52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: #52 Leona Violet Crispen Cole Allee

As the 52nd and last ancestor featured in 2014, I'm honoring my grandmother, who started me on this journey.

Over 20 years ago, my grandmother and I spent many hours going through her photo collection. If it were not for the photos, I might never have delved into my family history. When we started going through them, I had no idea who all these people were and how they related to me or to each other. I couldn't keep them straight on paper, so I bought my first genealogy program and started putting in names and dates.

The unknown photos captured my imagination, and I soon found myself launching into the research that has now grown my database to nearly 6000 names. Along the way I've identified unknowns, met new cousins and acquired photos for relatives I never knew I had. And I also turned to scrapbooking as a way to present and preserve the photos.

Leona Violet Crispen was born in Van Buren County, Michigan, on October 1, 1909, the youngest of three daughters of Daisy Myrtle Maddox and Clark Earl Crispen. The family later settled in the Lake Michigan resort town of Benton Harbor. Leona was the son her father never had. Instead of sewing, she learned to use his blacksmith forge, work on cars, develop film and print photographs.

Her parents divorced in 1921. I can't begin to image the impact on the young Leona. She must have lost friends and certainly her home life was disrupted. Her father moved to the house across the street, so she was able to move freely between her parents' homes. Because they had a civil and close relationship, she never doubted their love for her and her sisters.

During high school, Leona wrote poetry for the school newspaper and for the yearbook. Her love of writing poetry persisted through her life, as she contributed poetry to church and civic publications. After high school she took a job as a telephone operator.

On March 20, 1928, she eloped to South Bend, Indiana, with Clifford Royal Cole, a young man who worked in a foundry. She soon learned that he was unfaithful and cruel. His actions left their only daughter nearly blind and left Leona unable to have more children.

As the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929, her father lost the portfolio he had inherited from his sister. He was able to keep his house and, Leona, living with her father and her husband, decided to file for divorce. Imagine, for a moment, being 20 years old with a blind infant, an aged parent with no job, the economy in free fall and still choosing to end an abusive marriage. Her strength amazes me.

Leona decided about 1931 to leave the cold of Michigan and move to the warmth of California. Following the famous Route 66, she miscalculated a bit. She ran out of money and gas in the Northern Arizona town of Kingman. With her daughter, she lived under a bridge and in their car while she looked for some way to support them.

Her photography experience was her salvation. The old man who ran the local photography studio wanted to retire, so he hired her and she eventually was able to take over the business. However, she lived day-to-day and struggled through two more bad marriages and divorces during the Depression years. She married Everett Melvin "Jack" Stormer in 1932 and James Robert "Jim Bob" Turner in 1940.

About 1935, Leona had to place her daughter in boarding school at the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind in Tucson. She left Kingman behind and relocated to be near her daughter. World War II found her fixing airplanes and later working at the ration board.

On December 20, 1941, she married Fayette Franklin "Fate" Allee, her daughter's math teacher and, as a family, they built a stable life. After the war she found a secretarial job in the Tucson school district, where she worked until retirement.

Template and elements from Weekend at Home by  Kate Hadfield for Digital Scrapper, 2014

Leona cared for her mother in her final years, as well as helping her sisters care for their father during his decline. She was a nurturing person who also raised a nearly blind daughter and married a nearly blind man. Her kind, loving, fun and generous spirit was an anchor for our family throughout her life.

She was diagnosed with both breast cancer and skin cancer in the final few years of her life. Gardening in the hot Arizona sun for many years was the likely cause of the skin cancer that took her arm in 1997.

We invited family, neighbors and friends to help us celebrate her 90th birthday at her Oklahoma retirement center in October of 1999. She had a blast being the birthday girl.

The cancer took her from us on February 13, 2001. She was buried with her husband and her mother in South Lawn Memorial Park in Tucson.

As Leona's choices shaped her life, they affect her family to this day. Her descendants are an Arizona family because she stopped and stayed in Kingman. Her photographic experience became a life-long passion, leading to the vast collection of photographs, negatives and slides that came to me at her death. It is directly due to her choices that I am a scrapbooker and genealogy buff. And, of course, because of those hobbies, this blog exists.

So ends the series, 52 Ancestors in the 52 weeks of 2014. Please join me at Murder at Mauvaisterre Creek, as I share the story of the murder of Leona's great-grandfather.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: #50 Daisy Myrtle Maddox

I don't remember my great-grandmother, Daisy Myrtle Maddox Crispen Hull Votaw O'Neil, who died while I was just a toddler. It was she who passed on the family legends to her daughters, who told them to me. Her wonderful, but unlabelled, collection of old photographs started my journey into the past.

Daisy was born on February 16, 1878, in Morgan County, Illinois. Her parents, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Estella Lake and Joseph Allen "Al" Maddox joined a wagon train within the next couple of years and relocated in Kansas, where three more girls and one boy joined the family. Lizzie was a milliner and trained Daisy in the art of making hats.

In 1893, when Daisy was 15, the last Oklahoma land run enticed her father, who was successful in claiming 160 acres of land not far from Enid, Oklahoma Territory. The family moved into a soddie, a sod house, cut into a hillside, while waiting for Al to build a permanent house.

Daisy was tasked with watching the younger children when her parents went to visit family or to take care of business. One day a rattlesnake hid under a chest of drawers. The children were terrified and poor Daisy had to find a way to kill the snake. I believe she used a shovel after sliding the dresser away. I can't imagine being that brave as a teenager.

Daisy had dark eyes, long black hair and an olive complexion, indicators of her Native American heritage. The blacksmith Clark Earl Crispen who lived a few miles away was enamored of her looks. The 32-year-old Clark wooed the 17-year-old and married her on October 2, 1895, in Enid. Daisy's father had died about six months before and it may be that she was looking for an escape from her mother's home.

Daisy was a farm girl and soon found herself tending the home, working the farm and teaching her city-slicker husband the many things he didn't know about farming. At one point she grew frustrated and walked home to her mother's house. Lizzie told her that she had to lie in the bed she had made and sent her right back home to Clark.

Clark and Daisy had two daughters born on the farm, near Meno: Effie and Esstella. Eventually, Clark decided that farming was not what he wanted to do. He leased his farm to Daisy's brother, Archie, and the family joined his mother in the Lake Michigan resort area near Benton Harbor, Michigan. Clark went to work at one of the many manufacturing facilities in the area. A third daughter, Leona, was born to Daisy and Clark in Van Buren County, Michigan, before the family settled in Benton Harbor.

Template and elements from Oopsie Daisy, ClubScrap

Daisy grew tired of Clark's tendency to put people ahead of financial security for the family. She divorced him in 1921, after the two older girls were married. Over the years, she worked as a milliner and a photographer, as well as making quilts for her family.

In 1922, she married David Antisdel Hull, divorcing him a few years later. She married Argus Joshua Votaw in 1936, and was widowed in 1943. By that time her eldest daughter had moved to California and her youngest to Arizona. She spent time visiting them and finally settled in Arizona with Leona.

In 1945, she advertised:

If you are healthy, white Christian gentleman, alone, unencumbered, not more than 60, looking for a good cook, write Star-Citizen Box 82

Was that a veiled singles ad? A construction boss some 45 miles away responded. The two of them engaged in a romance fueled by letters and bus trips. There was a small problem: he was still married. After his divorce was final, Daisy married Meredith Lewis O'Neil on September 20, 1947, in Lordsburg, New Mexico.

One of the puzzles in my research is who this man really was. He walked away from Daisy after being married only a few months. The family didn't know if he met with foul play or left of his own free will. I only recently learned that he died in 1961 in the Arizona state mental hospital and is buried in a pauper's grave in Mesa. His death certificate shows he had dementia and give no useful information about his past. I can't trace him before 1940 and suspect he had an assumed name. I also wonder if he wandered away due to dementia.

Daisy spent the rest of her life living alone in a small guest house on her daughter's property. She died on December 2, 1957, in Tucson, and was buried at South Lawn Memorial Park. She left behind several quilts, hundreds of photos, a bundle of letters and a handful of old family stories.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: #42 Fayette Franklin Allee, Changed by a Rock

Let's play war! "Fate" Allee had turned eight on May 8, a few months before the snow that blanketed western Oklahoma, near Hammon. He and his siblings and cousins and friends built their forts and stockpiled snowballs as ammunition.

As the battle raged, young Fate popped up from behind the fort and caught a snowball in his face. Embedded in the snow was a rock that hit his left eye. I've never heard the details of what happened right after that. I think it's likely that his parents, Laura Pryor and Thomas Allee, tried to treat him, but soon had to seek medical attention from a doctor.

My grandfather, Fayette Franklin Allee, was very nearly blinded by that rock in the winter of 1913-1914. His life as an ordinary farm boy was over. A newspaper article in the Tucson Daily Citizen in 1970 reported:

During the next three years, the injury began to affect his right eye. Finally, the left eye was removed, but the damage to his good eye had been done.

Fate soon moved to Muskogee to attend boarding school at the Oklahoma School for the Blind. In addition to the subjects we all studied, he learned to read and write Braille and to compensate for his limited vision in all aspects of his life. He was trained in skills that used his hands. During high school he tuned pianos in the area around Muskogee to earn money to help pay his expenses. In some capacity, he stayed on at the school until 1929.

The Arizona State School for the Deaf and Blind was in need of teachers in 1929 and letters were sent to schools around the country. Fate was recommended by the Oklahoma staff and shortly thereafter moved to the Arizona school in Tucson.

His wife, my grandmother, wrote a letter about him to the Tucson newspapers and kept her drafts, which I now have. The bulk of this post consists of excerpts from those drafts.

Notepaper from Scholarship, quick drop page from Tribal, both from ClubScrap

In 1929, at age 24, he started teaching classes and supervising the boys (both deaf and blind) at night for the magnificent salary of $70 a month and room and board, which at that time was an excellent opportunity. There were two teachers in the department for the blind and about 10 or 11 students. There were about 50 students in the whole school. 

His parents had moved from Oklahoma to [Pueblo County] Colorado in 1926, but a couple of years before that the whole family had been baptized in a cow pond by a Baptist minister, except for the babies. He has (in 1970) two living sisters and three living bothers (and two dead). [All are now deceased in 2014.]

In 1934, he met his future wife [Leona Violet Crispen] when she brought her daughter, age five, to school for the first time. This tiny red-headed five-year-old soon won the heart of her arithmetic teacher and invited him to her home for Sunday dinner. In 1941, her match-making won out and her teacher and her mother were married [on December 20, in Lordsburg, New Mexico].

He has been a father-figure to hundreds of visually handicapped children in Arizona for three generations. Little five-year-olds have sat in hs lap when homesick and away from their parents for the first time. Others have learned to coordinate their hands by his patient, long-suffering help as they learned to cane chairs, weave rugs, weave baskets, do woodworking projects, lace leather objects, and many other lessons to help them perceive the world around them with their fingers.

Among his former students are many college graduates, lawyers, business men, administrators of programs for the blind, as well as homemakers. His present principal is one of his former students. He has taught reading, language, spelling, social studies, algebra, geometry, as well as the shop subjects with kindness, patience and gentleness these 40 years.

Although he has struggled to attain a great many University credits, he has never been able to accumulate a Bachelor's degree. Any university course is a hardship for this blind man, but he is noted for his patience and persistence. He is a calm, quiet man and all children adore him, send him Valentines and Christmas notes saying, "I love you." When they were grown and married, some have sent him the sweetest letters saying how grateful they are now that he was so patient with them and taught them so much.

Mr. Allee is an avid sports fan, enjoying football, baseball and basketball on radio and TV. In years gone by, he has worked with Boy Scouts as a Leader and conducted camps, cook-outs, and hikes in nearby Catalina Mountain sites. For many years he was chairman each year for the annual Rodeo Party or Picnic in the mountains.

He is a man of very few words, absolute integrity, dedication to his task, self-sacrificing, and accepting of all people and completely without guile, who gives of himself and between 10% and 15% of all he earns to Christian and charitable works.

After his retirement in June, 1970, Fate continued to teach adults through the Tucson Association for the Blind. One of the skills he taught was chair caning, which earned him features in the newspaper and even on TV. Over his lifetime he had two or three corneal transplants. His vision improved with each surgery and worsened with time. He was always legally blind and was never able to drive.

In 1995, Fayette and Leona Allee moved to a retirement community in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, near his former home in Muskogee. He died on December 2, 1997, and was buried in South Lawn Memorial Park in Tucson.