Jane Waldsmith Young, 1806 - 1880

I love to "google" Grandma Jane and find so many hits.  She had many descendents, including daughter Sarah Bovard whose diary written in the l860's is on the internet, and she was the granddaughter of Christian Waldsmith whose home has been preserved as an historic site in Hamilton County, Ohio.

Jane's grandfather, Christian, left Pennsylvania where his dad was an immigrant German Reformed minister, and built a mill near the Ohio River in Ohio where he raised his family.  Son Peter farmed in Butler and Hamilton counties, married out of the German community, and his daughter, Jane, was born in l806.   Jane met Abner Young, a Yankee whose family had been in New England for 200 years and who had moved to Cincinnati as a young man, and they married when Jane was l7.  Around l840, Peter, whose wife had died, moved on west with most of his family, including Jane and Abner, to Jefferson County, Indiana where he bought land for farming.

Jane and Abner had l4 chilcren, one about every two years.  Several of the children died as infants or small children, and three of her daughters had tragic deaths as adults.  Jane lived the last 40 years of her life in Scott County, Indiana within a buggy ride of most of her children and sisters.

In the Chronicle March 11, 1880:  Mrs. Jane Young, a very old and much respected lady, after a short but painful spell of illness, died on the 4th inst.


Sue<Hilda Casey<Ulric Casey<Lemira McClure<Deborah Young<Jane Waldsmith

Deborah Young McClure 1834 - 1875

The only picture I have of Grandma Debbie is a xerox of a photo in a locket.  I don't know who wore that locket or where it is, but the photo was taken when she was a young woman.  Debbie died of childbirth when she was 41.

The family story is that Debbie overdosed herself during childbirth.  Her husband, Dr. Dexter McClure, was away on a call.  Family stories aren't very reliable (I grew up thinking I was a descendant of Thomas Lynch, Jr. who signed the Declaration of Independence) but Debbie and the baby, William did die in Austin, Indiana in l875 not far from where her parents and many brothers and sisters lived.

Debby was only 19 when she married Dexter McClure who was 34.  He had grown up in New York and moved to Southern Indiana as a young man out of medical school.  Debbie was born near Cincinnati and her family moved to northeastern Scott County about l839.  By the time they married, Debbie would have known about the other Dexter McClure in Scott County, and I wonder how she felt about it.

In census records in the VanBuskirk family is a Dexter McClure born about l848 or l849.  Sometimes he is called Dexter McClure and sometimes Dexter McClure VanBuskirk.  None of the young women in the household, and there were several, were named McClure.  So this Dexter could have been named after Dr. McClure who delivered him, or Dr. McClure could have been married to a VanBuskirk (no record found in Scott County marriages) who died in childbirth and the child was raised by the VanBuskirks, or this may have been an out-of-wedlock son and Dexter didn't marry the mother, perhaps never acknowledging a son.  In any event, Dexter McClure VanBuskirk grew up and died in Scott County, and there is no hint in our family records of a relationship.

The diary of Debbie's sister, Sarah Young Bovard, tells about the family during the Civil War.  Sarah called Debbie and another sister "southern sympathisers."  One sister's husband was killed during the war.  Sarah also wrote about her boys eating wild mushrooms and finally getting a doctor to come.  She wrote that Dr. McClure was "summoned, but he did not come."

Two of Debbie's sisters had tragic deaths.  Margy was hit on the head with a rock and died (perhaps hit by her mother-in-law who was listed in the census as insane), and Aunt Ethe took carbolic acid.  Debbie's husband died about 4 years after she did.

Two of her daughters married Milhouse brothers who were cousins of President Nixon.  Two of her sons married Amanda Wiles, first one who later died, and then the other.  Her daughter, Lemira, also married a medical doctor and became the mother of another medical doctor.

Sue<Hilda Casey<Ulric Casey<Lemira Casey<Deborah Young

Lemira Orilla McClure Casey

What I've learned in thirty years of tracing family history is that facts, like births and deaths, are recorded in black and white in official records to be absorbed by family searchers.  But personalities, like someone being fat and sassy or a frowning pessimist, can ony be learned through letters and oral history.  I only wish we had more of that as letters are nearly obsolete.

My great grandmother, Lemira Orilla McClure Casey, died a few years before I was born (l860-1933) so I did hear stories of her all my life.  She was even-tempered, seldom made meals on time, and had her grandchildren do chores and errands for her.  What no one talked about though, were the deaths she had to face.  Her mom died when she was 15.  Two siblings died before she was born and three more while she was growing up.  And her father, Dexter McClure, was a medical doctor.

Lemira married Dr. Henry Casey and three of their ten children died.  Grandpa talked about his little sister, Lemira's daughter, Louise, who died when she was two.  Grandpa's youngest child's middle name was Louise as is his granddaughter's and great granddaughter's.

What many of us remember about Lemira is her house.  It was built in the mid nineteenth century as the Tull Hotel next to the new railroad through Austin, Indiana, and purchased by Lemira's father about 1875.  I was born there.  It had four rooms up and four rooms down plus a large attic which served not only as storage space but also as the playroom for a few generations.  The attic walls were like an autograph book (also now obsolete), signed by my grandpa's generation as well as my mom's and mine.  Cousin Wilma recently wrote me this:  when she and Harold became engaged, she took him to Lemira's attic to memorialize the wedding date on the attic wall.  Aunt Ethyl heard them and called up the stairway asking if Wilma had Harold up there.  Then she told them to come down that instant.  She wasn't going to have any hanky panky in her attic.

At one time, Lemira and her husband owned a plot of land between the Pennsylvania Railroad and Highway 31 in Austin. Then after Grandpa married, they gave him land by Highway 31 to build a house.  When I was growing up, there was a path through the garden between Lemira's house and Grandpa's house.  When the family congregated in Austin, we kids slept in the "big house," Lemira's house, almost close enough to reach out the window and touch the trains as they screamed by in the night.

Now, after a tornado one year and fire another, the house is a four room, one-story, cottage.  It broke my heart to see a photo of it taken about fifteen years ago.  But it is still there at Plum Street and the railroad.

My mom said her grandpa Henry would ask her, when she was small, "where's your grandma?  I haven't had my dinner yet.  See if she is in the outhouse reading the Sears catalog."  Cousin Wilma wrote that when they visited, she always hoped she would get an invitation to have dinner with Minnie and Ulric (Lemira's son down the garden) since Lemira's meals were always late.

I wonder if Lemira may have been a bit passive aggressive.  She must have been pretty mad that her mom left her motherless and with four little sisters and brothers to bring up, including a two-year old and five year old.  After two of the sisters had grown, married Milhouse brothers (cousins of President Nixon), and moved to California, Lemira took the train across the country to visit them.  She also visited her sister who lived on a farm in Scott County, and it must have been by horse and buggy as neither she, nor her daughter-in-law, Minnie, who visited with her, drove cars.

Grandma Lemira wrote great letters and thankfully, some of her sisters and daughters saved them.

Sue<Hilda Casey<Ulric Casey<Lemira McClure

Grandma Eliza Hancock Casey

I wish I knew all my grandmothers better.  When my young cousin was dying, my meditation was picturing her on the field of a stadium filled with our grandmothers who were cheering in the stands and giving her an enormous ovation for her life.  Not just our Grandma Minnie Casey, whom we both knew, but generations of grandmothers back to the beginning of time.

The grandmother I'm thinking of now is Eliza Hancock who lived in the nineteenth century and married Tom Casey, my great-great grandfather.  Eliza grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  One of my grandpa's cousins wrote that when she visited there, they walked through a field filled with mosquitos.  She didn't like it very much.

Eliza grew up in Snow Hill, Maryland, although there, her family was known as the "Boxiron Hancocks."  Who her grandparents were, I haven't found out, but I imagine they went from Virginia to Boxiron, Maryland and then to Snow Hill.  But in l837, when she was 23, Eliza was in Cincinnati and married Tom Casey.  He also had moved to Cincinnati from Maryland, but from Baltimore, as a young man.  I couldn't find a hint that they knew each other before Cincinnati.  So it is a mystery why she moved to Cincinnati and how she met Tom Casey.

Grandpa Tom, whose father had had a mill on a river near Baltimore, worked for Shreve Steel and Rolling Mill.  When I was small I was told that as a child, their son, Elberton, had boarded a cruise ship on the Ohio River when the ship suddenly sank, and the last thing the family could see of him was his white gloves waving goodbye.  The newspaper reported that the Casey boy was playing on the dock, slipped and fell in and drowned.

There must have been some smarts in the family as a couple of the other sons grew up to be doctors.  Tom left Shreve and bought land in Scott County, Indiana where they moved and farmed.  He was also a lay minister of the Methodist Church.

Grandpa told me his Grandma Eliza smoked a pipe.  He remembered her funeral on a cold, snowy day in 1900.  She is buried in Austin cemetery, not far from the Methodist church.

She had to have courage to have moved so far away from family in those days.

sue<Hilda Casey<Ulric Casey<Henry Casey<Eliza