Word of Willie

Willie Fox, Age 70

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From transcript of Lara Lynn Lane
2010: FT1SCL24MAY

Sherry:  And then she, when she married Elias she had Grandma Pearl and she had Anna, whom we called Aunt Anne and she had Willie, Willie Fox and I guess that would be William, I’m not really sure.  So Grandma had two, she had one sister Aunt Anne and she had one brother, Willie.


“She had one sister Aunt Anne and she had one brother, Willie.”

"And was Pearl the youngest?”

Sherry:  Pearl was the…youngest…Aunt Anne was a little older and Willie was the oldest boy.  He was the oldest, Aunt Anne was in the middle and Grandma Pearl was the youngest.  I think.  I’m not sure because I have a picture of Grandma Pearl with Aunt Anne and it seems like Grandma Pearl is holding Anne…so maybe Aunt Anne is the baby sister…

“I think Grandma Pearl was the middle one because she was holding Anne’s hand like she was taking care of her like a bigger sister,” Sherry recalls of the photograph as we are driving down to North Carolina and conducting this interview.


In addition to transcribing the initial interview between Lara Lynn Lane and Sherry Candy Lane, Lara has been going through Mama's photo scrapbook, keeping notebooks, and reading lots of books.

We also got to work trying to decide how best to blog our story.   In addition to logging some of our Census readings and writing a narrative to accompany the project, we've been making digital quilt pieces which can be passed among family.

We wanted to make images and texts into digital Quilt patches.

Mama says Willie had a beautiful tenor voice.  When Willie and Pearl were little, they'd have to walk real far on the roads (and sometimes ride a horse) to go to and from school so they'd sing and if it was after dark, they'd sing a little louder and louder coming up on the hollow where there was the spirit of a lady who'd been killed.  Then they'd get real quiet and walk real close, by each other, until they'd get through again, and get back home.



___ ___ ___ ___ ___ A Letter from Aunt Elva ___  ___  ___  ___

16 JULY 2011, Connecticut

This morning Mama pulled an old worn letter from her stuff and shared it with me.

Postmarked 1979 Fairview, West Virginia.

In the letter Aunt Elva tells us that her address had just changed from Wadestown to Fairview.

It's so amazing to read an old letter and feel like it just arrived...from yesterday to today just like that.

As project manager, I'll paraphrase the letter here as I read it through.

In the letter, Willie is unwell.  He's eighty years old and ninety pounds--chronic lung disease and a heart condition.  He was resting a lot in those days though he'd had a busy life when he was younger.  He'd worked at farming, dairy, taxi driving, and he'd worked for the Hope Gas Company.  Aunt Elva says in the letter, "we owned a farm until we got that we couldn't take care of it anymore."  They owned their little house, a trailer with a room built on it.  The small checks from Willie working made Aunt Elva write, "we really don't have that much, but enough to along on."

Aunt Elva was writing to Sherry because Sherry had asked to know some things about her family.  Aunt Elva was glad to write back, a little nervous (she says so), and can't understand why Pearl wouldn't talk about anything.

Aunt Elva didn't know too much about Pearl, Anna, and Willie growing up because they were so much older than her.  Aunt Elva was about two decades younger than Willie.

Willie is the oldest, Pearl next, and Anna the youngest.

"All the pictures I had," Aunt Elva's letter tells us, "were burned when our house burned January 5, 1969."  She thought her son Jimmy might have a picture or two, she was going to check with him (presumably before Grandma Betty went to visit and took the above picture of Elva with her son Jimmy amongst others).  Aunt Elva said she'd be glad to meet "her."  She'd fallen out of touch with Pearl after Pearl had moved from West Branch.  Before that time she'd always sent birthday and Christmas cards.

Aunt Elva also wanted to get an up-to-date address for Louise!  The other of Grandma Pearl's daughters...Betty and Louise.

We can make a basic worksheet of family tree research to do yet.

According to the letter, Louise was the older sister, who lived in Fairmont and who "used to stay with her grandparents a lot."  That've been Pearl's mother and father, Ida Mae and Elias Fox, Mammy and Pappy Fox.

Ida Mae's mother's name was Blaker before she married John Delaney.  They were from around the Mount Morris (nowadays in Pennsylvania) area but moved to West Virginia!!!

This is a key piece of information, but it's only hearsay until we verify the information.

Pearl's father, Elias Fox, was from around "the area where we live now....The Wadestown West Virginia community...."

Aunt Elva didn't know if Pearl's mother was strict or not in response to something Sherry must have asked..."yes, she was a hard worker, she worked out in the fields, as well as in the house," Elva wrote.

Sherry gave Lara permission to "scan" the letter and to preserve the images in our digital archive.  Here we've posted a couple pages as simple "jpegs."

Of course, we Googled "Camel's Run," just out of curiosity.  Didn't find much of a place called such on a contemporary map.  But we did work out that Mannington--near Betty's Camel Run [not an atypical name for land in relation to coal and gas fields]--is south of Metz, where Ben/Glenn Wilson hailed from at the time he married to Pearl Fox.

Mama did say that Glenn and Pearl were given a house for their marriage.  And some kind of sculpted head board that had a mess of Foxes carved all over it.

A good length more south of Mannington is the now-famous-because-of-computer Orlando, West Virginia.

We've posted a link to the website for Orlando, West Virginia in the Quilt.  We think it's a spectacular project and it was one of the first we saw about a place in West Virginia.  We wanted to model a Miracle Run website on the Orlando site, so we put that in our ambitions plans.  Really with so much material magnetizing to the project, we started to get overwhelmed.  Doing the research and the webinizing at the same time was even harder than keeping track of everything on paper.  But we worked at pacing the work and this is what turned the project into an ongoing and long-term accomplishment.  You can travel around in Mama's Quilt by clicking on some of the links below.


Yep, Aunt Elva's letter is one source of confirmation to some of what we'd heard about our family tree.

Blaker and Delaney, Pearl's mother Ida Mae Fox's side.  And of Sherry's real grandfather, Ben/Glenn Wilson, Aunt Elva wrote that she, "knew him when I saw him, but not too well."

The belated news of his death jarred something in Mama's mind, something that her mother passed along to her in the family lore...

…that day of Ben Wilson's death was kind of an unlucky date in our family.  But, it's also seen its share of good news, too, Mama recalls her mother Betty telling.

One door closes, one door opens, one family member passes along, and one comes into the world!

Aunt Elva notes in her letter that Ben Wilson played the "violin on a Fairmont radio station."  She wasn't sure if he'd got re-married, though he'd been seen with a possible new wife after he and Pearl (Fox) Wilson got un-married.


Ben Wilson was, so far as we know, Betty June's biological father.  He's the Glenn Wilson on the record of marriage we received from another relative.  Pearl and Glenn got married in 1920.

Aunt Elva tells my Mama in the letter that Pearl did make it back to West Virginia a couple times but Pearl "said it made her sick to ride that far."

And, apparently, Aunt Elva's hobby was playing the piano!  She was pretty modest about her ability, telling Mama it was one of her comforts.  Aunt Elva closed with suggesting Louise might have pictures somewhere of Sherry's great grandparents--Ida Mae and Elias Fox, the Wilsons.

That may be where we inherited those couple photographs of Ida Mae and Elias from, I'm not sure.  But spending some time with Aunt Elva today sure was just as sweet as old photographs and quilts on sofas while traveling!

2012 Update Note:
Sherry Candy Lane has sent out some project introductory correspondence in attempt to contact living relatives of Louise Hinerman.  She is specifically interested in learning anything she might about Louise's childhood.

2013:
We'd love to hear from someone yet.  Emails can be sent to Sherry and/or Lara at:
aquiltformama@gmail.com
or
nanasgoldenphone@gmail.com

__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

Mama Sherry plays the piano too!  And it's not only comforting to her but to all of us in her and Daddy's home.  When I was a teenager and anxiously waiting for a date to arrive or to hear about something regarding school Mama would play the piano.  It was her natural way of bringing the country inside of her into our very modern suburban lives.  And there is nothing like Mama's playing the piano at Christmas.  The songs bridge the gap between the 21st century and Christmases as far back as the ancient times when Mary and Joseph didn't even have a home for their baby Jesus.  Most often in our family our music comes out in church.

Being musical is something that a lot of people on Mama's side share.  Of course we have the famous musicians like Ben Wilson and the St. Leo Puddlejumpers and we found out that the musical element on Mama's side extended way back in the early Candee family.