This Ain't a One Man Show...

This genealogy research would have never really gotten off the ground if it weren’t for my wife and daughter.  When I first got started, I had numerous conversations over the dinner table as to all the new findings as well as using them both as a sounding board for new ideas that I was considering.  Daughter even contributed artwork to the project drawing pictures of her Aunt Lou and her Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Huston Breeding.

As many relatives have asked my wife during family visits, there was an occasion (early on) where she did grow a little tired of me spending so many hours working on the project.  This occurred in August of 2008 as Daughter was just beginning to attend pre-school.  On this one particular morning, my wife had asked me to take out the garbage, do the dishes and burn all the sensitive documents that had been piling up in the fireplace.  As she tells the story, I asked her to do it as I was busy with something else and she exclaimed “enough with the family history and the dead people.  You need to start focusing on the people that are alive!”  Of course, hearing this didn’t make me too happy and I got right to work on my household chores, but later on she relented a little bit as she saw how much this project meant to me.  

This was the first version
of our family history book

Fast-forward to a little more than a year later and we were printing off some copies of the book as it stood at that time (about 250 pages).  We were at a Sam’s Club in Houston and as the first books came off the printer, my wife looked at me and hugged me and told me how proud she was of me.  Strangely by contrast, I had the exact opposite feeling as I wondered if all this work was truly worth it and whether I should have spent my time doing something else.  She assured me that this was well worth all the time we had put in as it has afforded my daughter and me to have this incredible sense of family.

Besides being there for me throughout the course of the project, they have both done their share of heavy lifting.  On many of the family visits, Daughter has been right there to listen to the stories, look at the pictures…all the while, with very good behavior.  My wife has really enhanced her scanning skills and knows just as much about the Breeding family as I do. She’ll see the pictures being shared with us and know exactly who the person is.  She handles all of our thank you notes after our family visits, often making the greeting cards she sends out by hand.  The amount of thought she puts into that process is incredible.

As I said, this ain't a one man show...

  

Strike The Museum...on to the Next Best Option

In one of my last blog entries, I talked about creating a museum that would honor Hugh Breeding and his trucking company by restoring his house in Maysville, Arkansas….well, there’s no way that my wife would allow me to purchase the house in Maysville, Arkansas and attempt to create a museum.   No argument on my part…she just will not let that happen due to the sizable monetary investment that would require. 

So with that said, I was still thinking of ways to honor the memory of the grand old trucking company.  Recently, I was watching a show from NBC called “Who Do You Think You Are?“ which comes on regularly on Friday nights during the spring time.   It represents a good family time for all of us to sit together and watch TV without having to worry too much about inappropriate content.  

Last Christmas, I also purchased the British version of the same show.   On one of the British episodes, a celebrity from the show Top Gear named Jeremy Clarkson looked into his past and was trying to figure out about a famous businessman in his family.   His family had produced the Kilner jars which are a lot like our Mason jars here in the United States.   The company business eventually faded and today it is solely a memory.   During the show, his process of discovery was incredible and even though he has a British distaste for all things American, his episode is really entertaining and worth watching.   This episode really cemented my inspiration in trying to research as much information and memories on the Hugh Breeding trucking firm.  

 

To be fair, in the past, I’ve had other relatives previously inquire as to whether I would research the company.  In March 2009, a cousin of mine and I were visiting about family research and he actually asked me if we would ever create a study on the Hugh Breeding trucking company.   So early on, we set out to gather all the known research that we could find in the hopes that one day we’d have enough information to write a 10-15 page report.   Reflecting back, it’s unbelievable that our body of research in this area has far exceeded those expectations – today our chapter on the Company is over 150 pages in length. 

Of course, one of the most exciting aspects of researching the company is extending my network of contacts outside the Breeding family.  That is the quite challenging bit in acquiring the necessary interviews, photos, and artifacts on the trucking company.  Currently, we are reaching out to numerous families who had parents and other relatives that used to work at the Hugh Breeding trucking firms.   I have had numerous phone conversations and have learned an incredible amount about the company and the trucking industry.  Of course, it is very difficult in finding new contacts and I’ll be forced to think creatively in order to extend the reach of our project.  

In the future, we will be creating a Facebook Fan Page just on the Hugh Breeding Company so that other families can locate us on the internet and contribute their memories.  We are always looking for little memorabilia items like playing cards, ash trays, newsletters and company photos (even of the office Christmas parties).   We have even created some custom-made promotional items such as coffee mugs, mouse pads, etc.    Just as the family research turned out, I’m fairly certain that the trucking research will take some turns that will be totally unexpected.  Nonetheless, it is very exciting to work on this current phase of the genealogy project. 

Reader Memories of Hugh Breeding

Many times when writing the blog entries, it is very easy to fall into the trap of saying “no one is ever going to read this.”  However, I can honestly say in creating and maintaining a blog that if you even make one contact or if you hear one story that you didn’t know previously, then writing the blog is definitely worth all the time you put into it.  That was how felt when I received this incredible note from a reader in Maysville, Arkansas – the home town of my great-grandpa, Hugh Breeding.  Hugh Breeding lived in Maysville from 1944 until his death in 1982. 

So without further ado, here are some excerpts from a reader in Maysville.  Thanks so much JN for sharing these wonderful memories of Hugh Breeding.

  

Hugh Breeding with his sister-in-law,
Susie celebrating her 90th birthday. 
Hugh's dog Sugar went with him everywhere.

"Sleuthing is terribly addicting.... caught my attention for it is certainly true with me also.  I live in Maysville, AR.; my family has been here since the Civil War.  I've always attended Maysville Baptist Church where Mr. and Mrs. Breeding attended; I can remember them when I was a teenager in the '50's and 60's.  I actually read material from your website and used some of the information in a devotional at Sunday school concerning 'don't wish you had it as easy as your neighbor, you don't know what he has faced'.  It gave the older members of the congregation a chance to tell a story or two about Mr. Breeding, within five minutes I'd heard these anecdotes, thought you might enjoy hearing a brief version of them.

A lady that ran a restaurant in Maysville said Mr. Breeding came in many mornings to eat.  One morning he ordered two breakfasts.  She prepared them and brought them out, each on a plate.  He said, 'Oh, this second one is for my doggie, you didn't need to put it on a plate.'

Another man said, 'Do you know the story of his dog and the cemetery?  He wanted to have his dog buried in the cemetery but the association said they couldn’t allow it.  Since he owned the land right against the cemetery he buried his dog right up against the fence at a certain location he chose.  A short time later the cemetery needed more space so he donated land to the cemetery and naturally the land he donated was where his little doggie was buried.  So his dog is buried somewhere in the Maysville Cemetery.

Hugh Breeding with his dog Sugar. 
Whether eating at home or out at restaurants,
Hugh would always save the last piece
of chicken for his dog.

An older deacon said he never joined the church until he was older, maybe even after his wife Maude had died.  But the day he decided to join it was very cold and the Pastor said it was okay to wait until it warmed up before he was baptized.  He insisted that wasn't necessary that today was the day and they went right to the creek.  It was very cold.  The creek would have been the little stream that is west of his front gate about a quarter mile.  

Even today the pews and pulpit that are in the Maysville Baptist Church are ones that Mr. Breeding secured from some church in Tulsa and brought to our church.  They are much more elaborate than a country church could ever afford without his help.  He also had an organ and new piano placed in the church probably about 1963.  A lady that still plays music for our church said she was 13 years old when Mr. Breeding took her and another young girl and the pastor to Joplin, MO to look at and buy a new piano.  She remembers it vividly because he took them to a nice restaurant and she said she had trouble reading the menu and deciding what to order.  She had eaten in many hamburger places but it was her first time in a restaurant with cloth napkins and big menus.” 

Birth of an idea: The Hugh Breeding Museum

In January 2011, I received some inspiration for the next part of the project I was meant to work on. I was at my Aunt’s house in Florida and we were watching television when she asked me the question: “What would you do for a living if you had unlimited resources and weren’t concerned about money?” 

My response was that if I had more money than I knew what to do with, I would purchase the Hugh Breeding house in Maysville, Arkansas (the one by the road) and restore it to the point to what it looked like when Grandma Maude was running the house.   Of course, I would need some help from a few people in the family in terms of the design and restoration.   The house could then be a stopping off place for Breeding relatives to visit and stay overnight on their way around (and through) the Ozarks or if they wanted to go by and visit the graves at the Maysville Cemetery.  

Part of my dream role in my lifetime would be taking Hugh Breeding's house in Maysville, Arkansas and restoring half  of it to how Grandma Maude had it and taking the other half and creating a museum to honor Grandpa Hugh Breeding's trucking company.

However, I would add in a bit of a twist to the design.   I would want to turn half of the house into a museum celebrating the Hugh Breeding trucking firms with all sorts of photos and memorabilia from the company.   It would be great to even find one of the old trucks and have it restored so that visitors could climb inside and see what it feels like to get behind the wheel of a big rig.   I just think it would be great to create a museum that would honor our family as well as the business enterprise that employed so many relatives and other men and women in Oklahoma and the Southwest.  To this day, the Breeding name still survives and is synonymous with the trucking industry.  That’s what makes the story compelling.   Well, that is my dream…