At 62 years old, Edsel, CEO at Pinehurst Surgical Clinic, had only one vague memory of ever meeting anyone from his father’s side of the family. He didn’t even know his grandparents’ names. But over the course of the past year, with the help of software downloaded for free off the Internet — and some devoted sleuthing in graveyards and Register of Deeds’ offices — Edsel has found dozens of relatives, most of them living right here in North Carolina. The amazing thing is that most of these relatives didn’t know each other either until Edsel began his search.
“Bill has found a wonderful lost family,” C.C. Edsel says.
“This all started when my wife got a call from a distant relative,” Edsel says. “I started thinking, ‘Gee, I really don’t know much about my Dad’s side of the family.’ So I decided to start a project and find out.”
Edsel knew all of his relatives on his mother’s side of the family in Winston-Salem.
“But for some reason, we just didn’t know anything about my Dad’s side,” Edsel says. “We knew he had relatives in North Wilkesboro, because that’s where he was from. Every time my wife and I would pass North Wilkesboro, I would say, ‘You know, I’ve got a bunch of relatives up here somewhere, but I don’t know a thing about them.”
Most people search their family trees trying to discover their ancestors. Edsel was more interested in locating current relations. But to do that, he’d have to look backwards first.
“So I went to the Internet and went to some of their search engines and just typed in ‘Edsel’ and ‘N.C.’ and all these Edsels came up,” says Edsel. “Well, I knew my brothers, but there were all these Edsels that I knew must be related because our name is not that common.”
The very first listing that Edsel called on the telephone turned out to be a first cousin, Clate Edsel. Through Clate, Edsel learned the names of his father’s brothers.
“It was a chain reaction,” Edsel says.
One call would lead to several more, with Edsel keeping detailed notes. He printed out a relationship chart from the Internet so that he would better understand how he was related to the various people he spoke with. Soon, he was plugging in names.
“Family history is now the second most popular hobby in the U.S. after gardening,” notes Edsel, who had no qualms about calling people out of the blue and asking them who their parents were, or similar questions, as he researched his family tree. “Everybody was nice, and everybody wished me well. I think that’s because people are interested in genealogy these days, but I was surprised at how polite and kind people were.”
“As I talked to each one, they would give me names, and they would tell me stories,” adds Edsel, who wrote it all down for what would eventually become a bound book of family history.
In the spring of 2004, Bill and C.C. Edsel visited Clate in the North Carolina mountains. They took photos of Edsel gravestones — each a wealth of information — in a church yard in Moravian Falls. Edsel discovered one headstone that Clate had never noticed.
“It was engraved, very faintly, with ‘R.M. Edsel,’” Edsel says. “I asked, ‘Wasn’t granddaddy’s name Richard?’ They called him Dick.”
A cousin told him that she thought Richard’s middle name was Martin. That explained the middle initial on the gravestone and provided a turning point for Edsel.
“My middle name is Martin,” he says. “My Dad’s middle name was Martin, and my great-granddaddy’s name was Martin,” he says. “So the sense of family just started rushing in.”
One of the things that makes searching your family tree difficult, according to Edsel, is the fact that in the past people were frequently referred to by initials or nicknames, even on official documents. Edsel’s grandmother, for example, was named Martha Melvina Edsel, but she was nicknamed Viney, or Vina, and shows up in records that way.
Sometimes names are misspelled, as was the case with one branch of his family, who spelled the name “Edsil.” A search on FamilySearch.org brought up grandfather Richard Edsil from the 1880 census. Even though the name was spelled differently, the information was corroborated from other sources that Edsel had uncovered. In fact, it turned out that one descendant of the ‘Edsil’ line had been trying to find her relatives as well. Amy Poteat, Edsel’s first cousin twice removed, was thrilled to get an e-mail from him. When Poteat came to meet with Edsel, she brought with her copies of family history pages from old family Bibles.
“To me, this was the Golden Grail,” Edsel says.
A tale of mystery emerged concerning one relative.
“Everyone said there was one of the Edsels who just went out one night and never was heard from again,” Edsel says. “But nobody was sure who it was.
“They all referred to him as The Unknown Edsel,” C.C. Edsel says.
Jack, a cousin from Winston-Salem, told Edsel the tale he recalled hearing as a child.
“He had always heard that his granddad’s father was visited by a man one winter night, and that in the morning he left with the man and was never seen again,” Edsel says. “About two years later the family received a post card from Ireland. Cards came at Christmas for two years, then stopped.”
Confirming the identity of the “Unknown Edsel” became something of a mission, and Bill Edsel was thrilled when a relative shared with him a family chart she’d had an old school teacher draw up back in 1983. Next to the name Edmund C. Edsel (great-great grandfather to Bill) was a notation that he had later disappeared.
That was one mystery solved, but another one, a bit closer to home, remained: that of Bill Edsel’s father’s first wife.
“My Dad’s first wife died in 1939,” Edsel says. Edsel’s father William was a door-to-door patent medicine salesman who earned $50 a month. When his wife died, he placed all of his young children in the Methodist Children’s Home in Winston-Salem, where they would stay for five years until William married the woman who would become Bill Edsel’s mother.
“These boys — Bill’s half brothers — did not know their mother,” C.C. Edsel says.
“They literally did not know their mother’s name,” Edsel adds. “Didn’t know where she was buried. So I was on a quest to find this information.”
He found it in the Winston-Salem register of deeds office, where his father’s marriage certificate revealed the name of Amanda L. Meadows Edsel. On the birth certificates of his brothers, she was recorded also as Alice and Laura Alice Meadows. Until he began looking into it, Edsel wasn’t aware that one of his step-brothers, Johnnie Martin Edsel who died at aged two, had even existed.
After Edsel passed along the information he’d discovered to his half-brothers and their families, two of them decided to pay a visit to the Methodist Children’s Home. There they were shown the June 30, 1939, application for admittance that their father had filled out. It listed all of their relatives, who had to be contacted prior to admittance. Edsel’s oldest half-brother, also named Bill, was noted in the Home’s records as being “a prepossessing boy in appearance, but very slothful in his habits. He did not like to study nor did he like to work,” the report stated. Edsel says that the elder Bill Edsel — who rather ironically went on to become a U.S. census taker — “got a charge out of hearing that.”
While searching for the family of an aunt, Edsel encountered a woman with the same last name, although no relation, eager to pass on a bit of gossip. She informed him that his aunt “drank herself to death,” and that her son was “always in trouble and bad to drink.”
“I related this information to my wife,” Edsel says with a chuckle, “and she said, ‘That’s one Edsel you’re not inviting here.’”
“I did find out that some of my relatives were into moonshine,” he adds, “But they called it apple brandy.”
The Edsels rang in the New Year with an updated family tree that now includes some 900 names. According to Bill Edsel, anyone can do what he did using free software downloadable from the Internet.
“It has been very interesting finding my family,” he says.
“Everyone was so excited to see each other,” C.C. Edsel says of the October reunion. “All these wonderful people — that we had no idea were out there!”
While only 40 of the 100 invited could make it to the first reunion, a second reunion is in the works — and everyone has promised to attend.
Lynn Rhoades writes columns and features for The Pilot. She may be reached at lrhoades@nc.rr.com.
