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Photo by Bob Pennell Emillee Brazill, library director for the Rogue Valley Genealogical Society Inc., sorts through the contents of a box of family mementos found in a house in Gold Hill last fall. Old photos hold link to family history By PAUL FATTIG H is chiseled face stares intensely out of the past, his eyes squinting into the future. The grainy photograph is of once-famous stagecoach driver Jack Montgomery, circa 1900. Another photograph, taken a few years later, shows him sitting tall in a carriage pulled by a pair of matching horses. Montgomery is the patriarch of a family whose generations are captured in old photographs, letters and newspaper clippings found in a Gold Hill home last fall. The box of Montgomery family memorabilia was given to a member of the Rogue Valley Genealogical Society Inc. on New Year's Day. But most of the old photographs have no names, no dates. Consider the young woman holding a small boy wearing a dress. Or the aging matron whose jaw is set like a bulldog. "We want to find their descendants to give them all of this," said Emillee Brazill, the society's library director. "These aren't just pictures -- these are lives." They are also lives that once loomed large in the Rogue Valley. Montgomery, who was 77 when he died in 1910 in his home near Eagle Point, regularly drove stage from Yreka, Calif., to Roseburg. He was driving when the stagecoach was robbed of half a million dollars in gold dust it was carrying on May 7, 1857, according to an article in the September issue of Saga magazine. And his daughter, Leona Josephine Montgomery Roberts, carried the mail on horseback from the Agate Post Office to the Table Rock Post Office from 1901 through 1905. Based on information provided by the society, the Mail Tribune tracked down a descendant, Richard Roberts of Crescent City. "Jack Montgomery was my great-grandfather," Roberts said in a telephone interview Thursday evening. "About the only history I know about him was an article my grandmother (Leona) had about him driving gold out of Gold Hill. Unfortunately, our family wasn't one to sit around and chat about family history." Nor do any family members remain in the Rogue Valley. Roberts, 65, and his wife own a grocery store in Crescent City, Calif. Moreover, the family is relatively small, he said, noting he has no children, and his brother never married. Their father, Chester Roberts, was an only child, he added. "We'd love to have that box," Richard Roberts said. "You bet we would." The box reflects the lives of those who settled Southern Oregon. Brazill, who has been researching the family's history since the box arrived, holds up a photograph of Jannette Ann Redpath Montgomery, the stagecoach driver's wife. The family matriarch, wearing a long Victorian dress, looks like half of "American Gothic." "Her maiden name was Griffin," Brazill said, referring to a pioneer family whose name now graces a local stream. "It was the second marriage for both of them. Her first husband was David Redpath. They were married in 1863." After her first husband's death, she married Montgomery in 1878 in Jacksonville. "I'm wondering if that isn't Leona and Chester," Brazill said of the photograph of a mother holding a young son. "The other pictures of Chester as a baby look a lot like him. And the pictures of her later in life, her face looks a lot like that." There is also an envelope containing golden-brown hair. Inside the envelope is a handwritten note reading, "Mary Ann Redpath died March 22, 1870. My half sister's hair." An old hair comb made from bamboo was probably brought home by Chester Roberts, who served in New Guinea during World War II, Brazill surmises. The box also contains several of Chester's letters sent during the war. "How are the colt and goats getting along?" he asked in a letter dated May 21, 1944. There is a faded award for excellence in arithmetic given to "Miss Leona Montgomery" on April 4, 1897, when she attended St. Mary's Academy in Jacksonville. Brazill, who is eager to give the box to Roberts when he expects to pick it up next week, said reuniting memorabilia with descendants is part of what makes the volunteer work worthwhile. "When personal things like this come in, we try to find the owners, the descendants," she said. "That's where it belongs." For more information about the society, call 770-5848. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA