PRATER

When I first found that my Thomas Carter married an Elender I searched to determine who this Elender could be. After much speculation, Sarah Freedberg's posting led to learning that she was Eleanor Prater. Gary Benton Prather has an extensive website with info re the famiily line going back many generations.

Subsequently, I became aware that Thomas's brother William also married a Prater, Mary Eleanor. I learned that this Mary was Eleanor’s cousin. I got with Dorothy Allen, who lives a few miles away, to discuss the Prather-Carter connections and determine if she could shed any light on the William Carter/Mary Prater family. Dorothy had contributed to a Prater book series and was most knowledgeable. I particularly wanted to discuss any info she might have re William Carter's death; she had nothing. Dorothy had not heard the story about a Carter who returned home after the CW and was shot (our presumption is that it was William who was shot). But, she gave me some leads re who Mary remarried after the death of William (an Emmett) and did loan me her books for a few days. I ultimately did find an 1880 census believed to be for Mary Prater; a Mary Emmett as the wife of Leander with her eldest child shown on the census as being 13.

One of the books that I borrowed from Dorothy Allen had a fascinating section on early writings and the difficulty in reading or deciphering the written script. First, it is almost impossible to recognize or identify the latin letters. Then since there was no standardized spelling for words, it was only a guess as to what the word might be. For example, the same word was spelled differently in the same document. And then even if one could assign words to the scrawl, the actually meaning was a guess because of the archaic meaning that the words had or how the words were used. A few sections from the book are appended as an illustration.