Findings in the Most Surprising of Places

After finishing all the biographical work, I really intended to assemble a copy of the book, the walking tour video and all the pictures and place in a DVD and mail it to all the Breeding relatives.  However, this body of work never really gets completed.  There’s always a relative who would like for you to look into a story for them.  Sometimes this occurs and unknowingly, it set off a chain reaction of other projects.

Early on, one relative set us off on excellent research project.   He had told the story of a lady who had run a hotel in Green Forest and had had been kidnapped, tortured and robbed of her money (or something along those lines).   He had said that his Grandma Jennie Breeding McKee had “obsessed” over this when he was a kid.   We told the story to another older relative to see if she had ever heard of it and amazingly she had heard of parts of the story.   When I then told my wife what she had said and how she had told the story, my wife said “that sounds like a movie I had recently seen called “The Lonely Hearts.”   

Sure enough, we went and performed some research and it turned out that Hollywood made a move called the “Lonely Hearts” starring John Travolta and Selma Hayek.   Still, we could never figure out why Jennie Breeding McKee took such an interest in the story.   That is, until we approached our key researcher in Carroll County on this.   She did a little digging and found out that the victim’s name was Myrtle Young and her older half-sister was Susie Satterfield Breeding, the wife of Carson Breeding.   Once we knew this connection, this became another high profile incident in our family’s history and we then set out to learn as much about this story as possible. 

Myrtle Young was a lonely hearts victim
that was later made into several movies

 

On another occasion, a third cousin of mine kept after me to uncover the story of the Breeding’s of Rhea County, Tennessee.  When I finally got around to researching it, I uncovered that much of the Breeding family research on the internet prior to 1807 was incorrect (and still is)!   When we looked into Margaret’s request, we learned that my Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Bryant Breeding moved from Rhea County, TN to Overton County, TN in 1807 and he was not the same Bryant Breeding in Tazewell, TN or the same Bryant Breeding in Claiborne, TN.   

Many people on Ancestry.com confuse all these Bryant’s (they were cousins) and once they were confused, you can never accurately track your family back from that point.  Once we identified our Bryant Breeding, we were able to discover that his father was James Breeding Sr. located in Wythe County, VA and not Spencer “New River” Breeding as we had previously thought.  We would have never learned that had this particular relative not stayed after me to help her out.

Visions of...Something...Dancing in My Head

Writing biographical portraits really requires that you dive deep into the character of an individual.  Often you see the world through their eyes.  One of the unexpected outcomes of doing all of these biographical portraits are the visits you get paid.  However, I’m not necessarily talking about the same types of visits that you make when you go someone’s house, discuss family stories and exchange pictures.  These are entirely different rendezvous.  

CBS airs Survivor about twice a year.  On one season, they had a contestant who often talked about his experiences with his ancestors while sitting on a cliff overlooking the ocean.  People thought that was a bit unusual and on that reality show, a lack of food, water and poor hygiene can probably lead most contestants to have some strange experiences.  Do I believe that ancestors can come to you in dreams or visions?

Well, several times when I was writing these biographies, I got so “into” the character that I was writing about so much, that I did have visions.  When I was writing the biography of Noble Cunningham, for example, his story was so personal that during several nights when I was sleeping, I would “feel his presence” and that really inspired me when I was creating his story.  In fact, of all the biographies I wrote, his was not only one of the most difficult to assemble, but it was also my favorite – and most personal. 

My great-grandpa and grandma:
Hugh Breeding and his wife, Maude. 

My great-grandpa Hugh Breeding and his wife Maude also came to me during dreams on several occasions.  Early on when I was creating Hugh Breeding’s biography, I had all these single point memories that didn’t quite fit into the overall story.  One rainy morning in April 2009 as I was sleeping on the couch, Hugh Breeding came to me in a dream and told me to organize his story with all these little conflicting points into something similar to the “Tale of Two Cities.”  Thus, we started his biography with some of the good things and some of the bad things as he was many different things to many different people.  But that wasn’t the end of the visits….in another dream, both Hugh and his son Lyle took me through an art gallery where there were numerous paintings of the Seminole Oil Field where Hugh worked as a young man. 

During several dreams, I’ve also had Hugh and Maude take me through their photo albums and they tell me stories about their lives.   I will admit that it’s kind of a strange feeling when your Great-Grandfather comes to you in a dream and tells you to keep the faith and be persistent in this research journey.  

I guess now I’ve finally learned to accept that it’s okay to tell the world that I have a relationship with somebody that’s been dead since 1982.  More than anything else, I just appreciate him for coming along and making frequent visits on this journey of a lifetime. 

The Greatest Generation - Biographies, Phase 2

Glenn Breeding (along with his
uncle Hugh Breeding) was one of
the most famous members
of the Breeding Family.

Later in the summer in 2009, my family traveled north to Oklahoma City and along the way, we stopped in nearby Midwest City to visit with a second cousin.  My relative was the son of Glenn Breeding and grandson of Carson and Susie Breeding.   Carson was Huston Breeding’s oldest child.   When we were driving there, I thought I would simply go over and introduce myself and trade some photos and ask some questions about his grandpa Carson.   However, earlier in the year, I had done some research on his father Glenn and found out that he was quite famous and much written about in the Oklahoma newspapers.   His story was one of inspiration as he made a lot of money in the transportation business, lost a lot of it when he had labor problems and his business went bankrupt and then made a bunch of money again when he helped develop Midwest City.  He would share that common theme with his uncles Hugh and Delson Breeding in that they were risk takers, were very generous with their time and money, helped a lot of people, and really never gave a lot of thought as to where their next dollar would come from.   They were born entrepreneurs.     So, it occurred to me in the course of driving to see my relative that I should write a biography of Glenn Breeding and label it “The most famous of the Breedings.”   Of course, my cousin was very accommodating and we visited for three hours that morning discussing his mother and father and their lives.

Once we posted that biography to our family website, we had several other family members inquire as to if we would be willing to write about their parents.  Within a couple of months, we had about four or five biographies written of my Grandpa Lyle Breeding’s cousins (or the grandchildren of Huston Breeding, if you will).  At that point, we started to consider trying to complete the set of Huston Breeding’s grandchildren.  After all, we had detailed biographies of each of his seven children already put together.  But this undertaking would be totally different as we were looking at 21 biographies -  of all the grandchildren!

Of course, this part of the project would really provide me a lot of insight into the Greatest Generation. 

"The Greatest Generation" is a term coined by journalist Tom Brokaw to describe the generation who grew up in the United States during the Great Depression, and then went on to fight in World War II.  It also included those whose productivity within the war's home front made a decisive material contribution to the war effort.

Although it would take me over two years to complete, I learned a great deal about my Grandpa Lyle and his cousins and how they contributed to this “Greatest Generation” in US history.  My Grandpa Lyle’s biography was over seventy pages in length and I really gained a lot of insight into his life and also why I am the way I am.   If you remember, this was major reason I got involved in this project – simply to learn about his life.  Even more importantly, by uncovering the stories about the grandchildren of Huston Breeding and their lives, many relatives inadvertently told me memories not just about their parents but also their grandparents.  In the end, we had to wind up re-writing the seven biographies of Huston Breeding’s children as well because we possessed so much more material to work from once all the interviews were completed.

Walking in Their Footsteps

After about a year of working on my family history, I started wondering how other people worked on their histories.  One morning I was watching television and one of the on-air personalities on CNBC, Bill Griffeth, was discussing a book about his family history that he had written.  In his book, he detailed many of the stories of his family history but he also chronicled his own process of discovery (via a walking tour) to uncover and re-trace the stories of the past.  It got me to thinking…why not take a walk in my ancestor’s footsteps?

As I was getting started at the same time with my genealogy visits, I also began the process of putting together a plan to “walk through” parts of Green Forest, Arkansas and Livingston, Tennessee where my Great-Great-Grandfather Huston Breeding had spent his life.  It was in that summer of 2009 that our family contacted local historians in Carroll County, Arkansas and Overton County, Tennessee to take some time out of their schedules to show us around. 

On a Saturday morning in June, the local historian in Carroll County, Arkansas took my family out in her truck and showed us all the important sights around Green Forest, Arkansas.   We got to see some places where Huston Breeding lived, we got to see where he was shot and buried, and we got to see where Jennie Breeding McKee’s (my g-grandpa's younger sister) lived and where Eva Breeding (my g-grandpa's youngest sister)and Otis Hurt were married (among the many other things we saw).   It was quite the “walking tour” and we took many photographs and shot lots of video related to our family history.

A week later, when we traveled out to Tennessee, the local historian introduced us to a couple of other Breeding relatives who had quite a few Breeding family photos as well as three letters that my Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Byram Breeding had written to his second wife Ann in the 1870’s.  It was amazing those letters still exist today!  After our lunch meeting, we drove out to the local cemeteries where our family members were buried and then they took us over to “Pashie’s Place” where my Great-Great-Great-Grandma Patience Breeding lived (even after she and Byram had divorced).  After the vacation was finished, we edited down the video and had a nice two hour retrospective of the walking tour that nicely captured many of the places our ancestors had lived and called home during the 1800’s and 1900’s.