Genealogy Jottings

As we approach Thanksgiving later this month, my thoughts turn to reasons for thankfulness. I need to practice this virtue more regularly because too often I get caught up in the frustrations of my daily life. Yet if I look at just the homesteading stories from my own family history, my frustrations look like nothing compared to what my ancestors endured. A few examples:

• Laura Riddle (1853-1933) raised a family including two disabled children while homesteading by herself in Nebraska,
• Anna Petronellia Sherman Reed (1865-1961), as an older woman in her 50’s, homestead alone in Wyoming,
• Sophie Marie Bentsen (1878-1966) spent the winter with three small children and very little food on their Montana homestead while her husband lay ill in town with typhoid.

I certainly face nothing like the life of a homesteader with complications such as children with special needs, an aging body, or a suddenly-absent spouse. Even without these challenges, homesteading was not easy.

My father’s second cousin Olive Griffith Rector provided us with tales of some of the hardships the homesteaders faced. Her family settled in Oklahoma in 1901.

In her words, they arrived at the most barren looking place one could ever imagine. Her father had put up a one-room board shack for lodging. They heated it with a little stove using cow chips. Their beds were boards placed on sawhorses. They had to carry water. That fall they began work on a dugout that was finished just in time for cold weather. It had a dirt floor they swept with a weed. They used old cement sacks on the floor if they could get them. Their mother worked in the fields for three years to save enough money for a sewing machine. Olive claimed that their father built better housing for his livestock than he did for his family. She thought they would have stayed in the dugout forever if “the roof hadn’t rotted off and it leaked like a sieve”.

Does not sound like much fun to me. These people made huge sacrifices in an effort to make a better life for themselves and their children. I can be grateful for all they did, because I have benefitted from their efforts. My parents and I did not have to live this way. My petty annoyances in the 21^st-century suburbs cannot begin to compare with the hardships of life on a homestead. These people took a long view of life and ignored everyday frustrations in their efforts to get ahead.