Correcting Past Mistakes

In the summer of 1991, my grandmother, Pauline Cole Root, funded a family reunion trip to Jonesboro, Arkansas. Every year in Jonesboro, the Coles of Cole hill and the vicinity round about that corner of the state, continue the tradition of reuniting family. My mother and I had written two books on the Coles and their allied lines and were asked to give the most comprehensive presentation they had heard up to that point.

I remember the trip well. My Grandma Root, my Uncle Tom and Aunt Julie, my step father and mother, Grant and Kathe Hollingshaus, and my baby son, Adam, and I piled into a rental van and drove the long miles from California and Arizona to Jonesboro. My grandmother’s whole family made the effort to come from all over the United States for this special occasion. Once there, we all slept on the floor of a cousin’s empty house, and I enjoyed getting to know many people I had never met and seeing all the family sites for the second time in my life.

I had written the reunion address based on the information my mother and I had gleaned over the years concerning the Cole family. I put together slides with music which I would show while I narrated our family history. Mom created a beautiful family tree with pictures to present to my grandmother, and we brought several boxes of our books to sell to family members who were interested. I also wrote a family newspaper called the “Bear Facts Gazette” recalling the story of my grandmother’s early years in Jonesboro with her brothers and sisters.

Since that reunion, much to our dismay, we discovered that the first Coles in America were not those we had presented in our book. My mother has expressed many times her regrets and how she wished we could have corrected the false information. Unfortunately, genealogy is a puzzle. The fact that our ancestors lived in a time when records were often poorly documented or destroyed in the carnage of the Civil War, the time and effort we take to piece the puzzle together can be haphazard at best. When new information is found, we must backtrack and veer onto a different path to discover our past—thus, the reason I have decided to compile another Cole History, using the current information I have from my mother and my research.

I know my mother would want me to do this. But in order to present the most accurate information to date, this project will take a collaborative effort from the Cole family.

I ask that all family members who read this blog peruse the information I present and leave corrections and additions in the comments section after each article. Hopefully, as we join forces, our efforts will allow me to compile a wonderful book for our posterity.

Knowing who we are and who came before us unifies the family of all men. It reminds us that we are children of God. One of my favorite passages from William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” sums up my feelings about who we are.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

As more people join this blog site, I hope to hear your comments and learn from your intimate knowledge of the family.

Grave Sightings

In the summer of 1980 my mother and I took a genealogy trip to hunt for our Cole and Hager lines. We traveled through Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, the very states where our ancestors thrived from the 1800s to the present.

One stop in Carrollton, Georgia was particularly memorable. Mom and I were discouraged because we had searched an abundance of cemeteries for my fourth great grandparents, Jeremiah and Charlotte Martin Cole, but had never found them. We knew they had lived somewhere in Carrollton, and one morning we set out in our rental car to a remote part of community to see if we had missed other cemeteries. About four miles north of town, along Highway 113, we stopped and scoured another cemetery, but, again, came away without finding anything.

And then we spotted a small country store with all the flavor of the backwoods nearby. A man was sitting in a rocking chair on the long porch, and I had to laugh. The sight reminded me of a scene from Mayberry RFD. I was pregnant and ailing with morning sickness, so I stayed in the car while Mom got out to see if the man knew of any Coles buried in the area. He pointed her down the road and gave her some landmarks that led the way to a local’s home and backyard.

When we arrived no one answered the door. We didn’t want to invade the people’s privacy and walk their property without permission, but we desperately wanted to see who was buried behind the house. Down the road several children were playing ball, so we went to talk with them. One of the older boys, Jerry, was quite friendly and assured us the children went back there all the time. He offered to guide us to the cemetery with the admonition to check our “breeches for ticks” when we came out again.

He led us through knee and waist-high grass to a grouping of graves. As I tread through the underbrush, I was mortified, fearing a snake would slither out from beneath a rock at any moment. The cemetery was in poor condition, many markers were broken in half and lying in the dirt. Parts of the ground had sunken in, and it was difficult to see what lay under the carpet of weeds. But in the midst of our examination, we found our treasure: Jeremiah and Charlotte’s graves.

Mom and I could hardly contain our excitement. We chalked the worn stones and took photos of the ancient markers. We found other members of the family nearby too. We floated out of the cemetery that day, and, luckily, there were no snakes to surprise us or ticks to infest our breeches.

Later we discovered the cemetery had been part of the old Primitive Baptist Church where Jeremiah’s family attended. Someone had even documented and printed a list of the graves found in that cemetery. It wasn’t until recent years that a preservation association went in and cleaned up the grounds after a feisty battle with the home owners to assure others could access the cemetery. I will always remember our day in Carrollton, Georgia. It was the day we discovered Jeremiah and Charlotte Cole actually lived and breathed in that part of Georgia.

Inheriting Research

Last February my mother died. In some ways, the last five years had pointed to her unhealthy state, but still it was unexpected when she experienced her first stroke in January. My brother and I had moved her down from Utah in December and had enjoyed her for all of a month before the tragedy occurred. It was a grueling few weeks of hospitals, nursing homes, and shipping her body back to Utah to be buried next to her husband. But her passing was almost a relief to me, for it had broken my heart to see her over the last year unable to do the one thing she loved most in life: work on her genealogy.

Over the last thirty years, Mom and I had worked together on family history. We had been blessed with an abundance of information. We wrote two books together about our Cole family and allied lines. As I raised a young family, Mom immersed herself in more research and corresponded with lost cousins from all over the United States. Many on the Internet considered her an authority on the Cole line.

Upon Mom’s passing, I realized I had inherited a treasure of information, when I filled my office with ceiling-to-floor boxes of her genealogy. Never in my wildest imagining had I supposed her research had been as extensive as it was. Research books, letters, journals, family bibles, and old photos were now in my care, and it brings tears to my eyes just thinking about the time she donated to such a righteous cause.

This blog is dedicated to Mom and her devotion to our family. I hope to share the information and pictures about both sides of my mother’s lineage, as well as provide research helps and ideas to those who seek advice. I encourage my readers to add to or correct what information they can within these lines. The culmination of all comments and research data will help me complete the most extensive books to date about my mother’s family. I have no doubt our efforts will raise hallelujahs from her and her ancestry she is now getting to know first hand.