Week 6 – Social Media            

Frankie Joe Ditmore was a great man. A man for which I held great respect and much love.  He was my mother’s youngest brother. Uncle Joe was born in Western Oklahoma in 1926. He was a child during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Then, as a young man, became a soldier. He enlisted in the US Army in 1946 at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. During World War II, he was the second soldier to hit the beach in the invasion of Okinawa (according to his brother-in-law). He was a career soldier, and while stationed on the island of Pang-Yong-Do, he started the very first Boy Scout troop there. The year was 1960. The only negative comment he made about the war was, “They took an innocent farm boy and turned him into a killer.” Among his many commendations is a Purple Heart. 

After retiring from the Army, he went back to school to get his teaching degree. His first job was as a 6^th grade Special Education teacher, for which he had no training. They simply needed a strong man to fill the position. My cousin, Andrith, remembers him saying with pride, “If nothing else, when they leave my class, they will know how to behave in public.” 

Uncle Joe was a master story teller. I learned so much about my mother’s childhood from listening to his stories. My mother, Luella, was the only girl in the family. She was very prim and proper. I have no idea where she inherited that from, because her mother, Mabel, was a self-proclaimed Tom Boy until the day she died, at 99 years of age. As far as my mom was concerned, there was a place for everything, and everything had to be in its place. She also didn’t like dirt, at all. Growing up in western Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl may have been what sparked her disdain, but I’m pretty sure she suffered from OCD, which she passed on to me (thanks mom). Uncle Joe and his two brothers loved to torment my mom by putting their dirty shoes on her perfectly made bed. Knowing her, I can’t imagine the horror! My mother had already passed away by the time Uncle Joe shared these stories with me, so it brought great comfort to learn about her life as a girl.

Joe’s uncle, Fred (his mother’s brother), was a bootlegger during the depression. Uncle Fred ended up serving time in Leavenworth when he was caught selling whiskey. Although his father’s side of the family ostracized Uncle Fred, when Uncle Joe told stories about him, he always remarked that Fred only did what he had to do in order to provide for his family during part of the hardest times America has ever seen. That’s the type of man he was. He always saw the good in everyone.

I also learned much history about my grandparents, who were born in North Carolina and Missouri, respectively. Uncle Joe had taken oral histories from my grandfather, which he shared. I heard stories of how they came by train to Oklahoma in 1907 (the year Oklahoma became a state); how all their belongings were shipped to Bridgeport, TX instead of Bridgeport, OK. As a dog lover, I even learned about pets they had!  So many tales of everyday life are now treasures to recall. Because of Uncle Joe, I learned the value of knowing my ancestors (not just their names) so that I can continue to pass on their stories to future generations.

By this time, you may be wondering what in the world all this has to do with “Social Media.”  Well, I’ll tell you. I’ll learned almost all these stories via the internet.

In the late 1990’s, I had been bitten by the genealogy bug, but Uncle Joe had succumbed much earlier. He had started, with the help of his daughter, a Yahoo Group dedicated to uniting the Ditmore’s from across the globe. He began a quest to track down everyone named Ditmore, determine how we were all related, and encourage them to join the group to bring us all together

The progenitor of our Ditmore family, as far back as documentary evidence has been discovered, is John Ditmore, who fell out of the sky into Charleston, South Carolina, sometime around the beginning of the 19^th century. In 1809, he married Eliza Henrickson, daughter of a prominent house carpenter. John and Eliza would move to McMinn County, Tennessee and raise their ten children. These ten children gave John and Eliza at least 75 grandchildren (I tried to give an exact number but kept losing count). I didn’t even try to figure out how many great-grandchildren they begat.

Needless to say, the number of John and Eliza descendants are many. Through Uncle Joe’s efforts of rounding all the Ditmore’s up, he began holding weekly online group chats. They were something I always looked forward to and as the number of descendants in the group grew, so did the chats! We eventually had our own website, “The Ditmore Center” where many stories were shared. Subsequently, a number of Ditmore Family Reunions were held in various areas of the country, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, California.

Uncle Joe’s vision was born at a time when home computers were about as rare as having a black and white television set in your living room in the 1950’s. We’ve all become so used to having the world, literally, at our fingertips now, but Uncle Joe saw that these useful tools could unite a family, one click at a time. Most every family has a keeper of the tree - someone who knows names, dates and places.  But what Uncle Joe did - bringing generations of many branches of a single ancestor together - is truly an unimaginable feat. Everyone should have an “Uncle Joe” in their family. He was truly a pioneer of social media.

Uncle Joe is gone now, but there is rarely a time when I’m researching my family that he doesn’t come to mind. Although the Yahoo Group no longer exists, the remnants are still alive and well on the private Facebook group – The Ditmore Family Gathering. I can’t begin to imagine the heights Uncle Joe could have attained if Facebook had been a thing back then. I have no doubt he’s looking down and smiling as he reads every one of our posts.