Your Newsletter
for
Washington County Arkansas Genealogical Society
June 2004
The June meeting of WCAGS had an excellent turnout as our panel of the officers presented a program on “Genealogical Frauds.”
The program covered scams and frauds that have been inflicted on families for over 150 years – from the estate frauds of the 19th and 20th centuries to the scandalous works of the forger, Gustav Anjou, at the turn of the century to the Internet scams of today. The damage that has been done is enormous, and the fraudulent lineages abound in the family histories of today. Even the LDS, The Library of Congress and the DAR have not been immune and have been taking steps to correct the damage as it is discovered.
Carol Reel has donated her research on the topic of the forgeries of Gustav Anjou to the Fayetteville Public Library because of the number of family names that have been affected, over 300 at one count.
If you missed the program and would like to research this topic yourself, use your search engine. Type in “genealogy frauds”, and be prepared to read for several hours. Don’t be surprised if you find, as I did, that one of your families was a victim.
Our next regular meeting will be July 10, 2004, at 2:00 Pm at The Headquarters House, 118 E. Dickson, Fayetteville.
Meet Your Officers
The profile this month is on your secretary, Kyle Spicer. Kyle is one of the founding officers of WCAGS.
Kyle Spicer:
In 2002 Kyle Spicer was elected as treasurer of the then new Washington County Arkansas Genealogical Society. Today she serves as the recording secretary. In addition to serving as a WCAGS officer, she is also a member of the Marion Chapter of the DAR in Fayetteville.
Kyle was born in Okinawa and lived on the East Coast while growing up. Her father was a career Army officer, and the family moved about every two or three years. When she was a senior in high school, her family moved to Northwest Arkansas after her father accepted a position as a Professor of Military Science at the University of Arkansas. Kyle graduated from Fayetteville High School and attended the U of A graduating with a degree in nursing in 1976.
Since that time, she has worked for St. Mary’s Hospital in Rogers and for a couple of different doctors. She finally found her niche as a surgical nurse at Washington Regional Medical Center where she has been for almost 20 years.
Kyle says, “I got the genealogy bug about 25 years ago when a cousin sent me a book about the Tutwiler family that was written by another cousin, and I have been going ever since!”
Some paternal names she researches are: Tutwiler, Scruggs, Walton, Lushbaugh from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Alabama. Her maternal names are: Minton, Yadon, Long, and Howard from Crawford and Sebastian Counties, Arkansas. She adopted through marriage the Washington County names of How(e), Magness, Barnes, Craig and Cavin plus the Logan County names of Spicer, Norfleet, Fulmer and Muckle.
Her family includes a son, Jacob E. White, and daughter-in-law, Chio, who live in Germany and are currently serving in the US Army. Kyle and her husband, Thomas O. Spicer III, live in Fayetteville with their 6-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Ann.
New Members
We continue to grow. Last month the following folks joined our membership. Ethna Billings, Carolyn Rymel, Barbara Lewis, Lois Magness, Elizabeth Floyd, Karen Shreve Inman and Catherine Shreve Foster. We are so glad to have you join us!
Board of Directors
The first annual Board of Directors meeting for the Washington County Arkansas Genealogical Society will be held at 1:00 PM on Sunday, July 11, 2004. Our Board members are the sitting officers and two outside directors: Judge Mary Ann Gunn and Tony Wapple, Director of Washington County Archives. The regular monthly meeting of the Society will follow at 2:00.
WCAGS on Line
Earlier this month several of our members were doing some volunteer work at the library when a patron needed some help finding out when a person had died. They knew that the person had died in Washington County and was probably buried here. We suggested that the WCAGS website with the funeral home links be checked first before spending additional time going through the cemetery surveys page by page. (There are more than a few, and it can take some hours!) Would you believe? She found her answer in the database of one of the linked funeral homes. It took all of about 60 seconds to find the information desired. Check out the various links in our website. We are constantly adding more. www.rootsweb.com/~arwcags/
Wilson Creek, July 17
We will be taking a caravan of vehicles to Wilson Creek in Springfield, Missouri, on July 17 to attend the Civil War research seminar given by Jeff Patrick, Librarian at Wilson Creek Battlefield. The seminar is free and lasts about 2 hours. We plan to attend the afternoon session. There will be a sign up sheet at the July 11 meeting as we finalize our preparations for the event. By the way, how many of you know that the First Arkansas Cavalry, formed right here in Fayetteville, was a Federal troop?
Skeletons in the Closet
All of us are guilty of thinking we are highly unique individuals and that our problems are not very common. The truth is, the skeletons you may be keeping locked in a mental closet are exceedingly common. No one has the right to poke malicious humor at you because of some skeleton for it could be poked to him to just as great a degree.
There is story told about a woman who acquired a measure of wealth and for prestige reasons wanted to have her family tree traced back two hundred years. She was very status minded and felt that it would add a great deal to her social position if she could establish her family as being of TRUE BLUE BLOOD.
So, she hired an expert in the field to find out who her great–grandparents and great-great-grandparents were. But lo and behold! The expert found that her great-grandfather had died in the electric chair for having committed a combination rape and murder. The expert discussed this delicate matter with the rich lady.
Now the lady was also a very honest woman and not one to lie. She wanted the family tree to reflect the “truth”. So the expert conceived this way out. Rather than write that great-grandfather died in an electric chair, he wrote instead, “Great-Grandfather Jones died while occupying the Chair of Applied Electricity in one of the nation’s great institutions.”
Now all of us would like to have perfect family reputations. All of us would like to come from families who have been nothing but Kings, Queens, Presidents, Secretaries of State, Philanthropists, etc. but this just probably isn’t so. Almost any individual can look back and find that he has ancestors who were less than ideal or model citizens or just plain no goods! We all have a few skeletons in our closets and no one’s is unique!
Adapted from an unknown author
Some Final Things
We still need you ideas for a name for this newsletter. There is still time to put you thinking caps on and send in your idea. Speaking of sending things in, we still need the Washington County research names for some of you.
Now all y’all take care and happy hunting,
Jeanne Tackett, Publicity/ Historian