Eric has been working on our family history lately, in a way that will no doubt at least be found interesting to some of our family members and distant cousins. He thought it important to record some of the family stories. I’m going to let him tell them in his words (unless I need to correct a few things about me!), and also add in some of those ancestor pictures we have. This Part 1 will be about his father Leonard Haley and his ancestry – you know, the one our business is named after, and whose picture smiles down upon me in my office.
Leonard Elbert Haley, Founder of Leonard’s Books
It has been 44 years since I began, as a hobby, to delve into the family lineage of my wife and myself. When I started, I was living in Hawaii and basically limited in resources, that included stories from my parents and letters from the closest living relatives. My interest grew as I sought to verify even the scant information given me. I began visiting libraries in Honolulu, and once I was back in Indiana where I was born and raised, made occasional trips to the Purdue University Library, the Tippecanoe County Library, and the Allan County Library.
After moving to Carroll County, Indiana in 1989, I met a wonderful lady by the name of Phyllis Moore, who was the curator and librarian of the Carroll County Museum. She was obsessed with genealogy and was kind enough to teach me basically everything I needed to know: where to find resources, whom to talk to, and most importantly, she led me right to the records that were available for free. This small museum, though owned by the County, was chock-full of books, records, photos, and other documents that satisfied her own interests.
I remember that when I first shared with her the connection my mother’s family had with that of Governor Thomas Dudley of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, she said, “Oh, that’s the Sutton-Dudley line. We share the same family history. Let me show you what I’ve got.” Within a few short years, she walked me through the microfiche files of the LDS church and all the county records and census records available to her.
Her caution concerning the LDS files was that they were not always reliable, but then neither were many of the records of the various New England societies from a century earlier. Everyone has an agenda and that can often include a desire to build a heritage larger than life, or even to hide the truth to save the family’s reputation. One of her own ancestors was burned for being a witch in the infamous Salem witch trials. (One of my ancestors was her prosecutor!) That was not easy information to find and verify.
She soon offered my name to the Carroll County 4-H program, whose extension agent was looking for a project supervisor for the Genealogy project. I retired from that position 21 years later, after the program became a State Fair project and had been transformed into more of a complicated research project and less of a family heirloom project. Many of the youth in the program switched over to scrapbooking, which allowed them the freedom to include information that was important to them.
Research can indeed be fun, but it is not always inspiring. A family's history includes so much more than names and dates. It connects us with history itself and can connect us with one another too, as it did with myself and Mrs. Moore. It inspires us to look deeper into the past, to find bright spots in an otherwise dark history. It helps us to see that each of our ancestors, regardless of their shortcomings, served a common purpose in life. That purpose, in the end, was you and me.
I remember one of the last conversations that I had with my mother just two days before she passed. It was at the grave site of my father, and as I brushed some of the dried cut grass from his stone, I asked her, “Mom, why do all the family members buried in this cemetery have nice headstones, but my Grandfather Charles (my father’s father) only has a slab that is often not even well mounted in the dirt?”
She explained that my dad and his siblings had little respect for him because he got my grandmother pregnant when he knew he was dying of tuberculosis. But then she paused and said, “But look at all the wonderful people who are alive today because of that one irresponsible act, … so I guess that God knows best doesn’t He?” Yes, He certainly does.
And so, I present to you my family and my wife’s family, not in the form of the dry details of a research project, but as a continuation of a living history.
~~~
To start out, it’s important to understand that everybody has a genealogy. No one, in the words of my step-grandfather, “was hatched from a buzzard’s egg.” We all have great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents. We all have come from a mix of unscrupulous as well as genuinely honest characters. We simply don’t know who they were.
There are some family lines that cannot be traced back more than a few generations due to a lack of written history or documentation. There are others that can be traced back 30 generations or more. My purpose is to present the most interesting figures and stories of our family, connecting them with the dry stuff only when necessary.
LEONARD ELBERT HALEY
Leonard was my father, born in November of 1926, just about a month after his father Charles died of tuberculosis. Charles was the father of ten children, two having died when only a few days old. So, my father was raised in a household of eight children by a single mom – well, sort of. She was reduced to a life of severe poverty after her husband’s death and moved to the slums of South End Lafayette, Indiana. It appears that sometime in the early teen years of my father’s life, she began living with a man named Bill Drum. As a child, I always heard him referred to as her common law husband.
My dad didn’t tell us the details of his mother’s relationships, but the basics were as much as a young child could handle. I was told that my grandmother was married four times. The first was Charles (whose picture hung on the coal bin in the basement), and then there was Bill Drum, her common law husband (who raised Leonard). Next was Arthur Lane, and the last was Lon Dunbar, whom she divorced because he killed her cat.
I later discovered that Arthur Lane was also her stepfather, and Lon Dunbar was her son-in-law, the widower of her oldest daughter. These were the skeletons that I found hanging in the Haley closet while searching for the family’s history, but I guess it’s reasonable to say that my grandmother did what she felt necessary to survive and keep food on the table and a roof over the heads of her large family.
Leonard was what could fairly be described as a street urchin. He ran the streets of Lafayette, harassing the Chinese butcher, stealing coal off of freight trains so he could earn a dime to watch a movie, and generally getting into trouble. By his early teen years, he was hopping freight trains for short trips to Battleground, Indiana, and back again. Once he was told that a certain train would take him to Indianapolis where he could watch the Indy 500. He hopped that train and eventually found himself in Houston, Texas. The police in Houston were able to contact his mother, who had no means to get her son back home again to Indiana, so the officers took up a collection and bought Leonard a bus ticket home.
Leonard performed poorly in school. His seventh grade report card does not show that, with mostly A’s and B’s recorded, but a closer look reveals that his age was 15, and by the age of 16, he had dropped out of school and gotten his first job loading feed sacks. A year later, he was working in Evansville at The Sunbeam Electric Plant, apparently making cartridge casings, where he met Rejonnah Patmore. He was still only seventeen years old but convinced her that he was twenty-one. He traveled to Birdseye, Indiana, to ask her mother’s permission to marry her, and it wasn’t until they signed the marriage license that he confessed his true age.
Leonard received his draft notice and was quickly sent off to the Army boot camp, while his wife Rejonnah continued to work in the same factory complex, which was renovated for wartime production of the Republic P47 Thunderbolt. Leonard was part of the 8th Army Division which was preparing for the mainland invasion of Japan toward the end of WWII. He was, however, spared that potentially deadly assault when the first atomic bombs were dropped, and was instead part of the Occupation Forces in Japan after the surrender.
Tech Corporal Leonard E. Haley
What was probably puzzling to many who knew Leonard, was that he came back from the war a changed man. He had a focus to buy a home and a car, raise a family, work hard, and live a respectable life. He had two brothers who also survived the war, and the Haley family fared well, in spite of the odds against them.
Leonard soon learned the carpenter’s trade, built many houses including his own, and later started his own business selling antiques and used furniture. He made a good living, was impeccably honest, was a good father and faithful husband, and received the Lord Jesus as his Savior on his death bed at age 61, with a smile bigger than I had ever seen before.
Somewhere, something in him changed. The desire to do wrong was replaced with a desire to do right, and the desire to do right eventually led him to the Savior.
CHARLES ELBERT HALEY, ROBERT HALEY, JOHN WESLEY HALEY
Charles was born in 1889, and was the father of Leonard. I know little about him since he died of tuberculosis about a month before my father was born.
It appears that he worked as a lineman. He married my Grandmother Myrtle Mae (Ledman) Pruitt in 1909 and lived all of his life (37 years) in Lafayette, Indiana. While I never knew Charles, I remember my grandmother when she lived in a makeshift house in Lafayette, which was a combination of a small military Quonset hut and a tarpaper shack. She would show us pictures of her brothers, but never mentioned her deceased husband Charles, that I can recall. Charles is buried at Springvale Cemetery in Lafayette in a poorly kept section with a gravestone that is somewhat elusive.
Robert Haley, Leonard’s grandfather, was born in or near Lafayette in 1861. In 1887, he married Martha Jane Edwards, the daughter of James Edwards and Jemima Canaday. Sometime after Martha’s death in 1905 (at age 38), Robert married Ollie Kenworthy.
Ollie was from a Quaker family. My Aunt Eva spoke of Robert as “not having a religious bone in his body,” yet it appears that before he died, he became a Quaker and is buried at Grand View Cemetery in West Lafayette, Indiana. His death is recorded as occurring in 1933 at Lafayette’s Home Hospital, which was where I and my siblings were born, as well as my second daughter Emily and my oldest son Chris. The hospital no longer exists. Martha Jane is buried at Hebron Cemetery in West Lafayette. Her stone was apparently reset by the WPA during the Great Depression.
John Wesley Haley, Leonard’s great grandfather, sometimes referred to in records as simply Wesley or Westly, was born in 1828 in Virginia, the son of Benjamin Haley and Mahala Sumate. He married Margaret Lynch, who was born in 1834. They share a gravestone at Grand View Cemetery in West Lafayette. Wesley served in the Company D 150th Indiana Infantry during the Civil War, but served only from February-August 1865, at the end of the war.
BENJAMIN HALEY AND MAHALA (SHUMATE) HALEY
Benjamin Haley was the first of the Haley Family to live in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, arriving in 1850. He was born in Virginia in 1809, married Mahala before moving to Tennessee, and is listed in the 1860 census as a farmer in Tippecanoe County. While I have no other records related to his Virginia family at this time, the records of the Shumate family extend another 10 generations to Daniel de la Chaumette, born circa 1450 in the region of Limousin, France. So, while the Haley’s were probably English, the Shumates were undoubtedly French. Benjamin was my father’s great great grandfather.
Note: There is a wealth of information in the footnotes concerning Daniel de la Chaumete (bn 1619) on Geni.com.
PRUITT, LEDMAN, MILLS, HORNADAY
These branches of the Haley family are the ancestors of my great great grandparents, Abner Mills Pruitt and Evelyn Ledman.
Both sides of this family were Quaker, with the Ledman’s apparently moving over to the Brethren Church during its early years. It has been part of the family lore that Abner Pruitt (1860-1931) was a devout Quaker and preferred plain speech, especially when he was angry. Abner, by his request, is buried in an unmarked grave at Springvale Cemetery in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. After Abner died, Evelyn Ledman (1869-1949) married Arthur Lane, her stepfather, who was eight years younger than Evelyn and died three years after her, but not before marrying Evelyn’s daughter Myrtle Mae. Her gravestone at West Point Cemetery in Tippecanoe County, Indiana reads “Evelyn Ledman Lane.” Arthur is also buried there (somewhere).
Abner Mills Pruitt’s mother was Hannah Mills, the daughter of Daniel Mills and Esther Furnas. Esther’s father was Robert Furnas (1772-1863). We have a copy of a picture of him and of his wife, Hannah Wilson, taken in their senior years.
Robert and Hannah (Wilson) Furnas
Evelyn Ledman (1869-1949) was the daughter of Benjamin Franklin Ledman (1838-1917). Benjamin served with the 12th Indiana Battery during the Civil War. We have a copy of a photo of him in his senior years, with his children.
L to R: Benjamin Franklin Ledman with Harvey, Evelyn (Pruitt), and Will, his children
Benjamin Franklin Ledman is buried at the Piermont Cemetery in Piermont, Carroll County, Indiana, alongside his wife, Martha J. Hornaday, and her parents, John and Isabel Hornaday. The Hornadays originally settled in Cass County, Indiana along the Eel River, and later moved to Carroll County, where John was an early commissioner.
John Hornaday’s mother was Ruth Piggott (born 1777 in Cane Creek, North Carolina). Ruth’s mother was Mary Piggott Hadley, daughter of Joshua Hadley and Patience Brown. Patience was the daughter of Jeremiah Brown and Mary Royal (or Royale) Brown. There are intriguing stories about the life of Mary Royal, who was kidnapped from Scotland, and Jeremiah Brown, an early Quaker whose father was an even earlier Quaker. (See James Browne born in 1656).
Also interesting are the marital affairs of Joshua Hadley and others. Inter-family marriages were quite common, and the records are confusing in the tightly knit Quaker community of colonial America, especially in light of the way marriages were recognized or not recognized by the early Quaker church. One can’t help but wonder if this cultural oddity was still there in later generations of the Ledman Family. The Browns were one of the few families of Quakers in America before William Penn.
THE LEDMAN / CHIDESTER FAMILY
Benjamin Franklin Ledman’s father was Valentine Ledman, born 1803, the son of Henry Ledman (born 1767) and Charolotte (Lottie) Chidester (born 1784). The Chidester ancestry includes James Chidester (born 1629), who arrived in the Colony of New York around 1650 and continues back to Sir John Chichester who served King Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The line continues back still further to Richard de Cicester (born about 1175) who was granted lands by King John in Sussex in the early 13th Century.
The Chidester (Chichester) family is also connected through the Rowe and Barnhouse families to the Pomeroy family and is directly descended from Henry de la Pomeroy II (born abt 1194), the son of Rohese Fitzroy, the supposed illegitimate daughter of King Henry I of England.
There are several other notable lines of this family worth exploring.
I once assumed that the Haley Family ancestry was part English, part German. That was assumed because many of them arrived in North Central Indiana when many German Americans were arriving from Pennsylvania. But here is what I have since discovered.
Haley – English/French
Edwards – English/Irish
Pruitt – English
Ledman – English/Dutch/Irish/Scottish
Eric and I have been working the last few months on finding out about these people, using pictures and information from online sources, plus letters and interviews of older cousins from when Lisa was doing the Genealogy project twenty-some years ago. I mentioned to Eric the other day how I remembered that he had found out we were something like 17th cousins – that our ancestral lines crossed somewhere.
“True,” he said, “but everyone’s family lines cross, and then they criss-cross back and forth. The truth is, we are all related. We all share common ancestors.”
“Besides that,” I said, “aren’t all those designations like “English, French, and all just geopolitical anyway? Boundaries change!”
He agreed, noting that even Queen Victoria of Great Britain married a German (her cousin Prince Albert), ushering in the new tradition of the Christmas Tree in England. The only difference might be language, really, which one could overcome simply by learning a new language.
Or one could consider the case of George the First of England. He was German. He became King of England because the current line ended and he was the nearest Protestant second cousin. He apparently never even learned to speak English…
“So in the end, why do people try to divide us up into 'distinct races’? There is no distinction -- we are all one race: Adam’s race, the race of Man. And all of us who now live on the Earth have Noah as our ancestor, whether our skin is black, white, orange, green, red, or brown.”
That puts us all in the same family!
The problem with this arrangement is that Adam sinned and his entire line is corrupted. All of his descendants are born with a nature that is sinful, just as he himself was sinful.
The solution for this sorry state is to be “born again,” into a new family -- the family of God Himself. And when we accept this arrangement, believing in and trusting in Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross, this new family is set free from that corrupted ancestry.
Here is the mystery. God has no grandchildren -- only sons and daughters. There are no winding criss-crossing family trees -- only direct descent by adoption.
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
~John 1:12-13
May everyone who reads this blog trust in Jesus! We have no time to lose.
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