B-Day the Seventh of May
That's what I see to the west off 7H porch this early morning of May 7, 2020. Beyond the scaffolding, full moon going down over StAndrewsBay. B-Day the Seventh of May.
All my life this was an important day to me. My first seventy-five years anyway. Louise Gentry Weller, my mother was born May 7, 1912 in Bluff Springs, Florida, to Mamie McClammy Gentry and Walter Henry Gentry. Near seventy years since I've been there, last time the funeral of one of my grandmother's sisters as I recall. I don't remember who, but the movie in my mind is my father stopping the car in the dirt parking area outside an old country-style unpainted Baptist church like we used to see in these parts. Inside, I see three or four elderly women, sisters, or maybe sisters and cousins, or maybe sisters and in-laws, including Mamoo as we called my grandmother Gentry, huddled lovingly together around the open casket, sobbing.
North of Pensacola, out US29 beyond McDavid almost to Century and Flomaton at the Alabama line. Bluff Springs, Escambia County, Florida. Maybe there was a settlement or town there a century ago, but these days it may be a marked off maybe farming area on the map. I need to go again, as Gina has done, walk Crary Memorial Cemetery where folks are buried, visit ancestors. There are a couple of places I need to go beyond Pensacola: Broad Bay in Maine (Waldoboro it's renamed), where Andreas Wäller came from Germany in the eighteenth century, and Bluff Springs.
"Going" to Bluff Springs while thinking about my mother yesterday and this morning, I visited Crary Cemetery online, meeting any number of relatives. One, my great-great-grandfather Gentry
Ransom Gentry was born in Oglethorpe, GA in 1802; he migrated to Alabama where he first farmed and then became a Baptist minister. He and his wife Lena Brooks had five children: Ransom Henry, Gilbert Martin, Martha, Hasseltine, and Lena. At the age of 60 Ransom was conscripted by the Confederate Army and sent to war. Both Ransom Henry and young Gilbert were already in the army. Both survived. When Ransom was captured it was about 34 degrees below zero at Rock Island where the prisoners were taken. He became ill with pneumonia and died having lived only ten days after his capture by the Union Army.
Another, my grandmother Gentry's father Joshua Right McClammy:
Joshua Right McClammy, our spirited g-grandfather, was born to a life of luxury for the times with servants to cater to him; at the age of two, this life came under attack and soon disappeared as the War Between the States began, continued, and ended. He married Mary S. McCall and they moved to Bluff Springs, Florida before the turn of the century. While attending a wedding in his old home county, Joshua had words with Tom Smith; words led to gun fire; Tom died a few hours later. Joshua was shot in the back some eight to 13 times. His body was shipped home to Bluff Springs from the train depot at Tunnel Springs. He left a family of nine children for his widow to rear.
WAS SHOT NINE TIMES, WHILE ENGAGED IN A FIGHT WITH THE SMITH BROTHERS OF THAT PLACE--BODY TAKEN TO McDAVID YESTERDAY
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Jr. R. McClanney, residing about two miles west of McDavid, was killed Sunday night at a small place called Tunnell Springs, on the Southern Alabama Railway, and the body was brought to McDavid yesterday afternoon, where the interment will occur to-day.
McClanney and two brothers, named Smith, engaged in a fight Sunday night at Tunnell Springs, and it is stated by parties who passed through that place yesterday that McClanney fired the first shot. Immediately there was a fusillade, the two Smith boys and McClanney all firing at the same time.
And more stories including on the Weller side of my family, my father's people. Pop, my grandfather Weller, was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, where his father was rector of St John's Episcopal Church. I don't have a map of his life travels in front of me, but at some point he got to Pensacola and Bluff Springs, where he met and married Mom, my grandmother, IDK, maybe visiting there because his closest brother Charles was married to a Bluff Springs woman.
At some point I'm going back into the grave recordings to see if I can identify, at least tentatively, that funeral of Mamoo's sister, to get an idea when was the last time I was in Bluff Springs.
Mama's birthday. If I wasn't there, I phoned her. Maybe I best remember calling her on her fiftieth, May 7, 1962, from Ann Arbor, where Linda, Malinda, Joe and I were living while I was at Univ of Michigan.
Mama died Sunday morning, July 17, 2011 just two months and ten days past her 99th birthday. As she'd requested, her ashes were mixed with my father's ashes some months later, and on a cold windy day in driving rain, we scattered them - - on Massalina Bayou in front of the house where we grew up, on St Andrews Bay in front of The Old Place, and out as close as John could get his boat to the Old Pass, where Alfred was lost in 1918, and because of that tragedy my grandparents later moved to Pensacola, where our parents met, and because of which family history all of us in the boat that day, have life.
Bubba