Letty Amelia Clifford Lashbrook, 1856 - 1930

Her Heavy Heart

Today’s offering is thanks to a prompt offered by Genealogy Matters, who serves up a writing challenge weekly, the Storyteller Tuesday Challenge. This week the prompt is “Heavy Heart”.

Meet Letty:

Letty had other heartbreaks in her life, being abandoned by her father, the break up of her parents marriage, the death of her second born, first girl, but Letty’s heavy heart had to be her son Archie, her first born and only son. I mean, read these extractions from her probate file, as I outlined in her bio on my data base:

Lettie's Will had this interesting stipulation, the second item: "After payment of such funeral expenses and debts, I do hereby give, devise and bequeath unto my son, Archie N. Lashbrook, the sum of Five Hundred Dollars, in cash, to be paid to him, only, in the event that he is found or appears at the time of my death and the probating of my Will, and in the event that he is not found, or does not appear, at the time of my death or the probating of my Will, it is my wish and will that said sum of Five Hundred Dollars is to be returned back into my estate, to be divided pro rata among the beneficiaries hereinafter named."

The third item of Lettie's Will read: "In the event my son, Archie N. Lashbrook does not appear and cannot be found, at the time of my death, or the probating of this my Last Will and Testament, it is then my wish and I do hereby give, devise and bequeath unto my beloved granddaughter, Lettie Lashbrook, the sum of Three Hundred Dollars."

The Decree of Distribution of Lettie's estate, dated May 4, 1931, states: That Archie N. Lashbrook had not been found at the time of the death of the deceased.

If you have been a reader of my blog at Blogger, at Reflections From the Fence, you may have found and read some of my posts on Archie and his “story”. If not, they are still there, find the search tab at top left and type in Archie, or if you want to be more than a casual reader, type in Lashbrook. Yep, I am rather taken by those Lashbrooks.

I cannot imagine the sorrow with which she wrote that will. “…in the event that he is found or appears at the time of my death…”

He had been missing from her life since around 1916. She died in 1930.

Her heart must have been heavy.

Carol

* Disclaimers, I use Find A Grave, Ancestry dot com, FamilySearch, several newspaper subscriptions, free sites, such as Virginia Chronicles, Virginia Chancery Cases online at the Library of Virginia and more to research my ancestors.  I pay for subscriptions, full price.

** My judgements may or may not be correct.  Transcriptions may or may not have errors.

*** Links, URL's, for the most part will not be included henceforth on my posts, as so many of them change and then I have to come back and try to re-discover and relink.  Frankly folks, I have no desire to spend my limited time here on this side of the sod with those kinds of do overs.  As researchers, or just members of the internet community, sites such as Find A Grave are easy to find, some are free to use and with the information I am sharing with you, hopefully, you can duplicate the research/findings. That said, I have seen memorials at Find A Grave be removed.  If you have questions, I suggest you leave a nice comment for me.

**** Images may be digitally edited to fit my data base and for my ease of viewing, originals, are in most cases, maintained in an archival folder on my computer.