The ‘Bentley’ problem.
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| Ivy Bentley, Inez Alexander, Mattie Adams, Era Blick. Steve Bentley. Photo circa 1953. |
She was already pretty old by the time I knew her. In fact
when she died at the age of eighty six, I was only seven years old. But I do remember
her. She watched over me from time to time while mom and dad worked right
across the street from where she lived in Cadiz .
Dad had a store called Bentley’s Maytag. Yeah, my dear dad was, for a while at
least, a Maytag repairman.
Grandma’s place was half a house as I recall. I clearly remember
the fireplace, roaring with burning coal chunks. Grandma, a wisp of an old
woman always seemed frail and small, poking at the embers with an iron rod then
leaning back and heaving forth a dirty brown and smelly spit of tobacco juice into
a coffee can by the fireplace. Her voice was high, and a little raspy. I knew
enough even then to know that she was from a very different time. I don’t recall a
TV in her place at all, there might have been a radio, I just remember the
fireplace. She once handed me a couple of D cell batteries, she called them
‘play-pretties’ and left me alone to amuse myself with them. I did. I stuck
them to my tongue to feel that tiny ionizing tickle of a shock. This was of
course a bad idea. In a few short years I’d graduated from D cells and was
hooked on self-shocking with the vastly faster and more amp’ed up nine volt
batteries. To this day, the mere sight of a battery, AA, D, or even the big one in my car makes me drool with anticipation.
We took her on a road trip to Evansville
Indiana
We had a red, 1960 Ford Falcon station wagon. My sister and
I were in the very back (long before such a thing was declared illegal), Grandma Bentley sat behind the driver’s seat. At some
point she got uncomfortable and rolled down her window, stuck her head out and
puked. I can in my mind, still see the streaking splatter on the back windows,
it stayed there the whole trip.
Frankly that’s about all I recall about her. The memories
are very vivid, though admittedly few. The next and last thing I recall about
her was her funeral in 1964.
As I said she was the third wife of Daniel Efford Bentley.
She bore him three sons, Uncle Tobe I mentioned, I also knew Uncle Bob in Russelville ,
Ky.
You see the problem with Grandpa Bentley is that he died in
1918, nearly ten years before my father was born.
Grandma Bentley was born in 1878. She married Daniel while
in her very early twenties, around 1901. Daniel was already in his late fifties
by then, he was born in 1844, thus, thirty four years her senior. It was a
different time.
Daniel and his younger brother had served in the war
together, the Civil War. He was rostered with Company B, 13th
Virginia Light Artillery Battalion, CSA. As best as we can tell, he was with
his unit at the battle of, and subsequent Confederate surrender at, Appomattox .
Daniel’s own grandfather, Peter Efford Bentley, had served three tours of duty
during the Revolutionary war and his ancestry can be dated back in the U.S.
to the 1600’s with an apparent direct line of kinship to Pocahontas. This
connection is interesting, though hardly rare. Pocahontas’s descendants were
quite prolific.
After the war of northern aggression ended, Daniel became an ordained minister. He served several rural churches inTrigg
County Kentucky
still receiving a Civil War pension when she died, ninety nine years after that
war was over.
After the war of northern aggression ended, Daniel became an ordained minister. He served several rural churches in
So, about my father and his relationship to the Bentley’s.
My dad was born in 1927. His birth parents were Henry Ray
and Era Crabtree. By the time I was a kid Era had married another man and I
always knew her as Grandma Blick. Yes, I knew her as well. Grandma Blick’s birth name was Era Dennis.
That’s right, the source of my own first name was my
grandmother’s maiden name. What, you thought it was something else?
Henry Crabtree was not by any account or measure I can come up with, an
upstanding citizen. Put more plainly, he was a mean, violent drunk. I never met
him. Being poor and nearly illiterate in
KCH took part in a system that became known as ‘orphan
trains’. They would put some of their ‘destitute’ kids on trains, or in my dad’s
case, the rumble seat of a car, and take them to various county courthouses to
try to find them new homes. Not at all unlike what my wife does with dogs now.
The Bentley boys, then adults with their own growing families
and farms, were in the market for a young boy to live with their aging mother
and help her out. At the Trigg County
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| Kentucky Children's Home |
By every recollection I have heard from him, my dad never
had a problem with this. In fact Grandma Bentley and her sons always treated
him very well, even into adulthood. By the time I was a young kid I was closer to and more familiar
with my Bentley cousins and aunts and uncles than my blood-relatives on my
father’s side. That had a lot to do with geography though.
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| Grandma Blick with a couple of my real cousins. |
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| Grandma Blick's mother Inez Alexander 1880-1961 |
In my mind and heart it is hard to separate exactly who I am related to by
blood and who I am related to in name only. This is not only true for my father’s
situation, but for my own as well. My own daughter Leslye is adopted. Her oldest
child is Ashton Bentley. I am not related by blood to my daughter or Ashton,
but that’s only DNA. The topic of this series of essays is ‘family’, not
bloodline, since family is much, much more than biology. If the goal of genealogy
is the same as the role of ‘pedigree’ in dog breeds, then I simply have no use
for it. Everybody knows we mutts are the best.
Sources:
Wonderful as usual!
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