Excerpts from the Ashley County Eagle - Shell …

1 Excerpts from the Ashley County Eagle ARKANSAS 1889 1914 Alice Kennedy Lee 2000 INTRODUCTION Several years ago I began a search for my father's family. As an only child with no first cousins, I had lost my daddy in death when I was just eight years old. His father died before I was born, and his mother when I was barely four, so I had no grandparents to tell me the wonderful stories of my family and its history. My two aunts, who had no children, were not interested, as far as I could tell; the only one to survive past 1958 knew very little about the family and couldn't answer my questions.

2 She did give me my grandmother Kennedy's Bible, which had the names of her parents, but little else. I knew that my grandmother had one sister - Aunt Bert, and my grandfather had one brother - Uncle Joe. They were the only ones I had heard about. Imagine my surprise when, after months of research and hiring a researcher in Little Rock who located some of the family for me, I discovered that there were twenty-one siblings in the two families! I had my work cut out for me. My husband, Dan, and I made a trip to Ashley County to see what records we could find, and were very disappointed that we found almost none.

3 We then covered the courthouses where we knew the family had lived in the early to mid-eighteen hundreds, Prairie and Dallas, and wound up at the marvelous Arkansas History Commission in Little Rock, where we spent six days at different times reading microfilms, books, anything we locate. It was here that I discovered the Ashley County Eagle on microfilm. Since I couldn't stay long enough to read it all, 1 bought three rolls dated 1889 through 1914, bought a microfilm reader and started looking for any little bit of information about my Kennedys and Harvilles.

4 I found the deaths of my great-grandparents, John F. and Mary Tabor Harville, but only one daughter and one son listed as survivors. By this time, I had located them on censuses from 1850 to 1900. so I could fill in those blanks. As I read more and more of the little tidbits of information in the Eagle , I began to wonder if other people might not be as anxious as I to find their ancestors in day-to-day life, and I started writing down all the little genealogical items in the personal columns of the paper. That simple beginning has culminated in this nearly 300 page collection of these little gems.

5 I have made no attempt to copy lists such as grand juries, etc. -- only those items that show a relationship between people, or perhaps a new place where a family moved, to help someone locate a lost group; births, engagements, marriages, deaths. Obituaries in the early days were very brief and told little about the person, but in the later issues, they began to list survivors. I've made no pretense of trying to make this paper "politically correct." It can't be done. If the terms offend anyone, I am truly sorry, but the words are those of the editor, not mine.

6 Women were certainly not considered important at that time; babies' births are listed only under their fathers' names, no mention of the mother except when she died in childbirth, which was quite often. So many young women died, including two in my grandmother's family - one sister at the birth of her fifth child at age 32, and one sister-in-law at the birth of her tenth (!) child at age 42. The babies must have been weighed on their fish scales because they are almost never under ten pounds, and up to 12 as a rule. If a person is listed with only initials, one can't assume it's a man.

7 I made that mistake when I found an obituary for my great-great-grandmother, "Mrs. Rau." I spent many hours and several dollars reading microfilm, searching for a husband named Rau. Quite recently, I discovered to my surprise that was actually Narcissa Helen - the wife! Brides in this paper are often listed by initials, so check them out when you look for your family. Spelling may vary in the same edition of the paper, and I have copied the names just as they were. You may need to check several spellings of your family's name.

8 In some cases, parts of names are missing; these also are just as they were in the paper. Holes and ink blots obliterated some names completely. One thing that has amazed me in this paper is that the headlines could come from today's media: children shot other children and killed them; husbands shot wives; men killed each other with terrible frequency out of anger. In one instance, a young woman wanted to join a traveling theater group, so her father killed the owner of the group without a word of explanation! The most heartbreaking thing one finds is the number of babies and young children who died.

9 "Congestion seemed to be the biggest killer; measles, pneumonia, and the fevers (typhoid, swamp, slow, yellow) wiped out whole families within days. My grandmother's sister lost three children in one week, boys 13 and 14, and a little girl, 8, and never knew what killed them. A later paper says that "the fruit which was believed to be responsible" for all the deaths was gone, so the illnesses should lessen. People were bitten by mad dogs, and applied a "mad stone" to keep from getting rabies. Accidents took so many lives of children and adults.

10 Several children got too close to outdoor fires for washing clothes or rendering lard, and were burned to death. It is amusing to read that most all the weddings were planned around the train schedules. A couple would be married at 8:00 AM so that they could get the 9:00 train to St. Louis, a favorite honeymoon destination, or out west. The Eagle chronicles the coming of the railroad, as well as telephones, electricity, indoor plumbing , automobiles, airplanes, and appliances as they were invented. Thomas Edison made some remarkable predictions of things to come.