Henry E. Clountz
 

Clountz Family

A few family notes about names; there has been confusion in the family about my Grandfather Henry E. Clountz.  Some people call him H. C. Clountz, but his real name as far as I can find is Henry Eugene Clountz.  Also, his headstone shows he was born in 1884, but we think it was really more like 1886.

Also, my grandmother Nora Gertrude Flippin Cook's name and identity has been a mystery for years.  She kept her real name a secret from the family most of her life; they wouldn't talk about her family.  She even used different names on census records - Nora, Gertrude, Lenora (her mother-in-law's name), like she wa afraid someone would find her or recognize her, but that may just be a coincidence.  She used to say her maiden name was "Clay"; but even when she married, her fiancee had to go to her mother and ask her what Nora's last name was so they could put it on the marriage certificate; her mother said "Flippin" was her last name.  Big Mama began to reveal some information at the end of her life to one of her daughters, Dadie.   She admitted John Flippin was her father, but she still called her brother George Clay.  And I think she lived with his grandparents, the Clays, too. 
From my research into the census records where the Clays lived, the only John Flippin in the area lived right next to them.  The Clays and Phoebe in her teenage years, but he was 30 years older than Phoebe, who was a teenager, about 14 when Big Mama Nora was born.  But this is not strange for him, because in the 1880s when this happened, he was married to his second wife, with a few more to come - each one younger than the last; and he had children with them all, up until he died in his seventies.  So he liked young girls, a lot apparently.  There is never any record of Phoebe marrying John Flippin; the family always told the story that John died in a water mill accident.  I can't find that either.  I think Phoebe must have had a long standing affair with neighbor John Flippin over some years and had Nora and George from it.  I heard Phoebe had red hair and was not exactly like all the other Victorians.  (There is a little mental instability that runs through some in that family too; maybe it came from her, but this is a lot of surmising).  I'm trying to find anyone who knows about this family to confirm my suspicions or replace them with facts.
Big Mama's mother, Phoebe Sloan Clay, married another man, Mel Cinto; there was some mystery about that too.  It seemed like they were ashamed of him, maybe because he was Indian or Mexican - considering his surname, he could have been.  Nora, "Big Mama" as we all called her, said she ran away from home at an early age and stayed away for a long time, and her brother George helped her.  We don't know why, she never said, but we can guess maybe there was some abuse there from the stepfather.  It is known and a record (although I have not found it) that a traveling preacher (maybe from the Church of Christ of which the family were all members) and he and his family took Nora in (maybe out of compassion for a girl trying to escape abuse, who knows) and took her away from the family for four or five years; and the Clay family was looking for her.  When they found them, her uncle got a job chopping wood to pay for a lawyer to get her back from them and have them prosecuted for taking her away.  I don't know how that court business turned out; "Big Mama" didn't even know. She was still a kid.  But they did not let her go back and live with her mother, Phoebe and Mel, or the Clays either, her mother's parents.  She was adopted by a family that were friends and relatives of the Clays, the Tauls; and Nora Gertrude can be found on the census records after that listed as an adopted daughter. 
Nora married James Jackson Cook in 1901, mid-teens by the look of her in pictures.  She was born about 1886, so that would make her about 15 when she married, though she claimed she didn't ever know for sure what year she was born.