The Hogue GenealogyWhen my grandmother, Irene Cartan, died at almost 104 in Paradise, California, a busload of Barkers descended on the funeral. They mostly seemed to come from Oregon, and there were a lot of them! We also had cards from various Spangenbergs, Powers, and other cousins. I had no idea how any of them were related to me.
When you consider that all her research was done before personal computers, before the internet, and certainly before Ancestry.com, this was a herculean effort, a windmill that no sane person would tilt at. It was what I call a PONARV, a Project of No Apparent Redeeming Value. I tucked her book away in a back closet for many years, but never forgot it. The book is too dense to really understand. It's well-organized, so you can look up cousins if you already know what you're looking for, but you can't really grok the full structure. The tree is just too big. As a data visualization designer I was intrigued. Surely there must be some way to chart this genealogy in way that was easy to scan. Years passed, I retired, and mastered an obscure computer languge called Nodebox that makes it easier to tackle hierarchical charts. After much labor I was finally able to create a clean chart which shows the twelve branches in a way that makes them easy to compare. I present it here:
Click to see a PDF of the chart. It shows only the names of only the bloodline descendants. While typing it in, I noticed at least a few mistakes in dates, and a few unknown names. But I present it, and the PDF of the book itself, as is, warts and all. Also note that it stops at 1972; in the half century since then I suspect the total number of my cousins may have doubled. Looking at the chart you can easily see all the blue Barkers in the third major subtree. I am a little farther down, in the small tan tree just below the Barkers. Aunt Esther is a single, faint blue box just below her older sister, the one who married a Barker. It was an interesting experience typing in all these names, reading the other data as I went. There were relatively few infant deaths, but a surprising number of car accidents. In the first half of the twentieth century there were no seat belts or airbags and it shows. And what a parade of odd surnames. Every female descendant who married added a new surname to the pile. I think I could go to most any small town in Kansas or Oregon or Oklahoma, run my finger at random through the phone book (if they still had phone books), and strike a distant cousin. Go back far enough and we are all cousins.
Photo: The Nine Sons of Clinton Hogue
|
The answer to this riddle lay hidden in a slim blue book which was left to me by Irene's sister, my great aunt Esther.
It was 30-odd single-spaced typewritten pages titled "Descendants of Clinton Hogue and Lucy Catherine Strong, 1866 - 1972".
I met her occassionally as a boy on visits to Paradise. She had no children of her own and her husband had died in 1962.
She worked on her genealogy for many years, prowling libraries, sorting index cards, and banging away at her typewriter.
