Hello, Because a lot of you seem to be interested in the WOW because of the memorial tombstones you have found, I thought I would explain a little more about them. The tombstone is present because the person buried there was insured by Woodmen of the World. If your tombstone is for a female and is marked SFWC then it was provided by WOW's sister organization, the Supreme Forest Woodmen Circle. If an insured died and there was no other provision for a stone, then the insurance company provided a memorial stone. In the early days there was no addition fee for the stone, I'm not sure if there was one later. This tombstone memorial benefit was only one of many that you received for insuring with these companies. Short History Lesson on insurance (feel free to skip but it's not too bad a read) --- In the beginning, the organizations provided insurance and annuities to insured members at a time when the concept of insuring a person's life was still in its infancy. Being such a new concept, it could also be a hard sell. After all, unless an individual had experienced an adverse event in their lives, people were not eager to buy to protect 'just in case' a tragedy might happen. At that time the people who were most eager to insure were those who had had a provider die and suffered the consequences when the survivors had no resources. Families torn apart and scattered to the four winds was one. Families beggared and thrown out into the streets was another. There were no 'safety nets' in those days. Unless there was extended family to take in others, the results of such a death could be fairly horrific. So insurance was born and the companies vied to sell to the consumer. End of lesson -- (wasn't too bad was it?) WOW and, a short time later, SFWC were set up to offer 'more' than the normal insurance policy that was on the market in the early days. The cynic would say it was a selling technique. The dedicated insurance salesman/saleswoman of that time never saw it as such. When you were insured with either WOW or SFWC, you had the opportunity to participate in a social group known as a lodge. The number you sometimes find on a memorial stone is likely to be a lodge number. In the first three quarters of the century, the Woodmen of the World (WOW) was a fraternal organization and functioned as a social group with regular meetings for its members. If you bought an insurance policy you automatically became eligible for lodge membership. (Participation in a lodge was an insured individual's choice. If he/she wasn't active in lodge membership or if there wasn't an active lodge nearby, then the stone will just have the engraved WOW or SFWC.) WOW insured men and boys. The Supreme Forest Woodman Circle (SFWC), who insured women and girls, also had a lodge. This social aspect made the insurance policy a 'better buy', especially in places where social outlets were scarce. WOW lodges provided a place for men to gather that didn't involve drinking, women, and carousing. Maybe not such a rarity east of the Mississippi, but definitely one west of that region. Their wives appreciated the WOW lodges since they knew there husbands were less likely to get into too much trouble there. The SFWC policy was especially a good buy because 'nice' social gatherings for women were not exactly plentiful, especially west of the Mississippi, in the first forty years or so of this century. The SFWC lodge gave women a socially acceptable place to go in the evenings. It was a place for women only and gave them an evening out. Both organizations had local, state, and national conventions which members could attend to meet, greet, and attend to business. National conventions were more likely to be attended by those higher in the organization but all insured individuals were welcome. The Lodge had all types of activities for the young and old. It also provided the local communities with 'good works', especially in times of local disaster. Now I believe the organization has an ongoing relationship with the Red Cross. (WOW and SFWC merged in the 60s or 70s as WOW.) The insurance programs were very good also, especially the women's part which is what I know the most about. In the early days, insurance for women and children was almost unheard of. If a man died and had insurance, it helped to bury him and support the surviving wife and children. If a woman died uninsured, there was no such safety net. A man could find himself alone, broke because of burial expenses, and in a particularly bad situation, especially during 1920s and 1930s and the Depression. He might not be able to care for his family, especially young children. If his wife had been insured, then the insurance money helped tremendously. It paid to bury her, with possibly enough left over to have young children taken care of while he earned a living to feed and cloth them. If an uninsured woman died who was single or without a husband because of widowhood or divorce, then there was usually nothing to take care of her final bills, bury her, or provide for any surviving children. If an uninsured child died, then the funeral and burial expenses had to be borne by the family. If more than one family member died at the same time because of a measles epidemic or flu epidemic, etc., the problems were compounded and magnified. Remember we are not talking frontier days here when burials were made in crude wood boxes by the roadside and neighbors took in survivors because there was a need. Funeral and burial expenses were the norm in the first part of this century and, just like today, they were high in relationship to the overall economy. Neighbors might take in the strays from such a tragedy, even when economic times were bad, but the strays often had to live with resentment and even ill treatment due to the stress. The SFWC moved to fill this void in the 'safety net'. Since the organizations did almost everything else alike, I assume that WOW had a similar setup to the one I will describe below. The SFWC offered a range of services to woman that were totally unlike any others offered by most insurance companies of that time. If a woman bought a policy and she was left alone in her old age with the policy intact, she could go to the SFWC home in Texas (Sherman, Texas?) and live the rest of her life with her medical bills, etc. provided and without paying another dime. I think that if she was still married and both of them needed the service that they could both go to the Home, whether the spouse was insured with the company or not, but am unsure on this point. If she was single and died, the policy took care of paying her bills and burying her. If she had surviving children, they could go to the same Home and be housed, clothed, fed, and educated until they reached the age of 18. It was all a part of the policy. There was no grace period either. The Home was more like a private boarding place than an orphanage or poor house or even a 'modern' nursing home. The Home was a place of refuge in a time when there was no refuge for old women and unwanted 'orphans'. It protected them until protection was no longer needed. It buried the older folk when they died. It sheltered and educated children until they were grown. Of course when the modern day social safety nets of the Federal Government came into being the Home was no longer needed, but I know it was functioning in 1960 because I visited it. Personal Note: My paternal family was involved in the SFWC part of the company. My paternal grandparents lost both their two young children in 1914 from pneumonia complications during in a measles outbreak. The children, of course, were not insured. Expenses made times hard for quite awhile. My father was born in 1917. When he was five or so, a salesperson knocked on my grandmother's door in Douglas, Arizona (statehood: 1912?) and offered her a chance to insure him. Within a year, she was selling insurance for the company. She was born in 1889, and I count her one of the first women's 'libbers'. At a time when it was unthinkable for a woman to work outside of the home if she was married and had a family, she had a career selling insurance. Years passed and so did the great Depression, WWII, the Korean War, the 50s recession. Other types of insurance were introduced, including education endowment policies. I had 4 small ones ... each matured in four consecutive years and contributed to paying the costs of my college education. I still have my original policy which was converted to the adult policy when I became older. I'm willing to bet my father's policy is still in force and he is in his eighties. For my grandmother, the company was practically a life-long commitment (d 1979). I know she was in her seventies when she was finally forced to retired. She worked her way up from an individual salesperson to District Manager to State Manager with responsibility for recruitment, training, and supervision of salespersons, as well as servicing the policies. She arranged for lots of those memorial stones and saw to their placement. She settled many in the Texas Home, including three small girls who, without their mother's policy, would have been sent to the local poor house when their mother died within 6 months of her buying the insurance. I traveled with her during the summers from 1952-1960. My geographical knowledge of the state of Arizona from Douglas to Kingman's Mohave Desert, Yuma to the 4 corners region, is extensive. It was an opportunity that few children have, and my grandmother's involvement with SFWC is the reason for the great memories I have of that state. I attended and participated in national conventions in Washington D.C., Denver, Miami, and Dallas, as well as more Arizona lodge meetings than I can count. First hand I can testify to the WOW and SFWC benefits and to the caring nature of the fraternal organization they represented to their policy holders during the majority of this century. - Jo Ann Kendrick Robinson "Shirley B. Reed" wrote: > Hmail09@aol.com wrote: > > > > Woodman of the World is a fraternal org. they furnished Stones for members in > > the early part of the century. I don't know if it went with their insurance > > policy or if it was something extra. My husband is still a member of WOW. He > > is not an active member but he has a life insurance policy with them and we > > have our retirement money invested with them. His grandfather was a 50 year > > Woodman and my husband is a 40 yr member. Their address is > > WOODMAN OF THE WORLD LIFE INSURANCE SOCIETY > > Home office 1700 Farnam St. > > Omaha, Nebraska 68102 > > I have often wondered if they will give out genealogy info but have never > > inquired. Good Luck Helen > > > > ==== TXPARKER Mailing List ==== > > To UNSUBSCRIBE from the TXPARKER-L list, send a message to TXPARKER-L-request@rootsweb.com that contains in the body of the message the command unsubscribe and no other text. No subject line is necessary, but if your software requires one, just use unsubscribe as the subject, too. To unsubscribe from the digest, use the address - TXPARKER-D-request@rootsweb.com > > Oh thanks Helen. I didn't know you were involved with them. My mother's > gr. father is buried in Calvary Cem., which at one time was Richardson > but not in Dallas. The caretaker there sent me a photo of his grave and > it had the Woodman of the World emblem on it and if memory serves, it > gave a Camp # or something like that. > Love, Shirley > > ==== TXPARKER Mailing List ==== > List problems? Contact the Parker County listowner, PipL7x3@aol.com.