Orphan stories - Honeysuckle Farm, LLC

Week 19- Orphans, A New Blog, and Podcasts

Welcome to week 19 of 2018 and week 2 of my short hiatus from blogging about my own personal family (and my husband’s). Just this week and one more and I’ll get back to blogging about our families. During my hiatus, I’m posting information that is not easily found elsewhere. In case you’re just joining me I’ll let you know that I’m posting records of children who passed through the Jasper County Alms House (the “poor farm”) near Carthage, Jasper County, Missouri. Today I’ll be posting about one family and I’ll also be recommending one blog I just found and a couple of podcasts I’m enjoying.
Let’s start with the blog. I just finished watching the most recent season of Relative Race on BYUTV. (If you don’t get BYUTV, contact your satellite or cable company. It’s a family-oriented channel with lots of genealogy and family-friendly programming available.) On episode 8 of Relative Race (Season 3, original air date 22 April 2018), there was a brief mention that Team Black (Johnathon and Rebecca HOYT) had met a relative who podcasts her family history and this relative (Dru MATTIMOE) interviewed Team Black for her podcast. For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about creating a podcast that goes along with my blog so this bit of information caught my attention. I did a little internet sleuthing and found Dru! Before finding Dru though, I found her blog- Coffee and Headphones. The first post I read was entitled, Relevé, Plié. The link above will take you right to that post. Before I could read even a word of her post I was immediately taken back to my childhood ballet and tap days. Some of my friends and I were in dance classes when I was little. Here is a photo of my friend, Genita (on the right), and I in our dance costumes for the tap portion of our dance classes. This was right before a performance. We were standing in her grandma’s yard right next door to my house on the “old highway” in Jay, Delaware County, Oklahoma. Her grandma was my babysitter for several years when I was young. I was probably about 8 or 9 years old in this photograph.

I happen to work at the same high school where Genita’s daughter attends now and I saw her within a day or so of reading Dru’s post and thinking about Genita and our dance days. Maybe I’ll take a copy of this photo to her daughter one day before school’s out.
Yesterday I got to talk with Dru. (I was trying to fix the lawnmower yesterday so I hope I didn’t look too wild and crazy for our video chat!) I enjoyed our conversation and I’m looking forward to following her blog as well as her podcasting adventures. So GO READ DRU’S BLOG! I’m enjoying it and I think you will too, especially if you like a little ‘Hollywood’ to go with your history! Speaking of podcasts, I’m in the car often so I listen to a lot of podcasts. I was recently listening to an episode of Always Listening and the host, Joel SHARPTON, recommended Tyler Mahan COE’s podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones (which is both a podcast and a blog that follows along with the podcast). Tyler podcasts the history of country music. Now, I’m not the world’s biggest country music fan but something Joel said caught my interest so I flipped over to Cocaine and Rhinestones and I was hooked on the first episode (which for me, by the way, was Season 1, Episode 3, The Murder Ballad of Spade Cooley). I’m about halfway through Season 1 right now. Go take a listen. Season 1 is all about the old names in country music- the ones my dad played in the cassette player of that dinky little Datsun pickup that my parents somehow managed to fit two adults and three children into back in the days when seatbelts were optional (and rarely used). Sure wish I had a photo of that pickup truck. Here’s a similar one found at CFI America:

Don’t make the mistake of looking at this pickup as anything close to a full-size pickup truck. These things were TINY!!
Now for the orphans. If you aren’t interested, you can cut out now. It won’t hurt my feelings. If you are interested, read on.

Above is the cover and description of the records for anyone interested. Below is the first page of the transcription. I’ll be skipping the second child (#2- Elija ROBINSON). Just yesterday I made a breakthrough on Elija so I’m saving that for next week so I can research it a little more. This week I’ll be discussing children Rhoda and Eva MALONE and their mom, Mary MALONE (#5-#7 on the list).

Here’s what I know about the MALONE sisters. Mary MALONE came to the alms house with her two daughters- Rhoda and Eva- in February of 1883. Mary was born in 1842 in Illinois. She died (presumably at the alms house since it’s in their records) in August of 1886. She came in with her daughter Rhoda who was born in 1863 in Illinois and her daughter Eva who was born in 1874 in Illinois. I want to be clear here, I am presuming relationships based on the same last name and that they were all admitted to the alms house in February of 1883. There is no disability listed with Mary’s name or the girls’ names. Perhaps Mary was too sick to continue caring for herself or the girls anymore or perhaps she was too poor to do so and couldn’t find enough work. I don’t know. The above is literally all the information I had to go on.
So Mary would have been about 41 years old when she was admitted and 44 years old when she passed away. Rhoda would have been about 20 years old and Eva about 9 years old upon admission to the alms house. There is no discharge date for Rhoda or Eva. Looking at all the MALONE families in the area at that time, I think the most likely family for these people was the family of John and Mary “Polly” (HENDRICKS) MALONE. This family (at least the mother and children- I’m not sure about the father) moved from Adams County, Illinois sometime between 4 July 1870 and 15 June 1880 to Jasper County, Missouri. In 1880, Mary (sometimes listed as Polly) had the following children: Rhoda (born about 1863 in Illinois), Adam (born about 1866 in Illinois), Hiram (born about about August of 1869 in Illinois), and Eva (born about 1874 in Illinois). With this information, the gap in age from Rhoda to Eva makes a little more sense! Mary was a widow in 1880. She and her children were living in Preston, Jasper County, Missouri. I can’t find Rhoda in 1900. Eva is a servant in the Arnold household in Golden City, Barton County, Missouri. Adam is living with Hiram and Hiram’s family in Richland, Barton County, Missouri. Hiram, Adam, and Eva all married and had children. Adam passed away in 1921 (of Paresis), Eva in 1943 (of Myocarditis), and Hiram in 1950 (of Pneumonia and infirmities of age). I have contacted a member of this family and am exchanging information with her in an effort to figure out if this is the correct family and, if so, to link the family’s alms house years back into their historical record. In case you’re wondering why I didn’t bring up the death record of Mary, there isn’t one that I can find.
If you’ve made it this far- thanks for reading. Don’t forget to check out Dru’s blog, Coffee and Headphones. Also check out Tyler’s podcast, Cocaine and Rhinestones (or, if you just aren’t interested in country, maybe check out Joel’s podcast, Always Listening, which introduces you to new podcasts). You can also check out my sister-in-law’s blog at Down in the Root Cellar.
Take care of YOU this week!
Until next time,
Lisa @ Days of Our Lives blog

Week 18

Last week was so busy! The last two or three months of each school year are always insanely busy. I think I’ve finally hit that point where I won’t be blogging for a few weeks until all this craziness is over. I’m proud of the fact that this year I’ve been able to hold off the “no blogging” streak for a month to month and a half longer than normal. I’m going to cut myself some slack and not have a schedule for the next three weeks or so. I will blog when I can and I will try to tell a very short story and/or photograph on Sunday rather than provide a schedule. Hopefully in a month or so I’ll be able to tell some of the stories that were put on hold (like John BATES’ final years). For now, I’m going to back off because I think any schedule at this point would be too much.
Today’s short story is about one of the earliest tenants at Jasper County Alms House (the “poor farm”) in Carthage, Jasper County, Missouri. While I was at Joplin researching a couple of weeks ago I spent most of my time looking through a book containing a list of people who stayed there. One of my strongest thoughts when going through this book was how many of the children who came there ever made it back to their families? How did they get separated? What happened when they left there? I had so many questions. I’ve found that there isn’t much information online about a lot of the children that came to the home. For many of them I can’t even find out who their original families were.
The first person on the list was Clarissa YOAS. Clarissa was born 157 years ago. She was 14 years old when she was admitted to the alms house in 1875. She (or whomever brought her there) gave her birth year as 1861 and her birth state as Pennsylvania. She was single. Later in the book there is another entry for Clarissa. It said she was the daughter of Henry YOAS. She died on 30 December 1942 and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Galena, Cherokee County, Kansas. No other family members were admitted with Clarissa. If she was born in Pennsylvania, how did she get to Missouri? She had to come with someone. Why did they leave her at the Alms House? Did she have any family left? Do her descendants know about what happened to her? Does she even have any direct descendants? So many questions! So I did a quick search on Ancestry.com, Google, and Newspapers.com for Clarissa.
The majority of records that Clarissa appeared on were census records. Other than those records, I found her in the alms house record and I found her death certificate. There were no newspaper articles about her that I could find. Clarissa’s surname was spelled a variety of ways (YOAS, YOES, YOSE, and YOOS). Her first name was written as Clarissa, Clarisa, and Clara. Although the alms house record, death certificate, and some of the census records gave her birth year as 1861, at least one census gave her birth year as 1857 and another as 1851. Her birth state never varied- it was always Pennsylvania. Clarissa never married. She remained at the alms house from age 14 to the end of her life at age 81. If she ever had a child, it was not recorded in the alms house record and is not in any record I could locate on Ancestry.com.
In the 1880 census, Clarissa was marked as being “idiotic” which would explain her presence at the alms house and would also explain why she never left. In 1880, the definition of “idiotic” for purposes of the federal census was, “a person the development of whose mental faculties were arrested in infancy or childhood before coming to maturity”. Additional information found on Genealogy.com about this subject says, “a number of known disabilities would have fallen under this category, including Downs Syndrome”. Clarissa was also marked as a pauper on this census. It is interesting to note that in 1880 just across the state line in Lowell, Garden Township, Cherokee County, Kansas (only 5 miles from where Clarissa was buried) is another YOAS family with a son, Francis YOAS, who is listed as “insane”. He was born in Ohio in 1863.
The alms house went through a number of superintendents in the 67 years that Clarissa lived there. The earliest superintendent was Benjamin HAMMER along with his wife, Tennie. In 1900, it was James NALL and his wife, Laura. In 1910, I couldn’t find Clarissa (nor could I find anyone else I expected to find living at the alms house). In 1920 George W. MAXWELL was superintendent. Jud HOWELL and his wife Eva managed the alms house in 1930. The final available census is 1940. It was unclear who was managing the alms house in 1940. In the 1940 census, Clarissa declared she worked 4 hours a week. At the poor farms, every individual worked at a certain job and the job was tailored to what the individual was able to do. One additional thing I noticed in these census records is that people living at the poor farm were called “inmates”.
On 30 December 1942, Clarissa died. Her cause of death was listed as Senility. Her body was held for 13 months- possibly so family could claim her body if there were any family. Her death certificate listed her dad as Henry YOAS but did not list her mother. Clarissa was buried on 31 January 1943 at Oak Hill Cemetery in Galena, Cherokee County, Kansas.

I’ve been unable to figure out who Clarissa’s parents and other family members were. There are several families that I suspect are either parents or are closely related to Clarissa. The family whose son was “insane” is one of the families I feel is closely related to Clarissa. They are buried in a cemetery a few miles away from Clarissa (except for the “insane” son who ended up in an insane asylum and is buried in that asylum’s burial ground in Osawatomie, Kansas). That family is Ernst and Lucy YOAS’ family. They could be Clarissa’s parents but I don’t think so. I think Clarissa’s parents may be Henry and Elizabeth YOAS. Another possibility for her parents are Georg Heinrich and Elizabeth YOAS. I have messaged a person on Ancestry.com who I think may be able to answer some of my questions about Clarissa. If I hear back from her I’ll let you know.
Until then,
Lisa @ Days of Our Lives blog

Category: Orphan stories

Week 19- Orphans, A New Blog, and Podcasts

Week 18