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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
Farm Wife, Grandmother, Keeper of Everything (1878–1972)
"Every branch of our family tree, no matter how it spreads, grows from the soil where it first took root." —Author Unknown
Bertha Lena McConnell was born on November 25, 1878, in Leipsic, Putnam County, Ohio, the eldest child of William Johnson McConnell and Louisa Ellen Hollabaugh. Her birthdate and place were recorded by her brother Isaac McConnell on a piece of lined paper that also documented the births of her siblings—Isaac William (1881), George Franklin (1884), Mary Charlotte (1892), and Ross Arby (1894)—a scrap of family record that became one of the few primary sources for the early McConnell details.
The McConnells moved from Ohio to Indiana when Bertha was still young, settling in the Ligonier area of Noble County, where the family would put down roots deep enough to last generations. The McConnell reunions at Round Lake became a fixture of the extended family's life—noisy, sprawling gatherings where cousins who hadn't seen each other all year would pick up exactly where they left off, and the women would fill long tables with enough food to feed a small army.
"The two-fold strength of silent suffering and enduring love is the foundation upon which the farm family stands." —Unknown Rural Author
On September 27, 1900, Bertha married Volney William King in Columbia City, Whitley County, Indiana. Volney was the son of Isaac William King, the Civil War veteran whose story is told elsewhere on this site, and Christiana Lena Gerber. He was a farmer, a Spanish-American War veteran, and a man of few words. Bertha was not a woman of few words, and between the two of them, the household ran.
Their first children came on July 28, 1901—twins, a boy and a girl. Neither survived. One died the same day; the other lived only eleven days. They were buried at Sparta Cemetery as Boy King and Girl King, never christened. It was the kind of loss that reshapes a family even when nobody talks about it. Bertha carried it the rest of her life, and when their next child arrived—Lucille Dee, born July 29, 1902—the anxiety that came with those two tiny graves would settle on her eldest daughter like a second skin. Bertha watched Lucille like a hawk, more protective, more anxious, more demanding than she might otherwise have been. The child couldn't afford to be any trouble. They'd already lost two.
"A farm is not merely so many acres of land. It is a world by itself; it has its own history, its own genius, its own sadness, and its own content." —Excerpt from rural life writings, early 1900s
The Kings settled on eighty acres about a mile and a half southeast of Ligonier that came to be known as the Brush College Farm—land that had originally belonged to Volney's parents. The farm abutted US Highway 6 on the north and Diamond Lake Road on the south, with a gravel road on the west and the Longnecker place to the east. The address was King, RR2, Ligonier, Indiana, and the party line ring was two longs and a short.
After Lucille, children kept arriving: Evelyn Lillian in 1905, Louisa Christina in 1910, Clayton Volney in 1912, Mary Gertrude in 1914, and Isaac William in 1915. The farm turned into a crowded, busy household, and Bertha was the engine that kept it moving. Volney worked the fields with his Belgian horses, Betsy and Topsy, and Bertha ran everything else—the kitchen, the garden, the chickens, the canning, the baking, the dairy, the sewing, the cleaning, the mending, and the endless business of turning raw farm products into meals, clothing, and survival.
I never heard Grandpa raise his voice with Grandma Bertha. She ran the household, and he knew it.
"A good woman is the glory of her husband, the joy of her children, the delight of her household." —William Shakespeare
If the farm had a beating heart, it was Grandma's kitchen. Wood floors worn smooth in the traffic paths, white painted cabinets, a farmhouse sink under a window that looked out toward the garden. From that kitchen came food that anchored every memory I have of the place. Hickory nuts from the big trees along the field went into her baking. Rhubarb from the garden became lattice-crust pies that cooled on the counter. The apple trees supplied the raw material for the great apple butter days, when neighbors would bring their apples and copper kettles and Bertha would oversee hours of stirring, mashing, and seasoning until dark brown goodness emerged to be spread on fresh bread straight from the oven.
She could cook like nobody else. Grandpa's favorite snack was crackers and milk—which became mine too—and he loved green onions and radishes with bread and butter, a combination I still eat. But the real cooking was Grandma's department, and breakfast alone was worth waking up for.
She also had a practical streak that ran deep. She dispatched chickens the old-fashioned way—the inverted log and hatchet—and woe to anyone who tried a fancier method. Her son Ike had his own technique, which involved grabbing the chicken by the neck and spinning it underhand until the neck and body parted company. This incensed Grandma every single time, and she scolded Ike for it every single time. He never changed his ways.
"The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." —William Ross Wallace, 1865
Grandma believed in useful children. When summer came, the grandchildren were put to work wallpapering the inside of the outhouse—a clapboard structure that let in plenty of light, more than enough cold, and plenty of granddaddy longlegs. The wallpaper stopped the winter winds and the spiders, and Grandma considered it a job that needed doing every year. We also beat the carpets as part of proper spring cleaning, and we beat them with all our might. I was always thankful not to be assigned to emptying the chamber pots.
Picking potato beetles was more to our liking, because the rhubarb grew nearby. However, when too much rhubarb got flattened in our enthusiasm, we laid low for a while. At Christmas, we strung popcorn for the tree and made paper ropes for decorations and tested lightbulbs—the old kind, long and pointy, where the whole string went dark when one bulb failed. We worked on Christmas lights until the cows came home.
I helped Grandma candle eggs to find the fertilized ones for hatching—my cousin Jim Biddle's favorite chore when he visited. “You boys can both help,” she'd say. “There's plenty of eggs.”
"There is a special wisdom that comes from watching and listening, from knowing when to speak and when to simply smile." —Annie Dillard
What I remember most about Grandma is the way she managed people without seeming to manage them at all. When a particularly good toy appeared on the back of a cereal box, I'd convince her that one of her cookie tins could keep the cereal fresh until I finished it. “I suppose so,” she'd say with a knowing smile. “But you need to eat that cereal.”
When I was promoted to third grade mid-year but hated being separated from my friends, I persuaded Grandma to intervene. “Well, if you're not learning anything being miserable, I suppose we should talk to the teacher.” And she did, and I went back to my friends. She understood that a child's world has its own logic, and she took it seriously.
She also understood cheese. Once, while visiting her son Clayton in Cheraw, South Carolina, she walked into a grocery store and asked for County Line cheese, as though it were a world staple. The grocer replied, “Which county, ma'am?” In Bertha's world, there was only one County Line—the cheese factory located between DeKalb and Allen Counties, Indiana—and it was impossible to make macaroni and cheese without it.
"A mother bears the weight of every choice her child makes, whether she can change it or not." —Author Unknown
Bertha raised six children to adulthood on the Brush College Farm, and she buried two before they drew a proper breath. Of her surviving children, the eldest—Lucille—gave her the most grief and the deepest connection. When Lucille eloped at sixteen with her schoolteacher, Bertha and Volney fought the marriage. When Lucille left for Detroit and her daughter Peg was shuttled between relatives, Bertha helped raise the child. When Lucille married Doc Stratton and there were a few good years, Bertha and Volney embraced the new family. And when Doc died and Lucille married Jake, a man who drank too much and hit too hard, Bertha watched it all unfold with the helpless clarity of a mother who has seen her daughter reach for the wrong hand more than once.
Through it all, children and grandchildren cycled through the farm. Peg. Me. Cousins. Nieces and nephews. The farm was the safe place, the place you came back to when everything else had gone sideways, and Bertha was the reason it worked.
"The measure of a woman's strength is not what breaks her, but what she carries when everything falls apart." —Author Unknown
In January 1946, Volney left the farm for the last time, driven to the Veterans Hospital in Marion by his son Ike. Arteriosclerosis had changed his personality and memory beyond what Bertha could manage at home, and the locked ward in Marion became his home for the next twenty years. He would never return.
Bertha could not run the farm alone. She and I—eight years old—moved in with my mother and Jake in Ligonier. It was a disastrous arrangement. The household that was already unstable with just Lucille and Jake became worse with a grieving grandmother and a confused boy added to the mix. Bertha tried to hold some kind of order together, tried to shield me when she could, but she couldn't stop the blows that Jake dealt when he was drinking, which was often.
She visited Volney in Marion faithfully. Once, when I was eleven and about to leave for Arizona, she decided it was time to bring me along. The drive felt endless. The hospital was institutional and cold. Volney sat in a chair, smaller than I remembered, muttering play-by-play of a baseball game that wasn't happening.
“Hello, Vol,” Bertha said softly, leaning down to kiss his cheek. “I brought Billy to see you. You remember Billy.”
He looked at me without recognition.
“He remembers,” she whispered. “I know he does. He's just having a bad day.”
On the drive home, she talked about how good he'd looked, how clean and well-fed. She convinced herself the visit had meant something, that somewhere deep inside he'd known they were there. I nodded and agreed because what else could I do?
"Family is the anchor that holds us steady when the storms of life come crashing down." —Ralph Marston
Through all the losses and upheavals, the McConnell family reunions at Round Lake kept coming, and Bertha kept going. Those weekends were proof that family was bigger than any one household's troubles—noisy, chaotic, imperfect, but full of laughter and belonging.
At one of those reunions, Bertha waved me over from where I'd been trying to catch minnows in a tin bucket. “Take this down to your Grandpa,” she said, handing me a Mason jar of cold lemonade, beaded with condensation. “He's down by the dock with Ross and George. And don't spill it.”
Small moments. A jar of lemonade. A hand on a shoulder. A knowing smile over a cereal box. That was Bertha's way—she held the world together not with grand gestures but with ten thousand small ones, repeated day after day, year after year, until they became the fabric of a family's life.
"To love someone who is no longer there to feel it is perhaps the truest expression of faith." —Author Unknown
Volney died on October 16, 1966, at the VA Hospital in Marion, after twenty years in the locked ward. He was ninety years old. Bertha had been without him at home for two decades, but the loss was real all the same.
She outlived him by six years, living in Ligonier until a stroke took her on January 17, 1972, at the age of ninety-three. She was buried beside Volney at Sparta Cemetery in Kimmell, Noble County—the same ground where those two infant twins had been laid seventy years before, the same cemetery where the Kings had been coming to rest since Isaac William returned from the Civil War.
When my mother died on March 13, 2000, in Port Orchard, Washington, I brought her back east alone—Karen and the kids stayed home, the children still in school. I arranged the funeral and burial at Sparta Cemetery, and on March 21 I laid her next to Volney and Bertha and all the rest of the Kings. She'd spent her whole life leaving Indiana. In the end, that's where I took her home to.
"The greatest legacy is not measured by what you leave behind in silver or gold, but by the love and memory you kindle in the hearts of those you loved." —Author Unknown
Years later, standing in a farmhouse kitchen with wood floors worn smooth in the traffic paths and three perfect rhubarb pies cooling on the counter, I felt the memory flood through me so strongly I went unsteady on my feet. Lattice crusts, just like Grandma used to make.
That's what Bertha left. Not documents or speeches or any philosophy you could frame. She left the smell of baking, the sound of scolding Ike about the chickens, the firm instruction to eat your cereal, the whispered insistence that Grandpa remembered even when he didn't, and the unshakeable belief that if you kept the kitchen running and the children fed and the outhouse wallpapered and the carpets beaten, the world would hold together for one more year.
It did. Because of her, it did.
Bertha Lena McConnell King (1878–1972) was the daughter of William Johnson McConnell and Louisa Ellen Hollabaugh of Leipsic, Putnam County, Ohio. She married Volney William King on September 27, 1900, in Columbia City, Indiana. They raised six children to adulthood on the Brush College Farm near Ligonier. She is buried at Sparta Cemetery, Kimmell, Noble County, Indiana.
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
If you are tracing a Stratton line, start here. Harriet Russell Stratton's two-volume Book of Strattons is the most comprehensive Stratton genealogy ever compiled—both volumes are free and fully searchable online.