Meri's Musings

There is an old saying about family giving you both roots and wings. Here are photos of some of the roots and branches in my family tree, some distant, some near. I've written stories about most of these people  in my Sepia Saturday posts. We all have to earn our own wings. For more Mosaic Monday posts, click HERE .

When I was young,  a hand-colored portrait of this woman hung at the top of the stairs at my paternal grandparents' house. She looked so stern she always scared the peewadden out of me. That might not be a word, but you get the idea. Her name was Mary Jane Bliss, nee Mary Jane Butt. She was the daughter of Leonard Butt and Maria Weedman. She was born in 1845 married Sylvester Lyman Bliss  in Perry County, Indiana on August 14, 1861. Mary Jane managed to bear two children in short succession, my great-grandmother Eliza Jane and her brother John, before Sylvester answered the call of the bugle in September 1864. Sylvester mustered out in June 1865 and died in December 1865, presumably of something war-related. Mary Jane became a very young widow. And unlike most periods during American history in which young widows swiftly remarried, the Civil War snuffed out huge numbers of potential suitors. She got a small widow's pension (and I think the ribbon bow on her bodice  ...

It's Sepia Saturday again. So let me introduce you to my parents. Before they were my parents. Since my father isn't wearing a wedding band, I'm going to guess this was taken while they were just dating or during their engagement. Dad was too young to join the military  when World War Two broke out, but as it was winding down he joined the Navy and went to flight school. The whole shebang was over soon after and he was sent back to civilian life and went back to finish college. They met in Eugene, Oregon  where he attended University of Oregon and a small church college called Northwest Christian College.   My mom was a music major at N.C.C. and my father was studying to become a minister. They married before my mother graduated. My dad went on to graduate school at Butler University in Indiana and my mom worked "putting hubby through." They were married for around twenty years  before parting company.  I'm not sure they were made for each other. But s...

It's another Sepia Saturday, so I'd like to introduce to you Daniel Clayton and his wife Cyrene Moore Clayton. Daniel, son of John and Elizabeth (Elly) Clayton, was born October 14, 1824 in Richland County, Ohio. He was probably the youngest in a family of ten children, though the birth order is a bit hard to pin down because census records were not particularly detailed during his childhood and adolescence. It was only in 1850 that individual members of a household were named in a census and their ages given. That having been said, we do know that Daniel married a local girl, Mary Craig, when he was 21. They married March 10,1846 in Richland County, Ohio and Mary Craig Clayton died  on December 17, 1846, in Allen County, Indiana. Given that her death came just over nine months after the marriage, I'm guessing that she died in childbirth, though I don't know for sure. Daniel's father John died a few months after his daughter-in-law. About two...

I paid a little visit to Kim's Mouse Medicine blog this morning and saw she was participating in a play-along called Sepia Saturday started by a guy named Alan whose blog is called News from Nowhere. So I decided to jump into the photo pool with an ancestor picture of my own. Let me introduce you to Johan August Jonasson Blomgren (known to his descendants as August Blomgren) and his fetching bride Charlotta Jonasdotter. They were my mother's paternal great-grandparents. August was born in 1833 in Halleberga Parish, Kronoberg County, Sweden. Charlotta was born in 1833 in Madesjo, Kalmar County, Sweden. They married on April 11, 1857 in Madesjo.  Swedish parish records tell us that August was a blacksmith. He probably also farmed. Charlotta bore eight children: Emilie, Jonas Joseph,  Carl, Adolf, Wilhelmina, Frans, Anna Charlotta, and Aron Gottfried Blomgren. Emilie, Carl, Adolf, and Frans all died in childhood or adolescence. As the family accumulat...

Don't you wonder sometimes about those people up your family tree? This young woman, Wilhelmina Blomgren, was my great-grandmother. She was almost 81 when I was born and died in her 90s when I was a teen. She lived in the town where my mother grew up. a place where we visited a few times a year. But as for my great-grandmother, I really have few memories of her. Except that her hair was white and thin, she wore old lady shoes, she wrote phonetically spelled letters to my mother, giving away the fact that she'd come to the U.S. as a young woman and gave up speaking her native tongue to become an American. Oh -- and the place that she lived always smelled like coffee. We went to her funeral. I don't remember the funeral particularly but I remember the wake that followed, primarily because my grandmother's elbow got bumped when she was carrying a lemon merengue pie. I happened to be next to her and wore the pie on my head. I was the only person who didn't think it was ...