Memoirs: Family | A.Thomas Gunn, Jazz

Hailie Gunn's MEMOIRS

From the Beginning

I was born May 27, 1923 in Francisco Indiana to a young couple Ethel Young Morrison and Lewis Morrison My mother was one of eleven children. My grandparents were Hattie Elizabeth Taylor Young and Albert Young.

My grandmother’s ancestors are traced back to 1680 in the U.S. when they came as Quakers to New Jersey, They were mostly English/German/Irish descent. From there later generations went to Virginia and later my great grandfather’s family. John Taylor’s (don’t have the date) moved to Mt Carmel Indiana. He was a Justice of the Peace there. Mt Carmel is also the location where Zachary Taylor left his family while he was fighting the Indian Wars Grandmother Hattie had only two siblings, a sister Mary Taylor Geisler, married one daughter, and a brother John, married to lady named Ethel ,no children my mother was named for her. The three grew up in Mt Carmel.

Grandmother married late in life for those days at 26 yrs old. Until that time she cared for her mother an absolutely beautiful woman named Christianne we have several family pictures of her. She was ill for many years, through childbirth problems or something else, I don’t know. Grandmother stayed home after her schooling helping her and working in her Dad’s Justice of the Peace office. At age 26 she met a curly haired Irishman Abner Young and to chagrin of all the spinsters they were married.

Grandfather Albert was a very unlikely husband for my grandmother. He was a fiddle playing Irishman. With flashing dark grey eyes heavy black brows, long lashes and black beautiful black waving hair. Which even in his old age he was very vain about. His hair turned a beautiful white in his later years and Grandma would spend an hour everyday fixing his hair and combing it, pressing the waves into place. As he got older and grouchier he would look in the mirror and say “that isn’t right,mom” take a brush and mess it up and she would say “All right, dad” take the brush and comb and do it again. This went on until he was 93 yrs old and she was ten years younger and passed away. Granddad kept asking for her for a month or so, but realized she wasn’t coming home and died within two months of her death.

Albert's father was a farmer in Potoka Bottoms a rich farming area and died when granddad was in his early teens, I believe a Civil War casualty, and his mother Jane, an Irish immigrant married a MacNeil. In those days when a woman married her property became her husband and after great grandmother Jane died the farm went to her husband,. As she and Mac had a son he eventually left the farm to his son who sold it and lived comfortably in Francisco the rest of his life on the sale which should have been split between Grandfather Young and his half brother. Although I didn’t know of this as a child even I could feel a distance or coolness when family gatherings occurred. His stepfather did his best to run off Grandfather and finally he left at age 15 yrs.and made his own way I am unsure of jobs or his work. He met and married a young girl when they were both eighteen yrs old. Poor little girl, both she and the baby died in childbirth.

Grandfather Albert didn’t remarry until he was 36 yrs old when he met my grandmother Hattie. What brought them together I can only guess. Grandmother was so strict, firm, I think quite humorless though she played the organ, church hymns and she was very religious. She was very capable, at anything and to everyone’s surprise she and Grandfather had eleven children. They bought a small peach orchard at the town limits and that is where they lived until they both died grandmother at 83 and grandfather at 93 yrs. I wrote a couple short stories about my grandmother, one where she was growing up in Mt Carmel and my impressions and remembrances of her as a child and the second one about her jealousy of my sort of wild, good looking grandfather who could play a singing Irish fiddle for dancing the dances of his ancestry. Grandmother became a community and church leader in Francisco and was always on call for people during difficult times, deaths, births everything that goes on in a small community. My grandparents lost two children, the first a baby, named Mina probably crib death and the second an absolutely lovely 14 yr old, Tilla, who was the image of her grandmother Christiane Her brother, Uncle Wayne who was two years younger later always said she died of appendicitis, which was undiagnosed at that time.

All of the Young girls were very pretty with most of them having Grandfathers dark grey eyes and heavy wavy dark hair. Aunt Esther was probably the one that looked most like Grandmother. Grandmother had the straightest spine I have ever seen and I remember her coming around to her daughters or to her granddaughters and giving them a little hard tap and saying “Straighten that spine, pull back these shoulders.” She was intent on good posture as a way to keep the backbone from deteriorating. Until she died she always looked two inches taller than her 5’4’’ with such a straight spine and her carriage.

My mother told me about some evenings grandpa would play his fiddle and all the kids danced while Grandma sat with the current baby on her lap and tapped her feet to the music. My father’s family, the Morrisons came from Belgium and their story is much different. Apparently they were owners of a coal mine in Belgium and as time went on the Catholic Church said they were encroaching on their property. They went to Court and of course in that country and at that time you didn’t go to court with the Catholic Church. They lost their case, so had to give up much of the property. The two brothers sold what was left and my grandfather Morrison, his wife Virginia and their three kids packed up and came to America immigrating through New Orleans and the more French speaking area . Morrison was not their name, but it was a s close to the real one as the official could get so they became “Morrison”. As near as we can figure the original name was Morrisseau or something near that. They moved from there to Columbus Ohio, and worked for a steel mill , They had three children when they came to the US. William, Victor and Maria, the other three Elizabeth, Nellie. and my dad Lewis were born in U.S.

We have a murder in our family, Maria was murdered but I don’t know anything about it and when I told my mother it had come out in family papers she couldn’t believe it My father had never said a word about it to her surprisingly. It happened in the U.S we know when she was young. Even though the family had lived in Belgium they were French and some of the children, Uncle Vic and Uncle William had French accents all their lives.and Uncle William was quite difficult to understand. Though he was around ten yrs old when they arrived, the family mostly spoke French in the household.