I am combining these two weeks for several reasons. First of all, I started the year again not on the ball enough to get week one complete yet and secondly because these two post tie very well together. I struggled through 2022 to keep up with my blogging. (I did not keep up…it fell off the radar.) We moved across town last spring. It doesn’t seem like that should be that big a deal after all you just moved a mile away but you still have to box everything and find a new place for it. It totally consumed our year and will continue for the better part of this winter too as I still have boxes to unpack, to sort and then to decided what to do with the contents.

The photo above is by far ONE of my favorites. It was found in a dusty old box of photos that belonged to my Grandma Smith. It was this box of photos that has inspired my 26 years of research into our family. Meet Emma (McGoogan) and John Crites. This photo gives my chills every time I look at it. They spoke to me the first time I saw this photo and we continue our conversation every time I look at it. They are very special to me.

One of my very first visits to the area of Nine Mile, Indiana, where my Smith’s originated from, was in 1998 or 1999. I had gone to visit my Mother in Harbor Beach, Michigan. I lived in the suburbs of Chicago and at least 2 hours of my trip involved traveling thru parts of Indiana, I decided on a whim to take a slightly different route home by way of Nine Mile, Indiana. I knew it would add time and miles to my trip but it would be great to get a feel for where our family came from. My intention was to locate the cemetery and take some tombstone photos of as many family members graves as I could find.. I knew many family members were buried in Hoverstock Cemetery.

As I entered this small farm town located a short distance off Interstate 69, I found a local meat market. I had such a short window of time to check out the cemetery before I needed to be back on the road toward home so rather than driving around blindly looking for the cemetery, I stopped into the market to ask where it was. I was told that it was just about a half a mile down the road. I chatted with the man behind the counter at the market explaining that I was doing family history research and looking for relatives in the cemetery. He suggested that I go and introduce myself to Melba Edwards. She lived right down the street at the end of the block. She was a well known local historian. He said that she was always home and loves to talk about the local history.

Before going to the cemetery, I decided to go look her up. I drove down the street as he suggested and stopped at the large house on the corner at the end of the block. She was indeed home and thrilled to talk to me about local history. She gave me the opportunity to peek intimately into the lives of my 2 times Great Grandparents, John and Emma Crites.

She lived in the house that was the local doctors office at the turn of the century. The doctor was Dr James McBride who was her Grandfather. She has a library full of old ledgers, Family Bibles, binders and old historical documents that pertained to the Zanesville / Nine Mile Indiana area. This area is located at the intersection of three counties, Allen County, Wells County and Huntington county. She asked me the family names that I was looking for and what I knew about them. I told her the surnames of Crites, Smith, and McGoogan. She had the medical ledger from her Grandfather’s practice. She opened it looking for these names. A treasure chest was opened.

In the ledger, Dr. McBride visited Emma 17 times in the fall of 1893 beginning on September 2nd and ending on October 31^st. Many of the visits were on consecutive days. The ledger showed a charge of 1.50 each for eight of those visits. The total bill for the two months was $20.50. The ledger does not indicate what her diagnosis was. In the ledger, there were many notes about John and how he paid for Emma’s doctor visits.

On an October 4^th entry, it shows that he delivered and stack a cord of wood for $1.25. In late August before Emma got sick he had delivers a cord and one half of wood on two occasions for $1.87 each time. He deliver 2000 pounds of Hay for $ 9.00 on October 16th. And in 1892 on December 26, he delivered a 153 -189 pound Hog for $ 7.56. When you add all these entries together it comes to $21.55. Melba felt that Emma must have been very sick based on the charges in the ledger.

In 1894, Dessie, their eight year old daughter became ill. Dr McBride visited Dessie on eighteen consecutive days and three non consecutive days beginning on September 16 and ending on October 9. On September 26-28, Dr McBride visited her twice daily. The total charges for Dessie came to 36.00. On October 11, John did some road work for Dr McBride for 2.50. On October 19 and 20^th he delivered 12 loads of gravel for a total of $4.80. The remaining bill was pay for in full on January 19, 1895.

Melba also had the ledger for the local Mercantile which also proved to be interesting reading. It seems that John liked tobacco. He often bought plugs of tobacco. Emma sewed, most likely she made clothes because there were several entries that indicted that John bought her bolts of material.

After spending several hours with Melba looking at local documents. I had used up every minute of my extra time so there was no time to visit the cemetery this trip. I had to get back on the road and head for home. I would need to be taking Interstate 80 West toward Chicago because of my little detour and traffic will be a nightmare in the late afternoon.

I have made many trips to the Nine Mile area thru the years now. And many of them were detours when I was journeying to and from visits to Michigan while living near Chicago. The following photo is another favorite of mine. I have learned that this was likely taken on June 10, 1917. Their church, the Uniondale Methodist Church, had a Re-dedication service on that day. They took a large picture of all the church members which I found in an antique store during my 2013 visit to Uniondale. I was able to find Emma in the crowd and she is dress just like she is in this picture.

I have thru the years written several blogs about John and Emma on different platforms. Sometime after 2010, I got an email from a young man named Shane Brown. He lived in Uniondale and the deed for his house had Emma’s name on it. He reached out to me to see if I had any photos of the house. He had been told that Emma was a fabulous gardener and he was hoping to restore the yard and house to its former glory. We exchanged several email about what I knew about John and Emma. I sent him this photo and several others.

During the summer of 2013 my husband and I decided to go visit the Allen County Library. It is located in Fort Wayne, Indiana which is very near Nine Mile and Uniondale. We took out travel trailer and camped in a State Park in Bluffton, Indiana. We love to camp so it is rather a WIN WIN when we combine a camping trip with a Genealogy Research trip.

After spending the most of the day at the library, we visited a couple of cemeteries and headed south toward our campsite in Bluffton, Indiana. The sky was extremely dark and a thunder storm was brewing. It may have been in Bluffton or it could have been further south, it was hard to tell. I was looking at the map and noticed that we were approaching Indiana Highway 224, I suggested that we take a little side trip while we let the weather near the campground die down. I could not see Greg’s eyes because he had them focused on the road and the storm ahead of us, I can imagine that they had the look of “again…another side trip”.

I told him, “You know, Uniondale is right down Highway 224 just a few short miles. That where Emma’s house is…” I dangled that little tidbit out there for him to contemplate.

“Whose Emma? “ Greg asked as if he did not know that she was somehow related to me.

“She my 2 times Great Grandmother” I proudly proclaimed.

“It’s the house that my Grandpa was born in. It’s the house that I could not find the last time I went looking for it…Remember I told you that some guy named Shane Brown emailed me recently after reading my blog about Emma and John Crites. Remember…he told me that he owned Emma’s house and that he was restoring it ..Remember? He found my blog entry, which showed a picture of it with Emma and John standing in front of it…”

“Don’t you remember, I sent him other pictures of it. He was so excited to find me…”

Well, I could tell that he did not remember any of it…

But he said “I think this is Highway 224 so does that mean you want to turn here? “

“YES” I replied.

“Which way? Right ? “He asked

“Yes” I told him….. “ Towards Uniondale! ” I told him. I am sure he rolled his eyes but I was busy looking west down Indiana Highway 224. After a few short miles, I saw the sign for Uniondale.

Uniondale is a small farming community. As we drove north on Main Street, I recognized Emma’s church on the right. Ten years ago when I visited Uniondale, I did not know that was Emma’s church. Since then my cousin, Helen Jane gave me a family keepsake that her family had cherished from Emma. It had been saved and treasured all these years first by her Dad (my Great Uncle Fred)and then her Mom (Aunt Hazel) and then Helen Jane (my second cousin) . She wrote me a note when she sent it to me. She said that, “ this was always in my Mother’s china cabinet.” They always said it was from “Dad’s Grandma Crites” After Mom died, I brought it home and now I am sending it to you” Helen Jane told me she thought I ought to have it since I was the “keeper” of all the family facts and had done so much work on our family history.

I told Greg, “Look there’s Emma’s church.”

“Yes…How do you know that?” He asked.

I explained, “Remember that paper weight that I got from my cousin, it has a picture of that church on it!”

“Oh, Yeah…” He replied

I said, “ Hey, wait…slow down…stop!”

“What? “ Greg said, “Why?” He stopped the truck…

“See that house? We have pictures of family members and that house is in the background!” I told him.

This is a picture taken of during a visit to see John and Emma. It was taken around 1930. Standing in the back row from left to right are Cora Crites Smith (my Great Grandma) and Everett Smith (my Grandfather), Cora’s son. Seated are Emma and John. My Dad is on John’s lap and my Dad’s sister Lucille is standing between them. My Dad, Harold Smith, was born in August 29, 1928. His sister Lucille died at age 6.

“So that means….” as I turned my head to look across the street! “THAT is Emma’s house!”

And sure enough it was! I instantly had goose bumps and have them again now as I write this! And Shane Brown was indeed making this house look like it did when Emma and John owned it. He had opened up the porch which had been closed in and it was obvious that it was a work in progress!

I told Greg, “ I need to get a picture of it!” So I got out of the truck with the camera to take a picture and he sat in the truck…in the middle of the street in this sleepy little farm town, blocking traffic!

As I raised the camera, to take the picture, a lady came out the front door. She had a puzzled look on her face which said, “What are you doing?” I thought to myself…well this is embarrassing…she must think I am nuts taking a picture of her house…

“Oh, I’m So sorry…Can I take a picture of your house? My Great Great Grandmother owned it many years ago. I have old photos of it.” I told her. “Would that be OK ? “ “Oh of course, take as many as you want.” She exclaimed . Then she said, “I have to call Shane and tell him you are here!”

So she lite a cigarette and called someone on her cell phone, “Shane, you have to come home now! It’s really important … Come home now!”

And she hung up. “He’ll be home in a minute,” she said. All the while smoking her cigarette with excitement….(only an former smoker would understand that!)

I protested and said, “Oh I did not mean to interrupt here…I just wanted to see Emma’s house and when I recognized it, I thought I would take a picture of it.”

She said, “Oh no, he has to meet you…he has to! You need to talk to him and he needs to meet you!”

She suggested that Greg parked the truck and we waited on the porch chatting about the house and Emma and John.

After a few minutes, she called Shane again, “Shane, you have to come home now! There is this lady here and you need to talk to her…. Come home!” and once again she hung up the phone. After a few minutes more of chatting, all of a sudden this car came speeding down Main Street, past the house and entered a drive way to the south of the house. It was Shane Brown, the young man who I had shared emails with a few years before.

He looked to be about the age of my oldest son. He looked at his wife, and he looked at me…In the mean time she begins to tell him “ this is the lady, the one you got the email from. The one from the blog about the house, remember. “

You could see a transformation take place in his face. He got the biggest grim and you could see the excitement take over his body. For the next hour, we talked on the porch about Emma and her house which he now proudly owned. He produced the original county abstract for the property. Contained within it are all the legal documents which show the history of all the families who purchased this house. All the legal transactions, the dates and the actual signatures for Emma, John, Cora and Dessie. Emma had purchased the home for she and John with inheritance money that she received from her Mother Hannah after she died. All the while as I reading the abstract I can feel Emma looking over my shoulder proudly.. Her presence was all around us. Shane let me scan in copies of the abstract. It was a day that I could never have dreamed of having all those years ago when I started this journey with the old picture of Emma and John.

Shane talked all about the projects that he has started or will need to do in the future to return his little house to what it looked like when Emma owned it. He had to do foundation work because it had settled badly. He re-opened as much of the porch as he could, he gutted the inside and added drywall walls. When we communicated through email, I sent him a photo of John and Emma taken in the living room of what is now his home.

He had found the wallpaper that was on the walls in that picture when he took the old walls out. I wanted to see the inside of the house in the worst way but I already felt bad that we had just dropped in on them. So I would not ask. Eventually, he offered…but his wife was a bit reluctant…She said, “ It isn’t really ready for company, I was cleaning!”

I told her, “It was OK, really, that is not important to me. What is important to me is to stand in Emma living room!”. So we entered, and I could feel her everywhere. I stood in the very room that this photo was taken in. I had goose bumps and tears. Time stood quietly still and it was a bit overwhelming! I wanted it to last forever. It was a truly unexpected gift!

I never dreamed all those years ago when I looked at those dusty photos of this couple that this journey would become so special to me. Needless to say I would love to meet this couple but there is something deep down in my DNA that tells me every time I see them in these photos that we have already met. Its the tears and the goosebumps….Emma and John’s way of saying “We love you too dear! “

Happy Hunting!

Jan

#52Ancestores52Weeks