The October Ancestry Challenge 2013 is 23 posts in 23 days (Monday through Friday) about 23 ancestors.

We’re in week two!

Ancestor #7 – Ina Inez Burke Culpepper

My maternal grandmother Ina Inez Burke Culpepper.

I called her Mamaw. That’s her holding me in 1966.

She was born Feb 8, 1915 to John Patrick “Pat” Burke and Mary Elizabeth Howington and was the eldest of seven children. The family always thought there were six children total until last year when I visited the family cemetery and found a headstone for Rudolph Owen Burke 1916-1917. I researched all her dad’s brothers and her brothers, but none of their ages fit to have a child born in 1916 except her parents. Also, the middle names of all her brothers were Otho, Otis, and Olen, so Owen seems to fit in there nicely.

Mamaw married Earl Wilmar Culpepper on August 1, 1936 at the age of 21. They live a quiet life in and around Meridian, Mississippi and had two daughters, one being my mother. She worked as a seamstress and could sew anything by looking at it in the store for a few minutes. I’m positive she made the dress she’s wearing. If she were young today, I’d make her go on “Project Runway.”

She died following open heart surgery in 1975 at the age of 60. She came out of the surgery just fine, but no one told her to NOT take aspirin once she got home. I guess in those days, when you were in pain, you popped aspirin. She awoke unable to breathe and my grandfather said her neck was swollen and black and blue. She died of “complications of aortic valve replacement/respiratory arrest/laryngeal hemorrhage and edema/anticoagulation.”

She is buried with her husband, parents, and paternal grandparents at a little cemetery in the middle of nowhere in Newton County, Mississippi – Liberty Baptist Church Cemetery.

The best part of the story:

I couldn’t trace her mother’s family, the Howingtons. Her mother (my great grandmother) Mary Howington Burke was a brick wall for a long time. One day, I saw an obituary for her husband Earl’s mother (yes, my other great grandmother Annie Culpepper – Ancestor #1 blog). It said Annie was survived by a daughter named Mae Howington. I knew my grandfather’s little sister was Zeffie Mae, but who was this Howington she was married to?

Turns out, it was the man I always knew as Uncle Sug (as in Sugar). Melton “Sug” Howington was Mary Howington’s little brother. Mamaw’s uncle.  Since he was married to Earl’s little sister, that also made him my mother’s uncle. Long story short, I traced Melton and found the whole Howington clan! Yay!

So, in closing, I just want to tell you that what they say about the south is true, and it is possible I’m my own cousin!