I'm not sure how well you can read this, but it is an excerpt from the 14 October 1903 Lexington Gazette.  It is the obituary for my great-grandfather, Joseph Fultz. I had always heard that he died of appendicitis, and this confirms it.  Family lore says the unsuccessful operation took place on the dining room table--it's a big table. My grandmother's name was Janet, not Jeanette. She would have been about 15 years old at the time that he died.

I didn't realize that he was Methodist. When we lived in Fairfield, we went to Fairfield Presbyterian Church, so I always assumed that all the family members were Presbyterian. Maybe that was the Alexander influence.

This was another find through the Chronicling America efforts at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.

These are scans of daguerreotypes of Dr. Currie Barnett and Sarah Adams Barnett, his wife.  They are my third-great grandparents.

He was born in North Carolina in 1771 and she was born in Virginia in 1787.  He died and is buried in Roxboro, North Carolina in 1854 and she died sometime after 1860. These daguerreotypes were owned by Christine Barnett, who was their granddaughter.

About all I know of him is that he was a physician.  

This is a Fultz family reunion photo that I got from my cousin, Jean Fultz Bernard.  It is taken in the back yard of the Isaac Fultz home located in Raphine,Virginia.

The older couple in the middle are Isaac and Catherine Proctor Fultz.  My grandmother, Ida Willson Fultz is in the dark dress standing behind Isaac slightly to his right.  Her husband, Joseph Fultz, is standing behind her to the right (tall guy with  the mustache).  And my grandmother, Janet Fultz, is standing in front of her father, but one person to the right of her mother. 

The house stayed in the Fultz family for a number of years before it was sold.  For a while, it was operated as a bed & breakfast, and I actually stayed there once.

While we have had the photo for a number of years, we didn't know exactly when the reunion took place...until recently.  Thanks to the Library of Virginia's participation in the Library of Congress' Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/), small town newspapers have been digitized and are searchable.  Through this site, I found an article from the 17 August 1900 Staunton Spectator and Vindicator that says:

So that means that the reunion took place on 10 August 1900.  Cool!

Five Generations of Bruce Alexander Lipscombs!

Starting from the top left, we have the original Bruce Alexander Lipscomb, a.k.a. Aunt Bruce in my branch of the family.  She was Bruce Douglas Alexander, the sister of my grandfather, John Addison Alexander.  I am not sure of the origin of her name, but I know there are several Bruces elsewhere in the family (mainly male, maybe all male).  Douglas was a surname at one time, and Bruce probably was also a surname at some point.  The picture was taken in the early 1900s, maybe 1910s, somewhere in the Virginia mountains. She died in 1930, so I never knew her, but I have known the others either all of their lives, or all of mine.

Aunt Bruce married George Wiley Lipscomb and they had one son that they named Bruce Alexander Lipscomb, which brings us to the picture on the top right.  This picture was taken around 1920, probably in or near Covington, Virginia, where he and his parents lived.  He married Mary Thompson Sterrett and they had two sons, Bruce Alexander Lipscomb, Jr, and Joseph Sterrett Lipscomb. We lived in the same community when I was 2 to 10 years old, so we referred to the two Alecs as "Big Alec" for Alec, Sr., and "Little Alec" for Alec, Jr. I think that might be a southern thing.

On to the picture in the middle: Bruce Alexander Lipscomb, Jr.  Because we lived in the same community, we attended the same school for the first through the third grades.this picture is of Alec in the first grade.  I say that with confidence, not because I remember, but because it was written on the back of the picture (thank you, Cousin Mary!).  Alec & I had first grade with Mrs. Hayes.  I thought she was mean.  Anyway, he sat a couple of seats in front of me and I remember that he snuck back once to ask me how to spell "Alexander" (which is my maiden name).

In 1974, Alec married Mary Lynn Woody and they also had two sons: Bruce Alexander Lipscomb, III, and Robert Madison Lipscomb.  Alexander is featured in the picture on the bottom left.  I still call him Alexander, but he is also known as Zander (and maybe some other nicknames of which I am not aware).  This picture was taken at a family reunion in 1982 at Tate Alexander's house in Fairfield.  The same reunion mentioned in my post yesterday. So Alexander is about 8 years old in this picture.

Alexander married Gina Lenore Morelli in 2006 and just last August, they had Bruce Alexander Lipscomb, IV, called A. J.  He is in the picture on the bottom right.  I haven't met him yet, but I borrowed this picture from his Facebook page.

The original Fab Four!
From left to right: Jack Alexander, Tate Alexander, Jim Alexander, & Alec Lipscomb.

The top picture was taken in the 1920s in the yard of the Alexander farm in Rockbridge County.  I have many, many pictures of various combinations of these four boys.  Jack, Tate, & Jim were brothers (youngest to oldest) and Alec was their first cousin.  But Alec was really more like a fourth brother.  Chronologically, Alec fell between Jim & Tate. And they were very close in age...less than 4 years separated the oldest and the youngest.

The bottom picture was taken in 1982 at a family reunion at Tate's house on Red Hill Road in Fairfield.  The invitation was sent on a postcard using the top picture, so we had them line up in the same order. I love that we have both pictures spanning about 60 years!

Here are two views of the farm house in which I first remember living.  It's located near Fairfield in Rockbridge County, Virginia, on Borden Grant Trail--I think I saw it called Plank Road in an old census record.  These pictures were taken in the early 1900s, but it pretty much looked like this in the 1950s. 

My father's parents lived in this house when he was born.  And his father's parents also lived there.  When Mom & Dad moved back to Fairfield from Roanoke in 1954, we lived in this house.  Dad worked the farm and was a teacher at Fairfield School, which housed 1st through 12th grades.  He taught shop and 8th grade science and was the faculty sponsor for the Future Farmers of America.

In my earliest memories, we always had a huge garden--bigger than the yard around the house.  There were grapevines to the left of the house and an apple tree in the back yard.  We had a couple of milk cows, maybe half a dozen chickens, a couple of geese, five to ten pigs (hogs?), and some sheep.

I was never old enough to milk the cows, but my sister was.  I thought that seemed like a fun job but I'm not sure she agreed.  In fact, I'm pretty sure she doesn't.  I recall her saying that one of them stepped on her foot one time. 

I was, however, old enough to collect the eggs from the hens in the chicken house. That was a chore I shared with my brother. Rather than go through the people door, we would crawl up the small ramp through the hole that the chickens used to get to their nests. Chicken poop did not deter us.  There was one feisty hen that would stay on her eggs & peck at us when we tried to collect them.  I dreaded dealing with her.

The geese would usually leave us alone unless they perceived that we were too close to their nest.  Then they would make quite a racket and run after us.  And let me tell you, when you're a little kid, geese look pretty big!  So, we ran from them. Fast.

I remember Dad calling "Sooey!" to the pigs when he fed them.  They would come running.  (Later on, after we had moved to the city, we would yell that to call everyone to dinner at home.  Hey, it worked.) 

One year, my brother, sister, & I each had a lamb to raise.  I called mine Stripey because it had three stripes on its forehead and I didn't have much of an imagination.  (I never had a cat called anything but Kitty, either). We fed them bottles of milk using what looked like huge baby bottles.  After they had grown up a little, someone came to take them away.  It was a long time after that before I realized they had been taken to a slaughter house. 

We also had a long, single-level barn in which we raised piglets for a couple of years and chickens for several years.  I remember the chickens better.  My dad built or had someone build low, wooden, table-like structures that ran the length of the barn.  Spaced evenly underneath them were light bulbs that stayed on all the time to provide heat for the chicks.  Then there were feeders placed a foot or so away from the wooden structures.  The feeders were jars that held either food or water.  You would fill them upright, screw on a lid and flip it upside down.  The lids had troughs built into them.  The whole setup was surrounded by a short fence--I can't remember what it was made of, but it kept the baby chicks in.

We would get shipments of hundreds of baby chicks and take care of them until they were grown up enough to be sold.  There were both yellow and black chicks, but many more yellow ones than black ones.  My brother & I had the job of filling the feeders. We also had to crawl under the wooden structure and pull out any dead chicks.  They would crowd around the light bulbs to stay warm and sometimes would crowd in so tight that one would get smothered. It was kind of sad, but not too much because there were so many chicks!

I have lots of memories of the farm and these are just a few.