Sunday, July 28, 2013

Sentimental Sunday: Addilee Shelton and Three Brothers, ABT 1901-1902

This is my maternal great-grandmother, Addilee Tennessee Shelton Wolfe Odom Harris (18901977), and her three (younger surviving) brothers, James Rufus Shelton (1899 – 1968), John Sidney Shelton (1891 – 1963), and Lee Thomas Shelton (1894 – 1967).  Rufus looks to be at least a couple years old, so the photograph was probably taken in 1901 or 1902 (the next child in the family was born in October 1902).  

On the 1900 Census, the children and their parents, Levi Marion Shelton (1863 – 1941) and Sara(h) Ann (Sarianne) Spikes (1871 – 1935) were living in Winn Parish, Louisiana, so it's possible this photograph was taken there.  The family moved to the Montgomery area in adjacent Grant Parish sometime after 1910 but before September 1918. 

Rufus (whose hair, according to his World War I draft registration card, WAS red, although I doubt that was why he was called Rufus) married Mary Ann Davis in 1919.  They had seven sons and two daughters.  When he died at age 69, he was a sawmill employee.

Sid married Sarah Corena "Cora" Hayles in 1913.  They were farming near Montgomery by June 1917.  Sid and Cora had seven sons and four daughters.  He was a retired mechanic when he died at age 70.

Lee was apparently the male black sheep of the family.  By 1913, Lee had met and married Rose Althea Lawrence, who was born in California.  Their first child, Leonard, was born in Louisiana about 1915, and their second child, Clarice, was born in California in October 1916.  By June 1917, they were living in Mendocino County, California, and Lee was working as a miner.  

Lee next appears on the 1930 Census - as an inmate at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem!  His wife and three children (Rosalee was born in early 1930) appear on the census that year in Myrtle Point, Oregon.  I have not been able to determine what crime Lee committed, but the sentence was fairly short.  He did not go into prison until after Rosalee was conceived in 1929, and by 1936, he is listed as a logger in the Myrtle Point city directory.

The family is gone from the 1938 city directory, though, and on the 1940 Census, they are in Big Valley, California, where Lee works as a cat driver in the lumber industry.  In 1947, youngest daughter Rosalie is a senior in the Siskiyou (County) Joint Union High Schools yearbook, and Lee died in this county 20 years later at the age of 72.

© Amanda Pape - 2013 - click here to e-mail me.

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