Erasmus P. White

My great-grandfather (1861-1915). The photo is a copy of what my great-aunt Omega White (my great-Uncle Ted's wife)  told me was originally a postcard. She understood the photo to have been taken at haying time, around 1914. It is the only photo of him our branch of the family has.

According to my great-aunt Anna Mae (White) Ranus, her father "Ras" White was a blacksmith and owned a mill in Tipton Ford, Missouri, after he stopped farming. She also related to me (in a 1976 letter) that he taught music (voice and theory) in the local school, and that in his cousin Ray Busey's (mayor of Phoenix, Arizona in the mid-1940s) opinion he ought to have gone into politics. Anna Mae said that he read everything he could get his hands on.

According to a family group chart composed by his sister Abby White Baker (1873-1968), he was born in Abingdon, Vermilion County, Illinois. I cannot find a town or village by that name in Vermilion County, although there is one in Knox County. As his father and mother were listed in the 1860 federal census of Illinois as living in Vermilion County (which lies in extreme eastern Illinois, on the Indiana border near Fountain County), my guess is that the county of his birth is correct but that the town is not. I know of no reason why the family would have moved to Knox County; I know of no family members who were living there at the time.