Willie Dooley Thompson and Rosa Lee Tabors Harvick

To my Mother and Grandmother who taught me to be a woman, a mother and a grandmother. At their knees I learned to pray. They taught me faith in God by living it. I cannot imagine what my life would have been without them. Both gone to be with Jesus, I miss them so. But they are still here, they are me, my daughters and my grand daughters. The love and heart of a mother, passed on through the generations

We miss you here. Looking forward to seeing you when God calls us home..

Velvet Rose is soon to be 12, ( May). She has been living with grandpa and I since last Sept. Quite a challenge I assure you.

My dad's great grandmother was the daughter of the man in the picture. Here name was Mary Tennesee Bilberry.  This is her father John C Bilberry and his second wife Eliza Jane Walker Wilson Bilberry. This is not my ancetress mother, but the step mother who raised her. Her own mother, Vian Wilson Bilberry, was killed by the Indians after which John married Eliza Jane and she was the only mother Grandma Tennesee every knew.

Grandma Mary Tennesee Bilberry married Matthew Jefferson Standford Moore II. They were pioneers to the New Mexico Indian Territory.

Thier daughter Mary Elizabeth Moore married Noah Hinton Thompson

Mary and Noah's son William Blake ( Bee) Thompson married Gladys Logan, Gladys and Bee's son William Blake ( Bill) Thompson married Willie Dean Dooley.

Bill and Willie were my parents. That's me sitting between Mary and Noah , the back row is Bee and Gladys, ( my grandparents) and my dad Bill Thompson.  Mom is taking this picture and is not in it. It was taken in 1954.

This is my beautiful little grand daughter Velvet Rose.  She has been living with her Papa and I for about three and a half months. She is so wonderful with so much good in her. She is also a very troubled little girl and needs lots of prayer. Velvet will be 12 in May.

 1 box spice cake mix

1 12 OZ can solid pack pumpkin

1 cup chocolate chips, any kind chopped nuts, or raisins, optional

 Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease 9x13 inch baking dish. Mix ingredients to cake mix package directions. Beat together other ingredients. Bake until cake is set.

 Does not need icing

This is Katie and Velvet. Katie is fixing to turn 16 and is the oldest child of my oldest daughter. The little girl is my youngest daughters oldest child. Velvet is the child that is living with her grandpa and I for now.

They look more like sisters than cousins!

 

Three Little Girls

 Three little girls,

Full of laughter and light,

Three pairs of eyes,

Sparkling blue and bright,

Three gentle voices,

Soaring in song,

Filled with harmony,

 All the day long.

Three budding maidens,

Growing in grace,

Reaching for love,

And finding their place.

Three loving families,

Growing each day,

From which came our children,

Bringing joy to our way.

Our children grew up,

Our grandchildren came,

Our hearts filled with love,

Our delight we proclaimed

The day’s come to soon,

When we must part ways,

Our Susie’s in heaven,

But on Earth we must stay.

We’ll see her again,

When the Lord calls us home,

But our hearts ache with longing,

Since our Susie is gone.

 Rose, Susie and Bo...May 2000, before our Susie got so ill.

When the Clock Chimes

By Ann Ingalls
Kansas City, Missouri

It was a good thing Grandma Vanderwerp didn’t live very far away, only about 3 blocks, since my brother Tom and I needed to get away from the noisy confusion we called “home.”

Both of us were kind of quiet and born right in the middle of a large and busy family. We had six other sisters and brothers, a mom, a dad, two hamsters, two birds, a dog and, depending on the time of year, a washtub full of tadpoles waiting to become frogs.

Grandma understood about kids and frogs. She knew about tree-climbing and dress-up clothes and just about anything we had to tell, and she had an old, squatty, just-right-for-climbing cherry tree in her backyard.

Tom and I had dreams about the pies Grandma could bake from the cherries we’d pick. The trouble was, as Grandma said, “The birds have plans for those cherries, too.”

Sitting on her back porch, surrounded by Shasta daisies, we shooed those pesky birds away while we sipped ginger ale from anodized-aluminum cups Grandma reserved for our visits.

Sometimes, a little talking could persuade Grandma to let us spend the night. Sleepovers at Grandma’s were a special affair.

First, there would be a bubble bath with sweet-smelling suds, the result of the magic powders stored in apothecary jars high on a shelf in Grandma’s white-tiled bathroom.

After a soak and a scrub and a warm rub-a-dub, we crawled into the flannel PJs that Grandma kept “just in case.” We parked ourselves by Grandma’s knee sharing the needlepoint footstool that doubled as a doll bed when upturned.

Grandma read short stories from her large-type copies of Reader’s Digest. Sometimes, she would cry if the stories were sad, but mainly she would read humorous anecdotes and would throw back her lovely white hair and laugh. Soon, we’d be laughing, too.

Then we’d talk for awhile, each of us hanging onto one of her prominently veined and wrinkled hands. We’d ask questions like, “Why do your veins stick out, Grandma?”, “Were you sad when Grandpa died?” and “Just what kind of a little boy was Daddy?”

All the while, Grandma’s clock ticked away the time and Westminster chimes reminded us of each quarter hour.

Grandma often asked, “What does the clock say to you, little Ann?” Depending on my frame of mind, its message would vary. Once, when I had stayed a week and was an especially homesick 5-year-old, the clock said, “I’m sad because I miss Mama.” Grandma responded, “Well, climb on my lap, and we’ll think about her together.”

A brass fire screen with a fierce dragon, its tail arched and swirled to show its authority, stood before Grandma’s black, marble-faced hearth. It was rumored within our family to have been gold-plated at one time and to have belonged to Marie Antoinette, a famous French queen. Grandpa had acquired it from an antique shop in New Orleans for 50¢ in the early 1920s, shortly after he and Grandma were married.

At some point, the dealer realized what he had sold and tried to buy it back for a lot of money, but Grandma would have none of that. By that time, the dragon had become the backdrop for so many family pictures.

Eventually, Tom and I would start to yawn, signaling that bedtime had arrived. Up the double flight of stairs we’d tread to a room filled with contradictions—disconcerting in some ways, yet cozy and comforting in others.

A large mahogany bed heaped with lavender satin quilts and eyelet-trimmed pillows awaited. Lingering on hand-crocheted, lace-edged, linen sheets was the scent of lily-of-the-valley. On the walls, glaring ominously, were the framed faces of medieval Dutch ancestors—I hoped not ours. Severe hairstyles and stark dress betrayed their dispositions.

On a spoon-footed vanity, where Grandma kept hair ribbons, were displayed the loveliest porcelain boxes with painted flowers. Each box held a secret—a shiny button, a hairpin or a spiral shell. Accompanying these were perfume atomizers of every shape and description.

China dolls, which once belonged to Grandma’s sisters Cora and Nell, rested in a black-painted child’s rocker with a braided cloth seat.

Grandma tucked us in and reminded each of us with a kiss and a smile that she would be downstairs if we needed her.
 
Many years have passed since then. I’m grown now and still remember all of this as I write it down with Grandma’s tortoise-shell fountain pen filled with ink from Grandma’s crystal ink well.

Sitting at her roll-top desk with burled walnut trim, I remember the woman who painstakingly taught me to sew doll clothes, who read Winnie the Pooh stories a hundred times, who spit watermelon seeds and who stitched Halloween costumes and homecoming dresses with a flourish and fantasy in mind.

After a while, I intend to sit in her wingback chair, read short stories and humorous anecdotes and wait for the clock to chime. It will say, “I miss Grandma.”

From: Reminisce Newsletter

This is my niece's little girl on her first day of school this year. My poor pretty baby. She was not to thrilled!

We are sad. But he is rejoicing in Glory.

Rose

Isn't she sweet?  Runs like a top. I am in love!

Guess she could use a little sprucing up?  A bit of paint maybe?

First Father's Day Service

Martinsburg Journal
June 15, 2003

The first Father's Day

Fairmont celebrated holiday in summer of 1908

By Vicki Smith
Associated Press Writer

Fairmont - In the summer of 1908, the story goes, sadness ran so deep it just had to be shared.

As the birthday of her own late father neared, 41-year-old Grace Golden Clayton was thinking about loss - her own at first, then those of the children around her.

More than 1,000 were newly fatherless, their lives blown apart a few months earlier in nearby Monongah by the worst coal mining disaster in American history. Of the 361 men killed in the Dec. 6, 1907, blast, some 250 were fathers.

Fathers who should be remembered and honored with their own special day, Clayton decided.

So she made it happen.

"This holiday was one etched in sadness as well as thankfulness," says the Rev. Donald Meighen, pastor of Central United Methodist Church, which now stands where Father's Day was celebrated for the first time.

People in this small north-central West Virginia city don't take credit for making Father's Day a national tradition. They acknowledge that 95 years ago, residents didn't even try to spread the word beyond the town line.

Now, they want people to know that the holiday started here.

Since 1985, when the state erected a black and white historical marker declaring Fairmont the birthplace of Father's Day, "we rested on our laurels," Meighen says. "We had not taken it to the next level.."

The congregation of Central United Methodist took a special offering earlier this year and commissioned "Curse Not the Darkness," a play about Clayton and the Monongah mine disaster.

In May, the church opened a room with a small collection of artifacts that could become the foundation of a Father's Day museum. And Meighen is planning programs to help men become better fathers.

Thomas Koon, president of the Marion County Historical Society, is happy to see it. He set out years ago to get Clayton the recognition she deserves and right what he says is a long-standing wrong.

The woman often credited with starting Father's Day is Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Wash. In 1909, she sought a special day to honor her father, who became a single parent when his wife died giving birth to their sixth child.

That service was held in Spokane on the third Sunday in June 1910, and by the following year, there was a similar celebration in Portland, Ore. Chicago followed in 1915, Miami four years after that.

By 1924, President Coolidge supported the idea of a national holiday, and in 1956, Congress passed a joint resolution recognizing Father's Day.

President Johnson signed a Father's Day proclamation in 1966, and President Nixon made it permanent in 1972.

Yet Koon says it all started with Clayton and that first service - which wasn't even in June. Hers fell on July 5, 1908, the Sunday nearest the birthday of her father, Methodist minister Fletcher Golden.

Though unique, the service was overshadowed by events that competed for the community's attention.

An Independence Day festival drew 12,000 people to town with a hot-air balloon show, circus-style performers and politicians giving impassioned speeches to launch their campaigns.

The congregation also was coping with the death of a teenage girl from typhoid fever, Meighen says. Her father, a prominent businessman, arranged a funeral procession with 20-horse drawn carriages, and the mourning lasted four days.

Shortly afterward, the church was damaged by mine subsidence and shut down for several months.

"They had other things on their mind," Koon says. "The original sermon was lost... It just seems as though no one thought it was a great deal at the time.

"No one jumped on the bandwagon and went to the City Council for a proclamation. No one got on the governor. No one went to Congress," he says. "Mrs. Clayton apparently thought it was not lady- like for someone to go out and toot their own horn."

That's true, says 80-year-old Josephine Cottrill of Clarksburg, Clayton's great-niece. Cottrill attends the church's Father's Day service every year in Clayton's honor.

"She was a tall, stately woman, with gray hair piled on her head," Cottrill recalled. "She was very quiet."

Some speculate Clayton may have been partly inspired by fellow West Virginian Anna Jarvis, whose own crusade created Mother's Day.

Jarvis lobbied businessmen, politicians and clergy after he mother died in 1905, eventually holding the first Mother's Day service in Grafton in May 1908.

Koon figures Sonora Dodd must have been like Jarvis.

"Instead of doing what Fairmont did and dropping the ball, she went out ... and beat on doors and kicked up enough of a fuss to get people to say, 'This is a good idea.' Or, 'We need to shut this woman up,'" he says with a laugh. "Take your pick."

Fairmont is happy to credit Dodd with her efforts, Koon says. He just wants people to know she wasn't the first.

"It did not become a national holiday until a number of other people chewed on it like a pit bull," he says. "It took a lot of people a lot of work over the years."

Original Mothers Day Proclamation,
Julia Ward Howe: 1870:

Arise then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:

'We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies.

'Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause.

'Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.

'We women of one country will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

'From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own, it says "Disarm! Disarm!"

'The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.

'Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.'

As men have forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his time the sacred impress not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe of Boston, Massachusetts, the famous lyricist of 'Battle Hymn of the Republic", appalled at that time by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, wrote the above proclamation, had it translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and disseminated it internationally.

In Julia's own words, "The question forced itself on me, 'Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of human life, which they alone bear and know the cost? I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibility now appeared to me in a new aspect."

Julia went to London in 1872 to try to organize her conference, and when an established peace organization there would not let her speak to them because of her gender, she hired a hall and conducted her own meetings. However, this work did not come to any quick fruition, and Julia returned to Boston.

But Julia Ward Howe did not give up. She began to promote a festival to be known as Mothers' Day, to be devoted to the advocacy of peace, and to be celebrated on June 2 each year, which in Boston is a good time for outdoor meetings and in the midst of the flower season.

This initiative was successful, and Mothers Day was celebrated for many years in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, London, Geneva, and even in Constantinople (Istanbul). However, a later effort organized by Anna Jarvis to commemorate her mother's death eventually also became popular, and since it did not include the same controversial call for peace and conflict resolution, it eventually gained the political 'upper hand'. Motherhood itself, not the more controversial idea of women coming together in activism for peace, prevailed.

However, what Julia wrote in 1870 is generally considered to be the original Mothers' Day proclamation. The 'Festival of Peace' she called for and worked so hard for did not take place until 1904. However, it was decided there to set aside one day in the year to prompt women to work toward resolving conflict peacefully.

In 1914, by popular demand and without reference to its actual pacifist origins, US President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday of May as Mothers' Day in the United States of America.

Happy Mothers' Day!

http://www.quaker.org/chestnuthill/motherdy.htm