Leaves & Branches

I have recently been printing copies of Ohio death certificates from FamilySearch.org.   I already have many death certificates, but this time I am focusing on relatives from whom I am not directly descended (and, quite honestly, for whose death certificates I wouldn't pay).  My primary medical concern has been stroke, since there is a strong family history on my dad's side of the family.  As I read the death certificates, though, I noticed another pattern - death by train. I have known for some time that my great-uncle, Lewis Jefferson Dudley, died after being hit by a train.  Uncle Lew was the second child of Jesse and Mary Shaper Dudley and the brother of my grandmother, Mary Dudley Donaldson.  Other than the cause of his death, we don't know much about Lew.  From the newspaper account, he must have been walking along the railroad tracks on the night of November 11, 1906 when he was hit by a train.  He sustained a deep wound in the back of hi...

"We have a relative named Lulu? Sweet!" These were the words of my niece when I mentioned that my blog post would be on my great-great-grandmother, Lulu Dunn Wardlow. I first learned of Lulu when I found her obituary in my grandmother's Bible. I asked my dad if he knew her. He said he did and that "she was a nice old lady." He couldn't tell me much more, except that he remembered his grandmother's family discussing Lulu's walking a half mile across a field to her daughter's home . . . at the age of 90. Lulu Dunn was born to Robert and Elmina Shaw Dunn on August 20, 1854 in Sardinia, Ohio. She married John Reese Wardlow on August 3, 1873. They had nine children, the second of whom was my great-grandmother, Dora Elma Wardlow. John Wardlow was a farmer. The first picture I saw of Lulu was the one below, of a family gathering, probably in the early to mid-1930s. Lulu is second from the left in the back row. I had a hard time picturing this unassuming...

On Memorial Day weekend 2003, my family travelled to Washington Township, Brown County, Ohio to visit the Wardlow Cemetery. My dad was quite weak by that time, due to the disease that would take his life less than three months later. We brought a lawn chair for him to sit in because he was so weak and standing was painful for him. However, he struggled to his feet and managed to walk around the cemetery with my eight-year-old niece and me to visit the grave sites of five generations of our family. We walked to the rear of the cemetery to the oldest gravestone, which belongs to Samuel Wardlaw. Samuel and his wife, Elizabeth Nesbitt Wardlaw, moved from Virginia to Ohio with his parents Robert and Janet Wardlaw, and his brothers and sisters and their spouses. They were among the first settlers in this area and once owned the land where the cemetery is located. Samuel died in 1848. A foot stone marked EW was the only marker of Elizabeth's grave. Samuel and Elizabeth's son, Levi, an...

For several years I had wanted to begin researching my family history, but just never got around to it. One Sunday evening in the early 1990s, I pulled out my Grandma Davis' Bible. Although family births, marriages and deaths weren't recorded in this Bible, it contained notations of scriptures, poems that she wrote and likely intended to set to music she wrote, pictures, report cards, obituaries, and assorted other items that reflected her life. My grandmother was born Jennie Esther Ballein on July 17, 1901 near Sardinia in Brown County, Ohio. There is a little booklet in the Bible with a handwritten notation, "In case I should die I want this Bible to go to Jennie Esther Ballein, White Oak, Brown Co., Ohio, and no one else." The Bible was originally owned by one of her aunts. Included in the Bible was an obituary for Lulu Dunn Wardlow, my grandmother's grandmother and my dad's great-grandmother. I noticed that Lulu had died in 1945 and asked my dad if he kne...