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Dec 30, 1940 – 7 July, 2019
I am sad to post that cousin Peggy passed away this morning after her prolonged illness and battles with cancer. Please keep her daughters Alison and Nancye, and sister Nancy in your thoughts and prayers!
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So, out of the blue, 3 weeks ago, I get an email from some named Kent Babcock, someone I didn’t previously know. He, much like me, has been bitten by the Family Tree bug, and (also like me) had started scanning old family pictures and putting them into his Ancestry.com tree.
His mother, Ruth Kincaid, was originally from Etowah, Tennessee, went to nursing school at Erlanger, and went into the Army right out of nursing school. A number of her nursing school and Army pictures had names written on the back, and….you guessed it… one of them was Estelle Smith! He wanted to try and track down families of some of the nurses he had pictures of, and so he searched “Estelle Smith” on Ancestry.com (there are a LOT of Estelle Smiths out there…take it from me!). But he found my tree, with some pictures of Estelle, and knew he had found the right one!
His mother and Estelle were in the same Erlanger Nursing School class, and joined the Army and were stationed at Ft McClellan, AL! His mother met and married his father, who was also at Ft McClellan at the time. She left the military after WWII, while Estelle stayed in for a 23 year career. He noted that she was identified as “Smitty” in some of the pictures. If you’ve looked at Estelle’s bio on this website, you will have seen where a small note to “Smitty” was written and signed by “Turner,” who is undoubtedly Ruth Turner, also a 1941 classmate and looks to have been assigned with Estelle on the USAT Comfort… just another piece of the puzzle in Estelle’s story!
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2 weeks ago I flew down to the Cocoa Beach area to visit Peggy and her daughter Shawn. We had a wonderful afternoon, comparing Granny Smith stories and Mulberry memories! She is hoping to come up to Georgia to visit her sister (and our cousin) Nancy this summer. If so, that would be an opportune time to try and organize a Granny Smith Cousins Club meeting for lunch somewhere in the Chattanooga area, midway between just about everyone, except for Sandra and Patti, and the John Paul Smith group, who are all Texas and westward. As her plans get firmer, she promised to keep me up-to-date!
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I am sure I am about to be embarrassed about not recognizing these people, but they had their own page in the Smith Scrapbook that I scanned. I have no idea who they are. Anyone?
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John Paul sent me this tintype years ago. He thought it to be Jessee Waggoner, his great grandfather, and father of Charles Lafayette Waggoner, Granny’s (Sallie’s) mother. But Jessee died in 1854, at least a year before tin types were being used. It certainly could be of his other great -grandfather, Ishom Jessie Walker, who died in 1898. But could also be Charles Lafayette Waggoner, Jessee Waggoners son. There is some writing on the back. I have scanned and played around with tones and colors trying to decipher what it says, but can’t make heads nor tails of it. I have no other pictures that might of Charles Lafayette Waggoner, CHarles was married twice, first to Elizabeth Martha Spencer. I have written decendants of chilren from this first marriage hoping that maybe some of them might have a photograph of him, but no luck yet.
