Julie Adamcin | The Ancestor Who Voted for Lincoln

Stories in Our Roots

Julie Adamcin | The Ancestor Who Voted For Lincoln

Episode 12 • 24:00

SPEAKERS

Stories in Our Roots, Heather Murphy, Julie Adamcin

Stories in Our Roots  00:03

Welcome to the Stories in Our Roots podcast. I'm your host Heather Murphy. In this podcast, we dive deep into how knowing the stories of our ancestors can make a difference in our lives today. Discovering our family history is more than a hobby. It is a way to connect deeply with ourselves, those we love and the world around us.

Heather Murphy  00:26

This is Heather Murphy and welcome to Episode 12 of Stories in Our Roots. This episode will be released on Election Day here in the United States and my guest, Julie Adamcin, has a great story to share about what happened when one of her ancestors voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Be sure to check out the show notes for this episode. They include a link to the newspaper article Julie mentions in the interview, which stated that Mahlon Ashbrook never missed an opportunity to vote, and even includes a list of every presidential candidate he voted for over 15 presidential elections. Here's the interview with Julie.

Heather Murphy  01:10

Today I am joined with Julie Adamcin, and I am so grateful that she was willing to come and be a guest on this podcast. Julie, could you introduce yourself, please?

Julie Adamcin  01:22

Yes, my name is Julie Camp Adamcin. I put that in because Camp is really where I got started on this journey, is finding out more about that name. I am a hobbyist of this thing, but it's been something I've been doing since I was in high school.

Julie Adamcin  01:40

And where do you live now?

Julie Adamcin  01:42

I live in Tucson, Arizona.

Heather Murphy  01:44

And have you always lived in Arizona?

Julie Adamcin  01:46

No, my father was in the Air Force so we moved around a lot. And so when he finally got ready to retire, he retired here because of the golf courses. By then I was in high school and I go, well, why don't I just stay here? And so that's what I've done.

Heather Murphy  02:03

Great. What is your story on how you started becoming interesting and learning your family's history?

Julie Adamcin  02:10

Well, the fact that my father was in the Air Force meant that I was never around a lot of relatives. One set of cousins lived on the East Coast, one set lived on the West Coast. There had been some divorces in my father's family that meant I didn't get to know people. And they were also dead by the time I was I was born. And my mother's father died when she was one and her mother died when she was 12. So there really wasn't a whole lot of relatives to talk to except second cous... they're called aunts, but they're really the cousins of my parents, you know, very convoluted. However you describe an aunt. But they were the ones that kind of gave me some steps to begin. One of the things was family, my father's family, never really talked about his father, Mr. Camp. His name was Cyrus Zimmerman Camp. Because of the divorce, my father's older brother would never talk about him, changed his name, matter of fact, didn't want to be known by Camp. My grandmother never spoke highly of him. And I thought, well, there's got to be a story here. Tell me more about the story.

Julie Adamcin  03:15

But there was a few things that was clear that there was still a connection between my father and his aunts on his father's side. So before I was born, most of these aunts died within a few months of each other. And they sent my father a package that contained the Camp family silver, it probably should have gone to the firstborn, but since Harder change his name, my dad got it. So this box shows up to this guy who's in his 30s, just married, and he goes, "What am I gong  to do with this?" So it's stayed in a bag or cloth bag in the house. Everywhere we moved this stuff was in there. And when I felt really intrigued, I'd go in and read what was in this bag, besides the silver, and it belonged to, most of the papers in there belonged to my father's grandfather, whose name was Cypress Carpenter Camp. And I'm going, "Oh, he did a lot of interesting things." Because I had a sheet of paper that said that a book of his went into the Library of Congress. Well, that's kind of interesting. And the book was there. And then there were other pieces of paper, notes, letters, whatever, pictures. And I'm going, this is kind of interesting. But the kicker was that there was an necrology from Hamilton College, And a necrology, for anybody who doesn't know, it's like a collection of obituaries of people who died in a period of time. And so his college had one and in it is a complete description of Cyrus Carpenter Camp, who his parents were, who he married what he did, who his kids were, etc. So that got me going like, "Oh, this is kind of interesting."

Julie Adamcin  05:06

And you're 14 years old, this is 1960s, you can't go online. There was no place to go online, you're writing letters to places. And then there's also, if you really wanted to do research back then you go to the like public library. And there would be a section on genealogy. There was a book about the Camp family. I go, Oh, that must that must be related. Again, there's not that many Camps in the world. And then another one on Carpenter. And I had the name of Cyrus Carpenter Camp's mother because because of Carpenter, you know, I knew her name was Roxanne. And so I looked it up in this book called the Carpenter family and their history. Sure enough, I saw her name. And she was married to Herman Camp. I thought, Oh, this was kind of interesting.

Julie Adamcin  05:57

None of this happened really fast. This was like a high school kid that would have to do some sort of family tree just to get the grade. And so you do a little bit of that, you do a little of this. And the more I looked at it, the more questions I had, like there were these. In the in the silver were silver napkin rings, and on the napkin rings, they have names, but they didn't correspond with the names I had. Didn't think about it for another 40 years. But I figured that one out.

Julie Adamcin  06:28

My father had one aunt, and when he was sent to Salina, Kansas from the military, we spent more time with Aunt Sadie.  Aunt Sadie was a gem.  Married late in life, never had kids, was the family historian. She was actually my mother, my grandmother's cousin. And so she ratted her out, too. And so whenever somebody said something bad about my grandfather, she said, "No, it wasn't that bad. No, there's more to the story. No, it's okay." And she kind of took me under her wing, because I had the same birthday she did. And told me the legends, told me the stories. You know, she just kind of added flavor to the whole thing. I didn't know it, but she was doing it with all of my second cousins, too. I'll tell you about that later. But she, we all thought we were her favorite. And she would tell us the stories.

Julie Adamcin  07:19

So while we were in Salina, my father, my father's, another one of his aunts died. And she had been a principal, she'd been a big gun in St. Joseph, where most of the family lived. And this was when Aunt Sadie says, "You're not, you know, You're an Ashbrook." And I said, "My name is Camp. Where did you get this Ashbrook?" She said, "the Ashbrooks are much bigger, dear, you've got to know about the Ashbrooks." I said, "Why? Even my grandmother was Harder. What is this Ashbrook thing?"

Julie Adamcin  07:49

And so we go to the funeral of the aunt and her, she was an Ashbrook. And she'd been the principal of the school and all that stuff. And she gave something to each of us in her own way. She gave my father this table, marble top table, oak bottom, marble top table, heavy as you could get. Something that a military guy in the Air Force cannot move from one place to the next. But it's been in the family for years. And with that, I also got, and dad got it, but I found it later, the obituary of this great, great grandfather named Mahlon Ashbrook. Mahlon is a character, among other things, so many stories about him.

Julie Adamcin  08:35

But anyway, in 1860, he, and this story was in the obituary, in 1860 he was one of very few people in St. Joseph, Missouri, who voted for Abraham Lincoln. Back then you don't go, you didn't go into a booth and put, you know, check a box or have a hanging chad or anything. You raised your hand. So the neighbors knew who voted for Lincoln. One of his friends came by and said, "Mahlon, you're in trouble now. People are going to come and you know, bust up your house." So he took the family put them on a barge in the middle of the Missouri River and survived it came back and everything. But what the militia did was kind of shoot through the house. So there's still bullet holes in the table. I have the table now.

Julie Adamcin  09:25

Whenever my kids have to get a story about their family, that's the one I use. Because I think about what courage it took for him to vote for his, vote his conscience, and the price he paid, in a sense for doing it. Now he was highly respected in the town, you know, lived to be 90 something years old. But that kind of clicked with me as to what the family had done, even his travails and where he moved and all that stuff. But there was a lot of photos of him that I got as well and of his kids and everything else.

Julie Adamcin  10:01

So I started going okay and then later Aunt Sadie says, "Well here. Here's a family tree of the Alexanders." I said, "Just a second. I've learned about this and this and this. Now I've got the Alexander's?" Well, they married into the Ashbrooks. So we all wound up with this family tree. And it kind of takes us all the way back to when everybody came over, whenever they came over. So that's what got me started was Aunt Sadie.

Julie Adamcin  10:29

Years and years later, about 10 years ago, maybe, I finally got a hold of my second cousins, the children of my father's cousins. And we finally got together. And we found out so much. A, Aunt Sadie told everybody that same stories. B, we all had another piece of the puzzle. Each one of us had a piece that we're now putting together into, oh, and how each of us have dealt with. It's been interesting. Because one of the cousins is a nationally recognized art quilt artist, fabric artist. And she doesn't just sit there and put pieces of fabric together. She actually paints on and everything else and she's created some quilts that she named one after my grandmother, that are kind of silkscreen, pictures of monuments and headstones and faces of people on another one. Because another one of the uncle's was in the first group of Navy, US Navy people that went to China. He wrote letters home. Well, she took those letters and put them onto a quilt. So it's kind of an interesting group that we've all inherited something from Aunt Sadie.

Heather Murphy  11:42

So you've mentioned that all your cousins had different pieces of the puzzles. What What did you mean? Like what pieces did they have that you guys put together?

Julie Adamcin  11:51

Well, we actually went back. Mahlon lived in Ohio before he moved to St. Joe's. And so one of the cousins will still lives in Ohio. So we actually went back to Asheville. And back then we all knew that Mahlon had owned a brewery and bar, he and his brother owned a brewery and bar and it's in the history and everything. We went back to Asheville. And actually, someone has reopened the Ashbrook Brothers Brewery and Bar in Ashville, Ohio. We didn't get in, but we took a picture in front of it. But one of them, the girls has the glasses that belong to her great grandmother. And another one that's got the stuff because of my father's uncle was the one in the Navy, she has all the stuff that came from all those trips, and the furniture that they built in everything else. And so we were able to piece things together that put a real, put the flesh on the bones of what we've been hearing about for 50 years. And then we've shared that Aunt Sadie had told us the same story, that we were her favorite. And she used to say, "Julie, you've got to stay in contact with these people. They're your cousins." And I'm going, no, thinking of them as you know, distant people. And we never, other than meeting for that one funeral we've never met until just recently. And so that was how we pieced it together. But each one of us has got a different piece and we you know, we check, "Did you remember when this happened? Do you remember what this person was like?" And so it helped us confirm what we were our memories.

Stories in Our Roots  13:32

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Heather Murphy  14:13

And this relative that voted his conscience was he able to continually living in, was it St. Joseph?

Julie Adamcin  14:21

Yep. Well, he owned a trading post, outfitted people to go to on the Oregon Trail. He wound up owning a rooming house that's still standing. He owned a furniture store. Yeah, he did all of those things. I also realized that there was a trip that Abraham Lincoln took prior to this vote. And what would have happened is this, they would have taken the train to St. Joseph because that's where the train stopped and across the river was a county called Donivan County. And Donivan County was where the Camp family wound up. So this was the Ashbrooks and the Camp family wound up in Donivan County so they probably were at this same meeting with Abraham Lincoln at the same time. But I've found newspaper articles that tell me, you know, what was happening. But yeah, he came back was a upstanding citizen, died at age 90.

Heather Murphy  15:11

 Okay.

Julie Adamcin  15:11

Widely acclaimed.

Heather Murphy  15:12

So they were mad at him for a little while but didn't kick him out of town.

Julie Adamcin  15:15

They didn't kick him out of town.

Heather Murphy  15:17

So what has learning that story meant to your family?

Julie Adamcin  15:23

Well, first, my kids have heard it every time we have to write a story. So that's a good one, you know. But it's, if anything, it's it's that perseverance that someone did what was right, what he felt was right. And it worked out. But I think the other part is just about the women who were behind the scenes doing all this stuff.

Heather Murphy  15:48

So what other story would you like to share about your family that's been meaningful to you?

Julie Adamcin  15:53

Oh, gosh, there's so many of them. I think, most recently, my mother's family tree was very hard to get because everybody was dead. And there wasn't much I could find. I actually found that there was a major error in the data that I have. Because when I was checking things out, I said, "Mom, tell me what your father's name was, tell me what his father's name was." And I finally did what you did back then, I wrote a letter and got the death certificate, and it said that his father's name was Thomas Ryan. And I have the death date and everything else and what has died of and they said, kind of flu, pneumonia type of thing. And I go, "Okay, that's, that's cool. That's what I heard." And I finally hired a genealogist because I was just up against, where can I find this Thomas Ryan? And this genealogists said, "No his name is Timothy." And once we realized it, then I got "Well, why is there the wrong name on this death certificate? And who is this May Cunningham that signed it?" Finally figured out that was my grandmother's sister. But I couldn't figure out why there was this major error. Find that, I found out where Timothy was, I was able to trace everything back, I mean, it's been fantastic.

Julie Adamcin  17:07

And I just kind of, okay, I've got it all figured out, until just a few months ago. And now there's a little bit more, a little bit more comes out every day on the internet. And so I went into Newspapers.com. And I put in Robert Lee Ryan, California, and that popped a newspaper article about him dying. And it was done in January, February, somewhere in there, of 1920. My mom was barely a year old, my aunt was not born yet. And there were two other brothers, two brothers besides them. And this newspaper article talks about this young man who died of the flu. His wife was in the hospital did not know he died, because she was that sick. And they had to put nurse in their home to take care of the children, because they were also sick. This would have been the end of the Spanish flu. And I'm going, I'm wearing a mask, because I realized what had happened. And there was no one to tell the story to. My mom would not have remembered the story. So I called one of my cousins that said, "guess what?" He goes, "Wow, that's amazing." You realize, again, what, what they lived through troubles they had to deal with. And you would just have an appreciation of the effort that went into just surviving back then.

Heather Murphy  18:27

How do you share what you learn with your other family members?

Julie Adamcin  18:31

Well, my kids get it all the time. Too bad. And they're going okay, you better put down everything that you've got and how you got it. One of the things...

Julie Adamcin  18:42

Oh, there's one more story was again, my mother's family that I didn't know too much about. She stayed relatively close to one cousin, and we kept looking for him. His name was Joe Lee. I've looked up Joseph, I looked up everything else couldn't find him and, and finally started looking. And I found that there were several people who were looking for him online. Because I knew he was dead. I knew he died about the same time my mother did. And so I finally text it, you know, you can message somebody doing research, and I said, "Why are you looking this guy up?" And she said, "Well, I'm looking him up for my family, the Whites." And I said, "Well, who's that?" And found out that this, um, this cousin of my mother had been married twice. And he'd been married early and had a daughter by that marriage and she had gone off with her mother and had a different life and they live somewhere else. And kids with the second wife. I started going hmm, so I started connecting with them. And I said, "Do you guys know about each other." And evidently, this cousin had not told the current family about his first family until his oldest daughter was 18 and she came to visit. And so I said, "Oh." So we got together in Norman, Oklahoma and everybody got to meet. And that was fun. And that was the Ryan family. But the one that was really hard to find. I got home. I was home about a few days. I got a phone call from Norman, Oklahoma. And this guy calls me, he says, "I think we're related." I said, "I was just in Norman, what are you calling me about?  He said, "Well, 'cause my family's related to your great grandfather."

Julie Adamcin  20:24

And so this all happened within a month. And so it's kind of like you share what you can sometimes family members want to know. And sometimes they don't. Certainly having it online is good. That you could say, here's the tree, if you want to see it, I got it. Some don't want to know, think about it. Some people put up with you. "Alright, you think that's interesting, Julie. Okay, that's fine." Yeah, that's kind of what we that's how I share it. It's just and we'll talk, you know, we'll get together and say, "Oh, you remember this? How did you read it?" And so that's been helpful to kind of put the pieces together.

Heather Murphy  20:59

What would you consider the benefits that you've gotten from learning these stories of your family?

Julie Adamcin  21:05

I think, for me, it's put things in perspective that you understand a bit more. And so you may not be as judgmental about someone, if you see the whole picture in front of you. You know, I haven't walked in their shoes, but at least I have a better understanding of why they made some of the choices they had to make. I truly appreciate the women more than anything, because their stories are, they're the hardest ones to track, because names and you know, you lose things. But you realize that none of this would have happened without these women being very, very resilient, and really amazing on their own respect. But I think it helps put things in perspective. It also, you know, there's times I look at family attributes and have a son that's very, very smart and a little ADD in high school and drove me crazy. And I can see where he gets it. That's what I've seen. I also see where we get our hair, straight hair versus curly hair. I know which one which where it came from.

Heather Murphy  22:05

What advice would you give to someone who is just starting to research their family?

Julie Adamcin  22:11

Well, again, its like I've heard from some of your people, is start with the people you know, and the stuff that you could put your hands on, because that's going to have the most, it's going to give you the best guidance. Because if you just go online and start looking, you don't know, you know. I've found so many errors that you know, that can't be that didn't work, because that's not exactly you know, I've All right, no, somebody will say no, that's, you got that one wrong. So, use the people, you've got to help you broaden out what you what you see and make sure that the information is correct. Also, it's a journey. You're not just trying to get something on the wall. This is going to take you, well, it's been 50 years and I'm finding out more stuff every year. It's for fun. It also helps you figure out what to do with all this stuff. You find it when people die. You know, what are you going to do with those pieces? Well, there's pieces to puzzles that have been plaguing some of your family members for years. And so you just go Oh, okay, that that's good. I kind of wish at times my mother was around still that I could say, "I figured it out, I know what happened," but I kind of hope she knows I did.

Heather Murphy  23:23

Thank you so much for being willing to share your stories and your experience with me. I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Julie Adamcin  23:30

It's been fun.

Heather Murphy  23:33

Thank you for joining me today for Stories in Our Roots. Please help this podcast grow by subscribing, leaving a review and sharing it with your friends. If you have feedback or would like to recommend someone to share their story head to storiesinourroots.com and fill out the form. Thanks again for listening and I look forward to being with you again next week.