These are my great-great grandfather (from my mother's Yankee side of the family), Asa Gates White, born 1817, and his third wife, a spinster schoolteacher named Martha Bush Keyes, born 1826. The Keyes and White families were friends. Like Asa, Martha was born in Morgan County, Ohio, and later moved to Wabaunsee, Kansas. Wabaunsee was founded by Congregationalist abolitionists from the East just after the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854. Its schools, where Martha taught, are noteworthy for having always been integrated, 100 years before Brown vs. Board of Education. Later, Asa and Martha moved to San Diego, while Asa's children stayed in Kansas.
My grandfather, Harlow Ferguson, was Asa Gates White's grandson. In 1891, when Harlow was six years old, he and his older sister Bernice were orphaned in Kansas, and their grandfather Asa died a month later in San Diego. Asa's widow Martha was left responsible for the orphans' care, but whether because she barely knew them or because she lived at such a daunting distance, she did not send for them to California. Instead, Harlow was sent to live with a schoolteacher in Wabaunsee, presumably a family friend of Martha. In later years he hired out to a number of different families as a farmhand. He never again saw his sister Bernice or left Kansas. Bernice, though a protestant, was sent to a Catholic orphanage to live; we have no further news of her.
The White family traces its origins back to Elder John White, a Puritan and one of the founders of Cambridge, Mass. Asa Gates White served the Union Army in Company K, 6th Iowa Cavalry, from 1862-1865. My father's family, on the other hand, the Kilpatricks, were completely Southern, having emigrated to Virginia in the 18th century from Ulster, and then spread through the South along with the cotton culture. All able adult Kilpatrick males (too many to list, but including two great-grandfathers) fought for the Confederacy. Only when both my parents ended up in graduate school in 1944 at Berkeley did the Northern family join with the Southern. Eighty years before, their ancestors had been fighting each other, sometimes in the same battle, opposite sides.
17 comments:
I don't usually see the concept of family friends spoken much of or covered in American Hollywood, tv, or other types of shows.
I wonder why.
I didn't realize it was an actual thing, besides the usual blood relationships, until I saw foreign cultures utilize the subject matter for fiction.
Family lineages never made any sense to me in the word format of the English language. Only looking at it through a tree, visually, made it have sense.
Wonderful story.
Off topic, Texan99, you used to comment at "Rhymes With Cars & Girls" yes? What happened to him? Do you know?
I loved his blog, but then he went all-Twitter (which I do not use), and then poof, the blog disappeared.
Thx.
You know, I had completely forgotten about that site, which I used to enjoy so much! I haven't even thought of going there for ages, and can't remember why I stopped. I think maybe I had a feed, what-do-you-call-it, RSS, and I stopped getting reminders. Maybe that's when he wandered off to Twitter.
I like the way it describes the families as friends. That's right, of course, but it's something we almost never say.
Wabaunsee was founded by Congregationalist abolitionists from the East just after the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854. Its schools, where Martha taught, are noteworthy for having always been integrated, 100 years before Brown vs. Board of Education.
Nonsense. All of white (no, wait... "people who believe they are white" - I forgot that race is a fictional construct used to oppress the powerless and facilitate shallow generalizations about people based on the color of their skin) Amerikkka's success is based on plundering people of cholor and destroying black bodies.
There are no exceptions. I proactively denounce you for spreading lies and misinformation, Missy.
HAVE YOU NO SHAME????
Have you considered choosing a different book club? :)
Well, next month we're reading "Good in Bed". So there is that :p
That's very interesting Tex, I know people named Keys who have roots in Kansas. I wonder if they're relatives of yours.
Great photo, and great story. When I was growing up, we talked about families as friends, but I don't hear it anymore.
If American culture used to have something, but lately it has been phased out, well that raises the obvious question. Who has been erasing the culture for decades?
It's one thing to have a fashion trend that cycles over, or something lost due to technology changing society, but social media and such would have promoted friendships and alliances, cellphones would have done the same, airplanes would have done the same. Why was it not the same?
Grim:
Only when both my parents ended up in graduate school in 1944 at Berkeley did the Northern family join with the Southern. Eighty years before, their ancestors had been fighting each other, sometimes in the same battle, opposite sides.
This is the first time I recall hearing about your northern side.
My North-South parents also met in graduate school, but at Illinois after WW2 ended. My northern father's family mostly entered the US from Pennsylvania- some from Mass and some from NY- but some ended up in the Shenandoah Valley- rather like Abraham Lincoln's family's migrations. In the 1805s some of my grandfather's family sold their farms and moved from the Shenandoah Valley to Illinois, where many fought in the Civil War on the Union side. Had they remained in the Shenandoah Valley, they would probably have fought for the Confederacy or had Sheridan's forces destroy their farms.
Which reminds me of a story from the family story my grandmother assembled in the 1950s. An uber-great uncle who fought on the Union side in WW2, took responsibility for a black soldier who had saved his live in the Civil War. My uber-great uncle took the black soldier home with him, and employed him on his farm until he died. After the black soldier turned farm hand died, my uber-great uncle wanted to bury him in the town cemetery. The town fathers refused to let a black be buried in the cemetery, so he was buried right outside the cemetery. Over the decades the cemetery expanded, resulting in the once-excluded grave of the black soldier eventually being incorporated into the cemetery. Integration, Illinois-style.
WW2, by stimulating migration and marriages across the North-South divide, helped heal the wounds from the Civil War. My mother told me that when she was growing up in Oklahoma in the '30s, her older relatives were still fighting the Civil War. She vowed to stop fighting it.
Cassandra, your book club story reminds me of this book club. Or is it your book club? I Don’t Want to Talk About It.
I wonder if Ta-Neshi Coates, whose father was a Black Panther, realizes that those who know about the fate of Betty Van Patter do not have warm and fuzzy feelings towards the Black Panthers.
Gringo:
This is the first time I recall hearing about your northern side.
That's because it's Tex's post. The only Northern side I have is the folks who came from Scotland in the 18th century. :)
Now, that said, I do have both Confederate and Union ancestors. They were from Tennessee, where the division often split families.
And it's the first time I've talked about my Northern side, too, probably. I'm not in contact with any of them; when my mother died in 1959 she was already estranged from her family.
My uncle - my mother's sister's husband - was descended from Elder John White, so you are distant cousin to my close cousins.
I'll bet if we looked hard enough we'd find that all our distant cousins were distant cousins. Europeans just haven't been here that long.
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