William Henderson Crozier (1875-1953) and Myrtle English Crozier (1875-1949)

Will and Myrtle Crozier circa 1910

Will was my great-uncle, and Myrtle was his wife. The Croziers, my mom’s paternal side of the family, lived in the small unincorporated town of Dutch Mills in northwest Arkansas. 

I know next to nothing about Will and Myrtle, but one of the fun things about researching family history is looking at the Census records for family members. Not only do you find out about their lives (ages, schooling, professions, addresses) but also about who their neighbors were. The 1910 Census, for example, shows that the Croziers lived next door to the Whites. The Whites’ daughter Mary Clem ended up marrying Will Crozier’s little brother Roy. That’s right, Cousin Susan Reimers and Cousin Annie Marquez, your grandfather was Will Crozier’s little brother. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve dropped into a production of “Our Town” as I learn these stories.

The Croziers' roots run deep in Arkansas. The little homestead where my grandfather Joe Crozier grew up still stands, as does the church his preacher/farmer father, James Knox Polk Crozier, founded. I hope to visit there someday and look up some of my kinfolk who still live in the area.

Ruth Roberts McClelland

Ruth Roberts (1890-1977) was my 1st cousin 2x removed, the daughter of my great-grand aunt Julia Long Roberts. Ruth grew up in Silver Plume, Colorado, and according to the writing on the front of the picture, she attended Boulder College. Ruth went on to marry James Robert McClelland (yes, that silly "d" belongs there at the end), which is rather ironic, considering she's on my mother's side, and McClellan (no extraneous "d" required) was my father's surname.

Even though I was twenty-seven when she died, I don't believe I ever met her, which is strange, since she had family in California, and my family drove through Colorado multiple times on cross-country trips. Ruth's brother John Lewis Roberts and his family were very close to my parents, but for some reason, we had little contact with the other Roberts siblings. 

They must have kept in touch with my mother, though, because I have so many pictures of them, at least up until the 1920s or so.

Mary Jane Long McLaughin (1828-1920)

Aunt Mary circa 1908

From the early 1900s: My 2nd great grand aunt Mary Jane Long McLaughlin. My mother's great-grandfather's sister, Aunt Mary was born in Illinois in 1828. She moved to Troy, Kansas, where in 1847 she married Harkness D. McLaughlin and raised six children. Sometime between 1900 and 1910, long after Harkness had died in 1874, she moved to Los Angeles to be near family. She died at the ripe old age of 92 in 1920. I'm not sure if I'm looking at the past or at my future in this pic. Long live the Aunt Marys of this world!

Aunt Mary with Bud Crozier? circa 1920

Roadside Picnic with the Griers

From around 1910: My Aunt Alma and Uncle Ed on the right taking a break from a little road trip. I'm not sure who the people are on the left, but it looks as if the first man might have been a chauffeur (Alma and Ed were my only relatives with means); the first woman on the left is my Great-Aunt Georgia, Alma's sister; the woman next to her is someone named Ethel; and the little girl who looks as if she was photoshopped in from the 1950s is my cousin Dot, Alma and Ed's daughter.

Captain William A. Long (1828-1862)

Still thinking of soldiers who gave their lives: This picture was taken around 1860. On the left is my 2nd great-grandfather William Alfred Long. On the right is his brother James Hiram Long. William was a Captain in the Union Army during the Civil War. The Longs lived in Missouri at the time, a state much divided in loyalties. Seriously wounded in the Battle of Lone Jack in August of 1862, William was discovered among the dead and dying by a neighbor fighting on the Confederate side. The neighbor, James Henley, got a wagon and took the wounded Captain home, where the Henley family nursed William until he died. I had heard this story for years, but I suspected that my mom might have embellished it a bit. Turns out to be true. Even war can't completely extinguish the compassion found in the human heart.

Chaplain Graydon E. McClellan Heading Home

From left: My father, Marian and Jimmy McPartland?

From April 1946: After two years as an Army chaplain, most of it spent in the European Theater, my father sailed out of LeHavre on a troop ship headed for New York. On that ship, Dad met jazz musicians Jimmy and Marian McPartland. Jimmy served in the Army, playing jazz for the soldiers. That's how Jimmy met Marian, who had joined an English version of the USO. My father was never a jazz fan, but he really enjoyed these two, and he and Marian stayed in touch over the years. That's my dad on the left in the first picture. I THINK—but don't know for sure—that the couple in the photos is Marian and Jimmy; based on the last photo, which is a picture of them that I found on the Internet, I'm pretty sure that they're the very same people. And people wonder why I spend so much time looking through all these old photos! 

Definitely Marian and Jimmy McPartland

Marian and Jimmy McPartland?

Margaret Matilda Armstrong Long (1832-1897)

Margaret Matilda Armstrong Long circa 1860

The Long Family, circa 1865 (clockwise from bottom left):
Margaret Matilda, Julia C, Margaret Lucy, John G, Willie

By all accounts, Margaret Matilda Armstrong Long, my great-great-grandmother, was a mighty woman. Widowed in 1862, when her husband, William Alfred Long, was killed at the Battle of Lone Jack in Missouri, Margaret Matilda was left with four young children to raise on her own. When the children were older, she moved the family to Laramie, Wyoming, where she was active in the Temperance Movement and the local Baptist church. Eventually she moved to Silver Plume, Colorado, to live with her daughter Julia, finally ending up in Los Angeles with her daughter Margaret Lucy. Another example of the pull of the west in my family tree.

Daniel Boone (1734-1820)

I’ve been reading a very interesting book about Daniel Boone called Boone: A Biography, by Robert Morgan (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007). As my niece Nina McClellan Atchley discovered years ago, Daniel Boone was a relative. He was actually my fifth great-grand uncle; his sister Hannah Boone Stewart Pennington was my fifth great-grandmother.

I confess that I knew little of Daniel Boone beyond the Disney version of his story. The more I read about him, the more I identify with certain traits he held. In the book, he’s described as both a loner and gregarious. He was terrible with money and constantly in debt. It wasn’t that he was a deadbeat—he actually put a lot of effort into his money-making adventures; it’s just that he risked a lot on his vision of his future, often finding that things didn’t quite work out the way he’d planned. That never seemed to stop him from seeking new adventures, new frontiers to explore. He was restless, finding it almost impossible to stay home and settle into the daily life of an 18^th century American farmer. He loved his wife and children, and yet he would take off for months, even years, at a time, while he searched for that patch of Eden that would satisfy him.

It was this passage from Boone that really resonated with me. Morgan quotes Lord Dunmore, the British-appointed governor of Colonia Virginia, as saying, “Americans…do and will remove as their avidity and restlessness incite them. They acquire no attachment to Place: But wandering about seems engrafted in their Nature; and it is a weakness incident to it, that they should forever imagine lands Further off, are Still better than those upon which they are already Settled.” Guilty as charged.

Daniel Boone kept moving west until he was able to settle with his family in what he must have seen as his ultimate paradise: the lush and fertile land of Kentucky. He had made a few trips to Kentucky before he actually settled there. I can only imagine how much his wife, Rebecca, must have rolled her eyes every time he came back from one of his excursions filled with tales of the promised land that lay just beyond the mountains. I’m sure it didn’t help that he usually came back empty-handed and penniless, having lost whatever furs, hides, ginseng, and other treasures he had acquired on his trip to Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, and other indigenous groups not so keen on having white settlers move into yet another expanse of the land they called home.

Boone had a relationship of mutual respect with most of the Native Americans he encountered during his lifetime. Boone embraced their understanding of and reverence for the natural world, adopting many of their techniques for hunting and moving through difficult terrain. At times he was captured by Indians who wished to relieve him of his—in their minds illegally gotten—gains, the exchange between captors and captive was by all accounts relatively polite and even collegial. Even in his grief when his son James was killed by a group of Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokees, angry at the encroachment into their hunting territory, Daniel seemed to understand that this was the price of the fight for land.

Daniel Boone was known for his wit and storytelling. Despite his love of solitude when he disappeared into the wilderness, Boone loved large gatherings of friends and families, where he would entertain his audience with jokes and hair-raising tales of some of his most dangerous adventures. He also loved to sing. One of my favorite anecdotes about Daniel Boone has to do with some men who hear a strange sound coming from a place deep in the wilderness. They follow the sound to find Boone, sitting by his campfire, all by himself, singing at the top of his lungs. My kind of man.

I know it might seem silly to some to look to distant relatives for the origins of one’s own character traits, but I can’t help but think that there’s a certain truth in such connections. Daniel Boone is recalled and admired for his love of adventure, his sense of honesty and his sense of humor, his loyalty, his philosophical approach to the ups and downs of life, and his reverence for nature. These are qualities that have been highly revered and encouraged in the families that are part of my lineage and tradition. There is truth in that.

Painting of Daniel Boone by Alonzo Chappel

Who Are These People?

Given the hundreds—make that thousands—of photos that I've inherited, a few are unidentified. This is one of my favorites. I'm pretty certain these people are relations, but I'm not even sure which family branch they belong to. One way or another, my brother Johnny wasn't the first cellist in the family.

Margaret Lucy Long Osborne (1856-1930)

Maggie, Newly Widowed, in 1885

My beautiful great-grandmother Margaret Lucy Long Osborne, AKA Maggie, was a mere 29 years old when she lost her husband, Abner McDowell Osborne; hence the widow's weeds in this picture of her. Abner, known as Mac, was a conductor for the Northern Pacific, and he died in 1885 in Missoula, Montana, trying to stop a runaway train. Maggie was left to raise four little girls on her own and did a bang-up job by all accounts.

Little Alma Osborne

Mac had been married before he met Maggie, but his first wife, Frances, died in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1876. She probably died from some illness, but the newspaper account doesn't give the cause of death. Frances left behind a thirteen-month-old daughter named Alma, above, shown wearing mourning clothes, poor little thing. Such tragedies were common in those days, but I can't imagine that the grief of losing a loved one was any easier.

Clockwise from left: Julia, Pearl, Alma,
Georgia Osborne, circa 1900

The Osborne women, mother and daughters, were very close. After Mac died, Maggie and the girls moved to Colorado to be near her sister, Julia Long Roberts. Eventually (mid 1890s?), Maggie and the girls moved to Los Angeles, along with Maggie's mother, Margaret Matilda Armstrong Long.
The girls, Julia (my maternal grandmother), Pearl, Alma, and Georgia, all lived very close to each other as adults and raised their families together. They had huge family gatherings, and Grandma Maggie was the beloved center of it all.

1919 Osborne Family Gathering

Maggie Behind My Mother's Gigantic Bow

Maggie circa 1920s

Although Maggie's life could be painted as tragic—she lost her father when she was six, her husband when she was twenty-nine, and one of her brothers ten years after that—she found the strength to carry on, on her own, raising her daughters to be strong, loving women who saw the joy in life. I know that she was a woman of deep faith, and that must have sustained her through the tragedies, but there was something special in her spirit that made her look at the blessings in her life rather than dwell on the losses. I suspect that Maggie's influence was part of the reason my mother was so unflaggingly upbeat in her own life. Maggie died at 74 in 1930, having left behind a legacy of love and faith. How I wish I had known her!