LAWTON, Okla. (AP) - Helen John’s journey reconstructing the lives of some Southwest Oklahomans began in the place many of her early ancestors were finally laid to rest.
“It started a cemetery, at the Flower Mound Cemetery in the old John section,” John said. “I saw certain headstones and thought, ’I need to know how this person connects to the family.”
For nearly 30 years, she’s been on an expedition, hunting morsels of information and reveling in snippets, snapshots and stories about her own family, all the while reminding us that where we came from tells us the most about who we are.
“I think genealogy research will never die because as people we are curious,” John said. “It’s mystery, but we also need to feel good about our heritage. We are made up not just of our mothers and fathers, but of hundreds, maybe thousands, of individuals. It’s powerful to think about.”
John, a longtime member of the Southwest Oklahoma Genealogical Society and author of two books, first started digging into her own family history as a personal project, but along the way she’s unearthed knowledge about several families that initially settled Comanche County and made it available for future researchers.
But let’s go back, way back, true to John’s style.
“I have ancestors here from before statehood, both in Indian Territory and in Oklahoma Territory,” John explained, showing the differences on an early land map.
“My family has been here a long time. I’m proud of my Oklahoma heritage.”
John family members were dairy farmers on the eastern edge of Lawton prior to statehood, she explained in great detail. Her mother’s father’s name was drawn in the land lottery and the family moved from Texas to occupy the 160 acres in 1901.
“Many came here for change from harsh conditions, there were more opportunities,” she said.
John grew up east of town in the Flower Mound community and went to Lincoln Elementary School from first through sixth grades before attending Central Junior High School. She graduated from Lawton High School in 1961 before going on to college - now the University of Central Oklahoma - to obtain a degree in business education and English.
At age 20, she started teaching business English and salesmanship at Lawton High prior to the birth of her first son. She then taught 30 more years at Central and Tomlinson Junior High schools. She has two sons, John Hooper and Chip Hooper, as well as two grandsons, Jacob and Colin.
John started documenting her own family history in 1987 after a trip to the cemetery ignited her ravenous curiosity. She learned names of her first cousins, starting making phone calls and hosting informal meetings with distant relatives. She said her cousins were “wonderful” assets in her early research. They shared stories about family events, like a frog jumping into the beans during “dinner on the ground,” which were picnics hosted alongside Cache Creek near the family farm.
Eventually, one called her out of the blue to share a most important discovery - a small paper in a bedroom drawer on which were scrawled the names of her great-grandmother’s parents, The Lawton Constitution (https://bit.ly/1Ptz0mj ) reports.
“Sometimes even a little snippet of information is all a person needs to move onto the next search,” she said.
Despite the slow, tedious work of early genealogical research, many trips to bordering states, phone calls, digging, and more digging, John’s research exploded. With each person having two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on, the tangents on the story line are as infinite as branches on a family tree - and John eventually pursued as many as possible. She’s got floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with documents, stories and information about each of her family tracks, and there’s still more to know.
Not only did John enjoy the mystery of rebuilding her family history, she also delighted in learning about the lives of her family.
“Genealogy is more than a collection of names, dates and places,” she said. “It’s the little personal details that add warmth and make people seem alive … to give them life even though they’re no longer with us.”
That’s why when she was approached in 2003 to help index the persons buried in the Flower Mound Cemetery, she wanted to include a little more than just names and dates of birth and death.
Carles Turner and Christy Webber, who also have ancestors occupying the cemetery, helped gather information about the 700 people buried there.
There were 21 graves of unidentified individuals marked with homemade concrete stones, which had been placed there by a home economics class in the ’30s and ’40s. John searched burial records on microfilm at the local library - she can easily spend six to eight hours a day in the Family History Room while working on a project - and was able to identify six of them.
There didn’t seem to be any similarities among the unidentified graves. The individuals were of varying ages, and they died sometime between 1907 and 1915.
“There’s a number of reasons graves are never marked,” John explained. “Sometimes people never get around to it, there are financial reasons, or the family says, ’Oh, we’ll always know where Grandpa is.’”
But sometimes that information is lost along the way. In 1935, the cemetery records for Flower Mound were lost in a fire, further complicating her project.
Finally, in 2012, her index book, “Flower Mound Cemetery: Comanche County, Oklahoma Annotated with Biographical Sketches and Historical Articles,” was completed.
She said she wanted to provide a little more of a snapshot into each of the individuals’ lives, so she included any unique information about the people she could find.
“I just thought I if I don’t, or somebody else doesn’t, that information will be lost again,” John said.
Along the way, John found material for a second publication: “The Comanche County Tramp,” which is a compilation of interviews with farmers and rural residents of Comanche County published in The Lawton Constitution between April and December 1929. While searching old copies of the paper on microfilm for Flower Mound Cemetery obituaries, John said, she kept reading short synopses of local family farms written by someone who only referred to himself as “the tramp.”
He would travel the area, visit farms and then write about who lived there, what they were producing and, of course, how long they were subscribing to the paper.
“Even though I was working on the cemetery index, I thought, ’These are just too good to pass up,’” John said.
John transcribed all the articles and created two volumes with each entry about families, schools and businesses in the area, but she still doesn’t know who “the tramp” was. After winter of 1929, the articles stopped.
Now another resource is available for future researchers and citizens alike. The Southwest Oklahoma Genealogical Society sells copies of the books for $25 plus shipping.
Reconstructing history isn’t an easy feat; marriage and divorce records can be impossible to find without firsthand knowledge of when and where the events occurred.
Families sometimes changed spellings of their names, adding an “s’’ or spelling them as they “sounded.”
“The information is only as good as the account taken down by the initial recorder,” she said.
Personal stories are rife with details that aid in the search for historical information, which is why it’s often a good place to start when gathering information. From there, one can consult any number of records - birth, death, marriage, divorce, census, land ownership, civil disputes, family deeds, probates.
“It depends on the publication you’re working on,” John said.
Years ago, research consisted of long-distance phone calls and a lot of letter writing to obtain documents. She would pay a small fee for Everton’s Genealogical Helper, a small brochure with tidbits of information about various families.
“I’ve studied, researched, asked questions, and sometimes I’ve just been lucky,” John said.
She’s learned from other genealogists at conventions and attended their lectures to ask questions and pick up tricks of the trade. She’s even delivered nearly two dozen presentations of her own, sharing information about searching chancery court records.
No matter what, though, John said it’s absolutely crucial to have documentation to back up every claim. There’s a drawback to the modernization of genealogical research - the Internet has placed a massive amount of information at her keyboard, but it has also created a lot of lazy genealogy.
“People think they can just go to ancestry.com ? pay a fee and say, “Oh look, my family goes all the way back to so-and-so,’” she said. “I always ask, ’Well, how do you know that?’”
“They think they can find everything on the Internet, but if you don’t ever see the specific books on the shelf in the library, they’re going to miss out on a lot of information.”
Because she researches in this area, she knows a great deal about the land run, initial land patents doled out following the land lottery, Indian Territory, and other topics.
She’s spent countless hours in the Family History Room at the library, digging through thousands of reference materials. John is actually the primary researcher of land tract records for the Southwest Oklahoma Genealogical Society, and now her love for research is coming around full cycle to her next generation.
Again, it’s starting in the cemeteries.
John and her grandson Jacob volunteer to photograph graves for an online service, findagrave.com. They’ve fulfilled over 7,000 inquiries, even from across the Atlantic, from folks hoping to obtain photos of graves in Comanche County, and they’ve photographed over 14,000 total.
“Our philosophy is to treat the people as if they were our own family,” John said. “These are people who have lived, laughed and loved. They deserve our respect.”
She enjoys driving through cemeteries, especially during holiday seasons when they’re decorated and festive.
Her family participates in Wreaths Across America a time when they decorate veterans’ graves across the country.
“Cemeteries are not dead places, I don’t think of it that way,” she said.
John believes the type of research she conducts can inspire others to go to great lengths to find and share information to aid in her projects.
“Maybe they’re just waiting for someone to ask,” she said of why some people so willingly try to obtain information to help in her research. “It’s a matter of timeliness; some realize the shortness of life and then want to share as much as they can before that information is lost.”
Now John is working with her 92-year-old cousin in Kentucky, Creed Johns, who served in the Ammunition and Pioneer Platoon, Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division, Third United States Army. Half will be about his World War II experience, half will be about his years growing up as a tobacco farmer.
She’s also compiling a collection of community columns from The Lawton Constitution from 1904 to 1929. Back then, the paper would take submissions from the small communities about any and everything - a new car, a phone call home, chicken thefts, etc. - and publish them.
“It was like the Facebook of the old days,” John said.
John said it’s never too late for anyone to begin researching his or her own family history, and even if relatives are uninterested in the findings now, they may very well change their minds in a matter of years.
“You’ll never get bored,” she said.
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Information from: The Lawton Constitution, https://www.swoknews.com
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