My Mother's Family

I grew up marveling at the size of my mother's family, whose photo appears at the head of this blog. There were 13 children, and the joke was that they had to make their names into a kind of chant so that they could remember them all:

Alma, Hope, and Bessie

Cliff, and Beech, and Jessie

Elva, Anna, Sadie, Gladys

Lois, Faith, and David.

To help us understand their place in history, I give you one version of that part of the family tree, scanned from the pages of Kith and Kin of the Kinneys, by Fern Gallup Kinney (no date of publication was given, but I am guessing that it was written sometime in the 1950s). I say "one version," because I can see errors just in my own family's record, as laboriously typed by Fern. I was born in 1944, not 1946; my sister's name is "Jean Lee" not "Jeane Loe," and she was born in 1949, not 1948. However, these typos do not diminish the value of Fern's overall work, which contains 87 pages of family history going back to 1738.

Another note: You will notice on the first page shown below that my great-grandmother's maiden name was Sarah Ann Kinney Crabtree. That was not a Fern typo, as Sarah was a distant cousin to her husband, William Henry Crabtree. William was also descended from the same Israel Kinney who was the common ancestor of us all. 

Sarah Ann and William Crabtree were my great-grandparents. They had 13 children, one of whom was my grandfather, David Jewett Crabtree, Sr. David married Edith Giberson, and they also had 13 children, all listed below. They were my aunts and uncles and my mother, Elva Myrtle Crabtree Harris Rodriguez.