Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Staff photo: Matthew Asher Portales resident Clovie Chunn works on the microfilm machine at the Portales Public Library Wednesday afternoon. Chunn spends his free time researching the genealogy of his family, his wife’s family and his close friends.
Genealogy a decade-long project
Editor’s note: The following is one in a continuing series on local senior citizens.
By Matthew Asher
STAFF WRITER
Anybody can claim that they can trace their family tree back to the 1600’s but not too many people can back it up with documents.
For Portales resident Clovie Chunn, he has spent the last 10 years researching genealogy not only for his family but the families of his wife, Valerie, and his many local friends.
Staff photo: Matthew Asher
Portales resident Clovie Chunn works on the microfilm machine at the Portales Public Library Wednesday afternoon. Chunn spends his free time researching the genealogy of his family, his wife’s family and his close friends.
At 74 years old, Clovie himself has lived in Roosevelt County since 1946 when he moved to Arch, but his family has lived in the New Mexico territory since 1910. Before then, they can be traced back to Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and all the way to Maryland where his great (times seven) grandfather lived starting in 1683.
“This was in Charles County, Maryland,” Clovie said. “He patented some land then and once again in 1686. The family was there for about three generations.”
Clovie and Valerie enjoy reading the land grants because of how different they are from modern-day legal documents.
“Early land documents are written much more eloquently than today,” Valerie said. “It may tell you the whole history of who got it and when they got it. The description of the land may tell you in feet or in a vara (a Spanish measurement close to a yard). It may tell you, ‘starting at the oak tree, go 200 meters to an old wolf den, then go this way for 400 meters until you reach the river.’ Really beautiful language.”
After graduating from Elida High School, Clovie worked a variety of odd jobs, including lead guitarist and singer for a country rock band called “Country Bridge.”
“We played everywhere from the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas to Florida to New Jersey,” he said. “I got out of it after 14 years, because it got hard to find straight musicians who weren’t on pot or pills.”
Clovie finally returned to Roosevelt County in 1995 when his mother passed away. He took a job at a Walmart as a loss-prevention employee. This is where he met Valerie and the two have been married for three years.
“I met her in 2001 and on the 12th anniversary of us meeting, we got married,” he said. “It was Valerie’s father that got me into genealogy.”
“My dad has worked on my family for 20 years and has documented over 50,000 names in our tree,” Valerie said. “You hit dead ends then you look for other people until you hit another dead end and try to find connections. Prior to 1850, the U.S. Census would only list the names of the head of the household and then would have categories of men 5 (years) and under, women 5 (years) and under without names to make it harder to find people.”
On a typical week, one can find Clovie and Valerie in the genealogy department of the Portales Public Library. Valerie transcribes and writes out the documents she finds and Clovie types them out.
“We do it verbatim,” Clovie said. “If there’s a misspelling, we misspell it, too.”
For Clovie and Valerie, they enjoy doing this research because of the stories and information they uncover.
“You understand a lot better about who you are if you know where you came from,” Clovie said. “It’s kind of a legacy. We have our family tree on ancestry.com, and we have over 8,000 uploads and nearly 6,000 attachments. We try to document everything, not just take people’s word. If we can prove it, great. We’ve done lots of research for friends for free. We’re not doing this for money.”
Everybody growing up hears stories of what their relatives did growing up, but a lot of them are tough to prove. With the 10-plus years of researching people, Valerie and Clovie said they have learned that there’s always some truth to these stories, but like the game “telephone,” by the time it’s filtered through numerous parties, the story varies greatly from what actually happened.
“There’s always a nugget of truth to every old family story,” Valerie said. “We heard one about a relative who was supposed to be an Indian medicine man. That’s kind of true.
What we discovered was he was 100 percent white, but he traveled to the Indian lands as a doctor to take care of them. So he was a medicine man for Indians, but not an Indian Medicine Man.”
