The Importance of County Histories

Last year I was working on my husband's family line for a class assignment and discovered a county history book that provided valuable information on his family. Not only that, but the individual who had owned the book before donating it to the college library had carefully added pages with old newspaper clippings about the county since the book was published. It was like a time capsule, bringing context to the area my husband’s family had lived in, and the biography of the family provided information about family relationships that had not been known before. So when I started looking at my own family history, I hoped I'd have the same sort of good fortune for the Overmans in Allen County, Kansas.

Cover page for  Allen and Woodson County history.

As it turns out, there is a written history - The History of Allen and Woodson Counties, Kansas. Published in 1901 and 894 pages in length (not counting the index), it contains a detailed biography of my second great grandfather, Peter Jacobson. Peter was the father of Sarah Amelia, who married Charles Foster. Charles and Sarah were the parents of Ida Marinda who married John Carven Overman. John and Ida were the parents of Bobbie Neal, my father. It is a priceless discovery, even if the Overmans didn’t make it into the book. A digital copy of the county history can be viewed and downloaded here. Overmans weren't in the history perhaps because they were relatively new to the County, having been there for only six years when the book was published. However, Fosters are mentioned in the Jacobson biography as well as in other biographies. So was it possible that the Overmans were mentioned in other County Histories?

Cover page for Hamilton County's history.

Prior to moving to Kansas, the Overmans lived in Hamilton County, Indiana. Samuel Cornelius Overman, another second great-grandfather was born in North Carolina in 1805. By the time he was married in 1838, he was living in Hamilton County, Indiana. His son moved from Indiana to Kansas with his family sometime after Samuel Cornelius’s death in 1886. The family lived in Hamilton County for about fifty years and it is likely several Overmans remained after John Milton left. There was a better chance an Overman would be in this county history, depending on whether or not Hamilton County had a published history and when that history was written.

One of the plat maps for the county.

Hamilton County does have a history that was published in 1880. A digital copy can be downloaded here. However, only one Overman is mentioned in the book: Nathan Overman, Samuel Cornelius’s brother who was one of the postmasters for the Westfield post office. Even though none of the Overmans made it into the biography section of the book, there are plat maps which could provide information on the properties owned by the Overmans, as well as illustrations of some of the more prominent farms of the area. Even with no information about the family, the book has value in relating the history of the area they came from and helping us understand the kind of lives they led.

Keepsakes

The other day I was going through everything I could think of to scare up as many photographs of the Overmans I could find in my possession. Overmans, as opposed to the Chamberlain side of the family were infrequent photographers. This may have been for monetary reasons, or it may have been because they just didn't see the point in taking photographs when remembering was enough. My great grandfather John Milton thought the radio was a waste of of money when you could read all the news in the paper, so I imagine he had little interest in photographs. Then I remembered a box that belonged to my father. The box is something he made in school. It is cedar with a nice red finish and the metal straps he added to it are a little crooked, but overall its a nice piece of workmanship. I keep the box on a bookshelf for display, but I don't open it very often, and I forget what is in it until I think to open it again.

There is a Christmas story called "The Littlest Angel" my mother liked to read to us when we were little. In the story, the youngest angel, hearing that everyone in heaven is preparing gifts for the Christ child decides the best thing he can give is the box he kept under his bed at home when he was mortal. If you've heard the story you know what that box contains. It isn't the value of anything in the box; its that everything in the box is attached to a memory. So it is with my father's box. Nothing in it has any real monetary worth; the things within are only triggers for a memory.

There are little photos of my grandmother and of Max, the brother who died when he was sixteen; a photo of my father on graduation day clowning around for the camera; there's a pocket watch with no crystal that belonged to my great grandfather John Milton; letters for a Letterman sweater from El Monte High School Marching Band; a graduation program and tassel; an old thermometer from Montana, where my uncle Ray worked as a cowboy and met my aunt Betty; the list goes on. Each item had meaning to him. Fortunately he told me what memory was associated with many of these items, but some I don't know and I wish I did.
So it is with many an old box in many a family, when photographs were less important and a small trinket could trigger a memory.

John Carven Overman in Mexico

Consular Registry for Tampico Mexico

While researching my grandfather John Carven Overman for an assignment in school, I came upon a digitized record from the U.S. Consular Registration in Tampico, Mexico. The year was 1910; my grandfather had been in the Federal census taken in Kansas earlier that year, but in October he was in Mexico. The document I found gave him permission to remain there until October of the following year. He wasn’t in the military, so his reasons for being there were a mystery. However, a few things about the document struck me as unusual; he was working as a tool dresser, he was unmarried, and a note along the inside edge of the document (it was in a book) gave instructions on who to contact if anything should happen to him. He had also signed it and this was the first time I had seen his signature. It was neat and crisp with the backward slant of one who is left-handed. If such things are inherited, I now know where I got it from.

I wondered why he would leave Kansas and go to work in Mexico? What was going on down in Tampico and why did they need his services? As it turned out the story is centered on oil, Edward Doheny, the United States Navy, and the Mexican Revolution. I don’t know for certain if John Overman became involved with any of the conflict that happened in Tampico, but a cousin has a photograph of him in uniform standing beside his horse. And John wasn’t in the 1915 census in Kansas – the only census he missed while he lived in Kansas.

John Carven Overman spent the better part of his life involved in the oil industry before moving to California. To a young man from a modest farming background, the promise of making a good living in Mexico was no doubt appealing.

More about the history of oil in Tampico can be found here.

The True Story of Ed Overman's Death

To me Ed Overman seemed a larger than life kind of folk hero in the oral history of the Overman clan. He was well known and well liked in the area of Iola Kansas, even though he was not a man to abstain from drink. My father loved this uncle and though he was only about seven when Ed died, he had a very clear memory of him. His death however was anything but ordinary. Was the story my father told me true? I looked into it to find out. Listen to the podcast to find out the rest of the story.

Plat Maps and Family Stories

1921 Plat map for the town of Iola. John Milton Overman's  property is in the lower right quarter of the map, While editing a Wiki article on Allen County Kansas this last week I came across a goldmine: plat maps for Allen County circa 1921. As a former cartographer, I have a love for maps, and as a student of genealogy, I love them for what they can reveal about the people who lived in the places they represent. This particular map revealed the exact place my great grandfather had farmed. It also illustrated a feature about the farm that verified a story my father had told about an uncle. I won't go into the story here because it will be told in a podcast I will be adding to the blog in a few days, but an important part of the story involves a railroad line.

The 1906 plat map for Iola and southwestern regions.

 J.M. Overman is on this map as well.

I had been to Iola once, about twenty years ago, but didn't have any information on where the Overman family had lived. My uncle, Ray Overman, didn't really remember much about the town. His cousin who lived there part of the year was in Colorado and unavailable to see me. My father, Bob, had passed away two years before. At least I was able to develop a mental map of the area.

With the discovery of the plat map, a lot of things I remember being told made sense, and one of those things was the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad line that ran through John Milton Overman's farm.

Modern satellite image of John Milton's farm. The area in the 

lower right is where the original house was located.

With further research I found an older map from 1906. The railroad went through this map of the property as well. A website detailing the history of AT&SF rail company can be found here. It appears that the rail line was probably laid in the eighteen seventies, about twenty years before John Milton bought his farm.

The farm and the railroad right of way are still visible on modern satellite maps of the area. The Overman family no longer owns the property and the rail line has become a formal hiking trail, but the property is bounded on three sides by roads and is still identifiable. The next time I go through Iola, I'll drive by the property. If the owner is amenable, I may even walk out to where the old railroad line was, where the Overmans used to hitch a ride on a steam train into Iola.

(1921 and 1906 Plat maps from Kansasmemory.org)
(Satellite image from Google Maps)

The Life of Bobbie Neal Overman Part 3

In 1968 Bob’s father John Carven passed away. He was eighty-eight years old.

John Carven Overman

If there is one thing that defined Bob Overman, it was his devotion to Janet and to his daughters. When Janet decided she wanted to move back to the San Joaquin valley to live closer to her parents, the decision was difficult for Bob. He was experiencing real success with his new business. They owned a home in the then sleepy town of Dana Point and prospects were looking up for the future. What no one realized at this point was that Janet was in the early stages of mental illness caused by a subtle hormonal imbalance in her body. Her thinking was becoming irrational and Bob didn’t understand why she was behaving so differently. Her parents were also bewildered by her behavior and couldn’t understand her sudden insistence on moving away from Dana Point. While Bob had never been their first choice for a son-in-law, Cecil and Winnifred understood the hard work he had put into his business and appreciated his dedication to his family. In the end Janet gave him an ultimatum: to either move with her or she and the children would move alone. He decided to move with his family.

In moving a part of Bob died. His hope for success was gone; the San Joaquin Valley was not an optimal place for his sort of business. Mostly an agricultural area, there weren’t many housing developments in need of his work and the demographics were vastly different from Southern California. He knew it would also be difficult to be near his in-laws; Cecil was an easy going man who could get along with nearly anyone, but Winnifred was not and she tended to find fault in nearly everything Bob did. Nonetheless, he tried to be positive about this new stage in his life.

Christmas 1970. Left to right: Bob, Cynthia, Jennifer and Janet

The first few months were spent living in the household of his in-laws. Winnifred and Janet bickered constantly and the men spent a good deal of time out in the garage to avoid it. Eventually, with Cecil’s help, Bob found a home to rent. He also found a piece of property for sale and imagined he could build a business and a home on the property. He started by building a barn, then he started looking for customers. His talent for selling himself helped him to get his business started, but it was a struggle. After two years of working to build his business he discovered the property he had purchased had a lien on it from the previous owner. In spite of having paid for the property - in cash – it was taken from him and his money was never refunded. Now he needed a home that had enough property for his business. He rented an old farmhouse with a large garage and side yard he could use as his paint yard.

As hard as he tried, Bob could not get his business to grow the way it had in Southern California. Work was piecemeal, no one wanted to pay for the work rendered, and he was often short on money, unable to make the rent or pay for gas for his welder. Cecil supplemented Bob's income when he was made aware of the situation. Meanwhile Janet’s mental illness deepened.

Cynthia, Bob, and Jennifer 1982

By now his oldest daughter was entering community college and his youngest was starting high school. The landlord decided he didn’t want to deal with renters any longer (though he had done nothing to maintain the house) and told Bob the family would have to move. Tired of trying to make ends meet, Bob decided to move into town and find a job in Reedley, a small farming community. Other than small businesses the town boasted several large packing houses and a box manufacturing company. Bob found work at the box company but with a downturn in the economy, he was laid off about two years later. Janet was too ill to be of any help. By now she spent her days in their bedroom and refused to see a doctor. Unable to find steady work he looked for piecemeal work to keep the family going. Finally he was able to find a job at a company in the neighboring town of Selma. It would be the last place he would work.

Life of Bobbie Neal Overman Part 2

To say life was wonderful to Bob would be perhaps overly optimistic and not particularly truthful; likewise to say his life was terrible would be overly pessimistic and also not particularly truthful. Somewhere between these two extremes would be a more accurate representation.

Pictured: Pauline, Robert, Janet, Winifred and Cecil Chamberlain.

Janet was from a family firmly anchored within the realm of the middle class. Her mother had gone to college and her father had been through high school. Cecil Chamberlain was a depot manager for Santa Fe railroad and from a family that had known success as well as hardship. Winifred was the daughter of a Southern Methodist minister who moved his family every year or so to a different town and church. Janet and both of her brothers had gone to college.

Bob was from a long line of farmers. His mother, Ida, had an 8th grade education. As mentioned previously, John had a 2nd grade education. With a combination of Quaker stock from the Overman side and Baptist stock from the Foster side, none of Bob's family had ever been remotely wealthy or attended college. The Chamberlains were also a completely different generation from the Overmans and though cordial, neither family was particularly fond of the other. How much this tension affected the early years of Bob's marriage is uncertain, but it no doubt had some influence.

Earl Dean Overman

During Bob and Janet's courtship, Bob's brother Dean became ill. On 13 June 1958, a few days after Bob and Janet's first wedding anniversary, Dean, who was terminally ill with cancer, took his own life. The Overman brothers had always been close and it was a hard blow for Bob to lose another brother, made even more so by Dean's decision to end his life on his own terms rather than continue suffering the brutal consequences of radiation treatment.

The newlyweds settled in Southern California where Janet continued to teach in elementary school. Bob had made his first effort to work in the white collar world starting well before his marriage. In 1953 he worked for Southern California Edison as an apprentice clerk in the transportation office. Later, after his marriage, his aptitude for math brought him opportunities as an accountant for Reliance Steel Company and a bid specialist for Pittsburg Des Moines Steel Company, both which had offices in Southern California. At one point he tried to work two jobs while also attending college, but the experience was too stressful and he dropped out of school and quit one of his jobs. In 1960 the first child was born, followed nearly four years later by the second. Both were daughters, Jennifer and Cynthia.

A ticket to participate in the Campus Capers Show.

Around 1961 Bob and Janet produced a television show call Campus Capers for channel 18 in San Bernardino, California. It was a low budget version of American Bandstand and ended up being more than either of them could manage while trying to work their day jobs. It was while Bob was working on this show that his mother, Ida, passed away on 5 May 1962 of a stroke. She was babysitting their daughter Jennifer at the time. Bob recalled his last words to his mother were "Bye mom, I'll see you later."

In 1967/68, Bob left his job with Pittsburgh Des Moines Steel and started his own business. He worked out of the garage at first, then graduated to renting a barn on a hill above San Juan Capistrano. The business grew quickly, partly because he had discovered a niche that was ripe for filling and partly because he was a very good salesman: iron work. Gates, railing, fences, wall units, chandeliers, and furniture. If it could be made with steel, Bob would make it. This proved extremely successful. Soon he had his own shop in town called Valley Forge and a growing list of contracts with housing developers. In fact there was so much work to do he hired a young college student to work for him part-time. 

Unfortunately this would only last until 1969. Though business was booming, Janet wanted to move away from Southern California and back to the San Joaquin Valley to be near her parents. 

The Life of Bobbie Neal Overman, Part 1

Grade School Photograph

Bobbie Neal Overman was born February 17, 1929 in Humboldt, Kansas. He was the fourth and final baby born to Ida Marinda Foster and John Carven Overman. They had not been planning on another child, but welcomed him nonetheless. The spelling of his name - Bobbie - was an accident made by the attending nurse; it was supposed to be Bobby, but most people simply called him Bob.

Bob was a rambunctious child. When his older brother Ray (his senior by ten years) ordered him to wax his car before he went on a date, Bob did as he was  ordered, then hid on the floor in the back of the car and went on the date with  his unsuspecting brother. When brother Dean teased him for having to stay indoors because he was sick, he threw a butcher knife at him from his bedroom window. Fortunately the knife landed at Dean's feet, but it made a lasting impression on Dean and got Bob into deep trouble with his parents.

The first eleven years of his life were spent in and around Iola, a small town in Allen County, Kansas. He attended a two room  school house with his cousins where he excelled in math, often helping older children with their math homework. He rode his uncle's draft horse bareback to and from school with his cousins.

On 18 April, 1941 tragedy struck; Bob's next oldest brother, John  Max, died from a burst appendix. Max was seventeen, a gentle boy who couldn't bring himself to butcher his mother's chickens for dinner. Looking back on it years later Bob said it was probably for the best; Max would have been drafted into the army and would have likely seen combat. If Max couldn't kill a chicken, he said, he wouldn't have survived the battlefield. But as a child, he mourned Max's death deeply. Shortly after, the Overman family moved to California.

High School Graduation - 1946

The shift from a small western town in Kansas to the much larger town of Long Beach was a shock. Bob started the seventh grade at Charles Lindbergh Jr. High, wearing his best overalls the first day of school. When he came home that evening he told his mother he refused to go back unless she bought him a pair of pants - none of the kids in his class wore overalls and he wasn't going to tolerate being called an "Oakie".[1]

The Overmans moved from Long Beach to El Monte around Bob's freshman year in high school. He was a good student; though he had a difficult time with spelling, he excelled in math, history, and music. When he graduated his junior year, the school offered to pay his way through community college if he would teach history, but his father was not impressed. Having only a second grade education, John saw little value in a college education. He insisted that his son go to work and make a living instead.  Attending college would have given Bob a deferment from the draft, but could have landed him in the Korean War. Obeying his father, Bob went to work in a local slaughterhouse.

Having always been short, it came as quite a surprise when the summer after graduation, he began to grow rapidly. Within a  few months he gained nine inches in height, going from five feet, six inches, to six feet, three inches. The growth spurt was so fast that his joints ached and he developed stretch marks in his skin. Prior to the spurt, he had thought about joining the air force to become a fighter pilot before the army could draft him; now he was suddenly too tall to pilot a fighter plane! He was drafted into the army around 1947 or 1948. The exact time is unknown; many records during this time period burned in a fire and Bob's records were among those destroyed.

Bob's Draft Registration Card

What is known about his days in the army are in the form of anecdotes. He was stationed at Camp Roberts, and still having much of the boisterous behavior of a teenager, he played a few practical jokes on his superiors. In one instance his commanding officer told him to water all the flowerbeds around the camp parade ground while the platoon went on a march. As soon as the platoon was out of sight, Bob ran to every spigot in the barracks area and turned the water on full. When he heard the platoon returning, he turned all but one of the spigots off. By now the entire parade ground was flooded, but he stood by the same flowerbed where his commanding officer had left him, still holding the running hose over the now-submerged flowers.

On Leave From Camp Roberts

While at Camp Roberts he took several tests which helped him gain the rank of sergeant. He also took a language aptitude test where it was discovered he had the ability to not only learn a language quickly, but speak another language without an American accent. This placed him in a unique category and he was soon deployed to East Germany in special ops. What happened while he was there is vague, but what little is known isn't pleasant.

Upon returning to the states Bob was involved in an explosion that severely damaged his lower back. He was told he would never walk again, but stubbornly refused to accept the prognosis and proved the doctors wrong. It was during this time of recuperation that he got involved in a fight with a superior officer in the officer's lounge. The officer made fun of his slow, shuffling gait. Words escalated to blows. Bob grabbed a beer bottle from the bar and smashed it over the officer's head, fracturing his skull. This led to a court martial in which the officer was found guilty of antagonizing Bob and starting the fight, but Bob was found guilty of deadly assault. He was given an honorable discharge thereafter, but his rank was reduced to private.

Once out of the army Bob went through a variety of jobs, among them cowboy, milkman, auctioneer and schoolbook salesman. It was while he was setting up a schoolbook display that he met his future wife. Janet Chamberlain was a 5th grade teacher a McCord School in the town of Orange Cove, California. It had been a long day for her and she had a terrible sinus headache. What was worse, there was someone in the cafeteria next to her classroom playing the radio very loudly. She resolved to march into the cafeteria as soon as school let out to give whoever it was a piece of her mind. That was her plan, but it didn't turn out as she expected. Upon seeing Bob, she forgot about the headache and spent the next two hours talking to him. He asked her out to dinner that night. At dinner, he asked her to marry him. Janet was seeing someone else, but didn't hesitate to say yes. On June 8th 1957, six months after they met, Bob and Janet were married.

Marriage to Janet Chamberlain, June 8, 1957

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[1] "Oakie" is a derogatory term that was used for migrant workers, primarily from Oklahoma, but also used for any poor family that was from the western states. Bob, incidentally, never wore another pair of overalls again.

I have heard it said by other members of the Overman clan that all Overmans in the United States are related. I don’t know how true that is, but so far the Overmans I’ve met had the same or very similar origin stories. It goes something like this: the Overmans came to America about the same time as William Penn. After arriving they settled in Virginia, then moved to North Carolina. Their migration took them to Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, with a possible stop-over in Kentucky; some of what would be my father’s family finally settled in Kansas.

My father, Bobbie Neal Overman, provided additional details to the story. He said the family came over with William Penn and that all seven Overman brothers were Quakers. Seven Overman brothers for some reason puts me in mind of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and seems rather mythical, but I’ll keep an open mind about that for the moment.

My research up to this point has only gotten as far back as Cornelius Overman (1805 - 1886) who was the father of John Milton Overman (1852 – 1948). John Milton was my great grandfather. His son, John Carven (1880 - 1968) was my grandfather.

Being an Overman always carried a sort of pride I don’t see in many other families. My father and his brother Ray enjoyed telling stories about family members they had known, but were long dead by the time the stories were told to me. Photographs have provided faces to the names I became familiar with but there is a great deal more to learn. So the journey begins...