Ada C. Crofford

My great grandmother, Ada Clemina Hall, was born on July 18, 1856 in Chittenango, New York.

Ada C. Hall > Horace C. Crofford > Virginia M. Crofford > Teresa Zaun Austin

Ada's family (parents, Andrew and Olivia, Ada, and her siblings, Nina and Albert) traveled west and settled in the Dakota Territory sometime before 1876.  Their home was near Bear Butte Creek at the northern edge of the Black Hills (near what is now Sturgis).  Her father was a farmer and her mother kept house, perhaps with her daughter Nina's help.  A young man, Jesse, boarded with them and shared the work of farming.  Albert most certainly worked on the farm as well.  Ada became a teacher.

Ada taught school at Fort Lincoln in North Dakota, and was friends with General Custer's wife, Elizabeth, who was about ten years older than Ada.  Family legend has it that Ada was teaching school at Fort Lincoln on the day that Custer and his men left to fight the Battle of Little Big Horn in May 1876.  Ada later wrote a paper defending General Custer which is now housed in a museum in Newcastle, Wyoming.

"Mrs. Crofford was a school teacher at Ft. Abraham Lincoln and was a friend of General Custer's wife Elizabeth. She came to the Black Hills to teach in 1876." From the obituary of her daughter, Miriam Darrow printed in "Bits and Pieces" Newcastle, Weston, Wyoming, Vol. 4 No. 1, 1968

Ada married Horace C. Crofford in 1891 at age 34. They had three children born in South Dakota - Horace, age 5, Oliver, age 4, and "Abraham" (Abram), age 2.  The census indicates that she had another child that did not survive.  By 1900, they had moved across the line into Wyoming, just south of Newcastle. Daughter Miriam was born in 1902.

Ada holding Miriam, born in 1902.

In 1907, Ada's father Andrew Hall signed over to her the title to farmland in Weston County, in the Newcastle area.  Horace raised stock, and the three boys worked as laborers on the home farm.

Ada was an consummate inventor.  In 1905, she patented a design for an insect trap.  This design has been referenced by other inventors until as recently as 2012.  In 1906, she patented a signal attachment for a life preserver that would make a person in distress visible from a distance.  In 1918, she patented a method for sealing jars of preserves.   In 1923, she patented a mechanism to automatically release the thread tension in a sewing machine.

She was also a writer and historian.  Her story "Pioneer days in North Dakota" was published in the 1923 North Dakota Historical Quarterly.  I wonder if she was inspired by her friendship with "Libbie" Custer who supplemented her widow's pension by writing books about life on the plains.  http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/elizabeth-bacon-custer/12030

Common Threads

When I began doing research on my family tree, I wondered if I would find any shocking surprises like being cousins with my spouse or something. I actually did find a distant connection, both by surname and geographical location...but there was no accidental inbreeding as I feared!

I love finding unexpected connections. I discovered that direct ancestors of both of my parents certainly knew each other back in 1652. My paternal 9th great grandfather Thomas Judd was one of the seven founders of the Church of Christ in Farmington, Connecticut, and was a pillar in the church until his death in 1688. His children and grandchildren were baptized there. My maternal 8th great grandparents, Samuel Hickok (distant cousin of Wild Bill) and his wife Hannah, were members of the congregation at the same time and their children were also baptized in that church. There were only 84 proprietors of the town of Farmington at that time, so it was highly likely they knew each other well. 

Also in the 1600's, two of my mother's maternal and paternal lines were entangled together in Gravesend, NY. Thomas Applegate, my 8th great grandfather, came to America from Norfolkshire, England with his wife, Elizabeth. It seems that Thomas and wife both had issues with fiery tempers and loose tongues! Elizabeth was "censured to stand with her tongue in a cleft stick for swearing, reviling, and railing." Thomas was sued for slander by my 8th great grandfather Nicholas Stillwell, who was from a completely different branch of my mother's tree.  (Historical and Genealogical Miscellany: Early Settlers of New Jersey and Their Descendants, Vol. III, by John E. Stillwell, M.D.). 

General Custer keeps popping up in our family stories on both of my mother's maternal and paternal lines. My grandfather's mother, Ada Hall, was teaching school in Fort Lincoln, Dakota Territory, in 1876 when Custer left with his Cavalry for the Little Big Horn. She wrote that she let her students out of class to watch the men leave. Coincidentally, my grandmother's mother, Eva Allen, died in 1911 at Old Fort Supply, a residential hospital that was a former post for Lt. Col. Custer and the 7th U.S. Cavalry in 1868.

These are the stories that keep me addicted to genealogy!

I keep coming across certain common threads in our family history... for example, there are at least two pioneer schoolteachers in our lineage:
1) Ada C Crofford, Fort Lincoln, Dakota Territory, 1876.
2) Anna Lyons Crofford, Liberty Township, Indiana, 1837.
Each began the first school in her territory.

Custer House at Fort Lincoln

Gen. Custer appears in the unrelated stories of both of my maternal grandparents:
1) Ada Crofford, my grandfather's mother (mentioned above), was friends with Mrs. Custer and was teaching school in Fort Lincoln when Custer left for the Little Big Horn.
2) Eva L. Allen, my grandmother's mother, resided in a mental hospital in Oklahoma that was a former "Camp of Supply" from which Custer left to fight the Cheyenne Indians at the Battle of Washita.

I find this kind of thing fascinating.