Fearless Females: Emma Harriet Landon Bellinger

Lisa Alzo, who writes The Accidental Genealogist blog, has brought back a 31-day series of blogging themes called Fearless Females, in honor of celebrating March as Women's History Month. I hope to participate in as many of these blogging prompts as possible this month.

 March 2 — Post a photo of one of your female ancestors. Who is in the photo? When was it taken? Why did you select this photo?

Emma Harriet Landon Bellinger
1862-1915

This photo is a tintype of my great-great grandmother, Emma Harriet Landon Bellinger. Some sources refer to her as Harriet Emma, but in the family, she was known as Emma.

This is one of only two photographs I have of Emma and this one appears to have taken in her younger years.

I like the flowers in hr hair and the scarf around her neck.
And her eyes . . . very haunting eyes.

I chose this photo because I've never posted it on this blog before.Read all posts in this series

Sunday's Obituary - Ann Jane McVoy Landon

MRS. ANN JANE LANDON

The subject of this skietch was born in Columbia County, New York, July 11, 1817 and died at the home of her son, George Landon, west of Ashland, January 15, 1904, aged 86 years, 6 months and 4 days. She moved with her parents to Tioga County, Pennsylvania, and in 1837, at the age of 20 years, she was married to Daniel Landon.  There were born to them ten children, seven sons and three daughters, one son and her husband having preceded her to the better land.

She came with her family to Nebraska in 1870 and settled west of Ashland, where the remaining years of her life were spent.

The funeral took place from the home on Sunday, the 17th instant, at 11 o'clock, Elder C. A. Huyck of Ashland conducting the services. The interment was made in the Greenwood cemetery.

Source: Ashland Gazette, Ashland, NE, January 29, 1904

Daniel Landon
and Wife
Ann Landon
Greenwood Cemetery, Greenwood, Nebraska

Relationship to me: second great grandmother

Sheffer Pioneer Cemetery - Greenwood, Nebraska

For several months, I've wanted to take a field trip to Sheffer Pioneer Cemetery, which is about halfway between Greenwood, Nebraska and Ashland, Nebraska in Cass county.

Entrance to Sheffer Pioneer Cemetery
Greenwood, Nebraska

Directions: Sheffer Pioneer Cemetery is located halfway between Greenwood, Nebraska and Ashland, Nebraska. From Highway 6, turn north on 226th Street. Cross the railroad tracks and go about one mile to Country Club Road. The cemetery is located at the end of the minimum maintainance road beyond a private farm residence.

It had probably been about 25 years since I last visited the cemetery with "cousin" Joy Deal Lehmann when she was researching her book on the Landon family, which included a marital connection to the Loder family.

The cemetery had not yet been included in the FindaGrave.com site. Since it is a cemetery with historical significance and the resting place of many of the early pioneers of the area, I wanted this cemetery to be included on that site. So a few months ago I set up the cemetery on FindaGrave.com and began entering the interments that had previously been documented in other sources, most notably the fourth edition of Sheffer Pioneer Cemetery the Lives of Those Interred edited by Rose Anne Hockstra.

The information in that book was originally compiled by Mabel G. Laughlin in 1939 and later updates were made in 1967 and 1978 by Ethel M. Buck. The book was published by the Sheffer Pioneer Cemetery Association.

Descendants of those pioneers still meet at the cemetery for an annual picnic, something they have done for many decades.

I can't say that I've come across any other cemeteries that have an adjacent picnic area, but I can certainly visualize these tables with plastic red and white table cloths, with fried chicken, potato salad, devilled eggs, iced tea and cherry pie waiting for the descendants as they come to celebrate their ancestors each year.

Yesterday seemed like a good day to take a field trip to this remote location, so I recruited some assistance from a long time friend to go with me. And I was glad that I did! Having been raised on a farm, she easily spotted any poison ivy and other flora that might prove dangerous. So I tiptoed behind her as I took photographs of the graves that still had readable inscriptions. A couple of the smaller stones were located in too much overgrowth for me to want to get any closer. I love cemeteries, but I do not like snakes, critters, anything that stings or a plant that might make me itch. I did the best I could within my comfort zone! There are just over 80 interments, and my camera captured those stones that were accessible. There were a few that had no visible inscriptions, another had either fallen or been set down after it could no longer hold itself erect. But once we had walked the small cemetery, I felt that I had done the best I could under the circumstances.

I have no direct ancestral line buried at this cemetery, but many of those pioneers who are interred intersect with some of my distant kin through marriage - the Loders, Laughlins, Colemans and Atkinsons all have a place in my family tree, distant though it may be.

I will continue to document interments at Sheffer Pioneer Cemetery on FindaGrave.com and feature many of the tombstone photos on this blog on Tombstone Tuesdays. I'm optimistic that all of the interments will be included fairly soon. I'm committed to this little project, and with such a small cemetery, it shouldn't take too long. I hope blog readers will enjoy the tombstone photographs from Sheffer Pioneer Cemetery in the coming months.

Surname Saturday - Landon

I have to go back to my great grandmother for my connection to the Landon family. She was known in our family as Emma Harriet Landon Bellinger, wife of John William Bellinger. Other sources have shown her name as Harriet Emma. Either way, she is the starting point of my Landon roots.

Emma Harriet Landon Bellinger
1862 - 1915


Wife of John William Bellinger


Emma was born in Boone county, Illinois, one of ten children born to Daniel Landon and his wife, Anne Jane McVoy.


It is through the Landon family that my roots go back to Francis Cooke and Stephen Hopkins, passengers on the Mayflower.


There is very little that I know about Emma. She came to Cass county, Nebraska with her parents at a young age. At 17, she married John William Bellinger. Census records show them moving between Lincoln, Nebraska and Greenwood, Nebraska. They also lived in Fremont, Nebraska for a short time.


Emma and John had three children: Clifford Bellinger, Sina Bellinger (my grandmother) and Harry Bellinger. She died at age 53.


What I do know of Emma is in the pages of the scrapbook she started and that was continued by her daughter, Sina, after Emma's death. The scrapbook was an old catalog of supplies used to build houses. The scrapbook was full of articles she had clipped out of newspapers and pasted onto the catalog pages. The articles chronicled the lives and deaths of many of the Landon and Bellinger family and friends. This scrapbook gave me my first real taste of reading newspaper articles about my ancestors. Sources of the articles were never cited, but the date the article appeared in the newspaper was nearly always written down. She also saved poems and essays that appeared in the newspapers of her day.


It is through this Landon line that our family is related to former Kansas governor and presidential candidate, Alf Landon. Our common ancestors are Daniel Landon and Dorothy Holdrege. Our Landon family was detailed quite thoroughly by Joy Deal Lehmann in her Landon Family History (1988).

Our Landons came from England. Some sources suggest that the name was shortened from Langdon. In 1840, the highest concentration of Landons in the United States was in New York and Ohio. The predominant occupation of Landons was farming, followed by laborers.

As a youngster, I thought that I might have been related to actor Michael Landon, who was known for portraying Little Joe Cartwright on the Bonanza television show. Then I read in a fan magazine that his real name was Eugene Orowitz, so that was the end of that fantasy!

Sentimental Sunday – how I got started in genealogy

As a young girl, I remember that I was always fascinated by the old sepia toned photographs of these people I never knew. My Mom would tell me who they were and relate some of the stories she remembered about them.

But it was in the late 1970s when a strange letter found its way to us. It was a letter written by a woman in California, addressed to my grandmother, Mrs. Sina Kelly, in Greenwood, Nebraska. Why so strange? My grandmother had been deceased for about 25 years at the time. But – small towns being as they are, the postmistress in Greenwood had been our neighbor and long time family friend. She forwarded the letter to my mother.

Sina Bellinger Kelly, age 17



The lady in California was doing research on Sina’s family, the Bellingers. The researcher got Sina’s name from Sina’s father’s death certificate and decided to write to Sina, not knowing she had also passed. Always up for a good investigation and mystery story, I stepped up to respond to the letter.

Mom and I got out all of the old boxes of photographs and documents and began going through them, identifying the names of people in the photos as best as Mom could remember. You have no idea how many times I have been so thankful that we took the time to do that. Even then, Mom commented how she wished that her Dad and Aunt Etty were there to help us with that task. By the time we had finished, there were only two or three photographs that we had not been able to identify.

The California genealogist had requested we complete some family group sheets, which I did. As one might expect – finding a willing participant to provide more information on the family had to have seemed like a gold mine.

From this point, I began working on other lines of the family, on and off for several years. In the early to mid 1980’s this lady from California and her mother planned a research trip to Nebraska and we made plans to meet and visit some cemeteries. It was then that I met “cousin Joy” – Joy Deal Lehmann, who went on to publish her family history books on the Deal family, and our related Bellinger and Landon families. It was then that I saw the commitment and dedication of a true genealogist as I followed Joy around the cemeteries, tracking down people in town who kept the cemetery records. I drew the line, however, at entering a vastly overgrown cemetery which I believed had to be the home of hundreds of snakes!

Over the years, I would spent a month or two at a time working on the family history, then set things aside when life got in the way. But over the last two years, I’ve renewed my commitment and continue the quest with the kind of obsession that I saw in Joy more than twenty years ago. I may not have been doing this today had it not been for that letter she wrote to my grandmother.