52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week One – January 1 – 7, 2024
Family Lore Prompt
Reginald Sidney Allen (left) and Joseph Smith Allen (right) circa 1901 before train accident
Most family history genealogists have come across at least one “tall tale” in their research, I am no exception. One story that I remember well is that my father’s uncle had lost his arm in a train accident when he was just 12 years old.
Wildwood Cemetery, Williamsport, Pennsylvania
When I was a child, my parents used to take my brothers and me on a day trip to Williamsport, Pennsylvania to the Wildwood Cemetery where our Allen ancestors were buried. In the 1950s it was a widespread practice to go to the cemetery where your predecessors were buried to decorate the graves for Memorial
Day at the end of May every year. It was a beautiful cemetery that sat on a hill above Williamsport, a central Pennsylvania city that was famous for its lumber tycoon millionaires and the railroads.
The large cemetery held the graves of the upper class and middle class of central Pennsylvania. The tombstones and mausoleums had been there since the early 1800s. There were large plots arranged in circles with large monuments containing the remains of U.S. Civil War Union soldiers. It was enchanting to me. At least eight family headstones were contained in the Allen family plot that was near one of those military veterans’ circles. It was enchanting to me. We brought a picnic lunch and our flowers that needed planting in front of
Reginald S. Allen Gravestone
each stone.
Among the granite headstones were those of my great-grandparents, whom I had never met, my grandparents, and a grand-uncle whom I had never met. His name was Reginald Sidney Allen, my father’s paternal uncle. Being an inquisitive child, I asked about the lives of those buried there, including Uncle Reggie. My father did not have much to say about his ancestors, but my mother told me a bit about each one, as much as she knew having married into the Allen family in 1948.
Onto Uncle Reggie’s tombstone was carved his year of birth and his year of death, 1890 -1947. He was born and died before I was born in the 1950s. My mother told me that Uncle Reggie had never married, lived with his parents for most of his life, was an accountant, and had lost his right arm at the top of his shoulder when he was a child. Of course, I wanted to know more about that. My mother did not know the circumstances.
When we returned home after an hour’s drive back from Williamsport my father brought out a translucent glass paperweight from the back of his office closet. It was an item commemorating the date of the loss of Uncle Reggie’s arm. It read, “Reginald Allen Lost His Arm Oct. 16, 1901, Williamsport, Pennsylvania.” How sad!! My father assumed that his dad, my grandfather, Joseph S. Allen, Reggie’s younger brother, had been with him at the time of the mishap. I have not been able to substantiate that fact. After that, my father kept the paperweight on his desk. It always mesmerized me. It has since been passed
on to my youngest brother.
From time to time our family also visited my great-grandmother who was 93 years old and living in her home in Philadelphia that she shared with her “bachelor” brother. There is more family folklore centered around her brother, but I will save that for another blog post. Great-Grandma Allen was born just three years after the U.S. Civil War had ended! Wow!
I was too intimidated to ask her about her son Reggie or to ask my elderly great-uncle about him. I do not know if they would have told me much about him anyway. It seemed to me that the male members of the Allen family had secrets that were not often or ever discussed.
Fast forward to the 20th century to the advent of the internet and I was able to find much more information about my Allen ancestors in digital archives.
Later as I became an adult the genealogy of my family started to intrigue me. I began to dig into the past. Here is what I found. Uncle Reggie did lose his right arm when he was twelve years old by attempting to jump onto a railroad switchengine on his way to school and he was not expected to live. But live he did!
As for the story that he was never married, that proved to be false as well. I was able to research small bits of his life through Newpapers.com and Ancestry.com. Uncle Reggie did marry a woman named Martha Romaine Willoughby Corbin, a widow, seven years his senior and she had a young daughter. Even though my mother told me that Uncle Reggie had no children, I found that he did father a child with Martha in 1926, but the baby was premature and died soon after birth. Unfortunately, Martha’s daughter whom she had with her first husband, who died of drowning in a local river after she had been married to him for only two years, died in1929 as a fifteen-year-old teenage girl. Martha’s life seemed rather sad.
By 1940 she and my Great-Uncle Reggie were no longer living together. She had returned to her hometown of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania living with her brother and Reggie assumed residence with his parents in Williamsport. They never divorced and on her death certificate of 1943 her marital status was that of “married.” Reggie died in 1947, and his marital status
on his Pennsylvania Death Certificate was recorded as “widowed.”
I often wonder if the drowning death of her first husband, the deaths of her two children, and Reggie’s handicap were too much for her to bear.
I have more family lore and stories to be substantiated or debunked in my paternal and maternal family trees. I will continue to work on them because, as all genealogists realize, “your family tree is never done!”
Note: This is the first of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge which I have embarked upon for the year 2024. The second and third week were published earlier. I am finally up-to-date and synchronized for 2024. Fingers crossed that I may continue on this weekly schedule!
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