This Guy will have a marker soon

Guy Fulford was my grandfather's first cousin. He was a fisherman in Cortez, Florida and was born in 1894, the son of Nathan Hooker Fulford and Betty Manson Whitehurst Fulford. Guy served in the Navy during WWI and I noticed when I surveyed Palma Sola Cemetery in Bradenton, Florida ten years ago that he didn't have a marker on his grave.

Guy died in 1942 and his grave has a large cement vault over it but no marker other than a small funeral home temporary marker that has been there for almost 70 years. Unfortunately none of the family members could remember when in 1942 he died so I couldn't order a marker for his grave.

I don't like having to pay for research so I tried to locate a newspaper obituary without any success. I found him listed on a index of the Tampa Tribune for December 4, 1942 but couldn't find the actual paper. I finally broke down and ordered the death certificate from the State. It shows he died on December 3, 1942 as a result of Coronary Thrombosis. The death certificate said he and his wife Mamie Giddins Fulford were divorced, a fact I didn't know. His sister Susie Fulford Guthrie gave the personal information on the record.

So now we will get a marker for him.

Broken markers

I was reminded of an old broken tombstone marker recently when I was looking for a family photo. My wife and I found the grave of her ancestor, Thomas Longacre several years ago in Alabama.

He is buried in the Longacre Cemetery in Jackson County. There are only two Longacres there so I assume he owned the land.

Thomas Longacre was born in Virginia in 1788 but like many in his generation migrated to Indian lands when the government moved them west. He settled in the northeastern corner of Alabama and obtained a homestead grant in Jackson County. On the 1850 census he owned 1200 acres and it also showed he had 9 slaves.

He died in 1863 and was buried next to his wife Judith Ireson Longacre who had died five years before.

Over the last hundred and fifty years, the grave marker has been broken into many pieces. The section with most of the inscription has been placed upright against his stone tomb and you can barely make out a few of the words.

"Tears of her….(not legible)
... was devoted
to the service of the
Lord during which time
he was a member of
the Regular Baptist"

What do you remember

The local newspaper asked me to share one memory of Cortez, Florida in the "old days" for an article they were doing. I'm not really old enough to talk about the old days. I would probably need my sister in Virginia to do that.

Anyway, here it is, just in case it never makes it to print:

I used to spend summers and school holidays in Cortez and loved going fishing with my grandfather, Tink Fulford. We didn't fish on Sundays because almost everyone went to church but Sunday night it was ok to go fishing. My grandmother insisted we go to the Church of Christ both Sunday morning and Sunday night. Grandpa Tink didn't go to church on Sunday night and he wanted to leave as soon as possible but he wasn't going to tell my grandmother we couldn't go to church. I would have to run from the church building to the dock as soon as the service was over. Grandpa knew exactly what time we should be there and he would untie, start up the boat and wait. I could hear the boat engine from a block away. He would push off from the dock as soon as he saw me getting close. I had to run and jump on as the boat was pulling off. I don't think he would have left us if we missed the boat but he sure acted like it.

The Crabpot

This is only partly about genealogy research. Three or four years ago I came across some Harvey family members from Carteret County North Carolina. They saw something I wrote about my Foreman family and wanted to know if their Foreman ancestor was related.

It turned out that their great great grandmother, Cornelia Foreman Harvey was the sister of my great great grandmother Hope Jane Foreman. We exchanged several emails and they had some old photos they sent me which I appreciated.

Then this past December I saw a newspaper article about Neal Harvey of Davis, North Carolina and the Core Sound Christmas Trees he was making out of Crabpots. In Florida we call them Crab Traps, but folks in Eastern North Carolina have their own dialect, so they call them Crabpots. A cousin in Cortez, Florida stores a bunch of them next to my mother's house and she has never had very merry thoughts about them, but Neal Harvey got the idea he could brighten up Christmas with them.

Neal has made and sold Crabpots for years and since the fishing business hasn't been too good in recent years decided to use the material and shape a tree out of it. The result is a perfect Christmas tree that can stand up to just about anything mother nature can throw at it. Crab traps have to be strong, since they stay in the water for months at a time and if they develop a hole the fisherman's catch doesn't make it to market.

We bought a 6 foot Core Sound Christmas tree this year and proudly put it in our front yard. Our kids and neighbors will tell you our annual decorations are pretty lame but this year we started a new trend.

Finding Grandma

I found one of my long lost grandmothers. Actually she is step great great grandmother.

Sarah Winiford Strickland Green was the 2nd wife of my ancestor John Green. He died young, sometime about 1865 but she remained in the Taylor County Florida area up until at least 1900. She was on the census that year but until recently I never knew what happened to her after 1900.

I have her photo as it was in my great grandparents bible. I knew her grandson John Evans had moved to Suwanee County Florida and I found him on the 1910 census. One of his great grandsons contacted me recently and gave me some more information about the family in Suwanee County. I started looking at public records and found a death listing for a Mrs. Green in 1918. No first name is shown.

I decided to request the death certificate from the State of Florida so see if it had any other information that could tell me if it was Sarah. It took the State a couple tries to send me the correct record but finally I received a death certificate showing this Mrs. Green died on October 10, 1918. It also listed her date of birth as being January 2, 1838 in Alabama. That didn't match Sarah Green as she had listed her birth month as November 1838 on the 1900 census. I noticed the death certificate listed her age as 80 years, 1 month, 1 day. If they were off by one year, and she was 79 instead of 80, subtracting it from her death date her day of birth would be November 15, 1838. So I am satisfied this is Sarah. Either way the birth date on the certificate does not match the age.

She was buried in Siloam Methodist Church Cemetery in Columbia County near the Suwanee County border. The cousin went out to the cemetery but couldn't find a marker. At least we know what happened to her. Her husband, John Green is still a mystery but maybe one day he will turn up also.

All's well that ends well

I have to change my MO about using real names for this story. Not sure they would appreciate it, even though for now it looks like it has ended well.

I "met" via email a 2nd cousin a while ago who lives in Florida. She is the granddaughter of my grandmother Fulford's first cousin. After exchanging emails about the family history and other things for two years, she asked if I could help her find her mother.

It turns out she was adopted as a baby by our cousin and didn't know it until she was grown. Her birth mother was an 18 year old , unmarried girl who was working at a hotel in St. Petersburg when she got pregnant. She did the right thing at the time and put the baby up for adoption.

Fast forward 50 years and the daughter wants to find out about her birth family. She had actually paid $2,000 to the adoption agency to get very limited records that had a name and nothing else. She was able to locate a subsequent husband of her mother in St. Petersburg but they had divorced after a couple years and he had no idea what happened to her. She was a free spirit who was only known to be somewhere else.

So with just a name and approximate date of birth I started looking for her, using the same tools I use to do genealogy research. Online marriage & divorce records, death notices, city directories, newspaper articles, family trees posted at ancestry.com etc. I soon found out who the grandparents were but they had both died within the last few years.

I couldn't locate an obituary for either of them but after a while found a online family tree that had them listed. It didn't show any children but I knew the missing mom was a twin with at least one sister because it said this in the family notes. I contacted the person who posted the family tree on ancestry and had no response for almost two months. Then after several short, one line emails with no information that spread out over several more months I received two emails in one day.

The writer, who never gave me more than a first name said she had been in touch with the missing mom and they wanted to contact my cousin. I sent the email on to her, and she followed up and quickly talked by phone to her first cousin, aunt and was told how to contact her birth mother.

So wow, this search for dead relatives can take you to some interesting places.

William Gannon Fulford

When you do family history research sometimes you find more questions than answers.

I was looking at family records in Craven County North Carolina recently and found the death certificate for William Gannon Fulford. If you just record the day of birth and death you would have put these in your records and gone on. I like to look at the original documents because I have often found facts that connected with some other person I was researching.

In this case, I noticed an unusual cause of death. It is listed as being the result of a stab wound in the abdomen and a homicide.

William Gannon Fulford was the son of Denard Roberts Fulford and Sarah Elizabeth Edwards. Denard was born in the North Carolina and probably a relative. William was just shy of his 30th birthday when he died in 1914.

He had never married and I don't really know much about him except for his unusual demise. He was buried in Cedar Grove cemetery in New Bern, North Carolina. I have just started to look for his story but haven't found anything yet. It may take a while but I am sure the record is out there somewhere.