Our grandfather Charles Wayne McCreary (who generally went by "Wayne") grew up in Holton but went away to college and after his marriage made his home in Kansas City, Missouri.  [His first name was actually Chauncy, after a famous orator of the time named Chauncy De Pew, whom Myrtle fancied.  But he hated the name and never used it.]  Our dad, aunt and uncle were born there.  But when Wayne became too ill with tuberculosis to keep working, he came home to Holton to die and was cared for by his mother.  [In the 1913 Kansas City, MO city directory, his occupation was listed as "clerk" with the Erie Railroad, but by the time he had to quit work he had risen to secretary to the vice president of the El Paso & Southern Railroad, and he traveled with him in his private railway car.]   Wayne died in 1922 at the young age of 33, and his father, our great-grandfather George Duncan McCreary, had also died of TB the year before.  By this time Grandmother Virginia McCreary's parents, Dr. and Mrs. Flournoy, had retired to Los Angeles.  Virginia left her two older children in Holton while she went to Los Angeles to prepare for her and her children's future.  [The family lived in El Paso, TX from about 1917 to 1921, in hopes that the climate would improve Wayne's health. When death was near he went back to his mother's home to die.  Virginia then took her youngest, George, to stay with her parents in Los Angeles, returned to El Paso to ship her belongings to California, then left Betty and Keller with their grandmother in Holton until she could provide a home for all of them.]  I was never sure how long this Holton sojourn had lasted, but on my first afternoon in Holton, I met Dad's childhood best friend and neighbor Ed Stoll, who produced old school group photos showing little Keller in the 4th, 5th and 6th grades (and has made me copies of those), so clearly it was a considerable time.  Another childhood neighbor that I met, Rose, recalled that the neighborhood kids waited eagerly every year for summer to arrive when the McCreary kids would show up to visit with their grandmother.  [Although grandfather left little or no life insurance, the railroad gave Virginia free transportation for the children and herself for ten years.]  Neither Rose nor Ed recalled Betty, who was perhaps a little too old or disinclined to ramble around in the street, climb trees or shoot BB guns, but they have many fond memories (and a few funny stories) of Keller and George.   [Betty, when she was older, spent her summers helping at her aunt's barbecue restaurant in El Paso, so perhaps she was not there for Rose to meet.]

Aunt Betty did tell me that our Dad would have been a different person if his mother had permitted him to stay in Holton longer instead of having him join her in Los Angeles.  Perhaps Virginia just felt that keeping up after a growing boy would be too much to ask of an elderly widow.  [Betty and George both recall that Virginia missed her children and worked to provide a home where they could all live together in Los Angeles.  They lived with the Flournoys for several years until Virginia could afford a large enough house to have all her children back with her.]  Rose remembers great-grandmother Myrtle McCreary very well, a hard-working and religious woman who walked everywhere she went and never missed a Sunday at church.  She didn't remember which church, but thought it was probably the Methodist church, which was only a block away.   She always wore her gray hair up in a bun in the manner of the day.  At that time there were few houses on the block and the McCrearys owned nine lots, and Myrtle usually kept a garden next to the house.  Rose remembers sneaking in to steal apples from her apple tree; her mother warned her off but Myrtle never complained and Rose remembers her as being generally kindly to the neighborhood children.  Ed and Rose are up in their 80s now but still in good health and clear in mind ... in fact, those of our ancestors who made it to Holton and dodged TB seem to have lived long and healthy lives.

I was very happy when we got to the cemetery to find the family graves marked, for the most part, with nice large granite markers.  The friendly caretaker showed me the several groupings.  The first one we found was that of our great-great-grandfather John McCreary, the first generation born in America.  I had not previously known much about this ancestor except that his father George came over from Northern Ireland in 1812 to New Concord, Ohio.  Evidently he only paused there long enough to get the directions to Kansas!  John's youngest son George Duncan McCreary, our great-grandfather, was born in Leavenworth but most of his family seems to have migrated to Jackson County, Kansas by adulthood.  John's group of graves includes himself, his second wife (our great-great-grandmother) Mary Fesler McCreary, and his first wife Elizabeth (mother of his eldest son William).

Our grandfather lies with his parents George Duncan and Myrtle McCulloh McCreary, his aunt Calvin and uncle Henry Keller (for whom our dad was named), and Myrtle and Calvin's sister Nelia (who died "young" per Betty but don't know how young).  There is also a grave for an infant McCreary who died June 24, 1913, who would have been an aunt or uncle for us between Betty and Keller.  [George advises that this was his sister Helen who was stillborn.]

I had hoped to find an obituary published somewhere that might indicate where Wayne went to college or how he met Virginia, but the only obituary I could locate, in a Holton weekly on microfilm in the Kansas History Center in Topeka, did not provide any new information.  I did learn, from the various resources of the Holton library, that Wayne's paternal uncle Henry McCreary was a doctor in Jackson County and would have been roughly the same age as Dr. Flournoy ... perhaps he took pity on this colleague with four daughters to marry off and introduced them to his nephew. [George tells us that our grandparents met when Wayne boarded at a boarding house run by Dr. and Mrs. Flournoy.]