July 17

MEMORIAL...

On this date (July 17) in 1900, Ned Jonas Carter died at the age of 70. 

Ned Jonas was the grandfather of my great-grandmother, Annie Arnold Hicks. He married Melinda Clingan, and after she died he married Nancy Jane Evans. With those two wives he had 14 children. (Sixteen, if you count the two children Jane Evans brought from her previous marriage.) 

Ned Jonas Carter is the 'patriarch' of the Carter clan -- as far back as our family history records go. Most of the information I have about him came from my great-grandmother Annie Arnold Hicks. Here's what she wrote about him --

  Uncle Wesley died from cancer of the stomach. So did Grandpa. Grandpa married again after Grandma died but didn’t live with her long. He left her and came to our house to live when I was about five or six years old. He died in 1900 with cancer of the stomach at about the age of 60 years or maybe a little older. 

  Grandpa was of Irish descent...Grandpa was a heavy-set man with large muscles - a very strong man. He was a blacksmith by trade. 

  He used to take bitter apple for medicine. I don’t see any of it now. It looked just like dried apples in little slices but it is as bitter as it can be. He gave me a bite of it one time and it tasted so bad I almost never did get the taste out of my mouth and I never did like him very well. It is possible that he felt so bad that he didn’t want to make friends with us kids. 

  I remember when he came to our house to live, his stomach was swelled real big, but he was still walking around and I don’t remember how long he lived after he couldn’t be up. It seems like quite a while, a year maybe. I remember that he would throw up curded blood, I suppose. It looked like coffee grounds. But they had the best doctor that could be had in those days to doctor him, but he would have done as well without a doctor as with one, more than maybe a few shots to kill the pain of cancer in its last stages. Ma had to bury everything that he passed. The doctor said just to make sure. We didn’t have toilets then to flush it through. Neither did we have hospitals then like we have now, so the only thing to do was just keep him at home and do the best we could. 

  Then we had no undertakers. The neighbor men made a casket out of lumber and covered it with black cloth, lined inside with white cloth. And they always had to be buried the next day after death. He was buried in the old Pine Grove cemetery near Floral, Arkansas... 

  We lived in Arkansas away back in the hills at the foot of  the Ozarks when Grandpa came to live with us. He moved from Missouri. Grandma hadn’t been dead but about four years but he had married again and it didn’t work out, so he left his wife and came down to our house. I don’t believe he lived over a year after coming there, for he was sick when he came. He died in 1900 with cancer at the age of about 73 years I think. I was 7 years old then.