Amanuensis Monday- Raley Journal

I missed some time with this due to health issues, but wanted to come back to it. I decided to just share one story today that my great-grandfather, John James RALEY decided to include about a relative instead of more of the ancestry overall. I love the stories. I have to admit that with the recent discussions regarding copyright within our blogging community I have had to give some thought to this journal and the implications. I do know that he wrote this so that he had a history of his family, and I know that he gave it to my grandmother, but I would have to trust that people can distinguish the facts which can easily be verified through documentation (as I have for my own sourcing) from his own writings, which need to be creditied to him, so with that in mind, I would ask someone to contact me if they need further information. With that out of the way, here is an interesting story:

" Uncle Benjamin Pierce way back in the years from 1850 to 1865 was right wealthy. It was said that he was easily worth $30,000 back in those days but he died a pauper and was buried by the good people of Boonville, Warrick County, Indiana. Uncle Ben bought and paid for his coffin several years before he died and took it home and kept it under his bed in his bedroom, and sometimes in the fall of the year he would gather and hull walnuts enough to fill the coffin and take them home and put them in it. He was buried in it when he died at the age of 89 years. He bought the coffin from the people that own the coffin factory on the corner of Main and Michigan Streets, Evansville, Indiana, got in it, laid down, stretched himself out, and told the man that he bought it from that the thing was just the right size for him."