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.

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