Connections – At the Library – Safleys

Next week's theme for 52 Ancestors is At the Library. Yesterday, 25 January 2019, I was working at the local (Cottage Grove Oregon) genealogical society library on my regular Friday shift. During the time when no patrons were there to help, I decided to work on my project for our society's displays coming up this summer and fall.

We are choosing various members of our community to research and create a display about. I had chosen the J. I. Jones family because my husband and I at one time owned the house called the J. I. Jones house and I had already done some research on that family. One of the items I had collected was a manuscript written in 1976 about the Jones family done by Lillian Lewis Coffman, a niece of J. I. Jones. On page 20 Mrs. Coffman stated that the only descendants of C. H. Jones (J. I. Jones' father) who were then living in Cottage Grove were her sister, Lela Ward, Lela's daughter Mildred (Mrs. Cecil Safley) and a grandson.

The Safley name drew my attention. When I first started to work at the local museum, my supervisor was Isabelle (Safley) Gates Woolcott. Do you suppose she was connected to the Jones family? But I also knew that one of my second cousins, Kathleen Albertson, had married a Safley from Cottage Grove and they were said not to be related to Isabelle. So did I have a connection to the Jones family through that cousin​?

Thankfully our society has drawers and drawers of file folders of clippings about our local families filed by surname. So I checked the Safley file folder. After reading a number of obituaries and other clippings I discovered that Kathleen's father-in-law, Rodney Safley, was a brother to Cecil Safley who was married to a Jones' descendant. So one of my relatives on my father's side of the family does have a connection to the Jones' family as her children have cousins who are descendants of C. H. Jones.

But as I continued reading I saw another name I recognized. Rodney and Cecil's father, Joseph Safley, died in March of 1944. The newspaper included names of out-of-town relatives who had come to his funeral. Among this listing was Joseph's sister, Mrs. Margaret Meadows and her three sons and their families, who lived in Florence, Oregon. One of these sons was Williams Meadows. His wife was Beverly Isom, my second cousin once removed on my mother's side of the family, so her children would be my third cousins. But these children also have cousins who are descendants of C. H. Jones, because their father, Wm Meadows would have been a first cousin to Cecil who was married to Mildred, a Jones' descendant.

Thus, although I am not actually related to the Jones family, I have some cousins on both sides of my family who are and I can claim a connection.