By Sherlene Hall Bartholomew

Halloween’s a fun time for ghosts and goblins.  When we returned to Utah, after twenty-three years in the East, it was a source of wonder to drive around the neighborhood and see the creativity our neighbors put into turning lawns into cemeteries, hollows into spider pits, and pumpkins into scarecrows or pirates. 

Falling right in step with the spirit of this season, I have been receiving e-mails from newly discovered Internet cousins, filled with wonderful, wild stories about some of our early pioneers. As some of you know from my former columns, I know what kind of skeletons can rise from old family closets. Let’s face it:  Many of those who first came to this country were outcasts from elsewhere or they never would have come to our shores.

Many don’t know that even Virginia was at one time a penal colony!  Even the pious who arrived were often forced to exercise frontier justice in order to protect their families; or, possessed with superstitions of the day, they may have been among those who were accused as witches or, worse, sat among the accusers. 

Positive “Hauntings”

For now, I would like to talk about positive kinds of hauntings that accompany family history work.  There’s nothing quite like it.  Instead of ghosts, we feel angels at our shoulders, casting gladness on our every effort, finding those who have gone before.  I have sometimes awakened in the night, conscious of a spirit of love surrounding me that I felt I could reach out and hug.  It is as though an ancestor has come to say “Thank you,” or more hauntingly, “When are you going to?”

Without exception, every Internet cousin whose heart has turned to seeking after our dead has described the process as one that is exciting and joyful.  The spells such cousins conjure up, even for us living, are definitely of the healing sort.

An Internet Cousin

I wish you could all meet Kathryn Lones Pyles—I may have mentioned her in another column.  She is not LDS, so perhaps would not ascribe what she feels to the spirit of Elijah. I, however, do not doubt that he counts her as one of those who, with such dedication, is helping regenerate the earth.  She is a shining example to me of one whose heart has turned to the fathers, as prophesied in Malachi 4:5-6.

Kathy sends me at least five and often so many as fifteen e-mails a day, documenting information about our joint ancestors and relatives.  She visits the archives, libraries, museums, and historical societies, and once they close, scans the web for any clues that might help us extend our lines. 

Kathy copies out information, and then comes home to type it up, with sources, to forward to me, along with what she finds on the web, for input into PAF.  Some of these e-mails come through at strange hours of the night, but when I express concern about her health, she describes the feeling she has, doing this, as both invigorating and relaxing!  With all this, she keeps a lovely home, cans and preserves hundreds of bottles of produce, cooks for family and friends who visit constantly, and shows so much caring for all, including me.  I’ve learned so much, as she shares her life experience.  It’s amazing, when I think on it, that we have become such friends, as third cousins who have never met in person.

Incurable

This has not been a good few weeks for our family.  We learned that my mother’s cancer, that we hoped was cured, has come raging back.  A specialist determined that Dan’s mother’s terrible headaches and mini-strokes were probably caused by a small, inoperable brain tumor.

After this bad news about our own mothers, we learned that a beloved aunt, Joyce Hansen Hall, died.  We hastened to her funeral, watching with heightened sensitivity and emotion as our cousins, with confidence and serenity, celebrated the life of a master homemaker and heart-healer.

Just before that, Dan and I had barely quit coughing from bouts with bronchitis, when acrid smoke, billowing down the canyon from a “controlled fire” that certainly was not, practically drove us out of our own home and threatened eviction of my brother and his wife, who live in the hills.  We are surrounded by mountains, but could see none of them for lack of sleep and the thick smoke—not appreciated symbolism, underlining our current, seemingly out-of-control life-watch.  And as if that weren’t enough, we learned that our favorite, if only, son-in-law was considering job offers as far away as Texas, where he is from, with thought, of all the nerve, to take our daughter and only two grandchildren with him!

My immediate reaction to all this was predictable:  OK, I now must make space for urgent needs of the living:  Genealogy goes to the back burner.  I’ll cut this and halve those.  And these can wait ‘til later!   But even with all this reorganizing for time, I still felt overwhelmed.

Driven to my knees, I finally wrung and wept out my acknowledgment to my Father in Heaven that this is more than I alone can handle--that I hoped, with His guidance, to do my part, but was grateful to place the burden I could not lift myself at our Lord’s path-worn, scar-sealed feet. 

Some day I hope my prayers will be as urgent in good times, as in bad, so I don’t feel unworthy, asking as I do, at times like this.  Still, once more, our Father’s love condescended to clear my eyes and share my burden.  Once again, I felt His abiding love and peace.   After that long session, counseling with my Father, I actually rose from my knees with feelings of enveloping peace and even some excitement, for I have learned from other times like this that our Father solves problems in often surprising ways.

His Hand

His hand became evident at once. I was put in touch with a distant cousin, whom I had never met, who offered to set up a Langford website and post all of my mother’s Langford research.  Soon I was put in touch with new Langford cousins and family stories began not only flooding my mailbox, but were posted in new cousin conversations on the web.

I met Julie, a new Internet, single-mother cousin who, if you can believe, maintains a Chlarson site on behalf of her “husband emeritus,” in the interest of her children who carry his Chlarson genes.  Julie works full-time, comes home to care for her ailing mother, and still finds energy to nurture this website and new contacts she hopes might contribute information!  Sharing some of our circumstances, in the safety of Elijah’s superintended new friendship, taught me a few things about keeping afloat in the midst of commotion (Since writing this, Julie’s mother passed away, and once more I was blessed with example of faith and hope, in grief.  During the week of the funeral, she was still posting new Chlarson material on her site, buoying up other family members.)

The excitement in seeing her life’s work made available to all not only lifted Mom through some tough days, but assured us, her children, that her legacy continues, thanks to family ties that are firming, as we jointly seek after those who have gone before.  Watching these unsolicited developments, I have been filled with awe at our Lord’s grace, as I felt myself swept through a door first opened without hands, though maintained for easy access by loving, capable administrations of new-found cousins.

There is one who has brought so much life and humor, you simply must meet her too.  Besides making me laugh, she has also, in ways I know our Father arranged, been a great source of comfort.  Writes Shiron Wordsworth, a Texan cousin I “met on the net” this month:

I have a friend who decorates for Halloween.  There’s not a sign of that holiday around my house, but of the two of us, I consider myself the one more into the ‘spirit’ of the season.  She puts up decorations.  I, on the other hand, try to exhume dead relatives.  And with my deceased ancestors (Elza in particular), that’s by far the more ghoulish of the two occupations.

Pictures Don’t Lie

As Shi (pronounced “shy,” which she is not!) tells stories about her Langford ancestors, I do have one comfort, in that we have not yet been able to prove that her rowdy Langfords and my more innocent ones, of course, are connected.  Shiron, however, is convinced by circumstantial evidence she has uncovered that her Stephen and my Walker Langford, of early Crab Orchard, Kentucky, were brothers.  Further, she got way too excited when she saw this photo of my mother during courtship days, insisting that Mom’s image mirrors that of her beloved Aunt Ina, in eerily haunting ways:

Ina Jane Langford Teagarden, 1916-1958 (Shiron’s aunt)

Ida-Rose Langford Hall, b. 1921 (Sherlene’s mother)

I had shared with Shiron a little about the contrast between my often sinking, sick terror and my mother’s matter-of-fact “We all have to go sometime” response to news that Mom’s cancer is no longer in remission.  Here was what Shiron had to say, after I told her about that:

Sherlene, I don’t know why, but I want to share this story with you of Langford grit and how it has so personally affected my life.

I was nine years old when Aunt Ina died.  She was only forty-two.  But few people have marked my life so deeply.  She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when she was thirty-four years young and given six months to live.  But like a lot of Langfords, she was a fighter with an almost immeasurable amount of grit.  She also had a faith in God that was overwhelming.  Six months became eight less than pleasant years.  She was a beautiful, broken, and in many ways tragic woman, and I’m so grateful that I got the chance for her to touch my life.

In a subsequent letter, Shiron told me about how her Aunt Ina, along with Shiron’s grandmother, Mary Ann Langford Steenbergen, had been orphaned as young girls, so were taken in to raise by Uncle Tip Langford (the girls, by the way, were daughters of the notorious Elza alluded to above, about whom we’ll tell later).  At age fourteen Ina married a much older man who took it upon himself to beat her regularly.  She suffered terrible physical and emotional abuse at his hands, though he stopped short of venting such wrath on their young son.

Langford sisters Mary Ann and Ina were orphaned in 1920, before this picture was taken.

Ina was finally driven from her own home, leaving her four-year old son behind, but with plans to get a job and earn enough to return, claim her son, and continue raising him.  But it was harder in those days for a woman to make her way alone in the world, and she was never able to carry out this hope. Ina did, eventually, marry again.  Occasionally the boy came to visit, but there were always those wrenching scenes, witnessed by Shiron’s grandmother, as he clung to her sister and his mother, when the time came for him to return to his father.  Shi continues:

I can remember Aunt Ina sitting at the table with Grandmom, Mom, and me.  I must have been all of five, yet I can still hear that deep voice, as mahogany sounding as the color of her hair.  She had one of those toothy smiles that models covet and a tiny black mole to the right of her grin—the sort that people in the fifties paid good money to physicians to create for them.

Hers was a glamorous birthright that for some reason appeared later in her life.  She was lovely and mysterious to me, forever surrounded by a blue haze, from the cigarettes she kept close at hand. 

I was being raised a good Baptist youngin’.  The Baptists assured me that ladies didn’t cuss or chew, drink, or smoke that evil weed.  I never heard or saw her do the first three evil acts.  I did see her smoke.  But in spite of my moral education, I knew at some deep level that she wasn’t going to bust hell wide open over those cigarettes.  And I would have taken on the whole Southern Baptist Convention if they tried to say otherwise.  Quite simply, I loved her, and “many waters cannot quench love.”

She died in Indianapolis, Indiana.  We were there with her at her apartment the weekend before she left us.  On Saturday night, I sat on a couch beside her, plastered so close to her that it must have been painful for her, in her frail condition.  She didn’t seem to mind—just wrapped her skinny arm around me, pulling me closer. 

At some point in the evening, she asked her husband, Uncle Phil, to go to the bedroom and bring “that little New Testament.”  He retrieved it for her, and she placed it in my hands.  She said it was the one they had given her at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, when her condition was first diagnosed.  She told me she wanted me to have it “just because.”  It was a ragged and cheap version of that good book, but I held on to it like it was a leather-bound treasure.

On Sunday morning, it was all too apparent that she had to be hospitalized.  She and Uncle Phil lived in a second floor apartment, in an old building with a central staircase that opened right into her apartment.  I don’t know how I knew that this was the last time I would see her alive.  I just did.  At the top of those stairs, Uncle Phil asked her if she wanted him to carry her down.

“No, indeed, I do not!”

So, with Uncle Phil on one side and Grandmom on the other, she started down the stairs.  The rest of us hung on to the railing, watching her leave.  We were a mess.  We should have been as brave as she, but tears wouldn’t stop. 

Aunt Ina took two steps down, then stopped.  She looked at the place she was leaving. More importantly, she made deliberate eye contact with each one of us for what seemed like forever.  I’ll never forget her last words to us, when she finally spoke:

“Now you all stop this nonsense.  Stop it right now!  I will never be far from any of you.  Never!”

With that she started her journey down.  I saw eighty pounds of raw faith and courage navigate those stairs that day.  It was one of those defining moments in my young life.  The following Tuesday, she died.

Wherever life took me the following years, Ina Judith’s New Testament followed—Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois.  When I returned to Kentucky from Illinois, I couldn’t find it anywhere.  Somehow the Bible had been lost, and I felt almost as though I had lost Aunt Ina yet again.

In 1978 I found myself ready to graduate from Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Kentucky.  I was a single mother, with an eight year-old daughter to feed and not many prospects for furthering my education.  I did well in school—maybe to prove something to myself, maybe just because I loved school.  I had two more difficult years of school ahead, but I was at the half-way mark.  I was invited to attend an awards ceremony at the college and there received a much-needed scholarship to further my education at Spalding University.  It was a good day.

After the ceremony, I returned alone to my apartment, stopping to get the mail before entering.  There was a manila envelope from a friend in Illinois.  I opened it, reached in, and pulled out my friend’s letter first.  It went something like this:  “Shiron, this is the strangest thing!  This New Testament came to me in the mail, but there was no return address.  I couldn’t even read the postmark.  I think it’s your aunt’s Bible.” 

Shaking, I upended the envelope, and Ina Judith’s Testament fell into my hand.  For a moment I did not breathe, as I remembered that this, the very day of my awards ceremony, was also the anniversary of Aunt Ina’s death so many years before.  Once again, I heard those words:  “I will never be far from you.  Never!”  I could almost hear her say, “Way to go, Shi!  Good job!”

Do I consider this a story of things that go bump in the night?  Not at all.  But it was a precious coincidence, a reminder of the brave woman who faced worse odds than I was facing then.  When things get rough in my life, I often haul out that worn little book and remember her.  It gives me the courage to square my own shoulders, lift my head, and start down my own set of stairs, however long they may be. 

Ina Judith was a Langford.  So am I.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s a blessing, indeed!

I can promise you readers Internet cousins almost as enchanting as this, if you’ll just put Elijah to the test.  It’s so easy.  Just place queries at family surname Internet sites and wait for ghosts from the past to rise. 

What a blessing Shiron already is in my life!  How proud she has made me feel about my strong and sturdy Langford bones, as they clatter and rattle their way over the “net” and into my dreams.

I will have you know that we have more than bones in this family. In the next installment, I’ll tell what Shi told me about Elza’s Langford brains.  You really won’t believe this one!