{"id":824,"date":"2015-11-12T10:16:09","date_gmt":"2015-11-12T17:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/?p=824"},"modified":"2015-11-18T18:39:26","modified_gmt":"2015-11-19T01:39:26","slug":"thanks-to-an-earlier-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/?p=824","title":{"rendered":"Thanks to an Earlier Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/111215_1716_ThankstoanE1.jpg\" alt=\"\" align=\"right\" \/>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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Laura Riddle (1853-1933) raised a family including two disabled children while homesteading by herself in Nebraska,<\/li>\n<li>Anna Petronellia Sherman Reed (1865-1961), as an older woman in her 50&#8217;s, homestead alone in Wyoming,<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>My father&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;the roof hadn&#8217;t rotted off and it leaked like a sieve&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>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<sup>st<\/sup>-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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genealogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":827,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions\/827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}