Happy Birthday Grandma!

"Leap Day" is February 29, which is an extra day added during a "Leap Year", making the year 366 days long - and not 365 - like a common year. Nearly every 4 years is a Leap Year in our modern Gregorian Calendar. Ever since Leap Years were first introduced over 2000 years ago with the transition from the Roman calendar to the Julian Calendar in 45 BCE (Before Common Era), Leap Day has been associated with age-old Leap Day traditions and folklore.

Leap years are needed to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth's revolutions around the sun. It takes the Earth approximately 365.242199 days to circle once around the Sun. If we didn't add a day on February 29 nearly every 4 years, we would lose almost six hours every year.

One of the most popular traditions that has to do with Leap Day, is that women can propose to their boyfriends on this day! This day is also associated with traditional Sadie Hawkins parties where the ladies get to invite the men to a party, instead of vice versa.

One interesting statistic is: one out of every 1500 babies is born on Leap Day! These people have an actual birthday every four years! One such person was my beloved grandmother - Arlie Avenell Earp. Arlie, the daughter of William  and Mary  Neff Flatt,  was born February 29, 1896 near Meno, Major Co., Oklahoma Territory. That area was better known as the "Cherokee Strip." Four years later her family was living north of Stroud prior to the 1900 territory census.

 As a child I remember it was always a fun day...Grandma's actual birth day!

This is one of my favorite pictures of Grandma. It was taken about 1941 in Chandler, OK.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!

These valentines are all from the 1930's
 and belonged to my dad Archie Pounds.
He kept them in his "pretty box".

Lenna Earp

"Lenna Earp" by Gerry Robideaux

Black Cemetery, Stroud Oklahoma

Lenna Earp, 1895-1914

I was born in Adair County Kentucky in 1895. My parents lived in Little Cake, if you can imagine a name like that. My dad was a day laborer--didn’t have his own farm.

I don’t remember just when it was that Daddy brought us all to Oklahoma Territory, but I do remember we lived on a farm in North Keokuk Township in Lincoln County near the big town of Stroud. I was fourteen and Daddy had his own farm.

On the next farm was a boy named Hughie Earp, which was homesteaded by his parents, and he was seventeen. I liked this blonde, blue-eyed man, so different from me with my brown eyes and long dark hair. He must’ve felt the same way for we married in 1912. He was nineteen and I was seventeen. Our parents thought we were too young to know what we were doing, but Hughie did a man’s work all day with his dad in the fields and raising horses, and I knew how to keep house and take care of kids. I had little brothers and sisters.

Two years later we had a baby boy, and we named him Kenneth Hugh. He had my brown eyes and dark hair. Then eight days later I was dead from an infection. The doctor had come from delivering a baby calf at a neighboring farm and hadn’t washed his hands good afterward.

They buried me in Black Cemetery northwest of Stroud. Hughie put up a beautiful tombstone there. It says, “We Shall Meet Again,” and “Gone But Not Forgotten”.

And his sister Coy wrote a nice obituary. It told how I was converted and joined the church, and about my marriage and the birth of baby Kenny. I liked the little poem at the end.

Heaven retaineth now our treasure of earth. The lonely casket keeps

and the sunbeams love to linger where our sainted loved one sleeps.”

I don’t know about “sainted,” but Elder Perkins preached, it said, “in the presence of a large audience.”



Lenna Earp 1912 on wedding day.

Lenna Wilburn Earp was my grandfather Earp's
first wife.

Below is an article I wanted to share about the real possibility of losing access to the Social Security Death Master File or SSDI. This would be a great loss to genealogists. The article is by Kimberly Powell and her blog is "About.com - Genealogy".

Advocating Records Access - How You Can Help!

By Kimberly Powell, About.com Guide February 7, 2012

I wrote last week about the very real threat of losing all public access to the Social Security Death Master File, or SSDI. This would be a HUGE loss to anyone researching individuals in the U.S., whether you are researching ancestors, relatives, descendants of recovered military MIAs, missing heirs, etc. That's on top of the enormous threat to identity theft if this public database is no longer freely available to the many small and medium-sized businesses that use the death master file to verify an individual's identity in an effort to prevent fraud.
The Records Preservation & Access Committee (RPAC) has some great information for everyone, whether inside or outside the U.S., who uses and values the SSDI. For now they are encouraging formal responses to the Ways & Means Committee only for societies, but are strongly encouraging individuals to write to their Senators and Representatives. Since mail is often delayed, a faxed letter is even better. They also plan to launch a public petition

January Wedding 1940

On the
16th of
this month, my parents would've been married 72 years. There were no wedding pictures because Opal forgot to buy film for the little Brownie Kodak camera that she had given  Archie a few months earlier. It was a Sunday morning in 1940 and there were no convenience stores open that day. After the wedding both families gathered at the home of Archie's parents, Tom and Roxie Pounds, northwest of Chandler, Oklahoma, for a large celebration dinner. Opal was the daughter of Hugh and Arlie Earp, who lived north of Chandler. That evening there was a shivaree by their friends. The "friends" wanted to dunk Archie in the horse trough but his brother interfered and was able to squelch that idea! After all it was January in Oklahoma! This marriage with the simple beginnings and no pictures to memorialize the occasion, lasted 62 years.