Family Roots: Polo and Lanark in Illinois

 My mom’s mom grew up in northern Illinois, farm country that they called “out West” and there were hard times ahead when she was born in 1908 and the tiny baby was forced to sleep in a shoe box on the oven door of the wood burning cook stove. A makeshift incubator of the era. The children of Della McPherson and William Beightol - Grace Viola Beightol and her sisters, Clara and Alice, and brothers, Clarence, Orville, Carl and a baby brother who died as a toddler. Alice later died of appendicitis at 18 and Carl came to visit his sisters after they moved and married in Wyoming.  He decided to ride his horse into the Saloon. It was one of those decisions which change everything. Arrested and told he either enlisted or served prison time, Carl chose to enlist and served prison hard time by completing the Bataan Death March, only to die afterward in a hospital in the Philippines.

Clarence stayed in the family farm with his parents and Orville married a school teacher and lived nearby and continued working on the farm. Orville and Lucille adopted a 5 year old German boy, Freddy. Fred was killed in a car accident when he just finished a stint in the marines and was driving home from the farm in the dark of a moonless countryside and slammed into a car parked in a crossroads intersection with no lights on. After his death, one of his birth siblings came to visit while we were there too.

The two remaining sisters, after Alice died,  had moved to Wyoming and married two brothers. Clara answered an ad for a mail order bride and went to Wyoming. She didn’t fall in love with the man whose ad she had answered but fell for his brother. Grace came to their wedding and ended up marrying the original brother. Those two couples produced my mom, and her four male cousins. Grace and Lawrence had Priscilla Slack, while Clarence and Clara Slack had Roger, Terry, Donald and James.

The family farm outside of Polo and Lanark Illinois, became one of my favorite places as a child. Mom would bring her mom, and once my great aunt Clara as well. They would give the farmhouse a deep cleaning while my brothers and I climbed the cedar trees and played in the hayloft and “helped” feed the piglets and calves and begged to drink glasses of cream straight from the cow to the separator. I would get up early, but they would be up at 4 and milk the cows, eat breakfast and take a nap before 6 AM. My great grandma Della was still working hard but her spine had give up on staying straight  and her eyes were weak. At night she climbed the stairs to bed by putting her water glass a couple steps above her. Climbing up to that level, moving it higher and repeat. Her bedroom was filled with Christmas cactus in old tin cans and she loved to have me read to her before bed.