Your Name




Image from the internet, source unknown.  The Poem from my Mother's sister,
Mary Louise Wilson Bazzell, author also unknown.  Keith Ragan 
                   

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Nathan Ragan

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Foreword I was born in 1946 to Robert Nathaniel Ragan and Iva Delores Wilson Ragan.  I thank my father for his love of our family history and the stories he told to me.  I wish I had listened better and remembered more. My ancestral connection to Nathan Ragan of this narrative is through the lines of my father Robert Nathaniel Ragan > Jacob William Ragan > Nathaniel Francis Ragan > Nathaniel Simpson Ragan > Nathan Ragan, Jr. > Nathan Ragan, Sr. I have tried to substantiate my reasoning for the facts and events in this narrative as fully as I could. My information, while I believe to be as complete as any that I have found to this point, is not all conclusive and it will be a life-long search to add, modify and elaborate on Nathan’s remarkable story of courage and spirit during our country’s westward expansion.  I am open to research or ideas from other of my cousins that would make this narrative more compelling and accurate.  I hop...
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ELIZA BERRY AND FAMILY ORIGINS/SOLVING THE ANCESTRY  KEITH RAGAN·WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2018·  FOR ALL MY FAMILY, AND ESPECIALLY FOR AUNT MARY, UNCLE JUNIOR, AND MY BROTHER KEN   It felt like my heart jumped a few inches upward in my chest the first time I was able to make out the defining characters on Eliza Berry Moore’s crude sandstone grave marker. Buried underneath almost 125 years of forest debris, appearing for all practical purposes like just another rock littering the glade where the mortal remains of my Moore ancestors now lay; weathered and barely legible, I made sure it now stood upright once more in the shadowed recesses of the Woolard Cemetery in Wayne County, Missouri.   Just as my brother Ken Ragan and I had felt compelled to find the final resting place of Great-Grandmother Leoto Gardelia Toller Wilson several years before, we were on a quest on this day to find the final resting place of Great-Great Grandparents John Moore and Eliza Berr...
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Mahala C. Ward Tarlton of Wayne County Missouri

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For Our Courageous Grandmother, Mahala If you had asked me who Mahala Ward Tarlton was 20 years ago, I would have had no idea.  Once, when we had a family reunion in the Old Greenville, Missouri historic park, I remember my brother and I walking through the old cemetery by the St. Francis River and one of my aunts mentioning we had some Carltons or something similar in our family tree, and that we might find one of their headstones as we strolled through the repository of remains of Wayne County's early citizenry.  It was not to be, of course. My mother had told me, several times, the story of one of one of my grandfathers being murdered during the Civil War.  The story and the details of the cowardly act upon my ancestor remained vivid throughout all the years of my adolescence  but a busy career and a family that included three sons kept the name in obscurity until well into my late 40's when my fascination began with with my ancestry in earnest.. B...
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