Category: Genealogy

I was looking again at the giant book of genealogy that George put together for Mom and found that he knew when and who Paw Paw’s brother, Joseph John Grant, Jr., married. I don’t know much about Mom’s uncle Joe, but he was a salesman for Maxwell Motors in Salina, Kansas in 1917. He married a very cute girl he met there and she died the next year, not sure why, maybe Spanish flu or tuberculosis. He married again in 1958 in Las Vegas, and died in Los Angeles in 1970.

This got me looking a little closer at George’s book for clues to things I didn’t have records of at FamilySearch.org. In his book, I was reading through the childhood recollections of Eunice Thompson Geiger (about 60 pages typed), who was Paw Paw’s first cousin. She lived in Pensacola growing up and, during a Yellow Fever quarantine, left the city quickly (maybe in 1905) with her mother to visit “Cousin Fannie” in Knoxville. She was quite well off, lived in a grand house named “Melrose,” and was well versed in family history, which she imparted to young Eunice.

Continue reading “The Renshaw House Sisters”

Yesterday I wrote about my great, great, great, great aunt Harriet Straker Budden and her husband, Benjamin Bostock. I mentioned that Harriet’s middle name came from her father’s (James Budden) business partner, William Straker, of Barbados, who was also her uncle by marriage to her aunt Susannah Budden. These people lived in 1700’s, so records aren’t that great, but church records can preserve christenings, marriages, and burials, and become a very good source of information. The census only recorded male heads of household up until about 1850, so those are of limited use until 1860. Still you can Google these names and see what turns up, and sometimes you will find a newspaper article (James Budden and William Straker would post about indentured servants they were hiring for their shop). It gets complicated by the lack of standardized spelling (a constant problem in the census as well) so William Straker’s last name was sometimes Stricker, Striker, or Streaker.

But one place I found William Straker’s name pop up several times was in a book recording the proceedings of the Pennsylvania government in 1778, not long after the American Revolution, while the United States was fighting against the British. The United States worked very hard to get France involved in the war and they finally had sent over a fleet of ships and 4,000 soldiers under the admiral Charles Hector, comte d’Estaing. d’Estaing also carried the new French ambassador Conrad Alexandre Gerard de Rayneval. His fleet was sufficiently powerful to blockade the British fleet in New York harbor. During this blockade, a British ship was captured and one of the passengers was William Straker. He was originally from Barbados, but had moved to Philadelphia previously. However in 1775 he went back to Barbados to sell his holdings, and while he was there the war broke out. Since Barbados was held by the British, he figured he could get a ship to Britsh-held New York and then once in New York, get around the battle lines and back to Philadelphia. However the French fleet intercepted the ship he was on, taking him prisoner, and now the new ambassador asked Pennsylvania to award him Straker’s five slaves he had with him. Straker was able to explain what happened and the Budden family vouched for him, so that eventually he was released and able to keep his slaves (these were his household staff and had been with him for years, so it was probably best for everyone for them to stay with Straker). All of this is told in a number of different entries in the proceedings of Pennsylvania’s government, starting with a letter from the ambassador and ending with Straker signing an allegiance to the United States and an order freeing him and returning his property to him. Now here are the French coming to the rescue of the United States and their ambassador (who was also instrumental in France’s decision to support the United States) has asked for something, so this was probably a pretty delicate issue.

Continue reading “William Straker”

One of Mom’s ancestors is Commander Francis Bostick Renshaw, who was a naval officer in Pensacola before the Civil War and then switched sides when war broke out. His daughter, Isabella, married Joseph John Grant, Mom’s grandfather.

Frank Renshaw’s middle name, Bostick, comes from Benjamin Bostock, who married Frank’s aunt, Harriet Straker Budden (actually it isn’t 100% clear what the B in his middle name stood for; it could also be Budden; typically he wrote his name as Francis B. Renshaw or Frank B. Renshaw). Harriet was the daughter of James Budden and the granddaughter of Richard Budden who may have brought the liberty bell to the United States. James Budden fought in the Revolutionary War and corresponded with General George Washington during the war. He married Frances Bispham who was from Barbados, a British colony in the Caribbean. So they are my great, great, great, great grandparents. Their daughter, Harriet Straker Budden, whose middle name came from James Budden’s brother-in-law and business partner, William Straker (who moved to Philadelphia from Barbados; more on him some other time), married Benjamin Bostock, also from Barbados. So maybe Harriett’s mother used her Barbados connections to set that up somehow. In fact, shortly after his marriage to Frances, Benjamin gave his mother-in-law a Barbados sugar plantation which she was to use as a sort of trust to take care of her daughter, son-in-law, and their children.

Continue reading “The Bostocks of Barbados”

I was doing some genealogy research on some of Dad’s family, going back to his great grandparents and working my way down those families, finding some of his second cousins. His great grandfather, John Cashin, who emigrated from Ireland to Augusta, had a lot of children (at least 9), one of whom was Agnes Cashin. Agnes married a jeweler whose parents had emigrated from Germany, named Antone Renkl. They had five children. Their middle daughter was named Fidelis, born in 1890 and a first cousin of Papa’s.

I was working on familysearch.org and trying to find out if Fidelis was ever married. I had found spouses and children of her brothers and sisters already, but if you don’t find a marriage record, it is hard to find records of women once they adopt their married name. I did a Google search on her (how many people could be named Fidelis Renkl?) and found a mention of her in a Charlotte newspaper where she was a maid of honor. Wedding announcements are usually pretty good sources because they mention not only the spouse, but parents and brothers and sisters and sometimes where they live, etc. But the scanned text of the article seemed to be mixed up with something about Ty Cobb, the legendary baseball player. Reading closer, it was clear that Fidelis Renkl was in the article because she was the maid of honor at Ty Cobb’s wedding in Augusta in August 1908. She must have been very good friends with Charlotte “Charlie” Marion Lombard, Cobb’s 17 year old bride. Because he had taken off from the team without permission and was missing games, the wedding was rushed and he took his new wife back to Detroit as quickly as possible. The Tigers were trying to get to the World Series and he wound up missing 4 home games (the Cobbless Tigers still won 3 of them). How long ago was this? It was the fifth world series ever. Detroit wound up with the best record in the American League (no playoffs then), but lost the World Series to the Chicago Cubs. The story of his wedding appears in a book about Ty Cobb here and the newspaper article that mentions Fidelis is here, also quoted below.

I never did find a spouse for her because apparently she never got married. She lived in Alabama most of her life, in Birmingham for a while, where her brother, Antone, and his family lived before he died in a car accident in 1934. She died at age 77 in 1967 in Andalusia, Alabama, where her brother’s widow died and was buried in 1954. So maybe she helped raise her brother’s kids. She was buried in Augusta’s Magnolia Cemetery with a lot of other Renkls and Cashins, even though Papa and Barbadee and a bunch of the more recent Cashins are buried in Westover.

Here’s the text from the Charlotte article:

Augusta, Ga., August 6 Today at high noon, Tyrus Raymond Cobb and Miss Charlie Marion Lombard were quietly married at “The Oaks,” the country home of the bride’s parents, nine miles from Augusta. The ceremony was performed by Rev. Thomas Walker, pastor of the Woodlawn Baptist church, of this city. Mr. William Sheron was best man and Fidelis Renkl was maid-of-honor. Only the most intimate friends and immediate members of the family were present. Cobb arrived this morning from Atlanta and proceeded to the home of his bride-to-be without delay, not even tarrying in town to see the many friends who were anxious to greet him.

I’ve written about a few of Mom’s ancestors. Her great grandfather, Alexander Grant, was pretty colorful, living during a time of tremendous change in the United States. He was the son of Alexander Grant from Scotland, who moved to New Orleans and owned a store in the city as well as a couple of sugar plantations. So this Alexander Grant, sometimes called Alexander Grant, Jr., grew up the son of a pretty wealthy store owner in New Orleans. He also seems to have gained some skill running river boats up and down the Mississippi River, probably in part making runs between New Orleans and his father’s plantations (and maybe plantations of store customers) further down the river in Plaquemines Parish.

When the Civil War broke out, Alexander Grant was made a Lieutenant in the Louisiana navy and given command of a river boat renamed the General Quitman that had been converted to a gun boat by adding a couple of cannons. It was called a “cotton clad” in contrast to the “iron clad” warships. While cotton was probably easier to get than iron in the South, it couldn’t have been that much protection against cannons. Alexander Grant’s superior officer in the defense of New Orleans was Captain Francis B. Renshaw, formerly of the US Navy, who was born in Philadelphia and had been stationed in Pensacola before the war. Eventually Grant’s son Joseph would marry Renshaw’s daughter Isabella, both just kids at the time of the war. These are Mom’s grandparents. Grant commanded the Quitman in some reconnaissance missions and was probably involved in some skirmishes with the Union navy, but when New Orleans ultimately fell to the Union, Grant had the General Quitman burned rather than allow it to be handed over to the Union. There is a 1904 public domain book of navy records that mentions Grant and Renshaw a few times (use the search feature or index since it is a pretty long book). There is also a neat picture of an envelope addressed to Captain A. Grant of the Louisiana Navy here with some explanation.

Continue reading “Captain Alexander Grant”