Moonlight in Kentucky

Author: Eowyn Langholf Walker, WikiTree Forest Elf

For those not familiar, the WikiTree Challenge is a collaborative event that takes place every other week at WikiTree - the free family tree. Volunteers work together to grow seven degrees of connections for seven starting people chosen by a partner organization. The challenge runs for one week and participants work to contribute, improve, and add profiles to the WikiTree and see what interesting connections they can find for and between the starting individuals. The Challenge also helps to build connections between different genealogy organizations and communities, and to promote collaboration and sharing of information.

This week we’ve partnered up with the wonderful folks at the Kentucky Genealogical Society. They gave us seven interesting individuals to start with including the founder of Alice Lloyd College, Kentucky’s most highly decorated female veteran of WWI, a civil rights worker and a suffragist.

I wanted to chip in with the Challenge this week so I randomly picked one of the seven and almost immediately fell down a rabbit hole! We genealogists love those don’t we? I clicked to her profile and was introduced to Cora.?

Cora (Wilson) Stewart (1875-1948), a native of Rowan County, Kentucky, was a remarkable woman who dedicated her life to fighting illiteracy in the United States. Her innovative approach to teaching adults to read and write, through the creation of "Moonlight Schools," was groundbreaking and transformative. These schools were held at night, allowing working adults to attend, and were taught by volunteer teachers. Cora’s methods were so effective that they were adopted by other states and even other countries. She wrote books that were about the lives of her students, making the learning process more engaging and relevant. Her passion and dedication to education were truly inspiring, and her legacy lives on today.

My mother and grandfather were both teachers that were passionate about education so I felt a connection to the work that Cora accomplished. Not to mention I’ve always been a voracious reader. I’d never heard of moonlight schools but it was interesting to discover the beginning of “adult education”. As I dug more into her story, it was fascinating to learn about how quickly more of these schools popped up around Kentucky, including many Colored Schools as Kentucky was still segregated at the time. Cora was concerned about the literacy of everyone, even writing a book for soldiers to learn to read after the Selective Service found over 700,000 men were illiterate.?

Her influence and reach extended beyond Kentucky and touched the nation as she served as not only the Chairman of the Illiteracy Commission of the National Education Association but also Chairman of the Illiteracy Committees of the National Council of Education. Among her other accomplishments, she was also the first woman elected president of the Kentucky Education Association.

Stewart connected others with reading. At WikiTree our focus is on familial connections. With the power of collaborative genealogy, it took just a few days for Cora to go from being a lone profile to having over 6,000 connections! We can explore these connections with two helpful tools, our Relationship and Connection Finders. The Relationship Finder helps users determine the genealogical relationship between two people. It is also known as a "cousin calculator" and can be used to sort out confusing cousin relationships. The Connection Finder is a feature that allows users to find the shortest connection path between two people which includes relationships through marriage.

Here are a few interesting connections for Cora:

Herbert Hoover

In her fight against adult illiteracy Cora was able to convince President Herbert Hoover to create the first National Advisory Committee on Illiteracy. Cora is a mere 17 degrees from President Hoover and they are connected by one marriage. A second cousin of Cora’s, Jesse Davenport, married a first cousin of Hoover’s, Rebecca Fouts.

Levar Burton

Levar Burton is an American actor, director, and host of the PBS Kids educational television series Reading Rainbow for more than 23 years. He and Cora would certainly appreciate each others’ efforts!? They are 32 degrees apart.

A person of interest in this connection path is Robert Tresville, a US pilot during World War II and one of the documented original Tuskegee Airmen.?

Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton is a country music icon and also a philanthropist who has dedicated herself to help with early childhood literacy in America. Her organization mails free children’s books to kids from their birth until they start school.? No doubt Cora would have loved this! Cora and Dolly are 16 degrees apart.

Jesse Stuart

Out of the seven starting individuals given to us by the Kentucky Genealogical Society, Cora’s closest connection is to poet laureate Jesse Stuart. Jesse is one of Appalachia’s best known anthologized authors and even wrote a love letter to Kentucky. He and Cora are 10 degrees apart. It’s fun to note that they are both connected by marriages to a Stuart/Stewart.

Cora Wilson Stewart provided an opportunity for people to come together, share knowledge and learn. For those who learned how to read, she gave them access to the world. The WikiTree Challenge, and WikiTree itself, provides an opportunity for people to come together, share their knowledge, and learn from one another. Our participants uncover new information about family history and build a sense of community through collaboration that reaches around the world.?

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WikiTree is a free website that has been growing since 2008. Community members privately collaborate with close family members on modern family history and publicly collaborate with other genealogists on deep ancestry. Since all the private and public profiles are connected on the same tree this collaboration is progressively making it easier for anyone to discover their roots for free. See https://www.WikiTree.com.