Friends of Humanity
Some time ago, I wrote about my five-times great-grandfather Thomas Longley, who moved his family from New York City down the Ohio River to Kentucky in 1788. Thomas was a Baptist. I don’t know if he was raised in the denomination or converted at some point, but I know he attended the First Baptist Church of New York City, where he served as a deacon from 1787 until his departure to Kentucky (Parkinson 1846). Thomas continued to practice his Baptist faith in Kentucky, joining the Mays Lick Baptist Church as one of its earliest members (Goins 1980).
Every Family Has a Maverick, Part 2
When we last left our intrepid protagonist, John Jones, the Civil War veteran formerly known as Walter W. Collins, he had been honorably discharged from the army in February 1866 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was settling into a new life. Somewhere along the way, he had picked up skills in the building trades and was now working as a brick mason.
Every Family Has a Maverick, Part 1
Every family has a maverick (or two), and one of my family’s mavericks was my great-great-great-grandfather Walter White Collins. Walter was born in Guernsey County, Ohio, in 1838 and moved with his family to Lineville in south central Iowa around 1855. In 1857, Walter, then 19 years old, married Elizabeth Paul, and settled on a small farm next to those owned by his father and two older brothers. He and Elizabeth had two children over the next few years, and had it not been for the Civil War, that might well have been the end of his story.
Juneteenth
This isn’t a story about my ancestors, but it is one worth telling. Growing up in Texas, I was certainly aware of Juneteenth, which has only been a national holiday since 2021 but has been a Texas state holiday since 1980. To me, as a young person, the holiday wasn’t much different from Memorial Day or Independence Day, one of those summer holidays marked by parades and cook-outs and sometimes fireworks.