The Strouds were once nobles in England, but during the civil war their house was brought down, their ancestors' carcasses removed from the honored burial places like Westminster Abbey, and many were forced to leave the city which still bears their name, in Glouchestershire. You can still find the old manor house, and the grounds are still beautiful, but there is nary a Stroud to be found there. When we told my dad we had hunted in vain for kin, he said we should have visited the jail. We did hear of an old guy who was in his eighties, spent most of his time on the sea, scubba diving. but we did not have time to look for him.
The book about the Strouds in the family history libraries thinks most of us came from a pair of brothers who came over before the Revolution, just kids cared for by an immigrant family. Their descendants settled in Stroudsburg, PA, and later members migrated to Virginia, the Carolinas and eventually Oklahoma, where you can find a small town by that name today.
Evidently none of the ones who populated the slave states ever became prosperous enough to own land or slaves, since we have never seen a black person with our name. Although they were as poor as church mice, as the saying went, they had great pride in their work, and in their habits and tried to get as much education as they thought they needed; to be able to read the Bible and do a little "figuring". The little one room school houses were everywhere. Usually the only teacher lived in the homes of her pupils, taking turns, a week here, and the next at another home where she would usually be given a pallet (quilts on the floor) next to the fireplace. My grandmother said all the little kids wanted to bring their bedding and sleep next to her.
The cabins were very small, and most of the children slept in a loft accessable with a ladder. Food was cooked over an open fire until the Franklin stove became popular. It conserved wood and heated a larger area. Most of the heat from a fireplace went up the chimney, and when I was small it was a relief to go to bed with a hot brick wrapped in a an old blanket rather than sit in front of the fireplace with my back freezing and the fronts of my legs barbecued. The vein pattern stood out on the fronts of my legs all winter.
Gatsy Susan Gray married a Waters (some spelled it Warters), and it was her oldest daughter who married a Stroud. Her name was Eva Waters and she married Drewry Stroud. Her youngest sister Hattie also married a Stroud, so there were many in our county. Drew had been married before, to Ida Davis, who had died with her infant daughter in childbirth. My grandpa
never seemed to get over losing Ida. I remember hearing him tell how beautiful she was and that she was a perfect wife. My grandmother heard it all the time, she said.
Grandaddy did not have a home of his own, but lodged with different sons. When I was just a couple of years old he came to live with us and for a while during the winter I had to sleep with him. My mother was so afraid I would catch the "itch" he had on his legs. I don't know if it was scabies, but she insisted that he go to a doctor and get treated. There was a half bottle of the lotion he used left on our shelf when he moved on to my uncle's. My mother did not throw anything away, so years later I developed a rash under my arms and on my chest, probably by too many blankets when we had a warm spell at Christmas time. She was so sure I had something contageous. She grabbed the bottle, now separated into clots of pinkish milk. Shaking it thoroughly, she dabbed it all over my rash. Within an hour I was one big watery blister and it burned for three days. A benefit was that no hair ever grew under my arms!
My grandaddy was a strict disciplinarian. None of his children ever had feelings of afffection for him, only fear. He and "Grandmammy Eva" had 12 children. When their little boy Felix was still in diapers, just beginning to talk, he was seen by his father climbing into the new body of a wagon placed on the ground for the paint to dry. He yelled to the baby, "Are you in my new wagon?"
The child, trembling with fear, denied his obvious guilt by saying, "No, sir!", whereupon he was jerked up and beaten unmercifully with a board, not for a misdead, but for LYING!
My grandmother said she held the child on her lap and put ointment on the open skin while he cried all night.
That was not the last straw, however. It came some years later shortly after she delivered number 12. She went into labor on a warm Sunday afternoon in April. My grandpa was a Mason and his regular Sunday afternoon activity was to hitch up his pony to the buggy and go to visit one of his Masonic Lodge friends. He was thus engaged in deep conversation on his friend's front porch when my uncle came running up to say, "Ma says it's time to get the midwife." He wasn't finished with his conversation, and after an hour or so he brought the midwife - after she had delivered the baby herself with the help of her oldest son. She was one mad woman. His stuff was moved to the barn where he slept on the hay until cold weather when one day he came to the kitchen with a bundle of his clothes to announce that he was leaving.
I think he was gone for three years, just bumming around from one job to another. Nobody ever expected to see him again until he showed up suddenly telling everyone he had got religion, and he wanted to beg the forgiveness of his wife and all his children. She forgave him, but asked him to never speak to her again. "And," she asked him."how is little Felix, who was almost beaten to death, to forgive you. He died last year of a brain tumor, and I had no money to pay the doctor."
We were a close family. At family reunions I always thought it was funny that my grandparents were both there, but never spoke to each other. My mother's family was not close, and I only saw my maternal grandfather once. He didn't speak to me, only looked at me when someone told him I was his granddaughter. I was eighteen. Maybe that is why I have always wanted to be a good grandparent. Everybody deserves to have one.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
The Yankees (Damnyankees, that is)
My greatgrandmother, Gatsy Susan Gray, daughter of Alexander, was a twelve year old girl in March of 1861. Her grandmother Gatsy must not have been all bad for her to have been named for her. I learned the story of the Yankee soldier from her in 1939 when I was ten years old. My cousins and I were visiting her at Aunt Hattie's house where she lived. We had all just seen the hit movie Gone With the Wind, and it was all we could talk about. We related the staircase scene where Melanie, still in bed from having delivered her baby, came down with a shotgun to take care of the Yankee soldier who seemed about to molest them and take their food. We were describing it all to our greatgrandmother, who, to my knowledge, had never seen a movie. She was sitting in her rocker and we sat on the floor at her feet. She began her story by telling us that they were very poor. Their straw mattresses were made soft with huge feather beds stuffed with the small feathers of chickens and geese. She had already saved enough to make one for her own dowery.
Behind the house was a woodpile and a big iron pot where clothes were boiled each Monday. This was a rare day when her mother was making lye soap, taking all the fat saved from frying bacon, etc., boiling it in water to skim off the clean fat and leaving the meat residue in the bottom. To the fat she had added a mixture of lye and cold water. The lye is so volitile it immediately heats the water so that you cannot hold to the glass jar, and when it is added to the lukewarm grease it begins to thicken like gravy. After stirring an hour or so it can be poured into a cardboard box to cool. In three days it is soap.
She had just added the lye, and the thin mixture was strong enough to take your skin off. She stood stirring when she saw a ragged soldier approaching. General Sherman had discharged his army, telling them to find their own way back home. He asked for food, and she told him they were very poor and had none. He argued with her and when she wouldn't answer him, he entered the log cabin, brought out all the featherbeds and pillows, and slowly ripped them open with his bayonet, shaking all the feathers over the freshly plowed ground for the wind to scatter. He was sure he would find money sewn inside. Finding nothing he advanced toward her. She waited until he was close and with the huge long-necked gourd with which she was stirring she threw the thing full right into his eyes.
Her husband was ploughing in a distant field. I can only imagine the flurry of sending a child to retrieve him and the whole family having to dispose of him and keep it secret. If she told us that part, I blocked it out. I'm pretty sure he did not fight in the war. My family had very little to gain by going to war. None of them ever owned slaves, and could not visualize themselves ever benefiting, even if the South had won. I heard a lot about the Yankees. My belly button was referred to as "where the Yankees shot you". We joked about not knowing that damn yankee was two words until we went to university. Next time - the story of my grandparents who had 12 children and why he deserted her after the birth of the last one.
Behind the house was a woodpile and a big iron pot where clothes were boiled each Monday. This was a rare day when her mother was making lye soap, taking all the fat saved from frying bacon, etc., boiling it in water to skim off the clean fat and leaving the meat residue in the bottom. To the fat she had added a mixture of lye and cold water. The lye is so volitile it immediately heats the water so that you cannot hold to the glass jar, and when it is added to the lukewarm grease it begins to thicken like gravy. After stirring an hour or so it can be poured into a cardboard box to cool. In three days it is soap.
She had just added the lye, and the thin mixture was strong enough to take your skin off. She stood stirring when she saw a ragged soldier approaching. General Sherman had discharged his army, telling them to find their own way back home. He asked for food, and she told him they were very poor and had none. He argued with her and when she wouldn't answer him, he entered the log cabin, brought out all the featherbeds and pillows, and slowly ripped them open with his bayonet, shaking all the feathers over the freshly plowed ground for the wind to scatter. He was sure he would find money sewn inside. Finding nothing he advanced toward her. She waited until he was close and with the huge long-necked gourd with which she was stirring she threw the thing full right into his eyes.
Her husband was ploughing in a distant field. I can only imagine the flurry of sending a child to retrieve him and the whole family having to dispose of him and keep it secret. If she told us that part, I blocked it out. I'm pretty sure he did not fight in the war. My family had very little to gain by going to war. None of them ever owned slaves, and could not visualize themselves ever benefiting, even if the South had won. I heard a lot about the Yankees. My belly button was referred to as "where the Yankees shot you". We joked about not knowing that damn yankee was two words until we went to university. Next time - the story of my grandparents who had 12 children and why he deserted her after the birth of the last one.
Monday, March 16, 2009
In The Beginning
When I got so excited about having a blog, I thought I would become addicted like Paige and want to write every day. I even composed in my mind the stories I want to tell, but eventually fell back to sleep. I imagined that I would be able to embellish my stories with pictures like Paige does, but it seems I am technically challenged. I need a new computer and some serious lessons from someone who will let me pay.
Just imagine a cotton field in the south. The cotton is ready to pick, and we approach it from a narrow dirt road back from the modern highway. The building is square with only a door in the front. It needs a coat of white paint. Perhaps it has only had one coat in the past two hundred years. I have seen smaller churches, but not many, and the others had some semblance of a steeple. It is only one room, and out back there must have been an outhouse. Sandy Bottom Baptist Church has been preserved as a storage shed. I have a picture taken recently of my Aunt Ruth, my brother Bobby and myself standing on the front stoop, which I will send to you if you wish.
We went out there to pay homage to our fourth great grandmother (only third in Aunt Ruth's case) whose name was Gatsy Harper Gray, a name which was struck from the records of same church, for adultery before she was twenty. The evidence was very clear. Her husband whom she had married at age 15 had been away for two years and upon returning found her with a newborn son. The divorce proceedings recorded his testimony that he had not seen her for two years. The son, Alexander, like his older and younger brothers had the Gray name, and although I assume I am not directly related to the Grays, they remain in my genealogy.
There was some speculation as to the identity of Alexander's father. Two names of possible liasons appear in the stories gathered by family historians. I can only imagine the eagerness with which the research was compiled, but unless you really want to know, I will not go farther.
Life must have been very hard for Gatsy. There are no pictures, but I imagine her to look like Mammy Yokum, a small wiry woman with a fuzz of white hair protruding from the back of a gray handstitched bonnet. She would be sunburned in spite of the cardboard slats inserted into the lining spaces in the front of the bonnet meant to shade her face. In the corner of her mouth was always a corn cob pipe, not so much for smoking the home grown tobacco as to bite upon when faced with all the problems of running a farm by herself. Women did not wear men's clothes in those days, but long skirts down to her brogan boots, Mammy Yokum style. Maybe Grandmother Gatsy wore her skirts a little shorter than most, showing a little bit of leg, because she had no shortage of suiters and had two more children without the support of a husband. She drove her own mule and wagon, lived to be eightysomething (like me) and was nice enough that her son Alexander, my third great grandfather named his daughter for her, Gatsy Susan Gray.
I feel a special connection to both of these Gatsys. The first one's father had been a soldier in the army during the Revolution as witnessed by a petition made by his widow many years after the war seeking a widow's pension due to wives of veterans of the war. It would have been typical for her to wait until she was destitute to ask for help. Like all the ancestors I have met through these stories they were very poor tenent farmers. They grew tobacco as a cash crop, taking it to the market in September, and turning over half the money to the landlord. Tobacco continued to be the cash crop of North Carolina until just a few years ago when smoking was found to cause throat cancer. Now most of the fields are converted to growing cotton, the fiber which almost lost it's popularity when synthetics came out just after WWll. Hence the field of cotton surrounding Sandy Bottom Church.
In 1865 at the end of the Civil War, the second Gatsy was a twelve year old girl, on another tenent farm when she had an encounter with a Yankee soldier. Story to come.
Just imagine a cotton field in the south. The cotton is ready to pick, and we approach it from a narrow dirt road back from the modern highway. The building is square with only a door in the front. It needs a coat of white paint. Perhaps it has only had one coat in the past two hundred years. I have seen smaller churches, but not many, and the others had some semblance of a steeple. It is only one room, and out back there must have been an outhouse. Sandy Bottom Baptist Church has been preserved as a storage shed. I have a picture taken recently of my Aunt Ruth, my brother Bobby and myself standing on the front stoop, which I will send to you if you wish.
We went out there to pay homage to our fourth great grandmother (only third in Aunt Ruth's case) whose name was Gatsy Harper Gray, a name which was struck from the records of same church, for adultery before she was twenty. The evidence was very clear. Her husband whom she had married at age 15 had been away for two years and upon returning found her with a newborn son. The divorce proceedings recorded his testimony that he had not seen her for two years. The son, Alexander, like his older and younger brothers had the Gray name, and although I assume I am not directly related to the Grays, they remain in my genealogy.
There was some speculation as to the identity of Alexander's father. Two names of possible liasons appear in the stories gathered by family historians. I can only imagine the eagerness with which the research was compiled, but unless you really want to know, I will not go farther.
Life must have been very hard for Gatsy. There are no pictures, but I imagine her to look like Mammy Yokum, a small wiry woman with a fuzz of white hair protruding from the back of a gray handstitched bonnet. She would be sunburned in spite of the cardboard slats inserted into the lining spaces in the front of the bonnet meant to shade her face. In the corner of her mouth was always a corn cob pipe, not so much for smoking the home grown tobacco as to bite upon when faced with all the problems of running a farm by herself. Women did not wear men's clothes in those days, but long skirts down to her brogan boots, Mammy Yokum style. Maybe Grandmother Gatsy wore her skirts a little shorter than most, showing a little bit of leg, because she had no shortage of suiters and had two more children without the support of a husband. She drove her own mule and wagon, lived to be eightysomething (like me) and was nice enough that her son Alexander, my third great grandfather named his daughter for her, Gatsy Susan Gray.
I feel a special connection to both of these Gatsys. The first one's father had been a soldier in the army during the Revolution as witnessed by a petition made by his widow many years after the war seeking a widow's pension due to wives of veterans of the war. It would have been typical for her to wait until she was destitute to ask for help. Like all the ancestors I have met through these stories they were very poor tenent farmers. They grew tobacco as a cash crop, taking it to the market in September, and turning over half the money to the landlord. Tobacco continued to be the cash crop of North Carolina until just a few years ago when smoking was found to cause throat cancer. Now most of the fields are converted to growing cotton, the fiber which almost lost it's popularity when synthetics came out just after WWll. Hence the field of cotton surrounding Sandy Bottom Church.
In 1865 at the end of the Civil War, the second Gatsy was a twelve year old girl, on another tenent farm when she had an encounter with a Yankee soldier. Story to come.
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