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One evening early on in my research, our family was having a little slumber party in our living room where we would stay up late, watch a DVD and sleep together on the couch.  That night, I figured that I would take one last trip through the Carroll County, Arkansas website just to see if I could find anything on the children of Huston Breeding.  I had been through numerous “Breeding searches” in prior months but I figured I would try one last time to see if anything new had been added.  About thirty minutes later, I found a website for a cemetery located in Denver, Arkansas.  On this particular webpage, I found an individual named “T.H. Breeding” listed with a birth date of March 12, 1855 (the exact same birth date as my great-great-grandpa Huston Breeding).  In addition, there was a picture of the grave as well as a marking with the name T.H. Breeding and his wife Bell.  This was certainly the Joel Huston Breeding I was looking for and the notation on this webpage was slightly incorrect and needed to be J.H. Breeding.  This was such an important discovery as it accomplished several key things: 1) I now knew that Huston Breeding died on August 10, 1906 and 2) I also found out Bell’s death date as well (although I read it incorrectly at that time); 3) I also learned that Huston probably died in Carroll County, Arkansas and not somewhere in Oregon as I originally had been told.  Finally, I was excited to learn that he was buried in a real cemetery and not out in a backyard somewhere – this would mean that there would have to be a more formal story published somewhere.

With this newfound information, I then contacted the webmaster for the Carroll County website to offer up the T.H. name correction on their website as well as to ask for further help.  The webmaster pointed me in the direction of one of the researchers at the Carroll County Heritage Center in Berryville.  A few days later, another researcher who worked at the Heritage Center, sent me a note saying that she had researched the murder and had all sorts of news articles on the event.

Within a couple of weeks, the Heritage Center had mailed me a large package of information on Huston’s murder and other stories they had researched related to the Breedings.  It must’ve taken me one month to get through it all.   

Over the next several months, I had quite an active dialogue with the Heritage Center.  They would do their best to walk me through the various data that had been sent until they could get me “up to speed” on the stories.   As I soon discovered, it is one thing to read information from the local newspapers, but it’s totally another thing to understand how it all ties together into your family tree.   If I were to give one piece of advice to anyone starting on their family history, it would be to join a local genealogical society – either close to home or where their ancestor is located.  The professionals in these organizations are quite adept at getting you information that you probably won’t find at first on your computer.  In addition, when you get stuck in your research, they can often provide some very useful insights to get you moving again.

Ancestry.com: First Elation and then Agony

Thinking back to that day in April of 2008, when I first got started looking into my family history, I remember spending about an hour fruitlessly searching on the internet.  However, I soon ran into a website aptly named Ancestry.com.  These days we’ve all see their commercials where people are “slightly interested” in looking at their family tree and see a leaf and relatively soon, they have made a significant discovery about their family’s past.    I have to admit that when I currently see these commercials I tend to roll my eyes, but thinking back to my first time on Ancestry.com, the idea of rapidly discovering one’s ancestors is a terribly exciting process. 

After beginning a trial subscription to Ancestry.com, I began uncovering all sorts of Breeding family history.  For seven or eight straight days, I made numerous family history discoveries – a lot of it consisting of US Census data.  It wasn’t long before I had supposedly traced the Breeding’s back to the late 1600’s (as well as many other arms of the family that connected to the Breedings).  Also rather quickly, I was able to locate a Breeding family Bible that had been found in Tennessee and told the story of how many early ancestors of the Breeding family had served as Indian lookouts during the Revolutionary War.  Still, with all the new information, I found nothing on Huston Breeding’s murder.  I was able to locate him (listed as Joel Huston Breeding) and his family on the 1860, 1870, 1880 and 1900 US Census but nothing further than that.  I figured that if I could ever find anything out about the murder that would be the end of my curiosity and the project would be finished.

Over the next three or four months, however, I found very little new information and I grew terribly frustrated.  I had placed numerous requests on internet genealogy message boards in Oregon and just couldn’t get any response.  I figured that after Huston was shot (presumably in Oregon); his family must’ve buried him in the backyard (out of fear of the “mean man”) or something like that.  At that point, I was really feeling like this was the end of the project and I probably would move on to something else in my life.

How this Journey Began (Part 3)

A little later that year, my family visited Maysville, Arkansas where my great-grandpa Hugh Breeding was living.  He was close to 90 years old at the time.  My parents were still very insistent that I not ask him about the murder of his father.   Looking back, they probably just didn’t want to upset him.  However, on that day we were there in Maysville, my Grandpa Lyle also happened to be there.  At one point during the visit, my grandpa Lyle wandered over next to his dad and told me to come close and ask my questions.  It was then that Great-Grandpa Hugh pretty much told me the basics of the story that I had heard previously, except that he was able to describe in an animated fashion the details of what had happened when his father was murdered by this “mean drunk” Baker.  He was also able to relate his mother’s name (Bell Wilson) and that of his grandpa, Byram Breeding.  Still, it was the haunting story of his dad’s murder and the gun shooting motion that he made while telling the story that will stay embedded in my thoughts and memory from now on. 

And that was about it.  At the time, I had pretty much talked to “all” the relatives I knew of and there were no further “family history” stories for me and being twelve years old I tended to drop that interest and move onto other ones that would be important to a young teenager.

How this Journey Began (Part 2)

Looking back on that Saturday morning back in 2008, I could never really imagine what I was getting into and what I would ultimately get out of family history.  But to be perfectly honest, this quest theoretically didn’t really and truly begin in 2008 but instead the seeds of this journey were sowed all the way back in 1979. 

Back then, when I was twelve years old, I had received a Family Tree book for Christmas.  Naturally, I asked my parents for their help in filling in the new book but I soon came to realize how little they actually knew about the family’s history.   I then turned my focus to my grandparents.   Because of some “painful events,” my parents had told me not to ask my Grandpa Lyle Breeding about his family, however because he and I were always real close, I asked him anyway.  It was then that I found out the story of his grandpa, Huston Breeding, for the first time. 

As I remembered Grandpa Lyle telling me the story, his grandpa Huston Breeding, whom he never met, was working in Oregon at a local lumber mill.  When they came home one day, Huston was playing with a couple of little kids.  At that point, a mean drunk named Baker told Huston to put the kids down.  When he refused, this “mean man” took out a gun and shot him.  Baker then turned around and threatened everyone else in the room that if they said anything to anyone, he would shoot them too.  Further, Grandpa told me that the child that this argument was over would later shoot the shoot the man who shot Huston Breeding.  (As I would later find out some of the story was accurate – some wasn’t).

How this Journey Began (Part 1)

Saturday, April 19, 2008…..that is the red letter day.  As I remember that Saturday morning, I was working in my office at home and as I normally do every couple of hours, I took a brief respite from the monotony of my work to surf the internet.   

Most of the time, I will visit a few sports-related websites before immersing myself back into the task at hand.  Thinking back to that morning, I still have no idea what possessed me to do so, but I began searching to see if anything had ever been written about my Grandpa Lyle Breeding.  

My Grandpa had died over sixteen years earlier in April 1992 and even though I often had a hard time coming to grips with the notion that he was no longer with me, it’s not like there was anything to trigger me to spend an incredible amount of time learning about his life. 

When I could only find just minimal information on him, I then remembered a story he told to me years earlier about his grandpa Huston Breeding, and how he had been shot.  I then proceeded to look all over the internet but my searches could yield no content on the murder, either.