A Family Blessing (part 2) -- Discovering Ancestry

Many of us have “lost” families for various reasons. Maybe through death, geography, dysfunction, neglect, … ? But I love God’s promise that we never need to be family-less.

God places the lonely in families … Psalm 68:6a NLT

My husband John is one of the “lonely ones.” He is an only child of an “only child mother” who has next to no aunts, uncles, or cousins. And the few that he had as a child have passed away.

But he married into a big family (mine)…aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews galore.
And my siblings and spouses think John walks on water. (John says “that’s because I don’t make waves!”) In fact, they feel sorry for him being married to me (that’s another story).

And now God gave us our own family — our precious children and their spouses and amazing grandchildren.

Our family— less our oldest grandson Kaden, marching with Troopers dci this summer

But by God’s grace, John recently had an opportunity to search out a thread of his dad’s family ancestry in Missouri. So here is John’s ancestry story in his own words:

Rufus Robberson, my third great-grandfather, youngest of Elizabeth Robberson’s children

Being an only child, I have a very fewer family connections than most. But I have in recent years delved into Ancestry to experience, to some degree, the blessing of family. During one of my dives into genealogical data, researching the common birthplace of my paternal grandparents, Walnut Grove, Missouri, I found a picture of a bronze memorial plaque commemorating my fourth paternal great-grandmother, which also listed her husband and her fourteen children. This plaque is located in Robberson Prairie Cemetery north of Springfield, Missouri, on our route to Plano, Texas, for a Bible conference. Fortunately, I was able to locate the cemetery and the location of the metal monument in the cemetery using Google Maps Street View. So we decided to make the site a stop on our journey to Plano.
My father’s mother was Elizabeth, “Lizzie,” Robberson, a direct descendent Elizabeth Jane Pettigrew Robberson, who is memorialized the cemetery plaque. Elizabeth Jane was the matriarch of the Robberson clan in Greene County, Missouri. In 1830, after the death of her husband Abednego in 1829, she moved from Tennessee to Greene County, Missouri, with her brood of fourteen children, seven sons and seven daughters.
Elizabeth Robberson and her offspring contributed to the development of the area north of Springfield. One account states, “As soon as they were settled in, Elizabeth rode to Jefferson City to take out homestead papers for her and her children who had reached their majority. She found, upon arriving there that the land office had not yet been moved to St. Louis from Springfield, Illinois. With the typical hardiness of these early pioneers, she continued onward to Springfield to accomplish her task. She came back with enough land grants to make her the largest land holder in these parts, hence the name Robberson Prairie.”
Elizabeth Robberson is buried at the Robberson Prairie Cemetery, “which was the yard about her house when she first settled here in 1830. The first person to be buried in that plot was a niece whose grave is about 40 yards from her doorway.”
My third great-grandfather, Rufus Robberson, is last on that list and lived out his days as a farmer in Robberson Township. His son, around 1874, moved from Robberson Township and settled in Walnut Grove, to the west of Robberson Prairie, where a generation later in 1897 my grandmother, Lizzie, was born.
Sometime between 1850 and 1857 my third great-grandfather, William Green Loyd, brought his father (and his mother) and (his wife) and son to Greene County, Missouri, from Jackson, Alabama, settling in Ashgrove, west of Robberson Township and Robberson Prairie. William Greene Loyd was a contemporary of Rufus Robberson, both being born in 1822 and both farming in the area. His grandson moved a short distance to Walnut Grove, where, in 1898, my grandfather, Charles Nelson Loyd, was born.
Thus my paternal grandparents were both born in and lived in Walnut Grove, Missouri. Charles may have attended Harold School along with Lizzie. But by the time he was 8 years old he and his family had moved to Arizona for his father to work in the copper industry. In 1910, when Charles was 12, his family returned briefly to Walnut Grove, perhaps connected with the death of his father’s mother. Shortly after they moved back to Arizona, to Globe, my birthplace. But in three years, when my grandfather was 16, he returned to Walnut Grove to marry Lizzie, 17, and bring her back to Globe to establish a family of four boys, one of which was my father.
Our trip out west gave me an opportunity to touch the ground on which the Robberson family lived and to visit the worn-out town of Walnut Grove where my grandparents were born and lived. I appreciate the Providence that made it possible for my grandparents to find one another there and start a new family together in my Arizona hometown.
This is the blessing of family.

A Branch in the Vine

A Family Blessing (part 2) -- Discovering Ancestry

A Branch In the Vine