They Were All Just People
They Were All Just People by Quentin Robinson, County Historian
Whatever you do, don’t start researching your family history unless you want to find out that your ancestors were just ordinary humans, with all the ordinary quirks, characteristics, and problems we have today. It’s pretty easy to think of “the good old days” as something better than today. Lots of people fall into that trap, longing for the days “before everything went to hell.” You see it all the time on Facebook, people posting things about how wonderful life was when they were kids. How we never had to lock our doors, played outside after dark without supervision, went barefoot through the cow paddies all summer long, everyone watched Red Skelton and Lawrence Welk, and we laid around in the grass watching the summer clouds drift past. I know you’ve seen those things a thousand times. We remember things were “better” in the old days, so if they were better in our own “old days” they must have been perfectly terrific when our great grandparents were kids.
We also have a tendency to put our ancestors on pedestals….thinking of them as somehow heroic and without fault. I’ve done it myself, having had a great relationship with my grandparents it is easy to start thinking all the grandparents that came before them must have been equally warm, loving, and successful people just like the ones I remember, but the truth is not all of them were. Not all of them were heroic, certainly some were, but some were just mean, bad apples without many positive personality traits. Just look at the odds…there were a lot of them, ancestors I mean. You double the number for each generation. Two parents, four grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents, and before you know it you are no longer talking about a family tree, but a family forest. If you go back far enough you eventually come to a number that is larger than what the known population of the whole world was at that given point in time…What? How is that possible? What someone explained to me was that through time lots of siblings and cousins married one another, and those couples had shared ancestors so you lose numbers in those cases.
But, getting back to how things were better in “the old days”. Let me tell you something. Life 50 years ago, or 150 years ago wasn’t really all that different from today. People had the same hopes, dreams, fears and faults we have today. Women got pregnant before they got married, married couples got divorces, people were alcoholics, or suffered from mental illness, some of them couldn’t read or write and held menial jobs all their lives and people went to jail. Some declared bankruptcy, or lost their farms to foreclosure. Sometimes people killed one another. An average family history is full of tragedy. The infant mortality rate was sky high compared to today, few families escaped the loss of at least one infant, and if they survived infancy they still had to make it through the rest of their childhood. Things that are almost unheard of today…measles, mumps, dysentery, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, malaria, cholera, polio, diphtheria and smallpox took many young lives. Something as simple as ear infection or an infected splinter could kill you.
People don’t expect to find out that great grandma’s first baby was born 4 months after she was married, or that grandpa had a half-brother he never knew about…or if he did he never told you that he knew. We feel shocked and disappointed when we find out great-great grandpa died in prison. We are aghast to find out great grandpa’s cousin murdered his wife and tried to commit suicide and that he spent the last years of his life in and out of mental hospitals or living on the street.
Some family historians take all these surprises with a grain of salt because they understand it’s all a part of the big river of life. Sometimes they don’t really want to discover what they did. Recently I was working on the family of my great grandfather David Cooper. I had a good list of his siblings and was gathering additional information about those siblings to record on my family tree. I had started out with a listing of family information someone had made around 1900. For most of David’s siblings there was information about the spouses, and children, including dates of birth and death and where they lived, etc. When I came to his brother Joseph Cooper the old family papers contained very little information about Joseph or about his family. I wondered why all the other families of siblings had been so well documented, but not that one.
As I dug through census records, city directories, court records, cemetery records, etc. it didn’t take me long to understand why Joseph was practically overlooked in the old family records…he was, without a doubt the black sheep of that family. He worked at odd jobs when he worked at all, failed to support his family, then abandoned them, he was an abusive drunk to his family and was arrested by local police more than once for public drunkenness. His children had to go to work as young teens to help support their mother. His wife Mary finally filed for divorce…but then withdrew the complaint when it became clear that he was dying of stomach cancer. At Ancestry.com I noticed that a woman who is a descendant of one of Joseph’s daughters had a tree at Ancestry but had none of the Cooper family information on her tree beyond Joseph so I offered to help her since my information went two generations farther back in time than she knew. She was thrilled when I provided the Cooper family information, we exchanged a few emails as I provided her information, but after I provided Joseph’s own checkered history she suddenly lost interest and stopped responding to any of the items I sent. Some folks just don’t want to know anything negative about their ancestors.
My late Uncle Bob Shearer is another example of someone who felt personally ashamed by what happened to his great grandfather William Shearer (my great-great grandfather). He was so distressed by what he had discovered that he took all paperwork pertaining to that part of William Shearers life, piled it in the alley behind his house in Remington and set fire to it. That information was revealed to my Uncle Max who had witnessed the mini bonfire and had been sworn to secrecy by his older brother. (So much for family secret keeping) Of course there had been rumors in the family for Uncle Bob’s entire life…it was apparently not something that was spoken of very often but my mother knew William Shearer had died under some sort of mysterious circumstances. In a way Uncle Bob was trying to close the door long after the horse had left the barn.
Well, heck, I’m a curious person, so I started digging around on my own. As it turned out it wasn’t that difficult to figure out what happened to my great-great grandfather…he died in the Indiana Penitentiary at Jeffersonville, Indiana when the prison was hit by a cholera epidemic during the late summer of 1850. He had been convicted in the early part of 1850. When my uncle discovered that I knew the “secret” he made a special trip to my home where he practically begged me to forget what I knew and not talk about it to any other family members. Uncle Bob is gone now and while he lived I didn’t make use of what I had learned. But it still seems like “a heck of a story”.
I would actually like to know a lot more about that whole story than I have been able to learn. In 1850 it was a big story that got splashed around in a lot of newspapers all over Indiana and even several out of state papers covered the story, one story even gave an account of his deathbed scene, written by a minister who had visited William Shearer and other prisoners at the Jeffersonville facility.
The conviction was in the Federal District Court in Indianapolis, the crime (robbery of the mail) allegedly occurred in Winchester where William and his family lived. Someone broke into the post office and stole some mail. Empty envelopes were later found. It was determined that one of the envelopes had contained a $3.00 bank note. I went so far as to order copies of the Federal Court docket books covering that case but they gave no information about the crime at all. No information on who testified, or what they said. Newspaper articles written shortly after his arrest, during his trial, and after his death claimed he was convicted on weak circumstantial evidence, only that the morning after the crime was discovered William had bought some medicine at the local drug store and had paid for it with a $3.00 bank note. Now, here is the strange thing. Based on the probate files after his death he was solvent, would not have needed to steal money. He had been making his living as a teacher, surveyor, and attorney. He had been elected to the position of County Surveyor. But the story gets stranger. After he was initially arrested the case was dropped by the federal prosecutor prior to the trial. About a year later politics changed and a new federal prosecutor refiled the original charge against William and tried the case. One has to wonder why the first prosecutor dropped charges….and why the second prosecutor decided to pursue the case anew? On his deathbed in the prison William met with a minister and even knowing his death to be eminent he maintained he was innocent of the charge. His death due to cholera was one of about a score that died in the prison during that same time period.
A news story of his death reported that a petition was then in circulation throughout eastern Indiana, and had up to that time collected more than 2000 names requesting he be pardoned. He died before that could be submitted. I have never been able to come to a solid conclusion as to his guilt or innocence because so much information seems to be missing from the story. Certainly it appears there was not much evidence against him, at least that which I’ve been able to dig up besides the fact he used a bank note of the same denomination as one reported stolen.
I have shared this story with other descendants of William and will put much of this on my family tree at Ancestry. It’s one of those unexpected tragic stories that are part of life and such tragedies are not unique to my family. I’m of the opinion that leaving this information out of the story of that family short changes those who come after me. These are the things that show we are all human and all a part of a larger story.
