The Last Aha...: CONCERNING FRANK...

(Above) Four Generations:

Frank Record standing with various Record family members

Please forgive my very unedited prose...

There are those of you who will say that I should just let it go, that indeed, enough is enough. And yes, maybe you are right. However, after searching through old newspapers to see what I could find out about my great-grandmother in Regarding Gertrude, well, I figured I'd better get busy and see just what extra might be out there about my great-grandfather. I wondered if there weren't aspects of my great-grandfather's life and times yet to be discovered or at least remembered and shared. So I figure I will call this silly post Concerning Frank. Wherever you are Grandpa Frank, I hope it will do you justice.

The first thing I gotta say "to Frank" though is, "Dude, did you leave any pictures of your young self behind? Did you leave us any Instagram? Facebook? Any "Frank Record" YouTube videos?"

Dang it.

It's way difficult to find a good picture of the young Frank.

Yes, there are all the professional photos of "Frank and Gertrude" from the forties and fifties, but by then he's nearly at the end of his life. And yes there's the family picture from 1897 with Frank in "dead center" but not much else. (You know the one. He's the goofy-looking small for his size fifteen-year-old kid wedged between the bookends of his big sister Aunt Etta and his mother Hester.)

Yes, from what I can tell, there are very few photos of Frank Record as a young adult man, of say at about twenty-five years or so-ish of age. I managed to cobble together from some "crops and poor editing" a glimpse of him out of the 1906 family reunion picture. It's a crappy shot, but it does give you an idea of his "younger" features, and yes, some of the disabilities he must have battled. (If any of you out there have a picture of the twenty-year-old Frank, please send it on over.)

However, I'm getting way ahead of myself here. Let me explain...

In going through the old records, census, vital, newspaper, or otherwise, the first thing about Frank Record to discern is just exactly which Frank Record are we talking about.

Say what???

Sometimes that can be a little confusing. You see in the somewhat immediate family of his parents John and Hester Record alone there are three men called "Frank Record." You have "Big Frank," "Little Frank," and "Frank, Jr."

Are you confused yet? I know I was.

Above: Frank Record - image cropped and colorized from the 1906 family reunion photograph below.

I can tell you though that "our Frank in question" was (for somewhat obvious reasons), the man called "Little Frank." (I'm not even going to speculate on the reasons why there were two brothers called Frank in the same family let alone a nephew too....) Thinking about Little Frank, and his disabilities made me recall a story that was told to me about him many years later. It was a story about how it was that Little Frank had become disabled. I've always wondered about the story and if there was any truth to it.

The story was told to me by our cousin Barbara Andruss. Her mother Aunt Grace Record was his sister - and yes, in case you were wondering, Grace was also the little half-sister of "Big Frank," and a "half aunt" to Big Frank's son "Frank, Jr."

(See, I told you it would make your head hurt.)

Cousin Barbara told me this story in the early 2000s. By then, the Frank Record who was my great-grandfather had been dead for many years, and truly Cousin Barbara (outside of Uncle Harley) was the last of the children of that generation who might have known anything very firsthand about Frank. At the time (and surely also now) Cousin Barbara was the penultimate Record Family Historian. Barbara knew everything. Even my own Grandmother Katheryn Record (who pretty much knew absolutely everything about the family too) would sometimes say,

"Go ask Barbara..."

(Which I have explained better here:)

https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2017/03/that-which-we-inherit

Anyway, I digress...

This all came about somewhat randomly when Barbara asked me:

"Is it true that you're great grandfather's head was crushed when a wagon he was riding on crashed and a barrel rolled onto his head?"

(How the Hell am I supposed to know that? You're "Barbara," right??)

My reply to Cousin Barbara that day was more or less one of, WTF? as I had never heard the story before. As I had no point of reference, I just listened to Cousin Barbara as the story had been related to her - presumably from her mother Grace Record. I did know that my great-grandfather had some physical disabilities. I knew that he had a 'bad eye' that he sometimes covered with opaque glasses over one side. I suppose you could say that there was a certain, "miss-shappedness" to his face too, but as a little kid, I didn't think much about it. You see, the Frank Record who was my great-grandfather was kind and unassuming. He was great fun and could laugh at himself. He also had an uncanny ability to fix and rebuild clocks, which to the little kid I was at the time, seemed like pure and utter magic. He was always well dressed - I never saw him without a proper necktie.

Shortly before he passed away, he bequeathed to me a small pen knife that I still cherish to this day.

What he looked like sure didn't matter one iota.

My great-grandfather and I circa 1960

Still, Cousin Barbara's story stayed with me over the years. So recently, as I perused the old newspapers I wondered if anything might have come to print in those days about any horse or wagon or barrel accidents that might connect the events in Barbara's story to my great-grandfather. And while I can't be certain, I did find a tale about a wagon accident involving my great-grandfather that may or may not be the source of the story.

I will leave it for you to judge.

(That this is the correct Frank Record culled out of our multiple possibilities of Franks is proven by the fact that the other two Frank Records in question had already moved to Texas by the year 1900 when this accident (and its account) took place. So unless there was a 'fourth Frank Record' living in Humboldt, Kansas at the time, well, the account sure looks like it fits the bill for Grandpa - and matches up somewhat with Cousin Barbara's account a half-century or so more later.)

(1900)

Okay, well that's interesting enough and all, but surely there was way more to Frank Record than just what the source of his disabilities might have been. I mean he was awesome - so who really cares?

I wondered instead what instead were his hopes and aspirations?

What I found out was that my great-grandfather appears to have aspired to some form of Civil Service work, and, even on occasion, some form of an elected public office. Like his wife Gertrude, Frank looks to have also been a young person with dreams of something more, and maybe something better, or maybe even something greater.

Above: Indications of Frank Record's life in the community.

That's all well and good, but what about the other parts of Frank's life???

I've heard through the years about how he (and presumably Gertie) had invested all their money into an oil well in hopes of "making it rich." I always heard that Frank and his co-investors had drilled a "dry hole" and that Frank had lost all their savings. Dang, what a tough break!

I could not however find any account of this in the old papers - though I have no reason to believe it isn't true or that it didn't happen that way. However, I did find this - two articles that tell me how Frank stood up for what he believed in and for what he had coming to him - and also a brief mention about what perhaps he and Gertie had to do to make ends meet:

(1911)

Lastly, I found two accounts that might have changed the course of all of our lives. Things might have gone very differently for all of us if Frank and Gertrude had not survived this:

(1906)

Or this: - when a robber or possible psychopath broke into Frank and Gertie's home in (1911) Petrolia, KS

It feels like there is still a lot more to tell Concerning Frank, but let's face it - family history can (after a while) tend to put people to sleep so I will let it go. I did find that Frank had an operation for appendicitis in 1909 - this is interesting to me as it would be an appendicitis (or lack of an operation to remove one) that would take the life of his young daughter twenty or so years later. It's also a medical issue that caught up to my own father when he was a little boy.

(Don't know about you but I'm sort of seeing a pattern here.)