Marita Janet Meyers Douglas was the youngest granddaughter of my great-grandparents John C. and Mary Agnes Holmes Allen. She passed unexpectedly, but peacefully, at her home in Maryland on July 9. My deepest condolences to her closest family and to all who loved her.
My extended Allen family, which has always been small, recently lost its oldest member, my mother’s first cousin, Jasper Maxwell Allen, Jr. I never met Cousin Mack Jr., but for the last dozen years or so spoke with him once or twice a year by telephone. He was close to his beloved late wife Arnetta’s family, and I am grateful to them for this obituary:
The late Jasper Maxwell Allen, Jr. was born in Charlotte Courthouse, Virginia on February 10th, 1931, to the late Lena P. Allen, a school teacher and Dr. Jasper Maxwell Allen, Sr., a dentist. Jasper, Max, or Allen as most of us called him was a bit rambunctious as a child (by his own admittance), and often joked about his experiences as a kid and getting into mischief every now and then. One of his favorite stories to tell was how his beloved mother Lena was not only his mom, but also his teacher in elementary school. He would snicker about getting into what he called “double trouble” when he would misbehave in school!!
As a young man, Allen went on to Maryland State College, now known as the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree. He then went on to be drafted into the military and served during the Korean War, in both France and Germany. The military allowed him to utilize his degree and knowledge of technology and computers. During this time, he also acquired a love for the Volkswagen! While in the military, Allen would also go on to meet Merchant Marine Chief Henry Burton, who would later coincidentally, become his uncle in-law. After completing both college and his military tour Allen lived and worked in Washington DC before settling in Harlem, New York. His expertise in the world of technology earned him jobs with IBM, Rudband, and even a covert position that until this day he had never “spilled the beans” on. Which was absolutely within his nature. Allen was a “by the book” kind of guy.
While living in New York and working at Rudband he met who would later become the love of his life, Arnetta Lewis. Arnetta was Allen’s supervisor in the Key Punch Department. Their love blossomed during their carpool rides from work, in which Allen was the driver. At 90 years old, Allen could still describe the exact outfit and hair style Arnetta was wearing the day that they met (a gold and blue checkered jacket, a gold blouse and her hair was in a French roll). To quote him on their early encounters “my heart jumped up and moved around a bit!” Allen and Arnetta dated and later married on September 7th, 1957 and were married for 55 years. They would go on to leave Harlem and move to the Bronx where Allen spent the last 45 years. Allen and Arnetta did everything together! They bickered and fussed, partied, traveled, prayed, and loved their family and each as a unit. Arnetta preceded Allen in death in November of 2012.
As the elder of our family Allen remained the wise, smart, cool, funny, gracious, and slick guy we all loved, and we all had our very own special relationship with him. From the oldest to the youngest, he could hold a conversation with any of us about anything. He also knew how to get us to stop fussing at him by playing possum and faking a nap, he would sometimes peak one eye open to see if we were still there (Classic Allen).
Affectionately known as “Uncle Allen” by his New York family, Allen remained surrounded by loved ones no more than an elevator or a train ride away! Allen leaves behind nephews and nieces, Rodney A. Lewis, Juanita Lewis, Darcel Kennedy, John Harries, Rodney E. Lewis, Jasmine N. Lewis-Peguero, Kayla E.N. Lewis, Jasmine Rucker, Jamek Rucker, Kaiah Irene Lewis, Rodney Trey Lewis, Jason R. Peguero, Raul Peguero and Tracee Bryant. Allen also leaves behind a host of family and friends in his home state of Virginia. We love you and will miss you dearly Uncle Allen.
One of the earliest of the many sweet surprises my genealogical research has uncovered is that I am distant cousin to a close college friend, Lorna Dove. Lorna is descended from Durant Dove, alias Durant Henderson, whose mother, Nancy Henderson, I believe to have been the sister of my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Patsy Henderson.
I met Lorna’s father Milton Dove in the days leading up to our graduation from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. I knew of his tremendous work as a community activist in Kinston and was proud to claim a bit of kinship with him.
Today, I learned that Mr. Dove passed away last week at the age of 93. My deepest condolences go to the Dove family, who shared their father with so many for such good. Rest in peace, Milton Dove!
“KINSTON – On December 12, 1923, Milton Bickett Dove Sr. was born to Hosea and Rosella Dove on the family farm in the Woodington area of Lenoir County, North Carolina. He was a lifelong resident of Lenoir County having attended the public school system and graduating as valedictorian from Adkin High School in 1941. He passed away peacefully at his home on October 26, 2017. He met and married Mary Frances Mills on March 29, 1942 after which they moved to Kinston staying first in the Mitchell Wooten Courts Housing Projects, then in Lincoln City, and finally on Beech Avenue. Together they raised five children, Velma, Milton Jr., Kaye, Timber, and Lorna. Milton opened Dove’s Auto Service in 1946 and made many real estate investments. With the support of his wife Frances, he was able to pursue his life’s passion, community service. He worked with the Boy Scouts of America serving as scout master for many years, participated in Big Brothers and Big Sisters, the Black Artist Guild, and the Greater Kinston Credit Union. The family frequently joked about the fact that he served as president of the elementary school PTA long after his children had left the school. In 1976 when the Lenoir County Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was established, he was elected as the branch president. He was an NAACP Golden Heritage Lifetime Member and encouraged everyone to join as a lifetime member. While branch president, school desegregation was a primary initiative, however they also fought to eliminate discriminatory employment practices and spearheaded a voter registration drive. The NAACP presented him with many awards as he worked on the county, conference, and state levels. Throughout his life, he worked against Jim Crow Laws and upon discerning that they understood and accepted the risks associated with public protests, he encouraged his children to stand up for social justice. He successfully sued the Kinston School District for conducting a separate but unequal education system. The lawsuit resulted in a court-ordered integration plan resulting in his daughter Lorna’s enrollment in the previously “whites only” Northwest Elementary School. Prior to that, his daughter Kaye was one of the first black student enrollees in Grainger High School under the Freedom of Choice Plan. Attending the March on Washington in 1963 along with a bus load of other community activists was one of his fondest memories. Also being an ardent supporter and admirer of Nelson Mandela, in 1997 he visited South Africa and toured Mandela’s home in Soweto and the place of his 27-year imprisonment, Robbins Island. The trip to South Africa was truly a high light of his life. He was predeceased by his wife, Mary Frances; brothers, Wiley, Jarrell, King David; and sister, Ella Gray. He is survived by his sister, Eva Mae and brother, Alvin (Crystal) as well as five children, Velma Dove (Brian), Milton Jr., Kaye Jackson (James), Timber Washington (Lester), and Lorna Mills Dove (Daniel) along with a host of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. The funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, November 1 at the United American Free Will Baptist Tabernacle, 1011 Dr. J.E. Reddick Circle, Kinston, NC. Burial will follow in Mills Memorial Gardens. A wake will be held from 6-8 p.m. Tuesday, October 31, at Mills Funeral Home. Viewing will be held one hour prior to the service Wednesday at the church. Arrangements are by Mills Funeral Home, Inc. Sign the guest book at kinston.com.”
I had a hunch, so I Googled for an obituary. Sure enough.
I wrote of Pat York Painter in February 2015. We had made chance acquaintance online when she commented on one of my blog posts on the basis of our mutual descent from Thomas and Rebecca Nicholson Nicholson. “If you’re ever in Iredell County,” she said, “I’ll show you around.” I made it a point. And on a gray and rainy winter afternoon, I rounded the hills and crossed the creeks of Eagle Mills township, ancestral home to my Colverts and Nicholsons and related Daltons, as Pat narrated. She spun a web of stories that introduced me to the lands on which Walker and Rebecca Parks Colvert and Harriet Nicholson lived and identified the enslavers of Josephine Dalton Colvert’s forebears.
“Mrs. Pat York Painter, 80, of Harmony, died Saturday, May 20, 2017 at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem. Born in Iredell County on December 4, 1936, she was a daughter of the late Richard Barnard and Mabel Arlene York Hayes.
“Pat was retired from the Iredell County EMS, where she was the first female Paramedic in Iredell County. She spearheaded the startup of the First Responder Program and was honored with a Lifetime Membership in the Iredell County Rescue Squad. She graduated from Harmony High School and dearly loved her horses, gardening, driving her tractor and being outdoors. She was a hardworking and determined person. She also helped maintain the old Liberty School House.
“Survivors include her children: Linda D. Bronson (Kevin), Susan D. Smyth (Rick), John Duchinski (Julie), Trish D. Velzy (Steve) and David L. Painter (Emily). Also surviving is her brother, Tony Barnard (Lisa) and grandchildren: Dylan Smyth, David A. Painter, Kinsley Jo Duchinski and Jayce Johnson and a special cousin, Joe Mullis.
“Services celebrating Pat’s life will be conducted at 3:00 P.M. Tuesday, May 23, 2017 at Macedonia United Methodist Church with Rev. Mack Warren officiating. Burial will follow in the church cemetery. The family will receive friends at the church from 1:00 to 3:00 prior to the service. Members of the Iredell County Emergency Services will serve as active and honorary pallbearers.
“Condolences may be sent online to the family to www.nicholsonfunerals.com. Memorials may be given in lieu of flowers to the North Iredell Rescue Squad, 1538 Tabor Rd., Harmony, N.C. 28634. Nicholson Funeral Home is entrusted with the arrangements.”
Many thanks, Pat Painter. Rest in peace.
Cousin Zeke in 2013, age 93.
I happened to be in Wilson when the news came. Cousin Zeke had passed peacefully at the age of 97.
Cousin Zeke at right, with sister Bessie and their father Jack, circa late 1920s.
Alice “Zeke” Henderson Mabin was born 22 January 1920 in Wilson to Jesse “Jack” Henderson and Pauline Artis Henderson. Despite their ten-year age gap, she and my grandmother were close pals in the years before Zeke relocated to Norfolk, Virginia — where she met husband Joseph W. Mabin — and eventually Baltimore, Maryland.
Cousin Zeke in front of the family’s home on East Vance Street in the early 1940s, with sister Doris Henderson Ward behind.
Cousin Zeke returned to Wilson four years ago as her health began to fail. She had no children, but was well-loved by her many nieces, nephews and cousins.
Right to left: Cousin Zeke, her husband Joe, and her sisters Bessie Henderson Smith and Mildred Henderson Hall in Mildred’s den on Queen Street in Wilson.
Sisters Zeke and Bessie on their sister Mildred’s porch, 1986.
D.C. PHYSICIAN R.S. RANDALL DIES AT AGE 76.
R. Stewart Randall, 76, a Washington family physician whose medical career spanned more than 50 years, died July 17 at Washington Hospital Center of complications following a stroke.
Dr. Randall was a lifelong resident of Washington. He graduated from Dunbar High School and Howard University and its medical school. He began an internship at Freedman’s Hospital here, then served in the Army Medical Corps in France during World War II. He received a Bronze Star.
After the war, he returned here and opened a family medical practice, which continued until his death. He also was an instructor in the Howard University Medical School’s department of family practice and its preceptorship program in primary and comprehensive care. He worked part time at the Union Medical Center obstetrics and gynecology clinic.
He was a fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians, a life member of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia and a member of the D.C. Medico-Chirurgical Society.
He received a community service award from the Lower Georgia Avenue Businessmen’s Association for his work in helping develop a complex of medical offices and clinics along Georgia Avenue NW.
He was a life member of the NAACP.
His wife of 42 years, the former Ethel M. Gibson, died in 1989.
Survivors include three children, R. Stewart Randall Jr., Anna Randall Allen and Mae Ellen Randall, all of Washington; his father, Fred R. Randall of Washington; a sister, Ada R. Reeves of Washington; a brother, Dr. Frederick R. Randall of New York; and four grandchildren.
— Washington Post, 22 July 1992.
Pittsburgh Courier, 18 April 1964.
Louise Daniel Hutchinson, scholar of black history, dies at 86
By Emily Langer, The Washington Post, 26 October 2014.
WASHINGTON — Louise Daniel Hutchinson, who gathered, documented and preserved African-American history during 13 years as director of research at the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum in Southeast Washington, died Oct. 12 at her home in Washington. She was 86.
The cause was vascular dementia, said a daughter, Donna Marshall.
Mrs. Hutchinson spent much of her adult life working to collect and share with others the richness of African-American history in Washington and beyond. In 1974, after years of community activism, she joined the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, as it was then known. She retired in 1987.
Under the leadership of founding director John Kinard, she oversaw exhibits covering years of history in the Anacostia community, the movement of blacks from Africa to overseas colonies, and the life and accomplishments of Frederick Douglass, the former slave, abolitionist and distinguished writer.
She took particular interest in documenting the lives of African-American women such as Anna Cooper, who was born into slavery and became a noted educator and equal rights advocate. “Even black history hasn’t given black women their proper place,” Hutchinson once told the New York Times.
Gail Lowe, the Anacostia Community Museum’s senior historian, credited Mrs. Hutchinson with elevating the work of the research department and using individual life stories to illuminate broader history. “In telling the local stories,” Lowe said in an interview, “she validated community experiences.” Mrs. Hutchinson was “a stickler for accuracy and authenticity,” Lowe said, and insisted researchers keep magnifying glasses on hand for the close inspection of old photographs. Hutchinson, Lowe recalled, spotted Harriet Tubman and W.E.B. Du Bois in previously unidentified images.
“Because of the level and depth of her work,” Lowe said, “she was able to … provide accurate, documented information that other researchers and scholars relied on.”
Louise Hazel Daniel, one of nine children, was born June 3, 1928, in Ridge, Maryland, and raised in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington. Her parents, Victor Hugo Daniel and Constance E.H. Daniel, were teachers and friends of the African-American intellectuals and educators George Washington Carver and Mary McLeod Bethune.
After graduating in 1946 from the old Armstrong Technical High School in Washington, Mrs. Hutchinson attended colleges including Howard University and did secretarial work before beginning her career in historical preservation. In the 1970s, she assisted curators at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery with the selection of paintings featuring prominent African-Americans, her daughter said.
Mrs. Hutchinson’s writings included the books “The Anacostia Story, 1608-1930″ in 1977, “Out of Africa: From West African Kingdoms to Colonization” in 1979 and “Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South” in 1981.
Mrs. Hutchinson’s daughter Laura Hutchinson died in infancy, and her son Mark Hutchinson died in 1974, at age 8, of a brain tumor.
Survivors include her husband of 64 years, Ellsworth Hutchinson Jr. of Washington; five children, Ronald Hutchinson of Fort Washington, Maryland, David Hutchinson of Clifton Park, New York, Donna Marshall of Laurel, Maryland, Dana McCoy of Washington and Victoria Boston of Clinton, Maryland; two brothers, John Daniel of Washington and Robert Daniel of Atlanta; a sister, C. Dorothea Lawson of Bay City, Texas; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
In addition to her museum work, Mrs. Hutchinson participated in such initiatives as the development of D.C. public school curriculum in the 1980s, which incorporated the roles of black leaders in local events.
“I have real concerns about accuracy of history,” she told The Washington Post. “I believe it must reflect [the] participation of all.”
——
The Wilson Daily Times was an afternoon paper in my day. It was lying in the driveway when I arrived home from school, and I could read it first if I put it back like it was — pages squared and neatly folded. (Even today, I shudder at a sloppy newspaper, flipped inside out and pages sprawling.) The Daily Times‘ roots are in Zion’s Landmark, a semi-monthly newsletter begun in 1867 by Pleasant Daniel Gold. Elder Gold (1833-1920), pastor of Wilson Primitive Baptist Church, filled the periodical with sermons and homilies, ads for homeopathic remedies, testimonials, altar calls and, most enduringly, obituaries of Primitive Baptists throughout eastern North Carolina.
African-Americans did not often make it into the pages of the Landmark, but P.D. Gold held Jonah Williams in considerable esteem. Gold preached my great-great-great-great-uncle’s funeral and published in the Landmark a lengthy obituary by Brother Henry S. Reid, clerk at Turner Swamp Primitive Baptist Church:
And what does this piece add to what I already know about Jonah Williams?
Text found at https://archive.org/details/zionslandmarkse4919unse_0
Eons ago, one of the first documents I found related to my great-great-great-grandfather John Wilson McNeely‘s family was an 1828 obituary for his brother David C. McNeely, a student at Yale College.
Western Carolinian, 22 April 1828.
Wow, I marveled. There could not have been many Scotch-Irishmen from the backwoods of Piedmont North Carolina studying at Yale at that time. What a terrible loss this must have been for John and his family. I entered David’s name into my Family Tree Maker tree alongside Samuel McNeely’s other children William and Acenith (or Acintha).
And then the other day, I found this:
Western Carolinian, 29 April 1828.
Oh. … Okay. … So all my sentiments hold — except the loss to John. David was not Samuel McNeely‘s son after all, but James McNeely’s.
If there was one James McNeely in Rowan County in the first quarter of the 19th century, there were a dozen, and I have been singularly unsuccessful at teasing apart and differentiating them. Evidence shows that Samuel and his son John W. had close relationships with several James. However, the will of Samuel’s father John McNeely (1724-1801) lists no heir named James, only John, Alexander and Samuel and their sister Ellinor McNeely Bell. It is past time that I pull together a chart or a list or a something that summarizes links I’ve found among these McNeelys and may reveal previously unnoticed clues.
I felt sure that Napoleon Hagans‘ death had merited more than the brief mention I’d seen in the Goldsboro Headlight, and last night I found it:
Goldsboro Daily Argus, 1 September 1896.
This shining eulogy was penned by Ezekiel Ezra “E.E.” Smith (1852-1933), college president, recent United States Ambassador to Liberia, and arguably the most accomplished of Wayne County’s 19th-century African American citizens. (Smith was born free in Duplin County, just to the south, but moved to Goldsboro as a young man, married a cousin of Napoleon’s daughter-in-law Lizzie Burnett Hagans, and was principal for a time of Goldsboro’s colored school.) Side-stepping the indelicate issue of Napoleon’s parentage, E.E. painted a glowing portrait of his friend’s virtues — his hard work, his astuteness, his self-built wealth, his determination to give his children what he lacked. Napoleon’s business acumen and successes won relationships across color lines and among North Carolina’s colored elite, and E.E. listed those who took part in the funeral or had taken the time to reach out to pay respects:
Scuffalong: Genealogy. 