February 3, 2011, 12:18 AM | #51 |
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Hard Case,
Dropsy is an accumulation of fluids in the abdominal cavity usually from right sided heart failure, cirrhosis of the liver, or cancer. Also edema of the legs can be part of the above syndromes. Dropsy is an old term to mean an abnormal accumulation of fluids in a body cavity or the tissues.
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February 21, 2011, 09:48 PM | #52 | |
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I've been working on letters and photos from the other side of the family (gotta take 'em as they come), so I've had a bit of a dry spell of anything notable for you guys. But I ran across this one over the weekend while I was up at the cabin - it was mixed in with a foot-high stack of Harper's Bazars, some mining journals and an 1879 issue of Scientific American.
Anyway, the letter was written by William Cooper to his brother, my great, great, great grandfather, Charles "Chris" Cooper. At the time, William was in the middle of his crossing from Missouri to what is now just north of the California state line in Oregon. He had paused in Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory to rest his ox team and his cattle. Quote:
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March 14, 2011, 12:08 PM | #53 |
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Here's a fine looking feller! It's one of my great uncles, probably around 1910 or so. I don't imagine that he bagged that bird with a Winchester 1892 takedown rifle, but you never know...there were a lot of crack shots back in the day!
Sad to say, that rifle didn't make it down the family tree, at least not to any of the family that I know.
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March 14, 2011, 12:54 PM | #54 |
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Wow what an amazing piece of family history you have there, thanks for sharing them I loved reading through them all.
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March 15, 2011, 09:54 AM | #55 |
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A while back, somebody asked if I had any letters about what mining was actually like back in the day. So far, I don't, but I did run across this neat old picture of my great grandmother getting ready to do a little prospecting somewhere between Idaho City and Centerville, Idaho. This was probably sometime between 1900 and 1910.
If nothing else, she was a really good sport There is one of those family stories that's been passed down over the years about one of my great great grandfather's brothers (I don't recall which one off hand). As it's told, in the late 1800s, he had a mine near Idaho City that had pretty much played out, but with a lot of hard work, it would produce a pittance of gold. He'd go in and salt it a bit, then offer it for sale down in Boise. When somebody would come up to take a look, he'd offer to sell it "on terms", that is, to finance it himself. The, um, victim would take a sample of the ore that he'd "mined" into the assay office, find out that it was a pretty fair deal, make the down payment and set to mining. Of course, he could never get enough out to make the payments, so the brother would be forced to take back the mine. Then, after a bit of a cooling off time, he'd do the whole thing again. Now, to my skeptical mind, it's probably an apocryphal tale, but, still, who wouldn't like the idea of having such a scoundrel in the family line?
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March 16, 2011, 12:11 PM | #56 | ||
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I found a clipping from the Idaho Statesman from almost 110 years ago. It's about my great, great, great uncle, Moses Kempner. He married my great, great grandfather's sister, Annie.
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Moses was born in Krakow, Austria (Poland effectively did not exist between 1795 and 1918) in 1838 and came to Idaho in the early 1860s where he owned a store (the tax records say that he was a "dealer in liquor and tobacco") and ran freight in what is now the ghost town of Banner, north of Idaho City. After the business with his trial and after the mail route, he was also caught up in a huge federal fraud trial that involved Idaho's governor, Frank Steunenberg (who was later assassinated), one of Idaho's senators, William Borah (who prosecuted the assassin, defended by Clarence Darrow) and several other prominent Boise businessmen. They were all involved with the Barber Lumber Company, the predecessor to today's Boise Cascade Company, and were accused of conspiring to file illegal timber claims in the forests above Idaho City. Moses provided pack services and lodging to many of them, so apparently his testimony was somewhat crucial. On appeal, all were absolved of wrongdoing.
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March 17, 2011, 09:31 AM | #57 |
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Back in 1862, George Grimes discovered gold in his namesake Grimes Creek not too far north from where I live in Idaho. It was pretty big news and started yet another gold rush. For a while, the usual bunch of guys (including the Cooper boys, my ancestors) did the mining the old fashioned way, with pans, sluice boxes, rockers and cradles. But in the 1870s and 1880s, the work turned very industrial. Companies were formed and steam powered dredges were built in the various rivers in the Boise Basin to start pulling gold out in a major way.
By the end of the gold rush in the early 1900s, more gold came out of the 300 square mile area than had come from the Alaska gold rush. Not bad, I think. Here's a typical gold dredge with its crew. The third man from the left is my great great grandfather, Frank Cooper. Here's a link to a very, very large version of the same image. As usual, there's a story that goes with the picture. My grandfather said that they had gotten into some fairly rough material and the dredge was bogging down, so the engineman tied down the pressure relief valve on the boiler to generate more steam and get more power to the engine. Of course, what ended up happening was that the boiler exploded, shooting the poor guy out one of the windows and at least a hundred feet out into the river. Nobody was killed (!) and they rebuilt the dredge. I don't know if they fired the engineman, though. The other story is that about 35 years ago, McDonald's opened a new restaurant in Boise, only the second one in the city. It was a pretty big thing (yes, we were a little provincial). So, the whole family went down for a burger. We walked in and my grandmother stopped short and said, "Well, there's Grandpa Cooper!" Now, that was an odd thing for her to say because he'd been dead for well over 30 years. But instead of losing her mind, in fact that the very picture that I posted above was hanging on the wall at McDonald's. Turns out that there's a copy at the Idaho Historical Society and the restaurant owner had picked it and a bunch of other mining pictures out as sort of a theme for the place.
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March 17, 2011, 10:32 AM | #58 |
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Really cool - thanks for sharing.
My mom's mother came to Texas in 1894 by covered wagon from Mississippi. I remember the stories she told.
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March 17, 2011, 01:38 PM | #59 | |
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Quote:
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March 17, 2011, 01:52 PM | #60 |
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Hardcase: My dads mother was only a year younger and was a native Texan. She would tell stories of towns in Texas and how they grew. How times changed and why they changed.
The one thing that stick in my mind is a day I was about 19 or so, my mothers mother told me she had seen all she ever wanted to see. Two world wars, the great depression, automobiles, radio, TV, man on the moon, a president killed and many other events. I marveled at all the 1st she had seen.
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March 17, 2011, 08:19 PM | #61 |
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I hate to say this but that was only one generation of hundreds of generations that go back for thousands and thousands of years.
Oh if the previous generations could only speak then whatever they may have to say just might exceed our wildest imagination, and they go all of the way back to the beginning. It's an unbroken chain... Last edited by arcticap; March 17, 2011 at 08:29 PM. |
March 18, 2011, 09:54 AM | #62 | |
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Quote:
The hardest thing, I find, is actually authenticating the stories that I've heard. Some stuff is easy, most is hard. I've been told about one branch of the family that emigrated from Germany to Russia, then back to Germany, then to North Dakota. That part was easy to see from birth records in census data, but the real jigger was that they supposedly walked all these distances - it seems reasonable, given the time period, but there's no way of really knowing. Or, even crazier, that if you go back far enough, supposedly the McNeils are descended from a band of either tyrannical pirates or proud sovereigns of their own island (it depends on your point of view, I guess.) But to verify? As much as I'd like to travel to Germany, Russia, Scotland and the Outer Hebrides, it's not going to happen anytime soon. But that's OK - I guess that all stories have, at the very least, a germ of truth to them. That'll do me for now!
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March 24, 2011, 01:10 PM | #63 | ||
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In my family tree, there are many Christopher Coopers, so keeping them straight is a challenge sometimes. But there is one Christopher who sticks out because of the manner of his death - he was shot in a saloon over, apparently, a girl. Yesterday, I found a letter from his father, also a Christopher Cooper (this one being my great-great-great grandfather Charles Christopher "Chris" Cooper) to his brother Edward who was working in the mines east of San Diego, CA.
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March 29, 2011, 10:57 AM | #64 | ||
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Here's a letter from 1882, written by my great-great-great grandfather's sister Nettie to his other sister Annie. Nettie was living with her parents (my great-great-great-great grandparents) and Annie lived with her husband in St Louis. This is pretty much just a bit of chit chat between sisters, but I kind of chuckled over Nettie's admonition to Annie to take care of her dental problems.
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March 29, 2011, 11:39 AM | #65 |
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Fascinating thread and this is the first time I've ever looked at anything in this section. The past is barely past.
I don't have any old letters but my wife has a lot, including one from Lee's wife (Yes, Lee of Arlington), and one from an antecedent who was in Pickett's charge (and live to tell about it). While the old letters are fascinating, they sometimes disappoint when they don't mention things we might like to read about. They largely mention the same sorts of things we'd write about, if we still wrote letters. My father never finished grade school, yet he had a very passable hand when it came to penmanship. I'd even say it looked a little like some European penmanship from people the same age. In many places, you know, people lived in the "horse and buggy" era, as we used to say, until quite recently. If you go "deep enough" in, say, West Virginia, you will find log houses (never called cabins) still being lived in probably by the same family that built it before the Civil War. That was the case where I lived for a time in the 1960s. I met an old man who delivered mail on horseback. That was also a mining area (coal) and until the 1960s, it was booming. There were little villages every few miles along the roads, all gone now but for the names. It seems very sad to see what remains now. The people in the "coal camps" were mostly immigrants and some of the names linger on the the towns that remain but the old families from before the coal boom lived out on the family farms. Thanks for sharing.
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March 30, 2011, 02:29 PM | #66 | |
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That's so very true, BlueTrain. It's kind of funny what passes for "old" history here in Idaho. Things didn't really get going until around 1861 or 1862, with the discovery of gold. That's only 150 years ago - a pretty short time compared to the east coast and the blink of an eye to Europe.
Anyway, I ran across one page of a letter from William Cooper to my great, great, great grandfather Christopher Cooper last night. It's got no date, but I would put it at 1858 or 1859, based on where everybody in the family was at the time. It talks a bit about the down side of mining - it ain't cheap! Quote:
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March 30, 2011, 03:28 PM | #67 |
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You know, there were several gold rushes, including one in Canada just after the war. While not all of them included mayhem and murder, they were sure all something of an adventure for those that went. In that one I just referred to, many of the prospectors went by airplane to stake claims but many went the old fashioned way. A few had fathers who had gone to the Yukon in 1898, too.
By a coincidence, my wife had an ancestor who was a Cooper, here in Northern Virginia. If I remember the connections correctly, the one was my wife's grandmother's grandfather. That Cooper was Samuel Cooper, adjutant general of the United States Army and later, when his boss, the Secretary of the Army, became President of the Confederate States, he became Adjutant General of the Confederate Army. He married George Mason's granddaughter. Think he's related to you?
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March 30, 2011, 04:38 PM | #68 |
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No, other than the original Christopher, almost all of my Coopers started out in eastern Missouri, then ended up out west. Apparently none of them ever served in the military - they were too busy trying to eke out a living or recovering from some sickness or injury.
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March 31, 2011, 12:23 AM | #69 |
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Hardcase, this is a gold mine of heritage and I am intrigued at reading these letters. Somebody on page 2 mentioned Ancestry.com and if you haven't already, I highly recommend it. (No, I have nothing to gain by this recommendation) but I did it, and found my Mother's side back to right at the Revolutionary war. I placed my family to Ireland, Whales and England. The U.S. records cost $150 for a years subscription and the international version is another $150. Do some detective work, I have been fascinated by it. You also seem to have a lot of the women's maiden names, which is very valuable to ancestry. Thanks for sharing, Mac.
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March 31, 2011, 06:23 AM | #70 |
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While this is getting off the subject, I've done a little research on my family. My wife grew up knowing everything about her family because her ancestors were a little more distinguished than mine were. But I never used any of the commercial sites, just what I could find otherwise. There are lots of people with interests in geneology. But there are shortcomings.
I found that, even in places, with a lot of information, there were gaps. For instance, some place that had my father's name did not list all of his brothers (he was one of eleven). The more obvious difficulty is that ultimately you are trying to construct a family tree and everyone has a unique ancestry and except for your siblings, no one else has the same one you do. But I also discovered that it is a little easier when distant cousins married. That cuts down on the number of ancestors, you know. I still find it hard to believe I'm descended from anyone that lived a thousand years ago.
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March 31, 2011, 09:13 AM | #71 | |
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Mac1 I do use Ancestry.com and, since BlueTrain was speaking of cousins, I've found several of them through that site, which has helped a great deal with research that I've done on my dad's side of the family. For those who have an interest, it's the gold standard of genealogy sites.
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March 31, 2011, 10:50 AM | #72 | |
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Found it! The folks who made money in the California gold rush were the ones who got there right at the start. By the time this letter was written, in 1858, the easy pickins were long gone and mining was hard work with middling returns. But the new strike on the Fraser River in British Columbia (or, as they called it then, "New Caledonia") got the miners fired up and ready to make big money. Unfortunately, it left the merchants of the northern California gold towns in the lurch.
Another unrelated problem was that my great-great-great grandfather was trying to wrap up his father's estate, but because he had died intestate, the probate court needed to contact all of the children - a bit harder than it would be today, especially since they were scattered to the four corners of the continent. Oh, and by the way, what I thought was another letter was, in fact, the first two pages of the letter that I posted yesterday. Apparently the third page had become separated from the first two. So, this is the first two pages of the letter to Christopher Cooper from his brother William. Quote:
Within a few years, William and Henry Cooper would pack out of California to the new gold rush in the Boise Basin of Idaho. Frank would join them later and eventually most of the Cooper family would settle in Idaho City.
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April 1, 2011, 12:40 PM | #73 | |
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Turning the way-back machine up a little more, this one is dated September 28, 1820. It is a letter from Evan Thomas Ellicott, owner of an iron mill in Ellicott Mills, Maryland. The Ellicotts had quite an influence from Pennsylvania to New York to Maryland from the middle of the 18th century until the middle of the 19th. Although their biggest contribution to the Baltimore area was in flour mills (and in giving their name to a town), Evan was fairly successful in the iron business.
Christopher worked for Evan at the iron mill for at least a year, but at this point, he had moved up to the Pittsburgh area to work the iron mills there, possibly as an extension of Ellicott's business. The Cooper family did a lot of moving during their first several years in America as Christopher tried to find good-paying work. From what I can gather from other letters, due to an influx of immigrants from England and Ireland, wages were somewhat depressed. Also, there was a certain degree of resentment towards the new immigrants (as in, "taking our jobs"). I guess the wheel turns... The letter: Quote:
Also, in case you hadn't guessed, Evan Ellicott was a Quaker - in fact, his family went quite a ways back in the Pennsylvania Friends community.
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Well we don't rent pigs and I figure it's better to say it right out front because a man that does like to rent pigs is... he's hard to stop - Gus McCrae |
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April 7, 2011, 05:45 PM | #74 |
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This is amazing stuff, please keep posting!
I have been reading while at work (extremely boring job, far below my experience, and wish I had something in the firearms industry!), and have found this site, and this thread in particular, amazingly fascinating reading. Thank you so much for sharing your family history!
I am on the cusp of becoming a BP addict... I am a huge fan of firearms in general, and have long wanted to experience BP weapons but have never taken the plunge. After finding this site and reading some of the marvelous posts, it's only a matter of (a short) amount of time before I take the plunge! Thanks! |
April 8, 2011, 10:15 AM | #75 |
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Thanks for the kind words, Zenkoji, and welcome aboard!
There's more to post. Right now, I'm sorting through some more modern stuff from the other side of the family - since there was no rhyme or reason to the filing system I inherited, I sort of get this stuff as it comes. I'm also blessed with wonderful extended family members who have been dropping off their collections, so I try to sort through their stuff first so that I can get it back to them as quickly as possible. My office looks like a small museum exploded in the middle of it.
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Well we don't rent pigs and I figure it's better to say it right out front because a man that does like to rent pigs is... he's hard to stop - Gus McCrae |
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