Happy Birthday Indiana!

Little Flock Baptist Church
founded by Paschal Shelburn in 1821

Today is the 200th birthday of Indiana as a State. On this day in 1816, President James Madison authorized it, and the deed was done under an old elm tree in Corydon in south Indiana almost to Kentucky.

I had several branches of my family tree here by 1840. One might have been here in 1816, but they would converge soon after Indiana became a state:

• In 1818, my great, great, great, great uncle, Paschal Shelburn, came up from Kentucky and would eventually found the city of Shelburn, Indiana. My great, great, great grandfather, his brother, Champion Shelburn, would follow in 1837.
• In 1819, my great, great, great, great grandfather George Rich married Sarah Hawkins in Lawrence County. They would end up in Sullivan County. He may have been in Indiana territory when it became a state.
• My great, great grandfather David Y. Miller married Eva Bainter in 1829 in South Bend, Indiana.
• In 1836, my great, great, great grandfather James Walls was in Sullivan, and my great, great grandfather William Tell Walls was born.
• My great, great grandfather Eli Shepherd was in Scott County by 1836 when he married Lucinda Edwards, and they would end up in Sullivan County.

Family History 17: Notes for My Children

So we come to the end of my family history posts. I'll end with a few notes on my own life.

Florida
I was born in Indianapolis in the mid-60s, but my Dad's job took him to Florida in 1970. So I am a Hoosier by birth but a Floridian by childhood. I've never really felt like a Hoosier, although the family history I have been telling is a story that nearly goes back to the birth of the State of Indiana in 1816.

I have always been grateful for the high school education I received in Florida in the 70s. Integration was never a question. My teachers taught critical thinking and the evaluation of ideas on the basis of evidence, not sentiment or tradition. I know several of them were devout believers, but I am grateful that class was a neutral ground, a place where all ideas could be considered and evaluated by the canons of evidence and logic.

I felt like my teachers in high school could have been college teachers. I can't even express what a phenomenal math teacher Mr. Pickett was. He was a devout Christian too. Mr. Atkinson taught chemistry to bring everyone along, so I'm sure we didn't get as far along as we could have. But those were two tremendous years. I still remember some of the experiments we did. Mr. Stock made me a citizen of the world with a run through world culture that included everything from philosophy to art history to architecture. What great literature we read with Mrs. Gauss, Mr. Hadley, and Mrs. Van Roo.

These teachers began to open up my mind to a world of understanding beyond my wildest imagination. They gave me my first glimpse of what it meant to touch the universe with your mind. Those moments of enlightenment can come hard and fast when you're in your teens and twenties (not as frequent in your forties, I'm afraid). My passion has always been to share that world with others, which is why my all time favorite class to teach has to be introductory philosophy.

Central Wesleyan College
After high school, I felt like God wanted me to go to our area church school, much to Mr. Atkinson's puzzlement. I don't know if I'd have been mature enough at that point not to crash during a first year at the University of Miami or Florida State. CWC, now SWU, was a very personal place, where you knew your professors and they were truly in loco parentis. I probably needed that care my first year of college, sad to say. I probably needed to mature more as a person than I needed to learn chemistry.

SWU is in a beautiful location, with beautiful mountains and lakes nearby. The flowers at Clemson are astonishingly beautiful at the beginning of the Spring. I took a physics class there and got a taste of what a big university is like.

I started as a chemistry major. A warning to all high school AP students--whether you get AP credit or not, you should retake courses that are fundamental to your major in college. Two years of high school chemistry just isn't the same as a year of college chemistry, no matter how good your teacher is.

I hate to confess that I was pretty lost in the advanced experimental chemistry classes I found myself in my first year at Central. But there were also advantages to such a small school, with only three chemistry majors at the time. We all had keys to the lab and could spend an all nighter catching up on experiments if we needed to... making instant tea with magnetic stirrers and serving mac-n-cheese in Petri dishes, after boiling the noodles in a beaker on a Bunsen Burner.

I had enough AP credit to graduate in three years. I really didn't want to, but my scholarship only covered enough hours to graduate, not to go four years. My Dad, by the way, was on the Board of Trustees of CWC at that time, which is how I really got acquainted with CWC in the first place.

I finished the first year in chemistry, but felt called to ministry at the end of the first semester. I wanted to finish the degree in chemistry too but, alas, it was not to be. At the same time, I had the hardest time focusing in college. I wanted to read, read, read with all my heart. But I would read the same sentences over and over and over and over. I had the hardest time focusing.

Sometimes you wish you could go back and help yourself out, give the techniques you eventually learned to cope with those sorts of problems.

Asbury Seminary
Asbury was to deepen a new direction and trajectory for me as a Christian. My family was obviously very conservative Wesleyan holiness. I've written a little of my hermeneutical autobiography elsewhere. I don't want to take up much space here to write of my struggles of conscience as a young person.

Let's just say that I spent years tortured over the question of whether I was truly saved or not. The preaching of my childhood clustered around a couple of key themes. One was the need to have certain landmark spiritual experiences, namely, salvation and sanctification. The other main one was the need to live without sinning, including all the external things you shouldn't do.

Given that preaching, I pretty much felt like I was the only Christian at my high school (which was completely false)... except that I constantly questioned whether I had experienced a definitive enough experience to count for any of the landmarks. In college I tortured one girl as much with my self-doubt about whether I was truly saved as I did over whether I was truly in love. I'm sure I was a little reminiscent of Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory.

College raised questions, brought up "naughty data" about the way I had grown up looking at the world. I had grown up thinking that a spiritual girl, for example, would ideally look a certain way. But some of the most spiritual female students I knew at college didn't look that way at all. I read through Galatians on Easter Sunday, 1987, and had a cathartic moment of realization: my approach to Christianity aligned with Paul's opponents, not with Paul.

It was a major turning point in my Christian pilgrimage, perhaps the most significant one of all. It was the beginning of a path toward peace. Up till then, I spent my days hyper-reflective, filled with introspective naval gazing, a regular cycle of self-doubt and psychological torture. "Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned. Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned."

There was a kind of peace that Easter morning. It wasn't salvation. It wasn't sanctification. I had experiences of peace I counted for those, despite recurring doubts. This was a trajectory of peace. It was a peace about the fact that God was a God of love rather than wrath. It was a peace that God was a God of principle, not of precept.

In retrospect, I would say that I started to emerge from a pre-modern religious worldview at Asbury. Asbury taught me well how to read the Bible in context. Indeed, I consider my grounding in IBS with professors like David Bauer and David Thompson to have given me an advantage over many a PhD in Bible who are not rigorous in the discipline of listening to the text.

Bauer and Thompson are both men of faith, but I never felt like they were cooking the books. I had other professors at Asbury who, even though I agreed with them, seemed to me to be skewing the evidence to fit their version of faith. Ironically, they actually tended to de-convince me of their positions in the process of trying to convince me of their positions.

The IBS I learned at Asbury left me with a strong commitment to letting the inductive evidence go wherever it seemed to lead. Interestingly, I did not consider either Asbury or the Wesleyan Church at that time to be evangelical (a title that apparently only 2% of outsiders 16-29 have a good impression of). Indeed, IBS at Asbury increasingly led me to look with suspicion on the biblical scholarship of the "mainline evangelical" institutions because it seemed like they often were places of deductive Bible study, where they told the text more or less what it could mean.

University of Kentucky
When I switched to become a Religion major at CWC, I imagined that I would be a preacher. I enjoyed preaching because I liked thinking. There is a certain kind of preacher, like Steve Deneff, who are idea preachers. I found that very attractive and did some preaching in college with a traveling team of close friends. I supply pastored a couple summers, mostly preaching and doing visitation.

When I finished college, I didn't feel anywhere near mature enough to pastor a church full turkey, so I did what you did in my shoes. I went to seminary. As my time at Asbury continued, I began to realize that there was also a type of minister who taught in addition to preaching. I began to feel drawn to teaching.

In my final year at Asbury, I put out a fleece. If I became a Teaching Fellow at Asbury, teaching Greek and Hebrew, then I would continue on a trajectory to get a doctorate in New Testament. I had been interested in theology at first in college, because it initially seemed to me like there was more to work out at the intersection of philosophy and God. I figured I pretty much knew what the Bible already said.

But as the pre-modern blinders were more and more taken off, I realized more and more what an undiscovered country the Bible was for me. I also sensed subconsciously, I think, that I would always be a slave to someone else's interpretations if I did not know the Bible. I wanted to know what God thought for myself. I didn't want to be caught off guard.

In a way, the same reason I longed to know physics fueled my desire to study theology and the Bible. I wanted to know the ultimate basis for everything. Physics and philosophy could only take you so far. The Bible and theology could take me to the very thoughts of God.

Between the OT and the NT, it seemed clear to me that the complete mind of God was more to be found in the NT. Also, it seemed like the scholarly study of the OT had more landmines. No one seemed to care about Matthew starting from Mark. But to suggest that Genesis had sources would bring down the wrath of Josh McDowell on you.

If I hadn't been appointed Teaching Fellow, I would have taken a church in Florida and pastored. Who knows where that trajectory would have headed. I was not equipped to be anything but a small church pastor. I imagine I would have thirsted to study more at some point. I might have remained single a long time. The Wesleyan churches in Florida felt like islands far removed from each other.

But I became a Teaching Fellow. There are great moments in your life. 1985 was a spectacular year for me at CWC. 1990-93 were also some of the best. Great friends, a little money. I was largely free of my "Am I going to hell" fears. The future seemed endlessly bright.

I followed in the footsteps of Joe Dongell those years and did an MA in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Kentucky. I always felt like, at the end of a degree, I was where I wish I had been when I started. For example, although I knew Koine Greek, my first foray into classical Greek was Greek Drama--not a good place to start. And I had only had a little Latin in high school. Now I was taking masters classes in Virgil and Cicero. It was tough, to say the least.

I also taught a little at Asbury College while Dr. Harstad was on sabbatical for a year. I also taught some nurses at Midway College. Good experiences. A real privilege.

University of Durham
My three years in England, with a two month time in Tübingen in 1995, were incredibly rich for me. Immersed in a different culture for that long a time changes the way you understand your own culture. You don't get that on a short missions trip. You don't even get that living on a military base in another country.

In those pre-9-11 days, we were those funny, loud, stupid Americans (we became those dangerous, stupid Americans when we invaded Iraq). I think the St. John's College students must have cast me in Romeo and Much Ado just to hear my accent. Durham didn't require nearly the thick skin that Oxford would have required but it did require a little toughening.

It is a tremendous luxury to be able to think freely. Durham was mostly that for me. At the Graduate Seminar, the only rule was that you be able to think well and make a good argument based on the evidence. I was able to teach Greek at the university, which gave me a stipend.

St. John's College graciously hired me as a "Residential Tutor," which provided for my room and board. I taught Hebrew and a little Christology for Cranmer Hall, a theological school within John's. At that time, it trained both Anglican and Methodist vicars. The Methodist church of England has since pulled all its training to a single location, to the great dismay of many.

My time in Tübingen was also spectacular. I lived in the Kellar of Frau Michel, wife of the late Otto Michel, and met regularly with Professor Hermann Lichtenberger. I had good friends there, one of whom had come to Durham for a year. We had been on a rowing team for Johns together, a team of international misfits to be sure, with the other two from Spain and England. Our cox was a quirky aristocrat who could have been straight out of Four Weddings and a Funeral (Sorry, Helen ;-).

The Real World
I guess I'm thankful that I was so naive all those years about how easy it would be to get a teaching job with a doctorate in New Testament. Everyone is plenty willing to take your money for the education, but it's a quite different thing to get a faculty position. The current situation is notoriously difficult, with lots of unemployed, top flight, PhDs out there. I am thankful every day to have a job.

I spent a year substitute teaching in Florida to make end's meet, living at home. In the Spring of 1997, Kerry Kind also asked if I would be willing to spend a few months in Sierra Leone teaching at the Bible College just outside of Freetown. The country was in a lull in its civil war, and he wanted the Wesleyans there to know that they were not forgotten. I was single and expendable. :-) It was a great experience that I treasure, although for me it was not without its fears.

Freetown was overtaken less than two months after I left.

On the way back, Bud Bence arranged to have me come through Indiana to have a preliminary meeting about a possible teaching position at IWU. Very ironic, the thought of returning to the state of my birth. We met at a Steak n Shake in Elwood, now gone.

I think he saw it as taking a chance, to consider me. He felt like he had been burned with a Dunn graduate at Houghton who was at the center of a controversy on a particular issue. Bence was also looking for "thoroughbreds," people who could teach a wide range of courses. He had me pegged as a stereotypical academic who goes deep but not wide.

Ironically, I wasn't hired for that NT position. But they needed someone to teach philosophy for a year because Duane Thompson was retiring. There was no promise of a second. But one led to two, then the person they hired in NT left and I slid into her role. I'm now in my 18th year.

Indiana Wesleyan University
I have been at IWU since the Fall of 1997. I met my wife my first year there. I've raised my children here. I am, as I said, immensely thankful to have a job. IWU has truly been a family. I have felt valued. I have been able to teach subjects and write things I probably wouldn't have been able to teach or write elsewhere. IWU and Fulbright afforded me two more trips to Germany (2004, 2011), the first back to Tübingen and the second to Munich.

I've had a lot of good experiences while at IWU too. I adjuncted several years for Notre Dame, which was a great change of pace. My first few years at IWU, my family was able to go back to Europe for various conferences. At one in St. Andrews, Carey Newman took a chance on me and got Westminster John Knox to publish my first book, Understanding the Book of Hebrews. That was the break I needed to start writing.

In 2009, I felt called to be part of the seminary cadre to form the first ever seminary belonging to the Wesleyan Church. I have learned more about leadership, management, and organization in these last five years than all the rest of my life. In August we had a snapshot with 470 students, making us probably the fastest growing seminary in the world, under the leadership of Wayne Schmidt.

Who knows what comes next... For now, here endeth my family story.

Earlier posts:

1. The Revivalin' Twenties
In the Year 1920 (Dorsey Schenck, also see here)
From Quaker to Pilgrim (Harry Shepherd in 20s)
The Great Generation (my parents)

2. The Depression Thirties
Dutch Reformed Past (Samuel Schenck)
North Carolina Flashback (Eli Shepherd, also supplement)
Wanting to be Rich (Oscar Rich)

3. Passing Generations
Old German Baptist Heritage 1 (Amsy Miller, with clarifications here)
Old German Baptist Heritage 2 (Salome Wise)
The Dorsey Stream (Pearl Dorsey)

4. A New Family
Joining Two Streams (my parents)
A Young Family

5. The Closing Sixties
Prophet, Pastor, and Professor (Harry Shepherd)
The Wright Stuff (Seba Wright)
Flashback to Jamestown (Champion Shelburn)

6. Tales of My Life
Memories of Childhood
Notes for my Children

Family History 16: Eli Shepherd Supplement

I've already written about the Shepherds in this series. As this series comes to a close, I wanted to wrap up my further attempts to figure out this line.

1. Elijah Washington Shepherd (1839-96)
My grandfather's dad, Washington, died when my Grandpa was still 12. Washington applied a few times for some sort of pension or disability for injuries sustained during the Civil War. A cavalry horse ran over him, it seems, while he was escorting an unruly soldier back to camp in Arkansas. He seems to have sustained some sort of back injury that he carried with him the rest of his life.

On his pension application, he says he was born in Alamance County, North Carolina on March 25, 1839. This is a curious statement because 1) Alamance County wasn't founded until 1850, 2) all the census records have him born in Indiana, and 3) his parents seem to have been married in 1834 in Scott County, Indiana. Like so much of our history-telling, I think he was giving a truth, but he got a little confused.

I think his father's family was from North Carolina in the Randolph/Guilford/Alamance County (then Orange County) area, but I seriously doubt at this point that Washington himself ever set foot in North Carolina, unless it was passing through during the war.

In 1840, Washington and his two older sisters, Nancy and Ibe Jane, were less than five years old and living in Scott County, Indiana. Both of his parents were illiterate. I don't know what they were going for with "Ibe." She is variously listed in censuses as Ibia (1880) and Ibby (1900), even Ibbia.

By 1850, they had moved to Clay County and had two more girls: Emma (1847) and Louisa (1850).

In 1860 when the census was taken, Washington was working as a day laborer just over the border in Crawford County, Illinois. On August 31, 1861, he enlisted as a Private in Company C, Indiana's 11th Infantry Regiment. I wonder if he was motivated by financial reasons.

After the war, in 1867 he would marry my G-Grandmother Seba. They would live in Sullivan, Indiana. In 1870 he is listed as a "brick moulder." Both he and his wife were illiterate at that time.

By 1880, my Grandpa Shepherd's two older sisters had been born--Marquerite (1877) and Nora (1880). Now he is listed as a Blacksmith. This census suggests he could now read and write, but that Seba couldn't write. She died in 1890 and he died in 1896.

2. Wesley D. Sheppard
Parallel to Washington is either an uncle or a cousin named Wesley, born in the Guilford County, North Carolina area, July 17, 1823. He would marry Catharine Patience Reynolds on March 21, 1850 in Guilford County, and they would immediately leave for Indiana that year.

His name, and the name of his third son, Charles Wesley Sheppard, suggest to me that he was Methodist. Catharine, however, was of Quaker background, although she married out of unity when she married him. Her family had a strong connection with the Center Friends Meeting in Guilford County. She was still 23 when they married. Although she married out of unity, a very nice obituary for her when she died in 1911 suggests she continued to have good ties with the Quaker community back at Center.

I know almost nothing of where Wesley had been prior to his marriage. He must have lived in the area long enough to get to know Catharine. Sometimes I wonder if his family had already headed west and he came back for her.

A contact has added more information to this puzzle. Another individual has a letter from Catharine to a niece of Wesley. Her name is Theresa Sheppard, born in Randolph County, North Carolina in 1843. I have not been able to come up with any Sheppards, Shepherds, or close in Randolph County after 1810, so it's clear to me that the census records are incomplete.

In the letter, Catharine apologizes for not getting to see Theresa when she last visited Guilford, but she had no transportation. She is writing post-Civil War, I suspect in the late 1860s, because she mentions that a cousin of theirs, George Washington Shepard, had died in the war fighting for the South. There are other clues in the letter that I haven't fully figured out. 

One key clue is that Catharine had not heard from "Father Shepard" and "feared most of them dead.." This might suggest to me that Wesley's father had continued west beyond Indiana (or had remained in Kentucky). I'm assuming he would have been Theresa's grandfather.

Here are some other clues, however. Theresa herself seems to have had Quaker associations. This suggests to me that the Shepherds were in fact Quakers in origin, although perhaps not always good ones. My searching of the records suggests that the realities of frontier life often required men to be less than perfect Quakers, especially when war called.

To finish the Wesley story, we pick him up in Sullivan County in the 1860 census. He is listed as a farmer. On July 1, 1863, he is listed in relation to the draft. I'm getting a sense that no one wanted to mention that they were born in North Carolina in that time period.

In 1862, he is listed as a wagon wheel maker in Brick Mill, 12 miles east of Sullivan. In 1864 he died and was buried in Pleasantville Cemetery, Sullivan County. Apparently he was stabbed in Kentucky or Tennessee somehow and died later of infection.

Catharine would then move to Linton and spend most of the rest of her life in Greene County.

3. William Shepperd
There are two William Shepperds living in Randolph County, North Carolina in 1810. I suppose that makes it simple. One of them was probably my ancestor. Both of them have two sons who are less than 10 years old. If my GG-Grandfather Eli Shepherd was one of these two children, then we have the beginning of the family tree I know.

Here is a theory. William Shepperd, born about 1780, was living in Randolph County, North Carolina in the year 1810. At that time he had two sons. One was my G-Grandfather Eli Washington Shepherd. The other's name is unknown to me at this time.

At some point, William moved on perhaps to Kentucky, taking Eli with him. Perhaps the other son was a little older and stayed behind in Randolph to start a family. He would have Wesley in 1823 and probably two other sons whose names I don't know. One of Wesley's brothers was the father of Theresa mentioned above. Another brother, perhaps named Zacheus, had a son named George Washington Shepard, who died fighting for the South in the Civil War (another theory is that Zacheus was Catharine's brother rather than Wesley's).

Then Wesley's father would also head west, perhaps to Indiana and perhaps beyond. I can only speculate whether he took Wesley with him and then if Wesley returned to marry Catharine in 1850.

Meanwhile, Eli (Wesley's uncle in this scenario) made his way north from Kentucky and we pick him up in 1840 in Scott County, Indiana. It is here that he married my GG-Grandmother Lucy, and it was likely here in 1839 that my G-Grandfather Washington was to be born.

4. Lucinda Stark
One of the most interesting theories I have developed has to do with my GG-Grandmother Lucy, the wife of Eli. Their paths seem to have crossed in Scott County, Indiana. Her family, in my theory, were Quakers who had migrated to Indiana from Kentucky after migrating there from Pennsylvania. I don't know whether she and Eli had met in Kentucky. One record actually has him born in Kentucky but I haven't conceded that yet.

She married a man named John Curtis in 1826, perhaps in Kentucky. They moved to Indiana and she had at least one son from that marriage, a Jonathon in 1832. But her husband must have died.

So she then remarries to Eli in 1834. She was a few years older than him, it seems. In 1840 they are still living in Scott County and the thread I mentioned above takes over.

After Eli died, some time in the 1870s, she goes to live with her son Jonathon Curtis from her first marriage, who is now living in Jasper County, Illinois. She is living there in the 1880 census.

5. Back to Ireland
I am obviously not sure that Eli Shepherd's father was one of the Williams in Randolph County in 1810. There are lots of other Shepherds in Guilford County at that time, but they don't fit the family memory. The Shepherds/Shavers of Guilford/Alamance were German. Our family memory is Scotch-Irish, with Quaker connections.

Let me tell you another story.

a. In 1729, Solomon Shepherd Jr. transported himself from Ireland to America by serving as an apprentice of the ship. He was from Tyrone, Ireland, from the Grange Quaker Meeting near Charlemont County. His father was Solomon Sr., and his father was one John Shepherd. They were Scotch-Irish.

Solomon Jr. would serve as a Quaker minister. He married Jane Wilson in 1733 at New Garden Quaker meeting, Pennsylvania. He died about 1749 after they had four children: John, Sarah, Solomon III, and Elizabeth.

I can account for the movements of his children. John and Solomon III went west in Pennsylvania to Redstone County. In 1790, John was disowned by the Quaker community at Fredericktown. Those lines don't connect to me.

What is curious is that Solomon Jr's wife Jane actually moved to Guilford County in 1767. She moved there with her daughter Elizabeth to New Garden Quaker Meeting in Guilford, North Carolina. She would marry a man named Stephanas Haworth in 1768 and they would live out their lives there, dying in 1807 and 1804 respectively.

They moved there because the other daughter, Sarah, had moved there in 1762 when she married one William Brazelton from Maryland. They would then move to Jefferson County, Tennessee in 1790. Since Sarah and Elizabeth took on the names of their spouses, their lines can't connect to me.

b. However, Solomon also had a brother, William Sheppard, who came over from Ireland in 1739, also a Quaker. In fact there seem to have been a number of Quaker Sheppards swimming around Pennsylvania in the mid to late 1700s.

My current hypothesis is that some of his descendants also made their way south to the Guilford area. Some of them, like the William that was the father of Eli, were just passing through. (Could he be the grandson of the William Sheppard who came from Ireland?) Others stayed in Guilford.

For the moment, I'll have to leave it at that.

Earlier posts:

1. The Revivalin' Twenties
In the Year 1920 (Dorsey Schenck, also see here)
From Quaker to Pilgrim (Harry Shepherd in 20s)
The Great Generation (my parents)

2. The Depression Thirties
Dutch Reformed Past (Samuel Schenck)
North Carolina Flashback (Eli Shepherd, also supplement)
Wanting to be Rich (Oscar Rich)

3. Passing Generations
Old German Baptist Heritage 1 (Amsy Miller, with clarifications here)
Old German Baptist Heritage 2 (Salome Wise)
The Dorsey Stream (Pearl Dorsey)

4. A New Family
Joining Two Streams (my parents)
A Young Family

5. The Closing Sixties
Prophet, Pastor, and Professor (Harry Shepherd)
The Wright Stuff (Seba Wright)
Flashback to Jamestown (Champion Shelburn)

6. Tales of My Life
Memories of Childhood
Notes for my Children

Family History 15: The Wright Stuff

My family history posts are almost at an end. Here is one of the loose ends.

1. My grandfather, Harry Shepherd, lost his mother when he was still just six years old. I can't imagine what that would be like. I've mentioned a poem my grandfather wrote in her memory.

Her name was Seba Elizabeth Wright, born March 19, 1847 in Sullivan County, Indiana. Her name was problematic for census takers. It's Lucebey in 1850, Luceba in 1860. In 1870 it's Celia, and in 1880 its Elizabeth, her middle name. She died March 27, 1890 at the age of 43. Her mother had only died three years earlier.

I know almost nothing about her. The 1870 census says that neither she nor my G-grandfather Washington could read or write. The 1880 census says they could both read, but she couldn't write. She and my G-grandfather married April 5, 1867 in Sullivan, just a couple years after he came back from the Civil War.

Although she was born in Indiana, her father was from Virginia (Hardin Wright) and her mother was from Tennessee (Sarah Bennet). They married in Greene County, Indiana in 1833, no doubt a typical convergence of people coming up from the south and people coming west.

Hardin's father William had come to Green County, Indiana by 1830, bringing Hardin with him. The Wright family had lived in Grayson County, Virginia for several generations before that time.

2. Hardin (1815-1874) was the son of William Jr (1789-1861), who came to Green County, Indiana from Grayson County, Virginia. William Jr. was the son of William Sr. (1758-1829), who lived his whole life in Comer's Rock, Grayson County, Virginia.

William Sr. was the son of Richard Wright (1739-1820), who also lived his whole life there, as had his father Thomas Wright (1688-1748).  His father was apparently a John Wright, a Judge, who was originally from Chester County, Pennsylvania (1650-1736).

His father was a Thomas Wright from Connecticut (1630-1683), who lived in Connecticut his whole life. And his father was Thomas Sr. (1610-1670), who came across from Essex, England, before 1630 with his wife, Mary Cranbroke. His father may have been a Lord, John Wright (1577-1640).

3. Now it goes back in England. John's father was Thomas (1542-1617). Then a Lord Robert of Brook Hall (1516-1587), son of John Sir Lord Kelvedon Wright (1488-1551). This John rose in the ranks by assisting Henry VIII in his separation from the Roman Catholic Church. He was made "Sir" and "Lord" as a result and purchased Kelvedon Hall, which I guess remained in the Wright family there until 1922.

And so back and back in Essex it seems to go. Wright becomes Whitebread becomes Whytebrede, somewhere in Essex in the early 1200s.

Earlier posts:

1. The Revivalin' Twenties
In the Year 1920 (Dorsey Schenck, also see here)
From Quaker to Pilgrim (Harry Shepherd in 20s)
The Great Generation (my parents)

2. The Depression Thirties
Dutch Reformed Past (Samuel Schenck)
North Carolina Flashback (Eli Shepherd)
Wanting to be Rich (Oscar Rich)

3. Passing Generations
Old German Baptist Heritage 1 (Amsy Miller, with clarifications here)
Old German Baptist Heritage 2 (Salome Wise)
The Dorsey Stream (Pearl Dorsey)

4. A New Family
Joining Two Streams (my parents)
A Young Family

5. The Closing Sixties
Prophet, Pastor, and Professor (Harry Shepherd)
The Wright Stuff (Seba Wright)
Flashback to Jamestown (Champion Shelburn)

6. Tales of My Life
Memories of Childhood
Notes for my Children

Family History 14: Memories of Childhood

So with only one hole yet to fill (I'm still hoping I'll find more information), I arrive at my lifetime.

I was born in the late 60s.

1. It didn't seem so far in the past at first, but the decades fly by and you wonder where they went. You hear of people you haven't seen in years dying and you picture them the age at which they wandered through your life. And then you realize they are now in their 90s and wonder where the decades went...

Of my grandparents, only my Grandpa Shepherd was already gone when I was born. He died in 1963. My great-grandmother Rich was still alive for a year (d. 1967), but I of course don't remember her. I was a surprise to my parents, my next oldest sister is 8 years older. And all those before me were girls. My Dad used to sing a song to me as a child, "Kenny's my boy. He's the only boy I've got. All my other boys are girls. Kenny's my boy."

For the first years of my life, barely enough to have any memories, we lived on the northern outskirts of Indianapolis. The area is now well developed, except there is a bit of horse farm hiding on the south side of Carmel near our house on Preston Drive, just off College Ave. There's an artesian well somewhere up there. My Dad used to walk with me to the fire hydrant at the turn into the neighborhood off College Ave. I'm sure our talks at 3 and 4 years old were profound. :-)

2. We attended Northside, which would eventually move out to the suburbs and become Trinity Wesleyan on Allisonville Road. My Uncle Paul worked hard in the transition around the year 1980, when he died of a damaged heart. My last memory of him is him mowing waist high grass at the site where Trinity was going to go... with a push mower... knowing he had a damaged heart. He is buried across the street.

He was the favorite uncle of most of us. For me, it was the fact that he let me drive his riding mower. I loved his house and property on Highland Dr., just off of 106th Street. My wife and I actually found a house here in Marion that is modeled on exactly the same floor plan. I wanted to buy it when we were house shopping, but for some reason my wife wasn't as struck as I was. :-)

Uncle Paul had this large back yard that ended in woods with a stream. He was the gentlest of souls, never a harsh word, dipped in the River Patience by his father as a child. He could quote poetry, I remember.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1980, he was taking a nap on the couch after the large meal, suddenly sat up, and he was gone. I was a Freshman in high school, first semester.  and I remember that I had to study for an American History test over the Civil War during the trip. I remember there was still just a little trace of snow on the ground when we got to Indiana.

I could not really remember seeing snow, since we had lived in Florida for almost 10 years by then. There was that one strange day in 1974 in Fort Lauderdale when a few flakes fell and we all rushed out of class to see it.

3. His mother, Grandma Shepherd, had only died the previous year in 1979. She died in August. It seems like my family has a propensity to leave this world in August, around the time of Frankfort Camp Meeting. It's like August 1 is the beginning of our calendar, the center of the temporal universe. My Uncle Maurice on my Dad's side died in August around the time of camp meeting. Aunt Frances died just after camp meeting. My Dad's Uncle Calvin died around less than a month before camp meeting.

Grandma Shepherd was clearly in her twilight for the little over a decade of my life's beginning. When my mother was in high school, my grandparents had bought a house off of the Frankfort Pilgrim campus, across the railroad tracks, across a flood plane. Their house was severely damaged in a Flood I know at one point. I forget exactly when but I know a lot was lost.

My grandmother had a small house built behind their main house, maybe when my grandfather died, so that she could rent out the house in front and have an income. The two story house in front has long since been torn down and the little house in the back looks condemned. I have memories of my grandfather's sister Nora having a silver trailer parked next to the little house in the back.

Nora was born in 1880, which I always thought was cool, how old she was. I told my mother once that Aunt Nora's skin looked like the wrinkly under-crust of a chicken pot pie. My grandmother and Aunt Nora spent some months with us down in Florida when I was young. During that time, Nora inspired me to memorize all the Presidents of the US in order.

She was very patriotic, a militant Republican. I suppose that makes sense of someone whose father went by Washington (at least the patriotic part). She probably wouldn't have known it, but she actually had a distant cousin named George Washington Shepherd who died fighting for the South in the Civil War. Of course her Dad fought for the north and died when she was only 16. I can't imagine her having any sympathy for the South.

She had an old frame with pictures of the three presidents who were assassinated at the time it was made--Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, and James Garfield. Obviously the frame was made before JFK was assassinated.

4. I have a vague memory of Grandma Shepherd having a walker, maybe when I was 3 or 4 years old, but she was soon in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. I remember her and a friend named Mrs. Royer sitting in wheelchairs at Frankfort Camp Meeting. I remember Mrs. Royer because she didn't pull her facial hairs. :-)

Frankfort Camp was our yearly vacation. Most families take vacations to the beach or to Hawaii or some fun place. There were a couple like that, especially before my sisters were married. I know there was a trip to Pike's Peak in the 50s. My Grandpa Shepherd was nervous by how fast my Dad was driving. But then again, in his travels in the 30s the cars only went 30 miles an hour.

There were some trips to Florida right before General Motors moved my Dad to Fort Lauderdale. There was a trip to Key West in there somewhere. I remember catching cowfish somewhere in the string of islands leading down to Key West. One of my recurring dreams as a child/teen was the seven mile bridge running out of bridge or of the bridge slowly submerging into the ocean.

But for most of my life, all my Dad's vacation time was used up by church related activities. There was vacation time used for General Conference every four years (my Dad was a delegate every conference of The Wesleyan Church until the last one of his life in Orlando). There was vacation time for District Conference. There was vacation time for Winter Camp at Brooksville, Florida. And there was vacation time for Frankfort Camp.

My grandmother, I believe, gave my parents their red cottage on the camp grounds. Uncle Paul had a grey one about three cottages north of ours. One of my sisters leases it now. It was a 99 year lease.

I have nice memories of the camp ground as a boy. I remember the old boy's dorm being condemned. A couple boys and I climbed in a window and looked around. Then there was the old chapel. There was a walk in refrigerator in the basement and various other places you could sneak into. Then there was the admin building. It still had jars of things in formaldehyde when we explored it.

While my Grandma was in Florida, I offered to build her an airplane to fly her back to Indiana. I actually started nailing boards together. I wouldn't let anyone tell me that I couldn't build a plane.

I did that a lot as a child. "Dad, I see this ad for books to tell you how to raise worms and sell them for money." My Dad patiently bought me those worm books (even though they didn't really use worms back then for fishing in Florida). He even bought me a tub. But then I moved on to something else. There were all sorts of ideas in the ads in the back of Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics.

My grandmother had some sort of a biopsy done on her in Florida and Mom always thought that her mind was never really the same after that. She went back to Indiana and spent her final years in a nursing home in Rossville. If I remember correctly, my Uncle Paul visited her in the morning and my Aunt then came around noon and she was gone, August 3, 1979.

5. My Dad's parents had died a few years earlier. Grandpa Schenck died in 1974. I remember laughing and laughing with my youngest cousins on the front porch of his house on DeQuincy. I remember feeling a little guilty, and perhaps someone suggesting we be a little more respectful. Grandpa had a great coin collection. My Grandma Schenck died in 1977. I've mentioned quite a bit about both of them in earlier posts.

It occurs to me that I have not mentioned an unfortunate story that happened there with a grandchild in the 50s, I believe. My oldest uncle had married a girl even before he lived in the apartment next to my parents on Olny Street. They had two children together and then she left him in the mid-1940s, taking the kids with her. He would remarry and have a great marriage for over fifty years thereafter.

I hate that, in that segment of the Pilgrim world, he carried the stigma of being a divorced and remarried man his whole life, even though she had left him, even though he didn't remarry until after she had. Some thought he was committing adultery every day he lived with his second wife, even after he had been married to her over 50 years. This is just one example of the legalism to which I referred last week.

His daughter by that first wife went on to marry and have a child. One time when they were visiting my grandparents, that little girl ran out unexpectedly into the street from between two cars. She was hit and killed by a car going down the street, right there in front of my grandparents' house.

6. Even though our trips almost always had a church connection, there were some great trips. Take the 1976 Wesleyan General Conference in Wichita, Kansas. At that time, two of my sisters were working at "Brainerd Indiana School" in South Dakota. So we took a little time to drive through the Badlands (I failed to stay awake, I'm afraid). We visited Mt. Rushmore and the Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out the next year, with the Tower fresh in memory (of course we didn't go to movies, so I didn't get to see the movie until years later... movies always came out on TV on Sunday nights... and we didn't watch TV on Sunday ;-)

A couple years later, my second oldest sister had moved to the Philippines to be a missionary teacher there. My father, mother, and I went to visit her. It was a great memory of Manila, Rosales, Sinipsip, and Bagio City, not to mention Tikka lizards, Pandesal bread, squatters' shacks, a stop at Quam, and a sleepy stop at Seoul airport.

7. The merger of the Pilgrim Holiness Church with the Wesleyan Methodists in 1968 was a big deal for my extended family. Some Pilgrims thought of merger as movement toward a one world religion. They thought the Wesleyan Methodists were liberal. Of course there were Wesleyan Methodists who opposed the merger as well, probably for the same reasons.

But my grandfather Schenck didn't go with the merger, along with two of my uncles on his side. Another uncle was with the Nazarenes for a while. Then my Dad and his older brother stayed with the new denomination.

8. In a world without video games, without internet, when cartoons were only until noon on a Saturday morning, life was pretty boring. There were neighborhood friends. There were trees. You could dig a hole in the back yard.

Mostly there were encyclopedias, books on the presidents, and the Lincoln Library (it gave pi to a crazy number of digits). The nearby grocery store (Grand Union) sold a new volume of Funk and Wagnall's each month and Dad bought me the whole set over the course of a couple years.

1. The Revivalin' Twenties
In the Year 1920 (Dorsey Schenck, also see here)
From Quaker to Pilgrim (Harry Shepherd in 20s)
The Great Generation (my parents)

2. The Depression Thirties
Dutch Reformed Past (Samuel Schenck)
North Carolina Flashback (Eli Shepherd)
Wanting to be Rich (Oscar Rich)

3. Passing Generations
Old German Baptist Heritage 1 (Amsy Miller, with clarifications here)
Old German Baptist Heritage 2 (Salome Wise)
The Dorsey Stream (Pearl Dorsey)

4. A New Family
Joining Two Streams (my parents)
A Young Family

5. The Closing Sixties
Prophet, Pastor, and Professor (Harry Shepherd)
The Wright Stuff (Seba Wright)
Flashback to Jamestown (Champion Shelburn)

6. Tales of My Life
Memories of Childhood
Notes for my Children

Family History 13: A Young Family

1. My parents married in 1947. My oldest sister was born the next year. Their first years of marriage, they lived in a store building my grandfather Dorsey owned on Olney Street in Indianapolis. There were two three room apartments upstairs and, if you were looking at the store front from the street, my Mom and Dad were on the top left, and Vernon with Katherine were on the right. I guess there was no shower, bath, or refrigerator in each apartment, although there was a toilet, a sink, and a stove.

My Dad first worked a couple years for his older brother Vernon, a pie/cake business, I believe. Then my Dad drove a route for Tasty Bread, which required him to get up at 2 in the morning. I guess he fell asleep and drove off the road once. He'd go to sleep when he got home as late as 4 in the afternoon. But that was also about the time that his Dad's meat market would get busy. He'd ask Mom to get Dad up to help and sometimes she could hardly wake him. As my Mom told one pastor, "All he wants to do is go to bed." While they were living over the store, they went to Dorsey's church plant.

In four years they had three girls. I'm not sure how long they were married when my Dad took a chance on a different job with General Motors. Initially, it would be a pay cut. But it had a potential future that could take him further. He would go to work for GMAC, then called MIC (Motors Insurance Corporation). He would become an insurance adjuster, which fit his book keeping personality.

My mother would raise the girls and later teach piano on the side. At one time she had over 20 students. She was a member of the Indiana Music Teacher's Association. My three oldest sister would become the "Schenck Trio" in their teen years and would sing at various Pilgrim Holiness churches. There was one instance where one of them had trimmed bangs and a pastor was uncomfortable with her singing--because she had trimmed her hair.

My mother tells a story about struggling over how to dress the girls in relation to standards. She felt like the Lord gave her Philippians 2:12, "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling." She felt like God was saying that she shouldn't worry about what others thought but do what her judgment and conscience thought was best.

That reminds me of some stories from her earlier years as well. There was a story I think I've mentioned earlier of a church leader who thought children shouldn't play with dolls (that was at Kingswood, Kentucky). But as a young girl, she felt like she shouldn't listen to fictional stories on the radio like Ma Perkins. She felt like she was misappropriating her time, getting too involved with them.

2. They lived four years over Grandpa Schenck's store. Then they moved to Evanston Ave, right before my third sister was born. My Uncle Paul followed them there, not far from where Northside Pilgrim Church was (which later became Trinity Wesleyan on Allisonville).

Uncle Paul must have loved Mom a lot. After he and his young wife got married, they soon moved in a curtained off place in the kitchen area of my parents' apartment above Dorsey's store. He and Aunt B. moved where Mom and Dad moved several times. First to Evanston Ave, then to Crestview, and finally to a magnificent house and yard (I always thought) not far from Preston Ave. The exceptions were the year Mom and Dad moved to Evansville and the three months Mom and Dad lived in Anderson. Of course they didn't move to Florida in 1971. I wrote much of the story of this period after my father died, so I need not repeat it.

I mentioned last week how Paul followed them to Indianapolis the night of their wedding to give them money for their honeymoon. He gave my Mom her first bike when she was twelve years old in Greenwood. He put it together using parts from several bikes. (She hit a fence her first time) He went to a pawn shop in a torrent of rain the day before Mom graduated to get her a watch.

My Dad went up to General Motors Institute to take some classes during the 50s. At one point he took a Dale Carnegie course that made a big impression on him. Tricks to memorizing things, for example (Dale Carnegie's memory pegs, IRA memory formula). Somehow, Dad got me going down this line and I'm not sure where I came across a system I used throughout high school and college to memorize lists and numbers (make the numbers into words 1 is t, 2 is n, 3 is m...).

There were other slogans from Dale Carnegie that I found almost as impressionable as he did. Randomly, I was telling my daughter yesterday about KISS, "Keep it simple, stupid."  Another quote that came from Grandpa Shepherd was, "A man convinced against his will is of the same mind still." They're like Keith Drury's Strategetics. Common sense. Memorable.

Dad traveled a fair amount in those days, assessing vehicle damage at car dealerships. He knew dealerships and dealership owners all over Indiana. In fact, my youngest sister, born in the late 50s, always teased him about the fact that he was away in Michigan, as I recall, when she was born (perhaps doing his first training with GM). She always considered my Uncle Paul her surrogate Dad because he drove Mom to the hospital.

My oldest sisters slowly shifted from the public schools of Indianapolis to the high school at Frankfort Pilgrim College. My Grandpa Shepherd died in 1963 and my sisters one by one went to live with my Grandma Shepherd and go to school there. The first two graduated from the college, the third had to finish at Hobe Sound Bible College in Florida because the college closed after the Pilgrim church merged with the Wesleyan Methodists.

I suppose it was a predictable outcome. The Wesleyan Methodist schools seemed to be better schools academically and were further along with regard to accreditation. They provided a spectrum of degrees while the Pilgrims mostly had Bible colleges. My Dad was on the board at Frankfort when it closed in, what, 1971? I know that decision pained him, but it was logical.

My Dad was a rule-follower. He made a good District Treasurer. I'm sure he was a thorn in the side of more than one dreamer wanting to spend church or district money in one way or another. He of course submitted to however a final vote came out and didn't make a fuss, but he took the Discipline, the rule book of the church, quite seriously, almost as if it were the inspired interpretation of Scripture.

3. Those were days of my parents finding their own conscience in our Christian circle as well. My Dad soon started being on local and district church boards for the Pilgrim Holiness Church. I suspect he was middle of the road as far as standards went back then. My grandfather Schenck would become increasingly conservative--or was it that everyone else just became increasingly liberal? Of course "liberal" in those circles was crazy-conservative to just about anyone today.

My family felt like Grandpa Schenck wouldn't come visit for a long time because he thought there might be a TV inside what was actually a rather large stereo we had. In reality, I don't think we had even a small black and white TV until the 60s. My Dad had clear rules on the TV even then. My sisters weren't to watch any shooting, like on a cowboy show. They tried to turn the volume down if the plot came to that point.

One time they didn't get there in time and my oldest sister ran to him before he could show up, pleading urgently that, "It was in self-defense!" We didn't watch TV on Sundays because my Dad thought he would end up spending all day watching football if he opened that door. As the last child, "one born out of season," these rules were a little looser by the time I came along, although still the default.

[I realize that what follows sounded quite harsh toward people and institutions I deeply love and respect. I hope any such readers will know that I grew up very fond of Frankfort Pilgrim College and have many good things to say about the entrepreneurial spirit of the Pilgrim Church, especially in its early days. What follows refers to the rampant legalism that was also an element in it, as well as to the absence of any individuals with advanced academic training in Bible. It is not a blight on the intelligence of the individuals involved.]

I have a love/hate relationship with the Pilgrim Church of that era. On the one hand, I grew up going to Brooksville Winter Camp Meeting in the 70s, where many of the church leaders of the 50s ended up. I idolized the P. F. Elliotts, the William Neffs, the Florabel Slaters and Daisy Bubys, the Roy Nicholsons, the Melvin Snyders and others. There were noble, Spirit-filled people in this era that I looked up to. They knew the content of the Bible through and through.

But they had little expertise in the historical context of the Bible and little if any real knowledge of biblical scholarship. How few if any real Bible scholars were around in those days! The Wesleyan Methodists had a few quasi-fundamentalist scholars (Stephen Paine, Wilbur Dayton). They could speak knowledgeably about textual criticism. But I'd be hard pressed to name even one real Pilgrim Bible scholar from that era. It's no wonder our twig of the Methodist tradition never produced a systematic theology.

The church was full of people who understood entire sanctification to be about what you didn't wear and what you didn't do. I don't completely blame the many people who left the church for the Nazarenes in those days. (Of course the Nazarenes had their share of legalists too.) I completely understand that Paul Rees, son of the putative founder of the Pilgrim Church, didn't go with the Pilgrims. And when you look at a Don Dayton, who is a true scholar (church historian), it is no surprise that he has only skirted the edges of the church for most of his life, generally viewed with suspicion. (of course he is a bit of a rebel too)

When I first came to IWU and went to the Society of Biblical Literature, another Wesleyan skirter expressed surprise that someone from IWU would be there. I completely understood what he was saying. How odd for a Wesleyan to be at a meeting of biblical scholars. I could give examples of how this general avoidance of real biblical scholarship is still present in the church today.

When I was at Asbury, there was still a little lingering tension between the seminary and the local Wesleyan church in Lexington. Apparently, a former pastor had more or less maligned the education at the seminary as something to be avoided, almost suggesting that Wesleyan students there leave it. There were several Wesleyans teaching there who predictably stopped attending the local Wesleyan church. Wesleyan professors at Asbury have predictably always tended to be "skirters" of the denominational mainstream (e.g., Don Boyd, Chuck Killian, David Thompson, Joe Dongell less these days).

IMO, Asbury has been an incredibly positive influence on the Wesleyan Church over the ages in terms of its thinking. It turned on the lights of so many to inductive Bible study, Wesleyan theology, and the historic practices of Christendom. True, some Wesleyans left the church after going to Asbury. The late twentieth century of the Wesleyan Church was full of bleeding, the gap was so great between its general thinking and just about any kind of real theological education.

But I digress. My father had a great heart. I always say that he was "strict," rather than being a legalist. For his own context, he was a moderate, which is where I think the ideal almost always lies. When a relative told him he would pray for his soul if he went with the merger of Pilgrims and Wesleyan Methodists in the late 60s, he did not lash out at the person in defensiveness. But he didn't give in to such nonsensical ignorance either.

There was so much ignorance in those days. So many Wesleyans took the wrong side of the civil rights movement. "Those law breakers," they thought of the peaceful protests. The issues have changed, but the attitudes of so many Wesleyans are the same. The issues of legalism and misplaced values have changed. But the attitude is often the same.

We mocked the earlier generation for worrying about sleeve lengths and whether a pastor wore shorts while mowing the parsonage lawn. We might think them ignorant for opposing the integration of schools. But we sometimes have the same attitudes as they did. Many still think of holiness in terms of what you don't do (e.g., drinking). And many still want to stick it to those rule breakers who snuck across the border.

What do you think? Are we still much of the same mindset, just with different issues?

Earlier posts:

1. The Revivalin' Twenties
In the Year 1920 (Dorsey Schenck, also see here)
From Quaker to Pilgrim (Harry Shepherd in 20s)
The Great Generation (my parents)

2. The Depression Thirties
Dutch Reformed Past (Samuel Schenck)
North Carolina Flashback (Eli Shepherd)
Wanting to be Rich (Oscar Rich)

3. Passing Generations
Old German Baptist Heritage 1 (Amsy Miller)
Old German Baptist Heritage 2 (Salome Wise)
The Dorsey Stream (Pearl Dorsey)

4. A New Family
Joining Two Streams (my parents)
A Young Family

5. The Divisive Sixties
Prophet, Pastor, and Professor (Harry Shepherd)
Harry Shepherd's Orphan Past (Elijah and Seba)
Flashback to Jamestown (Champion Shelburn)

Family History 12: Joining Two Streams (My Parents)

1. After my Dad died, I wrote pretty extensively about his life. He was born in Thorntown in 1924 at his Dad's first church plant (I think it was a plant). Although Dorsey Schenck planted churches around some, I think they mostly lived in Indianapolis. I know Interstate 65 now goes over one of the houses where they lived (Parker Ave?). He went to School 51, if I remember correctly, and he graduated from Arsenal Tech High in 1943.

He would have liked to go out for track, even went to the first day of practice once, I believe, but he had to quit because he had to work in his Dad's store. I also remember him talking about how, in earlier days, his younger brother Maurice would get into trouble in class and he would be embarrassed when his Dad would show up at school in his butcher's apron.

He was impressed with his Dad's strength. I guess in those days Dorsey could pull an engine out of a car with a pulley and fix about anything mechanical of that sort. I think he could lift a whole side of beef.

Theirs was of course a very conservative home, even for that day. They did not go to motion pictures. They did not dance (Dad even sat out a square dance at school, if I remember correctly). They used a spinner to play Monopoly rather than dice (the "appearance" of evil). There was such a concern not to lie, that Eugene would not say "Lotto" but instead, "Must I have Lotto?" They did not smoke, long before doctors convinced the public it was bad for our health.

I guess they would try to stay up till midnight on New Year's Eve, which was hard. Sometimes Eugene would sleepily ask someone to spin for him when it was his turn.

2. My mother was born in Greenfield in 1926. Her father Harry at that time was pastoring an established Pilgrim Holiness Church. When she was less than a year old, they moved to Greenwood. From there he would go to teach at Frankfort Pilgrim College. His first stint there was from 1927-32.

I've mentioned some of my mother's early memories of those years here and there already. I've also mentioned the trip they took to Kernersville, North Carolina after FPC closed. The roads through Kentucky and Tennessee were of course gravel in the 1930s and the car could only go 25 or 30 miles per hour. I mentioned them stopping for the night and the car not having any windows. So a farmer invited them in for the night because of rattlesnakes. My mom remembers her mom jumping out with a block of wood to make sure the car didn't roll down the hill when the brakes weren't working well.

Kernersville didn't take that time, so he pastored in Bacova, Virginia for a year. Then they went back to Kingswood, Kentucky. Then to southern Indiana. There are more details scattered in previous posts. Finally, he would return to Frankfort when it reopened in 1939.

One story I think from southern Indiana is a particularly cold day when my mother forgot to take her gloves with her to school. On her walk home, there were two ways she could come. Unfortunately, her father took the opposite way and her hands became almost frostbite. When they finally met up, he took her to a nearby house to run hot water over her hands.

She also remembers a couple coming to her Dad to ask his forgiveness for, I believe, cheating him out of some property in Sullivan, if I remember correctly. She was told to leave the room for the discussion but I guess listened in a little anyway.

3. In the early forties, my Dad was in high school at Arsenal Tech (1939-43). He was set to go to Drafting school to become a draftsman when he himself was drafted into World War 2. I worked through some of his war training and memories in other posts.

My mother was at Frankfort Bible College from 1942-46. The President of the Bible College at that time (I forget the name offhand) thought she might be able to teach Greek and, I think, may have had her teach the class some when he was busy. I've heard her talk about a final in preaching when they picked a piece of paper out of a hat and then had to preach extemporaneously on some topic. I believe she outlined some book on the history of education to complete her credits for graduation.

She was the valedictorian of her class. I forget the precise topic of her graduation speech (have to get a reminder from her on that). I think she may have had her Dad in class in high school for a class on household safety. She remembers, for example, a lesson on not leaving things on the stairs so you won't trip. :-)

My Dad's sister Frances was also attending Frankfort and invited my Mom to come help Dorsey's church plant with piano. I forget who gave my mother piano lessons to begin with, but she can hear a tune and find her way to the right chords. I forget what the method is called (a lot of fill-ins today, I'm afraid). You make an octave of the melody with both hands and then fill in the chords and move with the flow. Over the years growing up, Mom could always find her way to the right key when a pastor would start singing spontaneously.

My mother spied a picture of my Dad in his army suit on one of these Sunday visits and the thought flew through her head, "I wonder if I would ever date him?" She would of course meet him when he returned from the war in 1946. His opening salvo wasn't particularly subtle, "A lot of guys my age are getting married these days and I wondered if you would go out on a date with me."

My mother was so unaccustomed to eating at restaurants that she actually picked the tip up to take to him the first time, thinking he had forgotten it. He proposed on the spot when he realized she would feel guilty to kiss him if they weren't destined to get married. At that time he was working, driving a truck for his older brother Vernon, who had started his own business. It required Dad to get up early in the morning, so I guess he actually slept through quite a bit of their dates together.

My mother's family didn't have a phone, so I guess he surprised her one day in late December 1946 on his way to his grandmother's funeral in Camden (Salome Miller). I guess she was embarrassed at how she and the house looked. By this time, I believe her parents were living in the house off campus, across the train tracks.

They were married in 1947. It was a double wedding at Frankfort Pilgrim Church. They drove south to Whiteland for the first night, and I guess Mom's brother Paul pursued them all the way to Indy to give them a little extra money for their honeymoon. He was working at the train station in Indianapolis at that time, if I remember correctly. They would then go down to Mississippi to some of the places Dad was during his basic training during the war.

Earlier posts:

1. The Revivalin' Twenties
In the Year 1920 (Dorsey Schenck, also see here)
From Quaker to Pilgrim (Harry Shepherd in 20s)
The Great Generation (my parents)

2. The Depression Thirties
Dutch Reformed Past (Samuel Schenck)
North Carolina Flashback (Eli Shepherd)
Wanting to be Rich (Oscar Rich)

3. Passing Generations
Old German Baptist Heritage 1 (Amsy Miller)
Old German Baptist Heritage 2 (Salome Wise)
The Dorsey Stream (Pearl Dorsey)

4. The Forties and Fifties
Joining Two Streams (My Parents)

5. The Divisive Sixties
Prophet, Pastor, and Professor (Harry Shepherd)
Flashback to Jamestown (Champion Shelburn)

Family History 11: The Dorsey Stream

Dorsey Schenck and
his mother Pearl

1. In 1949, Pearl Dorsey (my Dad's grandmother), was living with her daughter Lula in Michigantown. The living situation was interesting. After her husband Samuel had died of an appendix burst in 1930, she and Lula had somehow ended up as housekeepers for an old bachelor farmer by the name of Oyette McBride in Michigantown, Indiana. In 1943, he had married Lula, who was 22 years younger than he was. Then he died three years later.

Aunt Lula's final house

So in a short span of time, Pearl and Lula had apparently gone from having very little after Samuel's death to long term security. I am not sure how well off Samuel was when he died. At the age of 59, he was working as a laborer on a dairy farm. It is a little sobering to think that Pearl and Lula had ended up working as housekeepers and living with this bachelor farmer in his fifties. But after McBride's death, Lula would go on five years later to marry another farmer in town, a widower himself. I'm guessing they met at the Michigantown Methodist Church she attended. She would then live out the rest of her life in his house, outliving him by 29 years.

2. Pearl Dorsey was born in 1874 there in Clinton County, and she would die in December that year, 1949. By then my parents were married, and my mother attended her funeral. My grandfather presumably was named after her, "Dorsey Schenck."

I don't know much about Pearl, although a lovely typed letter survives from her cousin, Hattie Price, to her the year before she died. In the letter Hattie apologizes for how her typing has deteriorated from when she was Indiana state champion. She admires the composition skills of Pearl's brother Harry when he writes her. She speaks of the meal she had in the middle of typing the letter--she apparently took some time to type it. She warns Pearl about tramps and urges Lula to milk early in the evening and late in the morning.

But the main point of the letter was information Hattie had on how their family came to Clinton County, Indiana around 1840. Pearl's grandfather, Samuel Dorsey, had moved to Indiana with his mother and sibilings after his own father died in 1838. The letter has a lot of fun details, including a dog named Trip that rode with them on a wagon from Ohio. It would jump out when they stopped, then get back in when they continued.

I guess two of the brothers rode horses and guided a cow. They would milk the cow and put the milk in a churn. Then the up and down of the covered wagon would make butter. They came across what is now 40. They left Butler County, Ohio, in September or October because the kids put apples in bags before they left. I guess they were so afraid of being left behind that they didn't get many apples.

William and Ruth Dorsey

There is also a good story about how Pearl's grandparents ended up together. Apparently he (Samuel) had tried to catch her (Margaret) a little too hard and she had scorned him. She had married someone else and had three children. But her husband and two of her children had died of the "bloody flux" (dysentery). Meanwhile, Samuel married and had three children too, but he came home one day to find that his wife had left him and taken their daughter with her.

So they ended up together anyway and had at least five more children, including my GG-grandfather William Dorsey, Pearl's father. William Dorsey married Ruth Lee, who was 15 years his younger.

In the 1920 census, Ruth has died and William is 81, living with Samuel and Pearl in Frankfort. William would die later that very year.

3. William's father Samuel, born in 1802, had come with his father, John Michael Dorsey, from New Jersey. Then John had come from Maryland, born around 1770.

Samuel's wife, Margaret, had also come from Maryland. They apparently loaded their goods on a boat in east Maryland and went up the Chesapeake River and across the bay. Then they finished the journey to Butler County, Ohio by wagon (all according to Hattie). I have to think they had arrived in Ohio by the 1820s.

There are so many lines--wives, fathers of wives, mothers of wives. I don't have time to try to pin them down. Pearl's father was William. William's father was Samuel. Samuel's father was John, born in 1770. From that point back to the early 1600s, the Dorsey's lived in Maryland. In particular, they lived in Anne Arundel, Maryland.

4. It would appear that an Edward Darcy (1619-1659) came to Maryland in the early 1600s. He was born in Hornsby Castle in Yorkshire, England. He landed in Virginia about 1642, moved to Maryland, and apparently drowned off the Isle of Kent in Chesapeake Bay in 1659.

Hornsby Castle, Yorkshire

Edward came from nobility. He was apparently born in Hornsby Castle in Yorkshire, as was his father Thomas (1545-1604). His grandfather Arthur (1505-61) was the son of another Thomas Darcy, who was put to death by Henry VIII in 1537 outside the Tower of London for opposing the dissolution of the monasteries and delivering Pontefract Castle (as its guardian) over to a northern group opposed to Henry's withdrawal from the Roman Catholic Church.

The line of Darcys--or shall we say D'Arcy--goes back to around 1066 and the Norman invasion of Britain from the south. The furthest back I can get has a "Norman D'Arcy" born around 1063 and a "Mrs. Norman D'Arcy." I have to consider this a joke, since the Normans invaded in 1066.

From there the line would jump back to France, presumably back to Arcy area France, southeast of Paris.

Fun!

Earlier posts:

1. The Revivalin' Twenties
In the Year 1920 (Dorsey Schenck, also see here)
From Quaker to Pilgrim (Harry Shepherd in 20s)
The Great Generation (my parents)

2. The Depression Thirties
Dutch Reformed Past (Samuel Schenck)
North Carolina Flashback (Eli Shepherd)
Wanting to be Rich (Oscar Rich)

3. Passing Generations
Old German Baptist Heritage 1 (Amsy Miller)
Old German Baptist Heritage 2 (Salome Wise)
The Dorsey Stream (Pearl Dorsey)

5. The Divisive Sixties
Prophet, Pastor, and Professor (Harry Shepherd)
Flashback to Jamestown (Champion Shelburn)

Family 10: Prophet, Pastor, and Professor (Harry Shepherd)

I never met my mother's father, Harry Shepherd. He died of a bone marrow cancer (multiple myeloma) in 1963 in Frankfort, Indiana, before I was born. He was well known and much respected as an incredibly spiritual man, humble and selfless. His signature exclamation when he would get blessed was notorious: "Halleluyer." Shepherd's Hall on the Frankfort camp grounds was named for him after his death, originally built to be a boy's dorm, just a couple years before the college closed after merger.

I sometimes feel like I have two nations warring in my blood. The one is the Schenck that has a big mouth and has a hard time not speaking up when something seems awry. It feels compelled to say what's on its mind. When I was first being interviewed to teach at Indiana Wesleyan, then President Jim Barnes said questioningly, "Now your father has certain issues with the way we try to raise money, is that right?"

"No," I responded with a smile, "that would be my uncle." One of my Schenck uncles, of course. The Schenck in me has big plans and big ideas and is ready to leap into the unknown, confident that everything will work out. And if it doesn't, no problem. I'll just move on to the next thing.

The other nation is the Shepherd, and it almost seems to contradict the other. It is Quaker in spirit. It wants consensus. It doesn't want to impose itself on others. It's prone to go along with what others want and sometimes almost doesn't even seem to have its own will. At times it's indecisive and hesitant.

It loves to think about ideas--just about any subject. It seems like it can master and teach about any subject. Unfortunately, it isn't always quick to act. It's a theoretical personality more than a doer personality.

1. Much of what I just said is my impression of what my Grandpa Shepherd was like. He was indeed a Quaker minister for about a decade, although he became a Pilgrim Holiness minister in the early 1920s, I believe when he was dating my grandmother. He was a teacher who prayed (and I suspect belabored) over every grade he gave. I picture him reading every word of every paper.

There's a fun story about a grade he gave my other Grandfather, my Grandpa Schenck, when Grandpa Schenck was working on some ministerial correspondence course in the late 1940s. Apparently my Grandpa Schenck wasn't happy with the grade and said something to my mother about it. To me it is a snapshot of the two nations inside me. The one is belaboring overly conscientiously over every decimal point it gives as a grade, obsessed with doing the right thing in submission to the Absolute. The other is overly confident in what it thinks it knows and is quick to sense injustice, often without all the facts.

Grandpa Shepherd taught a wide variety of subjects, mostly in the high school part of Frankfort Pilgrim College: prophecy, Latin, geometry, calculus, English, world history, Health and Safety. He had graduated from Wabash College in 1907, an extremely rare and impressive occurrence in that day. His Quaker temperament did not make him a good classroom disciplinarian, however, a factor that unfortunately seems to have played a role in his retirement in the 1950s. Don't think for one moment that the children of holiness preachers and even Bible college presidents always act entirely sanctified in high school.

One fun story that captures his temperament well was one day when he was praying and my mother and her sister were moving a piece of furniture up the stairs. They overheard him praying for God to help them. My mother's younger sister I guess was heard to mutter in response, "Why doesn't he get up off his knees and help us if he's so concerned!" :-)

He was a late night person. He would sometimes write poetry after midnight. The family wasn't able to go to bed for good until after family devotions and sometimes it would be eleven before he got around to it. My mother remembers falling asleep waiting. :-)

I'd be delighted for any stories about my grandfather. He taught sacrificially at Frankfort. Like so many Bible colleges struggling to stay open, he often received his pay in cafeteria food, which during the Depression was often watery bean soup. (My mother also remembers turtle soup in North Carolina. She remembers being warned as a little girl about the heads left on the counter--they could still snap even though now detached).

My grandmother often did odd jobs to supplement their income, like washing other people's clothes. For years they lived in a little cottage on the camp grounds, owned by someone else. They would have to vacate it during camp meeting when those people were on the grounds.

If you go to the Frankfort camp grounds today, you can see how small these cottages were, less than 20 x 20 feet. I don't think the one they lived in had a second floor. Imagine two adults and four children living in such a small box! The cottage they lived in during those years was a little east along the sidewalk south of where Shepherd's hall is now, one of six that had been left from a tuberculosis sanitarium that was there at the beginning of the twentieth century. Those cottages have been long gone now for maybe sixty years, along with the original tabernacle (which was just east of where the Pitts Building is now).

My sense is that Grandpa Shepherd's non-complaining temperament may sometimes have resulted in him being one of the last ones paid or perhaps the first one not to be paid when the month's budget was tight. Everyone loves a selfless man when he's dead. They're plenty happy to take advantage of him while he's alive. I would be lying, though, if I pretended that he was not often honored during his life as well. There was another Shepherd's Hall before the current one, named in his honor in 1946 while he was still teaching there (basically a house converted into a dorm).

My mother says he almost always also had a "preaching point" somewhere as well. She told me a story a few weeks ago about when my uncle Paul (father of Carl and Jerry Shepherd) as a small boy drank from a can of "Coal oil" in the back yard of a farmer in Michigantown who always had my mother's family over for lunch every Sunday after he preached the Sunday service (the Rhines). My grandmother induced vomiting and rushed Paul off to help. Maybe a farmer would give him something from their crop as pay for preaching.

On another occasion, when he was pastoring on the weekends at Forest, Indiana, my grandmother was carrying my uncle David out of church during a service when her foot went through a board on the small landing out front. She fell backwards and her arm somehow locked to her side. She was never able to bend her left hand behind her back again, if I have the story right, and it took weeks to get her arm to move again.

Grandpa Shepherd was thoroughly dispensationalist and had a long canvas chart of history and how the end times were going to take place. During his ministry, he often was asked to come speak at churches on end times prophecy. He even wrote and paid $1000 at Westfield to publish a little book called Foundational and Fundamental Truth Concerning the Coming of the Lord (I plan to republish it at some point. My mother went with him to the holiness Bible college in Westfield to get it published.). His thinking was definitely in the vein of those who saw the re-establishment of Israel as a nation in 1948 as the "budding of the fig tree" in Mark 13:28-30 that would usher in the last generation. (This was the reasoning behind those who thought the Lord would return by 1988).

2. Harry Shepherd was born on June 6, 1883 to Elijah Washington Shepherd and Seba Elizabeth Wright. Elijah had fought for the north in the Civil War and had been injured when run over by a horse. He was apparently never quite the same again and died in 1896 when Harry was only 13 years old.

That left him an orphan, for his mother had died six years previously, before he had even turned seven. Grandpa Shepherd wrote poetry, and one of the poems he wrote in later life cherished what memories he had of his mother. I've posted the poem previously here.

He apparently felt a little like he was shoved around, unwanted during his teen years. The 1900 census lists him as a sixteen year old "servant" in the home of one William O'Haver. I wonder if he was relation of some kind, since O'Haver's mother's maiden name was Wright, my grandfather's mother's maiden name. The bulletin of his high school graduation from Sullivan High School in 1902 has him listed as the one who gave the class history at graduation.

In any case, he was able to enroll in Wabash College in 1902. It is amazing thing. Both his father and mother are listed as illiterate in the 1870 census, if I have pulled the right one. He apparently worked to pay his way through college, sweeping floors. My mother remembers him being able to make a floor amazingly clean. My hunch is that he was overly conscientious about it. In keeping with James 4, he would never say he was going to do something. He would say, "Lord willing" he would do such and such.

Many in his class would go on to be people of worldly significance--lawyers, politicians, doctors. He played on the college baseball team. Then his junior year, he was converted. If I am not confusing things, it was at a tent revival on the farm of C. G. Taylor, in New London, Indiana, just north of Russiaville. His sister Marquerite by that time had married James Carter and was living in the neighborhood (West Middleton). They would become Quaker ministers, both of them.

Being saved at that time meant not playing baseball on Sundays. Grandpa quit the baseball team. In fact, he seems to have taken two years to finish his junior year. I'm wondering if his conversion had something to do with that. He finally graduated in 1907. My mother has memories of him playing baseball at a Bible college picnic on those same grounds, when C. G. Taylor was president of the Bible college.

3. Harry would become a Quaker minister like his sister Marquerite. He would attend Cleveland Bible College in Ohio (now Malone), possibly at some point during the years from 1907-1910. Then in 1910 he married marry Orilla Kibbe in Michigan. They would serve as Quaker ministers together in Michigan until 1916, when she died of some kind of sepsis.

The relation between his ancestry and Quakerism has been a fascinating tale to investigate. I had always assumed that his family was deeply Quaker, but at the very least it was a little more complex than that. The most immediate Quaker connection seems to have been his (aunt?) Catherine, who married his (uncle?) Wesley in 1850 in Guilford County, North Carolina.

Catherine's family, the Reynolds, are distinctly mentioned in the Quaker meeting journals of the Center Meeting in Guilford County in the early 1800s. But when she married Wesley Sheppard (as his name seems to have been more regularly spelled), she married out of unity with the Quakers and was expelled. That means that Wesley was not a Quaker, or at least not one in good standing. Given his name and the name Charles Wesley that he gave one of his sons, I wonder if he was more likely a Methodist.

Grandpa's childhood memories of giggling at "Grandma Shepherd" in her Quaker garb were almost certainly him laughing at Catherine's mother Susanna, who wasn't blood relation to him at all. After his parents died, perhaps his immediate family came under more intense Quaker influence than they otherwise might have. All that is to say, the Quaker connection may not have been through his parents but through the influence of his (aunt's?) family.

I've already mentioned parts of the next phase of his life here and there. In 1920, he was apparently living with his sister Marquerite in Hemlock, Indiana, where she and her husband were then pastoring. He would then apparently return to Sullivan and would become associated with the newly named Pilgrim Holiness Church. He would marry my grandmother in 1923 and would pastor churches for four years until Frankfort Pilgrim College opened in 1927.

In those four years he pastored first Merom, Indiana. Then Orleans. There they had a stillborn child named Dorothy in 1924. Then they moved to Greenfield, where my mother was born. When she was only three months old they moved to Greenwood. It was from there that he was called to Frankfort to be one of its original teachers. He would have a "preaching point" at Forest and Michigantown in the first five years of the Bible college.

I've told of the closing of Frankfort in 1932 because of the Depression. My mother's family would travel to Kernersville, where A. E. Wachsel, a former president of what we know today as Southern Wesleyan University, was trying to start a Bible college. But he would had nothing to pay either and it wouldn't take that time (a Bible college would successfully be founded there later in the 40s).

So my grandfather moved on to Bacova, Virginia, where R. G. Flexon asked him to pastor. My mother was impressed with how big the rattlesnakes got there! Next they moved to Kingswood Bible College in Kentucky, then the HQ for the Pilgrim church. Finally, they ended back in southern Indiana until going back to Frankfort when it reopened in 1939.

He pastored churches in Burns City, Indiana in 1935. Then Elnora and Epson in a circuit in 1936. Then Greenwood again in 1937 until Frankfort Bible College reopened.

He would teach at Frankfort for more than 23 years total.

Earlier posts:

1. The Revivalin' Twenties
In the Year 1920 (Dorsey Schenck)
From Quaker to Pilgrim (Harry Shepherd)
The Great Generation (my parents)

2. The Depression Thirties
Dutch Reformed Past (Samuel Schenck)
North Carolina Flashback (Eli Shepherd)
Wanting to be Rich (Oscar Rich)

3. Passing Generations
Old German Baptist Heritage 1 (Amsy Miller)
Old German Baptist Heritage 2 (Salome Wise)

6. The Divisive Sixties
Prophet, Pastor, and Professor (Harry Shepherd)
Flashback to Jamestown (Champion Shelburn)