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Note: ’49
BIOGRAPHY: Your great-grandfather Bedgood was a “boatman”-and how! Not in a very big and spectacular way, but he spread it out over most of 75 years. He was a small boy in his hometown, Rising Sun, Indiana, during the Civil War. His mother took him out of school because he was so puny that he was not expected to live long. Now, you know (maybe) that away back in the last century the Ohio River was famous as it could be. Young Bill (William Albert) Bedgood seems to have forgotten his ills by getting enamored of boats, and by the time he was 24 years old he had traveled several hundred miles of the Ohio in various kinds of boats. Also by that time he had found a lovely lady who was willing to take chances with him in starting a new home, and they had a sweet, lovely baby son (guess who!) to look after mother while daddy widened the field of his explorations. Eventually daddy “took in” the Father of Waters, reaching New Orleans.
BIOGRAPHY: The lovely young lady who thus became your great-grandmother was Maggie Jones, and she already knew a lot about having boatmen around (when they were at home). Numbers of her uncles and brothers were mates, pilots, etc., on Ohio River steam-boats, and her father was wharfmaster at Rising Sun, also a cooper by trade.
BIOGRAPHY: Apparently, by the time the Bedgood cherub aforementioned was two years old the family (my little brother Frank having then arrived) was seeing the need of really going some place, for we were forthwith packed off to Kansas City, Missouri-clear across three states. It was in Kansas City that I first became conscious of things. But I must hurry on. Within a few months we moved out of K.C. to little old Missouri City, twenty-five miles down the Missouri River (a most famous stream on which to learn to be a boatman). We then lived in Clay County which was also famous as the home then of Jesse James and some of his business associates.
BIOGRAPHY: First, “Captain Bill” Bedgood operated a ferry-boat at the new home, the motive power being horses or mules on a treadmill. (Are you done Laughing?) During that summer my baby sister May came into our family, and this may have suggested another expansion of territory; for just before Christmas all our worldly goods-and babies-were piled upon a wagon and hauled to a God-forsaken hole-in-the-hills, Blue Mills Ferry, six miles further up the river, where the Captain took charge of another hoss-power treadmill ferry. Early the next spring (1881) all that plunder was loaded up again-this time on a sort of flatboat towed by a row-boat, --and we were carried back to Missouri City on the bosom of one of the old Missouri’s great floods. (What a shame I have to leave out all the “adventures of these wondrous events!)
BIOGRAPHY: In Missouri City the Bedgoods settled down then to dwell forever after-almost;--but it took thirteen different houses to hold us before I was 12 years old. “Captain” Bedgood became so closely identified with the Missouri River that we sort of looked upon him as the owner of it; the ferry boat was abolished about 1885 or sooner, but he became busy as a fisherman (mainly in winter) and a brick-mason in summer.
BIOGRAPHY: When I was 13 I suddenly learned that I was to become my daddy’s partner in the business of fishing. No more school for me! However, I was in school the next term. The next winter we were in camp together, miles away, coming home on week-ends or for periods when the weather would not permit fishing. (To get our fish to the Kansas City market we brought them ten miles upstream in our rowboat! Was that being a boatman?) Our next winter was spent the same way, only in a cabin-boat which we had built ourselves; came time to make the spring-time return home, the previous season’s tent, used as a sail on the cabin, made a grand ten-mile voyage.
BIOGRAPHY: As you may guess, I am giving you only the slimmest sketch of a very long “adventure story” in response to your professed fondness for history. Being a Missouri River boatman is indeed assurance of thrills. It got so that sometimes it looked like Captain Bill had a boat only when son Charles wasn’t using it. My last big association with the river was to make a 300 mile trip at the oars with another fisherman’s son, down the river in its annual flood. I was then 16-1/2. The next year I was apparently “gone forever”-and at 18 was down in Black Rock, Arkansas in a handle factory! But Captain Bedgood kept right on exercising his will over “Ol’ Man River” until he had to be carried away-in 1937, I believe it was. He had lost his second wife many years before, and almost up to his 85th year had preferred to live alone in various camps and cabins along the river. It must be admitted that very little of what his sons and daughters learned of gracious living came from him; and yet he was able to provide very nicely for them when he passed on.
BIOGRAPHY: But before I finally forget all about that winter under the wagon-sheet (1891-92), I want to say that it must have had a powerful influence on my life, for during the following spring or summer I made a pencil picture of it (9x12 inches) which hangs above my desk now, 57 years later, and last week I began making an oil painting of it, plus a lot of fancy features that I didn’t know how to make when I was 15. The painting will be 16x20 inches, and I have started off with a pretty “loud” sunset.
BIOGRAPHY: You should know a word or two also about the parents of your great-grands, for they were rather considerable in the way of common people.
BIOGRAPHY: Away back yonder when a bad bunch of British citizens tried to steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London, a man named Robert Bidgood was a body servant of the King of England. (Do you suppose that “i” was a printer’s error?) The first Bedgood who comes into our ken was James Easton Bedgood, who was born April 15, 1803, in the State of Virginia close to where the battle of Yorktown was fought just a few years earlier. (It looks like maybe his daddy was one of those Britishers who didn’t get away from Washington!) James evidently “growed up” quite huskily, for when he was 19 years old he was in Shelbyville, Tenn., and married to 16 year old Mary Jane Key, and before Mary Jane died, thirteen years later, they had seven children of both kinds. James then lingered around somewhere a very short year and married Mrs. Clarissa Bell Dudley-and here’s where your interest is supposed to perk up.
BIOGRAPHY: Clarissa Bell (I well remember her) was born in London in 1811, and was brought to America by her parents when two years old. She must have been quite taken by this go-getter Bedgood widower, for in due time she provided him with one more sons and daughters than Mary Jane Key did-making a total of fifteen for him. So far as can be learned Clarissa Bell Bedgood’s children were mostly born in Rising Sun, Ind., the baby who became your great-grandpa being the last-born August 29, 1852, (By way of Civil War record, he had an older brother, Alfred, who was a member of the Fourth Indiana Cavalry.)
BIOGRAPHY: I believe that when you see your great-grandmother’s picture you will insist on knowing something about how she came to be. I don’t know much, and I’ll give you the fewest words possible.
BIOGRAPHY: February, 1796 is early enough to begin. At that time a not so young strutter, Mayhew Adams, who was said to be a third cousin of President John Adams, was commissioned second major in a Massachusetts Militia Regiment. He married to Rebecca Mayhew; they had sixteen children, one being a daughter, Love Adams, born in 1764. One Schubel Norton married Love in 1790.
BIOGRAPHY: In 1818 Love A. Norton, daughter of Schubel Norton’s, married Joseph Noble at Allensville, Ind. Among ten children born to these Nobles was Martha, 1828, at Connersville, Ind.
BIOGRAPHY: When Martha Noble was quite a bit under 17 years old (in 1845) she hooked for life a young Hoosier named James H. Jones. They were married in Rising Sun, Ind. There were eleven children, and the one of special interest to you was Margaret Ann, born Sept. 19, 1857. (Poor little Maggie Jones! In the knowledge which has come to me in all these years it is saddening to think of all things I might have done to preserve her youthful sweetness! At least I am so glad to recall that after I left home we wrote to each other to the end like sweethearts. I could show you her last letter, written 49 years ago.) How happy your great-grandmother could be in her children and their children today!
BIOGRAPHY: Retyped by great-granddaughter, Marilyn Hamill on 28 October 2006 for inclusion in a computer genealogy program. All those spaces and strange characters appeared when I put it here, on Rootsweb!
Note: BIOGRAPHY: A Bedgood Family History, as told by Charles A Bedgood 8/16/
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