The Shockingly Pink Shell

There.  That one.  The shell.  That's the one.  She liked picking out the ceramic pieces.  They were bare.  Naked.  Just sitting there.  Ready and waiting for someone's imagination to come along and bring it to life.  Being a mother of eight, she knew a little something about that.

She sat down and turned the shell over, and picking up her scraping tool, her sister began to tell of Aunt Vyla's latest antics and she began to scrape the line left by the shell mold.  Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.  Every so often she'd pause, put the tool down, take her small sponge and dip it into the water bowl that she shared with her sister Anne, wring it to near dryness, and gently rub it along the area she had just scraped smoothing the line away.  Making sure with her finger the line would never be seen again.  She kept alternating between the monotonous tasks of scraping and smoothing.

As she was wringing the sponge once again, Anne said something about Aunt Vyla that grabbed her attention away from her task. And she wasn't careful to wring the sponge completely.  She swiped the base where the mold line had been.  Her recognition of what she'd done was too late.  "God bless America and all the ships at sea," she muttered under her breath.  "What?"  Anne inquired.  "Oh nothing," she replied.  "Go on.  What did Aunt Vyla do?  This time?"  Really, it was something.  Now the shell's base would be lopsided.  The extra water on the sponge had made the fragile greenware bend.  Just a little.  But just enough.  She sighed.  Then she went on to scrape once more.

Having finally smoothed the mold line away, there was only one thing to do before the piece was fired in the kiln.  To etch her initials on the bottom of the shell.  Using her scraping tool, she first scratched an "A".  "Not too bad," she thought.  Almost whimsy with the swirls on the bottom of the letter.  Almost.  Next she scratched a "B" into the soft clay.  Hm.  A wee crooked.  Which just about summed up her relationship with the man who stayed around long enough to share his name with her, to father their 8 children, and to leave once the going got tough.  Then she smiled.  O.K., maybe it was a smirk.  God forgive her.  At least she didn't snort.  This time.  Ladies don't snort.  Well, not in public at least.  Or so her mother had told her.


The next week, her shell was waiting for her at her place at the crafts table.  Scandalously naked.  Waiting for her to clothe it in color.  She'd thought about what colors to use all week.  She'd finally decided on pink and maybe a little turquoise for accent.  As she sat down, she gingerly placed a finger on the rim on the back left-hand side of the shell.  She pressed down and then released it.  Clunk.  Yup.  Lopsided.  She sighed.  As she picked up her brush and dipped it into the pink paint, her sister Anne asked her, "Did you hear what Aunt Vyla did yesterday?"  And as her sister talked about Aunt Vyla, she painted the shell.  Pink.  Actually it was starting to look shockingly pink.  She covered the whole shell in shocking pink paint.  Then sat there waiting for it to dry.  Once dry, she rinsed her brush clean and dipped it in the turquoise paint, and began to paint along the rim of the shell providing some depth and a very necessary break from the shocking pink.


When she entered the room the following week, she instantly saw her shell.  Her very pink shell.  It was hard to miss.  She sat down, dipped her brush into the milky glaze, and began to apply the glaze all over the shell.  As her sister began to retell a story about the neighbors, she wondered, "What?  No stories about Aunt Vyla?"


Three layers of glaze and five stories ~two including Aunt Vyla~ later, she was finally done.  She sat back.  And smiled in approval.  She liked it.  She liked its whole shocking pink and lopsided self.  Next week, she'd come pick it up after its last firing.  

Then Anne interrupted her thoughts, "What are you going to do with another ashtray, Alice?  You don't even smoke.  And its lopsided to boot."

Alice sighed and rolled her eyes heavenward.  Sisters.  She finally replied, "'To each his own,' said the old lady as she kissed the cow, and the old man who peed in the sea to keep the boat from sinking."


Then she snorted.

Note: I have no idea what the story is behind this ceramic piece.  I just know that my Gran, Mary Alice (Truitt) Blacketer, made it, and that she did so after she was married.  I took creative license, but the names are real.  Also there were always stories about Aunt Vyla.  Always.  Further, one of my older sisters taught a ceramics class that I attended when I was younger, so I do know a little something about ceramics.  I did witness on occasion my Gran snorting [and quite unlady-like at that].  Yes, she did use the old-lady-cow-old-man-boat saying.  [You didn't think I made that up, did you?  Even I'm not that creative.]  And yeah, my grandfather was a jerk.  It seems I've got a lot of those. [Snort.]  Anywho, here it is, and I use it to hold my paper clips in my office.  It matches absolutely nothing.  It's worth nothing to most.  And it means the world to me.

Gran's Initials.

The lopsided base.

My Gran ~ Mary Alice (Truitt) Blacketer

© Copyright 2010, Caroline Martin Marshall Pointer

Tombstone Tuesday: My Grandfather

My grandfather, James Wesley Blacketer, is buried in Fort Sam Houston Cemetery located in San Antonio, Texas.

What's In A Name? Open To the Possibilities

The "Maybe's" Of It All

I love patterns, and lucky for me, there are plenty to be found in genealogy.  It's so satisfying to find them in my research notes, database reports, or spreadsheets.  It may not give me an answer to a problem, but it can give me something quantifyable to look at maybe leading to some circumstantial evidence for a line that I'm stuck on.  One type of pattern that I like the most is naming patterns.  There are all sorts of naming patterns, and I have yet to find one in one of my lines that follows the official naming pattern "rules," but I do seem to find patterns within my family lines' given names.

 Don't Forget the Brothers and the Sisters

My maternal grandfather's surname is Blacketer.  Because it's a unique name, especially the further you go back in time, it's a pretty easy name to trace.  However, what makes this line so difficult is the given names.  Come again?  Well, to say it's a big family is an understatement, and apparently everyone just absolutely adored each other.  Hence, they named their children after their siblings, uncles, aunts, and the like ~ a lot.  Furthermore, many migrated with each other causing generations of those with the same exact names within the same age ranges to be living near each other!  Nothing's ever easy, is it?  In Ancestry.com's family trees, you can find many branches of this family ~ both sourced and unsourced.  Furthermore, on the surname message boards, you can find many confused researchers wondering, "Are we related?"  So, one day I decided to "figure them out," dilligently following each line, going from the "bottom up" then the "top down."  I already knew who the progenitor of my line was, William Alexander Blacketer from Scotland, I knew all of his children, and I knew how I connected to William.  This took time, but I don't think that it was particularly hard.  The main thing that I saw that other researchers may have overlooked was collateral lines ~ their ancestor's brothers and sisters.  They hadn't followed those lines, so that when another Blacketer "popped up" where their ancestor's line was [which relatives tend to do], they hadn't any idea if or how they were related.  To me, though, the Blacketer surname is not like the surnames "Jones," "Williams," or, God forbid, the dreaded "Smith," so I didn't feel too particularly intimidated.  Although, one thing that struck me while doing this research and again once I was done with the research was the given name patterns.  Interestingly enough, they exist in my line even today.

Can a Curse Be A Blessing?

My grandfather's name was James Wesley Blacketer.  He was my Gran's husband ~ you remember my Gran, right?  Well, they named their first born son James Wesley, and he named his first born son, James Wesley, a first cousin of mine.  Want to take a wild guess as to what my first cousin named his first born son?  Bingo!  Bob.  Just kidding.  He named him James Wesley. [And aren't my descendants lucky that I've got this part figured out?  Your welcome.  It was my pleasure.]  What was an unpleasant task was figuring out all the other branches ~ both close and distant.  The curse, if there is one, in this family is the replication of given names.  However, the curse is also a blessing in this case because it happens frequently.

The First Ones

To give you an example, I decided to take my grandfather's name and search my "Blacketer" database for the name "James Wesley," "James" as a first name or a middle name, and "Wesley" as a first name or a middle name.  Keep in mind, however, there are plenty in my database that don't have a middle name recorded and there are plenty of "J." and "W." middle initials.  Also, I looked up the earliest recorded James and the earliest recorded Wesley because I was curious as to who the first American Blacketer's in this family were with these names.

As They Moved West, Westley Lost a "T"

The oldest Wesley was actually a "Westley."  Born in 1771, William Westley was the son of William Alexander and Rachel Mary (?) Blacketer.  [Accck! Another Mary.]  William Westley had 10 known brothers and sisters and the next brother down from him is my 3rd great-grandfather, David Blacketer.  Also, this Westley named a son of his Wesley M..  [Will wonders never cease?] Interestingly [but not surprisingly], there's only one other William Westley [with this exact spelling] that I have found, and he was the brother of my 1st great-grandfather Harrison Blacketer.  The stats on the name Wesley are as follows:

[3] Wesley Blacketer

[1] Wesley M. Blacketer

[4] James Wesley Blacketer

[1] John Wesley Blacketer

[2] William Westley Blacketer

[1] John Wesley Blacketter

Let's Name Him "James" So the Name Will Never Die Out

The oldest recording of James in my Blacketer family is James Blacketer born in 1801.  He was the son of my 3rd great-parents David and Mary F. (Cox) Blacketer.  [Oh look, another Mary.]  This James also had a son named James born in 1833.  Well, if they were worried about the name "James" dying out in the Blacketer family, they needn't have worried.  Here are the "James" stats from my Blacketer database.

[8] James Blacketer

[1] James A. Blacketer

[1] James D. Blacketer

[1] James P. Blacketer

[1] James T. Blacketer

[1] James W. Blacketer

[1] James William Blacketer

[4] James Wesley Blacketer

Of Course I'm Not Sure...

So, you might be wondering, "Are you 100% sure that they were all named after the original James and/or Wesley?"  And the answer is, "No.  I can't be sure."  However, it's interesting to notate, to look at, to ponder, and to analyze.  You can take this information and add it to other information such as migration patterns, and together they might yield some interesting results.  My grandfather's name, James Wesley, probably wasn't the best name to look at.  The progenitor of the family, William Alexander, probably would've been better.  So briefly, here are the stats on the name William:

[23] William as a 1st name

[1] William as a 2nd name

[4] Willie [may or may not be a nickname for William]

Coincidences Do Happen...

Let's face it, though, these could all be coincidental, right?  Perhaps the most convincing of all is the number of times the generations have the same group of names.  For example, William and Rachel's children were as follows: Henry Burrell, John, William Westley, Elizabeth, David [my 3rd great-grandfather], Nancy B., Rachel, Keziah, Norman, Mary "Polly" [another one, yay me!], and Jane.  The following is a summation of their children's names ~ the one's that repeat [Also, I am missing 3 of the children's lines]:

[5] John

[3] Elizabeth

[3] William

[3] Thomas

[2] Rachel [named after Rachel Mary?]

[2] Nancy

[2] Jane

[2] Mary

[2] David

[2] Jonathon

[2] Henry [1 as a first name; 1 as a middle name]

[2] Wesley [1 as a first name; 1 as a middle name]

[1] Alexander [not repeated, but is the middle name of William, the progenitor of the line]

Keeping Your Mind Open...

Could you imagine going to Grandpa William's and Grandma Rachel's for Thanksgiving with all these kids with the same names?

"Hey, you, John #4.  Quit hitting Thomas #2." 

"And William #1 quit pulling Elizabeth #3's braids."

"And John Henry quit feeding the dog turkey!"

"No, not you, John #'s 1-4 or just plain Henry!  I mean John Henry!"  

[Yowzer!  Nope.  I couldn't imagine that nightmare...]  Furthermore, these names repeat more and more down the lines.  So when they migrated with each other, it was hard to keep up with all of them.  Moreover, my grandfather James Wesley and my Gran seem to have given some of the same names to their children: James Wesley [already mentioned], David, John, and...Mary [Goodness me!]  Of course, you have to be careful with this thinking.  Why do I say this?  Does anyone remember my Gran's name?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Why, it's...Mary, of course! [Rolling eyes heavenward.]  The whole point of all this is that it's probably a good idea to keep an eye on the names in your family ~ to keep your mind open to the possibilities...

Her Irish Eyes ~ They Were A Smilin'

Image by epSos.de via Flickr

Alice Florence (Vaughan) Truitt

With each name that I research, it still amazes me the finds that I make in my pursuit of my family's genealogy and the stories that I find behind their names.  Sometimes, though, the story leads to the name, or a picture, or another person to add to the family tree...Today I'd like to introduce you to my "Boo".  No, it's not Boo Radley [Silly. That's a fictional character.], but my great-grandmother, Alice Florence [Vaughan] Truitt.  I don't have a picture of her unfortunately, but I do have the story behind her name.

A Bean Counter is Off to Mexico

My grandfather, James Wesley Blacketer was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa 22 Mar 1894, grew up in Missouri, joined the army, was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, and this is where he met and married my Gran, Mary Alice Truitt [Boo's daughter].  My grandfather [who I never met] was pretty much a "bean counter" all of his life, which [no offense, but] doesn't usually lead to an adventurous life.  However, my grandfather managed to put a little pizzaz into his life when he secured a position with a company in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico.  Yes, you read correctly. Mexico.  Now, growing up I had always heard about my grandparents and my eldest aunt living in Mexico for awhile, but never thought much about it until I found my grandfather's and my grandmother's applications for a U.S. Passport on Ancestry.com.  This was definitely a good find because the applications included a picture of the applicants, and I had never "seen" my grandfather before.

Tampico, Mexico

Image by MichaelB in Houston via FlickrIn the 1920's [and a little before], Tampico, Mexico was a booming city with the introduction of the tramway/railway and the development of natural resources such as oil.  Many companie
s came there to "set-up shop", and apparently many Americans in search of work followed them, and my grandfather was one of them.

Happy and Bilingual [Sort Of]

So, what does this have to do with how my "Boo" received her nickname?  Well, I'm getting to that. As you can see, in the picture that was used for my Gran's application, there are 3 people.  On the left, I believe is my Aunt Anne [actually, she's my Gran's sister, but we always called her Aunt Anne], my Gran is on the right, and she's holding my Aunt Happy. [There's a story there, too, with that name.]  Aunt Happy was about 6 months old here in this picture.  The story that I heard countless times was that when the family came back from Mexico, my Aunt Happy could only speak Spanish, with just a few words known in English.  One of these words [and apparently one of her favorites] was "bamboo" [I suppose they had some growing there where they lived].  When not speaking Spanish, she called everything "bamboo" including my [you guessed it] great-grandmother, Alice Florence [Vaughan] Truitt.  Try as they may, they couldn't get her to call her anything else, and eventually it was truncated by my Aunt Happy to just Boo. And she's been Boo ever since.

Her Irish Eyes, They Were A Smilin'

My Boo, Alice Florence [Vaughan] Truitt was born in Port Bolivar, Texas 23 Oct 1883. [Port Bolivar is the peninsula that was one of the hardest hit areas by Hurricane Ike last year and is also known as Bolivar Point and The Bolivar Peninsula.]  Unfortantely, I don't have many memories of my own of my Boo.  In fact, I have just one.  I remember my Aunt Mary Anne and my Uncle Lloyd bringing Boo for a visit in the early 1970's and she was quite elderly then.  Uncle Lloyd was forever yelling at her.  No, not really yelling at her, but speaking very loudly to her [it just seemed to me like he was yelling].  Well, I never understood why he did that, so I asked him.  He replied that Boo was hard-of-hearing then he walked off.  I then turned to my Boo and said "I don't yell, and you're able to hear me just fine."  She replied, "Don't worry about him.  I just do it to annoy him."  [A woman after my own heart.]  
Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr [Howth & Ireland's Eye. County Dublin, Ireland.]

My Boo was a spry thing for being, at the time, just over 90 yrs old. [She passed away at age 94 in 1978.] Oh, that reminds me.  She danced the Irish Jig on her 90th birthday. I wish I had memories of it. I'm sure, though, her mother [my great-great grandmother] Annie (O'Brien) Vaughan's Irish eyes were a smilin' an' a watchin' from abov', stompin' her fee' an' clappin' her hands.