Family archives are a lot to take in

Tim Rivers has sent me down a rabbit hole.
And I’m not quite sure how to escape.
Tim’s the curator of the Elwood Haynes Museum in Kokomo. He came to Jay County last year for the dedication of the Elwood Haynes mural in Portland, and he returned a couple of weeks ago to speak to Jay County Historical Society.
He’s an enthusiastic guy. To say he is excited by his subject matter would be an understatement.
And when he learned that my maternal grandfather, Edward M. Haynes, was the kid brother of Elwood Haynes, his adrenalin apparently started pumping. He wanted to know more, whatever bits of family lore I might be able to share, and — more importantly from my standpoint — he was interested in sharing some of the riches from the archives of the museum in Kokomo.
Like most kids growing up in Indiana, I learned about Elwood Haynes in Indiana history class, which used to be taught in both fourth and eighth grade, apparently because they didn’t think we were paying attention the first time around.
I also had the benefit of my mother’s memories. She had been adopted at birth by Edward and Carrie (Jay) Haynes, and she remembered hearing stories about her uncle in her childhood. Elwood died about the time my mother was 6 or 7.
Many years ago, when professor Ralph Gray was working on what has proved to be the definitive biography of the Kokomo automotive pioneer and metallurgical inventor, my mother donated a bunch of her papers — old family correspondence mostly — to the Elwood Haynes Museum.
So it only seems fair that when Tim Rivers came to Jay County this month he brought along digitized copies of hundreds of documents and photographs on his laptop computer.
County historian Jane Ann Spencer and I spent about two and a half hours with Rivers, going through the material he had transferred to digital files. And before he headed back to Kokomo, he transferred more than 250 megabytes of data to a flash drive for me.
That’s the rabbit hole I’ve stumbled down.
There are letters. Letters from Elwood home to his parents from Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts, letters to the woman he would marry, business letters, letters to my grandfather and grandmother Haynes and more.
There were letters from folks in Portland asking for donations. After all, Elwood was a millionaire before the 1920s; but he appears to have been treated like a cash cow by some of those contacting him.
One pastor wrote to thank him for a large donation but couldn’t finish the letter without suggesting that maybe Elwood could also pony up the money for a manse for the church’s pastor. That it was not his church nor his denomination did not seem to matter.
There’s a poignant series of letters back and forth from Indiana to Colorado. Frank Haynes, the only one of the surviving brothers who seemed determined to strike out on his own, tried his hand at ranching and farming in a miserable area of Colorado. While everything Elwood touched turned to gold, everything Frank touched turned to dust.
And then there’s the fragment of a biography of the inventor written by his Presbyterian pastor in Kokomo.
Much to read, much to assess, much to mull over. That’s the way it is when you tumble down a rabbit hole.