Between the Lines: Family History and Quirky Stories From Our Forgotten Past

      Thanks to my dear friend and college roommate Onie, I have this picture of me with at my great-great-great grandparents's grave.  Hello, Myron and Jane Barbour! L is for Lindenwood Cemetery      We’d been driving in circles for more than an hour. Onie pulled over amid the graves and looked at her phone. “I have an idea, Roomie,” she said. We met almost forty years earlier, when we were both still 17, freshmen in college, paired randomly as roommates. She was from Fort Wayne; I grew up in North Carolina and as a freshman had no idea I had any family history in the Summit City. It was a discovery I wouldn’t make till 2008.       By now lifelong friends, I’d driven up from North Carolina to visit Onie, and while there, to check out the amazing Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library. I also came to Lindenwood Cemetery specifically to find the grave of my great-great-great grandfather, Myron Fitch B...

  Asa Moore and the First Indiana Volunteer Infantry, Co. B - Mexican-American War      For a young man from a small Indiana town, signing up to go off to war in Mexico probably sounded exciting, exotic and grand. Many a Hoosier must have had visions of palm trees and senoritas, old Spanish cathedrals, adobe villages with red tiled roofs, the Halls of the Montezumas, and dreams of honor and glory. That was so far from the reality of what Asa Moore Suttenfield experienced as to be ludicrous.      Asa Moore was born in 1823 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the son of William Suttenfield, a low-ranking soldier in the U.S. Army-turned-tavern keeper, and Laura Taylor. He was named after Colonel Asa Moore, who surveyed the Wabash and Maumee Rivers. He was just seven when his father died, and his mother struggled to support the children remaining at home. There was Ann, 15; Walker, 11; Asa Moore and little Mary Frances, who was only four. Laura als...

  Sister Antoinette Marie (Mary Nason), Sisters of Providence Sister Antoinette Marie, an enthusiastic young music teacher at St. John’s Academy in Indianapolis, retired for the night at the Sisters of Providence convent. It was February 5, 1907, her last night at peace for a long time. The next day, her grandmother, Eunice Nason, received a devastating telegram. Sister’s parents and five of her brothers and sisters were killed in an avalanche in a mining camp near Salida, Colorado. The headlines the next day were terrible. “Twelve Die in Snow Slide. Eight Victims Belong to Hammond (Ind.) Family.” Then: “Nason Family Await Tidings. Do Not Know Yet How Many Relatives Were Killed in Snowslide.”      Mary Sophronia Nason was the oldest of nine in a devout Catholic family. She entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Providence of St. Mary-of-the-Woods in 1904 at age 18 and was scheduled to take her final vows in a few...