Columns

Helen Luster, of the Pinhook community, and I have corresponded for several years now. In her occasional letters, she has shared with me old stories passed down through the Luster family, several of which I have repeated in this column.

Last week, I received a note from Helen, accompanied by two pictures. She wrote about a mild controversy in the Luster family over the identification of a couple in an old photo.

Henry Landes (Lan-dus) of Pennsylvania, who mustered into the U.S. Marines during the Civil War, kept a diary.

This diary became an important piece of evidence when stories surfaced of a man living in Tyler, Texas, named John St. Helen, who claimed to be John Wilkes Booth.

St. Helen/Booth said he had escaped from the surrounded barn in Bowling Green, Va., and wasnt dead after all.

As you may know, the Fayette County Genealogical & Historical Society publishes a quarterly magazine under the title of "Fayette Facts." This 60-page book is chock-full of research help on Fayette County families through church and courthouse records and family histories.

What you might not know is that the society exchanges publications with nearly 40 other genealogical societies around Illinois and beyond. One of these is the Genealogy Society of Southern Illinois, which publishes "The Saga of Southern Illinois," covering 28 counties in the southernmost part of Illinois.

Following years of living away from Fayette County, my dads oldest sister, Frieda Torbeck, decided it was time to return to her roots in St. Paul. She had left the area as a teenager, joining a neighborhood friend in a domestic job in northern Illinois.

Many of the young women who went to the cities to work as housemaids and nursemaids, returned home, married and raised families, their grandchildren now living on the old family farms. But not Frieda.

She found a position with a family whose mother had died and became housekeeper, looking after two children.