DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: WHERE DID GRANDMA LIVE? (Cheri)

Sitting in our travel trailer in Paducah, Kentucky last week, I realized that the area of Missouri that my grandmother grew up in was little more than an hour away.  A new destination to explore!

Where exactly to look, though?

We were about to head across the border to Missouri, but I really wanted to find an actual address for her home.  Luckily I had some family documents that I had scanned as I was cleaning out my parents' home.  I quickly set up an Ancestry.com account and found enough to start the drive.

I knew that my grandmother’s father had been a captain in the Union Army during the Civil War and that he had been married and widowed before my grandmother was born.

When they married, my great-grandparents were 24 and 60.  "I'd rather be the sweetheart of an old man than the slave of a young man," was great-grandmother Sarah's often-repeated comment.

Based on her father’s rank in the War and age, I had always imagined Grandma growing up in a two-story home on a small amount of acreage, maybe a working farm.

Later, I discovered that in 1900 (the year they were married and four years before my grandmother was born), her parents were living in Mill Creek, Illinois, with her grandparents.

I have no idea if the picture above is from the Mill Creek in Illinois.  We didn't get there and truthfully, there are so many Mill Creeks, since creeks were essential to milling 100 years ago.  (We currently live on Mill Creek Lane, in North Carolina.)

In 1900, Grandma's father was a farm laborer, but unemployed for the last nine months.  So much for the idea that military service and age had built Great-Grandpa something of a cushion!  (Also, how much of a “catch” was he for young Sarah?)

My grandmother didn't have a regular birth certificate, because apparently no one thought to record the event at the time.  38 years later, she submitted the affidavit of a Lottie Fuller, stating that my grandmother had been born in her house in Morehouse, Missouri, in 1904.

Lottie Fuller was her sister-in-law.  But wait . . . Grandma was born in her own sister-in-law's home? 

Her father had several much older children. 

Lottie Fuller didn't say where in Morehouse she lived, but the town wasn't - and isn't - a big place.  In 1900, there were 900 residents; in 2020, the population had grown to 1,015.

This is the town's post office:

It's not a prosperous place, either.  Old and new City Halls:

Morehouse must have been more prosperous when the existing City Hall was built (as the Bank of Morehouse, which you can see on the building's portico).

And then there was this:

 of The best source for addresses that I found was the census records, but even those are difficult.  There were no street or numbers identified – at least in these small communities of Illinois and Missouri – in the 1900 and 1910 census records.

I didn’t get any representative pictures of houses in Morehouse, as the houses that we saw all seemed to have people around, and I don’t want to invade residents’ privacy, or raise their ire!

By 1910, when Grandma was six, her family was living in a house of their own, still in Morehouse, along with one of my grandmother's cousins, and a border.  Who knows, maybe they were all farming together?

The most concrete information that I found was the location of Grandma’s home in 1920, when she was about 16.  She was then living with her parents on Roxie Lane in Poplar Bluff, Missouri.

Poplar Bluff is one of the larger cities in the region, with about 16,000 residents, but it is suffering.  Floods and tornadoes are problems, and the area is impoverished.  In fact, in one year, Poplar Bluff was hit with the country's 17th biggest tornado of all time and was part of the 27,000 square miles of land covered by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

I couldn’t get a picture of the exact home she lived in, because the house at that and the surrounding addresses were maybe 1970's vintage, apparently public housing.

Here is a video of some representative nearby houses, and a couple of still pictures.

It's hard to tell what homes looked like 100+ years ago,  but at least Grandma left before 1927!  She went to Nebraska for schooling at about 18 years old.

Reviewing records, I found that she lived in South Dakota, Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas, before moving to Vallejo, California, and living for many decades north of Sacramento, California.  After retiring, she and Grandpa drove around the country, hitting almost all of the Lower 48 states.

Probably just another element of my own wanderlust!