Ross Coles

From information given by William Long:

My great grandmother's brother's family, the Ross Coles Family. The Coleses were well known spiritualists (seances, spirit communications) in their community. Nancy Coles was an ordained minister of the Spirtualist Research Church of Parsons, Kansas, and Speaker of the Pittsburg Spiritualist Society. While living in Weir, Nancy advertised in the local paper that she gives "clairvoyant readings, advice on spiritual affairs, advice on business affairs, and spirit messages. Residence three blocks north of exchange mill, Weir City, Kansas." She was also a member of the Knights and Ladies of Security. I read somewhere that Ross also shared in the spiritualist belief. Many other members of the Coles family were spiritualists, so far verified by me to include my ggg grandparents James C. Coles and Mary Pearson, brother Isaac Coleses' son George Coles and wife Eliza Morris, and Eliza and her second husband, E.G. Bartlett, the "Landlord of Lacona," who ran the Lacona Hotel, and the entire Bartlett family, including their son Cash Coles. It seems quite predictable that many spiritualists came from a Quaker background, the old meetings held in small meeting houses without windows, where everyone met in the dark and who knows what transpired in some of those meetings leading to the popularity of spiritualism in the 1800s and early 1900s.