Welcome To Long Lost Relatives

David’s kin, Cherie Compotaro, recently found us through a link on the Find-a-Grave website and we’ve been swapping photos and stories and an invitation to the next Family Reunion to which we hope she’ll come to along with her mother. She’s likes genealogy as much as we do and I have added links to her family research website to my side menu. She has several family related blogs, lots of pictures and family recipes. Go say your howdys!

Family Crafting

Once upon a time, many young ladies were taught practical skills necessary to run households and provide clothing and meals for their future families. Mothers were the primary teachers, but grandmothers and aunts, if they lived nearby, assisted in the lessons. Boys learned from the men in the family to furnish their families' meat for the table by hunting and fishing. Woodworking skills helped build log cabins and furniture, but today we mostly craft, not out of necessity, but as fun hobbies.

Deliah (BAILEY) LARUE was a milliner (ladies hat-maker) and seamstress by trade. Mom said she can remember Grandma Deliah "Della" coming to visit and making several dresses for her out of matching feed-sacks when a schoolteacher sent a note home from school saying mom’s dresses was immodestly too short. 

One of her daughters, Maurine ULLOM, crocheted lovely afghans and doilies for all her children and grandchildren and taught me how to crochet too. I have a quilt she made me for high school graduation. Later, my mother sewed clothing for my siblings and I. To earn a badge, I learned some simple embroidery skills and knitting from a Girl Scout leader. My sister, joining the home sales team of Creative Moments, taught us how to photo-scrapbook. I took that a step further and taught myself how to rubber stamp, thinking to use it in my scrapbooks later.

Gladys (WHITE) O’NEAL made wedding cakes for years and to decorate them, she made ceramic figures. She taught my mother how to make and paint molded ceramics and my mother, in turn, taught ceramic classes for many years at Janet’s Ceramics. Mom crafted a lacy background arch with a light on a white ceramic base for our Precious Moments wedding figurine that decorated our wedding cake. Sadly the whole thing broke during one of our moves. She also made porcelain dolls and now paints realistic watercolors. 

Bertha (GOLDEN) CARRENDER, crocheted also. She made us a lovely white crocheted tablecloth for a wedding gift. David's mother also crochets and makes tied patchwork quilts.

Nanny Marie RUSH, sewed quilts out of feedbag fabric and crocheted. She was a member of a homemaker’s craft club near where she lived. Both she and my mother-in-law showed me how to make several small crocheted gift items and I have written out the directions to several on my craft blog. Click on links to articles.

Crocheted Potholders

Crocheted Framed Christmas Cards

Last Supper

Scrap Pincushion

My Sunbonnet Card

Note These Dates

Below is a timeline of helpful dates for a family historian to know. To find clues about our ancestor's lives, one must know where to place them in history. 

Beginning of mankind = Walking
Boats on rivers; Ships on the sea
3200 B.C. = wheels on chariots
1347-53 = Bubonic Plague in Europe
=========================
NEW WORLD!

1492 = Christopher Columbus

1582 =  The Gregorian Calendar was implemented by His Holiness, Pope Gregory XIII in October.
1585 = Roanoke Colony settled (N.C.)
1607 = Jamestown settled (VA.)
1620 = Mayflower ship landed (MA.)
1704 = First U.S. Newspaper
1749 = Calendar standardized; Conestoga wagon (PA). 

1751 = Law changed end of year to Dec 31. 
1752 = Sept. The United States finally switched from the old Julien calendar to Gregorian calendar with 11 days difference. Jan 1 began the year.
1755-1763 = French and Indian War
1775-1783 = War of Independence
1776 = July 4. USA Birthday!
1790 = First USA Census
1792 = Kentucky Statehood (15th)
1803 = Louisiana Purchase 
1812-1815 = War of 1812.

1817-1818 = 1^st Seminole War
1818 = Illinois Statehood (21st)

1820 = Missouri Compromise
1821 = Missouri Statehood (24th); Santa Fe Trail  
1830 = Oregon Trail
1831 =  McCormick's reaper
1832 = Black Hawk War  
1835 = Telegraph;

1835-1842 = 2^nd Seminole War

1837 = Osage River Steamboat; Miller County, MO.
1838 = Trail of Death
1839 = Daguerreotype photos
1843 = Typewriter
1845 = The New England Historic Genealogical Society
1846-1848 = Mexican War
1849 = California Gold Rush
1849 = Cholera Epidemic
1850 = Family Names in Census
1854 = Ambrotype photos
1856 = tintype or ferreotype photos
1858 = Colorado Gold Rush
1859 = Paper Photographs
1861 = Kansas Statehood (34th); Color Photography
1861-1865 = Civil War.
1862 = Homestead Act; Tax Act
1862-1870 = Missouri's Oath of Loyalty Law
1865 = Black marriages legalized in MO.
1869 = First Transcontinental Railroad
1879 = Edison's light bulb
1884 = Flash photography
1885 = Fingerprints
1886 = horse-less carriage
1888 = Eastman’s Kodak Camera
1889-1899 = Spanish-American War
1890 = American Frontier closed.
1892 = Ellis Island; Dalton's Raid on the Banks, Coffeyville, KS. 
1893 = First concrete paved street
1897 = Alaska Gold Rush
1899 = Philippine American War
1903 = Airplane  
1910 = Registry of Births and Deaths in Missouri.
1914-1918 = World War I.
1918-20: "Spanish" Flu 
1921 = Fire destroys most of 1890 Census
1929 - 1941 = American Depression
1933 = State Birth Certificates
 1935 = MO. Sales Tax
1939-1945 = WWII.
1950-1953 = Korean War
1950 = Atomic clock
1953 = DNA Structure Discovery
1954 = International Confederation of Genealogy and Heraldry.
1961 = First manned rocket
1961-1975 = Vietnam War 
1976 = Roots! By Alex Haley; United States of America Bicentennial; O'Neal's Golden Wedding Anniversary
1977 = Dad's 50th birthday 
1980s = Human Genome Mapping
1981 = Church of God (Anderson, IN) Centennial;  Ullom's Golden Wedding Anniversary
1983 = Ancestry.com;
1984 = Family Tree Maker software
1988 = Mom and Dad's last wedding anniversary. 
1991 = Persian Gulf War
1992 = Dalton Defender's Centennial 
1994 = GPS (Global Positioning System)
1996 = Memory Makers Magazine; Google Search Engine launched
2003 = My in-law's Golden Wedding Anniversary
2008 = Nazarene denomination Centennial
2019-2020 = Worldwide Coronavirus Pandemic
2020 = Eldon Church of the Nazarene Centennial, Eldon, MO. 

Timeline compiled by Dolores J. Rush, Updated: 2/5/2021

____ = First Church of God, Kansas City, KS 50th Anniversary
____ = Metropolitan Nazarene, Kansas City, KS. 50th Anniversary
____ = Grandview Nazarene, Grandview, MO 50th Anniversary 

I recommend this website to convert dates and times. Say you have a tombstone with a death date and age, but no birth date. Use this website's handy date calculator to figure an approximate birth date. Time and Date.com

Postle, OK—The Town That Was, But Ain’t No More.

Postle, Oklahoma was named for one of the first pioneers of Northwest Texas County -- George and Anna POSTLE. They moved to a claim of 160 acres in a prairie schooner, arriving in March, 1904. It was free land, 28 miles from Guymon and 30 miles from Hooker. The government first gave a patent to the land while the claimant lived on it and improved it. After five years, the official deed was given to the owner. Their closest neighbor, the MARKHAM'S, were six miles away east across the prairie.

Two years later, the WELSH family bought the quarter of land west of the Postle’s. Dan Welsh commenced to building a general store with a post office in the back. Win SCHNAUFER was an early day mail carrier, bringing mail to Postle three times a week. Later W.D.FRANKS built a blacksmith shop and a livery stable there. Postle was a stopping point between Hooker and Elkhart, KS. (f. 1913) on the Denver-Canadian-Dallas highway.

In 1915, when Alford and Tacy E. (BERRY) ULLOM, moved to Oklahoma from Streetor, Illinois, they purchased Postle (Section 1-4-12) from Dan Welch. In an area where building materials had to be trucked in, Dan physically moved his store building to the State Line between Kansas and Oklahoma the day lots in Elkhart, Kansas were sold. After settling his store, he was open for business the same day.

Postle became their homestead. Alford and Tacy’s son, John Henderson, brought his bride, Maurine Hester (LARUE) there in 1931. Their second child, Maynard and his wife, Ronda Faith (ARCHER) built their home between where the blacksmith shop and store once stood. They told of finding metal buried in the ground when they dug out the basement hole. The Postle School District No. 5 finally transferred to Elkhart, KS. in 1945.

More to Read:

1. "DOWN THE LONG ROAD TO POSTLE, OKLA." By Gloria Bayne. The Old Timers New Year Book  Lee Tucker, Editor. (First Printed in the Guymon Daily Herald, Friday, April 25, 1975; reprinted, Keyes, OK., 1978-1979).

2. “Northwest Flats” Heritage: A History of Five Townships in Northwest Texas County, Allie Mitchell. Oklahoma. Times Publishing, Texhoma.

3. The Old Timers As I Remember Them. By Chester C. Tucker c. 1963.

4. "Leave It To Miss Annie" By Georgia Tucker Smith. The Allen Press, Lawrence, KS; 1952.

5. Findagrave Links

Update: My mother filled in a few more neighbors that she remembers from the Postle area: " Willie and Bessie Haar lived 1/4 mile east of us.  Two miles west of us was Chester Lewis and his family. Two miles north and two miles west was L. Simmons.  Two miles more north of the Simmons was my Aunt Mable and Beryl Griffith.  Howard Kerns lived one mile North of the Griffith home.

Bessie was the daughter of Lemuel Simmons----------Chester Lewis' daughter taught school that  I attended in the Richland Center  School. 

After the Postle  school   was closed we were moved to the Richland Center School where I attended the 6th. 7th and 8th grade. Then we went to Elkhart School where I started as a freshman.  Mom took a bunch of kids in a sort of bus.  She drove us for a time and then Claude Bayer that had taken over the Haar place when they moved drove us.  We had 6 or 7 kids that rode with us to school. " 

Clara Mae Thrasher, beloved Teacher.