William “Bill” Jasper Morris (marked by the x in the above photograph) was just a month shy of twenty years old when he married Edith Mae Menges on November 25, 1915. Edith was already twenty-one, and according to family lore, Bill was the hired boy on her mother’s farm west of Bristol, near Elkhart, Indiana, that her mother did not want to lose. Family lore also suggests that his father arranged for him to work on the farm in the first place because Bill was a bit at loose e

The so-called "Gettysburg Flag" in the Lora McMahon King Heritage Room at Union Adventist University has been a part of my life for over twenty years. When I arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the summer of 2003 to take the positions of library director and college archivist, this treasured possession was one of the first items library staff brought to my attention. The flag was a gift to the college in 1985 from Muriel Fleming O'Connor (1913-1996), an alumnus (class of 1934)

Man with a monkey…Barracks…Japan? The words are fuzzy. The memory is vague. I am not even sure how old I was at the time. Uncle Eldon Morris and Grandpa Paul Fox were sitting in Grandma Lois’s dining room, passing a Sunday afternoon with swapped stories of their U.S Army days. Grandma washed dishes in the kitchen at the other end of the room, and I sat and listened. I wish now that I had recorded their stories that day. Eldon Morris around 1950 They had not served together.

Privately-owned community business colleges were the for-profit educational institutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They provided inexpensive training in managerial, bookkeeping, and secretarial skills through short, accelerated courses for students who would otherwise have been unable to attend traditional colleges or universities. Will Keith Kellogg, progenitor of the Kellogg Company, attended such a school in Kalamazoo, Michigan—Parson’s Business C

Lois (left) and Ruth (right) Morris dressed in uniform for their jobs at Miles Laboratories, Elkhart, Indiana. Dora Belle Keller and my grandmother, Lois Eleanor Morris, were not exactly friends at Bristol High School in Indiana. After graduation in 1938, they went their separate ways. Lois’s family moved to Elkhart where, as war-time production ramped up, she and her younger sister, Ruth, went to work at Miles Laboratories. Miles Laboratories produced pharmaceuticals and pac

I love to discover new ways to integrate family history with my sons' homeschool history lessons. The first time this happened naturally and organically, they were quite young. We were studying the Great Depression by reading C. Coco De Young's A Letter to Mrs. Roosevelt. In the story, Papa shows eleven-year-old Margo marks on the foundation of their house. He explains to her that hobos, usually unemployed men who'd left home to wander in search of work, had left the marks to

Lois Eleanor Morris Fox (January 18, 1921-December 31, 2021) My sister, Erin, said it best. We stood on her front porch watching fireworks on New Year’s Eve after learning that Grandma Lois had just died. The great-grandchildren were sober and teary-eyed because their mamas were crying. Arm around her daughter Emily, who perched on the porch rail, Erin said, “She was the best grandma ever.” It’s true. Grandma personified the phrase, “Grandmas are just antique little girls.” G

Ruth Bates Harris may be one of the most significant people of which you have never heard. I discovered her story as I researched a story about her fourth husband, Alfred McKenzie, for my Adventist Historical Footprints blog. The more I learned about her, the more I knew I needed to share her story. Born on August 27, 1919, in Washington, DC, Ruth never knew whether or not her parents were married. Raised by her father, Harry Delaney, for the first ten years of her life, she

As I write, I'm preparing to teach a class about World War II to a group of homeschooled third through fifth graders. Using picture storybooks, we'll touch on the various issues and events in the war. In contemplating possible projects and activities to go along with the stories, I naturally thought about asking the kids to interview their own grandparents about their World War II experiences...and then immediately nixed the idea when I realized the grandparents of these kids

Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved Little House on the Prairie series is an amalgamation of memory, fact, and fiction. As recorded in Little House on the Prairie, for the child Laura traveling to Kansas by covered wagon and settling on the open prairie was a big adventure. The truth is, it is not likely an experience she remembered. Beginning with Little House in the Big Woods, Wilder may not have anticipated writing any more books. Thus, when she decided to write about her famil

Brick walls. Every genealogist runs into one sooner or later. The dead-end of a trail of evidence with no obvious solution in sight. When this happens one has several choices. 1. Let the question sit a while. When you come back to it later, new information may have become available. 2. Keep battering at the wall. This is not usually productive, but if one does take the time to review all of the original documents, sometimes a new detail stands out. 3. Consider whether DNA

Bill Morris (1895-1975) circa 1910-1912 with an unidentified companion (left). As I was growing up, I frequently heard about my great-grandfather William "Bill" Morris's days as a vaudeville stagehand in Muskegon, Michigan. The story never included many details; nonetheless, Grandma liked to show us the photograph of her father dressed up as a western cowboy (pictured on the right), posed with an unidentified companion (pictured on the left), and refer to his "vaudeville days

Over the past several weeks on Facebook I have been chronicling my progress in organizing my grandparents' collection of family photographs and papers. For readers' convenience those posts are compiled below. Day 1: For those of you with boxes or closets of family photos and documents that you don't know how to handle, I've decided to start a series of posts featuring my own project. I acquired my father's family archives about three years ago. Since that time we've moved in

"Matriarchs" established that the women in our family are the storytellers. That doesn't mean the men have taught us any less. Their lessons have been communicated by actions more than words. Our two grandfathers were opposites in many ways. Grandpa Alson Eugene Pusey (1918-2009) was a life-long Seventh-day Adventist who was raised in town, the son of a factory worker. He grew up to earn a college degree and become a teacher. Grandpa Paul C. Fox (1920-2009) was raised a coun

What makes one family a clan and another family a loosely connected network of households–if they even know each other? Is it simply a function of a mutual effort and willingness to communicate? Is it the comradery of shared experience and close proximity? Or is it a social and cultural phenomenon doomed to obsolescence in the developed world and relegation to isolated pockets of ethnic homogeneity? I'm not a sociologist and I'm not even going to pretend to answer these quest

It was Wayne Winkler's observation about the fluidity of Melungeon race identity in the United States Federal censuses that prompted me to look at another pattern in my husband's maternal grandfather's genealogy. Some of Winkler's comments suggest there was a progression in Melungeon identity from the 1790 census to the the twentieth century, moving from white to mulatto to Native American and then back to white. In just ten years from one census to the next, the same individ

Fort Foote occupied what felt like a remote place four miles south of Alexandria and eight miles south of Washington, D.C. With no access by road and despite daily contact with the outside world when supplies were delivered by boat from Alexandria, a sense of isolation created boredom. After the 2nd Battalion of the Ninth New York Heavy Artillery had been there a while, perhaps on several occasions, some soldiers, including my great-great-grandfather David Stevenson on at lea

We all have them. The stories at which our grandparents only hint and won't satisfy us with answers, usually because they are too painful to think about. I grew up with a vague story usually referred to as the time Grandma G.G. (my great-grandmother Edith Menges Morris) was kidnapped by that terrible man (her step-father Fred Warner). I was told Warner took Edith to his sister's house near White Pigeon, Michigan, just over the state border from the Menges family farm near Br

One of the most important reasons for researching family history is to create a deeper emotional connection to family by better understanding the lives and motivations of one's ancestors. Documentary evidence which fleshes out an ancestor's biography may be difficult to find unless the ancestor was socially prominent, politically active, or achieved notoriety for some reason. While most genealogists are familiar with church records in the form of baptismal registers and meeti

This blog post is for my mother who has been suffering a twinge of inferiority complex since the discovery of my father's illustrious Nantucket Island origins. We are all familiar with family stories, supposedly connecting us to famous people, which turn out to be false. But sometimes a connection can be discredited as improbable and turn out to be true. Such is the case with my Cronkhite ancestors. When Walter Cronkite rose to broadcast fame, some of my relatives wondered i