Back in May, I was wandering around a favorite antique mall outside of Atlanta. As I passed a locked glass case, I noticed a small poster. “$100 Reward!” Two people were wanted for arrest, probably in 1920, in Resaca, Georgia. I say “probably,” because I couldn’t read the entire thing – it was behind some other items and photographs. But I saw enough to be intrigued, took a quick photo with my phone to remind me, and started digging when I got home.
I didn’t get far – the name of the guy was unusual, but the girl had a perfectly ordinary name. I did some research, left a message for the owner of a family tree on Ancestry, and thought, “I should really have bought that little notice, so I could have all of the information.”
Fast forward to September. I was back at the antique mall and decide to see if the little poster was still there. It was, so I bought it. Should have negotiated on the price a little, but I weighed the price against my curiosity, and curiosity won.
Here’s the poster:
I first thought of Bonnie and Clyde – I mean, how could I not, right?? First of all, her name is Bonnie, and there’s a guy, and a reward, and the word “arrest” … !!!! So I hit the newspapers ….
Nothing … not one word. There was a reward and everything! How did it not make the papers? Time to look for census records.
“Farris Bishop” – a name that shouldn’t be hard to research, right? Imagine this – there were TWO men living in Georgia at the time of this poster who were named “Farris Bishop” – both were born right around the same time, but only one near Resaca, Georgia, so I decided to track him. Didn’t get far – I pretty much lost him after the 1920 census [where he appears only one page before Bonnie Moore’s family], which is dated roughly five months before his disappearance with Bonnie. So maybe he was on the lam after this incident? He vamoosed? He R-U-N-N-O-F-T? [see “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” – seriously – rent it and see it. You’ll thank me later.]
As for the other Farris Bishop, he grew up in another county, had more siblings, and died in 1943 near Savannah, Georgia. I’m pretty convinced this isn’t the same guy. The census records don’t really line up, and he didn’t live near enough to Resaca to be the right person.
Bonnie Moore was a little easier to track. She was the daughter of Edward and Josephine Jones Stanford Moore. She had an older sister, Rena, and several half-siblings from her mother’s first marriage. Rena married a man named John Schmidt, and ended up living in California. But Bonnie stayed in Georgia, and appears in the 1930 and 1940 census records, living with her mother (her parents having divorced some time before 1930), and working as a saleslady for a dry goods store in 1930. By 1940, neither Bonnie nor Josephine is employed. After that …. crickets …. Josephine died in 1944, so what happened to Bonnie? Did she get married? Did she have children? Did she move to California to live with her sister?
Then I ran across a family tree on Ancestry that had a photo of a girl named Bonnie Moore, and it was the same photo as the one on the little poster. Jackpot, right?? I was about to get all of the details on Bonnie and what happened to her. Click … and what have we here?
A caption that says this is Bonnie and her sister, Rena, in 1916, “the year they went to boarding school in Powder Springs. Rena graduated in 1917.”
And there was another photo! Josephine [their mother] and Bonnie and a little boy named Harold, taken in 1922. According to the owner of the tree, on the back of the
photo, someone has written the names and “Don’t I look like a barrel?” Who is Harold?
I sent a message to the owner of the tree, but have never received a response, although that person seems to be active on Ancestry. So I went back to the photo of Bonnie and her sister and checked to see who else had saved it to their trees. Only four other people, but one of them had another picture! This one showed Bonnie as a middle-aged woman, standing in a yard … gray hair, same body type, and still named “Bonnie Lee Moore” – no married name. This person also listed a death date for Bonnie in 1996, in Resaca. It also showed that Harold was Rena’s son, and that he married and had a child of his own.
Bonnie’s death information led me to a site called “Find A Grave” (sounds morbid, I know, but it’s really great), where a person had posted both pictures – the picture of Bonnie and Rena and the photo of Bonnie as an older woman – to a grave listing for Bonnie. It seemed possible that this person is related to Bonnie and Rena, so I sent a message. Not long afterward, I got a response – LOVE the internet!
William and I emailed back a forth a bit. Bonnie was his great-aunt, and he was able to tell me that she died at age 95, after living most of her life in Georgia and, as far as he knows, she never married or had any children. Unfortunately, he knew very little about her life, other than what he had posted and what I had already uncovered. But he was gracious enough to give me permission to write about what we do know, and to share it.
So — Farris Bishop is a complete mystery, and Bonnie Moore seems to have led a perfectly normal, ordinary life, probably full of the highs and lows that occurred in most lives during the time period in which she lived. She was born before the Wright Brothers first flew, and she died when we were sending shuttles into space on a fairly regular basis. She lived during two World Wars and the Great Depression. She was born when William McKinley was president and died while Bill Clinton was president – eighteen administrations in all.
Nothing remarkable, really … except for 1920. Something happened when she was 19 – a young man turned her head, perhaps, and persuaded her to walk with him down a path that seemed exciting and different. Or perhaps she persuaded him? Not sure I will ever know, but I keep coming back to this story over and over again.
As always, if you know these people or discover more about the story, or if you have other comments, feel free to contact me here. And thanks for dropping by the blog ….