Cold Open: Missing Death Date

Nicole Palsa 0:00

And we get to my great-great-grandmother Dessie Dulaney. And we didn't have a death date for her. And I thought, well, that's unusual because her daughter, Rushie, my great-grandmother, was still alive. And I thought, well, if Granny's still alive, she doesn't know when her mother died. Like that seems a little odd. So I start asking questions. The initial reaction was, we don't talk about things. And I thought, well, let's talk about it.

Setting The Stage: Virginia And DNA

Growing Up Surrounded By History

Crista Cowan 0:30

Stories That Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America. Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us. So join me for season two as we discover from Sea to Shining Sea the stories that live in us. I don't know if you've taken an Ancestry DNA test or not, but I did back in 2012 when Ancestry first started selling those kits, and I've tested everybody in my family. Now you might wonder why somebody who knows so much about their family history would take a DNA test, but it's because there are always mysteries to solve. And that mystery involved a great-grandmother who was born and raised in the state of Virginia. Virginia is fascinating to me because if you have deep American roots, you know that you've got family who at one point lived in or passed through the state of Virginia. It was one of the earliest British settlements. It is the 10th state in the Union. And there are people who are still in Virginia who have lived there generations since the 1600s. And then there are some people who leave. Well, my guest today is Nicole Palsa. And in her DNA, she made a discovery about an ancestor who left. And what she discovered is a really interesting story. Enjoy my conversation with Nicole Palsa. Well, Nicole, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to meet you and to learn a little bit more about your story. Um, I'd love to have you just tell us a little bit about what it was like uh growing up and where you grew up and what your family was like.

Nicole Palsa 2:49

Sure. Yeah, I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and most of my immediate family was all really close to each other, uh, physically and otherwise. So always saw my family members. Um, and my mom's side of the family always had a lot of family history stories that were passed down, and my grandfather and my uncle were always really into it. Um, and then I graduated college and moved out to Nashville, Tennessee. There and here ever since. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 3:16

And did anybody in your family follow you or you just have to go see?

Nicole Palsa 3:19

No, just me. Just me. Yeah. So if I want to see anybody, I have to go back to Virginia. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 3:24

Um, so how did your parents meet? And what is that story?

Nicole Palsa 3:29

Um, they worked at a video store together.

Crista Cowan 3:31

Like a blockbuster?

Nicole Palsa 3:33

Yes. Yes, yes. I think it was like a local version, but yeah, they they worked at a video store together and I think maybe a pharmacy at one point. Um details are a little rusty, but they were they were uh fresh out of high school.

Crista Cowan 3:45

Okay, and so their families then were both local. How far away from you did each set of grandparents live as you were growing up?

Nicole Palsa 3:53

Oh gosh, 10, 15 minutes. Very, very close. And did you have all four grandparents living while you grew up? I did. So not only did I have all four grandparents, I had two great-grandparents and even a great-great-grandparent.

Crista Cowan 4:06

What growing up amazing?

Nicole Palsa 4:08

So one of my first pictures ever, um, I was an infant and it made in the local newspaper is a five-generation photo of all the women um on my mom's side. So me, my mom, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my great-great-grandmother all together about a month after I was born.

Crista Cowan 4:23

That's incredible. And how long did your great-great-grandmother live after that?

Nicole Palsa 4:27

Um, probably another 10 years. I mean, I was I think I was in middle school when she passed. Yeah. Oh, you have memories of her. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We didn't live close. That part of the family lived a couple of hours away. Um, and so we would go visit her um sometimes in the nursing home. Um, but I I definitely do have vivid memories of her. Sure.

Crista Cowan 4:45

That's so cool. And did you have a big family, a small family?

Nicole Palsa 4:49

Um, so I'm an only child. Um, so immediate small family, but um my dad has four sisters, so that part of the family is big, and my mom has uh two brothers. So um, yeah, so lots of cousins, especially on my dad's side of the family. And they all stayed local as well. Um, a couple of them have moved, so there's a handful of us who have spread out across the country, but growing up we were all physically really close. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 5:11

Oh, I love that. And and Richmond, like, tell me about growing up in Richmond. Like it's such an area that's so like deep in history and you're kind of entrenched in it.

Nicole Palsa 5:21

Yes, every field trip was somewhere historic. So, and not only that, my grandparents would take me on field trips, quote unquote. So we would go to Mount Vernon or we would go to Yorktown or you know, the National Zoo, or you know, we were always taking trips together. And so my childhood was just immersed in history. So it's not really surprising that I I love it so much.

A Family Tree Project Uncovers Silence

Crista Cowan 5:42

Oh, I think that's amazing. Yeah, I actually, if you go back in my family tree far enough, um, I I don't remember exactly which episode of the podcast it was, but I told a story about my ancestor Margaret Lawrence, who was on a convict ship from England, sent to the Americas and ended up in Richmond, Virginia. Her bomb was bought by a plantation owner there. So she was uh essentially like um in servitude, right next to his enslaved people. And he ended up fathering some children with her. And so my connection to Richmond, like I've I love the stories about her and the story of survival, and there's just so much about it that's so interesting to me. But then after her sons grew up, um, one of them stayed there in the Richmond area for another couple of generations. So yeah, so it's always been kind of this interesting connection for me because I've been so enamored with her. Yeah. That's great. Well, in in all families, stories get passed down for generations, and sometimes they're a little bit of a mystery. And I understand you have a little bit of a mystery in your family tree.

Nicole Palsa 6:53

Yes. So it started with a middle school family tree project. So it was one of those, you know, go back four generations, fill in names, birth dates, death dates, etc. And I knew that my uncle and my grandfather had already done, you know, all this work on my mom's side of the family. So I was like, oh, this will be easy. I'll just take it to them and have, you know, work with them to fill it in, then go to my grandparents on my dad's side and you know, knock it out. And so we're working on it, and we get to my great-great-grandmother, Dessie Dulaney, and we didn't have a death date for her. And I thought, well, that's unusual because her daughter, Rushie, my great-grandmother, was still alive. And I thought, well, if Granny's still alive, she doesn't know when her mother died. Like that seems a little odd. So I started asking questions. The initial reaction was, we don't talk about that. And I thought, hmm, well, let's talk about it. So after some uh nudging and some prodding, I finally got the story out. Leslie had left um Virginia around 1914 and it was supposed to come back to Virginia at some point, and nobody ever approached her again. And how old was your great-grandmother at the time that her mom raised? It was three years old. Yeah. You remember the day her mom went. She remembered the tote her mom was wearing the day she left.

Crista Cowan 8:10

And how many children were in that family?

Nicole Palsa 8:14

Um, so it was just her. Okay. So yeah, so Rushie was the only child.

Crista Cowan 8:19

And then did she ask questions like what, like, and then how did her dad move on? Like, what did that look like?

Nicole Palsa 8:25

So Dessie was single. She was not married. So she was an unwed mother. And so it was very taboo, and it just wasn't talked about. Um, Rushie did know who her biological father was. Um, I'm not sure how that information was, you know, passed on to her, but she did know who her biological father was. Um, and but she did not, he was not part of her life at all. So Rushie was raised by Dessie's mother, Margaret.

Crista Cowan 8:50

And was she also single by that time?

Nicole Palsa 8:53

So Margaret um was a widow. So Dessie's father had passed away when Dessie was about eight years old. And so the household, when when Rushie was born, the household was Margaret. Dessie was the oldest child still at home, and then there was a younger brother, Albert, and then Ollie and May were the youngest two um children still left at home. So when Dessie left, it was Albert, uh, May, Ollie, and Rushie that were at home with uh with Margaret.

Crista Cowan 9:22

And so because Rushie was old enough to remember her mom leaving, she wasn't raised thinking this was her mother and these were her siblings. She knew it was a big no she knew it was her grandmother.

Nicole Palsa 9:32

Absolutely. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 9:33

Okay. But like, how does that affect like that has that has to affect somebody and their like view on the world when their mother abandoned you like that?

Nicole Palsa 9:40

She she felt abandoned. She felt abandoned, and it was really hard. Um, and later in when I was in high school, I actually sat down to do do an interview with Rushie and to talk about it. And it took a lot of convincing of my grandfather because he was like, it's just too painful for her. And I said, you know, I'll be really delicate about it. I just want to kind of get the facts down. And uh, and she was very emotional over it. And she had a couple of items that had been passed down to her that belonged to her mom that she showed me. Um, but it it was just so painful for her. Um, not only with her mother abandoning her, but the stigma of being an illegitimate child at that time. Um, she was not treated well by some of her family members because of that. So um really tough on her growing up for sure.

Crista Cowan 10:23

What kind of a woman was she? Like, what was your interaction with her as she was an older woman?

Nicole Palsa 10:29

Yeah. So um, I called her Granny Hilton because there were so many grannies around, you had to distinguish between them. Um, so she was my granny Hilton and she was so kind and loving. And you know, by the time that I knew her, she was a widow. Um, that she lived on her own up until about close to she was 90 years old, I think, um, before he moved into kind of a community um situation. And um, you know, she mowed her own grass and you know, did everything around the house. And um, my fondest memories with her were sitting in her living room and pulling out old photo albums. And she would tell me who who the people were in the pictures and the stories behind them. And um, I I just loved her so much. She was such a great writer.

Crista Cowan 11:12

Was there ever a picture of her mother anywhere?

Nicole Palsa 11:15

Yes. So there was one photograph um that that we had in the family. It was of Dessie and Rushie, and Rushie was an infant, so maybe just a couple of months old. And that picture was framed in my grandparents' house. And so every time I went to go visit my grandparents, I would see that picture and just be reminded of that story and be like, what happened to this lady?

Crista Cowan 11:35

So, what was it about this story that like kept you intrigued? Was it the mystery of it all?

Searching Records For A Woman Gone

Nicole Palsa 11:43

It was the mystery and the fact that Rushie was still around, my granny was still around. And, you know, I just made it my mission to try to find out what happened to her mom. Um, because you know, she was in her 90s, and I was like, there's gotta be a way for me to figure this out and help bring some closure to her.

Crista Cowan 11:59

So what is so what did that search look like for you? How old were you when you kind of got serious about it?

Nicole Palsa 12:05

And yeah, so it was probably when I was in high school. Um, we actually had a genealogy elective class when I was in high school, and that gave me I it was the best thing ever. It it really is what started the bug for sure. Every high school should have that. Absolutely. It was amazing. And so I learned a lot of the research skills that set me up for success. And so I was going to the library of Virginia and I was looking at microfilms and all of this. And the biggest thing for me was okay, she disappeared around 1914. The next logical record would be the 1920 census. And so I I did every search I could imagine in the 1920 census using her birth date, her first name, Virginia, Illinois, based on what I knew. Nothing, nothing ever came up. And I tried every variation and it was just a dead end. And so um, I was like, well, did she die during the influenza you know epidemic or you know, some tragic accident? Um, couldn't find death records anywhere. It just nothing for years. And so it took until 2018 before I had a breakthrough.

Crista Cowan 13:12

And so how long was that like from the first time you've been?

Nicole Palsa 13:16

So that was about 20 years.

Crista Cowan 13:19

Okay. And did and is this something that like you constantly thought about, or is it something that you kind of dipped in and out of?

Nicole Palsa 13:26

I I definitely dipped in and out of it. So I also had um a distant relative who was kind of involved in the search too, that he was helping out. So he was um Dessie's brother's son-in-law.

Crista Cowan 13:40

Wow.

Nicole Palsa 13:41

Okay. So he married into the family. Um, but he had heard the story, you know, as soon as he became part of the family, and he was really into family history research as well. And so it intrigued him. And he had started researching it, you know, well before I was even born and kept coming up short and you know, couldn't ever find anything. Um, and his father-in-law was, you know, one of the last people to actually see Dessie. So um that was a little discouraging that he had been searching for decades and hadn't found anything. Um, but the fact that he was searching too is like, you know, we would compare notes every once in a while and be like, okay, well, I tried this. Did you try that? And um, yeah, so that that's kind of what kept me motivated, was knowing that I wasn't doing it alone, but I would kind of, you know, dip in and out of her.

Crista Cowan 14:25

And and when did when did your great-grandmother pass? Like in the middle of all of this, I suspect.

Nicole Palsa 14:32

2006. Okay. She was 95. Yeah, she lived a really long life. We thought for sure she was gonna make it to 100. And um, and yeah, it's it just didn't work out. But yeah, she lived a really long, beautiful life for sure.

Crista Cowan 14:47

Oh, I love that. So, what was the thing that was finally the breakthrough for you?

Nicole Palsa 14:52

Yes. So um, my family all did ancestry DNA tests, including my grandfather. And um, he did his in 2017 and he was like, I'll spit in the two, but he's like, I just don't want to deal with computer stuff. Um, he said, you know, so I'll give you the permissions and all that kind of stuff. I said, Okay, great. So May of 2018, it was the Friday before Mother's Day weekend. I got an email that he had a new first cousin DNA match. And I looked and I said, I don't know who this person is. I was like, that's encouraging. And so I clicked on this match, and the person had started building out a family tree. And the only thing I saw that I needed to see was that the man's grandmother's name was Dessie. And I just started bawling. And but I also did my due diligence and I said, Okay, this looks really promising, but I need to find a paper trail to confirm this. And so started looking at the information that he had put on his tree to try to find those records, like that elusive 1920 census. And I found finally found it. And the reason I hadn't been able to find her was because the transcription of the census had her name as Jesse. So the way I ended up finding it was Dessie had another daughter who was named Wilma. And Wilma showed up in the census, and that's how I ended up finding Dessie. And how did you find out about Wilma? Was that because DNA? Um see so the tree that the DNA match had built, Wilma was on that tree.

Crista Cowan 16:23

Okay. And so yeah, and so the match, can we use the match's first name? Are you okay with that? Yes. Okay. Yep, his name is Garth. Okay, so the match, this this new first cousin match Garth. Wilma is his mother. Uh yes. And then Jesse was his grandmother. So what year were what year was Wilma born?

Illinois, Pregnancy, And A New Identity

Nicole Palsa 16:41

Wilma was born in April of 1915. And she left in 1914. So the uh what I was able to find out was that the the last actual record of Dessie in Virginia was she came into some money in February of 1914. Um, so she got the portion of the land that she had inherited from her father. And so she sold that. So February, I think it was 27th or 28th. Um, she gets like a thousand bucks. And my theory is that that's when she goes to go visit her sister out in Illinois because she's got some extra money in her pocket. Um, and then things took a turn from there. And and tell us about the turn they took. Yeah. So the the family story was that Dessie had gone to visit her sister Sarah in Kirkwood, Illinois. And that she had stayed out there for a little bit, and then apparently she had sent word um that she was coming back home to Virginia, and then nobody had ever heard from her again. And um what I had learned in my research is that um she got pregnant by either her brother-in-law, Sarah's husband, or one of his brothers. So that's why she never went back to Virginia.

Crista Cowan 18:01

She'd already had one child out of wedlock and had probably suffered for that. Yeah. And and is there any indication or do you have any clue if this was a consensual relationship or a non-consensual relationship?

Nicole Palsa 18:14

I don't know enough about you know his character to my guess is not consensual. I just I can't imagine that you know, I don't know for sure.

Crista Cowan 18:25

Um but did she keep Wilma?

Nicole Palsa 18:28

Did she raise Wilma?

Crista Cowan 18:29

She did. So what was different this time?

Nicole Palsa 18:33

Um, I think she didn't have the family pressure. So growing up with, you know, she was living with her mom at the time when Rushie was born, and she also had her younger brother, who was the man of the house, and they belonged to the Church of the Brethren. And I think living in a really small community where everybody knew each other and the church was the center of everything. Um, and she was also related to half the county because of the way just you know where they lived. And so I think she was probably ostracized for the community and was not gonna really be able to live a good life there. Um, and so when she went out to Kirkwood and she got pregnant, she ended up actually crossing the state line into Iowa. And Wilma was born in Burlington, Iowa. So I think she just started a clean slate because she also claimed that she was a widow when Wilma was born. And that gave her the ability to avoid the stigma that came with being an unwed mother.

Crista Cowan 19:36

Yeah, absolutely. So did she ever marry and have more children?

Nicole Palsa 19:40

Uh, no more children, but she did marry. Um, so she got married in 1917 to a man named Fred Renner, and they lived in Tampa Coe, Illinois. And then um in 1922, she married a man um named Giff Mont, and he was her knight in shining armor, and they lived happily ever. So he's my favorite one of the whole story. He's the one who came and saved the day. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 20:02

And how old, how old was Wilma at that time? Like was Wilma still young or had she already been raised?

Nicole Palsa 20:07

So Wilma. So Wilma was two years old when um when Dessie married Fred, and then when Grip came into the would have been in first grade.

Crista Cowan 20:16

Okay.

Nicole Palsa 20:17

So Wilma never knew anything about her biological father.

Crista Cowan 20:22

Oh, okay. And is that maybe why her son took the DNA test? Was he looking?

Nicole Palsa 20:27

You know, he's he's never really cared why he took the DNA test, but he did tell me that he suspected there was something suspicious in his grandmother's past because she never talked about it. Has has he been forthcoming sharing stories or pictures or um he has not been much, but his brother has and his children have. So um I've gotten a lot of great pictures and stories and stuff from the extended family. I love that.

Crista Cowan 20:52

So so how long, like, how long from the moment you made that DNA discovery? And I love that you know, like it was the Friday before mother. Like, I know you know that you know the exact moment. Yes. So how long from the time you made that DNA discovery till you felt like you really had put together the pieces of her life enough that you could tell a story about her?

Nicole Palsa 21:13

Oh gosh. Um, I'd say probably two years. Um, I I had the basics down within a couple of weeks, but I think it's I ended doing a lot of research trips. So I went out to Iowa, I went out to Illinois to gather stories because where she spent the majority of her life in Lemoyle, Illinois, is a very small village, and there were still people there who knew her. Um, so I went out there and did interviews. And um, so gathering all of those pieces of information, it took about two years to really get a complete picture of what her life looked like beyond just, you know, when she got married, when she passed away.

Unexpected Stories From Her Second Life

Crista Cowan 21:50

Yeah. And so as you kind of look at this life that she led after she left Virginia, like, were there any other like stories or moments? Moments in time where she had something significant happen?

Nicole Palsa 22:03

So many things. So I think the first one was probably when she moved to Tampico, Illinois. So that was the birthplace of President Ronald Reagan. And little Ronnie Reagan um was living at a general store that his dad worked at. So they they lived above the general store. And at the time, Dessie was working for a local dairy farm. And so she would drive the milk wagon into town and deliver milk for everybody. And so the story goes that um Wilma passed down this story that Wilma would ride in the milk milk wagon and um Ronald Reagan's mom would ask Dessie to make sure he was awake for school. And if he was running late, he would Mitch a ride on the wagon and they would take him to school.

Crista Cowan 22:49

That's adorable. Yeah. And it's so interesting because you think about like people just go missing from the family trees all the time. And you never know what happened to them. And now here you are generations later making these discoveries and discovering that she intersected with historically significant people that you grew up knowing about, right?

Nicole Palsa 23:12

Right, exactly. Exactly. That that was probably one of the biggest early discoveries was like, wait a minute, what?

Crista Cowan 23:18

Did what? That's so fun. Any other stories you've uncovered?

Nicole Palsa 23:22

Yeah, she also uh during World War II, she worked at a um munitions plant. Um it was the Green River Ordnance Plant in Amboy, Illinois, and she helped build bazooka rockets for the entire duration of the war. So um Roma worked there at the time as well. And so Wilma wrote out this amazing detailed account of what their daily life was like working there. So she worked in a different part of the factory, um, but she described how Dessie would go in and have to wear a hairnet because the chemicals would discolor her hair and you know, just the whole process. And she even drew diagrams of what the munitions looked like, and it was just so fascinating.

Crista Cowan 24:00

Oh my goodness, what a treasure, what a gift.

Nicole Palsa 24:03

Yes, yes, absolutely. Will was really good about um on the things that she kept writing descriptions of things. So uh very helpful to have those things passed down.

Crista Cowan 24:13

Yeah, wow, that's amazing. I love that. Um, so as you think about kind of the specific, you know, place in Virginia that Dessie came from, what where where was that? Like you came from Richmond, where was she from?

Nicole Palsa 24:27

Yeah, she was from Floyd County, um, which is in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the southwest corner of Virginia. Okay. So, yeah, and one of the things I love about Floyd is, you know, I mentioned earlier that everybody's related to each other. Um, it because the early settlers that came to that region, they stayed there and their descendants stayed there because they loved it so much. And so there's just really deep roots. Um, my family think back to colonial era there. And so it's just um it's such a special place, you know. Families really relied on their homesteads to produce, you know, enough food for them. Um, there was some um lumber industry there, um, you know, churches were really prominent, uh, but just a beautiful tight-knit community.

Untangling Fathers And Building Trust

Crista Cowan 25:14

Wow, I love that. And my family comes from the northeast corner of Tennessee, so just below part of Virginia. Yeah, Hawkins County, Tennessee. Okay. And yeah, like we find every time I dive into my DNA matches on that branch of my family tree, there's just more cousins popping up. Yeah. And some of them are still there. And then as I start to put together the family trees, I realize they they don't fork. Right. Right. My mother calls it the family wreath, not her family tree, right? Because people just keep intermarrying with some of the same families over and over again for generations. Yeah. Do you find that in your own family tree?

Nicole Palsa 25:56

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So the um, so Rushie's biological father was an acres. That was also Wilma's biological father was also an acres. Oh, wait, yes. Because these are different branches of the acres family.

Crista Cowan 26:13

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So let me just make sure I've got the family tree straight. That's that's a fun revelation. So when you first went into this, you had no idea who Rushie's father was. Is that correct?

Nicole Palsa 26:24

No, we knew who Rushie's father was. We did not know, yeah, we didn't know who Wilma's father was.

Crista Cowan 26:29

But you but you figured out enough that Wilma's father was uh at least related to Dessie's sister's husband.

Nicole Palsa 26:38

So I we we looked at Wilma's sons who had done the DNA test and looked at their matches and were able to narrow it down. Okay.

Crista Cowan 26:47

Okay. So both of these women are descendants of Akers families, but those two families are not like immediate.

Nicole Palsa 26:53

Correct. Correct. They're about one generation apart.

Crista Cowan 26:57

Okay. And so you were able to identify Rushie's father definitively?

Nicole Palsa 27:02

Yes. Yep. So we had one of um his name was Matt Acres, and um Matt's granddaughter did it the DNA termist, and through her, we were able to confirm that it was him.

Crista Cowan 27:13

And so was there any more of the story that came to light because of that?

Nicole Palsa 27:17

Yeah. So um I found out, so Rushie knew the whole time that her dad was Matt Matt Acres. And apparently she approached um one of her cousins, I don't know, at the playground or school or something, and said, We have the same grandma. Well, the kid was so confused. Really, what are you talking about? So uh that was a fun story. That is a fun story. And apparently that grandma uh had like one interaction with Rushie where she gave her some candy or something, I guess because she knew uh that that was her granddaughter.

Crista Cowan 27:50

So it was kind of an open secret in the community. Yes, absolutely. It was such a different time, wasn't it? It was, it was. And so, and so as you think about it, right? Like you think about Rushie, and you knew her and loved her and had her with you for a very long time. And now you've made this discovery, not just of her mother, but she had a sister that she never knew. But that's that's yeah.

Nicole Palsa 28:14

That's the part that I think has been the most heart-wrenching is that she had family that she didn't know about. And um, because I think she felt pretty alone growing up, not having any siblings. And um after the her her aunts moved out of the house, it was just her and her grandmother trying to do everything on this homestead together. And so I think she did feel, you know, abandoned, alone. Um, and she, you know, she married, um, I think she was about 19 when she got married, and you know, things turned around then. She had started her own family. But I think it would have been really helpful for her to have known that she had a sister out there.

Crista Cowan 28:52

Well, it and that just that she had a sister, like the the fact that those two women were raised in such different circumstances.

Nicole Palsa 28:59

It's so different. There's actually a photograph on my wall right now uh of Ruthie when she was about eight years old and she's standing with the family. And so she's standing next to her grandmother. Uh, and then there's, let's see, an aunt and uncle, and um, they're all standing next to the house. And and Rushie's just wearing these rags. Like you could just tell the conditions that she grew up in are extremely, extremely poor. And then there's pictures of Wilma at the same age, and she's wearing a Sunday school dress and she's got her hair curled. And it's just the difference in how they grew up was night and day because Dusty was able to start a new life with Wilma and just have a clean slate, whereas Rushie was still at home with a widowed grandmother and just trying to survive.

Crista Cowan 29:45

Wow. And it's so interesting how just one person's choices and can can make all the difference in the world. Absolutely.

Nicole Palsa 29:54

And you know, and I've I've considered this so many times, you know, why did Dusty leave her child behind? And I think it really was pressure from the family of, you know, you can't support her, you better leave her here. Or, you know, I don't know the full circumstances of it, but um based on what I do know, my guess is that she was pressured into leaving Roshi behind. Oh, that's heartbreaking. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 30:17

But you found her and you found the story.

Nicole Palsa 30:20

Yes. And I found new cousins, which is the best. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 30:25

That is the best. And clearly they've been generous enough to share information with you, which is also really lucky because not everybody has that either.

Nicole Palsa 30:34

Absolutely. You know, and it took some time. Um, I think there was a little bit of trust that I had to build with them. Um, but once we did, you know, floodgates were wide open. We've been, you know, sharing back and forth, and I've had a chance to meet them in person. And I even took them to Virginia to show them around where Dusty grew up. So that was really special.

Crista Cowan 30:52

So after Rushie got married, you said it in 19, did she stay in that same little Blue Ridge Mountain town or did she go somewhere else in Virginia?

Nicole Palsa 31:00

So she stayed close by. So she ended up in Blacksburg with her husband. That's where my grandfather was born. So Blacksburg is just a spit froze away from from Floyd. So um Blacksburg, Christiansburg area, she stayed there virtually her entire life until she moved to Richmond when she was in her 90s. Is that Spotsylvania County? Uh no, that's Montgomery County. Montgomery County.

Crista Cowan 31:21

Okay. Sometimes I think I know where counties are and sometimes I get a little confused.

Nicole Palsa 31:27

It's all good. It's all good.

Crista Cowan 31:28

Yeah, Floyd and Montgomery are right next to each other. Okay. Well, is there any part of this story that I didn't ask you about that you want to talk about?

Nicole Palsa 31:37

I think for me, what I've learned about Dusty, because I think I went into it originally with a lot of judgment and how could she leave her daughter and learning more about what she went through, um, her first husband ended up being alcoholic and abusive. And she was able to get a divorce from him and survive that um and get remarried to a really good man. And so I think seeing everything that she went through um changed my perspective on the decisions that she had to make and why she did them. Um, one of the things that was really challenging in finding the paper trail for her was me was trying to cover her tracks. So she made up where she was born, what year she was born. She was trying really hard to make sure she wasn't found, um, which, you know, obviously made it difficult for somebody to try to find her for the right reasons, but she was doing it to make sure she was protecting her daughter. Um, and so it just gave me a new perspective on everything and what she did to do that.

Crista Cowan 32:35

Yeah. Wow. She sounds like an amazing woman. Yeah. And it sounds like Rushie had a good life in spite of beginnings.

Virginia Pride And Closing Thoughts

Nicole Palsa 32:44

She did. Yeah. I think she carried a lot of that with her in later years. Um, but she had a great husband, great kids, grandkids. Um, yeah, she she lived a good life for sure. Well, that's beautiful.

Crista Cowan 32:56

Well, yeah, Virginia is not just where you're from, it's part of like your family story for generations as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and think about Virginia as such a crucial part, particularly of that period of time in history. Like, what does it mean to you to be from Virginia?

Nicole Palsa 33:19

It means everything. Um, so researching Dessie's story led me further back in that line. And so I've gone back to the 1770s with that part of the family. And so just seeing what their role was during that time in history, um, because I think a lot of people are like, oh, Revolutionary War soldier, but there were so many other roles that people played in it. Whereas, you know, in my family, that line of the family, because they were Church of the Brethren, which is um practicing peace and nonviolence, nobody in that line of the family ever served in the military, ever. So there's no military records of anybody in that line of the family. And so research is a little hard during that time period when you don't have anybody in the military. Um, but it's it gives me such an appreciation for the fact that my family was part of the founding of this country, you know, kind of out in the frontier of Virginia at that time and surviving really difficult circumstances. Um, and yeah, they came over from Ireland and uh you know started a new life. And you know, Virginia has such a and rich history that I'm really proud to be from there.

Crista Cowan 34:29

I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing your love for Virginia. Thank you for sharing your stories of these amazing women in your family tree. Thank you for sharing them with us.

Nicole Palsa 34:39

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Studio sponsored by Ancestry.