James Yeazel is the Husband of my 3rd Great Aunt. As I was searching the Littler side of the family though and was just wondering through the names, I came across the settlement of his estate. Within the papers were forms to hand over the work to an administrator. – In this case two people gave permission with one being his widow.
What I especially found interesting though was that everything was to be appraised and a set amount was to be set aside for the widow – enough to live on for 1 year from the looks of it. Then I assume the rest would be dealt with. In this case the amount in the estate was less than the amount normally handed to the widow for 1 years expenses, so the widow received everything. I also found it interesting that the Value of Property allowed to the widow included the sewing machine.
I’m now curious to search the Illinois Wills site to see who else I can find!
My family has a ‘family reunion’ every year. It’s basically a family party with extra people…. and we do have a BIG family. The party has moved around to different houses throughout the years and been hosted by different people… The earliest I remember were at my grandfather’s pond, then on to my Uncle Franks, my cousin Buddy’s, my Aunt Margaret’s, and on to my cousin Don’s.
Who comes to the events also changes and as time 
goes on we have gained and lost family members. This year though I caught myself having to ask my mother more and more to identify people (and I am afraid to admit, she had trouble on several). I still know the family that I grew up with, and I so want my kids to know their kids, but as time goes on and we meet once a year – it becomes harder and harder to keep up.
I should also mention that for us the trip is 6 hours each way, always now on a Sunday during a weekend after school starts up here in Kentucky. The longest we can stay and still get home for bed time is about 1 or 2 hours. This last year I literally had to run from a conversation as I saw my husband and son heading to the car to leave without me (I’m 98% sure they wouldn’t have).
I remember one of my children replying that it wasn’t a big deal to miss a family trip as he wasn’t familiar with the people we were visiting. To me these family are only distant in location….. I so want my children to have that close tie to family, yet with miles between us all, how do you maintain that?
As I was home the other day I was discussing with my brother the many reasons why we were lucky to have made it through childhood. It’s funny though, my husband talks about people smoking on his bus on the way to school, but that would have NEVER happened on our bus. On the other hand, kids driving themselves to school as soon as they hit their 16th birthday was pretty common. – Mostly because farm kids started driving as soon as they could see over the dash board. I still remember the rules: If you see another car, pull over and park. If they hit you parked it’s their fault, if you are moving it’s your fault – child, no license, driving by yourself. My parents would have me follow to take an extra vehicle to the field, my aunt would have me drop her at the mushroom patch, and my dad would just let us practice.
Childhood though also included rides such as getting in the front bucket of the tractor and 
my dad spinning us around while he made the bucket go up and down. We would climb grain bins into the air and jump into corn and beans that were drying. Learned to swim by being thrown into a pond (at least doggie paddle). We started hunting as soon as we were old enough to hold the gun to shoot. Mini bikes, horses, and in our case odd animals that my dad collected were all part of childhood.
I remember cold days snowmobiling on a frozen river racing after my father (my dad would make us get off for the really steep hills and he would ride our snowmobile up), skating on frozen ponds where railroad tracks had been removed, and even playing in old railroad equipment that had been left buried on the earth by the removed tracks through a field my parents bought.
One of the dangers of growing up on a farm is getting lost in a field…. Surprisingly I don’t remember anyone I know getting lost, but I do remember wondering into fields when I desperately wanted to pee – and remembering the stories. I always wondered how it happened that anyone older could get lost in a field and die knowing the layout of most field in rows.
One story that my brother and I discussed though was my dad chasing down one of our deer that escaped (with antlers). He chased it up and down the field in an old scout, and then wrestled it back into the pin. My brother remembered looking out to see the deer with my dad pinned against a propane tank. My dad apparently always said he would have been gored if the deer wasn’t worn out from running back and forth down the field.
Visiting my family this weekend, a trip to the nursing home to see my dad was part of the visit. Now that my youngest has started school, and living 6 hours from the rest of my family I’m stuck with just weekends to come and help out. I’ve been lucky that my mother is still able to take care of herself as much as she is. This trip my husband and youngest came with and we got to attend a Jurrasic Quest event also. My youngest was super excited about that.
My dad has still been having issues at the nursing home and we’ve been dealing with – is there another place to put him? Surprisingly my mother was told that the nursing home he is in has a five star rating and so he needs to move so that they don’t loose their rating. I’ve been surprised with the number of times they call and tell us that he has fallen. The stories they tell give the impression that despite being unable to walk without assistance when anyone is watching – he appears to be a super quick ninja the rest of the time and get to places and then fall down when they aren’t looking. He is on their list to always be watched yet in the last two days he has fallen twice – and once last week so badly that he has fractured his hand…
While in to visit (Before the last two times he has fallen), we noticed on Sunday that he is now dragging his left foot behind him when he walks with a walker. It appeared obvious to me that he has had a stroke again. The nurse when questioned, said that he has been like that as long as she has known him, but also mentioned that she only works every other weekend. I realized that means that this was the first weekend she had ever seen my dad, as he just moved to that section.
My dad’s medicine seems to be making him pretty tired all the time. It’s pretty sad to see, but even with all that we can see small glimmers of my dad. Strokes do change behavior and physical characteristics. Seeing my dad drag his leg, and unable to stay awake to carry on a conversation reminds me that we have moved from the stage where my parents were caretakers to the next step where my brother and I move up to care for our parents (and our kids).
Growing up we had a lot of strange animals (no snakes actually, though we found quite a few)…. My dad would hear about something and run and get some animals. During grade school dad heard 
about a person with a collection of animals and decided he wanted one. We all loaded up and ran in to get what we could AND came home with a deer…. Pictured to the left is Bambi. He was friendly and as long as he didn’t have antlers on, we could interact inside the fence.
My dad would try all sorts of things though. At one point we had a crow that my dad found that would ride around on Bambi’s antler’s. It had an injured wing, so the crow was perfectly content to ride around. After a while my dad got more deer and we had a whole menagerie.
These were Fallow Deer, indigenous to Germany, and I’d swear my dad’s goal was to use them as lures to get deer to come closer while deer hunting. We would have the local game warden visit each year to make sure ours in captivity were legal and not white tail (local deer). Deer can jump amazingly high, so my father had high fences for them made out of old grain bins. The only escape I remember took 6 men to get the deer back in the pen, and I remember the deer standing with all 6 on it’s back.
While picking up Bambi we also got to see an old monkey named SOB (mean! and abused) and some honey bears. I wanted them SO bad at the time. My father tried later to trade for the honey bears but couldn’t make a deal. I remember the visit by the guy with the bears (they are little bears), and the bears got loose in his truck and locked him out while he was dropping off deer at the time.
SOB ended up taken from his owner and became a test subject for the University of Illinois. Even with all the odd animals we had and the quirky behavior my dad would never have abused an animal. Even a dog we had (Peanut, and yes the matching dog was Butter) that bit my dad while he was trying to help with an infected ear, ended up going to a family with no kids. The dog really had been ‘provoked’, so it wasn’t the dogs fault – and my dad knew it!
Later my dad and a friend tried Beefalo and decided it was GOOD! So they ran out and got two buffalo. We got the girl who my brother and I named Buffy. She was added to the herd at our house. Pictured below is my mother with the buffalo feeding chickens from the look of it.
It’s funny, at the time, although we all had a healthy respect for the animals and knew what each could do and when… we were in and out of the cages to feed them all the time. I’m sure I didn’t think twice about standing there to take this picture and I’m sure my mother fed the chickens, gathered eggs, and fed buffy and the deer like this a million times.
Buffy escaped once in my memory. An owl got into the chicken coop and couldn’t get out. As it flapped trying to get out through the top whole (an old grain bin top that had been cut off) – Buffy got scared and exited through the fence. I’m sure that was a site for all the cars coming up the road. Note: My parents do live on a dead end road and knew everyone around, but still a buffalo in the road on your way home ha
s to be a surprise.
Now as my dad’s memory goes, talking about animals is a way to connect. Seeing deer, a snake, or the fact that my son decided to make a pet out of a frog he found at their house is a great talking point with my dad. These deer were in my parents field! I do wish I had a way to show my dad pictures, I’m thinking I should move them onto my iPad to show him an image that he can see better – maybe put together a slide show of the things that he would find interested. Konnor’s new frog, Konnor’s toad, the deer by the house, even his dogs (did I mention we had 32 dogs at one time growing up!)
We did have a few other unusual animals for short stints, but they always moved on quickly. Everything from a ferret that tried to use a litter box in the kitchen to a a swimming pool filled with fish. My father ended up with a pond filled with catfish that were trained to come to the sound of his footsteps so that he could feed them dog food!
My father is growing old. We’ve said he has dementia, but the true story is a little tougher to deal with…
At 16 my dad wrecked a motorcycle. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a helmet on, not even sure helmets existed yet – and I’m sure they weren’t common. The story I’ve heard is that my Uncle Tom saw him wreck and ran to get the car. He then drove him to the hospital, where it was expected my dad would not survive. Dad had brain swelling (this was the 50s!) and I’m sure the drs said there wasn’t anything they could do for him. Amazingly my father survived though. He was in such bad shape that my grandfather, being a widower farmer couldn’t take care of him, so my dad was sent to live with my Aunt Dorothy. (She’s fairly colorful, so there are lots of stories there too) I should mention the year I was born my father wrecked a convertible Corvette – TOTALED. He was with my cousins Joellyn and Judy and they only survived by being thrown from the car. It rolled over…. Luckily no head trauma then though.
My dad went on with headaches and more, growing up to be a farmer himself (and having me and my brother). Not fond of medical care, my dad didn’t see a doctor for years. I do remember a kidney stone when I was in grade school where my mother had to take him to the ER, but other than that, NADA. Then finally a few years back my father has a seizure and they find his blood pressure is sky high. Not only that, but his blood pressure has been sky high for quite a while. (High blood pressure can cause capillaries in the brain to burst) My father’s blood pressure had went on so long it had caused damage!
My dad is convinced that people die in hospitals, which leads him to try to escape every time he’s in one…. This has led to him removing his own IV and being found in other people’s rooms a few times and the inevitable calls asking everyone to come and take him home…. BUT at that time the drs thought they had gotten it under control.
Skip forward a few years and my dad has a stroke (they run in our family). The doctors had a really hard time with the stroke due to the mass of brain damage (see the motorcycle wreck mentioned above), but finally they decided it was a stroke. Since then he has had a couple as well as his heart valve replaced (because it was leaky?).
So when we look at my dad and know he can’t remember, or is having a bad day – how do you decide.. Does he have dementia or brain damage? My thought is that dementia steadily gets worse where as brain damage (if the underlying conditions are treated) will not get worse unless there is more damage to the tissue.
Even knowing all this, really knowing the cause in this case is just knowledge. Does it help with his treatment? Would it change anything?
I think my answer is yes it does change a little, I have his genes. I need to decide whether I check off Alzheimer and dementia in my close family history. No one else in my direct line had dementia, so does my dad or is it brain damage? Is it my future?
I thin on my family tree medical conditions is something I need to start adding. I think I should add not just COD (Cause of Death) but also major chronic illnesses. My father also has Padget’s disease. I know that is hereditary! It’s something I need to watch out for just in case I received those genes.
Do you track medical conditions in your family tree?
