Climbing The Family Tree

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Sara
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Climbing The Family Tree

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By Kimberley McGee

LAS VEGAS SUN



It was a story of western pioneers: babies born in wagons, farms wiped out by violent rainstorms, guns, horses, land squabbles and untimely deaths. It was my story, but I didn’t own it.



The family had disappeared in the dusty annals of history, last names fragmented, stories half-told, as divorce, relocation and just plain time separated the once firmly-rooted family. Embarking on a personal history uncovers a spidery web of names, but more importantly, lost family ties begin to replant themselves and a sense of belonging to something larger grows out of the details.



There’s a revival of interest in genealogy, which last gripped the country thanks to Alex Haley’s book and TV miniseries Roots in the 70s. Its resurrection enhanced by Internet access is this week’s Time magazine cover story. Locally, family research centers and the Clark County Nevada Genealogical Society provide support for amateur ancestral sleuths. This is one persons story of a family’s history in Nevada, fleshed out by those resources.



My family settled in Nevada in the late 1800s. They designed waterways and helped build the first western settlements and mines. A canyon 45 minutes outside of Las Vegas is named after my great-grandparents, Albert and Mabel Carpenter, who settled the water-rich canyon in the early 1900s.They were a proud family with a strong pioneer spirit and their stories had slipped between my fingers from weak family ties.



To start, I wrote down everything I could remember. All those stories told on back porches or in the family car on summer vacations resurfaced Carpenter Canyon, shotgun weddings and mysterious deaths. These sketchy details formed the foundation for my search. Then I went to the Nevada History Museum library, to which I would come back as the names of pioneer cities and towns sprouted from the family’s fertile memories.



I knew some family members were buried in Beatty. With morbid excitement, I looked up tombstones and wrote down names and epitaphs that seemed remotely connected to me and asked my dad for living contacts. He dug around in his pile of old letters, we went down memory lane a bit, chuckling and sighing, until he came across a more recent letter from his cousin, Edna Brotherton, which included her e-mail address.



Then, weeded out of the tangled list of strangers, there are a few great aunts and uncles who could fill in the gaping holes. Although some leads don’t blossom, they are still there, hidden beneath layers of dormant memories that will soon branch into one more story after the next inquiry. I sent polite e-mails and left stuttering phone messages on strangers machines, then sat back to see who would come forward.



Once I started asking questions, the family I had known only from the fringe left excited messages on my voice mail and sent effusive e-mails. Research gives a plethora of background on people, places and dates, but can’t breathe names to life as my second-cousin Edna did. She e-mailed stories about her grandparents, Mabel and Arthur, and the untimely death of their 9-year-old daughter in 1918. Mabel was young when they met, maybe 13, she says, her voice light and giggling. They had to get married. The young couple moved throughout Northern Nevada, ending up in Tonopah for the birth of their fourth child. A very pregnant Mabel thought she had time before the baby’s arrival to drive the family’s horse-drawn wagon to her mothers house in Sharp, about a half-days wagon ride. Instead, her young daughters, all under age 8, helped her pull the wagon over, build a fire, boil water and sanitize the thread to tie off the umbilical cord of the newly arrived baby girl. Mabel drove on to her mothers with baby Mona in her arms. Mona’s entrance into the world would be as unexpected as her death.



Grandpa had put the gun under the mattress so the kids wouldn’t mess with it, Edna writes. But one of the kids jumped up on the bed and Mona was standing at the end of the bed. The shot hit her in the stomach. One of the kids ran to get their parents from the fields. The closest doctor was 100 miles away by wagon. Her siblings put flour on the wound to form a paste with her blood, as their mother had on their cuts and scrapes. The kids tried to put her stomach back in, but they couldn’t, Edna writes.



She must have died a terrible death. Edna knew some of the names from the Beatty tombstones, how they had lived and died, but it was my great uncle, John Carpenter, Mona’s brother, who revealed the most shocking and tender stories about the family. They buried my dad’s mom alive, Uncle John says, allowing a pause before beginning the eerie tale. Albert’s mother, Cora, had fallen into a coma during childbirth and was mistakenly pronounced dead a few days later. Cora’s mother arrived too late for her daughter’s funeral and asked that the fresh grave be dug up so she could say goodbye. When the lid of the casket was opened, Cora had turned onto her belly and pulled out her hair, still clutched in her cold, dead hands. Things were a little strained between Albert’s father and grandmother after that. Uncle John continued his fathers story, revealing an independent young man who clashed with his strict Mormon father, Albert Sr.



My dad was baptized by Brigham Young, Uncle John recalls, laughing a little. Brigham Young dunked Albert Jr. about 8 at the time, and brought him up and Albert said, Son of a (expletive). So he dunked him again. And he came up and he said, Son of a (expletive). Albert, knowing his father would tan his hide, ran into the desert. After days of searching for his oldest boy, Albert Sr. rode the 85 miles to his mother-in-law to relay the presumed bad news.



His dad came to the door and told her Albert was dead, Uncle John says. She didn’t let the grieving father know his son was hiding in her flower bed. Years later, father and son would meet on a dirt road as Albert Jr. made his way across the desert to the Grand Canyon for a brief stint as a gunslinger with

the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang (immortalized in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid).



In the 1920s, Albert and Mabel settled into what would later be known as Carpenter Canyon. But in one day, everything they had built home, corral and orchard was wiped out.



There was a cloud burst (flash flood) and all the trees came down the mountain ... standing up, Uncle John says, his arms and eyes widening as he describes the scene. It took out the cattle corral and the house. His mother had sent the children, wrapped in canvas cloth, to high ground to wait out the storm.



I watched it all just wash away, he remembers.



The Carpenters packed up what little was left and moved on, as they always had, in search of something better. I asked my newly-acquainted family about the kinds of games they played, the first movie theater they went to, the first television set they saw and their favorite clothes, and gathered my notes for the next step, tracing the lineage through a database.



After many attempts to match a network of names, a spouse finally connects to a great-grandfather. All of those names collected from books and telephone calls line up as a pedigree, family, chart rolls out on the computer screen to end at my great-grandmother Mabel’s birth in Virginia City, Mont. The Carpenters legacy continues as their scattered offspring begin to find each other. Other leads sprout, filling family holes as we shape the rich tapestry of our shared past.



February 06, 2001 Kimberley McGee



Kimberely McGee is a nationally published freelance writer from Las Vegas, NV that has extensive connections with local historians and subjects.



Published U.S. Legacies June 2004
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