And We're Back!

View from the front porch

Barn doorway Our vacation to Pa was wonderful. You know it’s a good trip when you don’t want to come home at the end. Our beloved old farmhouse was the same crumbling, creaky, time encrusted place we’ve grown to love as our home away from home. The fields around us abounded with wildflowers more beautiful and fragrant than any hothouse could produce. The long grasses rustled with perky little chipmunks, rotund, waddling groundhogs, and songbirds of every kind.Wildflowers
The weather was a welcome respite from the 100 degree days we were having at home. I think it hit close to 80 a couple of days, but the evenings were downright chilly, and we all huddled appreciatively under our fuzzy blankets. In the morning, we sat up on the back porch, warming our hands with mugs of hot coffee as we looked out at the hillside swathed in ribands of mist.One morning as we rumbled and bounced along one of the myriad dirt roads, looking for old houses and little family cemeteries, we chanced upon a flock of wild turkeys grazing in a field. Our arrival caused them to part-fly, part-trot down towards the woods, and a flock of little goldfinches swirled up out of the bushes by our cars; black winged bolts of sunshine startled into mass exodus.My eldest nephew rode up with my dad this year, and as it was his first trip up we gave him the tour. In spite of my dad’s protestations that he can’t remember anything about family history, while we were up at Cherrytree (oldest church in Venango County, with a cemetery to match) I caught him showing my nephew the graves of Henry Ross and Susannah Baney, and explaining that they were the grandparents of Minnie Gahring Toy, his grandmother. I know that somewhere, maybe in the air all around us, his grandmother was happy to see a tradition of hers perpetuated.Oh, and those stories about Grandpa Jake that I said we would be hearing while we were up here? I laughed to myself all Sunday night as my dad told those very stories to his grandchildren.On Tuesday, we took a day trip down to Kittanning, to meet up with the Velveeta Wingnut, my long-lost cousin and evil twin, and show her around the ancestral stomping grounds. I was really glad I’d gotten lost a few times there before; the main road across the river was under construction and traffic was being shunted in several convoluted directions. We figured it was our karmic debt for getting around Pittsburgh with minimal construction delays.We found a bunch of different old cemeteries that held family members from several of the seven branches we’re researching, and it was really gratifying to see everyone get caught up in finding the headstones of family members. We broke for lunch and ate at the Allegheny Mariner, which is just about the nicest place in Kittanning, with an awesome view of the river from its dining room. I guess we could have been working instead of having a sit-down luncheon, but I thought it would be nice for us to take the time to get to know each other and break bread, as it were, with fellow family members.

Back up in Oil City and Franklin, there's so much to see. This is a place that peaked in the Victorian period and it shows in the architecture. We spent a couple of days just walking around and taking in the sights.

Detail of stairway in the old Transit Building
One of our favorite places, the Yellow Dog Lantern. This is one of two places that have been in business continually for over a hundred years

Interior of the Yellow Dog Lantern

The neck grip helps calm the little critter

The most amazing antique mall/auction house ever

In Franklin, there's an antique mall/auction house housed in the old armory building that's like no other antique place I've ever been to. The owner has one of the most incredible collections of Wild West Show memorabilia, Pennsylvania long rifles, Civil War artifacts, Native American artifacts, flintlock and black powder guns I've ever seen. The regular antiques he has for sale are pretty amazing as well, but we were all blown away by his "museum" upstairs, where he housed his personal collection. I've never seen this many artifacts in one place, not even in a real museum. My dad, who usually doesn't go in for antiquing, was hard pressed to leave this place!

This next week, we're off to the Outer Banks, so I'm up to my ass in packing again. Because Murphy's Law is never more apparent than when you're pressed for time, the washing machine died first thing this week. I've been hoofing it up to Bea's to wash clothes for the upcoming journey until the new washer gets here, so needless to say, I've been a bit busy, hence absent from the blogosphere. I'm totally out of the loop with all of you, but after this week, when the summer doldrums set in, I know I'll be doing a prodigous amount of back reading and catching up with everyone.

Summer night on the porch

Family Dynamics, Part IV

Kaneville, May 3rd, 1904
"And now I guess the beautiful summer time, so much talked of, has come at last. "

Kaneville, July 28th, 1904
"Mrs. Mary Downs and daughter, Pearl, of Simcoe Canada, who were called home to attend the funeral of the former's brother, William Toy, have been spending a month with the former's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Toy.

The mink is a very unwelcome guest in Kaneville. Your scribe had 40 chickens killed one night last week."

I was trawling the VCP (Venango Citizens Press), looking for an obituary on Jonathan Klotz, one of my thrice-great grandfathers, when I stumbled across these articles. They had been written by my 3rd great grandaunt, Sarah Agnes Darling, nee Toy. She wrote articles about her family and neighbors for about 9 years; none of which are particularly literary in content, but are chock-full of the comings and goings of her family, with the occasional dry comment about the weather, or a neighbor.

Why is this important to me?

For the past 6 years, I have spent a week out of every summer going up to PA to find family history data. I know my way around the Pennsylvania Room in the Franklin Library with my eyes closed. I know the back roads almost as well as my father does, and he grew up there.

One of the first cemeteries I discovered in my quest was Rynd Farm; a quiet little place that sits above Oil Creek State Park. There along with her brothers and sisters, Agnes Toy Darling is buried.

But she hasn't been completely at rest.

When I took my father and my aunt up there the following year, I could not find her headstone. We searched the whole place, but no Agnes. When I went back alone, there she was.

It occurred to me, at that time, that there was something she wanted me to do- maybe a few things.

I began the collecting of her articles that year.

I started trying to get both sides of our family to meet up there every summer.

I began the enormous task of compiling a comprehensive family history that includes all of the branches of the Toy family of Western Pennsylvania, because there was nothing like it compiled anywhere.

I started corresponding with family members of the different branches - something that hadn't been done since the branches drifted apart.

These are all things that I feel Agnes Darling wanted me to do, for her.

I learned that she was also a family historian; a cousin out in California had a journal written by her grandmother, Nevada Feely Toy, that contained information on the Toy family and where they had come from, prior to migrating to Western Pa. We both felt sure that the information in that book came from Agnes Darling.

There are no surviving pictures of Agnes Darling, other than a tiny head shot of her in a family reunion picture, taken around 1935. She's in the middle right, surrounded by her nieces and nephews; my great grandfather's brothers and sisters.

That's her, the bitty little head, off to the right, in the middle.

This is her biography:
Sarah Agnes Toy was born in 1861 in Venango County, PA. Her family had recently moved to that area, along with scores of other people, following the discovery of oil in 1858 by Colonel Edwin Drake. She grew up in the shadow of the infant oil industry, a tough place to live and thrive. While some of the prospectors did strike it rich, most of them worked hard, played hard, and died poor. The nearby city of Petroleum Center was termed "the wickedest place east of the Mississippi", and was filled with saloons and houses of ill repute. Not the most ideal place to raise children.

She was the fourth child of Jacob Toy and Catherine Goldinger. Her eldest sister, Mary Jane (1852-1922) married a man from Canada, and moved there in the mid 1880s. Her oldest brother, William M. (1853-1904), my 2x great grandfather, fell from a derrick in his 51st year, and died shortly afterwards. Her other older brother, John (1858-1872), died at the age of 14, in an accident having to do with racing horses. Her younger sister, Hannah (1864), got married and moved to California, prior to 1900. Agnes was the only child left to her parents who could take care of them in their old age.

Sarah Agnes didn't get married until she was 29 - a ripe old age for the 19th century. She married James Darling (1861), who was a driller and a well shooter in the oil fields. "Shooting a well" means carefully lowering nitroglycerin into an oil well shaft that has begun to dry up, and then dropping a piece of metal called a "torpedo" into the shaft, hitting the nitro and blasting the shaft. The blast causes fracturing of the shale in the well, allowing more oil to be pumped from the well.

A year and a half after they were married, on September 24, 1891, James Darling and another man, decided to use nitroglycerin to blow up some stumps that were in the way in a field. (the crazy shit these people did with nitroglycerin, and crude oil would curl your hair! The newspapers of the time are filled with stories of people burning down their houses, trying to start a fire indoors with crude oil, or using nitroglycerin to blow up stuff.) They were both killed instantly. She was left a widow, with an infant, born that year, to care for.

Agnes moved back in with her parents and life went on. She cared for both her invalid mother, until her death, as well as her father, who passed away in 1912, after a series of strokes. She never remarried. When her father, Jacob, passed away, he left her the farm, as payment for her years of caring for him and his wife. She outlived everyone in her family, including her only son, Floyd, who died in 1929.

The stories of Agnes Darling abound: My father used to tell us how she would pull on her hip waders to go out and clean the rocks out of her creek. Once, when some boys were throwing rocks into her creek, she came out of the house, waving her father's pistol and shot it into the air. I actually met one of those boys, one summer when we were up there. My kids were down in her creek, looking for fossils, when an old man came up and started talking about bears in the area. When I asked him about Ag he knew exactly who I was talking about, and told me the story of the rocks in the creek, and the pistol.

Tell me she wasn't standing right there, while we were talking to that man!

My father also told me how his grandmother would go out to visit Ag to buy eggs from her- she was too proud to just take money, even from a family member- and that Agnes kept bantam chickens, whose eggs she would give to my father, because they were little and cute (he calls them "banty" chicken eggs). His grandmother also obtained digitalis from Agnes, to help with her heart problems, so it would appear that Ag knew a thing or two about herbal remedies as well.

I went to the Oil City Genealogical Library this past year, to do some poking around, and struck up a conversation with the librarian working there. I mentioned Agnes' name and she perked right up. "Oh! My mother and grandmother used to talk about her all the time! They were neighbors."

After more than 50 years since her death (1955), her presence is still palpable, in that part of the world.

She is a major force in my research, and every time I encounter another person who knew her, I can feel her presence in the meeting.

Someday, I will go to join her, and the rest of the ancestors, and I will have come home, but in the meantime, it is a comfort to have her at my shoulder, whispering in my ear.