In answer to your query about Smirls, I do not have any specific information for you. However, I do have some tidbits and names and relationships to share.

My aunt Alma Greenslit was born in 1912. When she was in her 80s she wrote a short family history for me about the years she lived with her mother and step-father Dick Greenslit on various places near Roundup between 1913-1924.

In the spring of 1917, Dick and Anna Greenslit and her daughter Alma and my father Harley lived on the southern part of the Rufus B. Thompson ranch (which was about 25 mi. north of Roundup, Aunt Alma said.) Here's an excerpt of my aunt's history:

" I was 8 years old and had never been to a school, and there was no school near us, so the last couple months of school that year (1917), our neighbors Mr. and Mrs. SMIRL had a married daughter CORA JEHLE living several miles north of us and she was teaching a country school driving a horse and a 2 wheel cart to school, and the SMIRLS asked the folks if I could go and stay with CORA and BENNY JEHLE and go to school. ...

"I slept on a big trunk in their living room and one night I rolled off onto the floor in my sleep. Cora came and helped me back to bed on the trunk.

"I remember helping Cora hitch her horse to the cart to go to school. There was a man at the school building a barn for Cora's horse using nice new lumber. It was Easter time (1917) and all the school kids hunted and found Easter candy eggs all around in the barn.

"I remember the man helping me to find a nest of Easter eggs and I thought of that many times over the next few years. And I wondered why, why did we hunt eggs. I had never heard about Easter." ...

... "It wasn't until I was 12 years old and living down in the Bull Mountains south of Roundup that Dick (her step-father Dick Greenslit), took me to Sunday school once in a while that I learned about Easter and why I found some Easter eggs when I was 8 years old."

Hope this vignette is about SMIRL and JEHLE is connected to your SMIRL family.

-- Helen Greenslit Graves
Lake Almanor, Calif.