Mother’s Day cometh. My eldest son just turned 12. My millennium baby has managed to suck up 12 years of my life without me hardly noticing the time pass. Was there even a life before Motherhood?
I imagine my own parents felt the same way about me when I turned 12, or 21, then 40…..
As a 12 year old child, my interest in my parents was minimal, to put it politely.
This week we were supposed to share some of our early schoolwork. I didn’t really save very much of my actual schoolwork other than a few reports which I can’t really scan and show here. The biggest focus of my elementary years was reading (voraciously), and gymnastics. I loved gymnastics and my school won the city wide gymnastics meet every year when I was in grade school. I qualified in both fifth and sixth grades to compete on the balance beam and in the jump rope event. I loved the balance beam so much my dad made me a wooden balance beam in our back yard. We had the best coach, Coach G, at Marshall Elementary School in Tulsa. I still have fond memories of practices and meets. One day an unsupervised practice landed me in the ER. Without the spotter I was 
supposed to have I was practicing back handsprings in the gym one afternoon. I landed on my head and jammed my neck. I could not straighten my head up but I was so embarrassed and worried about disobeying the rules that I quietly sat down and didn’t say anything, thinking I could fool Coach. He saw my crooked head right away and asked me what I had done. Once he heard I was sent to the hospital for observation. I was fine but after that I had never did back handsprings again which pretty much ended my gymnastics career.
Grandpa Leo Gotcher as a young man.
Gotcher is one of those really fun names to research. It can be spelled and pronounced a myriad of different ways. Also helpful is the fact that my grandpa Gotcher never really talked about his family history. He didn’t leave very many stories about his childhood and I have only a couple of pictures. It wasn’t until years after his death that I became more serious about researching my paternal line.
With some help from my aunt, I did know his parents’ names and the fact that his mother died in Missouri. And since grandpa was born in 1917 I found him on both the 1920 census and 1930 census. From there I went back several more generations and connected with other Gotcher researchers.
Now I am in the process of trying to fill in some of the basic facts with story. When I ordered my great grandpa’s death certificate I discovered that he died of a fractured skull in a car wreck. I then found the obituary which described the accident where Charles Gotcher was a passenger in a car that hit a viaduct pier in 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska where they lived. My grandpa would have been only seven years old when this happened. He was the fifth child out of six. The first five were boys and the youngest was a girl. In less than a year his mother had remarried and three more boys were born. During this time they lived in York County, Nebraska. Her second husband died in 1936. After that she married again and moved to Missouri taking only the little girl and the three boys from her second marriage.
I had also heard that my grandpa was in the CCC – Civilian Conservation Corps. So I ordered his records from the National Archives and found that he had added a year to his age in order to get in and that he had served with the CCC in Denton, Nebraska. I believe after that he worked in York county as a farm hand for several years and it is during this time that he met my grandmother, a teacher who was 13 years older than he. I will write more about them in another post.
Gotcher Family
After finding out about Charles, I then ordered his father’s death certificate and found, ironically, that he had died also of a fractured skull. This time from a “st.ry. accident”. (I think this means steel railway.) His name was Daniel Gotcher. He was divorced from Delilia Bozarth Gotcher and they both lived in Omaha. Charles was the third of six children. Daniel and Delilia both grew up and met in Troy, Doniphan, Kansas but were married and lived for a time in Holt County, Missouri. These are two places I intend to visit someday soon.
Daniel’s parents were Blackwell and Elizabeth Morrow Gotcher. Blackwell was born in Tennessee, lived in Perry County, Illinois for much of his life, then moved to Doniphan County, Kansas where he died. His first wife was Milinda with whom it seems he had nine children. She seems to have died between 1848 and 1850. He then married Elizabeth in 1851 and they had six children. Daniel was next to the youngest. Blackwell’s father was Thomas Gotcher whose parents were Henry and Rachel Larkin Gotcher. From there I connect with other researchers work and it still gets kinda confusing for me. I know at one point they were all in Virginia and then Tennessee and their land in one of them was named “Gotcher’s Grant”. From here the sons of Henry and Rachel disperse and one branch ended up in Texas where an Indian Massacre made that branch locally famous around Austin. There is a Gotcher Memorial there somewhere.
Right now, I am interested in finding and communicating with grandpa Leo’s older brothers families. His oldest brother, Glen, moved to Washington. Merle moved to Oregon and Paul and Donald stayed in Omaha. The only girl, Eva, married a Witter and lived in California.
Leo's Class Picture - Omaha, Nebraska about 1923-24?
3rd grade
I believe this was my third grade portrait. Believe it or not this was before my awkward stage – my fourth, fifth and sixth grade pictures were hideous and I never could figure out why my parents paid for them.
In fact, I still had the shadows of black eyes in my sixth grade picture (which I can’t seem to find now). The week before I had been running around my backyard and somehow managed to knock my head on a low hanging tree branch and the next day both my eyes turned black, causing everyone in my class to call me “Tree Gotcha” since my last name was Gotcher.
Anyhoo, this third grade picture is actually pretty typical of how I looked. You can tell my mother cut my hair and since my hair is wavy and has definite cowlicks, short is not a good look on me. She had probably made the shirt as well. When I was younger she liked to make us matching outfits – oh, the joy of being firstborn.
Rosanna with mom on porch of boys' dorm
This photo was taken within the first 2 months of my life. My mom is holding me on the porch of the boys’ dorm that they were dorm parents in at Red Bird Mission, Kentucky. I always thought it was fun to tell people that I lived two months in a boys’ dorm and when I was two we lived on a bus for awhile. It makes my rather normal life seem more interesting. The doctor who delivered me was named Dr. Life. And it seems I was a fairly normal first child. Mom wrote in my baby book that I was a good baby but I sweat easily.
Aviator Boy
I love this picture. I don’t know who this boy is but there were several pictures of him in my Grandma Gotcher’s box of pictures and he likes to wear the aviator hat and goggles.
Maria Artlysia Boblit Tracy Forbes
Last summer I discovered that my great great grandmother, Maria Artlysia Boblit Tracy remarried after my great great grandfather John Edward Tracy died in 1896. After digging around I found she remarried July 4, 1900 a John Burwell Forbes. At the time of their marriage she was 60 and he was 58 years old. He had a family before he married Maria and was himself a widower. I then remembered there were some Forbes pictures mixed in with the family pictures so I dug them out. They lived in Dodge County, Nebraska after they married and he died January 10, 1904. She died two years later, March 21, 1906.
The mystery now is; how did they know each other? In the 1900 Census he is
J.B. Forbes (young man)
enumerated as living with his son in Monona county, Iowa. The census is dated June 15, 1900 and they were married July 4th. I have to assume they had met before this. I did find that his family was living in McLean county, Illinois in the 1880 census and the Tracy’s lived there until 1873. Although I couldn’t find the right Forbes in the area in the 1870 census I’m almost positive they were nearby. So maybe they were neighbors and family friends. The Tracy’s only lived in the McLean area for about seven years but this is the only connection I can find. If this is the case did the families keep up correspondence all these years or did they reconnect after Mr. Tracy’s death and decide to get married?
J.B. Forbes Family
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