52 Ancestors 2026: A Family Pattern – The Great Convergence!

 

History may not repeat, but it often rhymes. In my genealogy research, I’ve noticed recurring themes—shared Reformed Protestant faith, the abundance of Davids in my Cossart/Cossairt/Cassatt line—but the most prominent pattern is migration.

Since the early 1600s, my ancestors from various European countries crossed the Atlantic to the New World for many reasons, from escaping persecution to seeking opportunity. I continue to be amazed that my family lines were present at the founding of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts Bay Colony, and New Netherland, as well as in the early years of William Penn’s Province of Pennsylvania. From these footholds, and from other colonial settlements, they began to look beyond the eastern seaboard toward lands that were opening up—at least from the settlers’ perspective—while already inhabited by Indigenous peoples.

Thus began the westward migrations of my ancestral families. New England lines moved into New York and then on to Ohio or Indiana. Mid-Atlantic families migrated into the Appalachian regions of Pennsylvania and beyond into Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois. Southern branches traveled through Kentucky and Tennessee. One line even set out along the Oregon Trail—though my ancestor, interestingly, was left behind.

By the time of the Civil War, certain patterns had begun to emerge. Several families—such as the Younts, Mayfields, Maddoxes, and Currys (more on them next week—stay tuned!)—had settled in Missouri, from the southeastern region to the north-central part of the state. The Maddox and Curry families eventually established themselves in Vernon County and were among the earliest settlers in southwest Missouri, an area that would soon be torn apart by the guerrilla wars. Meanwhile, other branches of the family were still living in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

The war, however, reshaped these patterns. Afterward, the prairies of southwestern Missouri opened further for settlement, and many of these eastern and midwestern families continued their westward movement, ultimately converging in Barton County by around 1870. There, they put down roots—farming the land and building communities that would endure for generations.

Regardless of their sympathies during the war—Union, Confederate, or simply a desire to avoid the conflict altogether—these families eventually came together. The descendants of English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss immigrants blended into a uniquely American lineage, rich with shared history.

In a nation that continues to grow more diverse and multicultural, we are all part of this ongoing story—from Indigenous peoples to colonial settlers to modern immigrants, and everyone in between. What unites us is not just our origins, but the ideals that continue to bind us together.

52 Ancestors 2026: Changed My Thinking – Or, Thinking More About the Past

 

I wrote earlier about my grandfather, Stephen Reed, who had a troubling past—leaving his young family for one woman and then another. I reflected on his complicated journey and the family he left behind.

I have not researched the life of my paternal grandfather, Virgil Cassatt, as deeply, but I know he struggled with drinking and was not a particularly successful farmer. According to family lore, his father, David, had done well enough to provide land for his three sons, but they eventually squandered their inheritance. Virgil certainly started off reasonably well. In the 1910 census he was farming in Barton County, Missouri, but over the next six years or so he tried farming farther west—apparently in Idaho (where one of my uncles was born) and in New Mexico (where my father was born). Note to self: it’s probably time to start looking up land records in these places.

But sometimes I begin to wonder. Although I cannot excuse their failings or the hardships their families endured, I find myself looking more closely at the times they lived in and the pressures they may have faced. Farming has always had its ups and downs, subject to the vagaries of weather and market conditions that can make or break a livelihood. We often remember the dramatic stories of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, when drought and high winds turned acres of topsoil into clouds that formed dunes and buried houses and outbuildings.

While the Crash of 1929 and the Dust Bowl loom large in our historical memory, farmers were already struggling throughout the 1920s. Demand for farm products grew during World War I, driving prices upward, but beginning in 1920 those prices collapsed, leading to declining incomes and falling land values.

Looking at the 1920 and 1930 censuses, we find Virgil and Marietta (Yount) farming in Barton County, Missouri, raising five children. The family had moved around but had returned to Barton County. In addition to the stress of moving and the pressures of farming, the family endured personal tragedies. Two of their children died in infancy, and both Virgil and Marietta had lost several siblings—three and two, respectively. Sadly, many families of that era experienced the loss of children, and it is easy to imagine how such losses added to their burdens.

In 1920, Stephen and Ruby were also farming in Barton County, raising my mother. By 1930, however, the family, now six, was living in St. Joseph, Missouri, where Stephen worked at a foundry and, at some point, sold cars. Had they lost the farm during the difficult farm economy of the 1920s? Was the death of their first son, six-year-old Stephen Claire, from appendicitis in 1918 more than the family could bear? Whatever the reason, Stephen eventually left his family.

Yet the families carried on, likely through the strength and determination of Marietta and Ruby, along with support from relatives. Ruby and her children moved back to Barton County, where Grandma and Grandpa Fast provided a home and support while Ruby supported the family by teaching school. Perhaps Marietta possessed some of the resilience of her grandmother, Elizabeth Ann Maddox Curry, who kept her farm and family together through the turmoil of the Civil War after losing her husband.

Sometimes trauma can echo across generations. Although my parents faced hardships growing up and entered the workforce during the Great Depression, my own life felt comparatively stable—family challenges, certainly, but no alcoholism or wandering. Factory work was not easy, but we benefited from the economic boom during and after World War II.

I am not sure I have completely changed my thinking, and I do not want to excuse the weaknesses of ancestors who gave in to temptation. Still, perhaps we can better understand the pressures they faced. We often speak of how “resilient” our ancestors were, but perhaps the stories of their struggles and failures were not always passed down.

After all, they (and we) are only human.

Note: Thanks to Cousin Vicki for more insight, and stories, from my paternal line.

Photos:

Virgil, Marietta, and Alta Cassatt; Stephen Reed

52 Ancestors 2025: Family Heirloom — Real and Imaginary

 

Given the many moves my family has made over the generations, the number of children in each generation, and the fact that we were never awash in finery, I don’t have many heirlooms with clear and definite family ties. Maybe one or two come close. There is a plate decorated with old-fashioned “ABCs” that my mother said came to Missouri in a covered wagon. I’m not entirely sure whether that story originated in our family or in an antique shop, or whether there truly was a Reed ancestor who traveled west before the age of railroads. From what I’ve been able to determine from my family tree, the earliest Missouri pioneers were on my paternal side.

My father passed along a number of useful items. As a millwright, he accumulated a wide collection of tools, including a formidable ½-inch drill with a yoke and side handle that can power its way through just about anything. One item he gave me was an Eclipse shoe cobbler stand (see above), said to have belonged to my great-grandfather, likely Henry Yount. Like my other paternal great-grandfather, David Cassatt—who ran a home broom-making operation—I suppose Henry “Skinhorn” (and there must be a story behind that nickname) Yount may have worked on shoes.

But there is one heirloom I truly wish I had.

My second-great-grandfather, Ben McWilliams, described a cane he had made by a German woodcarver during the Civil War. In 1862, he worked for a sutler, John H. Gotshall of the 172nd Pennsylvania Regiment, near Yorktown, Virginia. He described the area this way:

There was a monument standing there marking the place where Cornwallis surrendered to Gen Washington. It had a fence made of red Cedar pickets run in around same.

The site had also seen fighting during the Peninsula Campaign.

After the battle of Yorktown the fence was badly destroyed; but upon looking around I found a thin detached 2x4 rail covered with grass that had escaped destruction. I found a knot in center which enabled me to break in in two, which gave me a pied enough to make four canes. I gave half of it away, found a German wood carver in the Regiment, and gave him the other half in payment for his services in carving me a cane. He carved me out a cane, with the Goddess of Liberty on the head on one side and the Eagle and a copperhead on the other side. He then carved a union soldier standing up, under them, standing upon a cannon ball, and a big snake wound around the cane, which represented the copperhead trying to bite him (2 feet long.) I took it home and gave it to my grandfather, who returned it to me just before his death. I still have it.

I asked both ChatGPT and Gemini to generate renderings of the cane based on this description. 

Gemini:

ChatGPT:

To me, the results seem more decorative than practical—but it’s hard not to imagine what that cane must have looked like, and what it would feel like to hold an heirloom so vividly tied to both family and national history.

52 Ancestors 2025: Fire – The Lost Records

 

Fire has long been an essential part of human existence—used for cooking, clearing brush for planting, warmth, and metallurgy, among other purposes. Yet building fires and wildfires can also destroy lives, property, and history. For this essay, I want to reflect on what we lost in the 1921 fire at the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C.

The purpose of the U.S. Census population schedules was to count everyone living in the United States in order to apportion seats in Congress. At first, only heads of households were named, and other members were simply tallied by age and gender. Beginning in 1850, however, curiosity about the nation’s people grew. Over time, the census began recording names and relationships within households, as well as information about education, literacy, birthplace, parents’ origins, citizenship, property, and more. Additional schedules on agriculture and industry were also collected, proving invaluable to historians and genealogists.

Although the census data were analyzed and compiled into statistical summaries, the original books were often viewed as expendable once their immediate purpose was served. Storage conditions were poor, and that neglect set the stage for a disaster familiar to every genealogist: the 1921 fire that destroyed nearly all of the 1890 census records. The damage came not only from the flames but also from the water used to extinguish them. Only a few fragments survived.

For a long time, I didn’t feel the loss too keenly, since I have so much information from the 1880 and 1900 censuses, and my ancestors remained in Barton County, Missouri, through much of the postbellum years. But as I’ve tried to go beyond names and dates in my research, the 1890 gap has become increasingly significant. That census would have captured a pivotal time for my great-grandparents’ generation.

The Cassatts were well established and seem to have had a home industry making brooms—were they growing broom corn? The Younts married after the 1880 census—what did their young family look like? Hannah Brown Reed was a widow—were there children still at home to help her? Several generations of Fasts were alive; in 1880, John Jay and Hannah’s granddaughter lived with them after her mother’s death in childbirth—did she return to her father, who remarried soon after the 1880 census? And what about Fannie Knauss McWilliams, also a widow—was she living alone or with one of her children?

Other records, such as the Civil War Veterans Schedule and pension files, help fill in some of the gaps, but the census has long been a backbone for understanding family structure, guiding us toward answers or new questions. As a side note, I’ve often wondered why the Agricultural Schedules stopped after 1880. It turns out the 1890 schedules were likely lost to the same fire and water damage, and the later ones were deliberately destroyed—deemed by Congress to have “no historical value.”

Historians today are working to go beyond compiled statistics and the stories of prominent men, to uncover the experiences of ordinary families like ours. Those destroyed records would have offered a wealth of detail—insight into daily life, work, and community—that we can now only partially reconstruct.

Photo: Courtesy Bureau of the Census: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census

52 Ancestors 2025: Disappeared—The Children

 

It is not uncommon in family research to find relatives who seem to have dropped out of the records under mysterious circumstances. Yet, what struck this genealogist (and father) with a professional interest in public health is the recurring pattern of infant and childhood mortality throughout my family history. The evidence is everywhere: large families in the 17th and 18th centuries, the reuse of names for children who died young, and mothers who themselves died in childbirth.

For this post, I chose to focus on the 1900 and 1910 censuses and the listings of my ancestors in Barton County, Missouri. Why these censuses? Because in these years, mothers were asked not only how many children they had, but also how many were still living.

The inclusion of these questions reflects a growing national interest in public health at the turn of the century. The United States was expanding, and cities were swelling with people. Coastal and river regions, particularly in warmer climates, were plagued by yellow fever and malaria. In Kentucky—a major pathway for many of my ancestors—the rise of Lexington as a trans-Appalachian “Athens of the West” was abruptly halted by a cholera epidemic in 1833. As cities grew, the problems of waste disposal and sanitation became impossible to ignore.

By the mid-1800s, public health reforms were gaining momentum. In Massachusetts, Lemuel Shattuck (my 5th cousin, five times removed) championed sanitation measures. In London, John Snow famously linked cholera to contaminated water at the Broad Street pump. Advances in germ theory by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and others, along with improvements in medical education, underscored the importance of separating water supplies from human and animal waste. Cities—especially overcrowded and impoverished neighborhoods like New York’s Lower East Side—saw the highest levels of childhood mortality, but rapid improvements followed.

What about rural Barton County, Missouri? Farms allowed for cleaner separation of wells, outhouses, and animal pens. Milk from cows on the farm was commonly boiled. Crowding was not an issue, but access to medical care was limited. Vaccines for childhood illnesses did not exist, nor were antibiotics available to treat bacterial infections.

Even so, mortality among children was a reality. Many of the older mothers among my ancestors lost between one and three children. We don’t always know how old the children were when they died, but we can imagine the grief. The mothers who had babies at the turn of the century and later may have seen some improvement, though I’d need to dig into statistics before drawing conclusions—that would be the subject of a scientific study, not a blog post.

The family photo at the top of this post, taken around 1909, shows my grandparents, Virgil and Marietta (Yount) Cassatt, with my Aunt Alta Mae. According to the 1900 census, Virgil's mother Susan lost 3 of her 6 children, and Marietta's Mary mother lost 2 of her 7 children. Together, Virgil and marietta had six children who survived infancy, but they also lost a 9-day-old baby boy, Frank, in 1907, and another newborn son in 1925. Their daughter Alta grew up, married, but died in 1942 at age 34 after a two-week illness. On my maternal side, a young uncle, Stephen Claire, died of appendicitis at age 6.

Today, we benefit from sanitation systems, vaccines, antibiotics, and hospitals equipped to care for the youngest and most vulnerable. Looking back, we can see how much progress has been made through public health, science, and medicine. Large families were the norm in those days, yet even with strong faith, supportive families, and close-knit communities, our ancestors deeply felt the pain of losing their children. Though some of these children may have lived only briefly, their memories endured.

52 Ancestors 2025: In the News

 

I can’t say that my ancestors were the type to make national headlines—those were more likely the provenance of some more distant relatives—but in the age of newspapers, most of them had obituaries. This obituary of my 2nd-great granduncle, George Washington Mayfield, is rich with information and stories. His sister, Polly Mayfield, was my 2nd-great grandmother on my father’s side. Besides learning about George and getting names of family members, we also gain stories about wars and westward migration.

The first remarkable story is that of his father, Stephen Mayfield, who fought for the patriots in the American Revolution and, at age 17, served as a spy in his native North Carolina.

Mr. Mayfield was the only son of a Revolutionary soldier living in Missouri, his father, Stephen Mayfield, having enlisted against King George when 17 years old. He fought through seven years of the war for Independence, his service being the spying out of the royal forces in North Carolina under the guise of a mill boy taking grain to be ground.

According to FamilySearch, Stephen was born in 1758, so age 17 would place his service from 1775 until 1782. North Carolina was a particularly important theater in 1780 and 1781, when General Nathanael Greene and Lord Cornwallis clashed, prompting the British army’s retreat to the Virginia coastline. Perhaps Stephen’s knowledge of troop positions aided the now-seasoned southern forces in their success against Cornwallis.

The obituary also notes the family’s westward migration after the war, first to southwestern Kentucky—possibly to the town of Mayfield, though that may have been named for a different Mayfield settler—and then to southeastern Missouri.

George’s own life was touched by war, this time the Civil War. His obituary records:

Then came the Civil war, in which Mr. Mayfield would take no part, although his sympathies were with the South. He was persecuted by both armies and was arrested by the Southern forces as a spy, being mistaken for another man.

And:

Outside the farmhouse on the plantation was a large black walnut tree and an end of the rope, which was about Mr. Mayfield's neck, was thrown over this in a last effort to make him admit he was the man wanted, or at least testify against the suspected spy, who was his brother-in-law. Mr. Mayfield refused to speak and maintained his composure so well that the captain of the troop released him, saying he was too open-faced a man to have a double heart.

Although his obituary notes his Southern leanings, I could not find George listed in the 1850 or 1860 slave schedules. I did, however, find John S. Yount, his sister’s brother-in-law, recorded there. Perhaps George’s interests were more regional than financial.

In any case, while George was known as a successful farmer, his greater legacy was clearly in the fields of medicine and education. Five of his sons became physicians, and he helped his son found Will Mayfield College. While records provide names, dates, and locations, articles like this obituary breathe life into our family history. We can also see the southern influences in my own family, as the Younts and various Mayfields migrated to Barton County, Missouri.

52 Ancestors 2025: Off to Work – A Furrow in Time

 

For most of my family’s history, this prompt points to a single occupation—farming. “Off to work” usually meant getting out of bed and heading to the barn or the kitchen. With so many generations to choose from, where to begin? Farming shows up in colonial times—in places like Massachusetts Bay Colony or the tip of Manhattan—in the early years of our country on the frontier, and later as families spread westward. For this post, I chose to focus on the late 1800s, when my ancestors settled in Barton County (and surrounding areas) in Missouri. This period allows me to use U.S. Census records, especially the Agricultural Schedules, which list crops grown and their value.

I was fortunate to find the Missouri Agricultural Schedules readily available online. All I had to do was download the PDFs and scroll through by township. Using the 1870 and 1880 census records, I located many of my ancestors and entered their information into an Excel spreadsheet. I then uploaded this data, along with household information, to ChatGPT to help analyze what was happening on these farms. With so much detail, there’s almost too much for a single post—so this is just an overview.

On my maternal side, the family tree includes the Fasts (3rd- and 2nd-great-grandfathers), Benjamin McWilliams (2nd-great-grandfather), S. D. Reed (2nd-great-grandfather), and Anthony Gilmartin (2nd-great-grandfather). One good example is John Jay Fast, born in Ohio in 1814. Before the Civil War, he moved first to Fulton County, Illinois, and then to Barton County, Missouri. The census snapshots catch him in his mid-fifties and mid-sixties, showing a productive and diverse farm with a mix of grains, hay, and livestock. By 1880, with two of his sons striking out on their own, he hired extra help and still managed to increase both output and value. His farming skill was passed down to his son William Marion. By that same year, B. C. McWilliams also had a productive farm, while the earlier census shows him just starting out, breaking sod.

On my paternal side (Cassatt, Houseworth, Yount), I wasn’t able to compare 1870 and 1880 as completely because not all Agricultural Schedules were available. Still, the combination of Population and Agricultural records shows that these families, too, maintained respectable farms with grains, hay, potatoes, wood lots, and livestock.

The household data also helps paint a fuller picture. With AI’s help, I could see who was available for chores. It also highlights how often families were blended—widowed heads of household remarrying, sometimes to other widows who brought children into the family, or adult children returning after the death or separation of a spouse, often with children of their own.

These records help bring farming families to life, moving them beyond just names and dates. They also reveal the larger forces that shaped their lives: the extension of railroads, the Panic of 1873, swarms of locusts, and falling commodity prices brought on by the abundance produced as farms began to mechanize. There is so much more history—and so many more records—to explore. By organizing these details of marriages, births, deaths, and residences into timelines, and then using generative AI to connect the dots, I can keep building the narratives of these families. More blog posts to come—stay tuned.