Category: Photography

Talula, Talula
I don’t want to lose it
It must be worth losing
If it is worth something
Talula, Talula
She’s brand new now to you
Wrapped in your papoose
Your little Fig Newton

I spend most of the weekend doing more genealogy research. I found out two things that were interesting. Well, three, but one of them is a little tangential.

1. My great-great-great grandmother was named Tallulah. I don’t know anything about her family, because I haven’t found her maiden name. She married Henry L. Hoover, and their daughter Estelle married a Thompson, and their son Louis married my great grandma Nell Basquill.

But! Tallulah! How awesome is that? A quick Google shows that it’s a Choctaw name meaning “leaping water.” My mom said that grandma immediately identified the name as Indian, which I thought was odd. To me, it’s just an old-fashioned southern name. It’s funny how associations change over time. Here’s something interesting, though–Tallulah came from Alabama. The only Tallulah I know of is Tallulah Bankhead. She was named after her grandmother, who was from Alabama. I wonder if there’s a link there?

2. It appears as if my great-great aunt Margaret wasn’t quite as widowed as I thought. I don’t know that it was a big secret, so much as just how stories get told and how assumptions get made about them. I’d always been told that she was widowed, but I found Margaret in the 1930 census, and she was listed as divorced. At first, I thought it was an enumeration error, because my great grandma Nell was living with her at the time, and the census listed her as widowed. We know for sure that that wasn’t true. She divorced her husband, Louis, and he later remarried. So, I assumed the enumerator had mixed them up.

However! I also came across a record for Sterrett Pooser in the 1930 census, only he was living in a boarding house in Massachusetts. He was born in Georgia, so I’m fairly certain he has to be Margaret’s husband. I refuse to believe that there was more than one Sterrett Pooser in the world. Ever! So I talked to my mom, and she talked to my grandma, and apparently Margaret and Sterrett did separate before he died. God only knows what the heck he was doing in Massachusetts, though. His family were southerners.

Which brings me to my next, and tangential, point of interest.

3. Margaret’s husband’s people were, as I said, southerners–from South Carolina and Georgia. And, they were apparently slave owners. Not surprisingly, several of them were soldiers in the Confederate army. It’s not a pleasant thing to stumble across, but you have to be prepared to unearth the bad with the good, if you’re going to dig around in the past.