Deb Cavel

Ancestors

Daughter of Charlie Hall Cavel and Mattie Neil (Clark) Cavel

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Biography

Deb Cavel is the descendant of Palatine migrants.

Deb is the daughter of Charlie Hall Cavel and Mattie Neil Clark. ^[1]

My first conscious memory is of being held by my dad, watching two men shingle the roof of our house on Howard Street. I saw this as awe-inspiring. They were on the roof and I assumed they had flown there. I am told I was eight months old when the house got its new roof. Few children have such early memories, but I have several reaching back to my first year of life.

We lived in Duncan, Stephens County Oklahoma, only miles from where my dad was born. My paternal grandmother Josie Smith lived with us off and on to care for me, as my mother was not well. I developed a close bond with her, she taught me her Native Tuscarora language and told me stories I would recall years later as I searched for family records.

After Grandma died in 1955 we became nomads of sorts. Though Dad was a very skilled carpenter and cabinet maker work was often hard to come by, and he'd worked in the oil fields for most of his adult life. By the mid-50s the fields in southern Oklahoma were all drilled out and it was time for us to move on.

We lived briefly in a succession of dusty towns in the Oklahoma Panhandle, West Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and California. As Dad entered his late 50s we moved to Phoenix where one of my older brothers lived. Phoenix was booming and he had a good job as a finish carpenter. Dad quickly found a job and went back to work as a finish carpenter.

I was just entering high school. I'd gone to 16 different elementary schools and I was ready to settle in long enough to make friends. And make friends I did, mostly a few other eggheads like myself and several teachers who were hugely influential in my life. I loved high school and graduated as one of the top 10 students in a class of 800. I got a four-year tuition and books paid scholarship to university, in a pre-med program. However, my parents were suspicious of giving girls advanced education and refused to allow me to accept it. (Years later I went to university with my older son as a classmate.)

At 19 I took the money I had saved from working summers and went to a three-month business training school which had a residential component in Kansas City. My plane ticket was booked home to Phoenix, but two days before I was slated to return home both my roommate in Kansas City and I were offered jobs as customer service reps with an air freight company at O'Hare Field in Chicago.

I had a choice. Go back home with no job to live with my parents, or go to a new, well-paid job with my roommate. The company had an apartment waiting, in a building with a dozen other girls who worked the customer service desk. I called the airline and changed my ticket from Phoenix to Chicago.

Funny how your life can pivot on one small action. That phone call changed my life. My parents were outraged, but within a week at that air freight company, I'd met the man who 58 years later is still the love of my life. We've lived through what the Chinese call "interesting times", but our relationship has remained rock solid through all the storms that raged around us.

I became interested in genealogy in my teens when a second cousin sent my Dad a family group sheet to fill in. I began to pursue my interest in earnest in 1967 when my late sister-in-law June and I started trying to trace our paternal lines together. Those were the days when everything was done by writing hundreds of letters, by taking day trips to the National Archives in Fort Worth, and visiting the stacks in the genealogy section in Fort Worth Library, ordering films from Salt Lake, spending long hours hunched over the readers - and coming out nigh blind. Oh but it was thrilling! :)

My long-term research partners were my sister-in-law June Grider Cavel, my double cousin Wanda Clark Slaughter and my 1st cousin Brenda McClure. All are now among the dearly departed though it pains me to write it.

Genealogy tries to teach you to accept the good with the bad. You can no more accept credit for the good deeds your ancestors accomplished than you can be blamed for the bad they did. I've always been a great history buff. I just wish I had known in high school history classes that both Winston Churchill and FDR were 10th cousins 1x removed, through my Perkins line. (I still need to document both of those connections on WT) I'm not as tickled to know that Richard Nixon is an 8th cousin 1x removed, but having both Daniel Webster and Robert Frost in the family tree (though Frost is just a cousin by marriage) makes up for Nixon. Though to be fair, what Nixon did in the early 1970s pales in comparison to the machinations of a recently ousted occupant of the White House.

Along the way I've discovered that two of my 8th g-grandfathers qualify as members of the Jamestown Society: Burgess George Mason I - born 1629, died 1686, Stafford Co. VA and Speaker of House of Burgesses Robert Wynne, born abt 1622, d 1675, Charles City Co VA. Burgesses Francis Poythres(s)/Poythers and John Stith are related by marriage. Two dozen other of my ancestors braved the cold waters of the Atlantic to arrive in the American Colonies before 1700. Is it the legacy of these fearless (or at least desperate) individuals that shaped the American character?

I'm equally proud that in all four of my grandparents' lines, my Native Tuscarora ancestors stood on the Virginia and Carolina shores and watched as Europeans invaded their homeland. They were almost certainly justifiably apprehensive. From the time of 1st contact with DeSoto until 1750 their numbers crashed from an estimated 20,000 to a few hundred due to their vulnerability to European viral diseases like measles, smallpox, even the 'common cold' and as Will Rogers put it succinctly, 'The good Christians' habit of shooting a few Indians on their way to prayer meeting'. Slave raids devastated many Tuscarora families, as their women and children were snatched from the family gardens and marched to the slave markets of Charleston SC where they were sold to the highest bidder and shipped to the West Indies to work on sugar plantations. The mortality rate of slaves on sugar plantations was 20% annually, so there was a constant demand for ever more bodies to top up the labour force.

DNA testing has added a whole new layer of discovery to genealogy. Having worked with medical genetics since the mid-90s I've found genetic genealogy absolutely fascinating. Genetic spreadsheets eat entire weeks of time. For a genetics wonk, it's heaven! It has opened doors I didn't even know existed! Comparing matches SNP by SNP makes the hours fly past and means that my unfortunate husband has eaten a salad and a sandwich for dinner three times a week for too many weeks. Thankfully he is indulgent of my obsession.

The other thing doing genealogy for six decades has taught me is that death is inevitable. We are all working against the Cosmic clock. I am the PM for a goodly number of profiles. I do not want any of them to be abandoned when I whisk off into the Universe to join my ancestors.

To aid WikiTree in the administration of my account should I be permanently incapacitated, or in the event of my death, I hereby give permission for all private profiles I'm the only manager for to be transferred to any WikiTreer who is related to, or has an interest in, the profiled individual, whether or not they are currently on the Trusted List.

Happy Rooting Everyone!
Deb

Sources

1. ↑ Personal knowledge, in possession of my own Birth Certificate .