Cousins you didn’t know you had
Ben on Oct 11th 2007
Perhaps the most pleasurable part of digging into family history over the past couple years has been meeting people like Patti Johnston Case. Through one of my shot-in-the-dark queries asking some Beall somewhere if he know anything about my earliest known ancestor, Patti got wind from a mutual cousin, Jerry Beall of Portland, and dropped me an email. Lo and behold, I had a new cousin (and new relation, in her grandfather) that I didn’t even know I had before. John S. Beall was her great great grandfather, and she’s been gathering family material for the past 20 years. She said she has lots of information about JSB’s eldest son, John Lumpkin Beall and that line, in particular.
Patti is a registered nurse and has her own nursing case management business. Having raised six children between them, she and her husband are now easing into (semi-)retirement and doing a lot of travelling. When I caught up with her by phone this summer, they were down on their place at the lake in western Oregon.
I’m really excited about the first installment of Patti’s promise to share what she’s learned with me: a photo of John Lumpkin Beall. She said she thought it was cut from a group photo with two of his brothers, and that she might have the rest lying around somewhere. I can’t wait….
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| John Lumpkin Beall eldest son of John S Beall From Beall family history photos |
Besides trading nice emails and a nice phone call one evening, Patti helped me fill in some gaps about John L. He moved around a bit after the war, marrying his first wife Lizzie in Dalton, GA, then heading west to settle in Hunt County, TX, where her brother had settled. They had five children before she died, then he married a widow from Hamilton, resettled in Greenville, TX, and they had a family of their own.
John founded the Beall Hardware Company there in 1885, which was a successful concern. Thanks to the hard work of the folks who’ve transcribed headlines at The Hunt County, Texas, Newspaper Index Project, there is an online index of the local Greenville papers dating back nearly a hundred years, which proved a great source for a historical timeline of the family and development of their various business endeavours.
Filed in Genealogy |
