The Gen Project

One of my great-great-grandmothers on my mother’s side was a lady named Elizabeth Jane Rankin, better known to all as Lizzie. Her family was well-off and well-known in the Shippensburg, PA area, having been in that area for quite a few generations. Born in 1842, she was perhaps well on her way to permanent spinsterhood when she finally married John A. C. McCune in 1868. The picture to the right shows her as an older woman and was probably taken in the latter part of the 1800’s. Lizzie and John had six children: Caroline, Alexander, William, Mary Kezia, Alfred and Elizabeth.

Other than her significant dates and the names of her children, there isn’t too much information to be found about Lizzie. It is possible, however, to get a better picture of her life from some of the things that are known about others in the family. For example, from an article written after his death, we learn that her husband, John McCune, was quite fond of adventure before settling down as an attorney in Shippensburg and he and his brother Edmund was very involved in the founding of the college there. Part of the story of John’s adventures includes him disappearing after being lost at sea for awhile, so it is quite possible that, if he and Lizzie had known each other earlier, she may well have given up on him. Eventually, however, he did return and they were married in 1868.

At some point prior to her marriage, Lizzie, like other young woman of that time, would have been setting aside household items for the day when she had a place of her own. Among such items, apparently was a set of twelve teaspoons of sterling silver, though they may have been part of a more complete set. All we know though is that these spoons were handed down to her descendants and found their way to my house eventually. I only recently unearthed them as they were tucked away in my mother’s old silver chest and just turned up recently. The spoons were produced by the Whiting silver company and the pattern, called Grecian, was patented in 1862, so Lizzie would have acquired them in her early 20’s. The spoons carried the monogram of ER.

What made the spoons most interesting to me was the design itself of the spoons. The top of the spoon has a ram’s head design with the horns appearing on the back of the spoon as well, and the center of the spoon is decorated with a gargoyle. Hardly the type of design that is typically found in a hope chest, to be sure. In an earlier post, I had mentioned an old mourning bracelet that had come down from my Cumberland county side, so in light of these spoons, I think it’s probable that the mourning bracelet belonged to Lizzie as well. As far as I know, these spoons are the only silverware that has come down that belonged to Lizzie, but it would certainly be interesting to know if she had more of this pattern.

Invariably, when I go off on one of my day trips, I find myself wishing I had my records with me, especially when I see familiar names in the course of my travels. One easy solution to this issue is simply to carry a laptop with me with the data loaded, though there are some caveats to that approach. Since my primary research database is actually housed online, my local copy is rarely as updated as it should be, so I don’t necessarily want to make additions to the local copy and the upload to the main database, unless I have downloaded and updated that local copy first. Ideally, this happens on a regular basis.

Since my laptop is set up as a dual-booting machine machine with both Windows Vista and LinuxMint, I have a choice of programs in which to store the data. For my purposes, I am more likely to use a Linux-based program called GRAMPS to keep the data accessible, but I haven’t had a chance to play with that program much yet. If nothing else, I can always use a simple text editor to make notes of new data for uploading and updating once I’m back home.

One of my favorite photographic subjects recently has been the old Quaker meetinghouses in our area, and in the last few years, I’ve photographed quite a few of them, mostly in Chester County. One of the challenges involved with this pursuit is actually finding where the meetinghouses are located, since, in many cases, they are no longer active. While the active meetings are relatively easy to find, there is often little or no information available readily to help find the inactive meetings. Though I include information on many of my genealogy sites about the old meetings in each area, I an in the process of building a site that will concentrate just on the meetings, particularly the older ones that may not have an active membership any more.

For many years, I’ve wondered how to tell where various folks were buried when the record stated that they were buried at these older, inactive meeetings’ burial grounds. If, for example, they were buried at Brick Meetinghouse, the actual meeting is known as East Nottingham, and either designation may have been used. To make things more confusing, there is also a West Nottingham that was commonly called “Little Brick Meeting”. Neither of these is to be confused with the modern-day Nottingham meeting which is actually located in Oxford, PA, while both East and West Nottingham meetings are in Cecil County, MD. At one point in history, however, that particular part of Cecil county had been part of Pennsylvania. Does your head hurt yet?

One of the interesting parts of genealogy research is discovering old pictures of places that no longer exist. In a recent story on my Chester County genealogy site, I talked a bit about the old family home of Isaac G. Reynolds, my great-grandfather. Having an old photo of the house before it became part of the West Chester University campus, I started searching for old photos of some of the other family homes in the West Chester area.

The building shown above was once the Meconkey Mansion , built by David Meconkey, one of the wealthier men of West Chester. After he died in the mid 1800’s, his widow continued to live there for quite a few years, after which the building was tenanted by numerous others until finally being torn down. Somewhere in my files is a negative of an older photo of the mansion, prior to its becoming the Assembly Building. David would most likely roll over in his grave to know that at some late point in the house’s existence, it housed ladies of ill repute.

With so many economic issues in the news these days, I’ve been thinking about what I know of how my grandparents handled economic hardship during the Great Depression. On both sides of the my family, my grandparents moved to the country and began gardening. My maternal grandparents had been living in West Reading in Berks county after their marriage in 1925, but by the early 1930’s, had moved out to Brecknock township and converted an old hunting lodge into a small home. From what I’ve been told, the property had originally belonged to my grandmother’s family and at some point, it was given to my grandparents. I don’t know how longed they worked on the house before moving in, but there are a number of old photos showing the original cabin and quite a few of the addition being added. The property was heavily wooded, made up of about 20 acres with only a few acres cleared for the house and garden area. With an easy supply of wood at hand, the lumber for the addition came from the property as did firewood for the cookstove in the kitchen.

On the other side of the family, Dad’s parents bought an old farm property, also about twenty acres, but the house was already in livable condition, though there was no indoor plumbing until sometime in the 1950’s. Dad’s father had been a butcher for Armour Star for many years prior to his retirement and though money was very tight, they tended enormous gardens to feed the family. My grandfather was an avid woodworker and often found old furniture values in the country sales in the area which he could then repair and refinish for resale.

Growing up, my parents both had plenty of experience in small scale farming and we raised most of our own vegetables, though in our case, it was more from a desire for fresh food than out of economic necessity as it had been for their parents.