Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: An Ancestor Who Experienced or Did Something Unique or Memorable

What's memorable to one person (I won't even get into the actual definition of "unique") may not be to others, making it difficult for me to decide what to write about for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1.  Choose an ancestor who experienced or did something unique or memorable (such as an event, family life, trip, etc.).

2.  Share about your ancestor and his/her unique experience and how it may have affected their life in your own blog post or on your Facebook page.  Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.

[Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!]

Hmm hmm hmm.  What to write about?  After all, every person's life is unique.

Well, one of my favorite ancestors to write about is my 6th great-grandmother Ann (Ridgway) Gaunt.  She was Quaker, as most of the ancestral lines on my paternal grandmother's side of the family were.  She was born October 10, 1710 and died February 6, 1794, both events likely taking place in what is now New Jersey.  I don't know if she was unique, but she apparently was memorable, because people took the time to write about her.

From Peter Gaunt, 1610–1680, and Some of His Descendants (Woodbury, New Jersey:  Gloucester County Historical Society, 1989) by David L. Gauntt:

"Ann Ridgway was a well known Quaker minister of Little Egg Harbor, N.J.  She began preaching when she was a very young girl and traveled extensively on preaching excursions from that time until a very advanced age.  She was a minister for over 60 years . . . .  When very old, she could not stand to preach, but would kneel while preaching for an hour or more."

Memorable and admirable!

I also think my paternal grandfather was memorable.  He overcame a disability that would be a problem even for many people today and had a busy, productive life.

Bertram Lynn Sellers was born April 6, 1903 to Laura May Armstrong, an unwed mother.  She married Cornelius Elmer Sellers on November 7, 1903.  Elmer accepted my grandfather and raised him as his own.  Neither my grandfather nor his siblings ever knew that Elmer was not his biological father.

On January 22, 1916, when he was not yet 13 years old, my grandfather and three friends were playing in an unreinforced tunnel carved out of a dirt mound, and the tunnel collapsed.  Grampa suffered a serious leg injury that soon led to his right leg being amputated just below the knee.

A poor family in a relatively small town probably would not have had many resources available to provide lots of physical therapy or a state-of-the-art prosthesis (whatever that might have looked like in 1916).  It would be easy to imagine that the future of a child in this situation might not have gone well.

But Grampa married his first wife, Elizabeth Leatherberry Sundermier, on December 18, 1923.  They had three children together, born in 1924, 1925, and 1928.

It doesn't reflect well on him that he apparently abandoned his wife and children for some time, because in a list he created of all the residences he had had during his life, he wrote, "1928-1929 Traveling thru west no perm. Add."  That doesn't sound like an adventure where you have brought your family, so I've always presumed that he didn't, and neither of my aunts ever mentioned it.

He must have returned to New Jersey by the time of the 1930 census enumeration, because he was listed in the household with his mother in Mount Holly, New Jersey.  Maybe he came back after the beginning of the Great Depression?  His occupation was working in the silk mill in town.

My best guess is that that is where he met my grandmother, because in 1930 she was also in Mount Holly and also working at the silk mill.  I know that they had to have gotten together by about March 1935 at the latest, because my father was born December 4, 1935, and I can count back nine months.  This was without benefit of marriage, because Grampa was still married to Elizabeth at that time.

At some point after that, probably not too long, Grampa's daughters from his marriage came to live with them.  My aunt Dottie told me that they called my grandmother Mother Ann.  After thinking about this recently, I have been considering that this was at the instigation of my grandmother.

Before my father was born, however, in 1933, my grandfather started working for the government in the Civil Service, originally as a carpenter and plumber and later as a mechanical engineer.  He list of addresses includes a lot of moving around, which my father remembered, between New Jersey and New York.  They weren't enumerated in the 1940 census at all, probably because they lived in three different locations that year and were either just ahead of or just behind enumerators.

In 1941 Grampa started working at Fort Dix, New Jersey, which is where he met his second wife, Anita Clarice Loveman.  Unlike my grandmother, she wasn't willing to fool around with a married man, so (as she told me) she made him prove he wasn't married.  I guess that's what prompted his divorce from Elizabeth in 1953 and his abandonment of my father and grandmother.  And later in 1953 (at least I hope it was later) he married Anita in Okaloosa County, Florida.  They had one daughter in 1954.

Grampa was not an easy man to live with from what I have heard, and in 1961 Anita divorced him.  But he found someone else quickly, and a month later he married Adelle Cordelia Taylor.  She was his third wife, for those who are counting, and he managed this before I was even born.

He continued to work for the Civil Service for many, many years.  He was a Shriner.  He was well known and respected in the city of Niceville, where he settled.   He drove a stick shift.  He only started to slow down a little when he turned 80.

I consider him pretty memorable also.