Following Up on Ezra Gilliland

Posted on February 11, 2015 by melissawiseheart under Divorce, Documents, Family History, Genealogy, Gilliland Family

In the John Bridges Trial, two of his step-sons testified for him. It prompted me to learn more about them. I’m descended from their sister Mary Elizabeth. I have been unsuccessful thus far in finding anything on William. It seems he moved away. Ezra, however, stayed in New Albany, Indiana and there are some things I found for him.

From his trial testimony, he had been at Mr. Underhill’s house. John Underhill was a ship carpenter. Ezra’s brother William was a deck hand. His step-father was a shipyard watchman. In the 1860 Census, no occupation is listed for Ezra. His obituary says he was a steamboat engineer, and it’s easy to see where the influence came from.

One of the more colorful items was Ezra’s divorce. He married Ruth Helen Ruter on April 14, 1870. After twenty years of marriage, he filed for divorce.

New Albany Ledger, Saturday 1 Feb 1890, p.5, column 2, Stuart Barth Wrege Indiana History Room

New Albany Evening Tribune, Saturday 1 Feb 1890, p.4, column 3, NewspaperArchive.com

It’s far from a complete story on Ezra, but it does give me a sense of who he was.

Marie Neider: The Dancing Queen (52 Ancestors #06)

Posted on February 9, 2015 by melissawiseheart under 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge, Family History, Genealogy, Neider Family, Photographs, Stories

I know very little about my great grandmother, Marie Neider. She was born in Lampertheim, Germany to parents Christian and Elisabeth Neider on January 25, 1922. She had three daughters, one of whom died at the age of one, and one adopted son. She was married to Rolf Wolfgang Wölfert genannt Schmidt. She died in November of 1993, when I was ten years old.

My only memories of Oma (Marie) are vague at best. She and Opa (Rolf) flew here from Germany to visit for a while when I was about one and a half. I remember walking with Oma and Opa down a sidewalk. I remember stopping to smell the roses on the rose bush with them. I remember them giving me Äpfel (apples). I remember Oma laughing a lot.

Years later, in 1989, I remember waiting with my family in the kitchen for a while. The Berlin Wall had just come down and we were waiting for her phone call. I remember my mom and grandmother talking to her, but I don’t remember getting to talk to her. Although, I was six, so I may just not remember.

I recently asked my grandmother to tell me about her. I’ve heard stories, both good and bad, over the years, but I really wanted to know what she was like. She told me that Oma was a very social person. She loved to go to parties and her favorite thing to do was dance. Whenever she danced, she was happy.

Gottfried und Marie tanzen.

There is much that I need to learn about her still. I’m planning to take a class on German genealogy to learn how to find records over there. My grandmother said that her sister has a book with information in it that she will see if she can get copies of for us.

Mary Katherine Wiseheart: Nearly Two and Too Young

Posted on February 8, 2015 by melissawiseheart under Death, Documents, Family History, Genealogy, Research Process, Wiseheart Family

Mary Katherine Wiseheart died at the age of one year and nine months. She drowned in the neighbors’ fish pond. What little I knew of Mary Katherine came from my grandpa. Recently, as the family were going through things at Grandpa’s house, my uncle opened a book and found a piece of paper folded up. The note on the outside indicated that it was a lock of Mary Katherine’s hair. He opened it and it was indeed a lock of hair. I find it very hard to describe colors between blonde and brown, but I suppose it would be called ash.

This discovery prompted me to want to know all I could about her, but since she died so young, I felt sure that I wouldn’t be able to find much. As always, I began my search at the library. I looked for a death record. It didn’t yield any new information. It did, however, have a note that read “coroner inquest.” I looked for the coroner’s inquest, but she died in July of 1936 and the inquests on microfilm stop at February of 1936. I’ll have to check with the original repository to see if they have later inquests. I also checked the newspaper index to look for an obituary. Nothing had been indexed for Mary Katherine Wiseheart or variant spellings.

For a moment, I was at a loss. I thought about it and realized that I did have her date of death, 9 Jul 1936. I decided to look for the obituary manually. I pulled the roll for the New Albany Tribune that included July 1936. I started with the 9th and moved forward. To my surprise, there was a large, front page article on her death in the paper for the 10th. I believe that the only reason she was so prominently featured was because there had been another drowning the day before.

New Albany Tribune, Friday 10 July 1936, p.1, column 2, Stuart Barth Wrege Indiana History Room

I cried as I read it, feeling only a small measure of what her family must have felt. And I wondered at Sanford’s reaction. For a father who just lost a baby girl, he seemed to me to be calm about it. But the paper did say he was shocked. More than that though, as I researched Sanford for a future post, I learned a lot about his character and the things he had been through before this point and I now understand his reaction.

Mary Katherine, though not quite two years old, touched lives in such a way that those of us who never had the opportunity to know her have still grown up hearing of her.

An Example of Best Practice Genealogy from My Great Great Grandfather

Posted on February 5, 2015 by melissawiseheart under Documents, Family Bible, Family History, Genealogy, Tips & Tricks, Wiseheart Family

Some time around one hundred years ago, Daniel Wiseheart asked his father, William Henry (my great great grandfather), if he could borrow the family Bible. William lent it to him. A letter from Daniel states that the family Bible was destroyed in the 1917 tornado (or cyclone) that struck New Albany, Indiana. As I read this letter, I was dismayed. Until that point, I held out hope that one of Uncle Dan’s descendants might still have the Bible.

A couple of days ago, as my uncle and I went through the Rakestraw trunk looking for letters relating to Frank Springer, we found that William H. Wiseheart had copied down all of the information from the family Bible onto a piece of paper. Words cannot express the joy I felt with that discovery!

I’m also grateful that my great great grandpa had the foresight to copy the information. I can take a lesson from him. Make sure to copy everything before you loan it, or make copies for the person who wants to do the borrowing.

The following images are the envelope the paper was in, and the front and back of the page. I don’t know whose writing is the blue ink, but the information is accurate based on my research thus far.

Envelope containing transcription of William H. Wiseheart Family Bible.

Transcription of the William H. Wiseheart Family Bible by William H. Wiseheart. Births.

Transcription of the William H. Wiseheart Family Bible by William H. Wiseheart. Deaths, Marriages, and Memoranda.

Sanford Wiseheart: The Strong, Silent Type (52 Ancestors #05)

Posted on February 3, 2015 by melissawiseheart under 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge, Family History, Genealogy, Photographs, Stories, Wiseheart Family

Mary Elizabeth (Gilliland) Rakestraw with her great grandson, Sanford “Bud” Wiseheart, circa 1924.

Sanford William “Bud” Wiseheart was born on May 30, 1923 in New Albany, Indiana to Sanford Wesley and Mildred Gertrude (Springer) Wiseheart.¹ Bud’s great grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Rakestraw, lived with the family until her death in 1935.^2,3 She was the widow of a Civil War soldier and passed down many family stories to Bud and his siblings. In 1941, Bud’s father bought a farm just outside New Albany. They raised crops and chickens. Plucking the chickens was one of Bud’s jobs. He never would eat any poultry after that.

Sanford “Bud” Wiseheart on the farm.

Bud married Dolores Louise Schroeder on August 2, 1958 at Atkins Chapel United Methodist Church in Floyd Knobs, Indiana.^4,5,6 (For their engagement story, see Dolores Schroeder). They had four sons.⁶ Bud was a carpenter. He worked for New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School Corporation and he also did some freelance work. He was also very active in the church. He was an usher, bell ringer, Sunday school teacher, and maintenance man for Atkins Chapel. He also built the church’s Harvest Homecoming booth and assisted with Vacation Bible School. Bud died at home on October 30, 2014.⁷

Sanford William “Bud” Wiseheart

My grandpa was a hard working man who didn’t seem to have much to say, but when he did say something, it was more than worth it to pay attention. He was an excellent story teller and knew a lot about a lot of things. Every time he told me a story, it was full of heart. Bud was no stranger to hard times, but he weathered them all. The following is a story, in his own words, that includes two such times:

World War II. I must’ve been nineteen when it started. After a while, they started draftin’ and they had a bunch of us went over to Louisville and we were sent letters that we were to be inducted into the Armed Forces. Thirty three of us went over in that bus from New Albany to Louisville and eleven of us came back rejected.

They examined me and I had a bad ear. And the psychologist held me up and asked me all kinds of questions. He asked me what I got out of life. I told him, ‘I like to help other people, my mother and my father.’ And he kept callin’ me ‘Old Man.’ Nineteen years old and he’s callin’ me ‘Old Man.’ He said, ‘Tell me, Old Man, was there ever somebody in your life you loved very deeply?’ And I said, ‘Well, I can’t think of anything right off.’ Of course, what it was, my little sister, Mary Katherine, I used to sometimes change her diapers. I was kind of an interpreter. Sometimes she’d say something to her mother and Ma would ask me what she said. And so, when she was two years old, she walked right past where I was cleanin’ the stables out and into the neighbors’ yard and fell in the fish pond and drowned. That went pretty hard with me. I felt responsible, like I should’ve seen her. I should’ve saved her. I even prayed to God to bring her back and take me in her place…

But gettin’ back to it. I took a heck of a lot of flack. One time I was goin’ to the grocery with Pap and someone remarked, ‘There’s a young man who ought to be in the military.’ Well, now you can’t tell by lookin’ at somebody that they ought to be in the military. I just never did have any desire to shoot and kill anybody, but I never made any effort to avoid the draft.

They sent a notice out, ‘All people that are unfit for military service are expected to get into the defense work to help the cause.’ And if we didn’t go somewhere voluntarily, they were goin’ to draft us into defense work. So I went on up to Charlestown and got in on the construction over there.

My mother got a letter one day from Clara Edwards. ‘My Dear Mrs. Wiseheart, Thank you for your compliments on Albert and Vernon.’ They had both been inducted into the Army, you see. ‘Thank you for your compliments on their nerves. Well, let me tell you something. All you’ll ever see out of the Wiseheart boys is dirty bedsheets, the dirty yellowbacks.’ And then she signed it off. ‘Course Frank was too young and I was 4F, I couldn’t help it. Not that I wanted to go, but they said I was unfit for military service. So anyway, all them years of this hostile attitude.

Sanford "Bud" Wiseheart hanging the flags for the 4th of July.

Sanford “Bud” Wiseheart hanging the flags. July 4, 2009. Photo taken by Sarah Wiseheart of Wiseheart Photo.

Sources

1. Floyd County, Indiana Births, CH-14, p.113, Stuart Barth Wrege Indiana History Room

2. 1930 U.S. Federal Census, Silver Creek, Clark County, Indiana, p.14B, Ancestry

3. 1940 U.S. Federal Census, New Albany, Floyd, Indiana, p.10B, FamilySearch

4. Floyd County, Indiana Marriages, Vol. 55, p.244, Floyd County Clerk’s Office

5. New Albany Tribune, Sun 24 Aug 1958, p.6, c.1, Stuart Barth Wrege Indiana History Room

6. New Albany Ledger & Tribune, Sun 2 Aug 1998, p.B2, c.3, Stuart Barth Wrege Indiana History Room

7. New Albany Tribune, Sat 1 Nov 2014, p.A4, c.3, Stuart Barth Wrege Indiana History Room

A Wise Heart's Journey

Finding ancestors one step at a time.

Category Archives: Genealogy