"Roundheads and Ramblings"
ancestors
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Posted on Thursday, May 12, 2011 10:32 AM
One day this week, the front page of the Memphis newspaper featured a photo of the encroaching Mississippi flood waters. An elderly black woman sat on the front porch of her little house, watching as the river swallowed her yard and her front steps. "Two more bricks," she said, pointing to the corner of the house. "If the water gets over those two bricks, I may have to do something."
The accompanying story explained that safety officials and members of her family had already pleaded with her to evacuate to a shelter. Her refusal was firm. "This house may not be much, but it's all I've got. This house is full of memories. I've lived here all my life. I raised 12 children in this house. A little bit of water ain't gonna drive me away from here. This here house is my life, and I'm staying put."
As I read the article, I kept hearing echoes of the past. 150 years ago, the slaves of South Carolina watched their plantation owners flee from the invading Yankee army. And just as stoically as that woman on the front porch, they refused to budge when the chance to flee was offered to them. The soldiers, missionaries, and teachers who came to help them were puzzled by their reactions. After all, didn't all slaves want to be free? Of course they did, but to them, freedom meant being free to choose to stay in the homes they had always known.
What I was sensing here was not an attitude exclusive to one group of people or one occasion. Rather, it seems to be a universal trait of the human condition. Home is where we live and love and fight whatever small battles come our way. Home isn't a building or a particular town. It's a feeling of belonging, of being connected to something bigger than ourselves. And human beings everywhere will fight to cling to what they consider home, no matter how humble or threatening it may be.
A story of triumph appeared on the same day, in the same paper. Booker T. Washington High School was named the winner of the "2011 Race to the Top Commencement Challenge". The school is located just a few blocks from where that elderly woman sat on her porch. That morning, the school's principal had received a call from Vice President Joe Biden, telling her that President Obama would be delivering this year's commencement address. What a success story lies behind that announcement!
A few years ago, BTWHS was one of the lowest-achieving schools in the country. The neighborhood suffered from poverty, crime, and demoished buildings. Students floundered and quit school. Now, thanks to a concerted effort by their faculty, and supported by a federal grant, they have turned around not only the school but the neighborhood and the lives of those who live in South Memphis. To see all the facts and figures, watch the video they made.
Once again, as I read the article, I compared it to the story I am currently researching -- the development of the Penn School on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Like BTW, Penn set out to prove that all people can learn and grow into useful citizens. Penn, too, had a dedicated faculty, led by Miss Laura Towne. Laura believed that in a safe and supportive environment, all children could achieve a high level of academic excellence. She took small slave children and turned them into life-long learners. Her goals exactly match those of the faculty of BTW.
As I consider these similarities, I am more and more convinced of the value of the kind of writing I do. Through the stories of the past we can better understand the challenges of the present. People who lived 150 years ago faced the same sorts of problems we do and found the same kinds of solutions that work today. There are no hard lines of "then" and "now." We are all part of a continuum, sharing the same human condition. Historical fiction is one tool for strengthening our bonds to the human community.
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Posted on Thursday, March 10, 2011 11:09 AM
What a nag I'm becoming I didn't start out to
be quite so negative. For the last
several posts, however, I have been warning against believing everything you
find as you research your topic or your own ancestors. Before I leave this thread,
I have to add another. We'll frame
it as a positive rule: "Always check the identity of your source."
The more information becomes instantly available over the internet, the more
careful you have to be. There's a
wealth of material out there; there is also a never-ending supply of quacks, polemicists,
and other angry people. Don't accept anything without finding some strong
supporting evidence.
We'll talk more about
using the internet in another post.
For now, I want to call attention to a particularly dangerous area
— personal letters or diaries that
have been transcribed, copied, or edited by someone else. The Italian language has an
important proverb: "Traduttore
traditore." It means, roughly, "a translator is a traitor."
Spanish provides a similar thought: "E
que traduce, traiciona," or "He who translates is guilty of a
betrayal." I kept the Italian version posted on the wall right above my
office computer while I was working on a translation of Latin letters, just to
remind myself that my English translation should reflect nothing but what the
author wrote, not what I thought he SHOULD have written.
Back when I was first
starting to do the research for A Scratch
with the Rebels, I traveled to Penn State University to sift through a huge
collection of materials from the 100th Pennsylvania Regiment. Seven large boxes
in the library basement held a conglomeration of original letters, newspaper
clippings, and typescript copies of other letters and diaries from members of
the regiment. Nothing much had
been done to preserve the materials, so that the original documents were often
faded and ripped. I was grateful
for the typescripts and spent much of my limited time reading those because
they took less time effort. The
collection as a whole was so valuable for what I was doing that I didn't worry
much about authenticity. It had,
after all, been collected by other descendants of the Roundheads, and it was
compiled by a college English professor who taught in the area from which the
regiment had been recruited.
Some time a bit later,
I was in the public library in New Castle, PA, this time looking for newspaper
articles that would reveal how much the people back home knew of the war and
how they felt about it. At one
point the librarian came back into the archives to chat. She casually mentioned an elderly
gentleman who had been there several years before. He had been looking for evidence that the regimental
commander had been having an affair with the regimental nurse. He had insisted
that the chaplain had been quite upset about the affair. Had I seen anything
about that, she asked. I dismissed it out of hand. After all, I had just finished reading a typescript of Rev.
Browne's letters, and I had not seen a single mention of such a thing. I dismissed it as utter nonsense. The
librarian was relieved; Col. Leasure was a New Castle native and a local
hero. She wanted nothing to sully
his name.
I, too, put it out of
my head for the time being, but I became a bit intrigued by the
possibility. Col. Leasure was a
dapper little fellow. Nurse Nellie
was young and very attractive. And
Rev. Browne was a straight-laced Calvinist. So when I went to the Military
History Institute in Carlyle to investigate their holdings, I was pleased to
learn that they had the original letters from Rev. Browne — some three hundred
of them, many more than I knew about.
I asked for the collection and put my husband to work on one stack while
I plowed through the other.
"Look for any mention of Nellie," I told him.
It didn't take long!
These original letters were full of innuendo, snarling attacks on Nellie's
character, and semi-veiled
accusations of improper relationships. It was clear that the good chaplain had
hated the nurse with a finely-honed passion and that he resented the fact that
the colonel seemed to favor her.
But why the difference?
When I talked to the archivist there, he shrugged and said, "Well,
Browne's granddaughter was the one who prepared the typescript before we received
the letters."
And there was the
answer to at least part of the puzzle. The granddaughter had sanitized the
collection, systematically removing anything that might have reflected badly on
her beloved ancestor. It didn't
prove, of course, whether or not there had been an affair. It simply explained why I had not
reached the same conclusion as the elderly gentleman who believed what Browne
had believed.
I remain grateful for
the discovery. It gave rise to my
next book, Beyond All Price, and in
that novel I had to deal with the question of the affair. I won't give away my
final conclusion, but I can tell you that I would have written a much different
book if I had not read the original letters for myself.
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Posted on Monday, March 07, 2011 11:11 AM
On May 5, 1868, General Logan, commander of
the Grand Army of the Republic, issued an order declaring that Union and
Confederate war dead would be honored on May 30 with flowers laid
on their graves in Arlington National Cemetery. That was the origin of Decoration Day, or, as we are more apt to call it, Memorial Day. In cemeteries all over the country, small G.A.R. markers stand next to larger stones, and in May veterans and scouting troops plant a small American flag near each marker. There's no better time to go looking for a Civil War burial site.
My mother's family had its own Civil War soldier to honor,
and, when I was young, Decoration Day was the traditional day for the family to gather in North
Sewickley Cemetery, right outside Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, for a day of clean-up and family
reminiscing. Five McCaskey sisters, accompanied by
picnic baskets, flower pots, rakes, hoes, grumbling husbands, and assorted
children spent the day moving from gravestone to gravestone, not mourning but
celebrating the good times they remembered.
I learned my family's history during those yearly excursions to North Sewickley. There was the marker of the family matriarch, who brought her seven children from
Ireland to the hills of Pennsylvania in 1795, traveling first in steerage, and
then on foot. The stone bore only the single word, "Nancy," but it
still stands firmly rooted on that hillside. A small stone marks the grave of cousin Electa, believed to have died in the flu epidemic of 1918 (although the stone says 1917); another grave memorializes a tiny James McCaskey, a victim of diphtheria at the age of two in 1896. By noon, the decorating crew had
usually made its way to a circle of pine trees near the graves of the McCaskey sisters' grandparents. Lunch was spread on blankets while someone told the story of Sgt. James McCaskey, who died in
defense of his country in 1862. Long before I found the official account of James's death, I knew the story of the brave young man left sitting up against a tree on the battlefield while he bled to death from cannon fire.
Cemeteries can prove
to be a rich source for genealogical research.But as always, a researcher must accept any such
evidence with a high degree of skepticism until it can be confirmed. Here are some suggestions for doing your own cemetery
explorations.
1. Gather as much
information as you can before you actually visit the cemetery, unless, of
course, you're just curious and
not looking for anything or anyone in particular. Assuming you are interested in specific individuals, start
by asking questions. If you know
the cemetery you plan to visit, check with the caretaker or sexton to see if
there is a directory. If the
cemetery is no longer an active one, look for the pastor of the nearest church.
Or try the local history section of the public library.
2. An obituary from a
local newspaper can tell you which cemetery to visit. That's how David Welch and I eventually found the grave of
Nellie M. Chase. Her obituary, reprinted in a Reading, PA newspaper, said she
was living in Paris, TN at the time of her death. It also suggested that she and her husband ran
the railroad hotel there. The obituary noted that both of them actually died in Louisville, KY. That information led to a local newspaper article about
yellow fever deaths in Paris, TN. Other yellow fever articles led to a book on their employer,
the L & R Railroad, which in turn gave the name of the cemetery in which Nellie and her husband were buried. After
that it only took a quick inquiry to the Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville to
discover the exact location of their burial plots and to get a photograph of
their joined headstones.
3. Take the right
equipment with you. Plan to take notes on every headstone
you identify, but also be sure to have a camera. Notes have a way of perpetuating small errors. You'll want a picture later to
double-check the details. Traditionally, Christian graves are oriented toward the east; i.e.,
the headstone is at the west end
of the plot and the foot of the coffin at the east end, in preparation for
Resurrection Day. For that reason,
inscriptions on a headstone will be clearer if the picture is taken in the
morning.
4. Don't forget the insect spray. Mosquitoes can be formidable guards
against your investigations. And
unless the cemetery is very well maintained, take gardening gloves and pruning
shears. I really wanted to try to
straighten Uncle James's headstone, but a crop of fresh poison ivy dissuaded
me. A spray bottle of water also
comes in handy. Inscriptions are
easier to read when they are wet, and you may need to wash away soil
accumulations.
 5. Be alert
to the clues on the stones themselves. Carvings on the headstone may provide clues to religion or military
service. Children's markers are likely to have flowers or small animals. I like to think this little figure on cousin Electa's stone is a rabbit.
 6. Tombstones frequently bear birth and death dates, although birth years
are less to be trusted than death years. An inscription reading "Beloved
Wife" usually means the woman's husband was still alive at her death. Stones reading "Mother" and "Father" confirm the existence of children alive at the time of the parents' deaths.
7. Unmarried sons and daughters are more
likely to be buried near their parents. The graves of a woman or a couple near
small unmarked stones may indicate the deaths of unnamed infants. Death dates
can tie a victim to a natural disaster such as an earthquake or an epidemic of
influenza or yellow fever.
8. Note the names on graves close to those of your own family members. You may be looking at their friends and neighbors. Cemeteries have many stories to tell. Let the stones speak to you.
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Posted on Wednesday, March 02, 2011 11:17 AM
 I have learned a lot
about cemetery research from a mysterious
headstone that bears the name of my great-uncle James McCaskey, who was killed
in the Civil War. After much searching, I found this marker in the same Pennsylvania
cemetery where many of my other McCaskey ancestors are buried. It reads:
James McCaskey Born April 12, 1839 Died June 16, 1862 James Island, S.C.
Those details are all
correct; the military action on James island was the Battle of Secessionville. The problem is that the notification of
his death says that his body was never found. The official records say that the
Confederate troops buried the Union soldiers killed in the battle (some 509 of
them) in unmarked graves on the battlefield. North Sewickley Cemetery records
indicated that the headstone was placed in 1875, after Mrs. Jane McCaskey
purchased three adjoining plots and ordered three matching stones — one for her
recently deceased husband John, one for herself, and one for her missing eldest
son James.
Sure enough, the
marker next to the one for James marks the grave of my great-grandmother Jane
McCaskey. But on the far side of her grave, the ground has been cut away, and a
gravel road lies several feet below the resulting ledge. So where is Great-Grandpa John? There is no sign of him or his
tombstone at all. Was he ever there? Did an earthmover carry him away when the
road was put in? Or is he in the plot marked with his son's tombstone? At this point the solution to the
problem becomes too macabre to consider, so I am willing to accept what I THINK
I know without further investigation.
Lesson Number One: A
tombstone does not always equal a real burial. Obviously, James's headstone
marks an empty grave, a not uncommon phenomenon during a war that swallowed up
so many young men on distant battlefields. The Grand Army of the Republic
honors James McCaskey's service every Memorial Day by placing a flag on the
grave site, but even their records stop short of stating that he is actually
buried there.
 Lesson Number Two: The
lack of a headstone does not necessarily mean that no grave ever existed. As
time passes, stones crumble, weeds take over, land subsides, new demands for
grave sites force owners to change the layout of their cemetery plots. In this
picture, you can see that Jane
McCaskey's stone now teeters dangerously close to the edge of the cut-away
bank. In fact, it is largely supported by the roots of the tree in view just behind the stone. John's
grave would have been on the far side, since wives were nearly always buried to
the left of their husbands. John has disappeared, but we know from court
records and other documents that he was buried in that location in 1875.
Lesson
Number Three: Burial practices
change over time. While I was planning this blog post, I received a message
from another genealogist, a distant cousin of my husband's, who had found the
graves of my husband's grandfather and great-grandfather. I was astonished to learn that both men
were buried in the same grave at St. Mary Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio — one
above the other. The cemetery records show John Christoph Schreiber
(1845-1889) in section A, lot 48
North grave 4 E.D. (which stands
for extra deep, or at about eight feet). His son, John C. Schriber, Jr.
(1867-1928) is in section A, lot 48 North, grave 4 O.T.(on top, or at about 4
feet).
Cemeteries
can tell us a great deal about those whose lives we are researching. Sometimes,
perhaps, they tell us more than we really wanted to know! |
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Posted on Tuesday, February 22, 2011 2:53 PM
It couldn't be easier,
right? The first time you visit an online genealogy site, they ask you to enter
just the first and last name of the person in whom you are interested.
Then they suggest you add as many other details as you happen to
know. When I was starting the
research for Beyond All Price, I
entered a name (Nellie Chase), her birth state (Maine), and a year range for
her birth (1835-1845). And I got
results. 147 of them, in fact! Who
would have guessed that there would be that many Nellie Chases in the world,
let alone in a single state. The site suggested I could narrow my results by
entering more information, but more information was what I was looking
for. I didn't know her parentage,
her city, her death date, her husband's name, or any of the other things they
suggested.
Did I eventually find
the Nellie I was looking for?
Yes, I think so. But it took years, and that will have to be a separate story.. Now
if you are hunting for a family member,
you may have more facts than I did to start out with, but you are likely
to run into many of the same
problems. Here are some of the
pitfalls that you need to be aware of.
1. Census records look
valuable, and they can be, but their worth depends entirely upon the competence of the person
doing the recording. I just
examined a record for my mother's family from the 1900 Pennsylvania
Census. It listed the birth dates
of two of her sisters as November 1877 and February 1878. Three months
apart? Probably not!
2. For any kind of
record before the days of typewriters and computers, handwriting causes major
problems. Some examples are marvelously clear; others are scrawls or
overwritten with corrections, so that it is impossible to decipher them. Then
there are problems caused by mispronunciations or bad hearing or faulty
transcriptions. The online version
of the 1910 Census shows my mother (Margaret McCaskey) as Marguett Mccacbey.
3. Nicknames cause
their own set of difficulties.
Nellie Chase always used the name Nellie, but her given name could have
been Nell, Helen, Eleanor, or Ellen. My own brother had problems all his life
explaining his name. My mother
named him Jack. Just Jack. It was not a nickname, but people naturally
assumed that his real name must have been John or Jacques or even James.
4. Family names change
over time. A major culprit may be
an immigration record, on which an ethnic name was written down as the closest
English approximation. One branch of my father's family bore the surname of
Arendt in Germany. They arrived in
America as Aurand. Their friends
the Muellers became the Millers.
5. Sometimes name
differences are the result of a deliberate choice. I grew up knowing two cousins who sported the same name but
different pronunciations. Their fathers had a falling out and did not speak to
each other, so one pronounced the last syllable of the family name as
"KO" while the other used "KAWK." Both, however, spelled it
as "-cock."
6. And then there's my
husband's family. We are
frequently told that our last name should be spelled "Schreiber." Well,
it originally was. The family story
says that John Schreiber, who fought in the Civil War, found that his discharge
papers had his name spelled wrong.
He was given two choices.
He could refuse the discharge and stay in the army. Or he could change his name to
Schriber, take the discharge as written, and go home that very day. He went
home! And we've been Schribers ever since.
Don't misunderstand
me. Genealogical research is great
fun, and you can learn amazing things about your own family, including where
all the skeletons are buried. But
you do have to enter the search with a healthy dose of skepticism. The best family record sites offer you
an option to search for an exact spelling or an approximate one. I usually start with the exact search,
but when that fails, a "sounds like" option is frequently the
answer. After all, Nellie might
have been Nelie, or Nelly, or Ellie, or even Ellen, as she turned out to be.
Here are some online
databases that may help your search.
Remember, however, that they don't come with guarantees that they are
complete or that their information is accurate. I also recommend that you take
full advantage of offers to use the sites without charge for a short period of
time before committing yourself to
paying for a membership. You may
find the site useful, of course, but it may contain nothing at all to help you.
1. The Social Security Death Index contains birth
and death dates for deceased individuals with Social Security numbers who died
after 1962 (when the records were computerized) through the current year.
2. RootsWeb's WorldConnect Project is a database
containing family files submitted by both amateur and professional researchers.
For that reason you can expect to find a large number of errors.
3. FamilySearch. The Ancestral
File and International Genealogical Index (IGI), a service provided by The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, contain information on millions
of people worldwide, but these records too can be in error because many
contributors are amateurs.
4. The Ellis Island Database contains images of
ship manifests documenting over 22 million people who entered the United States
between 1892 and 1924 through Ellis Island and the Port of New York.
5. The USGenWeb
Project directory provides links to state and county
genealogical resources.
6. Perhaps the most useful for the beginning
researcher is Ancestry.com. It offers ongoing help, access to millions of
handwritten records, and the
chance to connect with others who may be researching the same people.
Do any of you have other suggestions to add to
this list?
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