Dear Gelvin Family,

In the summer of 2025, I traveled with my wife and our two boys to northwest Missouri to explore the towns and landscapes where our family lived at the beginning of the 1900s. As a kid from the woods in the Carolinas, to me the vast farmlands, massive skies, and rolling hills were striking; driving through them felt a little like navigating a boat on a verdant ocean.

One place we visited was the town of Maitland, which sits like an island outpost in a sea of corn. I’d learned about Maitland while reading family research done by Christina Loud, a cousin whose grandmother is the sister of my great-grandmother. Another cousin, Al Rankin, had shared her book with me several years ago, and I was struck by the stories and photos it contained - scenes of joyful gatherings with friends and family - weddings, dinners, work, hangouts, all unfolding at the “big house” in Maitland. When I came across a group photo with my own Aunt Ruth in it, a little girl perched in a row of cousins in front of a crowd of dapper revelers, the whole thing started to feel a little closer.

So I found Maitland in Google Maps, and started clicking through street view, block by block, until I came across the house. It had changed hands a few times in the intervening decades, becoming a funeral home, a restaurant, a bed and breakfast, a house of curiosities.  But by the time I found it on street view it was vacant and abandoned.

When we were making plans to visit Missouri last year, I decided to try and find out who owned the house, and through a series of phone calls managed to get in touch with them. Soon, along with my mom and her brother (grandchildren of Katharine, who grew up there), we were there in the house, exploring 100+ year old rooms, porches and grounds, imagining the lives lived there - the joys and comforts, the enterprise and the luck, as well as the tragedy, discord and sorrow.  To be clear - this family’s story is not all happiness and roses - and visiting the house, for me, felt like a good way to acknowledge both the good and the bad. 

While the house is currently vacant, and it does need a lot of work, it still seems to be in surprisingly good condition for its age. The folks that own it now are life-long Holt county residents who grew up in Maitland and decided to buy the house a few years ago in order to preserve it.  They have done some initial restoration work to stabilize it, installing new roof decking and shingles, but they don’t plan to hold on to it and will likely sell it soon.

When we met last year, they offered to sell it to me for the amount they’ve put in to it (purchase and repairs), which is $110,000.  I told them I couldn’t buy it at the moment, and went home charmed and grateful for the chance to explore it.  But then it struck me that there must be a lot of descendants of this family out there in the world by now; enough that $110,000 might be a fairly achievable sum.  I started doing some research and putting together a family tree to try to get the info consolidated, and then decided to see how many of you I could contact to gauge interest.

So that’s the purpose of this website and survey. Is there enough interest at all?  I have no idea what might be done with the house, but I do value historic preservation, and can see how preserving it might benefit the town of Maitland and the community that the Gelvins helped establish. So I decided to put some feelers out and see what happens.  

If you’d like to, please take a look at the family tree, fill out the form below, and also send the link around to other descendants you happen to know!  If you have any additional information about the house and about the family, please reach out - and we can work out a way to consolidate and share it.

Thanks,

— Drew Grimes