52 Ancestors Week 18: Road Trip

Question

Ready for Week 18 of the 52 Ancestors challenge?

Please share with us a profile of an ancestor or relative who matches this week's theme:

Road Trip

From Amy Johnson Crow:

This week's theme is "Road Trip." (I love a good road trip!) Here are a few ways you might interpret this prompt: an ancestor who moved a long distance, an ancestor who traveled for work, an ancestor you took a road trip in order to research, an ancestor who was a mechanic or was involved in the automobile business.

 

Share below!

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Comments

My grandfather Robert 'Bud' Marquiss was a trucker in the old days in Alaska. He drove trucks from Valdez to Anchorage in the 1950's which is a pretty treacherous drive back in the day. In the winter he often had to haul a double trailer - one with cargo and then a lowboy with a CAT so he could make it through the pass. He would have to load and unload it every half mile or so to plow enough of the road ahead of him to pull the truck forward and then start all over again. He also drove the 'haul road' and was one of Alaska's original ice road truckers. There are tons of great pictures of him pulling semis out of ditches, hauling outrageously large cargo - like the bridge pieces through a tunnel with less than 1 foot of clearance on either side.

He moved to Fairbanks in the late 50s and became VP of Weaver Bros. Trucking and then President of Texaco Star Heating Fuels, the local bulk fuel plant. But he never stopped being a teamster. In the 80's he would deliver our heating fuel and then take me to Dairy Queen for icecream. We always took the semi through the drive through and had to pull far enough from the window to climb down and retrieve our cones and then climb back up.

He was always on the move!

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Julie, this sounds like the TV Show, Ice Road Truckers.

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Great story/memory! I enjoyed reading that, thanks!

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It basically is Cheryl Hess - Just 40 years before the show began! Theres a book called Triumph over Turbulence by Jim Magoffin that has a short blurb about my grandfather (Bud Marquiss) and his plan to have trucks drive the road and then fly the trucks back because it would be cheaper and cut 2 days off the travel time. But the unions fought against it and it became very expensive. Can you imagine flying a plane all the way to Prudhoe Bay to load it with Semi's to haul them home?!

I'm trying to find my pics of it. They really had to do some crazy stuff and that was just in the 70's. In the 40's-60's they really did some crazy stuff traversing Alaska.

Bud had been a trucker since he was a kid delivering milk in Portland - then when he joined up in WWII he was a refueler in HI. I guess Alaska is easy after that.

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I am late posting BUT... 52 Ancestors, Week 18: Road Trip. Our father was an Interstate Truck Driver, even before I was born. I learned how to read a road map before I was ten years old. We drove by car from Ohio, to Iowa, to Ohio, to Connecticut, and back to Ohio, with up to six kids in the car by 1964!
But the 1954 Columbus, Ohio, Directory (right column) shows my Dad, Jack G. TAYLOR, (with our mother, Bobbie) as a Driver, and my grandfather (left column), Gerald H. TAYLOR, as Manager of Howard Johnson's Restaurant. 
 

Answer 1

Inspired by my stories of travels when younger, my grandfather bought a Canary Yellow Holden sedan when he retired, bundled my grandmother into it and drove from Victoria to Queensland and back. Apart from his service during WWI it was the first time either of them had left the state.

He was 84 at the time.

Comments

Fabulous! Great job grandpa!

Answer 2

52 Ancestors Week 18 - Road Trip

As soon as I saw this week's topic, I knew what my entry was going to be. Every year our town has a Gladiolus Festival. Why, you might ask?  Because at one point, we were the Gladiolus Capital of the United States.

So every second week-end in August, kids, adults and companies decorate bikes, floats or whatever with gladiolus and we have a huge parade.

We have the biggest marching bands, flea markets, old car shows, food, carnivals and a merry old time.

There used to be a drum corp competition, but that died out when the State starting having their competition the same time as we had ours.  We even had boats on the Kankakee River (1938) decorated.

We elect a Queen and a Princess that rule over the four day period.

So, when I heard road trip, I thought of this car that was decorated for the first Gladiolus Festival in 1938. I am not sure what they used to decorate it with, but the Chatfield family, who I do not have in my tree yet, decorated it.

Our parade has a regular parade route, so when I saw road trip,  I thought of this car making a road trip on the parade route. I wasn't sure if this car made the whole route decorated like this, but I would have loved to see it.

Comments

Wow, what a pic!

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Thank you SJ

Answer 3

My dad’s parents lived in Morgantown, WV, and I grew up near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a distance of about 90 miles. We made the trip back to see them about once a month, and back in the day before interstates, it took about 2 hours to get there.  I was always an avid reader, and if you know anything about West Virginia, you know the back roads there are very hilly and curvy, so reading in the car almost always resulted in the usual case of motion sickness.  My dad finally learned to time the replacement of the shock absorbers on our old 1952 Plymouth by whether or not I was getting carsick.  If I got sick, it was time to change the shock absorbers.  

Comments

Lynn, what a great answer. It remined me on the times I would get sick in the car. I remember once we were going to make a trip east, and we only got to the curvy roads in Arkansas before my mother had to hose me off at a gas station. She said this is no vacation, and she drove back to Oklahoma.

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"If I got sick, it was time to change the shock absorbers"

LOL!

Answer 4

My husband's grandparents Hugh and Eunice Hennen https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hennen-252 every few years would take a road trip from Oklahoma to Canada. Hugh's mother had grown up in Canada. On one occasion Eunice, who was in her nineties, was in the car with me, and she was looking out the window at Eufaula Lake here in Oklahoma. She told me that she and Hugh did all the things that they wanted to do in their lives, and they wanted to go to Canada and they were able to go. 

Answer 5

I have a variation on the road trip theme.  I have many ancestors from Essex County and took a genealogically related trip there last August.  I stayed at a hotel in Amesbury and during one of my morning walks, I realize that I was treading the same lands roads and trails as my ancestors had 350 years earlier.  The only difference was they didn't have a GPS equipped phone, cold bottles of water and were wearing heavy wool clothing. 

Attached is a map of my walks through Amesbury, Salisbury and Newburyport. 

Walks map

Comments

Essex County...is this Massachusetts?  Asks the Texan

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Indeed Edie, my mom is from Essex County, MA and my dad is from Harris County, TX.  I'm currently in Dallas.

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Well, wonderful! We're neighbors!

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That sounds like a fabulous road trip, Bret. I'm planning to do something similar, in Plymouth, Marblehead and Charleston, where so many of my ancestors settled. Your map is attached to a private profile, so visible only to the Trusted List, but GPS plotting is a great idea.

Answer 6

Not exactly ‘road trip ‘ my family flew out to Australia to start a new life, far from family and friends.

Answer 7

As soon as I saw the topic for this week, I thought of this photo with my grandparents Myrtle and Arthur Pountney. https://www.wikitree.com/photo/jpg/Pictures_of_Many_Years-6

When you break down, why not take a photo and wait for the engine to cool.

Comments

Love it! That is a great photo!

Answer 8

When Germany was divided, a good deal of my father's family lived in the GDR, while we lived in FRG. We kept in contact with that family after my father died and visited them several times. You always needed a reason for a visit because you needed a visa for it. (When my greatgranddad was still alive my father wanted to visit him and gave as reason "old age". They denied him the visa "this is no reason!") Back to my story: So we had visited my grandaunt with her family and mum had bought a coffee set there. She had paid it, but left it in the shop because they (she was there with someone of the family) wanted to visit the city first. So the shop owner had marked the set with the surname of my grandaunt, which is different of ours. They took it later, no problems. Now we come to the border.

"Open the luggage space." There is the box with the set and the surname of my grandaunt.

"What is in there?" "

A coffee set."

"Why is there a different name than in your passport?"

"I had bought it, left it there and the shop owner marked it with the surname of the aunt of my husband."

"Why not with your name?"

"Because he knows the aunt of my husband, but doesn't know me. For him that was clearer with the name of my husband's aunt."

"Uhm...Ok, but why is the name of your relative different?"

"Because she married! She is a born Eckstädt, but she married a Lorenz"

"Uhm... Ok, go ahead!"

And finally we were able to leave the GDR...

Comments

Great story Jelena!  Something to remember every time you drink coffee.

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I love this story!

Answer 9

None of my grandparents ever owned a car. My parents moved to a different part of the country so the only times we saw my grandparents was when we drove to them. It took 1,5 hour to get there. That's a long drive in the Netherlands. We went there once a month for a day or a whole weekend and visited as many familymembers as we could put in that time. Always starting at one set of grandparents and ending at the other. Us kids flew out to aunts and uncles who had kids of the same age but we knew we had to be at a certain home at a certain time for the return trip.

The only times my paternal grandparents visited us, was when their neighbour - a salesman - had to go somewhere in our part of the country. Once a year he brought my grandparents to stay for a day and took them home in the evening. It always was a very special day for us.

Comments

Who flagged this posting? Please unflag that post!

Answer 10

I'm from New Zealand, born and raised. This means that, naturally, every single one of my ancestors was an immigrant, and all of them immigrated to New Zealand from the United Kingdom or Ireland, bar a few who were French or who had previously made their way to Australia before boarding a separate ship here.
In fact, I have a table on my profile documenting each of my immigrant ancestors, their relationship to me, and when they immigrated + which ship they immigrated on.

George Taylor was the earliest of my ancestors to arrive here, sailing from Gravesend on July 5, 1840 and arriving at Port Nicholson on November 14 aboard the Martha Ridgway. 
It was by way of this ship that news was released of the intent of the directors to rename the settlement of Britannia to Wellington (which currently serves as New Zealand's capital) in honour of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, who had succeeded in passing the South Australia Act through the House of Commons. 
This act was the charter which that colony was colonised under, and it had originally been intended that the chief town of the South Australian colony was to be named after His Grace however the place was eventually called after the Queen (Victoria).
The decision to name the Britannia settlement came from some of the people at the head of affairs in the South Australian colonisation scheme, who were also connected to the colonising of New Zealand.

George married Jane Thomas, and they went on to have two sons.

Comments

I think you mean Queen Adelaide who was the wife of King William IV, king at the time. Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia.

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My apologies for getting the dates incorrect. There were two South Australia Acts, one in 1834 during William's reign and a second in 1842 during Victoria's, which explains my confusion haha.

Answer 11

I recently made a road trip to Cornwall to visit the area where some of my Cornish ancestors lived around Falmouth and Truro and some rural parishes. Although I didn't find any memorials to my direct ancestors I did find a few family graves including the grave of John Francis (1748-1816) in the huge graveyard of Kenwyn Parish Church. I took some photos of graves at Kenwyn and have uploaded those to Find a Grave but after a while I realised the sheer scale of the task - it would take a team of volunteers many days to photograph and document each grave.
I also have a few relatives in the historic Dissenters Burying Ground at Ponsharden, Cornwall but unfortunately that was not accessible at the time I visited.

Answer 12

Week 18 for 18 

Before my grandfather Paul Ranck died, I sat down with him and asked him questions about his childhood and he told me stories about the great depression.  I wasn't into genealogy then and didn't ask him about his ancestors - big mistake.  When he was young, his family migrated from the midwest to California during the depression.  He retold of some enterprising fellow who laid 12" by 10' long boards, tire width apart - across the sands of the desert and charged the long caravans of Model-T and other cars as they migrated westward.  Grandpa told that then they arrived to the Colorado river near Blythe, California, he saw for the first time in his life, large California oranges.  He explained with great relish how big and how sweet they were and how he had never had anything like them before.

Comments

I wish those orchards were all still there,  instead of backyards.

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I agree Edie, though they're not all gone. When lived in California, we had lovely orange and lemon trees in the backyard, and they're still thriving.

Answer 13

This week I'm sharing the profile of John Morrow, the husband of my great grand-aunt Esther Hall.  I discovered my great grand-aunt by accident, when researching someone else, so she is a 'bonus' relative, especially given how common the names Hall and Morrow are - they would have been difficult to find on purpose!

Esther and John married in 1881, when he was already a widower.  His relation to road trips is that he worked as a coachman.  He had this job in all the records I've been able to find for him.  As you'd expect, his location moves around - he started out in County Armagh, married Esther in County Antrim and they ended up living in Belfast.  His job in the 1911 Ireland census is listed as 'coachman and domestic servant' which is quite intriguing - did he have two jobs or were they somehow combined?  Also he would have seen the change from horse-drawn transport to the new-fangled motorised vehicles, especially living in the city.  That said, my father remembers working on his farm as a young man in the forties and they were still using horses alongside the motorised machinery.

Answer 14

For my Road Trip related blog, I discussed the journey my immigrant ancestors took. I discussed my grandfather Marco's family's story and my grandmother, Ollie's story. I also touched on my mother's side, too. https://arlhaverhill.blogspot.com/2019/04/52-ancestors-week-18-road-trip.html

Answer 15

My first reaction was ME and my daughter. My daughter and I have been taking road trips together every year since she graduated from college 20 years ago. We've made 3 cross country trips and been in all fifty states. She has a Rand McNally map and she very carefully marks all the roads she's been on. But then I'm not my own ancestor.

Then I had to laugh because I thought of the Smurfs: How much further Papa Smurf? And of course all the road trips to grandmother's house as a child. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? I swear the Pennsylvania turnpike is the longest road in the entire country. At least it is if you're eight.

Then there were all the ancestors, like Thomas Lord, who walked from Massachusetts to Hartford, Connecticut. Strictly speaking not a road trip, since there wasn't a road yet, just a path.

However, besides myself, my children, my siblings, my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, most of whom were and are enthusiastic road trippers, I have a great grandmother who took a road trip to Niagara Falls and other places in New York state about 1927. The newspaper announcement of her 80th birthday in 1927, mentioned this  recent journey. Julia Delphine (Fleming) Crofutt

Answer 16

The Oregon Trail was a road.  In 1846, my 3x great grandfather Heman Chapin Buckingham drove a team oxen (so he basically walked) with his family from Iowa to the Willamette valley in Oregon.  He lost a child on the trail and his second wife died shortly after arrival.  

Answer 17

My great-great grandparents, Anthony Omelia and Catherine Mumma-Omelia, were married in 1871.

During the early years of their marriage they spent a lot of time on road trips.  They had a wagon pulled by a horse.  They traveled around the northern section of Illinois selling their wares to farmer families.

Kate passed the travel time doing needle work.  This activity also gave them one more kind of item to sell.  She did great work.  Some of it has been passed down the family.

A few years later they opened a "Confection" store in Forreston, Ogle, Illinois.

Answer 18

In keeping with a different ancestral surname for each week of the challenge, this week is about Jared Michael https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Michael-71 and his family on the Oregon Trail.  Jared Michael was my 3rd great-grandfather.

Jared had eleven children, the youngest being age seven, when he decided to make the move from Indiana in 1846.  Some of the older children stayed in Indiana.  Of those that came, the trip resulted in two broken marriages: one daughter ditched her husband to come along, and Jared's eldest son was caught in hanky-panky resulting in his wife taking her two youngest girls and going home, accompanied by another son whom she eventually married. 

The wagon masters planned to spend the first winter in Missouri, near a place where grass would be present in the spring. In the winter, Jared  made sure his stock had enough grain to eat.  Suspicious that someone was stealing his feed, he put wooden pegs in the grain and observed whose animals they came out of. 

My 2ggf Elijah Grant Michael was aged fourteen when he walked from Missouri to Oregon.  Everyone except the very young or infirm walked.  He weighed 87 pounds (don't know what that is in kilograms) when he got to Oregon and doubled his weight in one year.

A memorable road trip for me was in 1987 for the Michael researchers' reunion to see the cemetery where Jared, his wife and other family members are buried in the Union Point area near Brownsville, Oregon.  I met distant cousins face to face whom I had been in correspondence with about Michael research.  If I were to make a similar road trip now I would want to be with a companion, but back then I was able to do it on my own.

      

Answer 19

I will nominate William James Pallant my Great Great Uncle who moved to New Zealand in 1875 with his wife, children and sister.

Once there he carried on his father James Pallant's trade. James was a Cordwainer and William opened a boot and shoe business in New Zealand.

Answer 20

My 2x great grandfather, Joshua Perkins (born 1827), made several road trips in the 1840-1850's. By 1845, he had left his birthplace in Woodstock, Maine, to live in Newton, Massachusetts, where he worked in a paper mill.  About 1849, he moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts, where he worked in the express business route between Chelsea and Boston, farmed and went into the grocery business for a short time.

By 1857, he had completed his last, longest long road trip, leaving the Boston area and relocating to Quasqueton, Buchanan County, Iowa, where he bought a house for $300 and worked as a carpenter while improving his farm of 60+ acres. After his acreage was improved, he was a full-time farmer and lived there until his death in 1911.