn before she married. A distant cousin was planning a trip to Scotland and asked if we wanted her to pick up some Glenn Tartan for us on her visit.

Frankly I didn't know what she was talking about and had to look it up to see if it was something to eat or wear. Apparently this is a big business in Scotland because there are a number of web pages you can use to look up your Tartan. I guess there are then any number of places to buy some of it on a roll or made into clothing.

With a name like Glenn you would assume the family came from Scotland. I looked back at the last known ancestor in the family and only have references to him coming from Ireland.

David Glenn 1745-1784 is found in many sources but they all say he came to the Colonies in the 1770s from Ireland. He settled in Newberry, South Carolina and served briefly during the Revolutionary War. He was given the rank of Colonel, and I'm not sure how. The Annals of Newberry, published in 1892 has a long account of his life and death.

I don't know much about the Scot - Irish history so it is possible the family had lived in Scotland before and moved to Ireland. Maybe some of you can explain it.

True Southern Greens

I have a good friend who talks seriously of being buried in his backyard. Apparently it is perfectly legal in Tennessee and being a true southerner he feels it is his right.


While visiting relatives in Alabama recently I made a detour to find the graves of several distant relatives.

Judith Anthony married William Green in 1797 in Warren County North Carolina. They moved to Wilkes County Georgia where he died in 1805 leaving her a widow with several young children.

Two years later she married Robert Ware and moved to Montgomery, Alabama. They owned a large tract of land and operated a ferry over the Alabama river.

A couple blocks off Wares Ferry Road in Montgomery I found the Ware - Green family cemetery where Judith and several of her children and grandchildren are buried. The large monument is for Robert Ware, who was a Revolutionary War veteran.

The cemetery is in the back yard of some folks who didn't even know it was there when they bought the house. The cemetery had a lot of tall brush and it had been years since anyone tried to maintain it. I guess the realtor, if they knew it was there didn't consider a family cemetery as a selling feature so the buyers didn't know until they cleared the brush it was there.

To their credit they have taken over maintenance and it is now in very good condition.