Family History

The state of Nebraska is littered with dozens of defunct towns. In the days of horses and wagons, they were living, breathing communities with a general store and a post office–maybe a school or a church.

Walnut, Nebraska, now little more than a memory and a decrepit building on my Uncle Richard’s property, is one such town. My great-Grandma Louise Cook was the postmistress for Walnut Grove Township and ran the general store, supplying the surrounding farms with news and goods.

Grandma Louise owned the general store with her husband Ben Marshall. Back then the store was across from my Uncle Dean’s house–that is, the house where his widow lives now. Ben and Louise were in the process of moving to a new store–the store that still stands today–when Ben Marshall died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Louise had a four-year-old son and a child on the way and the contents of the general store were mostly packed inside their new house–the home my Uncle Richard lives in now.

Louise held up admirably under the circumstances she had been given. She settled the new store, bore her son, Ben Jr, and cared for her older son, who was crippled by polio in the years after the death of his father. She was still a widow at the time of the 1920 census, with her occupation listed as “Salesmistress” of the “General Store.”

Some time later, Louise married my grandfather, Orval Anthony Cook. Orval was four years younger than she, and at the time of the 1920 Census, was listed as a laborer on the “home farm” owned by his parents.

Louise continued to run the store and be the Walnut Grove Postmistress throughout the Great Depression. The postmistress job was a good, steady income that enabled the family to weather the depression. The general store enabled many other families to weather the Depression. Often, families from the surrounding farms would purchase their groceries at the general store on credit they could not afford to repay. Grandpa Orval would go about to try to collect bills and often came home with an animal or two.

The Nebraska GenNet Project has a map of the Walnut Grove Township from the 1920 Atlas of Knox County. The northeast corner of the map is a snapshot into my family history.

Benj C. Marshall, whose property sits near the center of the extract above, was my great-grandma Louise’s first husband. By the time this atlas was published, he was already deceased and Louise was running the General Store on their property by herself. Her property was bounded on the west by the property belonging to her father, Herman Block.

By the southeast corner of Herman’s property, Orval Anthony Cook (who would marry Grandma Louise and become my great-grandfather) was working on the “home farm” belonging to his father Willie G. Cook. Frank E. Butterfield, who owned property sprinkled throughout the extract above, was Orval’s uncle.

The very corner property, which extends into Jefferson Township (and possibly into Washington Township as well), belonged to Nels Nelson. Nels’s granddaughter Carol would one day marry Louise and Orval’s son, my Grandpa Ronald.

Which brings me to today.

Walnut, Nebraska no longer exists as a town–but it still exists.

This is my mother-land, my home-place. While I never lived in Walnut, Nebraska, I still grew up there.

I grew up riding north over the “Big Crick”, turning west onto what was Benj C Marshall’s land. I waved to my Uncle Richard before driving past the old General Store.

I grew up “romping” through Walnut hills, “wading” in Walnut’s “Big Crick”, roasting wienies with Walnut wood.

While few, if any, will recognize the name “Walnut, Nebraska”, those that do think of it fondly.

Walnut, Nebraska?

Walnut is where my family is from.

Whenever I go to visit my grandparents, I make sure to have a notebook and pen handy. I never know when one or both of them will segue into a story–but I definitely know that my memory is too poor to retain all the details. So I jot myself notes as they talk–or as soon as possible afterwards.

I was not-so-surreptitiously taking notes on Monday when I realized that Grandma and Grandpa might like to know what the intended “final product” of all these notes is. So I opened the internet and dug out this narrative about Rosa May (Butterfield) Cook.

Rosa May was my Grandpa Cook’s Grandma, making her my great-great-grandma. I remember the vivid stories my mom used to tell me about great-grandma–the stories of the opossums, and the skunk, and the telephone. Rosa May is a member of the oldest generation that my mom and her siblings still remember–which made her an ideal target for my probing. A couple of years ago, I started pestering my family for stories about Rosa May–and I looked up as much as I could to corroborate anything they told me. The final result (which is nonetheless a work in progress) was my narrative.

The narrative was from an old version of my website. I had to save the page to my sister’s laptop and tweak the html in order to make it display properly. But I was finally able to open the web page and show Grandma. Grandma was impressed with the results and encouraged me to read it to Grandpa.

And so I did. I read the narrative to Grandpa, half afraid that I’d have gotten it all wrong. After all, Grandpa is the unchallenged family historian of the Cook Clan. Even with Parkinson’s and some dementia, his memory of family history is unparalleled. And he has a great deal of respect for our ancestors, too–a respect that insists that the truth be told down to the last detail.

But when I finished reading my narrative, Grandpa just looked at me and said, “Some others might question some parts, but that’s pretty much the story.” High praise from my Grandpa.

I don’t have the memories Grandpa has–he knew the generations that exist at most as stories for me. And I certainly don’t have his memory for the details of their lives. But my hope is that in my limited capacity, I can preserve some of our heritage–that might otherwise be lost–for the next generation.

I’m interested in the facts–the birth dates and wedding dates and times people moved–but I’m even more interested in the details of my ancestors lives. I want to know how they lived, what they cared about, what their houses looked like, what their favorite foods are, how they impacted others’ lives. I want to know the stories–the good, the bad, the nostalgic and the uncomfortable.

Which is why I want to preserve as much as I can in narrative format. I want to create a family history that is correct–but that is also entertaining. I may be interested in my family history–but I’m not content that I be the only one interested. I want to bring the family to life so that my generation and the generations after me will get interested too.

It’s a slow process–and most of my work is in the form of jotted notes in the dozens of journals kept in my closet. But someday, maybe, my part in the history will be complete–and I’ll pass the history on to the next generation to write. And maybe, if I’m lucky, they’ll write my story too.