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ROBERT (GeoBob) FORD'S
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Brief Family History: Robert & Karen (Storz) Ford with Selected
Pictures |
My two
boys--Bryan and Colby | |||||||||
Robert E. Ford Jr. is married to Karen E. (Storz) Ford
and has two sons, Colby 32 years old and Bryan 45. The photo
(left) was taken in Copan Honduras
while Robert was a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad Autonoma
de Honduras in 1998. Later he carried out field research on the effects
of Hurricane
Mitch in Honduras. Karen, Robert, Bryan and Colby Ford on the grounds of Smiley Heights Mansion, Redlands, CA in 2005--see Redlands Guide.
Celeste (our first grandchild) loves playing with the iPAD with her Mom and Dad...and still does.
The Ford's in February 2011 in Lincoln NE at the time of Karen Ford's mother's Memorial Service (Ethel Storz).
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Bryan Ford and his wife Anya (Anouchka Lachowska) traveling in Europe. At the time she was teaching mathematics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. They both taught at Yale University and have a lovely child--Celeste--our first grandchild. They now live and teach at EPFL in Lausanne Switzerland.
Celeste playing with gorilla dolls given by good friends in Rwanda. Colby in 2011 visiting his parents in St George Utah taking photos in the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve. At the time he was a geology student at the University of California, Riverside. He went on to finish an MS in Geology at Loma Linda University and now teaches Geology and Environmental Science at Dixie State University in St George, Utah. |
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Edith Frye and
Horace Standish History |
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Robert Elden Ford Jr. (on his mother's side) descends from Edith (Frye) Standish of West Wilton New Hampshire. Horace Standish descends from Myles Standish (of the Mayflower fame) and was born near Mystic, Connecticut. He spent much of his life in Tennessee at old Madison College and Sanitarium where he taught industrial arts until he moved to Tucson, Arizona in the late 1940s for health reasons. See also Landmarks article and Davidson County information.
Harvey Timothy Holt Frye and family about 1902 in West Wilton. Edith and her twin sister Ethel are just to the left of Uncle Charles Frye who is on the extreme right. "Uncle Early" (middle top) never married and lost an arm early in the 1900's from blood poisoning; he was an avid hunter, woodsman and farmer. His father "HTH Frye" also survived severe injury and near death in the Civil War (the Vicksburg Campaign)--he was dumped overboard from a hospital steamboat on the Mississippi River thinking he was dead. He managed to survive near drowning-reached shore and eventually made it back to New Hampshire. Juanita and Venessa with parents Edith and Horace Standish in Tucson in the 1940s. Horace had moved to Tucson for his health from Madison College near Nashville, Tennessee in the late 1940s.
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An early Frye home (~Cosee Frye McGrath) as it appeared in October 2000 in West Wilton New Hampshire (now under other ownership). Read about an early ancestor Major Isaac Frye (1747-1791) who fought in the Revolutionary War. See also the earlier ancestor John Frie (1601-1692). See additional photos of other the communities around Wilton such as Peterborough (see Stephen O. Muskie) or Temple, NH. (see the Birchwood B & B.)--see also the Terraserver topo map and aerial image of West Wilton and the online A History of Wilton, New Hampshire by Fred Wilkinson, 1956. The photos below are of the Wilton Mill Pond central square area (the middle photo is from 2000 and the left one is from in the 1930s and an online postcard).
The plaque at left is on the monument to military dead in the
central commons area by the Wilton, New
Hampshire millpond (across street from the historic Masonic
Building which is now the city library). See the Hillsborough County History/Genealogy page for more info. The Frye family lived across the street from Uriah and Annie Smith--early pioneers in the Seventh-day Adventist Church (see Adventist Heritage Ministry). Uriah Smith became the founding editor of the Review and Herald and Annie a poet and songwriter. | |||||||||
NINEVEH FORD
FAMILY HISTORY |
Jersey
Settlement and Jersey Baptist Church in Rowan County, NC
near Linwood/Salisbury | |||||||||
Robert Elden Ford Jr's great- great- grandfather Nineveh Ford was one of the first pioneers to settle in the Oregon Territory . He traveled to Missouri in 1840 and then took the first big wagon train to use the Oregon Trail in 1843 along with a brother Ephraim. Read account posted by Cecil Houk another Nineveh descendent as well as one by Charlotte Matheny. The PBS teaching resource and the website by Prof. Mike Trinklein and Steve Boettcher, creators of The Oregon Trail and links is also a useful site (for more go to Cecil Houk's Oregon Trail site). After a period in the Willamette
Valley Nineveh settled near Milton, Umatilla County about ten
miles south of Walla
Walla --today called Milton-Freewater, Oregon. The Umatilla
County Historical Society as well as the Whitman Mission National
Historic Site--location of the famous Marcus
and Narcissa Whitman Massacre--and the Umatilla County
GenWeb project and Museum of the Oregon
Territory are other useful information sites on the web that
describe the region and history.
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Nineveh Ford's grandfather (also named John Ford) first came to settle in the Piedmont of North Carolina near Salisbury - Linwood NC on Potts Creek about 1740-50? They were part of the so-called Jersey Settlement.
John's parents and grandparents,
and other ancestors such as George Eggers in the Jersey
Settlement, (according to best accounts) were originally Scottish
dissidents who were forced to became indentured servants and bannished to
the region around Freehold and Manalapan - Monmouth County - New Jersey in the 1680s. The causes of their leaving seemed to have been land
disputes as well as religious
conflict which drove them ever farther into the frontier regions
of North America. | |||||||||
Three Forks
Baptist Church, Boone, North Carolina and Revolutionary
War Links for Landrine Eggersand the Greene
Family |
Greene Family
History in Western North Carolina - Jersey
Settlement History | |||||||||
Three Forks Baptist Church (Boone NC) as seen in April 2002; the photo above is an earlier structure dating from the 1800s. You
can read more about this church which was first organized in
1790 --the first Baptist church organized west of the Blue
Ridge in what was then Ashe and now Watauga
County. John and Mary are both listed on early church
records at Three Forks; Mary was one of the founders of the Cove Creek
Baptist Church as well and was a long-time deaconess there well into
the 1840-50s.
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Records in the Monmouth County Historical Association show a signature by George Eggers on an early offering list contributing to the building fund for Old Tennent Church. Some documents also list Landrine Egger's baptism at
Old Tennent as a "Presbyterian" though there is some indication the Eggers
may have been Quakers while in New Jersey. Conversion to the Baptist
denomination seems to have occured with many of those who went to
the Jersey Settlement in North Carolina.
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John S.
and John Squire Ford Family
History near Boone, North Carolina |
Civil War Facts
and links to the Fords | |||||||||
The portrait at left is of
John S. Ford's son (John Squire Ford)--born 1861. See
also the Ford Cemetery near Boone, NC on the Blue Ridge Parkway
(located between mile marker 285.55--near
Bamboo, elev. 3262 where these is an access road to Boone on
right--and mile marker 288.1). It is located on land settled in the
1780s by an earlier John Ford Sr. and still remains in the
family. |
John S. Ford was a veteran of the Civil War and fought for
the Union in the 13th Tennesse
Cavalry while other family and friends fought on the Confederate
side; a brother (Wellington) died during the War. The headstone at
the left belongs to John S. Ford. The flag was
placed by family members on Memorial Day 2002.
Learn more about what it was like during the Civil War in the border and mountain region in the fictionalized historical novel entitled: Haversack & Hog Rifle, by Robert Lee Greene, 2000 (2nd edition), Minors Printing, Boone, NC. Ephraim W. Ford is listed among the "Watauga Minute Men enlisted on 18 September 1861" on the Confederate side (page 18-20). The Greene Family Tree is included in the book (cover inset pages). It starts with an early Jeremiah Greene and Joanna (Reeder) Greene who came from New Jersey (there were several descendents with the same name). GPS Location of Cemetery above: 36deg. 09'02.73"N, 81deg 37'23.08" W | |||||||||
Willis & Rhoda (Andross) Ford and |
Family links to Adventism in the Northwest | |||||||||
One of Nineveh Ford's eleven children was Willis Ford (see earlier discussion of the Nineveh Ford story). Willis and his brother Clarence took out claims in the Palouse country of eastern Washington near Pullman in the 1870s. After a difficult ten years farming as a bachelor, including a stint in the militia during the Nez Perce Indian Uprising led by Chief Joseph he married Rhoda (Andross) Ford and started a family and build a thriving farmstead. The photo below left shows Willis as a young man. The photo at the right (circa 1895) shows the oldest boy Frank Ford standing in the middle back while Orley, the youngest child (with curls) is in the front. Below is the farmstead where Orley Ford was born December 27, 1893. Orley Ford grew up on a large wheat farm south of Pullman, Whitman County Washington. The photo at the left is of Orley and his brother John in a country store near their farm south of Pullman on the Palouse prairie circa 1910-1912. Below (left) is the old barn and mill that existed until the mid-1990s. The photo below (right) is of the ancestral Willis Ford farmland on the Palouse Prairie about 7-10 miles south of Pullman Washington. See Virtual Tour Land and Life on the North American Prairie, by Robert Ford--slide 21. In the 1930s Willis Ford moved to Wasco, California after spending a few months near Signal Hill, California (he owned land on this site before oil was discovered but sold it because "it was not good farmland"). |
Nineveh Ford, at eighty years of age, was baptized as a Seventh-day Adventist as a result of the preaching of Pastor I. D. Horn, the first Adventist minister to visit the Walla Walla Valley. His son Willis and several other family members had become members earlier. Read more about the history of the first Adventists in the Northwest here. Learn more from the Walla Walla College Library Photo Project. Photo below (left) is of Orley and his classmates (he is seated on the front second from right. The photo at left is of the Old Ford home circa 1910 in College Place. Orley later became a lifelong missionary to South and Central America for the Seventh- day Adventist Church as did his son Robert Elden Ford (Sr.)- Robert E. Ford Jr's father (see more below).
Above left is Lillian Shafer and her sister Nellie. Lillian was the 14th of fifteen children from a large wheat farm near Larned, Kansas. The photo was taken in Kansas before her marriage to Orley Ford on July 2, 1917 under a big maple tree in the yard of the Willis Ford home in College Place. The old Ford place was located at the east end of Maple Street (now Sixth Avenue) and was the first brick house built in the Walla Walla Valley. | |||||||||
Profile of an SDA Adventist Missionary Family--Orley & Lillian Ford in Central and South America |
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The photo above (left) is of Orley Ford (as young man) with father Willis Ford on a ship to Cuba in the early 1900s. This was their first missionary expedition where they worked for a time as self-supporting literature evangelists. After graduation from Walla Walla College and some medical training at Loma Linda Sanitarium (Loma Linda University) Orley went as a medical missionary to South and Central America (see photo above-right of Orley pulling teeth). All of his life Orley combined medical work with evangelism as well as active involment in building schools and churches. Photo at top left is of Orley and Lillian on their first furlough from the mission field in south America in the early 1920's. Great -Grandma Rhoda (Andross) Ford is in the background at their home in Wasco, CA. The photo on the right is of Elden and Orley near Pomata, Peru at their first mission post--Arlys later died in South America. In 1921 they moved to Ecuador, in view of Mt. Chimborazo, where they established Colta Mission at 11,500 feet elevation. In 1929, they returned on furlough the the US but took the long way home by trekking through uncharted territories down the Eastern Andes slopes through he jungles to the lower Amazon and eventually to Belen, Brazil and then on by ship to New York City. The entire trip took six months and they brought back with them many unusual species of plants and animals which were deposited at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Orley (left) Elden (middle) and Robert Ford (right) in the courtyard of Grandpa Ford's house in San Salvador, El Salvador, Central America circa 1961.
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The photo at the left shows Elden Ford (my father) and grandfather Orley Ford in the courtyard of their home in San Salvador, El Salvador circa 1963. Orley had come to Central America in 1931, first in Guatemala and then from 1943 until his death in 1972 at the age of 79 in El Salvador. Orley and his wife Lillian (Shafer) Ford are buried side-by-side in San Salvador El Salvador. The photo below is of Orley Ford and a German missionary colleague (Alfredo Lutz) on a trip into the jungles of Peten, Guatemala in the 1930s. On that trip they walked over three hundred miles from deep in the Peten jungles to the coast at today's Belize City. The trip which took over two months and they frequently ran across Mayan ruins in the jungle that later became important archeological sites such as Tikal.
A later book also recounts part of the Orley and Lillian Ford story. See Mission in the Clouds: The Story of Orley and Lillian Ford, By Eileen E. Lantry. Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1990 (Boise, Idaho). The photo at the left shows Orley and Lillian Ford at the 1970 San Francisco GC (General Conference) as honored guests just a few years before Orley's death. The man at the right is a grand -nephew of Lillian Ford from the Shafer side of the family from Kansas.
Grandpa Orley Ford pulling teeth in El Salvador circa 1955. | |||||||||
ELDEN AND VENESSA FORD |
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Elden Ford and Venessa (Standish) (my parents) were also lifelong missionary-educators in Central America, including a time on Roatan in the Bay Islands of Honduras, where I grew up. My parents worked at various times establishing schools in Belize, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. For more on the Bay Islands--see my field research photos from Guanaja and Honduras and Hurricane Mitch--see impacts of Mitch in Guanaja.
Robert E. Ford Jr. (age 4) the oldest son and sister Kathy Ford (age one) is in Dad's arms.
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Later two other siblings joined the family--Daniel and Patricia (Pat Ford) Freel. Pat is a retired social worker and artist living in Loma Linda and Daniel (Dan) Ford, now retired, worked for Hewlett-Packard in Roseville, CA near Sacramento and later Amazon.com in Seattle as a systems engineer. The post at Frisco was my parent's second missionary post where they served as schoolteachers. The Frisco vocational agricultural school eventually closed primarily due to competition with the Standard Fruit Company. The problem was the school attempted to market bananas to the US with independent Bay Islands shippers rather than thru the monopoly shipping/ railroad interests of the company. Eventually the school with its fertile lands soldout to the government; it became the Escuela Nacional Experimental Agropecuaria de la Region Tropical Humeda (ENEARTH John F. Kennedy)--see article about "agricultural extension training" for women in Central America. See also the United Fruit Historical Society's Bibliography on the Banana Republic's history (United Fruit Historical Society, Inc). See also LULC Learning module Case No. 1 - Introduction for more about the Escuela Nacional Experimental Agropecuaria de la Region Tropical Humeda (ENEARTH John F. Kennedy). |
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Consulting Capacity and Photo Business |
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See also trip
pictures from Honduras where I led a May term study tour
to do reconstruction (1999) after impacts
by Hurricane Mitch as well as some pictures from a trip to
Kenya (2002)
You can also see more photos on the Virtual Tours I created of the
East
African Rift or one on the Prairies
of North America. as well as one on the Great Salt
Lake Ecosystem Region. | |||||||||
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