52 Ancestors 2019 - Ancestor #1 Ollie Ossilean Posey

Ollie O. Wilson was born Ollie Ossilean Posey on 9 September 1892 in Reynolds, Taylor County, Georgia.  Her parents were Andrew Breckenridge Posey and Mary Julia Windham.  Ollie married Judson Chesterfield Wilson on 19 November 1905 when Ollie was just 13 years old.  Ollie and Judson had two daughters, Eleanor Katherine and Myrtice Lucille.  Ollie Ossilean Posey Wilson died on the 9^th of August 1977.

Ollie Ossilean Posey Wilson was my mother’s grandmother.  I first heard her name spoken when I was just seven years old.  My mother had recently joined the Mormon church and her interest in genealogy was piqued during her conversion to Mormonism.  Mother began a regular correspondence with her grandmother asking questions about her life and growing up in Georgia.  Family history became a life long passion for my mother and she passed that passion on to me.

The first ancestor I ever learned about was my great grandmother Ollie.   Her name was so unusual that I often asked about her and how she got her name.  Ollie Ossilean seemed to be an unusual name.  No one, not even great grandmother, knew why she was given this name.  Over the years as I have researched the census records for Taylor County, Georgia, I have learned that Ollie was a common name for girls, but I have yet to learn where the name Ossilean derives or why her mother, Julia, chose it.

I met Ollie in 1975 when I was around 8 years old.  My parents piled my brother and me into our car (without A/C) and we made the long trek during the hot summer from Denver, Colorado to Georgia.  I remember that trip well.  One does not forget endless car rides with no air conditioning!  Besides the heat and very few rest stops along the way, the trip was made memorable by our visit with Ollie.  She was a frail woman, small in height and weight, and had a very deep Southern accent.

My mother brought a tape recorder and conducted a thorough interview with Ollie.  I have this cassette tape today.  I am glad I had the foresight in the early 1990s to transcribe the interview and later convert the tape to CD.  Both my mother and great grandmother have since passed away and to hear their voices again brings tender emotions.  What it also brings is information over looked.  I have read the transcript numerous times, but it isn’t until you know the question you want to ask that you begin to look for the answer.

During our visit with Great Grandmother we were introduced to a man my mother as a child had called “Uncle Jay Bird.”  I was told he wasn’t in fact an Uncle.  In the South, family friends are often referred to as Aunt and Uncle.  Older cousins can sometimes be referred to as such, as well.  But back to the interview.  I was curious as to who this “Uncle Jay Bird” really might be.  How close of a friend was he or was there in fact a genetic relationship?  Reviewing the transcript, I found that Ollie revealed his name, Edwin Hill, as well as that of his brother, Bernice (yes, a brother!) who had recently passed away.  This clue was what I needed to further research Uncle Jay Bird.  In the interview, Ollie tells of Uncle Jay Bird being terribly abused by his step mother when he was growing up, and often Ollie would feed him and let him hide in the tree in her yard.

In the 1940 U.S. Federal Census, Edwin Hill is found living with my Great Grandparents and their two daughters (one being my grandmother Katherine).  This confirms the name she has given for Uncle Jay Bird, and if they were, in fact, as close as she claims, it isn’t surprising to find him living with my great grandparents during this census.  But then something else happened…  Ancestry DNA.

Several years ago, I took the Ancestry DNA test.  Those who have tested with Ancestry will tell you, you can go quite some time before you get a match that catches your attention.  Recently, I received a third cousin match with a grandchild of Bernice Hill, the brother of Uncle Jay Bird.  Shock and surprise! And yet, maybe not so much.  Reynolds, Georgia is a tiny town.  Cotton farms surround the area and little else.  The population there was small back in the day and even smaller now.  Many of the people living there are related to each other in one way or another.  But how is it that Uncle Jay Bird is related to me?

Doing a side by side generation comparison of Bernice’s grandchild back to Bernice’s parents, and giving allowance that due to some age gaps being greater than others, it appears that Bernice and Uncle Jay Bird may be my great grandfather Judson’s half brothers.  In most any other circumstance, I would be able to sort this out except for one small matter… Judson’s dad.  Judson’s father was known as General Wilson.  No, not A general.  That’s his name.  Try searching that name just after the Civil War era!  What’s more, General Wilson died at the age of 27 when Judson was just a few weeks old.  We have no parentage for General Wilson.  He is our Brick Wall.  One my mother spent her adult life trying to tear down.

And then there are the dates that put everything into a muddle.  Judson was born 1880.  Uncle Jay Bird was born in 1903.  Even if Judson had fathered Edwin Hill, that would not give us a genetic match for Bernice.  General Wilson died in 1880, so he cannot be the father of the Hill boys.  But what about Judson’s mother Louisa Brumbeloe Wilson?  Well, that is the next journey I am embarking on.

If Great Grandmother Ollie had not introduced me to Uncle Jay Bird, and had not given us his real name,  I would never have questioned his relationship to my family nor given much notice to his brother’s descendants who matched me in Ancestry DNA.  I feel as though Ollie is reaching out from beyond and trying to help me in solving this mystery.  Her clues have been great so far.  I hope to come across more as time goes on.

Great Grandmother Ollie was married when she was just 13 years old.  She lost 9 children before she carried my grandmother full term.  She had a big heart and the stories I have heard of her helping strangers in need are indeed a testament to her upbringing and giving nature.  She is my first ancestor I have researched and the first and only ancestor I had the good fortune to meet in life.  It seems fitting that I chose her to be the first ancestor for my 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks challenge.  Keep the clues coming Ollie!  We will solve the Uncle Jay Bird mystery yet, and perhaps along the way, tear down a long standing brick wall!

Southern Comfort -- Food Memories of Days Gone By

Ever since I can remember there have been family dinners.  Family come to visit for holiday meals, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Family gather together for births and deaths, and there is always food involved.  Graduations and other celebrations also bring family together, and with that gathering, there is again, always food.  It would seem that the food is the glue that allows the people in my family to sit down and take the time to talk to one another.  Family dinners have come to symbolize togetherness and are a celebration of those days when life didn’t get in the way of family ties.

When I was a child, my family and I moved around on a nearly annual basis.  As my father was retired and decided to become a writer, our moves became more “inspirational moves” rather than “government dictated moves.”  Through my childhood years, I would hear tales from my mother about family gatherings at her grandmother’s house and the Sunday dinners that were a weekly event and a fond memory of mother’s own childhood.

Family Photo - Sunday at Grandmother's House

Southern families are rooted in tradition.  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” my family always says.  Traditionally my mother, along with her sister and parents, would travel each Sunday to Reynolds, Georgia, to have Sunday dinner at her maternal grandmother’s house.  Grandmother Wilson was a widow, and this was an opportunity for her two daughters to bring their families together and visit, as well as check on Grandmother and see how she was faring.  Along with the tradition of gathering together, there was a tradition of what was consumed at these dinners, and it was typically the same thing every week:  chicken, black-eyed peas, green beans or butter beans, yams or squash, collard greens and always corn bread or homemade muffins.  “The importance of food to southerners is perhaps best revealed in [the] proverb: a full belly makes strong arms an’ a willin’ heart.”  (Joyner, 17.)  I’m not too sure what that proverb means other than if you’re hungry enough to eat, your heart will be into putting in the work that is required to grow or kill your own food.  And that is just what mother’s family did back in the day.  They raised and prepared all their own food.  My mother recalled:

We never bought anything from a store.  In fact, I think I was twelve or thirteen years old before I ever entered what would be considered today as a grocery store.  We grew our own vegetables and raised our own chickens, and we ate what we cultivated.  Everything was fresh and every meal was made from scratch.

What is now considered a time honored tradition of preparing from scratch meals made from home-grown fruits and vegetables was actually necessity back in those days.  As mother mentioned, they didn’t have the luxury of shopping in grocery stores as we do today.  Taking the time to make favorite family meals, and making them from fresh ingredients, keeps alive the memories of days long gone by.

Personal Family Photo - Lackey Farm

Not all dinners at my great grandmother’s house were fried chicken, though that was the favorite and traditional meal.  Mother recalls a time when dinner was actually at Uncle Elmer’s house and the dinner was a hog.  The change in menu makes that day stand out in mother’s memory not merely because they ate hog instead of chicken, but the events that led to eating that hog.  And here we get the story of Elmer’s Hog.

We had a big group for lunch that day.  There was daddy and mother, Judy and myself, along with Uncle Ken, his wife and children, Grandmother, and then of course Elmer and his family because we were at Elmer’s farm.  Elmer was Grandmother’s younger brother.  Well, the menfolk decided that they wanted to have pork chops or ham that day.  So daddy, Uncle Ken and Uncle Elmer tried to kill this hog.  It was Elmer’s hog from his herd of hogs and pigs.  They get him and somehow he gets away.  They try shooting him.  Now, my daddy’s a crack shot, but he wounded him!  And so that made the hog mad and he was running around like a nut!  So, daddy shot him between the eyes and he said, “You know, we shouldn’t have made such the mess that we did killing this hog.”

Well anyway, they strung him up to a tree and they gutted him, and then they took his intestines and passed them through the kitchen window to the women who were already preparing the table for this stuff.  Here they washed the intestines out and they were already working on the stuffing.  This is how sausage is made.  I had no idea!  I’m looking in the window.  I didn’t eat sausage for years and years and years after that!  Meanwhile while the women were preparing the sausage, the men had carved this hog up.  Some of it was smoked but other parts were going to be cooked.  It took the whole day, so we ate very late.

It is not unusual for food memories to play a role in our lives.  The smells of certain foods (or the mere thought of them) can bring back a flood of memories, such as the sausage did for my mother.  Such memories can be fond or humorous, like remembering how the men had a difficult time catching the hog, while the same memory can be a deterrent from eating anything related to that memory, i.e. sausage.   These memories can affect what we choose to include in our current diets.  Mother still loves yams and black eyed peas, but it took her years to try another sausage.  Oddly enough, it wasn’t the killing of the hog that turned her off, but knowing which parts of the hog that were in the sausage that made her sick at the thought.

Traditionally, as stated in this story, the men did the killing and the women did the cooking.  In my family that didn’t change much until about 20 years ago.  Until about the 1990s, the women in my family would slave away in a hot kitchen and dining room in an effort to make things “just right” for visiting family.  Even women who arrived for the visit set to work helping out while men sat and caught up on current news.  Back in the 1950s when mother was having Sunday dinners at her grandmother’s house, she recalled that the women would be preparing the meals while the men sat out on the porch and chitchatted.

My father and the other men would sit out on the porch and rock and talk about, you know, the world problems, and smoke cigars to keep the gnats and flies away.  My father only smoked cigars on Sunday.  Only on Sunday and only in the country at Grandmother’s to keep flies and gnats away.  And only the men folk would do that.  And he wore a blue striped seer sucker suit with a straw hat.  And they always had their straw hat on.  Anyway, I always remember the men sitting out there rocking and talking.  When the women finished, they would come out and rock and talk and have ice tea.  There was a porch swing, and we used to just love to sit and swing and laze around.

Why do Southern women go to such trouble for their men?  It is all a part of Southern hospitality.  “Southern hospitality is the gentle art of sharing.  It is the noble gesture of putting another’s comfort before your own.  It is taking the time to make others feel good about themselves.”  (Jenkins, 13.) This idea of giving is not foreign to me, and that may be because I was raised to “do for others.”  I must say, however, that the twenty-first century has changed the dynamics of who is working in the kitchen or preparing the meals in general.  Today it is common for the men to stand over a flaming grill as they prepare the bar-b-que feast for guests.  The gender roles of responsibility have melted together and there is not so much the expectation of who is working while someone else is doing the visiting, just as there is little expectation that my husband or brother will step outside and kill a hog for dinner.

But there are things that do remain the same.  Family meals are still together whenever possible.  The prosperity of the past century has divided families geographically as jobs have required household transfers.  When family does get together, for holidays and special occasions, those special meals that help us recall our days together are prepared as a symbol of our togetherness – a celebration of sorts. 
Our children won’t remember dinners at Grandma’s house because Grandma lives two thousand miles away.  They probably won’t have Sunday dinner memories because those traditions faded away as the families moved farther and farther apart.  But they will have memories of family get-togethers, and in those memories they will recall stories, smells and even foods that they will go on to celebrate with their future generations.  And who knows, maybe a story they will share will be the one their Grandmother told them about Elmer’s hog!   

Today's entry was written in 2008, just a year before my mother's sudden passing.  I hope you enjoyed reading about her memories in rural Georgia.  If you liked today's post, please feel free to share with your readers by clicking on the share buttons below.  I would love to hear from you!  Please leave me a message below and tell me if this story sparked a memory of your family meals from when you were growing up! 

  Works Cited

Stratton, Ginger. 2008.  Tape recorded interview.  24 May.

Joyner, Charles. 1999.  Shared Tradition: Southern History and Folk Cultures.  University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago.  17-19.

Jenkins, Emyl.  1994.  Southern Hospitality.  Crown Publishers, Inc. New York.  13.

 Works Consulted

Botkin, B.A.   1932.  A Treasury of Southern Folklore.  Crown Publishers, Inc. New York.

Brunvand, Jan.  1998.  The Study of American Folklore.  W.W. Norton and Company. New York. London.