AUNT DOT'S MEMORIES2

This is the second segment of my transcription of the 13 page
handwritten memories of my Aunt Dot on her and my Dad's
childhood.



"Pop" is my grandfather Floyd Earl West Sr. and "Mother"
is my grandmother Cora Berthella Barker. Hazel was my
Dad's older sister, and Flossie the youungest. "Uncle
Clarence" and "Aunt Mable" were my grand uncle Clarence
West and his wife. Uncle Clarence was the caretaker for over
fifty years at the Aziscoos Dam.


I'd heard the story about the geese from Dad when I was a kid
but I never knew the story of how he came to be called Bud nor
that he had been called "Pudge" in high school.



And I am quite certain he'd never have told us about setting the
bed on fire!



"My brother, Floyd Earl West, Jr. was probably never called by
his sir name. Hazel was taught to call him brother and it came
out budda- hence the nickname Bud. In high school at Gould
Academy, he was known as Pudge and when his class mates
ask about him to this day- -he is still Pudge!


Bud always took good care of me---



When we lived on the lake shore Hazel was in grade school and
had walk out to the dam to get on the bus. Mother often went
to meet the bus and walk Hazel home. If she got to talking with
Aunt Mable it was sometimes awhile before they returned. Bud
was left in charge and most of the time we would be taking a
nap when she left. One time we got to playing with a box of
matches on Pop’s bed and set it on fire. When mother got home
the wall and bed were pretty well in flames. Bud and I were in
the doorway. He was buttoning my coat.(We were in the
neighborhood of being 3 & 5 years old as Flossie hadn’t been
born yet.) She got water from the lake and put the fire out. We
had a constant reminder as there was a large wood clock on a
shelf above the bed and one end of the clock was charred.



We always had lots of snow and loved to pile it up and make
tunnels and snow houses. One winter Hazel, Bud, & I made a
snow cave and Bud crawled inside and was cleaning it out
when the whole thing caved in on him. We were frantic trying
to uncover him. Yelled for Mother and she came down the hill
and dug him out. Was I scared!!



One of our favorite things to do was to battle with Uncle
Clarence’s geese. That goose and gander came up the lake
every day and always got out of the water at our place. We
were told to stay up the steps where they couldn’t reach us but
we just knew we could get the best of them. We made plans to
stand back to back-one of us had a broom and the other a
clothes stick to beat these geese back to the lake. They went
back all right-each carrying a screaming kid by the seat of our
pants. Mother always rescued us before they got in the water.
Our back “cheeks” had an awful lot of big black spots but we
were already planning how we would get the upper hand and
win tomorrow. "

THE ELUSIVE JOHN C.

You might have noticed that many of my blog posts deal with
ancestors with surnames such as (E)Ames or Ellingwood/
Ellinwood/Ellenwood or Abbot(t) on my fathers side of the family
more than on my own surname of West. The reason is simple and
quite common among many genealogists: I have a brick wall.


The furthest back I can go in my direct West line is to John Cutter
West who is believed to have been born in Plymouth Ma. on 8 Oct
1802 but neither I or others before me doing the family genealogy
have been able to discover any record of his birth as of yet. This is
why I like to refer to him as the Elusive John C.


There are any number of reasons why this is the case. One is that
it was an error by the census taker; an incorrect date, birthplace,
or he misunderstood the information and the middle name was
not Cutter but something else. There was a Cottle family, for
example, that was involved with the Wests descended from the
line of Francis West of Duxbury, Ma. Another possibility is that he
was not born in the town Plymouth but in Plymouth County.


There are other ways that the information on the Elusive John C.
could be wrong and I'll explore them further in other posts.


John and his descendants for the most part don’t seem to have
been all that big on writing so I’ve not found anything written by
them. There’s not much else on them that I’ve been able to find
so far outside of something written about a man I believe to be
Jonathan Phelps West, my great great grandfather. But even as
frustrating as it might seem I was lucky enough to have material
to start with and even a picture. I think. That fellow up there at
the top right of the screen is supposedly the Elusive John C.
himself.


Of course the problem with having a name like West is that it’s
such a common name and any browser search on “John West”
yields a lot of hits. I just checked it on Google and I got 859,000
on just the name without adding other words to the search. “John
Cutter West” yields 9...mostly posts from this blog or queries I
sent to forums. “John C. West” gets 15,500 references.


Still, I keep looking for the Elusive John C. I’ve found a few things
here and there, and meanwhile I also research the families of
women the West men married: Arvilla Ames, Louisa Richardson,
Clara Ellingwood, and Cora Barker. Maybe I’ll stumble across a
lead on John C. while exploring those other leads but even if I
don’t I’m enjoying the hunt. I’m finding out fascinating things
about relatives I didn’t even know anything about before.


That’s the joy of genealogy

ONE CONUNDRUM PARTLY ANSWERED

I just received an email from my cousin Diana. She
tells me that her mom, (my Aunt Dot) says that
“Gram's name was actually Cora Berthella Barker
although Gram always swore that it was Bertha!”

I guess Gram just didn’t like the “ella” part of Berthella
and used a woman’s prerogative to drop it.

Diana also tells me there was another Bertha West
living in the area, a wife of a West cousin in Errol N.H.,
so I’ll have to look into that, too!


But there's still that Clora....

CONUNDRUMS

I ran into one of those examples of “Things to Watch
Out For In Online Genealogy” tonight and it involves
my West grandfather.

Over on the FamilySearch website under the Pedigree
Resource File heading there are several entries for a
“Floyd J. West” whose birth date and place match my
grandfather’s. The trouble is, his name was Floyd E.
(Earl) West. The contributor also lists his marriage to
a “Clora Berthella Barker” instead of Cora Bertha
Barker. We appear to be related through the marriage
of my great granduncle Paul Leroy West or his brother
John Cuvier West to relatives of the submitter.


I can see how he might mistake an old fashioned
written “E” for a “J“, though.


So, how do I deal with this? There’s no date for when
the entries were posted, so I’ve no idea if the submitter
is still alive. There is an address there however so I’ll
try writing to it.

I had a similar experience a few years back when I first
made some tentative steps in online genealogy. I found a
website for a related family and there was an entry for
Grandpa West who was married to “an unknown person”
and it lists the children as only my aunt Florence and an
uncle Stanley who died in infancy. I emailed the owner
of the website but it remains unchanged. I have to wonder
if there might be some personal reason for the way it gets
the date of my grandparent’s marriage correct but
refers to my grandmother as an “unknown person”.


What’s that saying? Caveat emptor?