I spent all day yesterday adding information into my Jerry Banister Family Tree on Ancestry.com. The branches now support over 8,000 names! It was so time consuming, in fact, that I didn’t even take time to write my daily post. I also did a couple of errands, met friends for both breakfast and lunch, plus had dinner with my wife. Otherwise, I would have had a severe case of “Banister Butt” from sitting at the computer all day. (See Post #619). When I leave the mindless universe of cable TV for the tedious genealogical work involved with Ancestry.com, my wife often teases that I’ve drifted into what she calls “Banister World.” It can occupy hours of my time putting together what often is nothing more than a dead people puzzle.

After my recent visit with the Banister family in Scipio, Indiana, one of the sisters, Julie, established a shared file to store and compare family information. She then scanned ten documents comprised of many hand written pages that her sister Janet had gathered through the years. Janet prefers to do her genealogy work without a computer and had a lot of great information on loose pages that I wanted to add to my tree. For Janet’s benefit, I reciprocated with one of the massive documents in the shared drive that my meeting a few months ago with another Banister relative in Chicago uncovered. This particular chart outlines the descendants of my birth mother’s side of the Banister family.

I’m apparently the product of two Banister relatives, who eventually established families of their own. They both shared a great grandfather, David Banister, who was the son of Laborn Banister, the acknowledged head of the family tree. His Banister father remains unknown. My birth mother, Edna Faye Banister was determined from adoption and census records. The presumed birth father, Cecil Ralph Banister, was established through a “half-sibling” DNA connection with his daughter Julie. I have yet to put the pieces together on Edna and Cecil’s brief relationship. However, they did go to the same small high school for one year in Indiana – Muscatatuck. Oddly, in the yearbook Edna was listed as Madonna. He was a Senior and she was a Sophomore in 1949, two years before my birth.

Cecil Ralph Banister finished high school and started work at Cummins Engine Company after graduation before entering the Marines at age 20. He retired from Cummins in 1985 after 35 years of employment as a machine operator. Edna Faye Banister completed only her Junior year of school and gave birth to me, Jerry Lee Banister, the next summer. The course of their lives changed quickly. Edna’s family sent her away to Indianapolis for my end-of-August delivery, while he moved to Quantico, Virginia March 4, 1951 for basic training (PFC #1181863). He would have missed Edna’s 18th birthday and likely never knew she was pregnant. He then married his only wife Marilyn on October 8, 1951, and celebrated his 21st birthday on July 21, 1952 in Korea as Sargent Banister.

Edna Faye married Charles Poole and gave birth to a second son 5 years & 5 days later. She also inexplicably named him Jerry Lee. Her life is still a mystery to me during that five-year span, although she was working as a machine operator for Reliance Manufacturing in Columbus, Indiana by 1953 and as a clerk at Carpenter’s Drug Store in the same city two-years later. She moved to Anderson in 1955 before remarrying in 1962 to Clayton Davidson. She had also given birth to a third son, Gary Lynn Davidson the year before, followed by two more children during the next two years of that marriage. Of these three Davidson children, only the daughter Janet Faye currently survives, along with Jerry Lee Poole. Edna is currently unmarried but celebrated her 85th birthday on April 9th. Cecil, on the other hand, is survived by his wife Marilyn and five daughters after tragically losing a 16-year old son in October of 1971.

More pieces of the “world of family” puzzle will come together as I continue to spend time in “Banister World” and share information with my DNA relatives. I’m waiting for some paperwork from the State of Indiana regarding my adoption records that were recently legally unsealed. I doubt that this will give me more information but it will serve as “official” confirmation of Edna’s identity as my birth mother. At that point, I will make another effort to contact Edna and her other son named Jerry Lee, who continue to avoid contact with other Banister connections who thankfully believe my carefully documented story.