Father: James Henry HOLLAND
Mother: Pearl May BARKER
Family 1 : Johnnie Louise SELLERS
Family 2 : Avis Pray (CRAWFORD)
Family 3 : Victoria Maria Rodriquez RAMIREZ
_James HOLLAND _________
_William Henry Harrison HOLLAND _|
| |_Jane RED ______________
_James Henry HOLLAND _|
| | _Edward Ausburn WRIGHT _+
| |_Sarah Elizabeth WRIGHT _________|
| |_Rebecca CHAPPELL ______+
|
|--Joe Harrigan HOLLAND
|
| ________________________
| _Enoch E. BARKER ________________|
| | |________________________
|_Pearl May BARKER ____|
| ________________________
|_Luticia GRIFFING _______________|
|________________________
Notes:
 |
 |
The story was, that his parents met while running or working in a vaudeville theater on the border of Arkansas into Oklahoma. His mother would sell the tickets and his father would manage the stage. George M. Cohen performed there once and sang the song called Harrigan and in turn it became Joe's middle name.
Lived in Magazine and Eureka Springs as a young boy. Also lived with Grandma Holland and Aunt Elizabeth in McCrory when his parents were off working. Such as the time when Joe's father was in New Mexico installing kerosene cook stoves into VanNoy Interstate Restaurants along the railroads, and his mother was most likely running a boarding house there. He spent a lot of time with his two cousins, Wiley and Milton Warner, when he was growing up and said that Wiley was "his favorite cousin." Also knew the Neely family well, particularly the daughters, since they lived very close to Grandma Holland in McCrory when Joe was staying there.
When Joe was about 12, he lived in Millington, TN about 20 miles north of Memphis. His father had a garage then, and sold gasoline and fixed cars. When he was 16, Joe attended John E. Brown College in Siloam Springs, Arkansas and was in the 7th grade(?). His Aunt Daisy Neely had gotten him in for free for a year. His parents lived in Eldorado, AR at the time. He finished the 12th grade at the high school in Eldorado when he was 18. Like many who grew up in Arkansas during this time, he travelled and held jobs all over the South, and had a fragmented family life.
 |
 |
 |
He became a Mormon about the time that his father died, and became interested in the family history as a result. He used to come out and visit my grandparents in Napa when I was a boy, and I remember his wife, Victoria, being with him during the last visit which I saw him in Napa. He was living in Mexico City at the time and told me how they made tacos out of iguana lizards there. He would also talk about the history of the family a lot but none of us were interested at the time. All that I really remembered about him from that time is his stories about live lizards tied to a stick. He had given some papers to my grandparents in the mid seventies, which essentially contained all the information that we ever knew about the older generations of my grandfather's family. Joe, along with his daughter, Pat, visited my grandmother for the last time around 1984 when she was still living in Yountville, after my grandfather had passed away. I was living in San Jose by then and did not see them.
When I finally became interested in learning something about the family history around 1990, my grandmother was in a rest home, and had been out of contact with any one outside of the immediate family for a long time. I assumed that Joe would be a good person to begin with to find out more about the family, but nobody had his address as well as suspected that he was already dead. All that we had were these family history papers which my Aunt Clara and Uncle Hutch had consolidated into a short family history.
Later, while doing some research in my local LDS branch library here in San Jose, I came across some submissions (also in the mid seventies) which Joe had made in to their International Genealogical Index (IGI), and found an address for him in the material which he had submitted. The address turned out to be that of his daughter, Pat. He had lived with her for a short time before moving off to a dozen other places, and by a lucky chance, it was probably the only address from which I could have contacted him. Pat wrote me back and told me that her father had just suffered a stroke in Mexico about a month before my letter arrived, and she had moved him up to a rest home in San Marcos, so that she could attend to him better.
So we began corresponding and I even got a few letters from Joe, even though he was very ill by then. In 1994, I went to San Marcos and visited with both Joe and Pat. Pat was just starting to work on the family history too and so we had a lot to talk about. Joe passed away a year later and I returned to Texas. Pat and I went out and saw a big chunk of Texas including visiting Joe's sister, Helen, in Odessa. In 1997, we met in Little Rock, Arkansas and proceeded to find our Wright relatives living there.
With our trip to Arkansas, we discovered that Joe's research into the connection between the Holland family and the Wright family contained a serious flaw. He had found a James and Mary Wright family living in same general area and county (Northampton) in North Carolina as our Hollands in 1850, and they had a daughter by the name of Sarah Elizabeth Wright living with them. However, there was almost a 10 year difference in age between the woman listed in the 1850 and 1860 Censuses Joe was citing and what we knew as a "fact" (from several other documentation sources) for Grandma Holland's birthdate. Joe had a somewhat plausible explanation for this inconsistency: it went something like this, "Grandma Holland was a wonderful and a very good woman, but she was a little vain about her age." Indeed it was not that uncommon for women of that time to loose a few years when talking to the Census taker. But ten years would assume quite a bit of vanity, particularly for a woman that from all the other stories we had heard, appears to have been one of the least vain members of the whole family. Indeed, after we eventually discovered the correct Wright linkage, we wondered afterwards, how Joe could have made such a mistake without at least running into one contemporary Wright descendant who knew the real story during his return trips to McCrory area. Though I suppose, what is even more ironic, is the fact that his Wright family information in the IGI, incorrect as it was, allowed me to get in contact with him, which then eventually led us to find the correct relationship. Considering how many countless hours we spent going over Joe's information as well as finding many more documents through extensive research and travels, and then to have it all resolved by nothing more than a freakish occurrence of "dumb luck," also something to contemplate.
|
|
|
|
This page created on 04/23/00 01:33:20 . Updated 11/14/13 12:38.
