Didn’t get moving until late today but once I got going I just couldn’t stop. When I first got interested in genealogy back in the early 50’s my mother and I collected all we could find about her line and found so much material. Then we asked my father about his line. The Thayer name should be easy to find out about but he just laughed at us. He said no, he didn’t want to look into his family history as he said you never know what you would find. He said his father always told him there were too many skeletons in their closet and that peaked our interest. We went to work and found out quit a bit about the family but never found a single skeleton. It wasn’t until I went to Wolfboro to teach that I found the first hint of a skeleton. I was in the teacher’s room at noon. We were all in there having our lunch and Larry Heath was telling a story about his grand father. He said his mother and father lived in his grandfather’s house and he was a hard task master. Every morning he would come into the boy’s room, raise his arm high over his head and bring his arm down crashing across their legs saying “Time to get up.” If you didn’t pull your legs up before the arm hit it near broke their legs. It didn’t take more than once being hit with that big arm before they would wake up as soon as he opened the door. I said that sounded just like stories my father had told me about his family also but I had no idea Larry Heath could possible related to Carol Petts. As we compared notes I found his grand father was one Ora Thayer. WOW my maiden name was Thayer and I knew there was an Ira on my family tree so when I got home that night I looked up the family tree and sure enough there was an Ora also he was a brother to Ira. I knew quite a bit about most of that family as they were brothers and sister of my grand father. I had never met my grand father because he died in 1911 but I had heard family stories about these people. Then I remembered there were two old houses in my home town right on the town line between Harrisville and Chesham. The houses were falling down when I was little. I had asked about those houses because someone said they had some connections to my father. He said they belonged to the Heath girls but they had moved or died I don’t remember which and he said they were related to us some how but he didn’t know how and he didn’t want to talk about it. So I let it go but now I remembered and connected some how to the Heath name. Next day I asked Larry about his grand father. He said he didn’t remember his well but did know he disappeared when he was little and had always thought he died then but a few years ago his mother told him his grand father had died in the state mental hospital in Concord, NH. Bingo all the pieces fell into place. Here was the skeleton, this was why this one brother of my grand father’s no one seemed to know anything about and yes Larry and I were related, we were second cousins. Well today the mystery was finished. I found on ancestry.com Ora story. As a young man he hired out as a farm hand to a local farmer and three years later he married the owners daughter. They moved to their own farm and had three children and when he had to register for the draft for WWI it says on his draft records “Mentaly weak” and in the 1920 census he is listed as a patient at the mental hospital in Concord. All the piece fell into place and he was returned to the Thayer family tree where he belonged. Larry had said he never forgave his mother for not letting him know his grand father was alive when he grew up. He never got a chance to go and meet his grandfather. He remembered him from his child hood and would have wanted to go to the hospital to see him while he was alive. Just because he had a mental disease did not mean he wasn’t still the only grandfather he had and would have loved to know him. I am glad I can put him back on my family tree and know now that my father’s skeleton was not that bad, hey I have known most of my family was crazy anyways and it is nice to know where it came from.
I have finally settled on a method of recording my family tree information so I can keep tract of the connections so that I can find the information when I need it. So tomorrow I will be spending more time working on the family tree. Time now for sleep. Have a good night.