There's long been Fox confusion in the cluster of Foxes in the PA/WVA area. So our own genealogy work has relevance to a wider audience than Mama.
I once spent about 89 hours handcopying A LOT of Henry Fox references on Familysearch for the time period on the photograph of our Henry Fox (which Grandma Betty took when she visited her sister Louise).
Nowadays, we occasionally get sucked into some other Henry Fox sorting, but it's not so overwhelming.
There was apparently a Henry Fox...spotted on Find-A-Grave
which is for a Henry Fox (4 APRIL 1803-20 OCT 1881).
There's a photograph of a grave...
in: Old Ironsides Cemetery, Greene County, PN
Family links:
Nancy Fox John (1823-1904)
John Fox (1830-1904)
And, it APPEARS that the page was created by Lara Lynn Lane
Record added 20 NOV 2010
Find a grave memorial #610183308
But, I--Lara Lynn Lane--didn't yet have anything to do with this particular grave, page, or discussion.
The email comes with a suggestion from a "twy."
The email says the suggestion is:
Henry Foxe died 29 Oct not 20 Oct. He is my husband's ggg-grandfather.
But the link associated with this suggestion is a contributor profile of handle "twy" named, apparently...Emery Meltzer who is twy#47580380, and this particular page is re: Dorothy Miller-Hyndman Cemetery, "Thank you very much and welcome to Find-A-Grave."
Seems like some people are using Find-A-Grave for multiple purposes. When we visit the mammoth project we copy down every word found and any connections we can find, but then we check out the information in whatever ways we can with our further research.
The Lane family's Henry Fox is in Core Cemetery in Miracle Run, West Virginia.
We've been coming at things from contemporary times (around the turn of the 21st century) and trying to steadily work backwards. Trying to peek ahead usually messes us up pretty bad, but we can usually not waste the material and use it to expand our family-in-general research. Or at least leave some kind of marker on the Quilt journey to help others out.
In “Mericle” we find our Fox family.
Henry and Clerissa are in their late thirties.
Five of their children are attending school.
Reason is only six years old so he’s too little.
William’s still a toddler.
And (our future grandpa) Elias is all of eight months old.
All the children seemed to have had different ways of saying Clarissa when we sort through the wealth of records about this family. Clarie, Carlile, Claressa, Carlisis, Florissa...you can imagine the more children, the more perspective.
Henry Fox's wife, she was Clarissa Long before she became Mrs. Fox. And the children's parents came southwest from Pennsylvania. It almost seems as if they may have kind of camped out along the way, or, for some reason lingered before they simply settled a highly civilized place called Miracle Run. Until we settle into the sense of the names of terrain changing over time.
Pioneers.
We think we found a picture of Clarissa amongst Mama's collection of photographs. It looks to have been taken around the turn of the 1900's. At that time we find Clarissa on the 1900 Census and as mother she confirms she gave birth to 11children, 10 still living.
Clarissa Long Fox had her first child on the last day of December of 1854 (that was Adaline, ADD A LINE, get it? It's a German joke...just kidding). Clarissa had moved away from her parents and siblings in Pennsylvania and lit out for somewhere in Virginny with her husband, also a much younger pioneer.
I think it's pretty rare to have a mother of so many children around for sooooooo long. The birth record of Adaline shows Henry and Clarissa's residence in 1854 as Monongalia County (at least in the index).
And it's pretty amazing we have this photograph. Clarissa's father married a French lady even though he was Irish. And Clarissa married Henry who was of the German Foxes, the Fuchs. So our European ancestry was mixed at least since our pioneer days.
To see Clarissa shortly before her death we have to go to her son William's household, with Ada Jane. In 1900 Clarissa was the head of house and son William was "son." Then in 1910 William's the head of household and his mother is "mother." In 1910 William is already forty and in the family is his wife Ada and their son Johnnie Fox (he's eight). Clarrissa is 65 on the 1910 Census (Battelle) (user submitted record) and born in Pennsylvania. In some of the later-in-life records of some of the other children the children (and spouses) seemed to not know for sure if Clarissa and Henry had been born in PN or West Virginia. Since Clarissa was 65 in 1900, it's probably an indexing error that she appears as 65 again on the 1910 Census.
And it's a little unclear, but it looks like in 1900 (US CENSUS, ED74, Battelle Township (east side), Monongalia, West Virginia Clarissa has been a widow for six years. William is 32 and single. Clarissa owns the farm (see schedule 15). The children's childhood is passing into memory at this point in our story.
A lot's happened between 1870 and 1910.
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To school is the first place we are going outside the immediate family. And we'll marvel at those students trying to make sense of the world outside their homes. Total admiration for people learning new "standards."
By looking at the map of Miracle Run from an Atlas of Marion and Monongalia Counties 1886, we can find a couple different schools that the children might have been attending. But we’ll have to do some more history reading to find out if the schools on the 1886 map were NEWER than the schools of 1870.
Early schools were called private subscription schools because the parents paid the tuition. These were located in private homes, barns, and other available spaces.
By the early 1840s Governor Campbell began to have statewide conferences to examine educational issues--like why ILLITERACY was on the increase according to the 1840 Census.
Legislation of 1846 authorized school commissioners to use local taxes to supplement state aid for the poor. There had long been confusion about aid/funds for school that sometimes took the shape of fighting over the responsibility for educating kids without money for tuition, and, also parents reluctant to be labeled "paupers" so funds being unused.
By the late 1840s system schools arose in Kanawha, Ohio, and Jefferson Counties, and these were the only counties providing free public schooling before the Civil War.
"Field Schools" offered basic reading, writing, and arithmetic.
By 1850 West Virginia had 1300 primary schools.
According to the e-WVA (an online encyclopedia about West Virginia), the first Constitution of West Virginia established a public free school system. At that time counties were divided into townships and townships into sub-districts and school affairs were to be handled in mass meetings. This was a variation on “the alderman system” established in Virginia and authorized in 1796.
Locally controlled one-room school houses soon dotted the state.
The first superintendent was the Reverend Ryland White, a Methodist Minister who took the job in 1864/1865.
During this time there were only a couple schools for Non-Whites and they weren't in Miracle Run. One was in Parkersburg and one was in Clarksburg.
The average school term in 1865-1866 was 2.7 months which increased by 1871 to 4.1 months.
In 1870 there were 2405 teachers staffing 2257 schools.
641 of the teachers were women.
260 of the 495 new school buildings constructed in 1869/1870 were log structures.
Although the Constitution of 1872 expanded support of public education, segregation continued.
And making the State Superintendent job into an office in the Executive Branch of Government made the role "political."
Look's like we'll also want to read:
Charles H. Ambler's A HISTORY OF EDUCATION IN WEST VIRGINIA: FROM EARLY COLONIAL TIMES TO 1949. (Huntington: Standard Printing Publishing, 1951).
Mr. Ambler has published several books. The one on statehood movement would seem to be critical reading as well.
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