A Study in Contrasts

Researching my family history has become a study in contrasts. My mother was a fount of family stories. She loved to talk about her relatives and ancestors, and I grew up with the steady bubbling of tales of her beloved Aunt Pearl and her grandfather Abner McDowell Osborne, a railroad conductor who died trying to stop a derailed train.

My mother was one to embellish stories, not because she lied about things, but I knew from first-hand experience that her stories could take on rather epic qualities the more she told them. I had come to question her tale of my great-grandfather and the runaway train until I found articles from various 1885 newspaper accounts that verified the heroic drama that ended his life.

Mom saved photos—thousands and thousands of photos—of her family members, dating back to the mid to late 1800s. She also kept letters, and her family was a letter-writing group. Abner, or "Mac" as he was known, wrote letters to his wife Maggie from Wyoming and Montana, telling her of the work he was finding and giving a picture of what life was like in that barely settled area of the country in the 1880s.

I have letters my great-uncle Willie Long wrote home to his mother from Sweetgrass, Montana, in 1894-1895, begging his mother's forgiveness for disappearing for so long and promising to return to her after she obviously extended that forgiveness and begged him to come home. (More about Uncle Willie another time. His is quite a story!)

Thanks to my mother's reverence for all family memorabilia, I have the marriage certificate for Abner and Maggie Osborne, who were married in Wyoming in 1878, and it includes a little oval picture of each of them. They were quite the handsome couple, and judging by Abner's letters, they were very much in love.

In contrast, my father talked very little about his family. His mother, Pearl Effie Wilson McClellan, died in the Influenza Epidemic in 1918, when my father was only four years old. Dad would occasionally mention a cousin here and there as I was growing up, and I met a few of his relatives when I was young, but it was his step-mother, Alice, who held on to letters and photos that now give me a sense of the family history on the McClellan-Wilson side.

JY and Alice

Alice Cornwall Knoch McClellan married Joe Young McClellan, my dad's father, when Dad was about nine years old. Alice, or Grandma Mac as we called her, loved my father very much, and she and her big close-knit family took him into their fold, providing him with a mother, three new aunts, and wonderful grandparents to fuss over him. That must have meant so much to this little boy who had been through so much at such a young age.

Thanks to Grandma Mac's thoughtfulness in preserving things related to my father's history, I have a few of the letters that Grandma Pearl, as I call her, wrote to her father-in-law, John Arthur McClellan, in the early days of her marriage to J.Y. Pearl sounds like such a delightful, fun, and funny young woman, and she obviously doted on her baby boy, Graydon Elmo, whom she called "Sonny Boy." Pearl was a bit camera-shy, it seems; I have a picture in which she is hiding from the camera by ducking behind my dad, who must have been two or three at the time. I do have a few pictures of her, though, and even I can see the resemblance between Pearl and me. There's something about her that just resonates with me, and the thought of her dying so quickly at such a young age from that deadly disease adds a melancholy to my affection for her.

Pearl Wilson McClellan

A few years ago, my brother Roger and I met up in San Antonio, where he was attending a conference, and drove to East Texas—Orange, where Pearl died, and Kirbyville, where she is buried. Pearl's family, the Wilsons, were very established in that area, and there's even a Wilson family cemetery down the road from where Pearl is buried. That's one of the mysteries I'd like to solve: why was Pearl buried in a separate place and not with her ancestors? Was it because of the epidemic? Were people afraid to have those who died of something so obviously contagious buried in family plots? Or was there a falling out between J.Y. and Pearl's family? This is the sort of puzzle that fascinates me as I search deeper and deeper into my family's stories.

Pearl's Grave