Our American Family - Person Sheet
Our American Family - Person Sheet
NameChauncey ELSTON 26
Birth Date?
Spouses
Birth Date4 Oct 1909
Birth PlaceKansas City, Jackson County, Missouri
FatherOscar Athea PUCKETT (~1887-1966)
MotherGrace May BREWER (1891-1983)
Family ID2826
Notes for Chauncey ELSTON
!1. Ltr. from Grace PUCKETT.
Notes for Della (Spouse 1)
!1. Ltr. from Grace PUCKETT.

notes from Ronald Hughes:
Della was 83 years of age at this interview. Year was approximately early 1993.
In attendence were Fern and Francis Harmon, Bus and Lorene Hughes.

(Della)...ministers traveled from one church to the other. Pap White and my Uncle Jim Ellis and the minister who preached there more than anyone else was Brother Sims, we called him well they all come to church and they all went to our house for dinner, and the highlight of our dinner was hearing them three ministers argue at our dinner table, I just wouldn't have missed that for anything and I still remember what they all said, each one of them. Now Pap White and Sims were both diciples, Uncle Jim Ellis was Baptist and he didn't agree with any of them. It was alot of fun.

(Fern) Well, tell me more about Pap White's wife, what was her name...they
just called her Grandma White. You thought her name was White.

(Della) Well, her last name was White, but Pap and Mother was what we always called them.

(Fern) You don't know her first name?

(Della) But anyway, when we lived over there, by Uncle Jim White, which was our grandmother's youngest brother, they lived on one side of them and we lived on the other. Every morning when I went to school, I had to stop in at Pap and Mother's to get me something to eat on the way home from school, I always had fried meat on a biscuit, and I had just got up from the breakfast table but I always stopped. Then when I'd come home I'd stop and I got a piece of cornbread, cold cornbread with some more fried meat and a piece of onion after school. And one night, I didn't stop, I went home. Boy did they have the whole neighborhood, Pap and Mother did, hunting me and I was at home. I didn't do that anymore. But anyway, Uncle Jim White's kids and myself, we'd get down there at night, she in later years was in a wheelchair, she had fell and broke her hip, and we'd get that wheelchair out there and we'd all gather around her feet, she'd tell us all the stories, she knew all the stories and just where they were located and everything and she'd explain them to us. But they'd lived in the South and they'd had, she didn't call them slaves, she had a different name for them that she called them and I guess they were quite well-off because they had all these people there to run their plantation. But when The War came, the Yankee Soldiers came in there, shot her father and her brother, rode her mother down with horses and killed her, and took all the food and the meat out of the smokehouse, and burned their house and burned all their buildings on the farm and left that little girl down there by herself. But somebody comin' out of the war zone, picked her up and brought her to Missouri because that's where they were comin'. And then after the War, our Great-grandfather, who we all knew as "Pap", and both their names was White and they got married. They were both was chased out of their homeland by the Civil War.

[Lorene) Back in, was it in South Carolina where they lived at the time?

(Della) Well, they both lived in a different State.

(Bus) Do you know what state Pap lived in before he come to Missouri?

(Della) Seemed to me like that he lived in Virginia and she lived in South Carolina.

(Fern) Did they homestead down there in South Missouri or were they in on that part of...?

(Della) Well they...I don't think so because I never knew of them havin' a
homestead. But I thought Uncle Jim White, he played the fiddle. And Charlie and Hayden played French Harps and they would all get together and all us kids and Uncle Jim played music for us.

(Fern) Wasn't Uncle Jim White and Aunt Lizzie groups of twins?

(Della) No, it was Sara Mode.

(Fern) Sara Mode and Aunt Lizzie.

(Della) See Uncle Jim White was quite younger. He was close to my Mother's age.

(Fern) I was thinking that Aunt Lizzie had a boy twin. I thought it was boy, girl and that was where Mary Beth got her seed for having her twin boy and girl.

(Della) But Sara Mode, but Uncle Jim was young. You see, when I was seven years old, they had five children younger than I was. I think there was twenty-one or twenty-two of those children all together and Charlie and Minnie, they were younger than your mother and that was their oldest children. But got in down there at Pap and Mothers and we just had outselves a good time down ther, she kept us under control. She'd talk to us and when she was down and couldn't get around in her wheelchair and lot of the time after she broke her hip she was bedfast she'd say, "Pap get this young one some meat, she's hungry," when I'd come in down there. And he'd go into the kitchen and fix me something to eat, I was more able to fix it than they were. I wasn't really hungry. But I never went by there but once, cause there wasn't any telephones and they had to get hold of somebody that went by there and I guess Pap went out on the road watching for somebody to come by and to get somebody to go lookin' for me and they thought sure something had happened to me. They looked between their house and the school house, it was about two miles to school and I walked it, it wasn't that far from our house cause welived rather close to it. They had everybody around there looking for me. Somebody would tell this one that I didn't stop-that I wasn't home because I didn't stop. They didn't think I was home because I didn't stop by. Our teacher told us to go right straight home. I had to mind her, but after that that was my first stop, that was home. I went around the road, normally I cut through the field, but I went around the road, so I didn't go by their house, cause that's what I was told to do, or I might of but it was the wrong thing to do. So after that I didn't do it. But I always went through the field, there was a couple of girls that was always picking on me, they were larger than I was and they were always doing something. So, I'd kick out and go through the fields, I didn't go the road home. The first time I came to a field or a fence I could get to, I took out through the field cause it was a lot closer to home to cut through the field.

(Fern) That would be alot of kids, twenty-one or two.

(Della) And you want to know how they slept. Everyone down there had straw ticks, they didn't have mattresses and they were that. There wasn't any furniture in those rooms except those straw ticks, sometimes you had to cross over one of them to get to the other. They slept on the floor.

(Bus) Stacked them during the day.

(Della) You know what we done down there at Grandma Brewers when we'd stay all night down there? We all slept upstairs, you know the kids slept upstairs, and we'd take the feather beds off, she had feather beds all the time, and we'd get them on the floor and then we'd get up the next morning and we'd put them back up on the bed. So they wouldn't know we'd all slept together. Lot more fun, she'd never come up to see what was going on. But you know it's really funny, I'd think about her so many times. Now Grandpa Brewer was a young man, he was an active man, he just wasn't never sick, he was just real active and just alot of fun. But my Grandmother Brewer was always an old woman but she was only thirty-four years older than I was. When I was ten years old, she was an old woman. Now I'm not kiddin'.

(Fern) Was she killed through an accident?

(Bus) They went to Iowa to havest and was killed.

(Della) And they was driving an old Ford and it caught on fire, and Frank was driving and he raised up to see-instead of stopping the car-he raised the floor board up and the fire came up and he-it was a touring car-and he fell out and hit his head on the pavement. It fractured his skull and killed him. That was the year I was sixteen years old-my birthday and his birthday too. Cause his birthday was the first of October and mine was the fourth. He got killed the day after his birthday and his funeral was the day after mine.

(Fern) And I was born that year, my mother had me the thirty-first of October that year.

(Della) So we went?? Juleen?? I remember that cause my mother planned such a great big thing for me on my sixteenth birthday.

(Fern) That means that you didn't get to have it.

(Della) I didn't go down and I didn't go down for the funeral. I don't know now just what happened that I didn't go but there's some reason that I didn't go. I think Mama and Betsey took off and left everybody else here. But Orlena had my Dad and I over to her house and cooked me a birthday dinner on my birthday. They hadn't been married too long until Juleen was born. They got married
?April? then Juleen was born in December and they-she fixed a good dinner, she did a nice job of it. I was disappointed in it in that Mama couldn't do what she wanted to do. I tie all that stuff in together. That's how I remember it I guess. Do you want that? Buster knows what I'm talking about.

(Bus) The what-not.

(Della) That he made when he was a little boy. I was between Andy and Lee. Andy used to play the fiddle.

(?) Those guys were the musicians.

(Fern) Frank and John were the twins, I believe.

(Della) You know who named them? (END)
Last Modified 15 Apr 2022Created 10 Feb 2024 using Reunion on a Macintosh


Created 10 Feb 2024.
© Copyright 1993-2024 by John Johnson.

Created on a Macintosh computer using Reunion genealogy software.

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