THIRTEEN THOUSAND DAYS

   

                Above: My great-grandmother: 

                  Mrs. Dora Ono (Wilcox) Lee

It's not entirely untrue - that is this post's title of Thirteen Thousand Days. In this wedding day portrait reminiscent of a nineteenth-century impressionist, the title is meant to reflect her life in its entirety. Her life was short, but it was terribly and beautifully full. Indeed, she lived another hundred days or so longer. 

Ever a tidy and sweet lady, my great-grandmother and mother of seven children saw fit to leave this world a mere one day after her thirty-sixth birthday.

Such was the bittersweet beauty of Mrs. Ono Wilcox Lee

There is only a little to write about here regarding Ono. I could include the news clips of a young woman heading off to the University in the late 1890s but that only tells part of the story. I think it amazingly cool that the Wilcox/Hoyt clan put a value on education and had no issue with sending a young woman to a place of higher learning. She was probably studying to be a teacher. She was certainly aspiring to be someone or something more than the norm.

           

I think the best thing about my great-grandmother Ono came in this prophetic letter she wrote to her husband Burt after the death of their son John. I think she saw what was coming her way in a few short years. Ono was only about twenty-six years old when she wrote this letter. To me, she seems wise beyond her years. How could she have known what was coming??

Somehow in her heart, she did.

Here below, in her own words...

"March 1908

   My Dear Burt ~

This is a beautiful day - & fills me with an increased longing to have you near me - It seems as though it certainly won't be much longer until we have a little family of two again - and knowing how uncertain life is, & unprepared we all are for the end - I just want you to know that you have been more to me than you will ever know - I will admit I have had a great many heart-aches as we have gone on our little voyage together, a good cause for some of them and no cause (as I afterward learned,) for some of them, and darling I can look back over my days - & see a vast number of mistakes, that caused you, no doubt, more pains than I will ever know - but dear one, I have regretted a great many times doing things that caused you pain, when I knew of what I had done - but I guess those little misunderstandings are, after all, what makes our lives more perfect - & let us hope & pray, if we are left together, that the little crosses of our lives grow less & less - & we may grow nearer the Master who has seen fit to take two of our precious ones up to him - to await our coming - which I pray, we may be found ready when the call is given - 

Now dear one in case I should be called, & our baby is a girl - I would be glad to have her named Doretha - I would rather you let Mama raise the babies, but I don't give them to anyone, for if I am gone, all is yours that I have left - even to part of my life - Your loving wife - 

Dora Ono Lee"

An interesting part about Ono's letter is that she mentions two deceased babies - I have yet to locate a name or a record of more than just Little John.

Ono's stunning graveside funeral at night was a spectacle of flowers and lights.

I thought I might include this open she wrote about the pain she felt in the loss of her son John. I think it not only captures her sadness but also her eloquence. 

Ono was quite a lady.

This is all I've got for my great-grandmother Ono Lee. I think her own words tell her story the best. It's funny. Out of my ten great-grandparents (adopted and biological), I only knew three of them in actuality.

I think I wish I'd had a chance to meet and know Mrs. Ono Lee the most.

PEACE.

AN ORPHAN'S CHILD

    "NINETY-FOUR DOLLARS and FIVE CENTS"

Above: My maternal grandparents

Frank White Lee and Alta Violet Sage circa1930

  "Ninety-four dollars and five cents..."

   (It will make more sense later on.)

[Again, terribly unedited. ✓]

Sometimes, I wonder what brings people together. I wonder too about all those things that will, in later years tear them apart. At least for today though, I thought I'd write about the things that might have made them somehow feel right for each other. You know, like my grandparents, Frank and Alta.

(I know, I know, it's just crazy Jeff doing his thing, right?)

                                                                             *******

Recently, a cousin sent me a picture of Frank and Alta I'd never seen before. As I looked at it, I was able to get a sense of my grandparents' close if not necessarily intimate relationship. As I uploaded it to Ancestry.com and "gussied it up" (and as some new information has shown up this week) some of the reasons "Frank and Alta" got together in the first place became clear. 

I believe that people are often drawn to each other as mates out of a sense of similar history. Call it a personal bias that drives us towards a mate that will somehow understand our ancestry. I don't think there's any specific indicator here. It could be that they both like orange-lemon jello with pineapple on holidays, or more so, that they understand "the need" to have orange-lemon jello with pineapple when family comes around.

Personal history. Personal bias.

The photograph triggered in me the query and understanding of these things Frank and Alta might have had in common beyond sagebrush, sheep ranches, and dancing at the Wilcox Ranch. What I realized was that both Frank and Alta have a history of similar family 'events' in common. 

So you see my silly genealogical epiphany here started out this week with "Nana's father Samuel Selah Sage. You know "Grandpa Sam." (He's actually my great-grandfather...) I posted about him and his siblings a week or so ago in Water for Sages. 

https://atroubledsage.blogspot.com/2024/03/water-for-sages.html

At the time I wrote that, I was waiting to see if Sarpy County, Nebraska would be able to find and release "Grandpa Sam's" father's (Selah Sage's) probate record. On Monday, I was pleased to see an email with a seventy-two-page (!!!) attachment. They had found the administration records for the estate of Nana's grandfather, Selah Sage who died one hundred and fifty years ago this coming April. Some kind soul had bothered to find Selah Sage's file from 1874. So I guess you could say it all started this week here...

(And no, I am not crazy. But sometimes the simplest of 72-page things...)

Now if I had bothered to do the math previously, I would have easily seen that Nana's father Sam was orphaned (and that both of his parents were dead) by the time he was eleven years old. I guess for some reason I was too dimwitted to see this until the probate record for Nana's grandfather arrived last Monday. (Grandpa Sam's mother Mary died in 1872) Our Great-Great Grandfather Selah Sage died intestate leaving four minor children. Much of the probate records are letters from Grandpa Sam's older brothers and sisters basically begging the probate court to allow them to keep the minor children - and for them not to be given away to strangers.

                          

The Sarpy County, Nebraska Probate Court appears to have agreed with the petitions of the Grandpa Sam's older brothers and sister. Grandpa Sam was taken in by his older brother Silas Sage. Sam stayed close to Silas for the rest of his life. There is evidence of this in a handwritten note by Grandpa Sam when he either wrote or took down the names and addresses of Silas's children (along with his brother Alvin's)

                  

 Grandpa Sam's brother [Uncle] "General Sherman" Sage went to live with his (much) older sister [Aunt] Nancy (Sage) Roberts. From what I know of Sherman's life it was a difficult one.

                           

 Above: Nana's "Aunt Nancy" and the woman who raised her "Uncle Sherman" as a boy.

                                   

Grandpa Sam's brothers Jerome Spillman Sage and Alvin Hall Sage were taken in and raised by Grandpa Sam's much older brother (and administrator of probate) Henry Sage. Jerome died a few short years later but brother Alvin Hall Sage "got away." Nana's "Uncle Alvin" lived for many years in San Gabriel, California.

So how come no Christmases were spent with Uncle Alvin? Gotta wonder...

In any event - all of Great-Great Grandpa Selah's living children received "ninety-four dollars and five cents" once the estate was settled about a year later. This equates to roughly $2,500.00 in today's money. This tells me that Nana's grandfather wasn't broke. 

Then there was the amount of money that had to be paid to Great-Great Grandpa Selah's sister and maiden aunt Miss Elizabeth Sage. She made a claim against her brother's estate for four hundred dollars half of which was allowed. 

So not broke here. Just orphaned.

                           

Above image: Great-Grandpa Sam Sage - Nana's father in later years.

Now about here, I need to mention that Nana's mother Mary (Ginder) Sage died when she was eighteen years old. 

I need to mention that Frank Lee's father Burton Arthur Lee died when Frank was seventeen.

(The story of how Nana's mother was blinded by bees is a good one for a later date...)

Enter Frank White Lee...

His father Burton Arthur Lee was an orphan too. Burton's father John E. Lee died in 1885. His mother Lucy Melinda (Nestle) Lee in 1888. Burton's sister "Lucy Jr." was put in charge of the minor children.

                                   

                    

     Franks' mother Ono Wilcox Lee of course died when he was eight years old and he was raised by his Aunt Hazel Wilcox. Though not necessarily an orphan per se, Frank surely was on his own by the age of seventeen.

                                 

Above: Mrs. Clark Wilcox - "Hazel Wilcox"

So I guess it might have gone something like this...

The year is 1929.

FRANK: "Hey Alta, I hear that your dad was orphaned as a kid. Mine was too. I heard that your mom died last year. You might have heard my mom died when I was eight years old. I understand what that must be like."

ALTA: "I sure understand what you've been through. It's rough. Hey, do you like to go to dances? I do. Do you think you would ever want to go out to the dance at Amos Wilcox's ranch?"

FRANK: "Why yes, I'd like that Alta. I hate to miss those dances at the Wilcox ranch too. Tell me, if it's not too crazy a thought, have you ever thought about what you might want to name a baby girl?"

ALTA: "Well, if I ever have a baby girl... I think I like the name Yvonne..."

We are often bound together in life by the strangest things in common.

REST IN PEACE DEAR ONES.

THE SERAPHIM of BERT LEE

           

                             My great-grandfather Burton A. Lee 1877-1925

                                                                      *******

Seraphim: plural noun; an angelic being regarded as belonging to the highest order of the ninefold celestial hierarchy, associated with light, ardor, and purity...

Apologies for formatting and editing that never work out quite well...

PART I.

My mother was a Lee...

There is always a certain darkness when I consider The Lees. This is especially true when I consider the life of my great-grandfather Burton Arthur Lee. Maybe it's the sadness that seems to hide just under his Marlboro man style, or a certain reticence about him, or the Batman shadows of his eyes. Yes, the Lee family can sometimes be a dark bunch. They are often filled with the complexities of war heroes and tragic tales, of deaths, murderous poisonings, and suicide. Curiously too, their ancestry and that of my great grandfather's is also one of the most difficult to trace. 

They also have the best sense of humor around.

   

Yet beyond any mention of Burton's father, John E. Lee, and John's untimely death in the newspapers of the 1880s, or the same for John's heroics at Gettysburg and Andersonville Prison, my line to them up and through Burton's grandfather Erastus Lee disappears into the depths of shore on Michigan's Lake Huron. From there, a great deal of genetic nomadism occurs as my Lee clan moves from Michigan to Colorado to Wyoming and back again. 

Truly, they remain one of the most fascinating people to explore.

My great-grandfather Burton Lee's father died when he was eight years old.

It must have been very hard for "Bert" to lose his father at such an early age and also to live under such a hero's shadow. 

    

    

     

    

Various Lee Cousins - no doubt auditioning for The Munsters. 

My Lee family was originally or were rather most likely English loyalists. The family also shows strong traces of French ancestry with their Canadian 'inter-marriages' in and about Kingston, Ontario. They likely moved about via the lakes and waterways and moved from their only known point of origin in 18th century New York west to Michigan utilizing the Erie Canal.

No, they were not the "Southern Lees" of General Robert E. Lee's Virginia that my mother Yvonne often alleged a distant kinship to. (Sorry, Mom, if there is a connection it's a very remote one.) Rather our Lees who came before us and on down through Burton Lee's lines are from the cold waters of New England and Canada West.

Indeed, their French-Canadian connection is what gave birth to my great-grandfather's name. His grandmother was a woman called Eliza Berton, a lady whose family was also often referred to as "Barton." The name "Berton" was Anglicized, and decades later gave my great grandfather his first name of "Burton." 

The name "Burton" survives even now in his descendants.

I don't want to go too much further into the Lee ancestry. It all becomes speculation and is too murky and too much of a monster to get very far with anyway. However, there is one old photograph I would like to share with you. 

It's a picture that might be a further clue to our Lee family origins. 

 

The man pictured above is William Lee, born in New York circa 1806. His descendants show a DNA match to the descendants of Erastus Lee and on through to Erastus's grandson, Burton Arthur Lee. This William and our Erastus lived in the same Michigan county in the 1870 census. 

William is quite possibly Erastus's older brother, so understanding more about William may give us a better idea of just where our Lee family came from. 

PART II.

But that's a tale for another day. For now, I want to talk just about Bert (or "Bert" related subjects).  So I've decided to do what I have done in the posts for my other great-grandparents and go back to the old newspapers to see what I could find. 

The first thing I found was an advertisement in the Saratoga Sun for a place I'd never heard of - a business run by my great-grandfather Burton Lee.

   
   

    

Now like most of you, my eyes were immediately drawn to the name of "Chas. M. Wilcox," in the second image above - it is the name of my great-great-grandfather and the father-in-law of Bert Lee. I almost missed the smaller advertisement just below for The Windsor Stables, whose proprietor is

 "B. A. Lee." 

Who or what was The Windsor Stables???

Why had we never heard about it before?

  

Above: A description of Windsor Stables in an early twentieth-century guide to the Wyoming outdoors.

 

I guess it's no surprise that Bert's advertisement should appear next to that of his father-in-law's. The year is 1918, and a recent widower with five children is probably doing everything he can to put food on the table. From the description of the Windsor Stables above, they are a business that seems to accommodate their customers in a variety of ways. However, as far as I can tell, Bert doesn't own The Windsor Stables for very long.

In fact, it's a business that has been bought and sold several times over before being purchased by Bert Lee. An interesting advertisement for the same business appeared almost twenty years earlier (1892). Check out who owns the business then:

  

At one point in time, The Windsor Stables was owned by Charles Merritt Wilcox's brother John - John Franklin Wilcox, television actor Larry Wilcox's great grandfather. 

So our great grandfathers literally owned "the same business" - albeit at different times.

Crazy. 

Or is it?

PART III.

Now there's so much tragedy in Bert and his wife Ono's lives I didn't really want to go down that road in the retelling of it. Some of it is better left for Ono's story anyway. Nah, what I thought I might like to do here is to posit or explain just why Bert (and Ono of course) came to call their son and my grandfather born in 1908 -

 "Frank White Lee."

Now if I ever heard where Bert's son and my grandfather Frank got his middle name of "White" from I surely have forgotten. In recent years, I assumed that his middle name of "White" referred to "The Great White Six" a team of horses and stagecoach driven by Ono's father Charles M. Wilcox.

It felt like a logical homage and a logical conclusion. I no longer believe that to be the case. 

However, now I think Bert and Ono had a different source for both the first and middle name of their son. 

For just a second, I'm going to take you back to one tragedy. (Sorry I know I said I wasn't going to do that but...) The tragedy is the 1907 death of Bert and Ono's little two-year-old son John who drowned in the creek. 

   

                                                  July 1907

Keep in mind that my grandfather, Bert, and Ono's son Frank was born in May of 1908. Keep in mind too the shattering sense of guilt and grief that would have surrounded Bert and Ono over the death of their firstborn child. It is evident that they had to rely on the support of family and friends or go insane from the sorrow. Even with a new baby soon on the way grief must have still plagued them both. 

They must have been so grateful for the folks who stuck by them as they worked through their grief. 

As Ono's time drew near they must have talked about what to name the new baby if it was a boy or a girl. Now read the next passage and it all might make more sense:

    

Bert and Ono extended their thanks for help to their friends during their bereavement to:

"Mr. and Mrs. Frank White."

So my dear ones I posit that Bert and Ono Lee in their gratitude to their friends surely must have said, 

"If the baby is a boy we want to name him after you, Frank. We want him to be called, "Frank White Lee."

And so he was. 

So it was never about his middle name at all - but about his whole name. 

Now why couldn't I see that before? Duh.

I was curious about Mr. Frank White and what became of him and his wife Mary. Frank White was an Englishman who immigrated in about 1880. (Lord, knows why he went to Wyoming...) Mr. and Mrs. White lived in Saratoga, Wyoming until 1919 when they sold everything and moved to, you guessed it, California. 

Frank White died in 1922. His widow in 1938. 

    

It's interesting to me that Bert Lee's father John Lee died when Bert was only eight years old and that Bert's son Frank lost his mother Ono when Frank was only eight years old. Frank lost Bert too when Frank was only seventeen. 

Burton Arthur Lee died at age 48. 

His father John Lee at age 42.

His mother Lucy Melinda Lee at age 38

His wife Ono at age 36

And his firstborn son, John, at age 2

See what I mean about too much early tragedy?

With all this sadness in Bert's life, I wanted to show you that not every day was toil and trouble so I will leave you with one last clipping about my great-grandfather Bert's life:

  

Even in the darkness, there is still a little light. 

PEACE. 

Footnote: The "Eli Lee" mentioned in the above article was not a relative of Burton's. It was actually "Mrs. Lee" mentioned above who was a relative of Mrs. Charles Wilcox. (They were both Hoyts.) Mrs. Lee's name was Fanny (Hoyt) Lee and she lived to be 101 years old - Aunt Jerri recalls meeting her as a girl.

ALONG COMES MARY

                                              

"Mary Ann"

"In the end, all we have are the lives we touched while we were here..."

Unedited as always. 

I really hadn't really planned on going in this direction. I was content to re-visit the lives of my ten great-grandparents (adopted and biological) and to do so in no particular order and then move on to some other mundane aspect of family history. However, I realized that I'd written fairly extensively about a couple of them already - and perhaps more about them than anyone would really care to know.

Go figure.

I mean revisiting the life of bio great-grandmother Opal (Young) (Porter) Everett didn't seem like it would bring forth much in the way of "new" information. I managed to find her "out of the ether" and prove her five ancestral Mayflower lines so I'm good with that. Been there, done that. The same is true for Mary (Kraus) Ogle. And while the Lee/Wilcox, Record/Burson, and Sage/Ginder families keep pulling me back in, at least for now, there isn't a lot new to report. 

One thing has been certain: I really didn't want to "report" again on the life of bio-great grandpa James Melson Jones. Some folks in the family tree are just, well, not worth as much as others are - and "Melson" to me is the penultimate "worthless." The "Jones" family has never shown me much. In fact, their ancestral lines lead straight back into the slave-holding South - not my favorite go-to place. Both my mother's and father's families are largely free of "slave-holding" ilk. The Jones family (and their connecting lines) don't exactly fit that norm and sure don't scream great moral values in the treatment of others.

   

Above: My biological great-grandfather James Melson Jones and his second wife Edna (Smith) Jones the mother of Mary Ann pictured above. Rumor was that women felt generally uncomfortable around him.

However, I have always had an abiding curiosity about the "other children" of my bio great-grandfather, James Melson Jones. They are "the before unknown half-siblings" of my grandmother Katheryn (Ogle) Record. While I know that I have mentioned them before, I couldn't help but want to know more about them - those other two bio kids of James Melson Jones.

It was about then that I was confronted with the picture above in an old newspaper. I hadn't seen it before, but there she was in all her splendor, Mary Ann Jones, my grandmother Katheryn (Ogle) Record's younger half-sister. 

I guess (inadvertently) worthless old Mr. Jones decided that I needed to pick up his part of the story again anyway at least through his kids. Ugh.

                                           

Now I have nothing against "Old Mary Ann." It isn't her fault that her daddy was a philandering so-and-so. I guess my beef with any of the descendants of my grandmother's half-siblings is that for all the times I have reached out trying to reconnect all the "half-sections" of my grandmother's family I have been met with total and absolute silence.

It's as if they are saying, "Go away. We do not know you nor do we want to." 

Really? Have they met me??? Oh, I'm not going away.

Mary Ann married her Wall Street Journal husband, Winston Fournier, quite well. Their kids match dangerously close in all the DNA tests so no doubt they must be afraid of our latent Neanderthal bloodlines. (lol) All I can say here though is: Whatever Mary Ann. 

You can't hide from the gene pool.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Speaking of "Gene." My grandmother's half-brother. 

(Is it me, or does anyone else find it odd that Grandma Record named one of her sons "Gene" after her brother, and one "James" after her father????)

Did she just keep this a secret to herself? 

Was it a coincidence? I do wonder.

Anyway, let's talk about "Uncle Gene Jones" first. 

  To talk about my grandmother's older half-brother Gene means talking about his mother, Jessie Jeanette (Schulte) Jones. The papers say she abandoned James Melson Jones but the papers also say he was a "dutiful husband" - a fact we know is a load of crap since he was boinking my bio great-grandmother the young Miss Opal Young in 1914 while "dutifully" married to Jessie. I think that Jessie realized "Melson" was a useless dick and dodged that bullet taking herself and their son "Little Gene" back to her home in Missouri. 

Run, Jessie, run. Take Little Gene and go!

Sadly, Melson's first wife Jessie Jones died in 1928 after some strange illness leaving Little Gene grown up but alone. 

The circumstances surrounding the death of James Melson Jones's first wife and Gene's mother Jessie are a bit heartbreaking. She is said to have died from an illness that caused her to lose her sight. In this cropped obituary (the actual one is too long for this venue to show) it mentions that her son Gene took her to "Rochester, Minnesota" for an operation. They do not specifically say "where" in Rochester Gene drove his mother to, but one gets the impression that Jessie went to the Mayo Clinic there for treatment for her cancer - or whatever was causing her illness and blindness. 

    

Whatever it was, Gene's mother died and left him a seventeen-year-old kid living with relatives.

What "this" Uncle Gene's relationship with his father was doesn't seem to ever come out in the wash in anything I read. I can tell you that the name "Melson" was handed down to Gene's son Michael who carried the same name as his grandfather. "Michael Melson Jones" - a first cousin to Jack, Gene, and Jim.

I should mention here that Uncle Gene Jones was actually named "Wilbur Jean Jones" - and that for (somewhat obvious reasons) he just went by the name of "Gene."

An ironic footnote to the life of Great Uncle Gene Jones is that in 1941 he was in Los Angeles County. Likely he was there for military service, but he was there long enough for him and his wife Ruth to give birth to their second son "Taylor Jeffrey Jones."

Wouldn't it have been something if he had visited his sister in Long Beach?

I don't know about you but the frequency and serendipitous recurrence of names (Now Jeff???) even by generations is starting to really creep me out - just saying.

So yeah, I'm gonna hope this guy goes by "Taylor" or "T.J." and this is not a case of "Jeff meet your cousin Jeff."

Eewwww.

Anyway, I've been working on getting a picture of Great Uncle Gene to go along with the one of Great Aunt Mary Ann. So far not a lot of luck with photos in the "Great Uncle Gene department."

Give me time. :) 

So I guess at this point I'd better get back to Mary Ann, but more so to her mother Edna. She was the unlucky lady who married old James Melson Jones as his second wife.

Now I have to say - the Smith family - that is the family of James Melson Jones's wife Edna have been super cool to me and have been forthcoming with information. Obviously, Old Melson married up when he married Edna Smith.

     

Be that all as it may, there was one place in their wedding announcement that truly caught my eye. That place is El Dorado, Kansas population of 3100. The year is 1917.

(and)  Miss Smith "has always lived here..." 

                            

It's the same town that Opal Young was from. Opal - my grandmother's biological mother.

SO......looks to me like Opal and Edna knew each other, or Edna certainly knew Opal's older sisters, and since Opal's father was Sheriff of the County ....yeah, that's a little close. No wonder Opal picked up and left for Oklahoma about that same year. I mean who could blame Opal for any of that?? 

Did she really wanna watch her Baby Daddy and Edna parade around the town square?

            

That's messed up.

Okay, so to Hell with all of them. My father will sometimes ask about the Jones family and I tell him the truth in that I never hear from any of them. That, however, isn't completely true. I do hear from a grandson of James Melson Jones's sister - a woman who was also named "Jessie Jones."

Is your head starting to hurt from these names yet?? Mine is.

Anyway, "Jessie's family" has been super cool to me, sending what pictures they have, so as far as Great Aunt Jessie" goes (or at least her offspring) they get kudos from me.

                        

                  "Aunt Jessie" -  Jessie (Jones) Michael 1888-1968

          My grandmother Katheryn Record's biological aunt on her father's side

Okay, well, I guess it's time I closed this post out before I put you all to sleep. Suffice it to say I'm still learning what I can about the Jones clan in our admixture.

But I couldn't resist that Hollywood Glossy of Aunt Mary Ann up at the top. Does anyone else see a resemblance to Grandma Katheryn Record?

And I needed to give a shout-out to Aunt Jessie - many thanks for raising good people.

PEACE.

              

                

WATER FOR SAGES

 

                                              

My great grandfather Samuel Selah Sage 1863-1947

And yes, before you say anything I know that no one gives a shite about any of this. It's just what I do... that is bothering people with useless people, places, and things from a long time ago... 

                                                                            ~

Let's face it too. Family history can get pretty boring - and that's when it's not too complicated or acting like some math equation nobody will ever solve. Still, we keep at it and sort it out the best we can. We don't want to show up in the Great Beyond and not know the names of our ancestors. Indeed, how embarrassing would it be having your great-grandfather introduce you around the place, like say to his brothers and sisters and you not having a clue who any of them were in relation to you? Egads. How cosmologically gauche not to know the names of your own relatives? 

However, sorting everyone out among the celestial Who's Who crowd can be tough to do sometimes. And then, proving who is related to who - well, let's just say that sometimes we may have to get to that Great Beyond before we ever have all the answers.

I noticed this not too long ago when I was trying to gather proofs to submit to the New England Historic Genealogical Society to prove my mom's "Gateway Ancestor." Mom's gateway comes through her mother's Sage family ancestry. Now "Gateways" are tough to come by as they link her folks from the Great Migration to European Royalty. Usually, it's some off-the-wall illegitimate line and hard as hell to prove out - but you have to have a "Gateway" to begin trying to prove anything at all - and you have to be able to prove yourself (and your random bloodline) back to the Gateway if say you'd like to espouse some legit relationship with Anne Boleyn, or in my mother's case, a few Magna Carta Barons and yes, even to the sister of William the Conqueror. 

Go figure, right?

However, as the kids say, The Sage Family is dope. 

I know what you're thinking, (that it's all utter bullshit) and I don't blame you. However, consider only that the good folks at the N.E.H.G.S. said my proofs to the Gateway were "okay" and that they were lineage society worthy. See? Just when you thought we had no claim at all to that castle in Balmoral.

Not to mention that the Sage family has some of the coolest relatives. Not only are our Sage lines related to the Salem Witches, but who wouldn't want to call the bastard son of Benedict Arnold's cousin?

But as usual, I digress. 

I realize that "okay" doesn't mean the same thing as "perfect."

(Ah! My work is never done.) 

New Jersey Monument mentioning Obadiah Bruen

Since I've been re-visiting each of my great grandparents, and seeing as the friendly-looking nineteenth-century rancher Samuel Selah Sage pictured above is my key to a royal "Gateway," (a man called Obadiah Bruen 1606-1681) I thought I should revisit the proofs I'd submitted to N.E.H.G.S.. As I've mentioned before, it's always a good idea to revisit your work, and if possible improve on it. As I looked through the old proofs that tie my great grandfather albeit to a Gateway Ancestor and to European Royalty I saw something that bothered me a bit.

                                               

  

                        

When I assembled the proofs almost a decade ago, I relied heavily on the Genealogical Record of the Descendants of David Sage by Charles and Elisha Sage. (Images above) It's like the "go-to" book for the Sage family and their ancestry. 

The trouble is, it's terribly unsourced. Don't get me wrong. It's a great book. However, I think old cousin Elisha Sage was more interested in lauding the fact that our ancestral forebearers hid Benedict Arnold's children from the patriots as they burned through the town or applauding some Coat of Arms that doesn't belong to anyone in the Sage family at all - and may or may not have been bequeathed to them by William the Conqueror. Yeah, it's so 19th-century genealogical parlor games edition stuff. 

Then there's the fact that there needs to be a source citation for something or anything to be had. Eeewww. In The Sage Genealogy, the references are few. 

Cheyenne State Leader, Cheyenne Wyoming, Sept 30, 1914, page 8

So I wondered: How could I be certain about which branch of the Sage family we fit into outside of The Sage Genealogy? How could I independently verify the names of Sam's brothers and sisters? I was concerned too about linking old Sam up in the picture above to his father Selah. As of yet, I haven't found a Last Will and Testament for Sam's father Selah. Beyond census records, and an erstwhile obituary I felt I needed more. 

That's kinda when I found it. That is my first  "independent source" to very the names of my great grandfather's brothers and sisters. And I found it in of all unexpected places - when they were being summoned in the newspaper to proceeding in the Wyoming Supreme Court. 

Apparently, they'd been sued over water rights.

Above: Sam's wife, my great grandmother,                              Mary (Ginder) Sage

What the gist is of the Cheyenne, Wyoming, lawsuit that names them over water rights I haven't yet discerned. In a way, this 1914 article's purport doesn't matter - insofar as it names five of the twelve siblings of Sam Sage as listed in the Sage Genealogy above. 

What better way to verify the name of family members than to have them publicly sued in a state Supreme Court?

Papillion Times, Papillion, Nebraska, February 26, 1926, page 8

Still, I looked further, and I still need more. Then, I found the second lawsuit, this time for land and mineral rights in Nebraska. This article from Papillion, Nebraska in 1926 goes so far as to name nine of the twelve children listed in The Sage Genealogy - and it specifically names who their father was:

Selah Sage. 

Turns out Sam was orphaned and cared for by an older brother.

Is it me or is it unusual that Selah Sage had been dead for fifty years at the time of this court proceeding? 

Is somebody trying to rip Grandpa's estate off?

I wonder...

Anyway, 

Winner, winner, chicken dinner. 

Okay, it's not a big deal. However, at least it's a better tie and additional proof that gets us closer to our already-known Gateway Ancestor. 

And it proves that old cousin Elisha Sage did his homework when he wrote his book.

In the meantime, I wanted to reshare this blurb about the Sages, General Washington, and those pesky kids of Benedict Arnold. I may revisit the subject of Arnold's bastard, John Arnold Sage at a later date.

It's always fun to have a great bastard in the tree. 

Don't forget - you come from some amazing folks.

Peace.

Footnote: Today I was contacted by the Sarpy County, Nebraska Probate Court. They believe they may have located the LW&T of Selah Sage and will reach back out to me just as soon as they are certain. As they say:  

The plot thickens.