Scroll down or click here to go to J. E. Vaughan's family information page. Scroll down or click here to go to panels devoted to the family of Maude and Everett Vaughn. Click here o learn more about that mysterious Vaughan couple, William and Fereby Benton Vaughan. Click here for a 1934 Garrett High School photo of John and Mattie Wolfe Vaughn's son Johnny Vaughn. Click here to see a list of my all-time favorite movies; you may want to send us a list of your own favorites. Click here to see some of myhood memories about Kentucky high school football. Feel free to comment. Click here for links to some of GOOGLE's more recent Vaughn-Vaughan family-search results. Click here for links to informative sites concerning books by James E. Vaughan, including The Vaughan Family in Wales and America, The Alchymist and The Silurist, Diana and Leo, and BANKMULES - The Story of Van Lear, a Kentucky Coal Town, the author's boyhood hometown. Click here to go to James E. Vaughan's boyhood hometown website at vanlearky.com. Click here for links to the 20 most useful sites on the Internet. (Subjectively ranked by e-Lynks personnel).

jevaughn.com is my personal family web site. It features information regarding the family of Anthony Wayne Vaughan in Eastern Kentucky and Western Virginia, and other descendants of the "Welsh Indian Trader" William Vaughan (1750-1840), along with links to other Vaughn-Vaughan family web sites. If you wish to communicate with me, please use the address below. James Vaughan 1006 Fairway Circle Jonesboro AR 72401 e-mail: jevaughn@suddenlink.net I have tried to include accurate information and the most useful family sites on the Internet. Feel free to use this information, but take note that some of it is unsubstantiated. The information on this site, and any use made thereof is subject to a disclaimer and a copyright notice. A listing does not in any way imply an endorsement or recommendation. To see the disclaimer, click here. INDXR.com® is a Delapress web site © 1990-2012 Delapress. All Rights Reserved. GOOGLE® is a registered trademark of Google, Inc. LYCOS® is a registered trademark of Carnegie Mellon University. Other than Delapress, aGoogling.com, e-Lynks.com, INDXR.com, vanlearky.com, jevaughn.com, and Superlynks.com, trademarks are the property of other owners. This site was last updated January 12, 2012. Return to the top.

Anthony Wayne Vaughan and his wife America McBrayer Vaughan, pictured at the left around 1912, near their home at Rush (or possibly Winslow), in Boyd County, Kentucky, are the author's grandparents. Grandfather Anthony Wayne Vaughan and Grandmother America McBrayer Vaughan, are seated with young Ruby Ball on Grandmother's lap, and Norma Hall, daughter of Ella Vaughan and Noah Hall, to her left. Gladys Fultz and Lester Ball are standing behind and between the two adults. At the far left are Mattie Wolfe Vaughan and her husband John Vaughan, who is holding son Delbert. In the stroller is John and Mattie's son Hubert. Next, left to right at the rear, are Everett Vaughan, Ida Vaughan Ball, an unknown young man peeking over the shoulder of Wayne Vaughan, Ruben Ball, Will Vaughan, Tobias Vaughan, and Howard Vaughan. Grandfather Anthony Wayne Vaughan was born in Wayne County, Virginia (now Cabell County, West Virginia) 17 October 1848. He was the seventh of ten children of James and Susannah Wilson Vaughan. In 1863, as a boy of 15, he worked with his father who was employed by the Union Army to care for horses at a federal post in South Point, Ohio, on the north side of the Ohio river. James' father, Thomas owned a sizeable farm, but he and his wife, Nancy Ford Vaughan, left most of their property to their son Thomas II. Around 1858, James and his wife relocated across the Big Sandy River in Lawrence County, Kentucky. It was from this location that James and his son Anthony Wayne commuted downriver to their work at the confluence of the Big Sandy and Ohio at South Point. On the 21st. of October 1871 in Carter County Kentucky, Anthony Wayne Vaughan married America McBrayer, the daughter of William McBrayer. America was born 31 March 1848. This union was blessed with thirteen children: Lou Ella (1872), Charles (1873), Ida (1875), Susan Jane (1876), Esther Ann (1878), Daisy (1879), my father James (1881), Allen Toby (1883), William M. (1885), Howard (1887), John (1889), Daniel Everett (1892), and Anthony Wayne II (1893). Anthony Wayne, son of James, grandson of Thomas, and great-grandson of William and Fereby Vaughan, was the principal source of my early knowledge of my Vaughan ancestry. It was memories of his stories, told to me as a child, which motivated me to research and write the book, "The Vaughan-Vaughn Family in Wales and America: A Search for the Welsh ancestors of William Vaughan (1750-1840)." After more than twenty years of family research, however, at least two unanswered questions remain unanswered: (1) Were Floyd County Kentucky's Ayres Vaughan and Arkansas' William Vaughan related?, and (2) who were the parents of William and Fereby. If you would like to learn more about this genealogical puzzle, and perhaps offer a possible solution to it, click here. Return to the top.

Cousin Steve Vaughan sent me an email with the photo at the left attached, asking if I could identify all of these individuals, I recalled having seen the picture many years ago, but I was unsure as to the identity of some of the youngsters. After sending copies off to other members of our family, and after giving the matter some serious thought, I was able to come up with some names and dates that I now believe to be accurate. At least I am reasonably confident in these statements: This photo was made 19 to 20 years earlier than the first family photo (above). The date of the photo is probably around 1893 or 1894. The three people on the back row are, l to r, Charles (b 1873, probably age 20), Ida (b 1875, probably age 18), and Daisy (b 1879, probably age 14). On the first row are, l to r, Anthony Wayne Vaughan Sr. (b 1848, probably age 45), John (b 1889, probably age 4), America McBrayer Vaughan (b 1848, probably age 45), Anthony Wayne II, (b 1893, probably age 1), Will (b 1885, probably age 8), Lou Ella (b 1872, probably age 21), and seated in Ella's lap is Daniel Everett (b 1892, probably age 1). At the far right, my guess is that this is most likely Howard (b 1887, then probably age 6). This leaves four children unaccounted for. Recalling that Susan Jane and Esther Ann died in infancy, the two children not pictured are (most likely) Toby, and my father James. Allen Toby was born in 1883 and would have been 10 years of age. My father James was born in 1881 and would have been 12. If anyone has more reliable information, please feel free to share it with us. Return to the top.

Pictured at the left is Cousin Willie Vaughan, seated on the front porch of his home in Tampa, Florida with his dog Rascal, c 1935. My first insight into our Vaughan family's Welsh roots occurred during Cousin Willie's visit with my Grandfather Anthony Wayne Vaughan and our family at Van Lear, following my father's death in the mines in 1935. I distinctly recall several conversations of Grand-dad and Cousin Willie, and their agreement that our first Vaughan of record in this country was William Vaughan. Born around 1750, he was referred to as a "Welshman who traded with Indians." Later, in the 1950s, Jack and Joe Vaughan, members of a Northwest Arkansas branch of our family, told me similar stories about our Indian Trader progenitor. The stories they told of "our place in Wales, some thirty miles north of Cardiff," were essentially the same as those told me by Grandfather Anthony Wayne, although my Virginia-Kentucky Vaughans and Jack and Joe's Northwestern Arkansas Vaughans had had no contact down through the years. Later research revealed that in 1772, the Indian trader William Vaughan married Fereby Benton (b ca 1750 North Carolina, d May 1850 in Madison County Arkansas). In a deposition given in 1892 by Benjamin Vaughan in support of claims for Indian citizenship, he stated that Fereby Benton Vaughan was his grandmother. Her maiden name was Fereby Benton and her mother, who was Cherokee by blood, was a Looney. Fereby married William Vaughan in the "Old Cherokee Nation in Tennessee," Benjamin stated. After service in Captain David Looney's company during Lord Dunmore's War against the Shawnee in 1774, William acquired land in Russell County Virginia, then migrated to Hawkins County Tennessee where he and Fereby remained for a time before going on into White and Warren County Tennessee. They stopped briefly in Southeast Missouri before continuing on to Northwest Arkansas, where they and most of their children settled. Their eldest Thomas, who would become my great-great grandfather, remained in Virginia. My great-great-great grandfather William and his wife Fereby had at least seven children, including their first-born Thomas (1773), John (1774), Samuel (1776), Daniel (1787), William II (1789) and Elizabeth (1790). All of these birthdates are approximate. Around 1793, Thomas married Nancy Ford (b ca 1776), daughter of John and Betsy Hill Ford of Virginia. To this union twelve children were born: John (1794), Elizabeth (1796), Jane (1800), Martha (1802), Nancy (1804), Phoebe (Ferabe) (1806), William Tyler (1808), Lucinda (1813), my great-grandfather James (1814), Christiana (1816), Thomas II (1819), and Abraham (1822). James (b 1814) married Susannah Wilson, daughter of James and Sarah Mountz Wilson, ca 1833 in Boyd County Kentucky. Susannah was also said to be part Cherokee. She and James had ten children: Goodwin (1834), Mary Jane (1836), Allen T. (1840), Lucinda (1841), Rebecca Belle (1842), Cassia (1846), my grandfather Anthony Wayne (1848), Hugh (1851), Jackson (1854), and Mary (1859). Return to the top.

My father, James Vaughan (1881), pictured at the left c 1920, married Ella Hammond (b 1888), on 27 February 1910. To this union were born two children, George Willis Vaughan (17 August 1912), and Ida Mae Vaughan (16 October 1914). Like many other families who migrated into Johnson County Kentucky after the mining town of Van Lear was established by Consolidation Coal Company in 1910-14, the family of Anthony Wayne Vaughan and America McBrayer Vaughan had several male members represented there, including my father James, his brother Everett, and his brother-in-law John Hammond. James was working in Van Lear on the 7th day of March, 1918, when Ella died suddenly in Ashland. Following the death of his first wife, James returned to Ashland and remained there in the employ of C&O Rwy, returning with his second wife (my mother) and two children to Van Lear in 1920, where they lived through 1924. At that time he and his family shared a double house with his brother Daniel Everett Vaughan and his wife Maude, and their children, Charlene and Maurice. The brother of James' first wife Ella, John Hammond, was then employed as a foreman at Consolidation Mine #152, and the Hammond family lived nearby in what was known as "Silk Stocking Row" across from the Van Lear Central Schools. James returned to Ashland in 1924, and for a time operated a small coal mine with his father at Winslow near what is known as "Number Eight." After his marriage to my mother, my father was employed in 1927 by Semet Solvay, at which time the family resided on 33rd Street in Ashland. In 1928, he and his family returned to Van Lear where his two eldest children entered the Van Lear public school system. When George decided that he wanted to enter the coal mines in 1930, James quit his job as a foreman to take his son into the pits and show him the ropes. George returned to school to graduate with the Van Lear High School Class of 1932.. Return to the top.

My mother, Frances Lynk Vaughan, is pictured at the left in a photo taken around 1920. The daughter of John and Lyda Burgraff Llynk, she was born 22 January 1892. On the 9th of September, 1919, James Vaughan married (2) Frances Lynk. This writer (James E. Vaughan, b 7 December 1925) is the only child of this union. My mother's father John Lynk married Eliza (Lyda) Burgraf July 3, 1871 at Ironton, Ohio. Lyda, as she was known to her close friends and family, was born at Butler, Pennsylvania to John and Hester Burgraf. The identity of the original male emigre Burgraf, and the date of his arrival in this country is presently not known, although the family was said to have roots in The Hague, Netherlands. The children of John and Lyda, from eldest to youngest, were Thomas, Ida, Mayme, Joe, Minnie, Roy, Kate, Jack, Frances, Bryda, and George. Lyda had a sister who married a Simmons. This couple had a son, Will Wright Simmons, a noted operatic tenor, who performed regularly with the Canadian Opera Company, and in Europe as well. John Lynk was a blacksmith who plied his trade at Kilgore in Boyd County Kentucky. His son Joe worked with him for a time, and remained in the home at Kilgore with his wife Clara, where they took care of his mother during her declining years. They had no children. Tom migrated to California, Roy to West Virginia. Ida married George Childress and they lived out their lives in Indiana where they raised their two daughters Evelyn and Lucille. George Lynk spent a good part of his life in the mining town of Glo in Floyd County Kentucky. He and his wife had one child, a daughter Rosemary. Bryda married Lewis McGlothlin and lived in Ashland. They had one child, a daughter Lyda. Jack saw service in the army during World War I. Mayme married Bill Howell, and spent most of her life in Indiana, raising five boys, who moved to Michigan where they found management-level employment in the automobile industry. Kate married Ernest Daniels, a railroad man, and they had two daughters, Bess and Beulah. Minnie married Crocket Lyons, who was a foreman at Ashland Steel. They had one daughter, Frances, who was named for my mother. When Crocket suffered a debilitating paralytic stroke, Minnie took over as the bread-winner, converting her Ashland home into a rooming house. Return to the top.

On July 15, 1935, a methane gas explosion in Consolidation Mine #155 took the lives of my father, James Vaughan, and eight other miners. The other miners were Roy Murray, brothers Bill and Charley Kretzer, Shirley Hereford, Honus Gool, Durwood Litz, Frank Tuzy, and Virgil Clay, the youngest at 21. My father James was the oldest at age 53. A plaque in their memory is now on display in the Miners' Room of the Museum. In the photo at the left are the six surviving children of Bill and Charley Kretzer. I recall the day of the tragic event quite vividly. One of my young friends came running down the main road to tell me that there had been an explosion at the mine, and my father was in it. I went alone in back of our company house and climbed the hill, trying to believe that it just wasn't so. But it was. A report issued by the Bureau of Mines stated, "The mine (Number 155) had two shallow slopes and an airshaft and was connected to Number 154 mine. At 8:40 A.M. men on a locomotive, approaching first-right, felt a heavy concussion and, after looking into the mouth of first-right, they telephoned outside that an explosion had occurred. Calls for assistance were sent to the state mine inspector, the company offices at Jenkins, Kentucky, other mines, and the Norton Station of the Bureau of Mines. Crews and rescue leaders arrived promptly. Ventilation was advanced by erecting brattices and curtains. Progress was impeded by roof falls, especially where timbers were knocked down or broken in the squeezed area. A gas-mask crew explored ahead of the brattice men, and an apparatus crew made one trip to look for a possible fire, but none was found. The bodies were removed by July 19, two from under heavy falls. Gas had accumulated in the squeezing rooms in which ventilation was almost cut off; it moved onto the entry where it was ignited by an arc from the wiring of a motor or pump. An open-type electric locomotive nearby was not in operation. The explosion picked up and ignited a small amount of coal dust, but did not propogate out of the immediate section. The mine was not rock-dusted, but dust on the entries contained material from the clay floor and brushed roof. The bodies were burned, broken, and crushed. Electric cap lamps were used, but the mine was not considered gassy." Three days later nine funerals were held. The Kretzer brothers were buried in their family plot in Reedsville, near HItchens in Carter County. Virgil Clay was interred in a cemetery on Richmond (John's Creek) Hill at Van Lear; Roy Murray in his family's cemetery plot near Lowmansville; Durward Litz in a plot near Auxier and East Point, across the river from Harman Station; Honus Gool at the mouth of Webb Hollow in Van Lear; Sherley Hereford in Ashland Cemetery; Frank Tuzy in Mayo Cemetery at Paintsville; and my father, Jim Vaughan, in our Vaughn cemetery plot at Rose Hill in Ashland. Return to the top.

Following our father's death, George Vaughan remained in the employ of Consolidation Coal Company as the family's sole breadwinner from 1935 to 1940. Ida Mae entered nurses' training at Saint Elizabeth's in Covington following her high school graduation in 1934. With war raging in Europe in 1940, George joined a number of other Van Lear boys in an electronics training school operated by the army at Avon near Lexington, Kentucky, transferring to the Army Signal Corps the following year. He served in Europe and was caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, along with Cousins Johnny and Hubert, sons of our Uncle John Vaughan. While George, Johnny, and Hubert survived the war, our Cousin Warren Vaughan, son of Everett and Maude Childress Vaughan, lost his life in Europe. Brother George and his co-worker army buddy were stranded in their Signal Corps truck in the German-occupied sector of Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. George was awarded several army commendations by the U. S. Army, and the Croix de Guerre and Frogierre by the French government. At war's end in 1946, he returned to civilian life and entered the employ of Frigidaire Division of General Motors at Dayton, Ohio, where he met his future wife, Nora Revis, daughter of George "Snead" Revis and Molly Asher Revis of Lebanon, Ohio. They were married in April of 1949. The Molly and Snead Revis family had deep roots in Eastern Kentucky, where Snead lost one of his eyes to a gunman while pursuing the man in his role as Sheriff of Leslie County. On Molly's side of her Asher family, her brother John acquired large tracts of valuable coal lands. The large Revis family also had success in a variety of roles in southern Ohio. Brother George Vaughan and his wife Nora (Revis) Vaughan had no children. Our sister Ida Mae married James Jacobs in 1943. They had two children, Melane (b 17 May 1944), and James (Skip) (b 19 July 1952). Ida Mae passed away in 1983 and is buried in Los Angeles where she resided for forty of her sixty-nine years. George died January 25, 1996 at age 83. His wife Nora passed on February 27, 2008. Both are interred at South Lebanon, Ohio Return to the top.

Pictured here at the left are my mother and her girls' Sunday School class at Van Lear's Missionary Baptist Church around 1940. In the back row at the left is my mother, fourth from the left is Peggy Beers, far right is Louise King. Bottom row, third from the left, is Doris Ann Harris. My mother was always active in our little Van Lear Missionary Baptist Church, and she saw to it that I attended Sunday School and Church on Sundays, Vacation Bible School, and Prayer Meeting on Wednesday nights. My friends Frankie Cunningham, Leo Perkowski, and I often found ourselves decked out in bathrobes as the Three Wise Men at Christmas time. More than seventy years later I can trace much of my knowledge of the Bible to my church attendance during my youth. My mother was a remarkable woman, although the same may be said for a number of Van Lear moms, where Consol management insisted on high morality and uprightness in its worker-corps families. Employment by a good employer during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was so rare that the employer could insist on high personal standards. As C. V. Snapp, a Van Lear school superintendent, once said, "If a man didn't send his children to school, he might get moved out." In 1942 surgery at Paintsville Hospital failed to arrest the development of my mother's breast cancer, and we moved to Ashland where she would be near her radiation therapist. Return to the top.

At the left are my wife Wanda Lee (Rice) Vaughan and Mom's sisters, Aunts Bryda McGlothlin and Minnie Lyons, with whom I boarded until I finished high school at Ashland Senior High in the spring of 1943. The summer of '42 was a strange one. I had three different jobs before the year was out. I first worked for Myron Bates at his A&P Store where I earned 30 cents an hour, bagging groceries and printing signs. I soon landed a job with a group of men who had been hired by Ashland Oil Company to dismantle its old Tri-State refinery plant at Kenova, West Virginia. For this dirty work I doubled my pay to 60 cents an hour. Each day as we walked past Dreamland swimming pool and pavilion, I longed to join the young folks who were lolling about in that haven. My mother had been undergoing radiation therapy at King's Daughter's Hospital. One hot August morning Aunt Min told me that I should not go to work. Mom was worse. A doctor came and administered a pain killer, and that day my mother died. Friends from Van Lear came to pay their respects, brother George had Cousin Case Layne appointed as my guardian, and I quit my job with Ashland Oil, and prepared for my senior year at Ashland Senior High School. Although I made the Ashland Tomcat basketball team as its 6-foot 2-inch center, our Van Lear Bankmules could have beaten the Ashland Tomcats quite handily. I quit the team and took a job at Sam Israel's Royal Jewelry Store, working two hours each weekday after school and eight hours on Saturday as a "gopher." With the extra $10 each week I was then able to start dating girls! Return to the top.

Following high school graduation I rode a train to Lansing, Michigan, and spent the remainder of the summer and fall with my Cousin Harry Howell and his wife Wynne. I attended Michigan State College in East Lansing, and worked at the Oldsmobile Building 75 munitions plant. At that time Harry was general manager of the Oldsmobile forge plant. My routine that summer and fall never varied: Monday through Saturday it was up for breakfast with Harry at 7:00, on to East Lansing for 8:00 O'clock English, followed by foundry, and mechanical drawing. After lunch I worked the 3-to-11 shift at Olds, then walked home at midnight. On Sunday we played golf at Walnut Hills. Although I was most appreciative of the help my cousins gave me, I had met some Michigan friends who were going into military service, and I had become intrigued with the prospect of becoming a Naval aviator. In October I was accepted as a fledgling Naval Aviation Cadet, and was sent to Grosse Isle Naval Air Station as an interim Tarmac, hopefully awaiting assignment to a pre-flight school. Now, as I look back on those years, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge all of the help, love, and support that I received from kinfolk and friends following the loss of my father and mother. At Van Lear, George's friends, Lowell Phillips, Deward Kazee, Harold Rucker, Edgar Stapleton, Earl Anderson, O. D.Sparks, and Erwin Brown rallied to his side, while Uncle Everett and Aunt Maude took me into their family at Pikeville and later at Martin. In Ashland, there were Aunt Min and Uncle Crockett Lyons, Aunt Mayme and Uncle Bill Howell, Cousins Case and Ruby Layne, Bill and Pauline Elkins, Uncle Everett and Aunt Maude Vaughan, Aunt Bryda and Aunt Kate Daniels, coaches Charley Ramey and Ted Franz, Mister Ludorf and Walter Wingo at Sam Israel's Royal Jewelry Store, where I worked after school and on Saturdays, Cousins Frances and C. J. Bolton, the men I worked with at Paul Blazer's Ashland Oil Tri State Plant, Myron Bates and his A&P Store, Jimmy Stinson and Phillip Lane, and -- following high school graduation -- Aunt Mayme's son Harry Howell and his dear wife Wynne who had taken me under their wing in Michigan, and for these many kindnesses I shall be forever grateful. I can't help but wonder if our modern society has lost this spirit of unselfish kindness and helpfulness. In the photo at the left are six people who had a profound influence on my early life: My mother's sister, Aunt Mayme Howell and her five sons, Ray, Willard, Chet, Harry, and Leonard. Return to the top.

Upon entering the Navy V-5 pilot training program in October of 1943, I was sent to Grosse Isle Naval Air Station on Lake Erie for a winter of duty as a Tarmac, servicing Stearman biplanes for English and Canadian student pilots while awaiting what I hoped would be Navy pilot training..Alas, my ambition was not to be realized as the Navy had more than enough pilots to win the war without the help of our 150 Tarmacs. Although I was picked to join the Grosse Isle Naval Air Station basketball squad for an abbreviated season of play, I was not one of the 2 Tarmacs chosen for pilot training. Instead, the 148 remaining members of our two Tarmac companies were sent off to College V-12 programs. My year and a half at Arkansas A & M at Monticello was unremarkable, highlighted by more basketball and a rather rigorous round of Naval Science instruction. In due course we were shipped off to Oklahoma University and NROTC training where I was commissioned an Ensign as a member of the last wartime NRO class at O.U. After spending the summer of 1946 with my navy friend Jack Venable, working at night in his father's service station in Hazen, Arrkansas, I returned to O.U.where good fortune soon smiled upon me. The events that had transpired thus far in my young life, and those yet to come, would soon make me a firm believer in the realness of Divine Providence, and perhaps even something that some called Predestination. Return to the top.