My Ancestors

January 1, 2008

Family stories my grandmother told held no interest for me until I became the recipient of a trunkload of antique photographs and an old secretary full of treasures the women of my family had been saving for four or five generations. Oh yes, I grew up knowing that certain pieces of furniture were old, Aunt Pearl had an old elephant collection, that our grandmother was tricked into selling the old treadle sewing machine. I remember each summer when we visited her, she would recount many more stories and show us the old photographs; I can still see her slender finger lovingly tapping with emphasis the photos her grandfather and great grandfather had taken, the ones the women had saved.

Since that time I have discovered my past through those photos, diaries, and scrapbooks from the 1800's belonging to the very real people of my family. They were pioneers from Luxembourg, Prussia, Scotland, Ireland, and England, many born in America too, with little money, but made of the stuff that kept them determined to create a life in the new world of the western United States. They were teachers, soldiers, preachers that rode the wilderness, miners, millers, carpenters, milliners, misplaced aristocrats, judges, lawyers, farmers, artists, and thankfully, photographers.

Several summers ago a man from the internet shared a book, Buckeye Schoolmaster, edited by J. Merton England, which details the Roberts and McCan families in Madison County, OH. The family writer, John Roberts, kept detailed, dated diaries, telling of his student days, his career as a pioneer teacher, and how his brother, William Henry Roberts, bought a daguerreotype photo studio in 1865 and moved to Missouri, later marrying a widow, Susan Jane Avery Eddins. She was the first white child born in Henry County, Missouri. Her father, Henry Avery, owned the first cabin to have glass windows, brought all the way from Tennessee. This family was documented in an old 1914 book titled The Avery Clan, A Fragmentary Genealogy, by John Avery. William Henry and Susan Jane moved to Durango, Colorado, after Susan's oldest daughter's husband, A. J. Faris, died in an mining accident. Mr,. Roberts trained a young man from Luxembourg, Francois Xavier Gonner, to use the equipment, and Frank married the photographer's daughter, Hattie Estelle Roberts. He became a very prolific Durango photographer. At 19 years old, Hattie was a teacher in the Longfellow School, having graduated from high school in Clinton, Missouri. Gonner information came from the book, Luxembourgers of the New World, by Nicholas Gonner, Frank's uncle.

Mothers' name was Avery Jane McKelvey. Her mother, Dorothea Gonner, was Hattie Estelle's daughter. Dorothea married a "promising young man from the valley," that is Marvel, and he, with an older brother, mined in Victor, from where most all the Cripple Creek gold came. His name was Alva McKelvey, born in Ouray, and his father was Allison McKelvey, a miner who camped all over Colorado, as evidenced by the various mining towns in which his children were born. Allison and his wife, Minnie Keltow, were both born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and married in Alamosa, Colorado, 1882. Minnie's parents, divorced, still came on to Rico and Ouray between 1880 and 1885. My entire Colorado family is buried in Durango and Marvel. And they all lived between 1830 and 1986.

Mother married a man from Pennsylvania, Wilmer Bailey. Dad is the last living person in our immediate family from the generation who lived through the depression, fought in World War II, and saw men land on the moon. He survived Pearl Harbor as an enlisted Army-Aircorpsman and navigated B-17 bombers out of Italy into Berlin. His mother was Maude Beulah Faust, who came from a very long line of Fausts from Pennsylvania.

These family members migrated from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, the Carolinas, and Missouri. Jarvis Greene fought in the last Indian skirmish of the War for Independence alongside Daniel Boone. Henry Avery fought in the War of 1812 beside General Jackson, and owned slaves before the War Between the States and his son freed them after. Peter Avery, his father, blazed trails in Tennessee and gave support in the War for Independence, but on the way to his burial, his body fell off the wagon and they had to bury him right there on the side of the road. Of course there are many more stories to tell. That will take a book.

The other side of the family, which belongs to my daughters, are people from Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico, and possibly Switzerland. They were scouts, soldiers, a doctor, and many farmers. William Ves Salars was a goat-herder as a teen, a mule train driver, and a blacksmith when he finally settled down to have a family in the wild places of New Mexico. His family was on their way from Oklahoma to California, lead by a scout named Joesire (or Josiah) Roberts, from Alma, New Mexico. Some of the Salars went on to Arizona, some settled in California. Legend has it, if one of them had kept his property, the Salars would now own Los Angeles.

Ves Salars stayed behind and settled in the Mogollon and Silver City region. His wife, Sarah Ellen Roberts, at about age 3, was in the last Indian raid in New Mexico, in Mogollon. Ves' son, William Edward, married a young woman, Dorothy Roe, from West Texas, who, alone, had to move to a higher, drier climate before she graduated from high school to avoid life-threatening asthma.

The Roe and Jackson families were farmers from the southeast of Texas, Williamson, Colorado, Burleson, and Austin counties. One man, Robert Stockton, was a doctor from Tennessee, who married Laura Virginia Dent in New Ulm,Texas. Her mother had married two brothers, Theodore, who possibly died in the Civil War, and James, who raised his younger brother's children. Her daughter, Gertrude Stockton, married a farmer named John Jackson, from Milam County. And their daughter, Lora Mae Jackson, married a farmer, Buck Roe, who moved the family to Anton, in West Texas, where the original farm land is still owned by the family. Buck farmed during the desperate Dust Bowl years. And their daughter, Dorothy Mae Roe, married William Edward Salars, who was a survivor of the Bataan Death March in World War II, and the well-respected captain of a university police force when I met and married his son, Ronald Neal Salars.

At this juncture, our daughters will go forward with more descendants of the many families listed here. So will my sister's children.

Cousins abound everywhere! You know who you are out there. You have helped me establish my lineage with your own hard work: copies of pages from books, your own personal family reports, and ideas and stories of your own. There are county genealogical and family websites which link us together in the magic world of the internet.

The LaPLata County Historical Society has preserved the actually quite short 135 years of Durango and I am pleased to thank publicly Robert McDaniel, the director of the Animas Museum, for his dedication to "my town."

And then there are the censuses, which prove our family members existed. A great amount of data in my pages come directly from census and family records. Some census takers might have interviewed persons in the household who might not have had correct information. Some women might have fudged on their ages, or failed to note one or two children were step-children and had different surnames. Some entire families missed the census as they were relocating when the census taker came around.

I could not have done this without the never failing devotion my husband, Gary T. Gibson, has to his and my genealogy. He has helped me create and refine a family tree of over 3,000 names. Gary created this website ten years ago and added (and will continue to help me add) all my families to this point. I welcome everybody to look at my family and contribute or correct as they can. Unless we knew these people personally, we cannot be certain our information is ever perfectly correct. I am the kind of genealogist who is flexible enough to correct data in light of new sources. And who does not need additional proof? Documented sources make our work credible, though some of it might not be entirely accurate.

We have finally taken the time (days) to add the other families I have been researching. Most of them have four or five generations of individuals of whom I can be certain. I'd like to write about their migrations and how they met up with each other. In time I'll add some of those old photographs.

Come along the journey with me...

Kathy,
DgoCelt@aol.com

Disclaimer: If you find an error, please email me. If you have questions on my sources, please email me. If you have information to share, please email me.