Father: Columbus Washington CAIN
Mother: Ora Ellen WRIGHT
_____________________________
_Alonso Jackson CAIN ___|
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_Columbus Washington CAIN _|
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| |_Sara LADD _____________|
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|--Charlotte Earnestine CAIN
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| _Franklin Pierce WRIGHT _____+
| _Charles Gaylon WRIGHT _|
| | |_Martha Jane THOMPSON _______+
|_Ora Ellen WRIGHT _________|
| _Newton Jasper BARBEE _______
|_Jimmie Minnie BARBEE __|
|_Manorva Clementine COLLIER _
Notes:
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How We Found our Family
History Down at a Convenience Store in Kensett, Arkansas
by Larry
Wendt
I first came to Arkansas with Pat Bodine in 1997, shortly after Pat's father and my grandmother had passed away. Pat lives in Texas and I live in California. I had met her in 1993 after spending some time locating her father, Joe Holland, who had visited my grandparents when I was a boy, and had been the primary source of information for my family about our history. I had started to examine this subject around 1991 after many of the trails from a few years before had grown cold. My grandfather had passed away in 1982 and my grandmother had suffered a stroke and was in a rest home. By the time I had located Joe, he had also suffered a stroke and was in a deteriorated condition. With the passing of their generation, the continuity to the lives which had preceded them as well as the sense of humanity which such lives teach us, was in danger of being lost. So Pat and I began to do research together, pooling our resources from her Texas side and my California side. It was only a matter of time that we decided that we had to come to Arkansas if we were to ever figure any of this stuff out.
Among all the other things which we wanted to accomplish on this trip, I really wanted to see the town were my mother had spent her early years growing up. Stories of "Back Home" were a major feature of my childhood imaginative landscape. Since my mother's family had left Arkansas for California around 1940, my only intention for visiting the little town of Kensett, which I thought would be practical, was to find the house where she and the rest of her family lived before they left. It was just a little side trip and break for a Sunday (since all the history libraries and court houses were closed) from "more important" research work which we had started to do in the area, and undoubtedly it would have little genealogical significance for either of us.
My mom could not remember what street the old family house was on (even though she said it was there when she passed through the town in the seventies). I had a street map of the town but she said that Kensett never had any street names that she knew of when she was growing up. There were some old photos of the house. It was near the school house (which had since been blown down and rebuilt she told me), and I figured we could at least find the house if we could find the school.
So Pat and I arrived in town around noon on a fine Sunday day in March, and went out and proceeded to find the only school yard we could in Kensett. I got out to walk around and take pictures. A local sheriff drove up and wondered why I, looking as I do -- obviously being not from around there (Pat's van with out-of-state plates were pretty suspicious too), was wandering around a school yard on a Sunday. After a brief explanation, he directed us to this local gas station/convenience store/restaurant kind of place known as "Fiddler's One Stop" -- a local haunt of the town mayor we were told, who just might be familiar with the old house which I was looking for. Pat was eager to go over there and give it a try, though I was a bit more hesitant, thinking we'd never be able to find anyone who would remember where my grandparent's family were living over 50 years ago. But we go over and soon find this "Fiddler's One Stop" store. Pat gets out and goes in quickly, while I'm still fumbling around trying to find the right map, a note pad and a pencil to bring in. She comes out almost as immediately, and says to me, "Some of your kinfolks are working here!" I'm pretty sure my response then was "What!?!"
Indeed, I was certain at the time, that anyone connected to the Warner family living in the area were more than likely to be very extinct. However, Pat had apparently walked into this place, saw this guy in the back wearing a trucker's cap and eating his breakfast. She walked on up to him and asked something like, "Y'all know where the Wright house is?" in her best Texas twang. The guy turns out not to be the town mayor. One would supposes, that he must of looked up rather puzzled, wiping his mouth while responding with something like the Arkansas version of, "I beg your pardon, madam?"
Upon hearing this exchange, the owner of the establishment, who was at that moment, standing behind the counter frying up a big pile of chicken, while taking money for gasoline and candy bars, blurts out "Well, I'm a Wright!" That is when Pat came and got me. Or, at least that is how I understand the way this whole sequence of events unfolded as we talked about it later.
So, I walk into this confusion. There are several people coming in and out buying gas and fried chicken with little kids running through the snack aisle picking up bags of candy. The woman is trying to deal with every one else and field my rapid questions too. I started explaining about my mother's old house on the school yard grounds, how the school blew away later, but they had left before that in a car which they bought with a hand-shake from a Mr. Angel, and came to California along with their dog to take a job at Mare Island Shipyards, and before that had... when I realize half-way into all of this that Pat had confused Warner with Wright. The woman wanted to know what I was, "Are you a Warner or are you a Wright?" and I responded with something like, "Well, uh... Both! But my name is Wendt, however it's this Warner bunch that I'm asking about, my great grandmother's mother was a Wright, and she married a Holland and her daughter married a Warner, and I had come all the way from California where the Warners went, and my cousin had come out from Texas where the Hollands went, and we were just trying to find the place were my Mom had lived back in the early forties and..."
She interrupts with, "There is a connection between Wright and Warner, you know."
Hesitantly I responded, "Yeah... Uh... but... How did you know that?!"
Then she said, as she turns over some more frying chicken and has a puff from her cigarette, "Well, let me take care of some of these customers here, and I'll tell you all about it."
"Great!" I anxiously replied, while I stood there blinking incredulously for a moment wondering what I should say next.
So, both Pat and I go sit down by this poor guy who she first accosted, and that was trying to finish his breakfast, and we start pestering him for the time being. Turns out that he just happened to be the public relations officer for the White County Historical Society over in Searcy, and we start to have an interesting conversation about the local history of this particular area, which was quite close to a famous battle during the Civil War (The Battle of Whitney's Lane, 1862).
Meanwhile, the woman behind the chicken fryer, who we learn is named Charlotte, would have a break from the customers now and then. We would talk in snatches, only to break off when another customer would come in, and so we would return to our conversation about the Civil War in the area.
Charlotte turns to me and says, "Now, you're a Warner?"
"Now are you any relation to this Warner who use to live around here in a... in a..."
"Why that was my Great Uncle Milton!"
"Well, I'll be!" she says, "You know, you sort of look like him too."
Of all people -- Uncle Milton: my family had a bitter falling out with him back in the early fifties. We heard only sporadic rumors of him since. After so many years, he was presumed to have been long dead. But, here this convenience store operator just happened to know him it turns out, and I just happened to met her after being in town for less than an hour.
Uncle Milton use to frequent "Fiddler's One Stop" quite often when he was in town. He particularly liked hamburgers. I found this somewhat amusing because my grandfather was a big hamburger fan too. I was later to find out that hamburgers were indeed a very big deal all over Arkansas. So anyway, Milton was a "Fiddler's One Stop" regular and use to come in for his periodic hamburger refueling. He would go away for several months. Charlotte heard that he had family up in Oregon, though later she remembers it could have been in Maine instead. Milton was something of a hard-luck case and town character as she described him. There were several stories around town about what it was that he did for a living, though many didn't ring very true except for the one that he was a retired railroad man. This made a certain amount of sense too, since he was also living in an old box car that had been pulled up many years before on an empty lot in down town Kensett. Back home, we had heard that he was living in such a box car and that it had once belonged to one of the Presidents of the United States before the days of Air Force One. Though it later turned out, that this just might be only a California story. The old box car did belong to a president all right -- the President of the train company as it turned out.
As the years rolled by, Milton would appear in town more and more disheveled and confused about things, and wander around aimlessly about. The last time he returned from where ever he went off to, he did not even know who he was most of the time. Charlotte became quite concerned about him. One time he showed up at "Fiddler's One Stop," soaking wet. She and her husband got him into some dry clothes. Charlotte kept an eye out for the old guy. She went over to the boxcar which he was living in one day, to try to find some papers or photos that would say anything about his family or where he was from, so that she could get in touch with them to do something about his situation. However, she could find nothing but piles of old dirty and wet clothes, little jars full of nails and screws, other odd pieces of old assorted broken junk like a typical guy's workshop with nothing to suggest that he even had a family. Eventually she called Human Services over in Searcy. They came out and took a look at him. Somehow they got a hold of his daughter and she flew into Searcy and flew out with him back to where ever they came from. A train museum eventually came and hauled his old box car away to be refurbished and put on display somewhere.
That was about four years ago Charlotte said, and she never heard anything more about it -- until I showed up that is. She asked me the standard Milton query that I heard ever since I started this research, if I had heard anything about what had happened to him, but I responded that I knew nothing at that time. She told me that she had once asked him, when he was in one of his more lucid moments, if he had any kinfolk in the area, and he mentioned that he once had an aunt over in McCrory who sold hats, and that he was also related to Charlotte in some way, but he stopped talking suddenly when she tried to question him any more on the subject, as if it were some secret he was attempting to conceal. Somewhere along the line Charlotte finally asked her mother, Ora, who had been working on a family history for some time, about how the Warners were related to the Wrights, and it was then she got the whole story she said.
Before Charlotte described what the connection between the Warners and the Wrights was, I figured at first that Charlotte could be connected to the two unknown (to us at the time) Wrights that had appeared at Grandma Holland's funeral in 1937. Grandma Holland was a Wright. Pat's father, Joe Holland was the one who established for the rest of my family, how Grandma Holland was connected to this particular Wright family that had once lived in North Carolina before coming to Arkansas. According to this old newspaper clipping about her funeral which my grandparent's had kept, two of Sarah Elizabeth Holland's brothers had showed up, a "Taylor" and a "James A." Wright from "Magazine". When I asked, Joe (who had a stroke and was in a rest home by the time I had found him), about them in 1994 and how were they related, he seemed unaware of the contents of Sarah's obituary or who these two might be, and he had never included any reference to them on any of genealogy lists which he had made over the years. Later, we also asked his sister, Helen (whom we had driven across most of the West Texas desert in 1995 to visit in the 1940's oil-boom town of Odessa), but she had not gone to the funeral and was not familiar with any Wright family members at all she said. I had found a big James Wright family in the 1920 Census in the Magazine area and had wondered if they were the same family. I had noticed several other Wright families in McCrory-DeView area at the turn of the century census records as well. Pat had also found a grave site fairly close to that of W. H. H. Holland's with the name of F. P. Wright on it during a quick visit to the Odd Fellows Cemetery outside of McCrory during the previous year. Since the Wright name was pretty common though, there was not much available to us at that time to determine if any of these people were related in any way or not.
I showed Charlotte a copy of Grandma Holland's obituary clipping and my extracted 1920 Census records for Wright families which I had found for "DeView Township, South of Road:" William C. Wright, James A. Wright, Robert L. Wright, and Frank P. Wright. She looked through it while serving chicken and taking money for gas, and finally said something like, "Yeah, this Frank P. -- here is Franklin Pierce Wright."
She replied, "Why, he's the brother to this Sarah Holland, that you are talking about, of course."
"Another one we don't have," I muttered to myself. I also did not realize at the time, that this Wright was also her great grandfather. She looked at my extracted 1920 Census list for this Frank P. some more. Where I had listed his children, she said it was missing several names and some of them were also misspelled. However this was Franklin Pierce Wright's family she confirmed.
She pointed to one of the children, a "Henry T.", and said, "Uncle Henry's still living on some of the original family land." She then suggested that we should go out there to where he was living and have a talk with him about all of this.
Then I asked her how she was related, she responded with, "Well, my granddaddy was Gaylon Wright and his daddy was a brother to this Holland woman." It was getting more complicated and confusing for me by the minute because none of the names matched with what we had from what Joe Holland had figured out years before. Charlotte then said that she had some papers "back at the house" that "could explain it all." She could show them to us after work. She could also go out with us to the cemeteries where they were all buried, and then over to Uncle Henry's house and introduce us to him.
We had been talking for much of the afternoon by then. Two women came in to replace Charlotte and we took off to her house. We followed her car to her home, met her husband, and talked some more about Uncle Milton and the Wright family.
She then gave me this large pile of genealogy lists which her mother had originally researched and another family member (Mike Wright) had continued to work on. I started to go through it, and noticed that the name for the parents of Sarah Elizabeth Holland was listed as Edward Ausburn Wright and Rebecca Chappell -- a completely different North Carolina family of Wrights than what Joe had determined.
From there we went over to McCrory and Charlotte showed us the mercantile stores and where Aunt Elizabeth had her hat shop. Like Uncle Milton, everyone who knew her, has a story about Aunt Elizabeth. Then we went out to the Odd Fellow's Cemetery and we found William Holland's grave and Charlotte showed us several of the Wright gravestones there. She then took us to DeView where we met Bobby Wright who takes care of the church there and he gave us a tour. Charlotte also told us of another place called Beards which also had a cemetery but the roads were too bad for us to get out there at that time. She then took us over to Henry's and Jessie's house and we met and talked with them for a short time. Charlotte also made arrangements for us to meet "Ernie," their daughter. During this later meeting, we discovered that Ernie had the same photograph of Daisy and Bill Neely which my Aunt Clara had (but we didn't know who it was and Ernie did) and therefore provided us with our first physical evidence that yes -- we were indeed related. Ernie also took us out into the ancestral countryside of Possum Creek and the copperhead-infested Beards cemetery, while telling us many stories about her family. She also introduced us to Franklin Wright, another family historian, who had a photograph of Sarah and E. A. Wright, of which I had another, later picture and which had belonged to my great grandmother, Cora, and of which no one in my immediate family could identify any longer.
After we returned from Arkansas, Charlotte got us in touch with Mike Wright, a very active Wright family historian who had done much of the present genealogical work for the family in Woodruff County and subsequently I have made wide usage here. Charlotte also got us in touch with her sister, Gayle, another very active Wright family genealogist, and with whom I stayed with during my second research trip to Arkansas in which we spent many hours in the Woodruff County Courthouse in Augusta, as well as made extensive trips into the countryside and met many other Wright family members in the area. Also, from our encounter with Charlotte, Pat later picked up some information while vacationing in Maine which allowed me to finally locate Uncle Milton's children. From that connection, contact was made with Dana Speck whose mother, Laura Brewer, has been researching the Warner family for some thirty years.
Indeed for both Pat and I, Charlotte was one of those lucky breaks which all genealogists dream about finding someday. Indeed, this document would not exist if we had not walked into "Fiddler's One Stop" when we did. Charlotte sold the store the next year and retired. It was all boarded up and abandoned when I passed by there in 1999. One wonders how far we would be with this work if we had waited to come the following year.
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This page created on 04/23/00 01:33:20 . Updated 07/03/00 22:34.
