Name/Title
AU Selby, Paul Lambert Jr. - 1972-09-18 letter to Mary Elizabeth 'Bette' (Lambert) KnappEntry/Object ID
2004.1.47Context
Paul L. Selby, Jr.
Post Office Box 271,
Morgantown, West Virginia 25606
September 18, 1972 VIA AIR MAIL [stamped]
Mrs. George L. Knapp
3145 East 42nd Street
Tulsa, Oklahoma 74105
Dear Cousin Bette,
I was delighted to get your letter. Down here I have come to feel as if I were and orphan because truly everyone is cousin to someone else - you just don't dare cuss anyone, because you just might start a feud. So, when I opened your letter and found it addressed to "cousin", I felt as if the angels had finally begun to come through with just a shadow of a smile.
First off, I have to beg some time to fill out the charts you have sent. I have some of the old family bibles stuck away in my library at home and, believe it or not, I'll have to dig into them to get accurate dates even on my own mother and father. We never gave much for birthdays and such as I was growing up and I never did get very accurate about Dad's birthday except it was in in [sic] March and in 1895. Mother - and you will instinctively understand because you met her - absolutely refused to let any of us do anything or find out anything about her birthday. She even set their wedding day on Christmas so it would get mixed up and forgotten in the holidays! We had one heck of a time getting here a birth record at the time she and Dad went over on Social Security and other retirement necessary data. John, my brother, has taken care of her estate since she died up in Columbus; so he'll probably have this stuff. At any rate, all this is to say that I'll have to do some digging out of things which ordinary people know well. But, I'll not delay too long.
In the meantime, I can give you some leads to follow up. My brother John (and there were only two of us) is:
John Edward Selby, Esq. (that's high falutin' for lawyer)
Bricker, Evatt, Barton & Eckler
100 East Broad Street
Columbus, Ohio 43215
1800 Lynnhaven Road
Columbus, Ohio 43221
He's married and has two sons and two daughters and so will have some to add. He also can probably be a lot better help on the "tree" than I can - I hope.
Norma Hopkins Putnam, my and and mother's sister, has passed away some time ago. She had one son. He is David Hopkins Putnam [1-614-488-7105 penciled in] and lives at about 2400 2338 Kensington and I guess I never figured out their street number because all we had to do was walk across the street.
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Dave is Counsel for the City National Bank & Trust Company at 100 East Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215 (another lawyer). I suspect he'll be even a better source for addresses and data on Uncle Earl Hopkins (Mother's brother) and our cousins Carol and Mark than John, my brother. I think they are all still in Columbus. I really hate to admit it, but I've got a name block on Carol's husband's name and Mark's wife's name right now. My wife, Jeanne, will shoot me when I get home, but that'll be only the first time this week!
As a tiny beginning on what I owe you on my family record, I married Jeanne Carolyn Burkhart, daughter of Roy A. Burkhart and Hazel Shover, a Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite family out of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Roy Burkhart was a minister at First Community Church in Columbus and the only one real close who really earned a place in "Who's Who". We have three sons. Steve, the oldest, is married and has a daughter who'll be one year old in February. Steve, after some delay in the Army, is now a senior here at West Virginia University. (It must be obvious that I am typing this myself, by now.) Mark, the middle son, is also married and has a son who'll be two the end of this month. Mark is also a senior, but both he and his wife will graduate from W.V.U. in December. Daniel Lambert, is the youngest, and is a sophomore at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio. He's not married, thank the Lord. It's tough enough to put tow families through college, let alone adding a third wife!.
Dan's attending Otterbein in Westerville calls to mind that, as a small kid, I can remember a whole lot of Lambert cousins in and around Westerville. They must be] within the line you're hunting because they were all kissing cousins - much to my pre-teen-age and teen-age disgust, at the time. Furthermore, Dave Putnam's aunt and grandmother on the Putnam side lived up that road, too and while we liked to go to their place and have fun, Dave's aunt Irene always spoiled things by dragging a couple of blonde girl Lambert cousins over with instructions that we were to "be nice." I can remember an Uncle Otterbein Lambert, an Aunt Hannah, an Aunt Carrie Charles or Harris - she had been some kind of missionary - and a Richard Harris who was a minister. You can see that I was really very much interested in those days.
There is a point to this rambling, however. John and David Putnam and I were all importuned to become members of the Sons of the American Revolution and members of the Mayflower Society and we were eligible because of Lambert, Hopkins, and, in the case of David Putnam, because of Israel and Rufus Putnam. There are a couple of characters around Columbus who have worked out all those lineages and John or Dave might be able to get you some valuable information from them. Also, I'm sure one of them can do you some good on the Westerville Lamberts, as well as our own. I'm really very sorry about my terrible and disrespectful memory - I spent so many years as a trial lawyer training myself for a kind of memory which would hold uncannily fast to details for the short need of a trial and then to forget them all to move into the next trouble, that I have never got back to the normal kind of memory about family, etc. Jeanne will tell you that this has caused some heartache and embarrassment over the years.
As you may know, my mother and father came pretty close to violating the laws against consanguinity. Mother's mother was Rebecca Lambert and Dad's mother was a Lambert and all came out of Athens and Morgan County, Ohio, sort of just over the ridge in and around Chesterhill. I never really knew my Grandmother Selby - I mean I didn't know her - because she died when Dad was
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just getting ready to go up to Columbus to Ohio State University before World War I. So, that will have to come from the records somewhere.
Finally, before I close this off and get it off so you can know at least that someone up in this country will answer your letters, I have another memory out of late junior high or early high school I have to check with you. At that Time, I recollect, there came out of the West - from Okmulgee, Oklahoma - a beautiful and very glamorous cousin who went to Ohio State and became a Pi Phi. She was Mary Frances Lambert, I think. The thing I remember with some embarrassment was my open-mouthed admiration and with some chagrin that she told of a brother, I think, who played football for Stanford. After Jim Plunkett took Ohio State apart for Stanford in the Rose Bowl, I recalled that my retort to her was that I was going to play for Ohio State and we'd see how Stanford stood up then. Is that your family?
I promise that I'll get as much out of the old family records as I can this week and get the papers filled out. However, maybe John and Dave Putnam can get you some stuff too. I'll send them copies of this so that you won't have to make too long an explanation about what you need.
Cordially,
Paul L. Selby, Jr.
[End of Letter]
