"Roundheads and Ramblings"
genealogy
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Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2012 9:50 AM
Census records are kept sealed for 72 years, from the date at which
they were taken. So the April 1,1940 records were just opened for the
first time last week. The experts at Ancestry.com have done an amazing
job of photographing every page and arranging the images, so that
genealogists can find the pages by state, county, city (called
"inhabited place"), and ward. Indexing by name will take much longer, so
for now you can't enter a name and hope to find that person. And until
the indexing is finished, finding your ancestors will take some time,
since it depends on scrolling through page after page of handwritten
data. Still, you can find the people you are looking for if you know
where they lived. As a member of Ancestry.com, I was able to register to
be notified when the two states I'm most interested in exploring have
been indexed and made available.
What was happening in 1940? Well for some of us old-timers, we were busy getting born, learning to crawl, tasting real food for the first time, and keeping our parents up all night. For the rest of you, it was still "the olden days." But chances are really good that you know, or remember, someone whose life is being revealed for the first time. 1940 was the year that most of Europe was already caught up in a major war, but America was still almost 2 years away from entering WWII. For the United States, the crucial issue was recovery from the Great Depression, and you'll find signs of that all through the census questions.
Among the questions asked of everyone were these: - Do you own or rent your home?
- Have you moved in the past year?
- Do you share that home with others, and if so, what is their relationship to you?
- Are you employed? If not, are you receiving unemployment pay?
- Have you changed jobs in the past year?
- Exactly what kind of work do you do?
- What kind of company, establishment, or individual employs you?
- How many hours did you work last week?
- How many weeks were you employed during the past year?
- What is your annual salary?
For a few randomly-selected individuals (about 1 in 10-15) additional questions included: - Birthplace of father and mother
- Are you a veteran or a dependent of a veteran?
- Do you have a Social Security number?
- Do you have some other form of old-age insurance?
- What is your usual occupation (what you are trained to do, not necessarily current employment)?
And for women: - Have you been married more than once?
- Age at first marriage?
- How many children have you given birth to?
Here's one random example, pulled from my own home town. One of the people selected for addition questioning was a 42-year-old unmarried man who lived with his father, an older brother, and an older sister in a rented home. In the main data, he is listed as a laborer, employed by the government in a project to wash City Hall, and his total income for the year was $520. In the supplementary section, he was not a veteran, had no Social Security or old-age insurance, and considered himself to be a crane operator in the bridge construction business.
The details are fascinating and eye-opening. Prepare to be shocked -- and then grateful for what you have.
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Posted on Tuesday, April 10, 2012 1:57 PM
When I was in first grade, I had a beau. "Johnny" was a typical freckle-faced boy -- not very clever, but raised to be polite and quiet. He lived about five blocks from me, close enough in those days that he could walk to my house and ask if I wanted to play. I never did. He didn't know anything about doll houses and I didn't like cowboys and Indians. Time after time, I sent him away, saying "I don't like boys!"
One day he knocked on our front door. My mother answered, looked around to see who had knocked, and finally looked down to see an earnest little face. "Please, Ma'am. Are you Carolyn's mother?" When she admitted that she was, he asked, "Please, could you tell her to like me--just a little bit?"
Well, it made a a great story at the dinner table, much to my embarrassment. My mother, who missed no opportunity to councel me on proper female behavior, shook her head at me. "Really, Carolyn, you should at least be nice to him. Who knows? He might be the only boy who will ever ask you to the prom."
My father's reaction was quite different. "You stay away from him! I'll have no little boy courting my daughter at age six! I don't intend to let you date until you're thirty."
I thought the whole thing was silly, and I pleased my father by taking his advice (well, some of it!) I certainly stayed away from Johnny all through school. He remained shy, not very bright, neither an athlete or a scholar, just one of the kids in he back of the classroom.
I don' remember ever talking to him, until i went to college. On the first night of Orientation Week, I went to a Freshman sock hop -- and there was Johnny. "What are you doing here?" I asked.
"I'm starting college," he said. "Wanna dance?" So we tootled around the gym for a while, and then I let him walk me back to the dorm, purely for safety's sake. I never saw him again. My mother reported that he dropped out after two weeks and joined the army.
And that was that. Until this past Saturday. I was taking the holiday weekend off, and decided to spend a little time nosing through the newly released 1940 census. It hasn't been indexed yet, but it is possible to find the town where you were living and then page through the various wards, looking for your last name. I found our local grocery store owner, the high school drama teacher, a couple of classmates, including one who died young, and a man who worked for my father. Finally, I spotted my parents, listed at the very bottom of a page. I was there, aged 10/12s of a year old. And there was my brother, working as a special delivery mailman. We weren't yet living in the house where I remember growing up, so I didn't expect to recognize the names of any of our neighbors.
UNTIL . . . there was Johnny, just 9/12s of a year old, living right next door. I wonder if he ever knew that we were once that close? Did he miss his chance with me before he was out of diapers? |
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Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2012 10:40 AM
Right now American TV audiences are being treated to another season of "Who Do You Think You Are?" The program, heavily promoted by Ancestry.com, takes us through the family histories of celebrities, showing how families can be traced for generations. Wonderful discoveries! Shocking revelations! Who would have thought . . .? Now, don't get me wrong. I really like Ancestry.com and use it frequently. But if you're planning to indulge in some genealogical research of your own, take along a hefty dose of skepticism.
 Census records look valuable, and
they can be, but their worth depends entirely upon the competence of the person
doing the recording. I 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!
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 so many
corrections 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.
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 even Ellen, as she turned out to be. 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.
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.
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 day. He went home! And we’ve been Schribers ever
since.
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Posted on Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:59 PM
I used to have a bit
of fun with my students while trying to make clear the unreliability of
so-called facts. "Imagine that it is fifty years in the future and you
have become famous for your (writing, art, political commentary, etc). Critics
have decided that the crucial moment that set you on the path to success came
during the weekend of Mardi Gras in 2011. Don't tell me what you did. Just picture it mentally. What was it? Where is the evidence? Now, what did you tell your best friend about the
weekend? And what did you tell
your parents? If future biographers look for evidence in your letters, diary,
journal, text messages, or Facebook photos, how accurate will their accounts
be?" After the blushes and giggles subsided, they got the message!
I'm currently dealing
with the same sort of problem. Much of the evidence for the life of Laura M.
Towne, the heroine of my next book, must come from her own writings. There are, however, several renderings
of those writings. The evidence
comes in layers, like an onion, and each time we peel away a layer, the
stronger becomes the scent of unreliability.
A published volume
offers the easiest way to access Laura's writings. Rupert Sargent Holland
edited the whole collection and published it in 1912. It has been reprinted and
is available for only a few dollars on Amazon. It reads well and it dates most
of the materials, although some confusion results from the editor's failure to
distinguish between journal entries and letters — an important distinction, as
my students would have recognized. As a result, contradictions crop up — a
statement that she has never felt better followed by a complaint of on-going
illness, for example. Gaps also exist. Did Laura really not write anything
about important events that
occurred during those gaps, or did her editor just not include what she wrote?
And who is Mr.
Holland? As her editor, he necessarily stands between the writer and her words.
An internet friend who has been working on this same material suspects that he
may be Laura's nephew. I have spent some time in the genealogical records, and
I've been unable to find any connection between Holland and the Towne
family. I do know that he was a
Harvard-educated lawyer, who also wrote edifying children's books, such as Historic Boyhoods and Historic Girlhoods. His writings all
emphasize those qualities a right-thinking child should emulate. But did he
actually censor Laura's writings in any way?
A collection of
materials concerning the Penn Center is housed at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. A typescript of Laura's journal and letters is
accessible on microfiche in the library. I've not yet seen it, but my
internet friend has. She tells me
that the typescript is marred by two problems. The more serious one involves passages in the typescript
that have been actually scratched out or marked over for exclusion. Since the
marked passages do not appear in the print version, it seems safe to assume
that the deletions were made at the time the book was being written. We can't know who made the choices,
however. Did a relative say to the
editor, "Don't include this bit"? Or did the editor decide the
excluded passage did not fit with the point he was trying to make? Either way,
the reader is hearing a voice other than Laura's.
It would be easiest to
blame the editor, but the original typescript has gaps, too, indicated by
ellipses (. . . .) showing where material has been deliberately left out. Who
created the typescript? We don't know, although there is a reference in the
introduction that seems to suggest that Laura may have been the aunt of the
transcriber. How did the typist choose what to leave out? Was (s)he influenced
by a need to protect her relative?
There's no way to tell
without being able to view the originals side by side with the typescript.
Laura's letters and journals still exist, but for the time being they remain
locked away. They have been housed
in the Archives at the Penn Center in South Carolina, but they are now in the
process of being catalogued and transferred to the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. They were pulled from circulation three years ago, and no one
seems to know when they will be once again accessible. I've been mourning their
temporary loss just when I need them, but I do recognize — as did my students —
that what Laura wrote may not have been what Laura felt or did.
Here's just one
example of how the layers of evidence can change the facts. Laura falls ill during her first year
in the Sea Islands, suffering from one of the many swamp fevers. She doesn't like to complain to those
around her but her medical training leads her to record all the nasty symptoms
in her journal. And because she doesn't want her family back home to worry
about her, she tells them that she was never healthier. The transcriber keeps
both the "I'm healthy" letter and the "I'm dying" journal
entry, but omits (. . . .) all the gory details of stomach fluxes and bowel
disorders — a typical Victorian attitude toward bodily functions. The book
editor spots the discrepancy and makes a choice. He wants his heroine to be a strong woman, so he omits any
mention of her illness. And the
reader comes away believing that Laura found the Sea Island climate a
particularly healthy and invigorating one. |
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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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