Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 37, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 February 1905 — Uncle Bill Came Back Loaded. [ARTICLE]

Uncle Bill Came Back Loaded.

Unole’Bill N. Jones got home last night from two months’ stay with bisj five surviving brothers descendants in Bartholomew, Shelby and Franklin counties And as usnal Unde Bill oame back loaded with some good but truthful stories- Of his father’s once good sized family only six brothers and sisters now survive. There average age is 74 years. The average of the three oldest” is 80 years. The very oldest is Western Jones, who lives in Franklin county, and he is 85 years old. His first vote was for Henry Clay, in 1840, and be has voted for every Whig and Republican candidate for president since and each of his brothers, as fast as they oame of voting age have followed exactly thessame course. His father was twice married and had three children by the first wife and 14 by the second, and though only six of these ohildren now survive, their ohildren and grand and great grand-ohildren are like the sands of the sea in number and have spread to the remoteest regions of the nation. Unde Bill’s father moved into Bartholomew county in 1820. Two years later he went back to Kentucky where his relatives were, on some errand, and when he got home again, he found that his wife had died and left a girl baby, which weighed only 2£ pounds. He got on his horse again, put the baby on apiilow before him and started back, the 75 or 100 miles, to his Kentuoky relatives.

Bottle babies were not the prevailing fashion then that they are now, and besides fresh oowa were soaroer than nursing women, any how, and therefore he depended for food for the baby along his route on “hand-outs” from mothers along his way and he never stopped at a house where he did not get what the baby wanted, if they h«d it for him, and in those days they generally had it, There were no bridges then and he (swam his horse when they were too deep to wade, and in such oases, he oarried the baby in his teeth, swung in a cloth. That baby Mrs. Celia Victor is living in Shelby oounty this s’ate, today at the age of 82 years.