Duel Strong

I started researching my family history eighteen years ago and have four thousand names connected in a very extensive tree. As might be expected, some bad seeds can be found. I did not have to go back very far to dig up too much information about my Great-grandfather Duel Strong. My dad’s maternal grandfather left some scars in the linage of the Strong family’s fourteen generations coming from England in 1634.
Duel died at eighty-six when I was ten. I remembered him as a crotchety old beekeeper wearing a cowboy hat but when dad refused to go to his funeral, I knew there was something wrong.
Duel’s first wife Emma left him after raising a son and six daughters. The children and others bore the hardship or just bad luck of living in that household. Perry was the oldest. His wild reputation I have found in newspaper clippings of the day including draft dodging to Canada and ‘suspicious’ behavior with the fifteen-year-old daughter of his father’s ‘housekeeper’ when he was twenty-three. Dad told of Perry’s Model T body that was rebuilt of wood after a crash. Zilla lost an eye in a sledding accident and died at twelve from appendicitis. Leona and Meda found decent husbands and raised normal families. Clara became a flamboyant socialite after leaving home. Three of her husbands are known and estimates say there were probably seven. I interviewed her in 1990 for some family information or as she called it ‘trying to dig up a little dirt.’ She resented me as a grandson of Jay that stole her sister Mina at seventeen when he was thirty years old. My grandmother died at thirty-four due to medical practice of using x-rays to burn off moles but resulted in cancer. My dad was ten at the time.
Freda also married young to escape a turbulent household. At eighteen she married Jake Morin then thirty-seven. They soon had a daughter Bessie. Jake’s drinking and failed work ethic left them estranged after three years so Freda took Bessie to live with her mother then remarried in the town of Holly. On June 11, 1927, Perry came to visit and took Freda and Bessie to the moving picture show. Jake laid waiting in the bushes by the railroad tracks with a stolen gun. One shot killed Perry and several shots left Freda dying while running to her mother’s house. Perry was thirty-two and Freda twenty-six. A posse quickly formed and went after Jake down the tracks. He was captured after his gun jammed trying to shoot a deputy in pursuit. My dad remembered riding to Holly in the middle of the night and seeing the blood-soaked bodies at the house of Grandmother Emma. Dad was six. Clara told me that Jake was released from prison when he was eighty and went to live with his daughter Bessie.
Duel’s second wife Amanda made the newspapers too when she poisoned herself and her two daughters fourteen and seven. Stemming from a ‘domestic dispute’ the distraught lady survived to leave the old bastard but the youngest daughter died from consuming the bichloride of mercury tablets.
Not all Memorial Day sightings are fond.