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52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 2 "Favorite Photo"

The theme of week two for the "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" challenge is "Favorite Photo."

This is another fun theme for me, but I'd like to share a little background info first. I have always been fascinated with history. Especially local and family history. When I was a little girl, my sister and I spent our lovely summer days with our grandmother while our parents were at work. Oh, the adventures we had!

One outing that I looked forward to each summer was the Clark County Historical Museum. What fun to explore their collection which is housed in an historic home that was the first post office for our hometown. 

I did a few small family history projects during my elementary and high school years, but nothing too in-depth. After the birth of my oldest son, I really felt driven to explore his ancestry. I began building a family tree and spent over a decade working diligently to collect ancestors and the facts of their lives. Census records, birth & death registers, and photos of their grave sites. 

About 12 years ago, I realized that I had very few photographs of our ancestors and that became a major focus of my research efforts for the next several years. I found some online, shared by distant family members, and others in local and county history books. And I began asking older relatives for any photos they might have. We now have a prized collection of family photographs. I'm not sure I could ever choose just one favorite - each one is special in it's own way.

The one that I would like to share today features my 3rd great grandmother, Ida McCoy Shaner. Ida was born in January 1880 in Knox County, Indiana to William McCoy and Nancy Wilson McCoy. She married Charles Shaner 12 Sept 1897, also in Knox County. Ida and Charles had 9 children, with 8 still living at the time of Ida's death in January 1934 at the age of 54. 

The photo came from an album of my great grandmother, Bonnie Edgin. In Bonnie's handwriting, the photo was identified as "Grandma Shaner with chicks."

The first time I saw the photo, I felt such a closeness to Grandma Shaner. I love animals and the farm life. I grew up in a small town, but my husband and I bought his family farm a few years ago and have been building a small homestead on these few acres. The fact that Grandma Shaner loved her chickens enough to pose with them for her portrait just really spoke to my heart. Like Ida, I have spent my life in the county I was born in  - getting married and raising my family here. 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 1 "I'd Like to Meet"

 

I learned recently of a genealogy challenge to feature 52 ancestors in 52 weeks this year, organized by Amy Johnson Crow.  What a great challenge! This really piqued my interest. I have been collecting the stories of my children's ancestors, both mine and my husband's families, for nearly 25 years now. It's about time that I get serious about sharing those stories with everyone else. I need to record them instead of keeping them all in my head or buried between the lines of the multitude of records that I've collected in both digital and paper format.

The challenges are emailed to participants each week. Here's the info on Week 1: 

This week's theme is "I'd Like to Meet." Most of us have an ancestor who we'd like to meet (even if it's to ask, "What are your parents' names?") This week, write about that ancestor or why you'd want to meet him or her. Feel free to be creative!

What a great way to begin the challenge - a nice, easy question for me! 

The ancestor I would most like to meet is my 3rd great grandmother Sarah Mills Pargin.

Sarah (1866 - 1907) was the mother of Goldie Pearl Pargin, my great great grandmother. Goldie was Sarah's oldest child and is the one standing behind her mother on the right hand side of the photo.

Sarah married Peter Pargin in Lawrence County, IL. Peter is my 3rd great grandfather and father of Goldie Pearl Pargin. Or at least that's what we've always been told . . . I have always had serious doubts about him actually being Goldie's biological father. Goldie was born in 1888; Peter and Sarah didn't wed until 1891. The 1890 United States Census was destroyed in a fire decades ago and birth records were not reliably recorded in Illinois until 1916. Every other paper record of Goldie's life lists Peter as her father.

The family lived in Lawrence County, Illinois but traveled west to southwestern Missouri/northeastern Arkansas around 1905. Sarah passed away there in 1907. Her husband, Peter, and most of the children returned to Lawrence County by 1910. The youngest child, Maude, was born in Missouri and was raised by family members there after Sarah passed away.

I have taken a DNA test, along with my grandfather (Goldie was his grandmother), and the DNA results show that Goldie was not in fact a Pargin. I believe I have narrowed the suspect down to one father and son in another local family, but I'm not certain if I'll ever fully solve the mystery.

I would love to sit down with Sarah and talk with her. Who was Goldie's father? Was it a romantic, secret affair? Or something darker? What prompted the family to move to Arkansas? What was life like there? Was her marriage to Peter, who was quite a bit older than her, a happy one? Did they marry by choice or because of the shame of an out-of-wedlock child for Sarah?

I like to think five minutes is all that I would need with her. Just five minutes... but I think we would have so much to share and would certainly talk for much longer than that.