Photos from my Lithuanian Family

Thanks to generous support from my mother, I've been able to test through Ancestry DNA. I'm new to the matching process, but I've found a handful of fine folks whose DNA appears to have some common strands with mine and who share a connection to Lithuania.

My aunt gave me the following photos. They were given to her by Aunt Pat, the younger (half?) sister of my great grandmother Mary Petruska Liegus. I don't know the names of all of the people, only some and I don't know how everyone is related. I'll share my long complicated history of trying to unravel their mystery one at a time.

For now, here are the photos in one place for comparison purposes. I'm impatient to share them.

Please share any insights you have about backstory, traditions, locations, photographers, time period, resemblances, weaving patterns, religious iconography etc. etc.

Mary J. Barrow Kimble Both Ways

My cousin Janna brought the photo below on the left to our family reunion in 2012. I had never seen the portrait of our great great grandmother Mary J. Barrow Kimble .

Mary died June 15, 1876 in Monroe County Missouri leaving two young sons, Frederick Lee and William Elbert, and her husband Wiley Kimble, a Civil War veteran from Smyth county Virginia. Within the year Wiley remarried. Less than 3 years later Eliza, his second wife, also died. Wiley eventually returned with the boys to Virginia. Did he carry this photo back to Virginia?

Mary Kimble

Mary Kimble

This week I stumbled on the photo at right. I had uploaded it years ago to our MyFamily.com site from our great Aunt Elva's photo album.

Should I have recognized Janna's photo?






Isn't one a copy of the other? But the sleeves don't show on the photo at right. The photo at left lacks definition. Look closely at the ringlets on Mary's right in both photos. Despite the differences, the details match flawlessly. I suspect both photos came from the same original at different times.

Where is the original? Do you have it?

Who took portrait photographs in Monroe, Missouri in the 1870's? Did each of Mary's sons have their own copy of her photo? William celebrated his second birthday just two weeks before his mother died. His brother Lee hadn't turned four yet. Did they ever gaze at these photos and long for a mother they couldn't remember?

Up in Heaven Sitting on a Log

This is my favorite picture of my great grandfather William Elbert Kimble. Dad's cousin Betty sent this note about it.

"We can't help on the date or place of this picture.   But, he used to say, wish I was up in heaven sitting on a log and now he is."

William E. was born in Monroe County Missouri in 1874 and died in Tazewell, Virginia in 1962.

Walter the Butcher

My great grandfather Walter survived smallpox. When he registered for the draft during World War I the physician noted the scars and found them pronounced enough to distinguish him. He listed them on the draft registration card.

The fingerprints in his VA file, though, don't include any explanation. "What did HE do for a living?" my husband asked when I showed him the prints from Walter's right hand with an empty circle drawn where the tip of his middle finger should have been. 

"Oh duh!" was the brightest thing I could say. "He was a butcher."

My great grandfather's paper trail fills a yawning void in oral history. "My grandfather," Mom told me, "came from Lithuania on a pickle boat." That and the name Ladislas Liegus (or was it Leigus?) constituted the sum total of what I knew about Granny's father. I decided to dig deeper.

The unlabeled photos in the furnace closet intrigued me. Mom said the man in the army uniform holding the cigarette was her mother's father. He had been in World War I and was buried at Arlington Cemetery -- beneath his estranged wife.

My mother worked in suburban Virginia, next to a corner of Arlington Cemetery's vast expanse. She had worked there the better part of twenty years when I asked if she'd take me to Arlington Cemetery to see if we could find her grandparents' grave. I didn't even begin to comprehend the scale of that place, yet I pictured us wandering for hours scanning row upon row of white stones. Instead we went to the office and asked. We asked for Ladislaus Liegus. The only Liegus in the records was a Walter. Mom had never heard anyone call him that and wondered if it was the same person, but I had seen the name as I rolled through microfilms at the Family History Library in Salt Lake and at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. We drove toward the spot on the map then walked. The memorials of my mother's fallen peers, killed in Vietnam, drew her somber attention.  We walked until we reached the low stone wall.

We had a great view of the backside of Mom's office at the Bureau of Naval Personnel because we stood close enough to hit it with a rock. Mom worked all those years closer to her grandparents than to her parking place.

Uncle Carl

Obituary from Clinch Valley News (Tazewell, Va. newspaper) that appeared on 11 April 1973:
William Carl Kimbel, 66, of North Tazewell, died Tuesday, April 3, in a Bluefield Hospital following a short illness.
He was a son of the late William E. and Lula Mae Lewis Kimbel and was a veteran of World War II. He was a member of Tazewell Presbyterian Church.
Survivors include his widow, Margaret Howery Kimbel; one son, Carl Eugene Kimbel of Woodbridge, four brothers, Oscar Kimbel of Tazewell, Raymond Kimbel of Richlands, James Kimbel of Silver Springs, Md., and William Kimbel of Mt. Home, Tenn.; two sisters, Mrs. Joseph Armstrong of Staunton, Mrs. Bing Baker of Houston; and two grandchildren.
Funeral services were conducted Thursday in Tazewell Presbyterian Church with Dr. W. F. Wadsworth officiating. Burial followed in Grandview Memory Gardens, Bluefield-Tazewell Road.
Pallbearers were Raymond Lewis Kimble, Dan Howerty [sic], Howard Eldreth, Ernest Whittaker, Walter Howery, Sam Jones and Dee Wilson.
Honorary pallbearers were Clifford Hoops, Cecil Patterson, P.I. Yates, Robert Hall, Melvin Akers and Ralph Mulky.
Members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars were pallbearers.

(This photo is not from the obituary, but from my uncle Fred, Carl's nephew)

Husband for sale (not mine, of course)

All my excuses for postponing the launch of my family history blog vanished when this gem appeared during a recent search for my alleged great great grandfather Frederick Andrew Chubb (1870-1954) of Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Apparently a wire story, this version comes from the New York Tribune. The Aukland Times also picked up the story. You can see the full page here. 

Some would consider Chubb a skeleton in the closet. I like to think of him as the Sriracha in my genealogical gumbo and I found him by googling "revolution buster" and Chubb.

Join me as I attempt to put flesh on the bones of my ancestors by moving beyond names, dates and places and begin to piece together their stories.