Mnemosyne's Magic Mirror

We’re The Government, It’s Our Stuff and We Want It Back! The Issue Of Replevin

2012-01-29T22:21:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, when I wrote about the “secret archive” of Major Thomas Thompson Eckert of the War Department’s Telegraph Office being purchased by the Huntington Library, I raised the issue of replevin.

So, what’s this replevin thing all about?

The 19^th century classic legal dictionary – Bouvier’s – defines replevin simply:

re•plev•in noun /riˈplevən/ “a form of action which lies to regain possession of personal chattels which have been taken from the plaintiff unlawfully.”

First off, the warning – I’m not a lawyer and I don’t play one on TV.

And even though I’m writing about the principle of replevin, I’m not offering any kind of legal advice, just some book dealer observations and past history. Besides, the issue of who owns what can be complicated, since things are not always as they seem or as people think they should be.

When it comes to “government” records, replevin can be a very contentious issue, often dividing people of good will. Frankly, it’s a fact of life that governments often “abandon” stuff made of paper or schedule stuff for destruction. Then, when, at some future date, it turns out that the stuff might have either financial or historical value – sometimes because the producer or government clerk becomes famous in some way – the government wants its stuff back.

For example, any number of WPA-produced art prints were left behind in trash barrels and abandoned file cabinets when local WPA offices were closed. Then, they were just “junk” made of paper and paint. Now, however . . .

Manuscripts and documents that are presumed to be “records” that have been “alienated” (i.e., stolen or taken improperly) from an “official” government source are often sought after by today’s government officials who seek their return, using the legal principle of replevin. Private owners are sometimes notified by local, state or federal government officials or lawyers that they are in “illegal” possession of “official” government “records” and are commanded to return them to a specific government official, office or archives. Often, the presumption of government ownership is based solely upon the fact that IF the documents had been produced today, they would be considered “official” and are therefore the rightful property of some government agency.

Here’s the problem.

In many cases, there’s no clear indication that the documents were “official records” or ever actually owned by the government in question. In fact, at the time the records were produced, they may very well have been owned by the person who produced them, not by any government agency. Were they produced today, it would be a different story altogether, but, when it comes to determining ownership of “government” records, it is important to avoid “presentism” – the erroneous assumption that what is true today was always true in the past.

Let’s look at how that works.

If we want to see the presidential papers of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, we can visit the Kennedy Library in Boston. Similarly, we can visit the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas or the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York if we want to examine the papers produced by those Presidents during their terms as President of the United States. All of those Presidential Libraries are now under the control and management of the National Archives and Records Administration and therefore the papers therein are “government” property. Moreover, since the days of Richard M. Nixon and the passage of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, all subsequent “official” Presidential records are government property.

But what about President Ulysses S. Grant’s papers? Or the papers he produced while commanding the Union Army during the Civil War? Surely, these are government property, right?

Well…no, actually.

Ulysses Grant got to take his presidential papers home with him when he left office, as did all of his predecessors. Likewise, he took most of his military papers. There’s no Ulysses Simpson Grant Presidential Library that houses all his paper stuff. His papers are scattered in libraries and archives all over the United States, with the Library of Congress holding the bulk of his papers because they were donated by his family.

In fact, if one of his official “Presidential” letters comes on the market and you want to buy it, go right ahead. On the other hand, if it’s a Bill Clinton memo that’s officially Presidential – i.e., about official Presidential business to, say, a Cabinet officer- it’s likely to be something else altogether because of the aforementioned Presidential Records Act of 1978.

Similarly, Congresspeople take their papers home when they leave office, as do many state governors. For years, the New York State Archives has sought legislation requiring New York’s governors to deposit their papers in the State Archives. When the Legislature passed that legislation several years ago, then-Governor Paterson vetoed it.

Strange to say, elected officials can often take their “official” papers to their backyard rubbish bin and burn ‘em all, if they so desire, unless there is legislation to the contrary.

Elected officials' papers notwithstanding, often determining the actual ownership of a document that may – or may not – be “official” can sometimes take a lawsuit. Sometimes, the courts rule in favor of the possessor and sometimes in favor of the government.

A classic case - officially known as United States vs. the First Trust Company of Saint Paul - concerns the diaries of William Clark, co-leader of the 1804 – 1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition, officially known as the “Corps of Discovery Expedition”. In the 1950s, when these then-privately owned papers were donated to the Missouri Historical Society by the descendant of Civil War General John Henry Hammond, the federal government filed a replevin lawsuit and attempted to claim the papers based upon the logic that they were federal government papers since Clark had been an Indian agent.

The court disagreed, observing that they contained no evidence of being “official” government records. In this particular case, the replevin lawsuit was unsuccessful.

The point of all this is to drive home the idea that things are not always what they seem. Just because you think it’s a government document doesn’t necessarily mean that it is. Likewise, just because you bought a government document in good faith on EBay or it's been in your family's possession for half a century doesn’t mean that they (the government) can’t take it back. For information about the court-ordered return of Davy Crockett's unused marriage license to the Jefferson County TN courthouse, see the ABAJournal article here.

Like I said, this replevin thingie can be a complicated and contentious issue.

The Wired Mr. Lincoln and The Secret Civil War

2012-01-27T16:51:00.002-05:00

One of the treasures of the New York State Library’s collection is Abraham Lincoln’s own handwritten first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. How it got there [hint: it was a gift from Lincoln himself] is a story for another time; today, it’s all about where this draft document was likely written.

While some say that Lincoln began writing the first draft of this proclamation on a steamboat while returning to Washington after a military tour, David Homer Bates, author of Lincoln In The Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps during the Civil War, published in 1907, told a different story.

He related the story of Major Thomas Thompson Eckert, superintendent of the War Department’s Telegraph Office, who observed that Lincoln came to his office nearly every day and worked at Eckert’s desk in the cipher-room, writing and reading despatches from the war front. One day, he asked Eckert for a quire of paper and, for several days, labored over the wording of some special document.

Whenever Lincoln left the cipher-room, he either took the document with him or asked Eckert to lock the document away, knowing that it would be safe from prying eyes in the hands of the man responsible for the military’s secret messages. After a while, he revealed to Eckert that he was “…writing an order giving freedom to the slaves in the South, for the purpose of hastening the end of the war.” According to Eckert, that first draft of what was to become known as the Emancipation Proclamation was written with one of the small Gillott barrel-pens that were issued to the telegraph cipher-operators by the War Department.

Thomas T. Eckert himself was a telegraph man before and after the Civil War, having built the first telegraph line on the Fort Wayne railroad in the 1850s and later serving as president and board chairman of Western Union after the war.

During the war, Eckert ran the War Department’s telegraph operation. At the time the telegraph was a new technology, but was eagerly embraced by President Lincoln and his high command, who found it to be an effective way to speedily communicate in code with the commanders in the field.

Here’s a photo of Eckert and some of his men in the field from the Library of Congress collection. Eckert is seated in the chair on the left. Notice the civilian – not military – clothes. It looks rather like a men’s sports outing or class reunion, not a military operation.

The Telegraph Office handled the war's secrets, all contained in thousands of coded messages. Messages on wires to Washington from field commanders. Messages on wires from Washington to the generals. Thousands of messages, most in cipher, transmitted over miles of wires by operators in Morse code. In other words, secret messages, written in one kind of code and transmitted in yet another kind of code.

For many years, it was assumed that much of this secret telegraphic correspondence had been either lost or destroyed. Turns out, however, that it was not. Rather, it left Washington with Major Eckert, and when he died in 1910, it stayed with members of his family.

And earlier this week, the folks at the Huntington Library in California announced that they had purchased the entire collection – all 76 volumes of messages and cipher books - for an undisclosed sum. The collection – which hasn’t been seen by historians since the Civil War itself - had been in the possession of Eckert’s descendants for almost a century and had been sold en bloc at auction in 2009. Seth Kaller, the dealer who purchased it and later offered it for sale stipulated that it would only be sold to an institution, or to a private buyer who would permit “scholarly and public access.”

The Huntington stepped up to the plate and added it to their already massive Civil War manuscript collection. The opening of this collection to researcher is huge news in the Civil War history field.

You can read the story of the Huntington purchase here in the LA Times story and you can also read the complete catalog description ofthe Eckert collection here on Seth Kaller’s website.

Naturally, this raises an interesting question or two: if these documents came from the War Department’s Telegraph Office, aren’t they “public documents” and therefore, shouldn’t they be part of NARA’s collection?

Short answers: No and no. In fact, NARA declined them.

There’s some information about these questions in the LA Times story, but it will be a good opportunity for me to talk more about the idea of “public documents”, a legal thingie called replevin and just who “owns” what sometime real soon.

Stay tuned. There’s more to come.

Today, however, it’s all about the Eckert Collection going to the Huntington.

When The Good Guys Do The Right Thing, Everyone Comes Out On Top

2012-01-19T12:05:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, things fall into place and the good guys do the right thing. Then everybody wins.

Yesterday, my copy of The Manuscript Society News (Vol 33, No 1) arrived in the mail. Among the many interesting articles was librarian Sam Fore’s description of the private and independent Harlan Crow Library in Dallas, Texas, driving home the point that a researcher needs to cast a broad net in search of manuscript material.

For example, while the complete set of autographs from each of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence and each of the sitting Presidents would not be out of place in this kind of collection, the manuscript journal of Georgia delegate William Pierce, Jr. that includes his “character sketches” of all the other delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention would no doubt provide a unique insight into the gentlemen who shaped the nation. Similarly, artist Gilbert Stuart’s own handwritten 1795 list of those who were to receive copies of his portrait of George Washington is interesting in its own right.

Note: this is truly a "private" library, attached to the personal residence of real estate mogul Harlan Crow. You see photos of the interior here.

Still, back to the “good guys - do the right thing” idea…

On page 21 of the News, a short paragraph related that the Jersey City (NJ) Free Public Library found a manuscript volume from the 18^th century in their collection. Specifically, it was a transcription of the 1749 – 1755 court records of Stafford County Virginia that had been copied in 1795 by the then- Stafford County deputy court clerk John Fox. It had been “liberated” from the Virginia courthouse during the Civil War by a captain of the Fourth New York Regiment and brought north, probably as a “war prize.” Eventually, it came to rest in Jersey City.

In any case, the good folks at the Jersey City Public Library did the right thing and repatriated the volume to Stafford County, Virginia – its rightful owner - after its century and a half vacation in New Jersey.

Why is this important on several levels?

If you do Virginia research, you probably already know that Stafford is one of those “burned” counties where many records were destroyed during the Civil War. In fact, the Library of Virginia lists Stafford as “almost hopeless” in its online research aid. So, any time anything gets back to Stafford, it’s good news.

By the way, for those with an interest in manuscripts, documents, autograph collecting and all historic things hand-written, you might want to investigate becoming a member of the Manuscript Society.

You can learn more by visiting the Society’s website at: www.manuscript.org.

Coming Down With Blue Pinky Finger Syndrome

2011-12-27T15:49:00.003-05:00

I’m sorry to say that I do not have any fond memories of learning to write in elementary school.

Don’t get me wrong – I have memories all right, but none of them are fond.

You see, since I’m left-handed, everything in the educational universe was designed to annoy, disable, thwart or otherwise discombobulate my early attempts at writing neatly. Everything was all turned around.

First off, there were those little desks – those blonde chair-like things with shiny metal legs, adorned with a small flat surface for books and writing attached to the right-hand side. We left-handers – especially we the pudgy ones - had to go through all sorts of physical contortions, twisting ourselves in miniature versions of Dr. Frankenstein’s misshapen assistant (“Yes, Master…”) just to write our names in block letters on the tops of our papers.

Then, there was the simple fact that, in the English-speaking world, we tend to write everything from left to right, unless we’re doing some sort of parlor trick, in which case, all bets are off. Plus, I went to an elementary school that mandated the use of fountain pens – no ball-points permitted. Believe it or not, ball-point pens were considered “new-fangled” and pencils were not permitted. So, that means that we lefties always left school at the end of the day with BPF (Blue Pinky Finger) syndrome, looking like some ominous form of digital necrosis had set in. (In case you haven’t given it much thought, you can take my word for it; it is VERY DIFFICULT to write anything from left to right with your left hand AND a fountain pen without smearing wet ink all over your pinky finger.)

But enough about me and my tribulations; suffice it to say that I’m a lousy penman when it comes to longhand. I can do it in a pinch, but generally I tend to write in a kind of calligraphic shorthand that few can read. So, you’d think that I'd jump on the bandwagon of the pedagogically enlightened folks running the schools in Indiana and Hawaii (and, it seems, lots of other states) and cheer the news that kids no longer will have to learn to write cursive.

Well, actually…no. That’s a Very Bad Idea.

Sure, cursive is hard and old-fashioned. It’s difficult and slow. Sure, keyboarding skills are probably more important in the 21^st century. And, right, there’s no “standard” as to what constitutes “cursive” that’s universally accepted. And absolutely – writing in cursive can be sheer agony if you’re a southpaw.

But – and it’s an important “but” – being able to WRITE cursive it the easiest way to learn how to READ cursive.

Imagine a whole generation of Americans unable to easily read the cache of their grandparents’ letters. Imagine a future researcher going into a county court house and leaving, unable to read the deed transcriptions made in the 1870s?

Can’t happen here, you say? Well, then talk to folks who do German research and they’ll tell you the difficulty reading the German cursive script known as Suetterlin. And it’s not just English-speakers – it’s modern young Germans who’ve never had to learn it.

Imagine being cut off from your culture because you are not able to read something written in longhand a century ago?

I’ll take Blue Pinky Finger Syndrome over cultural and historical illiteracy any day!

Season of Memory, Season of Forgetting

2011-12-23T21:32:00.002-05:00

Most folks probably think that writing about one’s dead grandmother right before Christmas is somewhat maudlin, but please bear with me and think for a moment about the season of Advent and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

For Catholics, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception occurs every single year on the 8^th of December, a little more than two weeks before Christmas and during the liturgical season known as Advent. Since 1854, it’s been a Holy Day of Obligation, which means, among other things, that Catholics are required to attend Mass.

In 1956, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception fell on a Saturday. My widowed grandmother, who had turned 67 a few months before, set off on the two-mile walk to her parish church to attend afternoon Mass. After Mass was over, she started home. When she was within sight of her house, she suffered a heart attack. Her friends and neighbors carried her home and placed her on the living room couch in her sister's house, where she died a few hours later.

I was eleven years old. My grandmother was my closest non-parental family friend, the family’s memory keeper and my own first genealogical informant, who told me stories about her mother and Irish immigrant grandmother and about my grandfather’s baseball years.

Following a two-day wake in my aunt's living room, my grandmother was buried next to my grandfather about two weeks before Christmas. There was not much to be merry about that particular year.

Still, Christmas came and went. It was different, since it was the very first Christmas at which my grandmother didn’t appear in her widow’s black dress. In fact, she was the first close relative that I knew personally who had ever died. I don’t remember much about Christmas that year, only that it was more subdued than usual. We still did the usual Irish Catholic Midnight Mass ritual (I was an altar boy and had to go anyway) and the usual Christmas dinner and gift-giving, but the rest of the day is kind of a blur.

After the holidays were over, the real work set in. My grandmother’s house needed to be emptied and cleaned. She owned a duplex house, and rented the other half to one of her younger widowed sisters. My father and his sister negotiated exactly who got what. He got lots of the cut glass, while she got the jewelry. She got the china, while he got most of my grandfather’s baseball stuff, including his White Sox World Series uniform. Most of the furniture and the clothes went to charity, except for the player piano, the piano bench and hundreds of player piano rolls, which got sold as a package deal to a friend of my father. Likewise, the Victorian-era oil lamps that had been in my great-grandmother’s house across the street.

Because I was only eleven, I wasn’t part of any of these delicate negotiations. It was only about six or so years later, after my father had died, when my mother told me about the diaries that my grandmother had kept, way back in the early years when my grandfather played professional baseball (circa 1910 – 1920). Diaries that covered the Lowell years, the Chicago White Sox years, the births of her children and much, much more.

The diaries! Even though I spent lots of time with my grandmother, I never knew that she kept actual diaries. So, where were they and when could I read them? Did my aunt get them? Were they in the attic? What secrets would be laid bare in them?

“We burned them all,” my mother said. “because we didn’t think that Annie would want anyone knowing all the personal things that she wrote about.”

So, when I read Cheri Lucas’s post on her blog “Writing Through The Fog” earlier tonight, in which she writes about “…erasing memories and the Facebook timeline…”, I thought of those long-ago diaries.

Ms. Lucas writes, “And because sometimes I just want to erase: to forget in the same way I had wanted to forget everything associated with a past relationship and a hard, confusing breakup.

But my curation of my own history—the deleting of previous status updates, the “featuring” of particular posts—is strange. More so than before, I am able to highlight what is important in my life—or what I want others to view as important—and fill in missing details from today to when I was born…

Imagine if my grandmother had had the opportunity to experience social media like Facebook. Media that lets you edit and re-form your own past history for the future. Would she have done things differently? Did she really want all those memories contained in those diaries erased through fire and ashes? Given the opportunity, would she have edited her diaries? Was she writing for herself or for others long in the future yet unborn and unknown?

Of course, no one will ever know.

Mnemosyne’s Mirror is about memory: how we form it, how we record it, how we filter it and how we preserve it. Every now and then, it forces us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves some basic questions.

Who owns family memory? Who controls it? Is it really ours for the editing? Most of all, should memory ever be erased, and, if so, by whom?

Warmest wishes for this holiday season, no matter what December family tradition is meaningful for you.

What a Piece Of Work Is Man???

2011-12-12T21:12:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, the things you find accidentally/ serendipitously/ unexpectedly, all while looking for other stuff can be a whole lot more fun than the stuff you set out to find in the first place.

Here’s an example, followed by a comment.

While searching the October 1896 edition of The Medical Brief (see above) for something else entirely, I came across the following – written for the journal by a doc in Kentucky:

Man

Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of microbes.

He cometh forth like a flower, but is soon wilted by the winds of adversity and scorched by flames of perplexity.

Sorrow and headache follow him all the days of his life.

He hoppeth from his bed in the morning and his foot is pierced by the cruel tack of disappointment.

He ploddeth forth to his daily toil and his cuticle is punctured by the malignant nettles of exhaustion.

He sitteth himself down to rest at noonday, and is lacerated in his nether anatomy by the pin of disaster.

He walketh through the streets of the city in the pride and glory of his manhood, and slippeth on the banana peel of misfortune and unjointeth his neck.

He smoketh the cigar of contentment but, lo! It explodeth with a loud noise, for it was loaded.

Behold he glideth down the banister of life and findeth it strewn with splinters of torture.

He is stung by the mosquitoes of annoyance by day and his frame is gnawed by the bedbugs of affliction by night.

What is man but the blind worm of fate, seeing that his days are numbered by cycles of pain and his years by seasons of mourning.

Behold he is impaled upon the hook of desolation, and is swallowed up by death in the fathomless ocean of time and is remembered no more.

In his infancy he runneth over with worms and colic, and in his old age he groaneth with rheumatism and ingrowing toe-nails.

He marryeth a cross-eyed woman because her father hath a bank account, and findeth that she is ridden with hysteria and believeth in witches.

His father-in-law then monkeyeth with stocks and goeth under.

What is man but a carbuncle on the neck of existence? Yea, but a tumor on the back of fate.

He playeth at the races and staketh his substance on the brown mare because he hath received a tip. The sorrel gelding with a bald face winneth by a neck.

Behold he runneth for office and the dead beat pulleth him ever and anon and then voteth against him.

He exalteth himself among the people and swelleth with pride, but when the votes are counted he findeth that he was not in it.

He boasteth of his strength in Israel, but is beaten by a bald-headed man from Taller Creek.

He goeth to the post office to glance at the latest papers, and receiveth a dun from the doctor for his last year's attentions.

He goeth forth to breathe the fresh air and to meditate on the treachery of all earthly things, and is accosted by a bank cashier with a sight draft for $127.39.

A political enemy lieth in wait for him at the market place and walketh around him crowing like unto a cock.

He trusteth in a man who claimeth to be filled with righteousness and standeth high in the synagogue, and gets done up.

For behold his pious friend is full of guile and runneth over with deception.

From the cradle to the grave man giveth his alms to him that smiteth him.

His seed multiplyeth around him and cryeth for bread, and if his sons come to honor he knoweth it not.

Fate prevaileth ever against him.

What is man but a painful wart on the heel of time.

John Collins, M. D. RockHouse, Ky.

So, just who was this “John Collins, M.D.?” Being a genealogist, I needed to know, so it was off to the census and a few other quickie online sources.

Aside from being a physician taken with the cadence of his King James Bible, Dr. Collins was a farmer – doctor.

The 1900 US Census shows that John Collins, age 36, physician, lived on a farm in Magisterial District 3 – Rock House in Letcher County, Kentucky, along with his wife of 13 years, Polly, age 33, and their three children Ada, 12, Arthur, 11, and Bruce, 7.

In 1901, Dr. Collins was secretary to the Letcher County Board of Health. Lest you think he spent his days in quiet reflection as a country doctor, writing humorous poetry and attending to the occasional sick person, Marcus Welby-like, his July 16^th, 1901 letter to the Kentucky State Board of Health will likely disabuse you of that notion.

While discussing the successful containment of an outbreak of five cases of smallpox, he noted:

“Our chief difficulties in stamping out the disease were: These cases occurred in a district where a bitter feud was raging, and our doctors were loath to visit the district; but the people near, on first intimation of the trouble, instituted prompt means for confining and limiting the disease.”

The feud – known as the Wright – Reynolds Feud – was the conflict referenced above.

I guess it’s hard to think about smallpox containment when members of your potential patients’ families are shooting at each other…

WASPitude

2011-12-02T20:17:00.002-05:00

Okay, I love this stuff.

Actually, I just finished laughing out loud, which is not something I do very much while I’m reading articles online. So, what was it that turned me into a chortling, snorting, quivering ball of…?

Well, it all started with a short Atlantic article by Eric Randall on exactly which wedding announcements make it into the coveted weekend edition of the Sunday New York Times. Now, of course, to even care about this topic it helps if you’re looking in the Times for someone in your immediate family or a close family friend who’s been recently married (I’m not) OR you’re addicted to reading these kinds of things generally (again, I’m not) OR you’re a sociologist, cultural anthropologist, or practicing genealogist (okay, kinda guilty here.)

So, who gets chosen?

Actually, rather than me telling you how things seem to be, why not read the Randall article for yourself? Here’s the click-through to the article itself.

Buried in the article there’s a hyperlink to another article by Katie Baker that gives the actual metrics that you may want to use to increase your offspring’s odds of getting in the NYT "Weddings/ Celebrations" section someday. Think easy-to-understand statistics.

Now, if you’ve never read Katie Baker’s brilliant treatise that appeared last July called “Matrimonial Moneyball”, here’s the actual link.

Ms. Baker writes (albeit usually about sports) for Grantland, a sports and pop culture site that is likely not on the current reading list of most genie types, but when it comes to the stuff that is the “meat and potatoes” for those of us who are, she’s certainly nailed it here. After you finish reading this, if you go to the Grantland homepage and click on her picture, you’ll get a list of her other columns. The ones on the NYT Weddings section (there are several) are well worth perusing.

For genealogists who live and breathe in hopes of finding lots of good stuff about ancestral weddings in long-ago newspapers, this is a great read.

Who knew how easy it was to game the system?

Of course, once you know the rules, you can practically guarantee a NYT “Weddings/Celebration” section mention for your offspring/descendants.

(Think “Yale/lawyer-banker/gay/Greenwich, CT/Founding Father-entrepreneur ancestor”)

And, by the way, the Grantland website is named for the great sportswriter Grantland Rice, who wrote some nice things about my grandfather when he was pitching for the Chicago White Sox back in the day...

Mr. Thoreau, Libraries, and The Importance of Checking Out Sources

2011-11-30T18:07:00.003-05:00

These days, lots of people use snappy quotations in their email signature blocks.

Some use the words of Transcendentalist thinker and pencil manufacturer Henry David Thoreau. You know, the “Walden” guy, pictured at left.

A few days ago, I read an email by a properly degreed librarian and certified archivist that contained the following snappy quote, along with the author’s name, in the signature block. It read:

"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries." -- Henry David Thoreau

Wait a minute . . .

There was something about that quotation in the writer’s email signature block that didn’t ring true.

First off, it was not written in a style that was in any way similar to that 19^th century Transcendentalist style of Thoreau’s time. Secondly – and much more important – it was a-historical.

The quotation seems to suggest that Thoreau thought that libraries, - you know, those “free and open to all” institutions, - can “get you through times of no money” which would of course be far better than being rich, but having no access to libraries.

In other words, when there’s no money, there’s always the library.

As far as the lofty thought goes, there’s not much to argue with here, except that “free libraries open to the public at large” were not much of a part of Thoreau’s universe. In fact, because of a simple accident of birth, Thoreau would not have had much experience with using libraries in a time of no money.

You see, he was born too early to have spent much – if any – time in libraries that were free and open to all.

There were, of course, some great libraries in large cities during Thoreau’s time, but they were not free. They were subscription libraries, with paying shareholders and paying members. Generally, they existed for the almost-exclusive benefit of their paying members. The occasional visiting (male) scholar was often given temporary on-site privileges at the library, but local (male) residents were expected to pay for their library privileges. Libraries and money went hand in hand. In times of “no money” there was not much in the way of library access.

Although shareholder-funded libraries and some guild-like “mechanics’ libraries” had been around in North America since the late 18^th century, they appealed largely to the well-to-do urban male citizens. Females were permitted few prominent civic roles in the early new republic. Subscription libraries did not admit them as regular members, shareholders or subscribers, although a tiny number of women who had achieved renown as scholars or writers were occasionally given temporary visiting privileges.

Paying male subscribers thought that having women in libraries was, well, unseemly and distracting. Besides, what could there be in libraries that would have even the slightest interest to women? Plus, aisles were narrow and there were stairs, so women, with their long dresses, would be in constant danger.

Of course, women were not totally left out in the cold. During the 1830s, the “lyceum movement” got underway in Massachusetts, and lyceum-sponsored “winter lectures” by important public intellectuals were given in cities and small towns in the northeast. Admission was sometimes free, and sometimes not, but still, the lectures were open to all, men and women alike.

The early 19th century was a time of progressive self-improvement, led mostly by educated and civic-minded males in the northeast. It was during this time that the “social library” movement also began, primarily among those well-educated young men in urban areas.

An early example of this concept, the “Young Mens’ Association for Mutual Improvement in the City of Albany” was established in 1833 and chartered by the New York State Legislature in 1835. Its founder, Amos Dean, a young Union College graduate (where he had helped establish the Kappa Alpha Society, the nation’s first literary social fraternity) was elected the YMA’s first president and gave one of its first lecture series - on the “new science” of phrenology. Dean, an Albany lawyer, was also later selected to be the first president (1855 – 1859) of the University of Iowa, running things mostly long distance from his law office in Albany.

(note: I was on the board of the “YMA” [dba the “Albany Public Library”] for lots of years and am currently the archivist and a past president of the Executive Council of the Kappa Alpha Society, so I consider the long-deceased Amos Dean an old friend and mentor)

Similar “young mens’ associations” – all precursors of the modern public library - were established in Troy (1835), Buffalo and Rochester (1836) and Schenectady (1839).

By 1853, the YMA for Mutual Improvement in the City of Albany had more than 1700 members. With a lecture hall with seats for 800 and a reading room stocked with the leading newspapers and periodicals from around the country and from England, the YMA was one of the cornerstones of intellectual life (at least for men) in Albany. While the library had amassed more than 10,000 volumes, it was hardly the publicly funded library that we think of today when we say “public library”. It had an income of slightly more than $5000 and annual expenses of about $4500. Its revenue came from the sale of lecture tickets, annual membership subscriptions (originally $2) and voluntary member contributions. None of it came from public sources. More important, it was still largely a membership organization.

Many years later, its book collection would become the nucleus of the Albany Public Library. Even though it became a "public" library, it was still - officially - known as the "Young Mens' Association for Mutual Improvement." Traditions die hard in a city chartered in 1686.

But, during Thoreau’s time, it was a membership institution, open to all - at least, "all" with two bucks to spare.

In a word, in 1853, the concept that there would be many libraries that would receive public funding and would therefore be “free to all” was still far in the future. How far? Much farther in the future than the death of Henry David Thoreau, only nine years later in 1862. The Boston Public Library, the first publicly-supported library in the United States, chartered in 1848, did not actually open its doors until 1854. Other “free to all” public libraries wouldn’t appear until the end of the century.

Thoreau said and wrote lots of things during his life. However, a little research showed that, as I suspected, the quote about libraries and money was not his at all, even though it shows up on any number of “official” public library sites and has even made it into their “official” newsletters and publications.

(second gratuitous note: I am resisting the temptation of linking to all the public library sites that attribute this quotation to Thoreau. It's hard, but I'm doin' it anyway...)

In fact, it’s listed on the authoritative Walden Woods Project’s “Mis-Quotation Page”, second quote from the bottom. Interestingly, the page gives the history of the mis-attribution and the original source from which it was adapted. Rather than spoil the fun, I’ll let you check it out for yourself here.

You'll also learn lots more about Thoreau by poking around the Walden Woods Project site.

The takeaway here should be simple, at least for genealogists.

One: It pays to check out all sources and attributions carefully; not everything is as we would want it to be.

Two: Lots of stuff on the ‘net is not right.

Three: even credentialed and certified professionals can be wrong from time to time, especially if they fail to check stuff out carefully, thus “caveat lector.”

Bottom line: Verify! Verify! (Yeah, I know - Thoreau said, "Simplify! Simplify", but what the hey!)

Putting a Little Heat in Thanksgiving: Occupy History!

2011-11-22T20:46:00.004-05:00

So, I’m thinking … the traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner with all the fixins’ is kinda bland. Not much in the way of gastronomic punch. Basic bland gravy. Basic bland potatoes. Basic Bland Bird.

So, what to do?

Well, now I’m thinking that the folks at UC Davis Police Department may have had the right idea after all.

Nothing like a little pepper spray to liven things up.

After all, the good folks at Fox News – in the person of Ms. Megyn (“it’s a food product, essentially”) Kelly – have apparently decided that military grade pepper spray is some kind of tasty food item, and therefore, eminently suitable for the Thanksgiving table. After all, it’s derived from pepper (which lots of people eat) and even appears with other edible peppers on the Scoville scale (see above) - although it’s somewhat off the charts, being ten times "hotter" than habanero peppers.

You can get more info about this kind of industrial-strength pepper spray from Pulitzer Prize author and science writer Deborah Blum’s blog here.

I guess that for Fox News viewers, the mustard gas used in World War One would be some kind of condiment as well, to add zest to those bland Boche sausages…

Of course, if you watch a lot of Fox News, you’re likely to have a somewhat skewed view of reality. At least that’s what a recent study done by the folks at Fairleigh Dickenson University seems to show.

Sure, I know it’s hard to believe that watching Fox News can actually make you about 18 percentage points stupider than folks who watch nothing at all, but the study seems to show that to be the case.

For example, Fox News viewers and radio talk show listeners think that the protesters in Syria have already effected regime change there. Apparently nobody’s told Syria's Bashar al-Assad that he’s out of work and, chances are, he doesn’t watch Fox News. (Of course, to some folks, all those Middle Eastern types all look alike. Al-Assad, Gadhafi, Mubarak… what’s the difference???)

Chances are, you’ve never lived in a “third world” country. I have.

Chances are, you’ve never experienced the militarization of the local police before. I have.

Chances are, you probably think that if you just mind your own business, don’t get too deeply involved and just spend your time doing your genealogy, everything will be all right. It won’t.

When Thanksgiving rolls around in a few days, and you brush off your family group sheets and remember your Mayflower ancestors, remember also that they were Separatists and Dissenters.

Whatever the "status quo" was at the time... they were not a part of it.

They were not the folks in power and they were not the folks in political control in their own country. They had more in common with the folks at Davis who were pepper-sprayed than with the folks in uniform with the canisters. In many respects, they were much like the Occupy Wall Street (or Oakland, or Albany, or Boston or Paris.... well, you get the idea....) folks.

Oh no, you say... my Pilgrim folks were all about religion, not politics. Quick reality check: in the 17th century, religion and politics were pretty much inseparable. The concept of "separation of Church and State" was still a long way off.

Chances are, there were also powerful folks in England in 1620 who thought that those annoyingly scruffy Mayflower passengers could greatly improve their lot in life if they’d just take a bath and get a job.

Sound familiar?

Ruhleben: Germany’s Race-Course/ Concentration Camp for British Subjects in World War One

2011-11-21T20:09:00.003-05:00

Genealogical and historical treasures can pop up online in the strangest places.

For example, who would ever think to look on the Harvard Law School Library’s Special Collections area for the new digital exhibition about a German “concentration” camp for British subjects during World War One?

Frankly, how many folks have ever heard about Ruhleben, a former racecourse turned WWI internment camp about 10 kilometers from Berlin? Or the folks that spent the duration of the war there?

Or that the "residents" designed their own municipal coat of arms? (Note the "rats rampant" in the illustration above left...)

And if they ever heard of Ruhleben at all, how many knew how it operated (hint one: the “guests” ran it), and what went on there? (hint two: its own newspaper, plus theatre and musicals and lots, lots more kept folks from going stir-crazy)

The collection (well, actually TWO collections: the Maurice Ettinghausen collection and the John Cecil Masterman collection) have been digitized and are now available for study on the Harvard Law School Special Collections website. It’s brand-new and well worth checking out. Here’s the link:

Ruhleben: A Digital Exhibit

It’s a well-thought-out and intuitively-designed website and conveys lots of information in a highly graphic way. Frankly, most people will find it more than a little bit interesting, since “most people” probably have no idea that the German government rounded up so many male “enemy aliens” and sequestered them in a place like Ruhleben for the duration of the war. All in all, about 100,000 people spent at least part of the war in these kinds of camps.

Many of the Ruhleben “guests” were British businessmen working in Germany, while others were students and teachers. Only males between the ages of 17 and 55 were interned, and about 5,500 people spent a large part of the war in the makeshift village-camp known as Ruhleben.

Not all of the thousands of Ruhleben residents were obscure English businessmen and commercial travelers. The “guest list” also included athletes, musicians and scientists who were studying or resident in Germany before the War, many from Commonwealth nations, including Canadian composer and conductor Ernest MacMillan and later Harvard professor Winthrop Pickard Bell, familiar to many genealogists for his work on early “foreign Protestants” in Nova Scotia. “Prince Monolulu” (the West Indian born Peter Carl MacKay) horse-racing tipster and probably the best-known black man in English racing circles after the war, was also a guest at the Kaiser’s Ruhleben race course.

It’s important to note that the Harvard Law School site is not the only source of information about the Ruhleben camp. Since it was a camp that housed British nationals, it’s only natural that there would be additional information in the U.K. National Archives.

Here’s the link to the U.K. National Archives page with additional information about Ruhleben:

(Note: those with possible family members interned at Ruleben will find the many references and links helpful.)

In addition, here’s the link to a Ruhleben website called The Ruhleben Story.

You can search the links on the left-hand side of the page for the names (and short biosketches) of many who spent time at Ruhleben as “guests” of the German Imperial government.

The Harvard Law School website raises two interesting legal questions, which I suspect that genealogists will also find interesting – especially if they’re researching military ancestors: the first question: what exactly is a “concentration” camp and is it different from an “internment” camp or some kind of “prisoner of war camp”? The second question: what is the legal status of “civilian” (i.e., non-combatant) internees and, by extension, how do their “rights” differ from those of “prisoners of war” under international law?

Nothing about what we do is ever simple. Still, the spanking-new “Ruhleben” website certainly helps to shed new light on the “war to end all wars” and, in the process, gives us new things to think about.

Denisovan DNA, Neanderthals and Bruce Trigger

2011-11-20T21:35:00.001-05:00

Neanderthal Ancestor?

No, that's not me on the left - but there are days when I feel like that.

In fact, that Neanderthal gentleman may be one of my remote ancestors.

But first, a short story -

I was a serious, archives-haunting, microfilm-scrolling genealogist for some years before I was a university undergraduate. I had the charts and family group sheets to prove it.

Of course, way back then, I viewed the world through the eyes of someone raised in the western/ European tradition, and had little knowledge of other non-Western kinship systems. It took a university professor – the brilliant Bruce Trigger – to open my eyes to the myriad possibilities of the word “family.”

Dr. Trigger (1937 – 2006) was an anthropologist and ethnohistorian. When he taught me the basics of anthropology way, way back in 1964, he had just arrived at McGill University with a brand-new Ph.D. His background was in ancient African (Nubian) cultures, and his best work, on the Huron of North America, was still yet to come.

The anthropology course itself was new – so new that it didn’t even have a text. Just Dr. Trigger’s handouts and reading lists.

Dr. Trigger wasn’t a genealogist, but as an ethnohistorian and anthropologist, he took the broad idea of family seriously. He pointed out that the word means wildly different things in different cultures. People who are “closely related” in one culture might not be so in another culture. Biological relationships are not necessarily family relationships. In other words, “families” are largely artificial constructs, varying from time to time and culture to culture. This was all heady stuff.

Moreover, those artificial cultural definitions were also used to define exactly who was an eligible marriage partner and who wasn’t. The further back in time the discussion went, the murkier things got. People mated for all kinds of reasons and didn’t necessarily become “family” by so doing.

This, of course, was well before the DNA concept had taken hold in both anthropology and genealogy. Work on historic family/genetic relationships was still largely based upon eliciting information from “informants”, especially in cultures where there are not written texts.

I spent part of that year researching and writing about the marriage customs and family definitions of a small group of islanders who lived in the Solomon Islands on a small atoll called Tikopia. The talented and very long-lived New Zealand ethnologist and anthropologist Raymond Firth (1901 - 2002) had written the definitive work on the islanders, called We, the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia.

Over the months, I practically memorized the book in its entirety.

In a way, it was probably the most important “genealogy training manual” that I ever studied, largely because it forced me to re-examine all those things that I thought were “universal”, but turned out not to be. (as an aside - Firth, an eclectic researcher, had been the research assistant to Sir James Fraser, author of The Golden Bough – the Modern Library edition of which I read several years before taking Bruce Trigger’s anthropology course.)

Anyway, one of the things that Bruce Trigger taught me was to be open to new ideas of family and new discoveries. Just because “everyone” has always “believed” something doesn’t necessarily make it “true” – just “commonly believed.” There’s a big difference between the two concepts.

So, here it is, 47 years later. Bruce Trigger died five years ago at sixty-nine. However, like most great teachers, his influence lives on. His students remember. Every time I see something new and startling in the field of anthropology/ archaeology/ ethnology – especially something that will eventually shake things up – I think of Dr. Trigger.

Lots of genealogists will pass over the article below from last week’s Discover magazine that I’ve linked to as being a topic too remote, too far back. It doesn’t have any bells and whistles and there’s no technology angle. But still, it’s something that Dr. Trigger would have latched onto, brought into class and turned his students loose in a class discussion. He would have asked, “How does this change things?” and “How will this change what we think we know about our own past and heritage?”

Take a look and decide for yourself. It’s about Neanderthal DNA. And another strain called Denisovan DNA, which is not much talked about. In short, it’s about who you are. Here’s the link.

Bruce Trigger would have loved it.

BURN, BABY, BURN! Should We Plan On Bringing Marshmallows To The Forthcoming University Book Burnings?

2011-11-16T21:26:00.001-05:00

Our “short intermission” a while back turned into a rather lengthy hiatus from the blog-iverse.

Meetings, appointments, an unexpected speaking request and this particular NYG&B honor upended my formerly well-planned schedule. Ah, well . . . best laid plans and all that…

Today, rather than return to the “food is family” series, I have been moved to comment on an interesting piece that appeared a few days ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Regular readers will of course recall my concern with the current “If Only Everything Were Digitized and Free” meme that is sweeping through both academic and genealogy communities.

Remember – I actually LIKE online digitized stuff. I take pains to point out that I’m not really a Luddite. I do, however, like to remind folks about the Law of Unintended Consequences, thus reinforcing the oft-quoted concept that the “best laid plans of mice and men” are sometimes not completely thought through.

If this is not quite sinking in because I’m intentionally understating the obvious, just refresh your memory of the “memory hole” that George Orwell described in 1984. Here’s the definition from the website dedicated to preserving Orwell’s “newspeak”; just scroll down to “memory hole”. Hint: it’s also worth going back to the novel to read how the memory hole was used to “disappear” stuff.

While, on one hand, digitization of records and texts makes distribution easier, on the other, digitization of records and texts also makes alteration and obliteration of information easier. Photoshop, anyone?

Moreover, I frequently take pains to point out that digitization is NOT a means of preservation, but rather a medium of distribution. Problem is, it’s widely perceived by “non-professionals” to be “preservation.” Once it's been digitized, who cares about the originals. The web is rife with stories about elected local government clerks who view records digitization as THE solution to expensive long-term records storage issues.

Fact – simple solutions to complex problems often do not work out for the best. If you ever – back in the 70s or 80s – decided to use one of those then state-of-the art “magnetic” photo albums for your irreplaceable Polaroids, you will know exactly whereof I speak.

But, to get back on track, and all of the above having been said, consider for a moment the thesis behind Marc Prensky’s article, titled In the 21st Century University, Let’s Ban (Paper) Books .

Prensky suggests that total book digitization is the foreseeable future and that the total transition to digital formats and e-readers will be much like the transition from cuneiform to paper and from manuscript scrolls and parchments to printed paper books. It’s just one more step on the path of intellectual progress. Inevitable. The Future. O, Brave New World.

Disregard for a moment the copyright, quality control and access issues that may be involved here. Think instead about Prensky’s future world of learning.

He envisions an interesting university of the future:

In this bookless college, all reading—which would still, of course, be both required and encouraged—would be done electronically. Any physical books in students' possession at the beginning of the year would be exchanged for electronic versions, and if a student was later found with a physical book, it would be confiscated (in return for an electronic version). The physical books would be sent to places and institutions that wanted or needed them. Professors would have a limited time in which to convert their personal libraries to all-digital formats, using student helpers who would also record the professors' marginal notes.

An interesting choice of words, that. Think about it: students “found with” paper books; books “confiscated”, the “limited time” for professors to “convert their personal libraries”, using impressed student “helpers.” There are echoes of Ray Bradbury and his Fahrenheit 451 and other scarier, stranger places mothballed in the dark recesses on the brain that these words conjure up

Perhaps Prensky is envisioning a Margaret Atwood-like digital dystopia. Or perhaps, as some of the commenters suggest, this is all some kind of Jonathan Swift-like satire.

Presnky is a bright guy. He has a number of academic credentials and a host of books and articles under his belt. He introduced and talks a lot about the “digital native” and “digital immigrant” concept that he pioneered, as well as using games as teaching tools.

Still, when he writes, he can be controversial. At very least, he makes folks think and sometimes makes them angry.

Remember – this article appeared in The Chronicle Of Higher Education, after all. Lots of its readers are – well – higher educators. Who teach in colleges. And research universities. Their comments are more incisive than lots of the stuff you will find on the internet and well worth reading. And, as might be expected, not everybody agrees that digital universality is a particularly good thing.

Consider, for example, the thoughts of a person who is self-described as “beck6818:”

There is no doubt that technological advances have increased access to information, but I do not believe the goal of education is simply to increase access. My students have access to plenty of resources, but they haven't the slightest idea about how to sit and think, and no amount of digitizing will help that.

I love this.

This is exactly what I stress in my lectures. Genealogy is NOT just looking stuff up and copying it down. In this digital age, with so much electronically available, this is the easy stuff.

Real genealogy, however, is the HARD stuff. It’s about forming questions, considering all possibilities and devoting substantially more time to record analysis than to record collection and digitization. In short, it's all about thinking.

In the end, a totally electronic, book-less university may well be the world of the future. There may come a time when lots of folks think that everything that’s available digitally is all there is and all there ever was.

The scary part is that they may also think that it’s all correct and true. After all, it’s digitized and online.

What could possibly go wrong with that idea?

A Short Intermission

2011-11-05T21:41:00.001-04:00

Consider this the “short intermission” in the “food is family” series.

I decided this small nugget was too good to pass up, and if I waited till the end of the “food” posts, I’d slip into other things and probably leave it behind, despite my good intentions.

Here’s the story behind it:

I spent the past three days (along with several other members of the NYG&B’s Education Committee) at the New York State Library and Archives in Albany, providing research advice and assistance to participants of the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society’s 2011 Albany Research event. Participants from all over the US got to pick our brains – for whatever that might be worth – on potential solutions to their “brick wall” problems.

In between appointments, I did some of my customary grazing in the 7^th floor library stacks, discovering research treasures in some of the “non-genealogical” sections that I never spent much time with before.

While skimming the first issue of the Kansas Law Journal for its potential for family history gold, I happened upon this “filler” piece. I love it when you find stuff like this in unexpected locations. It reminded me of the little pieces that David Greene inserts here and there occasionally on a “space available” in The American Genealogist (TAG).

I couldn’t help capturing this law journal piece and passing it on. Best of all, it's all about the consequences of providing advice. Enjoy!

It is narrated that John R. Porter of the State of New York, now famous throughout that State for his brilliant attainments, when a young man, was assigned by the court the defense of a man charged with assault in the second degree, to give the accused the best advice he could under the circumstances, and to bring the case to trial with all convenient speed. Porter immediately retired to an adjacent room to consult with his client, and returned shortly without him.

“Where is your client?” demanded the astonished Judge.

“He has left the place, I guess,” replied Porter with the most refreshing sang froid.

“Left the place! Why, what do you mean, Mr. Porter?”

“Why, your Honor directed me to give him the best advice I could under the circumstances. He told me he was guilty, so I advised him to cut and run for it. He took my advice, as a client ought, opened the window and skedaddled. He is about a mile away now.”

The very audacity of the young barrister deprived the court of the power of speech, and nothing came of the matter.

“Notes”, Kansas Law Journal, Volume 1, Topeka, 1885, page 44.

Sometimes, It’s Good To Have A Big Brother Or A Cop Looking Out For You

2011-11-04T16:49:00.002-04:00

Way back before the federal Food and Drug Administration got started, the sale of adulterated foodstuffs was both common and also a big issue, especially in large cities and in places with large immigrant (often low-income) populations. Most Europeans arriving in North America in the 19^th and early 20^th century had never tasted maple syrup or maple sugar, so when they bought it in their neighborhood grocery stores in America, they had nothing to compare it to.

Just how good was this strange American sweet stuff made from trees (well, tree sap, to be more precise)?

For many immigrant families, the verdict was clear: maple syrup was expensive, but nothing special. Why waste your money? After all, there were better sweeteners. Problem was, they weren’t really buying actual maple syrup. Because of that, maple syrup may never have been a part of your family food tradition.

The state of New York was an early leader in combatting food adulteration and fraudulent labeling through its Department of Agriculture. The 1911 report from the NYS Agriculture Department concerning the state’s 1905 labeling law neatly sums up the issue with regard to maple syrup:

Prior to 1905 very little genuine maple syrup could be found in the cities of New York State, as competition in the adulterated article or imitations drove it from the markets. Nearly all adulterated or imitation maple syrup, however, was labeled "Maple Syrup," and the majority of the containers were labeled “Vermont Maple Syrup," on account of the reputation of the state of Vermont, deemed the banner maple syrup and maple sugar producing state of the Union. This deception was easily practiced because of the fact that the consumers in localities where maple syrup was not made had acquired a taste for the adulterated or imitation product after many years' consumption, without ever tasting pure maple syrup. This applies to nearly all cities. Statistics showed that only one-tenth of the maple syrup and maple sugar consumed in the whole United States was produced in the United States. Investigations by the department proved that the so-called “Vermont Maple Syrup and Maple Sugar " were used principally for mixing with cane sugar or rock candy syrup to give it a flavor in imitation of the genuine article. Maple syrup was commonly adulterated with golden or drip syrup, with commercial glucose, with molasses and with refined sugar. The persistent activity of the department has changed those conditions, so that the consumer will be properly informed as to the nature of mixtures formerly sold as maple syrup. The labels of the containers no longer read "Maple Syrup" but bear, in some instances, "Fancy Table Syrup," "Table Syrup," or simply “Syrup," with the ingredients plainly set forth underneath the name of the article. Only in rare instances is the term "Vermont Maple Syrup" used on a syrup not the product of Vermont.

- Pages 76 – 77, Eighteenth Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture of the State of New York (Albany, 1911)

So, because so much “maple syrup” sold in large cities in the late 19^th century was something else entirely, whole groups of people – especially in immigrant communities - grew up being duped by their favorite pancake syrup.

Imagine growing up thinking that all great Parmesan cheese came out of a green cardboard can-like affair …. That great artisanal cheese was always sold in individually wrapped slices… Or that classic chocolate chip cookies were made by elves who lived in a tree…

Why am I harping on maple syrup, you might ask?

Because I’m using it as an example of how we can study our historic family foodways thoughout history. What your family puts on the pancakes, waffles or French toast actually matters and can be a clue about what your ancestors did. Was it an early reaction to Caribbean slavery? Was it simply New England or New York self-reliance? Or were they duped into thinking that the real stuff was no big deal? Was it a cost issue?

But wait . . . there’s more.

As I said when I started this theme several days ago, food gets complicated for family historians. Some things are okay to eat; other things, not so much. Some things are familiar to some families; other things, weird. Your family’s reaction to foods like tripe, raw fish and certain pickled animal body parts is often culturally determined and passed down from one generation to the next.

Then there are external forces that can bring about dietary changes – some permanent and some temporary. Welcome to maple syrup, white cane sugar, politics and the days of the Hitler War. And what your grandma cooked. And why there was “War Cake”, sometimes called “Poor Man’s Cake.”

More next time.

If Food Is Fake, Is It Still Part of the Family Foodway?

2011-11-03T16:53:00.003-04:00

In the last post, I pointed out that maple syrup and maple sugar go well with politics.

Here’s more:

Late last month, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy introduced Senate bill S – 1742, entitled the Maple Agriculture Protection and Law Enforcement (MAPLE) Act. Co-sponsored by the other Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and also by both New York senators Schumer and Gillibrand and by both Maine senators Collins and Snowe, the bill will make it a felony under federal law to sell “fake” maple food products. In other words, if you’re going to sell it as “pure maple syrup”, it better be the real thing – not some ersatz concoction of colored corn syrup, thickener and flavoring.

In the northeast, the maple syrup and maple sugar industry is very serious business. With real unadulterated maple syrup currently going for about $50 a gallon, last year, the maple industry brought $30 million dollars into Vermont.

So, why should all this be important to family historians, apart from the obvious grower and consumer protection angle?

Simple. Food purity and food labeling have been “official” problems for more than a century. Here’s the “family history” angle. Way back when your grandma and her ma were buying what they thought was maple syrup from the friendly neighborhood corner grocery store, there were unscrupulous manufacturers out to make a fast buck, ready to capitalize on the high-value reputation on a specialty food product like maple syrup. They’re still around today.

Face it - everybody thinks they know what maple syrup is.

It’s syrup, not rocket science. Your mom probably put it on your pancakes or French toast when you were a kid. You might write it down on your grocery list and pick up a bottle or two at the store. There are lots of name brands, so they must be all right – or so it seems. However, if your mom or grandma didn’t live in the northeast or wasn’t what we call today a “foodie”, chances are that bottle of syrup said something like Log Cabin or Mrs. Butterworth or Aunt Jemima.

Reality check: even though you thought it was yummy when you were ten and even though it might be the “standard” that you use to judge syrup today – it probably wasn’t actually maple syrup.

Earlier this year, the state of Vermont asked the Food and Drug Administration (the FDA) to investigate whether the folks who manufactured the syrup sold in grocery stores as “Log Cabin All Natural Syrup” were breaking existing law by using the “all natural” sobriquet. The Vermonters thought that xanthan gum, caramel coloring and only 4% maple syrup doth not an “all natural syrup” make. Fancy that!

Then they went after McDonald’s for selling “Fruit and Maple Oatmeal” as a breakfast treat, just because the “Maple” part was all artificially flavored and fake. (Picky, picky…) McDonald’s now provides Vermont customers with real maple syrup on request as a result.

Like I said, we’re serious about maple up here in this corner of the United States.

Next time, we’ll see how the state of New York took an early lead to insure that the stuff your great-grandma thought she was buying was in fact the real deal.

After all, if something is a part of your family’s food tradition, it’s always nice to know that somebody with authority and power is looking out for you and yours.

Till later . . .

The Taste of the Northeast

2011-11-02T16:30:00.004-04:00

If the northeast corner of the United States has a discernable “taste”, it might well be maple.

Maple sugar, maple syrup, maple whatever. The taste of maple in all its myriad glories. Of course, we share that unique taste with our Canadian neighbors to the north and even with some of our Pennsylvania and Upper Midwest cousins, but when push comes to shove, and when crisp Fall days bring busloads of leaf-peepers into the area to ogle the brilliant color foliage displays, it’s pretty obvious that we’re maple folks around here.

Sure, the good folks in Canada produce the bulk of the world’s supply of maple products, but those of us in the northeast are no slouches, either. Plus, if you live anywhere in the U.S., you don’t need a passport or similar government-issued I.D. to travel here to look at our leaves or get some of our locally-produced maple stuff.

Our towering northeast maples give us great shade in summer and – as a form of punishment for enjoying it all too much - lots of leaves to rake in the fall. The trade-off for some of that raking is the “sugar season” in the earliest days of spring, when the sunny days and frosty nights get the sap running.

Drive around the rural northeast in sugar season and you’ll see acre upon acre of maple trees, all seemingly joined together with miles of plastic tubing. The old-style sap collecting buckets that used to hang from the sides of the tapped maple trees are mostly gone now, replaced by those miles of plastic tubing.

Besides, the idea of “sugar season” is much more appealing than “mud season.”

For centuries, northeast farmers with a stand of maples (sometimes called a “sugar bush”) spent part of their time transforming the maple sap from their trees into maple syrup and maple sugar. The transformation takes place by boiling the sap, thus driving off the excess water and leaving the sweetness and that unique maple taste. Generally, it’s outdoor work, best performed in a rough, shed-like building called a “sugar shack” while there’s still snow on the ground. Come “sugaring-off” time, parts of the rural Northeast have a distinct smell as the smoke from wood fires mixes with the scent of the boiling maple sap.

In the earliest times around here, syrup and sugar making was a labor-intensive family affair. There was plenty of work for everyone. There were buckets of sap to be hauled, firewood to be chopped, fires in need of building and tending, boiling sap that needed watching, sugar that had to be packed and syrup that had to be bottled.

In good years, after the family stash of syrup and sugar was put away, there’d be enough to sell or trade.

While the maple trees freely give up their sap, the process of transforming it into the wonder of syrup is hard work. It takes around 40 to 43 gallons of maple sap to make a gallon of maple syrup. That’s a lot of hauling and chopping and processing. That’s also why maple syrup has never been inexpensive.

Still, maple sugar was Nature’s gift to the new nation fixed on developing its own self-sufficiency. Tench Coxe, the late 18^th century author of "A View of the United States" noted that "every farmer having one hundred acres of maple sugar land in a state of ordinary American improvement . . . can make one thousand pounds weight of sugar with only his necessary farming and kitchen utensils."

There’s another side to maple syrup and sugar making that I alluded to in the last post. Maple syrup and maple sugar have an interesting “political” history that goes back to colonial and early Federal times.

Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia published an essay in 1788 entitled “Advantages of the Culture of the Sugar Maple Tree” and shortly thereafter founded a group called “The Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree.” Then, in November of 1790, Thomas Jefferson purchased a 50 pound bag of refined maple sugar; rumor has it that maple sugar was the sweetener of choice at Monticello.

Further north, as settlers pushed west, James Fenimore Cooper’s father William, a land speculator and promoter, lauded the advantages of life in his particular part of upstate New York by pointing out the abundance of sugar maples.

Lucretia Coffin Mott, a Nantucket Quaker, learned that only maple sugar was served at her Quaker school in Nine Partners, New York. White sugar had been banished.

Of course, this “maple sugar thing” was much more than just the leaders and thinkers of a young nation advocating the advantages of being independent and self-sufficient. It was more than idle economic speculation; it was politics – pure and simple like the maple syrup itself.

Many believed that widespread use of maple sugar and syrup would depress the market for West Indian cane sugar and molasses, and in the process, destroy the institution of West Indian slavery. Benjamin Rush wrote, "I cannot help contemplating a sugar maple tree with a species of affection and even veneration, for I have persuaded myself to behold in it the happy means of rendering the commerce and slavery of our African brethren in the sugar islands as unnecessary as it has always been inhuman and unjust."

Maple sugar was, in effect, a political tool of the early abolitionists. If maple sugar could be processed to a state where it was as sweet and nearly as tasteless as cane sugar, there would be no real incentive to import the cane sugar made by slave labor on West Indian plantations.

For more insight on this, please read Yoni Applebaum’s excellent (and intriguingly titled) essay that appeared in yesterday’s Atlantic, called “Making The Grade: Why The Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best.”

Also, if you’d like to get a sense of what it was like to make maple syrup and sugar years ago, check out this short “history” section on the Maple Weekend website. Perhaps you’ll plan a trip to these parts during sugaring off time next year:

Stop back next time. There will be more about this in the next post. In the meantime, remember that the stuff on the supermarket shelves labeled “pancake syrup” is probably not “real” maple syrup, no matter how much the manufacturers who concoct the witches’ brew of high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavorings and fake color would like you to think it is.

Spring for a small bottle of the real thing and experience the difference. In a way, you’ll be tasting history.

Maple’s truly the taste of the northeast.

When Food is Family and Family is Food

2011-11-01T21:01:00.001-04:00

“When washing rice, preparing vegetables, and so on, do so with your own hands, with close attention, vigorous exertion, and a sincere mind. Do not indulge in a single moment of carelessness or laziness. Do not allow attentiveness to one thing [to] result in overlooking another.”

From Tenzo Kyoken (Instructions for the Cook) , written by the Zen Master Dogen of the Kannon Dôri Kôshô Hôrin Monastery in 1237.

This is good Zen master advice for any kitchen chef - and also good advice for life in general. It’s especially on target if you substitute “When doing family research” for the “When washing rice, preparing vegetables” part.

So, now that I’ve got you thinking of food and family …

Chances are, if you’ve ever heard or used the word “smear cheese” to refer to cottage cheese or some kind of spreadable soft cheese, you have a German speaking ancestor (or two or three), or you lived in a place thickly settled by German speakers. Like language, food is complicated, political and filled with information. People in some parts of the world – out of simple necessity - eat to live, while in other parts, they live to eat.

What people eat matters. It helps define who they are.

For example, a teacher-friend in Uganda years ago rejoiced when the annual swarms of locusts returned to our school compound. His children would gather them up in sacks - hundreds of them - , remove the wings and then his wife would fry them up until they were crisp like bacon.

However, for him, the very thought of humans eating lobster was abhorrent. In his universe, lobsters were decidedly NOT FOOD. Locusts, on the other hand ...

Food is sustenance, but it also transmits both culture and memory.

For many of us, specific foods can trigger vivid and highly specific memories and also help define long-past special events. For French writer Marcel Proust, it was the smell of a cookie, specifically madeleines, served with tea, that evoked those memories of times past and resulted in a great novel. For my mother’s step-mother, it wasn’t Thanksgiving unless she had a slice of my mother’s chocolate pie topped high with real whipped cream for dessert. Mince-meat, apple or pumpkin pies never said “HOLIDAY” to her.

Only chocolate pie with real whipped cream would do.

For me, the thought of a steaming bowl of my other grandmother’s thick vegetable soup made with whatever bounty Fitz the Vegetable Man had on his truck that day still conjures up memories of cool Fall days, long, dark Saturday nights and of being ten again.

For Mrs. Blogger, it’s root beer: memories of her father’s homemade concoction, in turn triggering memories of her grandfather’s hand-cranked, homemade vanilla ice cream, served up on the porch in the lazy summertime of rural West Virginia.

The memory of a frosty float with homemade root beer and homemade ice cream…almost heaven.

Last week, while hosting Mrs. Blogger’s brother, I dug out their Aunt Dollie’s recipe for Fried - Baked Apples, southern West Virginia-style. The recipe, written out in longhand on a small piece of lined paper by Dollie more than 30 years ago, is more narrative than recipe, with her cooking instructions, admonitions and advice.

Moreover, it’s a recipe that Dollie - born in 1908 - had likely made hundreds of times, until it was second nature and burned indelibly into her memory. In fact, it’s unlikely she ever wrote it down - - until we asked her for it.

It’s only a scrap of paper, but it still has a voice that speaks out loud and clear, even though Dollie herself died nearly two decades ago.

If I were to ask, “What food triggers the strongest family memory for you?”, you’d likely have no trouble answering. After all, we carry our memories around with us, ready for almost instant retrieval, just as soon as the right triggers go off.

However, what if I were to ask you, “What foods were the favorites of your great-grandparents and what food reminded them of THEIR grandparents?” That’s a much tougher question, even for genealogists. That’s because it’s a question rarely – if ever – asked.

Few of us ever thought to ask our grandparents – or even our parents – about food memories. Still, learning about our ancestor’s foodways is yet another way we can come closer to understanding how they actually lived their lives.

Our family food memories can easily slip away, in all the hustle and bustle of exploring new digitized records and new online databases. Still, if we really want to understand who “our people” were, the foods that were important to them should become the focus of our family research, right along with their vital statistics and the houses they lived in.

Our research might be as simple as paging through our grandmother’s well-worn cookbook and retrieving and scanning all those handwritten “receipts” that call for a “pinch” of this and a “three dollops” of that. Still, we might decide to take the “more complex and scholarly” road, tracking down original old country store account books in archival collections to learn what foods were available commercially in rural areas where our ancestors lived.

Then there are those scholarly articles written by historians that detail and explain the evolution of the sometimes complicated dietary codes that some religious groups followed.

Society of Friends (Quaker) ancestors? Learning that many Quaker families avoided cane sugar entirely because it was contaminated by its association with the social evil of West Indian slavery can be enlightening.

I’ll be playing with this “food and memory and family and history” concept for the next several posts. After all, Thanksgiving – that King of family food holidays - is just around the corner.

Stay tuned.

(Oh, and by the way, properly fried fresh locusts are kinda bacon-y)

Hallowe'en Decorations, Books, and Rev. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's - All Together in One Swell Foop!

2011-10-23T18:19:00.005-04:00

PUMPKIN!!!!

In less than a week and a half, Hallowe’en will be upon us.

Mrs. Blogger will celebrate the annual return of industrial-sized bags of candy corn to the supermarket shelves and yours truly will be all a-goggle at the new crop of inflatable Hallowe’en lawn ornaments that populate the private manicured green spaces called “lawns” in local suburbias. Frankly, as a confirmed and probably certifiable lover of both kitsch and bargains, it’s hard to resist (at only $179.95) the seven-foot animated inflatable skeleton that plays the pipe organ. Yes, exactly! A Pipe Organ!!! Like Lon Chaney in "Phantom of the Opera!!!"

C’mon; you KNOW you want one! Just follow the link here to admire it and perhaps to order one for yourself.

Of course, Hallowe’en isn’t generally much of a genealogy or book holiday.

At least that’s what I thought until a few days ago. But then, I stumbled upon a website that dealt with the age-old question I’ve been pondering here for a week or so.

The Big Question: What to do with all the books that nobody really wants anymore?

After all, in spite of being the unrepentant “bookie” that I am, I’m still a realist. You can’t save everything. There’s only so much shelf space. Eventually, some stuff has to go. And if truth were to be told, there’s a lot of stuff (book-wise) that should never have existed in the first place.

(Take no personal offense, Danielle Steele…)

Sooner or later, excess books can become a problem, for both libraries and “private-sector” owners.

As I said, you can’t save everything, at least not in book form. So, what’s the solution – if, in fact, there is one?

Welcome to the world of the Crafting Mom. It is, of course an online world of wonder for the Mom Who Does Crafts.

Who would have thought that the solution to the world-wide “book backlog” problem could be simply solved by a crafting mom with a razor-sharp Exacto knife and a bucket of paint?

Frankly, the holiday possibilities are endless. Why stop at Hallowe’en? Other holidays – Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving - are now all fair game as book-recycling holidays. The only limits are the crafting imagination, which, I am led to believe, knows no bounds.

Anyway, I know you’re intrigued by all this hype; so here’s the simplest of solutions. Check out the website and wonder why this has not become some sort of national biblio-recycling policy.

Rev. Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745)

For some reason (and no doubt one that reflects the perverse nature of my own mental processes), this immediately caused me to think of one of my all-time favorite works in English dealing with recycling: the Rev. Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”.

Swift (1667 – 1745), the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and one of the greatest writers in English, is probably best known for his classic “Gulliver’s Travels.” Nonetheless, “A Modest Proposal” is a fine example of social commentary written by one of the truly great masters of satire.

Before writing this pamphlet and releasing it in 1729, Dean Swift thought long and hard about one of the pressing social problems of his time: the widespread problem of poverty in early 18^th century Ireland and the “excess population” of Irish children – children who were mostly the offspring of impoverished Irish Catholic families.

As a descendant of some of the very-same children the Dean was writing about, I immediately saw the genealogical implications of Swift’s “solution” when I first read “A Modest Proposal” at university a long, long time ago.

What to do, what to do, thought the Dean? Lots of Loony-Tunes ideas were being floated about in both Ireland and England by folks with pretty shallow thought processes. The Dean figured that since nothing quite succeeds like excess, he'd pile on with a "why haven't we thought of this before???" solution of his own.

If you haven’t read “A Modest Proposal” in a long time, here’s the link to an online version at Project Gutenberg.

Remember as you read it – Jonathan Swift was perhaps the most gifted satirist of his (or, for that matter, any) time. “A Modest Proposal” is a fine example of what a great artist can do with a serious question if he sets his mind to it and at the same time plants his tongue firmly in his cheek. Solutions to complex problems are not always “9-9-9” simple, obvious or practical, no matter how “interesting” they may first appear.

And sometimes, absolutely inane ideas can sound positively reasonable in the right set of circumstances.

The more “sane-sounding” inane solutions appear to be, the more insane the times.

Imagine what the Dean might suggest could be done with all the excess books in the world. He’d likely put the Crafting Moms to shame with his solutions.

Cherub Kitsch or Great Art?

Oh, and I wasn’t kidding about loving kitsch-y things: Here’s a pic of one of the “presents” I got folks several Christmases ago. I just hadda keep one for myself, perhaps as a collectible “inflation hedge” in the event of hard economic times.

I understand art collectors will likely pay big money for fine ceramics like this…

At least - - - I live in hope ...

Public Libraries Are Free; So, Does That Mean They Don't Cost Anybody Anything?

2011-10-17T21:35:00.002-04:00

Lots of folks took the time to read the last post here about libraries and books. And, as I suspected, real books still matter to lots of folks. Nobody likes to see books go to “book heaven”, even if they’re the umpteenth copy of really bad teen paranormal romance novels.

And with regard to the destruction of actual manuscript public records - that's a special legal issue all unto itself.

There was, of course, an ulterior motive behind the post in the first place. It wasn’t just about pulping books. It was to subtly suggest that “free” public libraries aren’t really “free” at all. Choices have to be made. Choices cost money. The physical space that libraries need is not “free.” Publishers do not provide books for “free.” And – surprise – the companies that provide libraries with online databases don’t do this for “free.”

Somebody pays for it all in the end. You pay. I pay. Pretty much everybody pays something. And while public libraries are “free” to use, that doesn’t mean that they’re, well, “FREE.”

Like lunch, ferinstence.

Look, everybody loves libraries. Just ask ‘em. But when you ask them to actually PAY for libraries, their tune starts to change a bit. In fact, the melody gets to sound a bit off-key.

Back in 2008, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dropped a bunch of money on OCLC (OCLC – the library cataloging gurus - the people who bring you WorldCat and one of the leaders in the field of library research) to look at the “support” status of libraries as the 21^st century was getting underway.

When all was surveyed, said and done, here’s what they found:

Public library use is increasing.
Public library support from government at all levels (federal, state, local) has either flat-lined or declined and ballot initiatives for additional funding haven’t been doing very well.
Ballot initiatives for new space have been doing especially poorly.
Largely funded by local tax dollars, libraries compete with local police, fire, public works and other “key services” departments for public funding. Guess who wins?
Being “supportive” of libraries in the abstract and actually being willing to fork over actual cash to actually support them financially in the “real” world aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Lots of these “on the surface” public library “findings” were predictable.

However, it gets really interesting when you drill down in the report and see some of the more specific findings. For example, more than half of the people who described themselves as “financially strapped” felt that their local public library already had enough government funding and said that they would be unlikely to vote for increased support. Less than 30% of the respondents overall felt this way.

40% of these “financially strapped” folks thought that tax increases for libraries would be “a waste of the public’s money”, compared to 16% of overall respondents.

Remember – this report came out way back in 2008, before “financially strapped” took on its current meaning and encompassed even more of the population.

Another interesting finding was that the segment of the population identified as “Detached” – that is, the “higher income than average” (29% earn $100,000+), well-educated, non-library users are no friends of libraries when it comes to public funding. While more than 40% would be willing to spend more for fire, police, schools and public health, only 20% would support increased library funding.

Libraries were close to the bottom, beating out the last-place “park services” only by 3%.

The really interesting finding was the report of the views of what OCLC called the “Web Wins” segment of the population. These are the folks who felt that the Internet beat the public library five ways to Sunday. They tend to be well-educated, technologically savvy, gainfully employed and economically successful.

Turns out that the public library is the “least likely” of all public services that they’d support. Police, yeah, sure. Fire, yup. Even “parks”, that’s a “go.” But libraries – not so much.

After all, they rarely use the public library. They're convinced that they can do it all online at home. Plus, they think that librarians do not add value to the research process. Here’s the kicker: in answer to the question “It’s easier to do research on the Internet using search engines like Google and Yahoo than in the local public library”, 69% of the “Web Wins” respondents agreed, while only 37% of the total respondents agreed. Of course, most had high-speed internet access at home.

45% of the “Web Wins” group think that all the great TV programming and all the great kids’ activities make public libraries much less important to kids than they once were.

So, if you’re one of these folks and you think it’s all on the ‘net and that librarians don’t add value to the research process – please – do me a big favor. Don’t vote. Don’t teach my grandkids. Don’t do anything that puts you in charge of any kind of “public policy”, especially when it comes to libraries.

Still, the most interesting finding was simply this: support for libraries was strongest among those people who felt that libraries were “transformational”, not just “informational”.

Libraries and librarians make a difference. Plus, it’s more than just about storing printed information in book form. It’s about learning. More people are using libraries. More people are seeing their value.

Libraries are all about transforming lives.

Transformation doesn’t come cheap.

You can read the whole OCLC report here. All 212 pages. Knock yourself out.

Everything! We’re Genealogists! We Want Everything! Free! Online! Whaddaya Mean You Pulped It???

2011-10-12T20:48:00.001-04:00

Today was a “book” day.

I’ve been choosing and packing books for our vendor exhibit space at the Connecticut Society of Genealogists annual fall event this coming Saturday – this year in North Haven, Connecticut – and also ordering books for the event the week following in Bergen County, New Jersey.

(I’m doing one talk at the Connecticut event, should you be interested.)

So, to continue with the “book day” theme, let me point out that the brand-new New England Historic Genealogical Society book catalog was released today. We stock a number of the NEHGS titles, so it was good to find some new things in print.

In print. In paper. As in real paper-and-glue books.

You know, the kind of things that don’t need a special “reader”, will work when the power goes out and can be loaned out or given to friends. Real books. You may have heard of them.

Now, before you get on my case, call me a Luddite, tell me to get with the program and suggest it’s only a matter of time till everything of value is (a.) digitized and (b.) online for free, please permit me this simple indulgence to point out that you’re probably grossly mistaken.

No question, more and more stuff is being digitized. Similarly, more stuff is going online. That’s all to the good. But not everything. Not even close.

Moreover, there’s a dirty little secret that nobody talks about. Real glue and paper books are being destroyed. Pulped. Dumped. Sold for waste paper. Burned. Ground up. Shredded. Turned into blown-in insulation for the thousands of overpriced McMansions that now dot the landscape in ex-urban America. The very same McMansions that offer convincing proof that there are Schools of Architecture and licensing boards that should be sued for malpractice, at least as far as architectural aesthetics and design are concerned.

But I digress. The issue at hand is books. As I said, today was a book day.

First, let me say that I LOVE Google Books and all the other digitization programs. Nonetheless, when I swivel my desk chair around to look at the stuff on my own shelves – my personal reference collection of real honest-to-Murgatroyd books – most of them are not digitized. There are both copyright issues and “popularity” issues that keep that from happening.

Let’s face it: a book titled “The Record : a History of the Graduates' Association of the State Normal School, Worcester, Mass. ; Revised and Brought Down to 1904” is not a title that makes the heart beat quicker.

In fact, our friends at WorldCat locate a single copy at the Worcester Public Library.

That’s it. One copy. In one library.

There may be others, but WorldCat doesn’t know about them.

Were you to check the out-of-print booksites for that title, you’d find that currently there were exactly NONE for sale.

So, my personal copy on the shelves behind my desk is – to use the technical term – “hard to come by.” Of course, most people will never want or need a copy, so it’s a “low-priority” item for reprint or for digitization.

Besides, there’s a copy at the Worcester Public Library. You can always go there to look at it.

Oh, wait… there’s that “dirty little secret” thing I talked about.

That’s all about space and storage being expensive and libraries being “patron demand-driven”.

Did you know that libraries actually got rid of (i.e., destroyed) books? Given much thought lately to how/why they did that and how/by whom that was decided?

I spent a large number of years as a trustee of an urban public library and also as a board officer of a large library system. The concept of “library of last resort” – the library that kept one single reference copy of things that needed keeping – was a much talked about and little acted upon issue, but that was before space was an issue and before digitization got a foothold in the library/book world.

Now it’s a major issue, but still a little talked-about or acted-upon one.

So, if you think that “books in libraries” are safe from extinction and destruction, you might just as well believe in gardens of prancing unicorns and free pie for everybody. Ain’t gonna happen.

Here’s an article by Linda Holmes on the NPR Blog website that underscores what’s really going on in the book/library world with regard to books going “bye-bye.” It’s called “Hard Choices: Do Libraries Really Destroy Books?”

Read it. Be surprised. Weep.

Then go buy a real book and save it for future generations.

Because what you think is probably happening ...probably isn't.

Censuses Behaving Badly: The Case of the Two Therman Lockharts

2011-10-10T19:42:00.002-04:00

Ennis, McDowell County, West Virginia has never been much of a metropolis.

In a “Coal Country” county with few roads and lots of sparsely populated “hollers”, surrounded by places with names like Antler, Switchback, Jed, Six, Johnnycake and Panther, it doesn’t appear as a “destination” in tourist guidebooks.

Remember, in the 2010 census, the population of the entire county was just a hair north of 22,000 people – about the same as in a square of apartment blocks in some parts of Manhattan.

In fact, if it weren’t for geology and if easy access to the Number 3 Pocahontas Seam had been located somewhere else, there’s a very good chance that Ennis, West Virginia wouldn’t exist at all. However, because of that seam, about 300 men who worked for the Turkey Gap Coal and Coke Company dug out nearly 1200 tons of coal from deep inside the earth around Ennis every year. Mules and steam locomotives hauled the coal out to be loaded into railroad cars. From Ennis, it was hauled on the railroad track that hugged the twists and turns of the Elkhorn Creek that cut through those McDowell County hills.

Coal mining has always been dirty, dangerous work. Men went in in the morning clean and came out in the evening covered in black dust – on the outside and on the inside. In 1910, the “Annual Report of the West Virginia Department of Mines” noted that the Turkey Gap mine in Ennis needed careful attention “…for it has been known to liberate a large quality of explosive gas…”

The McQuail family’s Turkey Gap mine at Ennis was not the only coal operation that cut into the rich Number 3 Pocahontas seam. In between Ennis and nearby Elkhorn, men worked at the Upland mine, the Houston One and Houston Two mines and the Crozier One and Two mines. Each mine employed hundreds of men, some of them off-the-boat eastern European immigrants who spoke little or no English and who lived together in rooming houses. The 1910 census noted that their first languages were Russian, Slovenian, Slovak, Hungarian and Russian, the sound of which had not been heard much in this part of West Virginia until coal brought boom times. And because the census taker couldn’t ask the questions in a language they could understand, the age and marital status of many of these miners is simply listed as “unknown.”

Coal mining towns needed all sorts of workers to keep things running smoothly. There were carpenters, blacksmiths, storekeepers, cooks, rooming-house keepers, barbers, and doctors. There were foremen, managers and superintendents. There were preachers and teachers. There were single men and large families with children. Folks who were born a few miles away and folks who had traveled there, sometimes from the other side of the earth, all there because of that Number 3 Pocahontas Seam.

One of those many travelers from afar was a single 23 year old man whose census entry indicates that he was a “teacher – public school.” His full name was Therman Allen Lockhart, but most people simply called him “T.A.” He lived in Edith Piles’ rooming house in Elkhorn District - probably just a walk from his school - along with eight other boarders, plus Edith’s extended family and some hired help. His father and mother were living on a farm in Grant District, Jackson County, West Virginia, more than 175 miles to the north, and too far for the occasional casual visit home during the school year.

T.A. was a country-schoolhouse teacher. He taught everybody everything that needed teaching, from history to math to science to spelling. He had coal miners’ sons and storekeepers’ daughters in his class.

This is what his teaching certificate looked like (and you can see that he was very, very good at history):

You can also see him in the photo above, which came from T.A.’s own collection. He’s the last person on the right, in the dark suit and tie, looking somewhat uncomfortable and very serious and teacher-ish. Almost all of the other people in the photo are his pupils at the Ennis School during the 1909 – 1910 school year.

Here's a close-up. The stern-looking woman to his left may well be the 30 year old teacher Essie Shelton, also a resident of Mrs. Piles’ boarding-house, whose name is next to his in the census – however, it’s hard to tell the young-ish teachers from their “almost as old” students.

T.A. didn’t stay long in Ennis. He taught in several other locations, found a wife, moved back to his home area in Jackson County and stayed there for the rest of his life, raising a family, and keeping livestock, chickens, and hives of honeybees. In between those activities, he delivered the local mail for the post office, wrote frequent local history columns for several local newspapers and in the 1930s, worked on his family genealogy, interviewing his older relatives, keeping copious notes and writing family sketches.

T.A. Lockhart wrote many of the family stories that our own grandkids will read someday. You see, T.A. was one of their eight great-great grandfathers – each of whom has a unique North American story.

The point of telling you a small part of T.A.’s story today was to draw your attention to something you may not have thought much about lately.

Simply put, for genealogists, census work can hold lots of surprises, especially in this “new age” of digitized and indexed images. Here’s an example:

Years ago, genealogists cranked away at microfilm readers, searching for a family or name. When the sought-after name was found, the information was recorded or printed and that was that. After all, once you found what you were searching for, why keep on looking?

Enter the wonderful world of online census indexes. Now, the search time for a record is often reduced from hours to fractions of seconds, especially when everything goes right. But every now and again, an anomaly shows up.

Like “The Case of Two Therman Lockharts” in the 1910 Census of West Virginia.

One Therman Lockhart is listed in Elkhorn, McDowell County. He is the teacher-boarder living in Mrs. Piles’ boarding-house who is pictured above.

His boarding-house entry, seventh from the bottom, dated 4 May 1910, can be found on sheet 6-A of ED 85 (Elkhorn District, McDowell County, WV):

The other Therman Lockhart is the teacher-son living on the family farm in Grant District, Jackson County, with his parents, Jonathan and Virginia (Full) Lockhart.

Here is that entry, dated 22 April 1910, found on sheet 5-B of ED 44 (Grant, Jackson County, WV):

They are, in fact, the very same person, even though both census takers in Jackson and McDowell Counties spelled his first name wrong. (That spelling issue may be why he called himself “T.A.”)

Without this census anomaly, a researcher would not likely think to look for Therman Lockhart in more than one place in 1910 – the Jackson County entry being the most “logical.” In fact, if you were researching the family in general and T.A. in particular and had never seen the “Ennis” photo above or did not know about T.A.’s very short teaching career in southern West Virginia, you’d have no reason at all to look for him in McDowell County.

After all, why would a researcher expect that someone – all of whose census entries from 1900 to 1930 reflected continuous residence in Jackson County, West Virginia - might be found “elsewhere”?

No question, finding him in McDowell County provides the researcher with important data not easily found anywhere else.

That’s one of the marvels of technology – being able to find those little things that probably should not even be there in the first place – like Therman Lockhart’s double entry in the 1910 census.

Oh, and by the way, check out two of the guys sitting directly to the left of the teachers. Here’s an enlargement (see photo left) of that part of the photo.

Look in their hands. A gun? A playing card?

Teaching has always been a tough job. Kids act up and kids act out, whether it's 1910 or 2010.

Been there, done that.

"Redactio Ad Absurdum"? Can't Tell You: It's Classified

2011-10-06T15:06:00.003-04:00

One of the many advantages of having received a university education outside the United States and in a country that is officially bilingual is that I am no stranger to the word “rédacteur.”

It was hard not to see the word on a daily basis in the Province de Quebec. You find it on the title page of many French anthologies or other works of literature. You find it in newspapers. You see it on the credits of Quebecois news programmes. In French, it simply means “editor”, or the person who gets the work ready for publication.

The real issue comes when you loosely translate that simple French word into English in the United States these days.

At that point, when rendered in good ol’ American English, the “rédacteur” can become something different – in fact, the word itself is laden with a whole lot of highly-charged political and social implications. In effect, the French word “rédacteur” becomes the English word “redactor.” In the United States, that person - the “redactor” - is the individual charged with the responsibility of deciding exactly what you, in your role of reader or researcher, will NOT be allowed to see.

These days, “redactor” equals “censor” when rendered in American English.

Of course, redactors are not editors in the traditional sense – they’re the folks with those thick black markers who cross out sensitive passages prior to publication - passages that they think could endanger national security, disclose protected personal information or embarrass the people in power (or the folks formerly in power).

That’s why I was interested to see that the Brennan Center for Justice has just issued a new 76 page report called “Reducing Classification Through Accountability” that focuses on the “national security – government secrecy – who’s really in charge here” conundrum. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but the concept discussed is important. A culture of secrecy pervades parts of government and the twin tools of classification and redaction can have a chilling effect on the distribution of information.

It’s easy to classify or redact things in the name of “national security”; fear is a powerful motivator.

Unfortunately, getting stuff “de-classified” or “un-redacted” isn’t quite as easy.

These days, it’s not uncommon to find something like this in the reviews of any recently published book about foreign policy written by a former employee if the government:

“The recent work describing the United States’ role in [fill in the blank with non-European country of choice] has been heavily redacted by the [fill in gov’t agency here] in the interest of national security.”

The “national security” issue trumps everything for the redactor; the black Magic Marker is king.

Generally, for genealogists, the issue of “classification & redaction” isn’t much on the radar.

Still, it should be.

Not because of concern for the records of the long-ago past, but rather - for the records of the recent past, the immediate present and the not-too-distant future. While it won’t much affect you in the search for your 3^rd great-grandpa, it may present a major barrier in your search for information about your third cousin, once removed. And it may very well affect your great-grandchildren in their search for you and your offspring someday.

Genealogists need to be concerned about the state of future records, not just for the old stuff that they use themselves; future records are those that will be needed by future researchers not yet born. And it’s not just about government records; other records repositories are already affected as well.

For example, there’s been a discussion about redaction that’s been going on in the professional archives world for some time now. Earlier this week, it took up a lot of space on the Society of American Archivists listserv. Archivists – in search of collegial guidance – continue to ask each other, “What should we do about all the stuff in archives that has that troublesome “personal identifier” information, especially if the person whose info we have might still be living?”

“Personal identifier” information (aka “PII”) includes such things as Social Security numbers, birth dates, credit card numbers and home addresses. Stuff like this ends up in archival collections all the time, especially when some descendant is cleaning house and donates “the personal papers” of her semi-famous professor-grandfather to a university archives. Problem is, a lot of this information is “almost old”, often dating to the dim period after World War II. But not quite old enough. Some of the information concerns other people, not just the professor-grandfather. There are letters, bills and receipts. Pay stubs. Tax returns. Some of it is already public, easy to find elsewhere. This can make for difficult decision-making. There are only so many hours in an archivist’s day to look stuff up.

Then there’s the privacy issue, especially when it relates to things that many folks find embarrassing.

When I describe early 20^th century newspaper research in one of my talks, I usually point out that yesterday’s privacy is not today’s privacy. For example, it is unlikely that this snippet, which appeared in the Johnstown (NY) Daily Republican in August 1893, would appear in any local paper today. Editors would fear a lawsuit for “invasion of privacy.”

Today, local and state privacy statutes and Federal laws like HIPAA and FERPA (laws governing the release of “protected” medical and educational information, respectively) are putting archives personnel on the defensive, especially if they work in an environment circumscribed by staff attorneys who live in fear of having to defend their agency in a lawsuit. Or face the wrath of angry donors.

The concept of “best practices” is in a constant state of re-examination, especially if there is no specific law covering specific records. Should parts of files or whole documents be redacted? If so, for how long? Should “sensitive” information be removed altogether or be restricted in some way? What about really old information, such as late 19^th century medical records or early 20^th century student records? Where to draw the line, especially if it’s not clear if a record is actually “covered”?

Does the death of the individual named in the “protected” record change things? Should a living relative embarrassed by information (say, evidence of illegal drug use or cheating) in an ancestor’s file in a public university archives be able to keep that information from researchers? What if the ancestor was a “public” person and the embarrassing information had already been reported in the press? Should only “scholarly” researchers be allowed access? What exactly is a “Scholarly Researcher?” Does wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket fit the definition?

None of the questions above have hard and fixed answers; in a lot of places, it’s still “under discussion.”

One archivist in a local government archives noted that a record series covering records of juvenile offenders – including cases dating back to World War One – could only be accessed with a court order from a judge. Another working in a non-public setting wrote that she had found a simple solution to the redaction issue: black out the offending personal information on the original with Magic Marker; photocopy the original; place the photocopy in the collection in place of the original; shred the original. Problem solved. The offending tell-tale “private” information is no more.

In some states, records of institutions providing treatment to the mentally ill are archived, but kept unavailable for a very long time. The entire series is redacted and locked down. Forever.

What if the records we used looked like this:

The more I read, the more complicated the issue becomes, especially when I consider a series of “what if” questions. What if I couldn’t access my great-great grandfather’s brother’s Civil War pension file today because someone 60 years ago observed that it contained detailed and highly personal medical information? What if some early government record keeper decided that those Revolutionary war pension applications contained too much personal financial information about applicants’ families and ordered them burned? What if somebody in the not too distant future determines that the “72 year rule” for the release of census information is entirely too short and needs to be lengthened by 50 years? Or decides that only redacted copies of federal records can be released (a.) in the interest of national security and (b.) to prevent identity theft?

Already, people get upset when county clerks place current property records and property tax information online for all to see. Some folks have requested that clerks remove their ancestors’ names from online record indexes in the name of “privacy.”

Bureaucrats are risk-adverse and cautious creatures by nature. Bureaucrats tend to supervise and control people who run archives and records management programs. Sometimes, it’s easier to take the path of least resistance and keep things under wraps rather than to decide on the side of transparency and open records.

In private archives circles, this is a purely “academic” issue and open to internal discussion and debate; private archives and private records can be kept private for any reason whatsoever, especially when there’s no government law that “protects” them. Archivists and their attorneys make those decisions about who gets access. They get to decide what gets kept and what gets “weeded”.

Still, public archives are another matter.

Here we enter the bizarro world of conflicting public priorities. On one hand, we want complete transparency and total openness in our government. We want our politicians and government employees to disclose every tiny little detail of their private lives and personal finances so that we can all look it over if we want to. We want to know all the nitty-gritty details of those government contracts and we want to watch them negotiated. The argument often boils down to this - If it’s produced or paid for with taxpayer dollars, it should be public and open for inspection. That’s good government, folks say.

On the other hand, we want our own “personal” information kept private, especially if it’s financial, health-related or potentially embarrassing, even when we’re receiving government payments. If Aunt Sallie is entitled to Medicaid and food stamps, no newspaper should publish that information. That’s private. The amount of Uncle Freddie’s Social Security check and pension from the bank that employed him should be private, but the pension of his next-door neighbor, who was a driver for the city sanitation department, should be public, along with his home address. Now it’s not about “good government”, it’s the “personal privacy” issue.

And what about 100 years from now? Will it matter anyway?

For archivists, it’s usually a “no-win” situation. Do it one way, and you’ll have the “open government” folks after you. Do it the other and the “privacy” folks will want your head.

Even though I have my own opinion on all of this, I’m not actually advocating for one side or the other in this discussion; I just want you to understand that this is a very complex problem in the world of archives and records management and is not going away any time soon. Plus, it’s part and parcel of the ongoing discussion about records access that we (as genealogists) have been having with public records keepers for some time now.

Redaction of information in records – many of them housed in government archives – is here to stay, as is the “classification for national security” issue. Documents will continue to be locked up, withheld, occasionally defaced and even sometimes destroyed in the name of personal privacy by records keepers who are convinced that they’re doing the right thing.

In the not too distant future, archives and vital records departments will be run by professionals who were born too late to remember that there once was a time when people weren’t deathly afraid of other people learning their dead relatives’ expired MasterCard account numbers. When personal home office shredders - like cell phones and home computers – just didn’t exist. When newspapers published who in town was on vacation and where they went. Or when Social Security numbers were routinely used as employee ID numbers and nobody really cared.

It’s something we all need to think and learn about.

Working In the Garden of Genealogy: Farmers or Field Hands?

2011-10-03T18:57:00.002-04:00

Over at Marian Pierre-Louis’s blog Roots and Rambles, there’s a discussion going on about the market for professional genealogists and other such things. She started the discussion by linking to my earlier post (see here) and then posed these questions:

Is the role of professional genealogists disappearing? Are their services no longer needed? Should they focus more on providing education services? Do you feel genealogists haven't focused on education enough? Is it time to pack our bags and go?

I tend to be wordy, so rather than clutter up her “Comments” section, I thought I’d chime in over here.

There’s an old saying, sometimes attributed to Joseph P. Kennedy (JFK’s father), that goes something like this: “When your shoeshine boy is offering you investment advice, it’s time to get out of the market.” Of course, old Joe Kennedy didn’t mean that all the money had dried up, just that savvy investors needed to look elsewhere, in places where nobody else was looking.

In other words, when everybody and their brother thinks they’re all of a sudden market experts or Warren Buffett wannabes, the real experts, having already recognized that the boom is over and that the bubble has quietly burst, are now quietly looking elsewhere.

In a way, something similar has been happening in genealogy during the past decade (even though I don’t think the family history boom is over in any way. Not by a long shot!)

There’s a whole lot more genealogy being done than when I started in 1961. More and more people are paying more and more money for things genealogical, including hiring professionals. More and more people are finding the genealogy niche markets, like I did with reprint maps way back in 1977. Tim Sullivan’s Ancestry.com reaches a hugely larger market than John Sittner’s original Ancestry, publisher of “The Source.”

All of this is a good thing.

More and more people have been taking courses and seminars – both online and in-the-flesh, joining study groups and tuning it to podcasts and webinars, better educating themselves in the field with the hope of turning “pro” someday.

I know this because they tell me directly at conferences where I speak and sell books. This is, of course, a good thing and makes for better genealogy overall, as more folks know more stuff and do better work for themselves and others.

However, we’ve yet to see the market analyses that show there’s a huge amount of (a.) pent-up customer demand with (b.) corresponding purchasing power; i.e., customers with cash just waiting for more professional genealogists to appear and solve their brick-wall problems.

In a lot of respects, it reminds me of my days as a retail antiquarian bookseller.

It seemed like every other person coming into the shop wanted to own a bookstore when he or she retired, mostly because he or she “just loved” books and thought it would be neat to spend the rest of their lives surrounded by old books, reading, reading, reading all the live-long day. (Clue: real bookstore owners don't have time to read on the job...)

I wish they’d call me now; I have a great inventory of rare stuff to sell them at a great price to get them started.

Once “Antiques Roadshow” got popular, the “public at large” was convinced that every book more than 50 years old was supremely valuable and folks could never quite understand why I wouldn’t offer them hundreds – no, thousands – of dollars for their beat up family bibles and A.L. Burt reprints that they brought into the shop to sell. It was almost like what the saw on the “Roadshow”, they thought.

Even later, folks would drop in with a book they wanted to sell and tell me how much it was worth. After all, they already looked it up on the internet. They zeroed in on a price they liked, disregarded the hundreds of others priced much, much lower, ignored both “points” and condition, and glossed over the fact that it was an ex-library book, with all the stamps and other marks. The “internet” said it was worth $300, and, of course, the internet is always right.

The internet will also tell you you’re descended from Julius Caesar and the Queen of Sheba, too.

So, genealogists see that Ancestry.com is now a public company with subscriber numbers in seven figures and that “Who Do You Think You Are” has been renewed for yet another season. Ergo, genealogy is “hot.” The public seems to be eating this stuff up and is spending money on genealogy hand over fist.

It’s only a matter of time when genealogy will spread, Amway-like, through every American sub-division and the market for professionals will go through the roof.

Maybe. Maybe not.

The point of my original post was to point out that “the public at large” doesn’t quite understand what we do or why and how we do it and that the lack of understanding will have a negative effect on funding the public resources that we use (libraries and archives) and on keeping public records open and available. We talk to each other about what we do, but folks outside the group aren’t getting the message, as evidenced by the people talking about genealogy on financial websites. Those guys are the “public at large”, not the folks reading this or Marian’s excellent blog.

How about this as a measure of the market: first show me the section labeled “Genealogy” in your local Barnes and Noble.

They have a labeled section for “Teen Paranormal Romance” but not for “Genealogy”, at least not where I live. Apparently there’s a market for “TPR”, suggesting that there are more teens interested in having paranormal romances than folks interested in their genealogy.

Here’s a market lesson to take away: when it’s ready for prime time, like Home Repair, Self-Help, Mysticism or Cooking, B&N will have a section for it.

Next – imagine what would happen if “Who Do You Think You Are” announced that they were done with “celebrity” genealogy; next season, it was all about a grocery store cashier in Kansas, a bank teller named Horace, and a little old Italian lady from Syracuse, New York, all trying to find their ancestors. Where would the show’s ratings go then? (Do you wanna flush those ratings, or should I…)

Those currently high ratings come from folks who want to see their favorite stars in a reality TV setting, not folks who want to watch a reality show featuring their next door neighbor doing strange things. They already have “Cops” for that…

You watch it because it’s about genealogy and if you must know, you’re way, way down the “long tail” of the TV ratings curve. You’d watch it if it were on C-SPAN at 2 AM (if only you could stay awake).

Most folks wouldn’t. It’s called being in the minority.

Finally, here’s the real test: when there’s national conference JUST for professional genealogists held in a hotel conference room that seats at least 200 people and ONLY those folks who make a middle-class living doing professional genealogy (with no other income stream, no second job, no trust fund, no working spouse, no pension or other means of support) are allowed to attend, then there’s evidence of a viable market – but only if all those seats are filled.

The first test of “admission” is if you’re filing a separate “Schedule C”, “Subchapter S” or corporate business return for your professional genealogy biz or receiving a W-2 or 1099 from a genealogy business as an employee. The next is if you’re supporting a family of four, making mortgage and car payments and can still afford to send kids to college on your “professional genealogy” earnings alone.

I'm not saying that only folks who make a lot of money are professionals - far from it. I'm not saying that the market for professional genealogists won't continue to expand. I'm simply saying that the market is not huge. And that there are many more tattoo artists than genealogists who earn a lot of money without any other visible means of support.

Maybe you could already make the cut as a professional genealogist; if so,congratulations! But remember - there aren't a lot of folks like you out there.

There will always be a market for professional genealogists, but we have a long way to go before the potential customer base is large enough to absorb everybody who wants to be a professional.

Sure, you might have studied French for eight years in school and have a great accent, but there are only so many glamorous UN General Assembly translator jobs in New York City to be had. You might have to settle for being an elementary school substitute teacher instead. Or you may have to be satisfied with something else altogether.

Or better yet, you might decide to create your own niche business and grow your own market.

Voltaire’s Candide said it well hundreds of years ago: Il faut cultiver son jardin. You have to cultivate your own garden. Create your own market. Become THE expert. Don’t follow; lead the pack.

Consider this: the young guy who sold me my new cell phone yesterday at the Verizon Wireless store told me he had both a bachelor’s degree and a shiny new master’s degree. Apparently the market demand for whatever his specific field was hasn’t grown as fast as the number of competing degreed graduates – which is why he’s now standing up for eight hours, chatting with the general public and selling phones.

Nothing wrong with that, but probably not what he expected leaving high school.

Once again, the people – the public at large - who don’t do family history or understand the genealogical research process or know how to separate evidentiary wheat from chaff think what we do is simple. It’s not. They can’t see what value it has. We can.

For all of us who do this, we need keep on explaining, advising, encouraging and telling them our story.

Some of us can tell them HOW to do it; that’s a different, more specialized educational activity. We can all, however, keep telling them WHY we do it and WHY they should want to.

It’s what might be called “growing the market.” Best to do it now in the days of plenty than in a time of drought.

Our Storied Lives And Our Big Box Of Hats

2011-10-03T13:45:00.002-04:00

Stories are like hats.

Look around and you’ll notice that most people don’t wear hats anymore. Except, perhaps, when it’s too cold to go outside without one.

Stories are like that. Most people don’t write them down or tell them anymore, except when they have to. And for most people, those “when they have to” moments are few and far between.

Years ago, people wore hats almost all the time. There was a hat for going to work and a hat for going to church and a hat for walking the dog. Big hats and little hats. Fancy hats with beads and feathers and beat-up furry warm hats. Home-made hats and store-bought hats. Hats in the closet and hats in the attic and hats on the little table beside the front door.

As I said, stories are like hats.

Years ago, people told stories to one another. Some got written down, others didn’t. There were long stories and short stories. Scary stories and funny stories. Stories for going to bed and stories to make you feel better. Stories that explained why things were the way they were. Stories that got passed down from age to youth, and were told over and over again. Stories where nothing ever changed.

Even though you knew the fate of Goldilocks, it was always thrilling when the three bears came home, no matter how many times you heard the story. Hearing the Goldilocks story over and over again always made you feel good, and was a lot like that beat-up furry warm hat that always felt good when you put it on.

In some parts of the world, people don’t have much, but they have stories. In other parts, there are things aplenty, but all the stories seem to have been stuffed in a box in the attic, like so many old, out-of-fashion hats.

Years ago, stories were a family thing. Grandmothers told their grandchildren about what they did as children, told them about the stories and songs they learned and about the awful scratchy hats their parents made them wear in the snow. Grandfathers wrote small snippets of stories down on paper, folded them and sent them off to their children who lived far away on what seemed like the other side the earth, but was only eight states to the west.

These stories were actually letters, with the little family stories wrapped up neatly inside, like those candy crèmes with stiff glossy brown paper on the outside – the kind of candies that you couldn’t ever identify until you took a bite.

Letters can be stories, too, with little bits of story all tied together on a page. Grandfathers always knew that. “I wanted to tell you that your Aunt Margaret has been unwell with palsy for most of the month and Uncle Freddie’s farm was sold to some city people from Syracuse who think they will try to raise some bees. No rain here for weeks now. Esther got a new hat from Monkey Ward’s in the mail last week. She thinks she looks like one of them movie people. Ha!”

People come and go. Most of all the letters with the stories in them that have ever been written have already been thrown away, and only a few remain. Fashion comes and goes, too. Most times, hats end up in a box and get taken to the thrift store or the charity shop, where total strangers find them, admire them, try them on and take them home.

In many ways, stories are like those hats, as well.

Think about it. You have stories – after all, we all do. Maybe you think they’re old and out of fashion, like those hats. Maybe you don’t know what to do with them. Maybe you need to try those stories on, on more time.

How can you try a story on?

Simple. Write it down. Then put it somewhere so that people – family members or even total strangers – can find it.

Maybe when those stories are found again, even total strangers will admire them, try them on and take them home.

After all, stories are a lot like hats.

Fever And The Miasma: The Tale of Levi Chapin Comes To An End

2011-10-02T17:47:00.002-04:00

(This is last part of the story. Follow the hyperlinks to Part One and Part Two)

Yellow Fever Microbe (CDC slide)

Under a high-powered microscope, the organism that causes yellow fever looks pretty harmless; you can see it on the left. In fact, it looks a lot like an exemplar of museum-quality abstract art.

Looks, of course, can be greatly deceiving.

If Levi Chapin died of yellow fever in eastern Virginia in September of 1833, we can know one thing with absolute certainty– it was not an easy way to die.

The disease gets its name from the yellow color that the victim’s fevered skin and eyes often turn. In the Spanish-speaking tropics, it’s called by another symptom-descriptive name: “vomito negro” or “black vomit”. High spiking fever, icy chills, vomiting and bone-wracking pain are a few of the tell-tale symptoms of the disease once called “yellow jack”.

Today, when we speak of yellow fever – a disease that only a few U.S. physicians specializing in tropical medicine will likely ever see first-hand, we use cold, clinical terms like “flavivirus”, “arbovirus”, and “arthropod”. We speak of etiology, vectors and vaccines. None of those terms were in common use in the early 19^th century.

What was first called “bilious remitting yellow fever” was a terror-inducing medical mystery, seemingly arising out of nowhere.

Of course, back then, people thought that cholera could be “caught” by eating under-ripe fruit and that malaria was the result of bad air.

Back then, nobody knew exactly why yellow fever happened, or exactly how to cure it. People spoke of “the miasma” and burned tar in roadways to ward off the disease. They quarantined ships in harbors so that sailors wouldn’t spread the disease by breathing on or touching the uninfected. Some thought the disease was caused by rotting vegetable matter; others saw it as God’s punishment for one thing or another.

Collecting the Near-Dead in 1793 Philadelphia

Yellow fever epidemics periodically carried off sizable portions of the urban population, especially in southern cities like Savannah and New Orleans. Still, prior to 1822, some northern urban areas suffered as well. Estimates of deaths during the Philadelphia epidemic of 1793 were in the 4,000 – 5,000 range. Carriages roamed the cobbled streets to collect the dead and the nearly-dead. Note the pedestrian in the picture at right above covering his mouth so that he doesn't "catch" the disease.

In some communities, officials did not permit the burial of yellow fever victims in local cemeteries. The disease was thought to be contagious long after death and some feared that whatever caused it lived on in the ground. Graves were dug in remote parts of potters’ fields and if an epidemic caused large numbers of deaths in a community, yellow fever mounds – mass graves of hasty burials – became a common sight.

Even as late as 1905, some municipalities such as Minneapolis had public health ordinances that classed yellow fever as a highly contagious disease along with cholera, smallpox, typhus and measles. Bodies of persons who fell victim to these diseases had to be disinfected, placed in metallic caskets and buried as quickly as possible, with no viewing and only a private family funeral permitted.

If Levi Chapin had fallen victim to yellow fever in 1833 Virginia, it is highly unlikely that his body would have been returned to New Hampshire for burial. Fear of the disease would have dictated otherwise.

By the 1830s, the disease seemed largely confined to southern coastal and river cities. The fever severely struck Norfolk and Portsmouth in southern Virginia in 1855. Even later, in the summer of 1878, about 20,000 people died in the Mississippi Valley, with the cities of Memphis and New Orleans being hit the hardest.

When New Orleans physician John James Hayes wrote his short handbook titled Yellow Fever: Its Nature, Cause, Prevention & Cure in 1858, he thought he had all the answers. He wrote:

“The disease called Yellow Fever results from a deficiency of atmospheric air in the lungs; from a want of the adequate quantity of it in the lungs; and consequently from a want of the due changes imposed by it on the circulating fluids; from a want of one fluid being converted into blood, and a want of the other being duly eliminated.”

Dr. Hayes thought it was all about “air and fluids.” Observing that the New Orleans poor suffered the most during the summer yellow fever season, he recommended a temporary lifestyle change. He suggested that “the poor should quit their confined, badly ventilated houses, which, during an epidemic season—a hot season —I would call ovens, and live in the open air, in a free exposure.”

Aedes aegypti

The true cause of yellow fever – a microscopic flavivirus spread by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes – would not even be suspected, let alone proven, for many decades after Hayes’s spectacularly bad advice to the New Orleans poor to sleep outside… with the mosquitoes.

Not surprisingly, yellow fever was always news, whenever it occurred. Even reports of a few isolated cases in places far from home made the local newspapers all over the country during the 19^th century since local editors speculated that those few cases might be harbingers of a much larger epidemic. Then as now, newspaper folks liked to be on top of epidemic disease stories, even though nobody knew that mosquitoes were the real culprits.

So, if Levi Chapin had actually contracted yellow fever in Virginia in September of 1833, there is a very good chance that the newspapers would also have reported some evidence of the disease in some part of Virginia around that same time. In fact, there were numerous yellow fever stories in US newspapers during the month of September 1833, but they were all about the outbreak and progress of the New Orleans epidemic. Virginia, Washington and Maryland were not mentioned. Moreover, I have not yet located any newspaper that reported Levi’s death.

If Levi actually died of yellow fever, no newspaper of consequence took notice. Here’s what they were writing about (from The Newburyport [MA] Herald, 13 September 1833)

There are lots of newspaper stories on New Orleans, but none about yellow fever in eastern Virginia around mid September of 1833.

So, perhaps that part of the story is wrong as well. Unconfirmed and uncorroborated family stories are interesting to read and speculate upon, but they carry no real weight as evidence. Think of them as clues that goad us on to investigate things just a little bit more.

So, the results of this inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Levi Chapin are mixed, but not completely unproductive. Evaluating the quality of the evidence we find is part of what we do as researchers. Facts get weighed and sifted; new discoveries can sometimes prove old evidence to be faulty.

We now know that the 1862 Chapin genealogy conflated Levi’s brother and nephew who were both named Stephen, and got Levi’s year of birth wrong. We now know that while the 1963 History of Walpole, New Hampshire was right about Levi being an inventor and having patents (plural), the description of those patents was incorrect. We now know, thanks to an early 19^th century journal, exactly what Levi invented and how it was supposed to work. We now know that Google Patents has lots of interesting information, but not for those early patents issued prior to the 1836 fire at the Patent Office. We now know that researchers can use the Journal of the Franklin Institute to re-capture some of the information that was lost in that fire. And that the Google Patents “Search/ Optical Character Recognition (OCR)” software still needs a bit of work. Plus, we know lots more about moulding planes and 19^th century tool-making than we know when we started.

Still, we do not know if Levi Chapin actually died of yellow fever in eastern Virginia in 1833. We do not know if he ever actually visited his son Philip in Baltimore or his nephew Stephen in Washington. Why he chose to travel to Virginia in the first place is currently lost to history, as is the final disposition of his patents – the “Improved Chapin Hanging Saw” seems not to have made much of a mark in the sawmill business.

In fact, the inquiry process itself raises a few questions not previously considered. For example, let’s suppose that Levi Chapin actually did die of yellow fever, as they stories say. The early symptoms of the disease often take nearly a week after exposure to appear. Could Levi have visited New Orleans, been bitten there by a virus-carrying mosquito, and then returned to Virginia by boat, shaking and feverish, thinking he had a bad case of some flu-like illness? Moreover, are there other records in archives in Baltimore or Washington – when his close kin lived – that could shed more light on his demise and his travels?

There are now many more lines of inquiry to consider in the quest for facts about the life and death of Levi Chapin and I’ll continue to explore them as opportunities present themselves. Not all family history problems have easy solutions, but since much of the thrill is in the hunt itself, finding a few new doors to open and more clues to explore is its own reward.

Finally – there’s one other minor thing of genealogical interest that came to light while searching through Google Patents. Plug in a bunch of related family names, and all kinds of curious things come out . . .

On 5 April 1870, a man living in Alton, Belknap County, New Hampshire named Smilie Tilton received patent number 101,545 for an “improved extension table.” Smilie Tilton – who also invented and patented an “improved” wooden cheese wrapper and an “improved” calf-muzzle - was married to a woman named Mary Elizabeth Bancroft (1840 – 1886) who was born in New Hartford, Connecticut.

Turns out that Mary E. Bancroft was the granddaughter of Westfield, Massachusetts plane maker Nathaniel Chapin and thus, the great-granddaughter of Levi Chapin – the man whose death sparked the search and this series in the first place.

There’s no doubt in my mind that inventor-entrepreneur Levi Chapin would have likely approved of his great-granddaughter’s choice of an inventor-husband. He may even have liked the feel of the wood that Smilie used to make the model of his “improved” extension table, pictured in the patent file below.

Maybe it was even Chapin wood, from a Chapin family tree in Walpole, New Hampshire about a hundred miles away.

Wood, Tools, Factories and Patents – Part Two of the Continuing Tale of Levi Chapin

2011-10-01T20:39:00.002-04:00

(Note: this is Part 2: Part 1 is here)

Trees. Logs. Boards. Wood.

For most of the early 19^th century, the family of Levi Chapin of Walpole, New Hampshire and wood, in all its various manifestations, were largely inseparable.

In the earliest days, it began with the trees themselves on Levi’s 800-acre farm. The trees were harvested, hauled and trimmed by the Chapins, sawn in the Chapin's sawmill, turned into lumber and then sent down the river to Springfield, Massachusetts to be re-formed into the rapidly growing community’s houses, stores, offices, and furniture.

If you had an ancestor living in 19^th century Springfield, her kitchen table or cellar door may have been made with wood from Levi Chapin’s farm. The planks that floored her bedroom may have been smoothed by one of Levi’s sons. Her parlor fireplace mantel may have started as a thousand pound piece of a hundred-year-old tree hauled off a hill by a Chapin horse.

Levi’s five sons grew up surrounded by the work wood makes, in all its manifestations. There were trees to be cut. Bark to be removed. Sawdust to be swept up. Firewood to be sawn and split. Logs to be transformed into boards by those unforgiving mill saw blades.

Their lives were circumscribed by the sound and smell of wood: trees falling, axes and saws pounding and ripping, fires of waste wood crackling, and the dull thud of a never-ending supply of boards being stacked in higher and higher piles for shipment elsewhere.

With sawdust in their lungs and tree sap in their blood, the Chapin boys were almost made of wood, and wood was made for these Chapins.

It’s no surprise that three of Levi’s sons chose careers that were dependent upon wood. Eldest son Nathaniel (1792 – 1876) joined his brothers Hermon (1799 – 1866) and Philip (1805 -1887) in a place called Pine Meadow (part of the town of New Hartford), Connecticut in a moulding-plane making venture for a few years. In time, both Nathaniel (the grandkids’ ancestor) and Philip moved away to run their own factories, leaving Hermon to become the Connecticut “King of Moulding Planes and Ruler of Rules.”

Moulding planes tend not to be on most genealogists’ radar. Say “wood planes”, and the average genealogist thinks of something that you buy at a hardware store to take the rough parts or high parts off a piece of wood.

But moulding planes are something entirely different; in fact, in order to understand moulding planes, you need to learn a new vocabulary, with words like “astragal”, “ogee”, and “cavetta”. These are words that describe the shapes – the moulding profiles - that are made by hand tools known as moulding planes.

So, what exactly are “moulding profiles”, you might ask? After all, in all your years of doing family history, nobody has ever asked you to know what an “ogee moulding” is.

The best way to explain this is to suggest you tour a 19^th century house with all its original mouldings. Crown mouldings where walls and ceilings meet, chair rails set partway up the walls, and fireplaces where stylized mouldings abound. If you can, actually run your fingers across the moulding and feel the smooth curves, sharp angles and the grain of the wood.

All those fine mouldings that you see in 19^th century historic houses in Connecticut and Massachusetts were likely made on the spot when the house was built. There were no lumber stores or Home Depots where those fancy mouldings were sold by the linear foot; housewrights and carpenters used moulding planes – often from one of the Chapin plane factories – to make their own interior mouldings by hand.

The patterns of the moulding – the curves and thrusts and angles – are called the moulding profiles. And an “ovolo moulding” looks like this:

This shape is made by craftsmen using a wood plane that looks something like this one:

For years, New England craftsmen sought out the Chapin brothers’ planes for their quality and cutting edge. Some Chapin planes bear the mark of Nathaniel, the brother who set up shop in Westfield, Massachusetts: they’re stamped “N. Chapin & Co. Eagle Factory Westfield”. Others bear Hermon’s mark: “H. Chapin Union Factory Warranted”.

Hermon’s plane and rule making enterprise in New Hartford was very successful. When his son Philip (named after his father’s youngest brother) inherited it in 1866, he took himself a wife and built himself a house to reflect the Chapins’ success story. The house, I’ve learned, is currently for sale. If you have $785,000, you too can live like young Philip Chapin.

Here’s the link that underscores the fact that in the age before power tools and mass marketing, the manufacture of high-quality planes and carpenters’ rules could make you wealthy.

Nathaniel and Hermon’s youngest brother Philip’s planes were not much used in New England; after he learned plane-making in New Hartford with his brother Hermon, he set off south to Baltimore, Maryland where, in time, he became a prosperous and prolific plane maker. Planes stamped “P. Chapin. Balto.” are heavier and bulkier than the New England planes.

Chapin planes are now museum pieces and collector’s items. The Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford has both a large collection of Chapin planes and lots of archival material from the Chapin factory in Pine Meadow.You can search for it in the CHS online catalog.

Interestingly, Philip, Levi’s youngest son, was living in Baltimore at the time that it is said that Levi made his trip south to eastern Virginia, ostensibly to “…dispose of his patents.” And Baltimore is close to Washington D.C. And eastern Virginia.

Keep that thought in mind for a bit while we talk about patents.

In 1793, the U.S. Congress passed the Patent Act, placing the issuance of patents under the Secretary of State’s office. There was little in the way of stringent review like there is today: if you were a citizen, your payment of $30.00 and the submission of a drawing, a description, and a working miniature model of your invention, usually got you a United States patent.

In 1810, the federal government purchased a building in Washington known locally as “Blodgett’s Hotel” and began renovations to use it as the headquarters for both the Post Office and the Patent Office.

Things were simpler then.

Fast forward to the present.

Several years ago, the folks at Google announced a new free tool: Google Patents, direct from the USPTO (the official United States Patent and Trademark Office). It’s described on the Google website as follows: Google Patents covers the entire collection of issued patents and millions of patent applications made available by the USPTO, from patents issued in the 1790s through the present.

If you have an inventor-ancestor, you can play with Google Patents here. One thing to bear in mind, though: the character recognition technology that Google Patents uses leaves a lot to be desired. For example the name “Robert Amory” – pretty clear on his printed 1924 patent for manufacturing blankets – is rendered by the search function as “BOBEPT AMOBY”

Quirky search function notwithstanding, Google Patents sounds great, right? If there’s a “Levi Chapin” patent for some kind of an improvement to water wheels, it should appear on Google Patents.

Problem is, when you use Google Patents, no “Levi Chapin” patents appear.

That’s because there’s one little event that the Google Patents FAQ blurb completely glosses over: the “Great Patent Office Fire” of 15 December 1836. The fire totally destroyed Blodgett’s Hotel and virtually all of the early patents burned up. Estimates are that nearly 10,000 patents were destroyed in the fire, with only a very small number escaping destruction. Congress later permitted the “restoration” of 2,845 patents, using the information from private files. So, while it’s correct to say that the Google Patents records go back to the 1790s, it would be more correct to point out that most of the earliest records no longer exist.

What now?

Fortunately, the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia began publishing a periodical journal in 1826, making it the second oldest continuously published scientific journal in the country. In the early days, one of their regular features in each issue was a large section called “American Patents” in which they reported on and described the latest patents issued by the Patent Office.

Currently the journal concentrates on engineering and applied mathematics, and should you feel compelled to subscribe, all 10 issues a year can be yours for one low yearly subscription payment of $2,633.00.

It was much less expensive in Levi Chapin’s day.

On page 30 of Volume 5, issued in 1830, the Journal of the Franklin Institute reported that a patent (number 5676) for “an improvement in the mode of Hanging and Straining Saws” had been issued to Levi Chapin of Walpole, New Hampshire on 13 October 1829. A few years later (January 1833), a notice appeared describing another patent (number 7099) for “an improvement in the Saw Mill” issued to Levi Chapin, Walpole, Chester County [sic], New Hampshire on 1 June 1832. Each issue described Levi Chapin’s invention in detail, so that by referencing the Journal, interested descendants can read what the inventions were actually supposed to do.

So, Levi Chapin actually had patents, even though you can’t find them using Google Patents, since they’re from the “burned” period.

Note, however, neither patent described in the Journal of the Franklin Institute “improves water wheels” in any way, as the Walpole New Hampshire history suggests. They’re all about saws and cutting wood. Remember, these Connecticut River Valley Chapins were all about wood, in all its manifestations.

Also remember Levi’s youngest son Philip. Philip, still unmarried, lived in Baltimore and made planes at the time his father Levi is reported to have died in eastern Virginia of yellow fever. Eastern Virginia is close to Baltimore.

Philip appears in Matchett’s Baltimore Directory in the edition of 1835 – 1836 at 36 Light Street:

So, overall, the information that appears in printed sources is close to accurate, but not truly on the mark. It wasn’t his brother in Washington; it was his nephew. His patents were not to improve water wheels; they were all about sawing wood. In my former career, we used to describe this kind of thing as “good enough for government work”, however, it’s not quite good enough for family history.

Therefore, the question arises: did he intend to “sell” his patents, as the Walpole history relates, or did he plan to license them to mill operators? And since his son Philip lived in Baltimore and his nephew Stephen in Washington, was his visit south actually a family visit/ business trip or something else altogether?

And, of equal interest, what about his contracting yellow fever and dying in September of 1833? What can we learn about that, if anything?

Stay tuned! There's more to come!

If It’s In Print, It’s Always Right, Right? The Tale Of Levi Chapin And A Search For Facts

2011-09-30T15:27:00.002-04:00

Today, the story is all about a man named Levi Chapin – a man you probably never heard of.

The Deacon

Levi was one of the many third great-grandchildren of an illustrious Massachusetts gentleman known as Deacon Samuel Chapin (1598 – 1675), whose monumental statue stands in front of the City Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The statue is the work of famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and was commissioned by one of Deacon Samuel’s descendants: Springfield railroad tycoon Chester W. Chapin (1798 – 1883), congressman and long-time president of the Boston and Albany Railroad Corporation. Chapin, who began as the president of the Western Railroad, orchestrated the merger of three rail lines into the Boston and Albany between 1867 and 1870 and became very, very wealthy in the process.

As a point of interest, no one knows what Deacon Samuel Chapin actually looked like, so when Saint-Gaudens was designing the Chapin statue (sometimes simply known as “The Puritan”), he modeled the Deacon’s stern face on Chester’s face. After all, Chester was paying for it and great wealth has its privileges.

I took the above close-up photo of the larger-than-life-sized model of the Chapin statue at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire a few weeks ago.

Anyway, back to Levi’s story.

Levi Chapin (Josiah⁵, Seth⁴, Seth³, Josiah², Deacon Samuel) was born on 5 May 1766 in Mendon, Massachusetts, baptized there on 29 June 1766 and died on 18 September 1833 somewhere in “eastern Virginia.”

Or so the story goes.

The birth and baptism dates come from the printed vital records of Mendon, Massachusetts and the death information comes from several printed local histories, a manuscript genealogy written circa 1895 and now in my possession, and family lore, more about which in a minute.

In between those 1766 – 1833 dates, Levi lived mostly in New Hampshire, specifically in Cheshire County, along the Connecticut River and across from what is now Bellows Falls, Vermont. A prosperous farmer – gentleman - entrepreneur, Levi owned more than 800 acres of real estate, including most of the land upon which the village of North Walpole is now situated.

So, what’s the deal with Levi Chapin? Why write about him at all?

Levi Chapin is the 6^th great-grandfather of our grandkids and their first cousins (and a whole lot of other people, it turns out), so I have more than casual passing interest in his story. Specifically, I’m interested in documenting that “died in eastern Virginia” stuff that appears as an undocumented fact in lots of places.

Why? Because sometimes “SUO” can appear in genealogies and can send researchers down any number of blind alleys. SUO is shorthand for that technical term: “Stuff of Undetermined Origin.”

And because all too many folks are so delighted to find any ancestral death date and place in a printed source that they throw caution to the winds and accept it as fact - for no good reason at all.

But before I get to that specific issue, I want to tell you more about Levi.

Levi Chapin bought his large farm in Cheshire County, New Hampshire from an early settler named Sherburne Hale. Here’s how this was reported by Lyman S. Hayes in his 1929 book The Connecticut River Valley in Southern Vermont and New Hampshire: Historical Sketches, published by The Tuttle Company of Rutland, Vermont. It comes from the section recounting nonagenarian William Hale’s remembrance of the “Warm Winter of 1827” on pages 180 – 181 and references the farm that his father sold to Levi Chapin:

So, Levi Chapin was much more than a farmer, it seems; he was in the lumber business big time, sending lumber from his own sawmill down the river to the growing city of Springfield, Massachusetts where his illustrious ancestor had lived several centuries earlier. This “sawmill/ lumber business” fact will become very important later on, as you will see.

So, why would a New Hampshire farmer/ lumber entrepreneur turn up dead in “eastern Virginia” in 1833? What did he die of? In fact, why would he go to “eastern Virginia” in the first place?

Take it from someone who does lots of Virginia research – this won’t be an easy set of questions to answer: eastern Virginia is a very big place. Plus, unlike New England, Virginia death records in 1833 are hard to come by, if not well-nigh impossible. Research in this time period in Virginia is not easy.

Is this going to be a lost cause?

Well, let’s look at what Orange Chapin’s 1862 genealogy of the Chapin family has to say about Levi. The full title of the book is The Chapin Genealogy: Containing a Very Large Proportion of the Descendants of Deacon Samuel Chapin, Who Settled in Springfield, Mass. in 1642. The “Levi Chapin” section is short:

First of all, disregard for now that Levi’s birth year shown above is incorrect by a decade; this is most likely a typographical error. And, yes, Levi lived in Westmoreland, New Hampshire (the next town south of Walpole) before he bought the Hale Farm a few miles to the north. His wife’s actual identity is much more complicated, somewhat controversial and beyond the scope of this discussion; frankly, it’s the reference to his brother Stephen, “who removed to D.C.” - as in “Washington, D.C.” - a place surrounded by what could easily be called “eastern Virginia” – that caught my eye.

Turns out that Orange Chapin got it almost right: Levi did have a much older brother Stephen, but that brother Stephen never moved to Washington, D.C.

Levi's Nephew Stephen

However, brother Stephen Chapin’s son Stephen (Junior) actually did move to Washington D.C. when he became the president of Columbian College (now George Washington University) in 1828. Stephen (Harvard College, Class of 1804) the minister, former theology professor at Waterville (now Colby) College and later, Columbian College President lived in Washington until he died there in 1845.

So it turns out that it was Levi Chapin’s nephew – Stephen Chapin, D.D. – who was the D.C. resident. Levi was about 21 years younger than his older brother Stephen but only 12 years older than his nephew Stephen, so it’s not surprising that the younger Stephen was thought in some circles to be his brother.

Confused yet?

Here are a few nagging questions: Did Levi go south to visit his nephew around 1833, and if so, why? What could drag a senior citizen Yankee farmer from rural New Hampshire to the center of sin and corruption that was 1830s Jacksonian Washington?

Did he travel alone?

Was it part of a longer journey? (Remember, getting from the upper Connecticut River Valley to “eastern Virginia” was not something easily or comfortably accomplished in the 1830s, the state of overland public transportation being still rather primitive.)

There may be a helpful clue in Martha M. Frizzell’s 1963 two-volume, town-published History of Walpole, New Hampshire. On page 404, after describing Levi Chapin’s lumber business and his business dealings with Henry Atkinson Green of Bellows Falls, Vermont (the father-in-law of Hetty Green, the eccentric investor known as the “Witch of Wall Street”), Frizzell notes:

“Mr. Chapin was of an inventive turn of mind and having made some improvements in the primitive water wheels in use at the time, he went south in 1833 to dispose of his patents. In Virginia he fell ill with yellow fever and died.”

So, in addition to being a farmer, sawmill operator, lumber merchant and upstanding town father of Walpole, New Hampshire, Levi Chapin was also an inventor. A man with “…an inventive turn of mind” who no doubt spent those dark and cold New Hampshire winter nights thinking up things that could make his family’s life easier and more productive. Better water wheels? What kind of “improvements”?

“…he went south in 1833 to dispose of his patents.”

Patents! Did he actually file for and receive patents for his inventions?

Perhaps knowing more about the patents will provide a clue or two! What and where can we learn about Levi’s patents?

Now that I have your attention, I’m going to ask you to come back when the next part of Levi’s story goes up here on the Mirror so that you can learn even more about looking for early patents, which is not as easy as folks make it out to be. Hint: you can’t just look it up on Google Patents.

Stay tuned to learn why not.

And then there’s all that “dying of yellow fever” business… and the fact that not everything in print is always correct.

So many questions!

It Must Be Fall: After All, The Fall Issue of “New York Archives” Is Out

2011-09-29T00:40:00.004-04:00

Tag-Teaming Articles

Maybe it’s part of that sense of urgency that a lawn now laced with yellow-brown maple leaves brings.

Perhaps it’s the shorter days, or the thin, brittle light that comes through the windows in late September.

Maybe it's that aisle of Hallowe'en candy in the grocery store. Whatever it is, things seem to move just a little bit faster this time of year.

This past weekend, we headed north to Bangor, Maine for the Maine Genealogical Society’s annual Fall conference. I presented three talks, and after a leisurely drive on back roads through three New England states on Sunday, we got back before upstate darkness finally set in.

Yesterday I was on the train to Manhattan. Today the tasks were (a.) flu shot, (b.) grocery store and (c.) reviewing and revising my next genealogy article for the quarterly New York Archives magazine.

By 3 PM, it was all done and the next article was in the editor’s hands. Before the deadline. Two days early, in fact. All nine hundred fifty four words.

Today’s mail brought my author’s copies of the current issue (Fall 2011 - Volume 11, Number 2), also a few days earlier than usual. It must be the season, with everything moving just a little bit faster and slightly ahead of schedule.

This issue has lots of articles of interest for family historians.

Archives staffer Keith Swaney describes a new online tool that will allow researchers to drill down even further into the Archives’ online finding aids. (I’ll play with it tomorrow, when time permits.) Teri Gay’s article on the “Suffragists of Easton” explores the story of some rural farm women of hardscrabble Washington County intent on getting “the vote” who, in 1891, formed themselves into a group called the “Political Equality Club.” She examines the waves they made and the records they left behind.

Warren Broderick’s article titled “Melville’s Muse” discusses the possible connection between Herman Melville’s writing of his novella Bartleby, the Scrivener and his brothers Gansevoort and Allan Melville’s place of employment. Both brothers worked for the New York Court of Chancery - as did Melville’s character Bartleby. In so doing, he provides a concise and clear description of the Court – abolished in 1847 - and the kinds of records that were kept there. Again, there’s a lot here for genealogists on a topic rarely discussed – the Court of Chancery.

But that’s not all. Laurence Hauptman’s article on the “Iroquois Count of 1845” presents fascinating information on Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s “New York State Six Nations Census”, the original manuscript of which is in the New York State Archives. Today little known outside New York, the census and its supplementary report anchored Schoolcraft’s reputation as the foremost Indian authority of his time, although the report, as Hauptman explains, was not without controversy. And yes, it’s a real census, with names and such.

I found the article by Joseph D. Collea, titled “Sparring With Mosby’s Guerillas” particularly interesting. Confederate Major John Singleton Mosby, the elusive “Gray Ghost” of Virginia whose Rangers harassed Union troops for months on end, is the fifth cousin, four times removed of Mrs. Blogger, with both of them sharing a line of descent from Edward Mosby (1660 - ca. 1742) and Sarah Woodson (1665 - ca. 1710) of Virginia.

Then, there’s my own genealogy article (pictured above), called “Details, Details: When Little Things Mean A Lot”. The article examines the importance of being alert to those tiny clues in records that can provide the researcher with new insight and perhaps a new research direction. It grew out of an article called "Change of Heart" that appeared in the last issue, written by Antonia Mattheou, the archivist of the Town of Huntington, Long Island. She found two early 19^th century letters, one of them dated 1819 and each signed only with the writer’s first names: “Mary” and “Abraham”. In the last issue, she described where they were found (tucked in with some local property deeds) and then transcribed “Mary’s” letter to “Abraham” – a missive that would best be described as a “Dear John” brush-off.

In this issue, Jody Hohmann, the editor of New York Archives magazine discusses “Abraham’s” unsent draft response. Her section includes a transcript of ”Abraham’s” letter, and then, in her last paragraph, throws the issue of confirming the writers’ identity over to me.

I, in turn, discuss the little clues in the letter and point out how a genealogist would put together a research “game plan” from those clues and then set out to discover the records that could lead to the true identity of “Mary and Abraham.” In other words, a brief explanation of methodology and the Genealogical Proof Standard, written for the non-genealogist.

Those were only the highlights of interest to family historians; for the “general reader” there’s a whole lot more.

New York Archives magazine appears in hard-copy only and is sent four times a year to all members of the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, an organization dedicated to “sustaining the excellence of the State Archives and … ensuring that New York’s most valuable historical records are available for future generations”.

If you share those ideas and goals, you should seriously consider joining the NYSAPT, like I did years ago. You can learn more about membership here. Then you’ll have your very own copy of the magazine to peruse, which is even better than me describing it to you every now and again.

Plus, you’ll likely pay for your membership with all the discounts members get on things.

Genea-Investors: Is Wall Street Telling Us Anything About "Big Picture" Genealogy?

2011-09-22T20:54:00.001-04:00

Wall Street - No Bull

Here’s an interesting point to ponder.

Today, the stock market – both the New York Stock Exchange (known as “the Big Board” ) and the NASDAQ - took another beating, extending their recent “down days” to four in a row.

Things are tough out there.

One of the companies that suffered was the one run by our good friends in Provo, UT: Ancestry.com. Point of disclosure – I own some shares, and this blog post is neither an encouragement for you to buy nor an admonishment for you to sell. In fact, it’s not about investing at all, despite what it sounds like.

Bear with me for a while.

Ancestry (whose ticker symbol is ACOM) got zonked today, losing $3.18 a share, thus plummeting nearly 12% to $23.49 a share. As a point of reference, ACOM was worth as much as $45.00 a share earlier this year. So, if you bought shares at the high, your investment was down by nearly half.

As I said, things are tough out there.

Now, today was a down day on the market overall – not just for Ancestry, what with all the bad financial news coming out of Europe. The Dow was down nearly 400 points, a little over 3.5%. The “fear index” was up. But still, Ancestry was down more than most. Nearly 12% is a lot.

Is genealogy over? Are people done subscribing?

Not likely, but it’s very interesting indeed to poke around the web – specifically in the financial/investing message boards – to see what investors are saying about genealogy in general and Ancestry.com in particular.

Most Wall Street investors are not genealogists. In fact, most investors think we’re (i.e., the genealogy folk) a little bit weird. Scratch that – they think we’re a whole lot weird. That’s because they don’t do genealogy, mostly because they have no personal interest in history or in dead people.

Bluntly, they’re in the market to make money. And most of ‘em are kids (which, to some of us, is anyone under 50…)

So, you’ll find the message boards for Ancestry investors and investor-wannabes riddled with messages about why a company like Ancestry can never succeed long-term. For example, one poster recently observed that genealogy was really easy and that he finished his in about four months. He observed that he might check back every 10 years or so to update things, but since he was “done”, there was no reason to subscribe any more.

Another poster admitted to being kinda, sorta addicted to genealogy AND a senior citizen, but since he had done all the census stuff on Ancestry, there was nothing left to do. So he did not renew his subscription.

A less than enthusiastic Ancestry watcher rhetorically inquired of other posters, “Are You Nuts?” and then proceeded to question why anyone would spend time or money to trace their family history on Ancestry.com or any other subscription website. Or trace their family history at all.

Several other posters commented that they thought his gene pool might be very shallow, with no deep end at all.

As I said, things are tough out there.

What does all this mean? In the investor’s “big picture”, not much; in the hobbyist/ genealogical professionals’ world, however, it means we’re not doing enough outreach to those people that are usually called “the Public At Large”.

People who aren’t “one of us” still think we’re all those proverbial “blue-haired old ladies in tennis shoes” trying to find stuff so that we can all join hereditary societies, feast on tea and crumpets or trace our lines to the rich and famous.

Sure, there’s some of that, but that’s not what motivates most of us. In fact, a good part of the rest of humanity has no clue about the passion that drives us to do what we do.

Bottom-lining it, we need to tell our story better. We need to show our non-practicing, non-believing friends that there’s merit in what we do.

That good genealogy means better health history. That thorough genealogy means that much more is known about “big” (national) history and about “small” (local) history. That competent genealogists can be professionals, and professionals can be competent genealogists. That the forgotten facts we uncover, dust off and reassemble are facts about the people who built our nation, our infrastructure and our society, not about ourselves.

That real genealogy is not about “ME”, but rather about “US” – all of us.

If ACOM stock slides a little bit – no big deal in the long run. The market – like the weather – is highly variable.

However, if we turn our backs on public outreach and education – really big negative deal, and we’ll all suffer in the long run. Library and archives funding will become more difficult to find and the sound of doors closing on public records will get louder.

Shouldn't we all be working to tell our story better - and not just to our social-networking selves?

Where Was “The Garden of Eden”?: And Are All “Sources” Equal? And Are They Sources At All?

2011-09-21T20:01:00.003-04:00


Adam FirstMan and Eve FirstWoman

If you spend much time looking at genealogy stuff online, especially in those places where you can find lots and lots of multi-generational family trees submitted by users and subscribers (many of them anonymous), you’ll notice that lots of folks identify other people’s totally unsourced family trees and gedcoms as “sources.”

In other words, they’re saying that, “I couldn’t be bothered actually checking this stuff out myself. I’m really busy and this is just a hobby. I’d just as soon take (insert somebody elses’s name here)’s word for it, even if there are no real source citations to back it up. And, hey, even if it’s not right, it still adds more stuff to my charts! It’s good enough for me! I need more names and dates! Of course, if it’s not right, don’t blame me. I got it from somebody else.”

Not surprisingly, as more and more people discover genealogy through the internet, the number of unsourced family trees online seems to exponentially expand. (Hey! Look at me, look at me! I’m probably descended from lots of famous people, kings and generals and such! And Indians! And pirates!)

My particular favorites are the family trees for Adam FirstMan and his wife Eve FirstWoman. I’m especially taken with the ones that identify Adam FirstMan as living in “Eden, Lamoille County, Vermont” or “Eden, Rockingham County, North Carolina” and showing Adam as having been born in 4004 B.C. (which the good programming folks at Ancestry.com translate as "British Columbia").

And most of ‘em - mirabile dictu - are “sourced.”

Maybe Vermont-to-North Carolina “Adam FirstMan” was a snowbird.

If you’re not a member of a local genealogical society, or are not working with a mentor, or do not go to conferences regularly or are not part of a study group – in other words, if you’re working all by yourself and unless somebody tells you otherwise, you may be inclined to “cite” the place where you found what looked for all the world like a “fact” as a “source”, leading to an explosion of “sources” that are totally unconnected to any kind of verifiable reality.

This is not to say that you need to do all - or any - of the things mentioned in the beginning of the paragraph above if you want to do good genealogy. It simply means that it's a whole lot harder to do it by yourself.

Just because Ancestry.com calls it a “source” doesn’t make it so. And finding it in a compiled genealogy book published in 1878 doesn't make it a "source." Same thing for mug books and county histories.

And since, in the minds of the under-experienced researchers, all “sources” – especially those in print - are equal, no matter what their origin, lots of weird stuff appears online - - sprouting up like so many mushrooms after a summer rain.

Clues become Sources. This is not a good thing.

It’s particularly interesting to Missus Blogger and me, since lots of what’s online about HER family cites Missus Blogger’s grandfather as the “source” – usually citing his unsourced local history newspaper articles – all written under a “nom de plume” way back in the 1930s and 1940s. There are lots of ‘em, and the information gets passed around a lot. Over and over.

We have many of his original manuscripts and notebooks so we know where he got some of his facts and we know what was sourced and what was legend and myth, (d/b/a “oral history”), passed down through the generations.

Problem is, much of what appeared in print was based upon hearsay, conflated evidence and wishful thinking. It’s not that the real evidence wasn’t there; it’s just that way back then, not everybody bothered to check it out, not even Missus Blogger’s author-historian-grandpa.

Stuff like the census was only available in far-away Washington; land and probate records were in courthouses hundreds of miles away. Nobody had a lot of money for travel. Hearsay was good enough and “Uncle Joe sure looked like an Indian. Who’s to say there isn’t Indian blood in the family?”

Besides, why stand in the way of a good story?

Certainly the little French kid who was baptized in Strasbourg in 1757 that she’s descended from was a member of the French nobility. Everybody said so, so it must be true. Of course he threw his gold-braided hat in the Seine. Of course he could read and write seven languages, maybe eight. (that’s what the story says…)

Of course he learned to be a guilder in London before the Revolution, when he was about 16. There is, of course, no doubt that he sailed to far-off America because he really wanted to be a minister-farmer in the far backwoods of Virginia, a three day’s ride from any town with more than 500 people.

That’s what London guilders and French nobility did in those days, right? Every French nobleman harbors a secret desire to live in 500-Miles-West-of-Nowhere, Virginia, and be the only guilder on the frontier. "I'm just farming here and preaching until the market for gold-leafed stuff improves...", he said...

It sure is a good story, so, as people say, it must be true. “I heard it from “Grandpa” who heard it from his “Uncle Joe” who got it from his “old Aunt Sallie” who learned it from . . . “ - well, anyway, you get the idea.

The older the source, the more believable it seems.

In fact, folks often use 19^th century printed information as indisputable fact, without bothering to check how it came to be. Or, if there were typographical errors. Or mistakes in dates. Or the usual Victorian-era “tidying up” of embarrassing facts.

That’s why I wrote the post a couple of weeks ago about the need to check out sources and verify them, no matter how much you might want to trust the compiler/narrator/writer.

Memory is faulty. Handwriting can be hard to decipher. Correcting typeset galley proofs is costly. Changing things carved in stone (headstones, monuments) is prohibitively expensive. In the minds of editors, not all newspaper stories with errors merit correction. The expression “good enough for government work” is based on more than a kernel of truth.

Still, if you’re going to put stuff online and use the word “source”, or if you’re going to “cite” something, please take the time to see if it’s credible. And reliable.

Think it through. Don’t just copy it because somebody else posted it.

Because bad genealogy just doesn’t go away. In fact, it get copied and passed around. Over and over again. Pretty soon, lots of people believe it.

In a future post, I’ll probably address some stuff that’s out there on a pretty “official” looking archival site administered by a well-known university. There’s a finding aid to manuscripts referencing a prominent historical figure that includes genealogical information. The information is very wrong and, not surprisingly, the correct info is very easy to find.

Still, the “bad” info is out there, and has been copied by any number of other “researchers” as Gospel-true, and has even made its way to Wikipedia (surprise!).

But that’s for another day! I don't have time right now...

Today, I wanna see if Adam FirstMan is on Find-A-Grave!

So, What About “English-To-Pirate” Machine Translation?

2011-09-19T18:05:00.001-04:00

Today is September 19^th and therefore, as everybody on this little green Earth knows, it’s “International Talk Like A Pirate Day” once again.

Since I spent part of last Saturday in Williamstown, MA, lecturing about online German genealogy research and explaining the good, the bad and the ugly of online German-to-English/ English-to-German online machine translators, I thought it would be interesting to see if there were any English-to-Piratish translators out there.

Aaargh and shiver me timbers! The number of translators is (a)vast! See for yourself by Googling “pirate translator.” You’ll be amazed at what you find.

So, one by one, I tried them - many of ‘em - out. (Not all of 'em, mind you; just "many of 'em.")

How did it work, you ask?

Simple and fine. I took the first paragraph of last year’s “Pirate Day” post and plugged it into the translator, taking it for a test drive.

The results were “interesting.” I decided that I was kinda partial to the one available at http://translate-pirate.com. It was, well, a bit more colourful than many of the others, and, by the way, it will also translate websites.

Of course, your mileage may vary, so test-drive several of the ones you find.

Here’s what I fed to the above-mentioned translate-pirate.com translator:

Thus, it seems like an appropriate occasion to recount the story of Granddaughter and Grandson’s 5th great-grandfather and his encounter with guys who talked liked pirates all the time – because they were. The kind of “piratish” they spoke was a dialect of Chinese, as spoken on the islands in the China Sea that the Portuguese called the Ladrones. Here’s the story:

And here’s the translation result (without any corrective editing by me) that popped out:

Thus, "Parrot Strangling Slops Barrel!" it seems like an appropriate occasion t' recount th' story o' Granddaughter an' Grandson’s 5th great-grandfather an' his encounter wi' guys who talked liked pirates all th' time – cause they were. Th' "Up The Jolly Roger With Ye!" blunderbustingly kind o' “piratish” they spoke be a dialect o' Chinese, as spoken on th' islands in th' China Sea that th' Portuguese called th' Ladrones. Here’s "Batten Down The Hatches!" th' story:

Now, if you want to read more of the true story of Cape Cod China trader William Sturgis and his adventures with real pirates off the coast of China in 1809, here’s the link to last year’s story:

http://mnemosynesmagicmirror.blogspot.com/2010/09/aaarrrrggh-here-there-be-pirates.html

Who Owns “Happy Birthday” And Why Good Researchers Should Care

2011-09-14T14:48:00.001-04:00

Sometimes, I get distracted.

Even the best plans for the day can get undone when something really interesting comes across the desk. This morning it was an article that I never planned on reading in the first place; I found it quite by accident – while researching the recently filed “orphaned works” copyright dispute mounted against HathiTrust. They’re the folks working with a consortium of universities, Google books and others to assemble the world’s largest collection of freely-available digitized scholarly books and articles in the world.

As I often talk about using the HathiTrust Digital Library project in one of my talks on unusual and frequently overlooked resources for genealogists, I figured I’d better know what’s what since the lawsuit asks for an injunction that would be tantamount to a “stop work” order if successful.

And since the HathiTrust Library has 9.6 million items digitized, that’s a lotta “stop work.”

Anyway, that’s not today’s story and it’s only slightly related to today’s topic.

Today it’s about kids’ birthday parties.

And music – specifically a song. And royalties. And crime.

And why you (yes, YOU) are very likely a vicious scofflaw, wantonly, criminally stealing someone else’s intellectual property without even the slightest pinprick of conscience, and all in full view of your own little offspring and relatives.

Or maybe not.

You see, it’s pretty widely known all over the tubes of the Internet that the song “Happy Birthday To You” is still under copyright and that the copyright is currently owned by (wait for it) Time-Warner. In fact, Justice Stephen Breyer even referred to that fact in his 2003 dissent in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case. That was the case that finally granted 20-year extensions to some copyrights.

So, if a Supreme Court justice AND the Internet says so, it must be true, right?

After all, if you can find something online and you can also find a “reliable source” – like a Supreme Court guy – to say that the “something” that you found is true, why go any further? Certainly a very large percentage of genealogists would agree that it’s “good enough.”

So, if you sing “Happy Birthday” to your kid, or your grammy or one of your co-workers, you need to send Time-Warner or somebody a check – or else you’re in violation of copyright law and you’d be a common thief. Tsk, tsk… Remember, ignorance of the law is not an excuse.

Or maybe not.

Can something written more than a hundred years ago still be under copyright? Is that even research-able? And if so, surely someone's done that, right?

All of which leads me to this morning’s Article of Distraction: “Copyright and The World’s Most Popular Song” by Robert Brauneis. Brauneis is a professor at the George Washington University School of Law in Washington, D.C. He is a Harvard J.D. and a former law clerk for (then) First Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen G. Breyer, who is now “Justice” Breyer. At the GWU School of Law, Brauneis is also the co-director of the Intellectual Property Law Program, so when it comes to copyright, he knows whereof he speaks.

Best of all, he writes in readable English and he thinks like a very skilled and very experienced genealogist. In the article abstract, he specifically mentions “… the dangers of relying on anecdotes without thorough research and analysis.” Perhaps that may sound familiar? Further, the article abstract ends with this sentence: “Over two hundred unpublished documents found in six archives across the United States have been made available on a website that will serve as an online appendix to this article.”

Archives, “real-deal” unpublished documents, thorough research . . . could it get any better?

Actually, yes.

It’s not very often that you find an article about the law written by a top-notch law professor that references the census, Rootsweb, gravestone research, obituaries, church records, the Filson Historical Society, NARA, oral history and a whole lot more. As Brauneis sketches out the family history of the sisters of Patty Hill, you might almost think you were reading an article in a peer-reviewed, footnote-rich genealogy journal.

As it becomes clear, even songs can have a “genealogy”, just like their copyright owners. And quality research - whether it's a family or a copyright - is based on finding actual documentation, not on accepting what "everyone" already knows to be "true."

Warning: this is not a quick read; the article is 69 pages long. Still, it raises lots of interesting points, especially about what can happen when “everybody” believes something is true, but nobody actually checks. Here’s the link to the pdf file of the Brauneis article. The price is right: it’s free.

(which sure beats the song “Happy Birthday To You”...)

As Brauneis points out toward the end of the article, “Happy Birthday To You” currently generates about $5,000.00 A DAY in royalties for its copyright owners.

Have you paid your fair share?

If not, the copyright owners would politely suggest that you 'fess up and pay up or shut up and stop stealin' their song!

Booked Up? So, What’s On A Bookseller’s OWN Bookshelves?

2011-09-07T15:46:00.000-04:00

I am told by close family members that I have an excessively, obscenely large collection of arcane reference books.

Frankly, I don’t care; that’s one of the secret pleasures of being a bookseller specializing in out-of-print material. You get first dibs on the great stuff you discover in out-of-the-way places.

On my way back from Long Island last week, I stopped at a friend’s bookshop in the mid-Hudson Valley – just in case there was something I needed. These days, when I buy for my own reference library, I need to pace myself, because space is not infinitely expandable and it’s hard to make room on the shelves for “just one or two more.”

Still, I couldn’t pass up a very nice copy of Joseph C. G. Kennedy’s Preliminary Report On The Eighth Census – 1860, published by the Government Printing Office in Washington in 1862. In addition to the usual and expected statistical tables, there’s the text – most of which Kennedy wrote himself. Sometimes, it’s a single line in these kinds of reports that can send you off on a quest for more information elsewhere. For example, on page 100, under the heading “New Domestic Animals”, Kennedy wrote, “Camels and Cashmere goats have been successfully introduced, and strong hopes are entertained of their perfect acclimation and permanent utility.”

Camels???

That sent me off in search of yet more information on camels in the United States circa 1850 – 1860. Who knew about the schemes to use camels as commercial freight carriers in Utah or as draft animals on Alabama plantations? Who remembers the Secretary of War (Jefferson Davis, in fact) who promoted the US Army Camel Corps in Texas during this time period? Who knew that the ship carrying camels from Tunisia as a gift for the President of the United States also carried a piece of marble from the ruins of ancient Carthage that was to be used in the construction of the Washington Monument?

That’s why I keep adding things to the shelves. There’s just too much good stuff that I want to have at my fingertips as a ready reference.

For example, there’s my copy of the 1944 Annual Report of the American Historical Association in which appears the “Guide to the American Historical Review, 1895 – 1945.” This handy “guide” provides me with browse-able, indexed information about a wide range of nifty articles that appeared in the “Review” during its first 55 years. Things like Dallas Irvine’s July 1939 article titled “The Fate of Confederate Archives” which appeared in Volume 44. Or Albert Deutsch’s article in the April 1941 issue entitled “The Sick Poor in Colonial Times.” Both of these topics are items of interest for projects I’m currently working on and the articles are now on the “to read” list.

If I hadn't thumbed through the book, I might never have found references to those articles, neither of which would have been on my radar back in 1986 when I first bought it. My research interests constantly evolve.

Then there’s my very worn and water-stained copy of the Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools of the State of New York… , published in Albany in 1845 by “Carroll and Cook, Printers To The Assembly.” Doesn’t sound like much, but the first-hand reports from the county school superintendents provide an insight into New York education and social customs in the 1840s that are hard to find anywhere else. For example, A.S. Stevens, the superintendent in Wyoming County, wrote that he was having a problem convincing the parents in his district that corporal punishment in school was not a “good thing.”

He wrote, “The moment a word is hinted against corporal punishment as a necessary means of school discipline, the better part of the community are in arms and upon you at once, as a disorganizer, attacking the good order, the long established, wholesome and necessary rules of society; and a setter-up of strange doctrines. And they, in all respects very good citizens, cling to this relic of the barbarian age, with all the tenacity that others have done to a firm belief in witchcraft, necromancy, or in the great Diana of the Ephesians.”

Other county superintendents described their school houses. Warren County’s Lemon Thomson noted that, of the 105 schools in his district only 35 had blackboards and only 21 had privies, observing that proper privies were needed “…both for the convenience of scholars and to induce them to cultivate and retain the habits of delicacy, neatness and decorum.”

Local school superintendents - despite making handsome six-figure salaries in these parts these days - tend not to write with this degree of clarity or insight, never mind the "Diana of the Ephesians" reference.

Then there are, of course, the many shelves of bibliographic references – everything from bibliographies of Bermuda and Nantucket history to references for mystery fiction, local history, genealogy, medical works, religion and the common classics on bibliographic description. For example, the 1983 International Bibliography of Historical Demography may seem obscure, but if you’ve ever heard my “Sleuthing in the Stacks” talk, you would have learned about the importance of keeping up with what’s going on in that particular scholarly world. Historical demographers use the same kinds of records as genealogists. They just study whole groups of people, rather than families and individuals. Hence, a genealogist working on a problem in England in the early 1700s may find the reference to Grace Wyatt’s 1981 article titled “Migration in South-West Lancashire: a Study of Three Parishes (1661 – 1760)” helpful, especially since the journal Local Population Studies tends not to make most genealogists’ casual reading lists.

Nearby on the shelf is John D. Gay’s superb 1971 study called The Geography of Religion in England. This one earns its keep because of its fascinating maps that present information on the distribution of various religious groups throughout England at various time periods. Need to know where the “General Baptists” and “Particular Baptists” were in the 17^th century? Consult Map 25.

Wondering about the beliefs, development and distribution of the “British Israel Movement”? Consult the text on page 183. Since you asked…The British Israelites believe that they – as Anglo-Saxons – are the chosen race of God and that they are the lineal descendants of the House of Israel. Apparently it was a group particularly favored by the aristocracy in the 1920s and 1930s.

These titles, of course, just scratch the surface and take up less than one half of one three-foot shelf of the 48 shelves that are designated “reference.” Then there are the piles of books on the floor. And in boxes. And under the bed. And in the closet.

Well, anyway, you get the idea.

“If Your Mother Says She Loves You…”: On the Importance of Questioning Sources

2011-09-06T20:23:00.001-04:00

Over the Labor Day weekend, I took some time to bring a few of my genealogical research databases up to date. I settled on several Virginia/West Virginia families and zeroed in on the Ryans, late of Boone County, West – (By God) - Virginia.

For genealogists working in this part of the country, sorting out people who share the same last name can be a real challenge on a number of levels. First off, there’s the spelling. “Ryan” competes with “Ryon” and “Ryen” on lots of public records. Then, because the pronunciation of “Ryan” can be – like the weather – highly variable, the name sometimes appears as “Rine” or even the much more fancy “Ryne” or “Rhine.” After all, these are not the bog Irish, Famine –era immigrants of the Northeast (my folks), but rather the folks who came to Virginia long before there was a United States. Spelling is a sometime thing.

Then, there’s the regional predilection for identifying people – both males and females – simply by the first two letters of their first and middle names, followed by their last name. In one document, the man appears as “Charles Ryan”. A few years later, he’s listed as “C. N. Rine” in another document.

Same guy? Probably, but further verification wouldn’t hurt.

Also, there are the folks who have the very same name as several of their close kin, all of whom live reasonably close to one another, just to make life interesting for genealogists a century later.

So, in taking up the challenge of sorting out and updating the Ryans, I finally came to Charles Lewis Ryan (1856 - 1934). This “Charles Ryan” was a first cousin of the grandkids’ 3^rd great-grandmother Emma Virginia Ryan (1861 – 1922). He is certainly not to be confused with that OTHER nearly contemporary “Charles Ryan”; that would be Emma’s own brother Charles Ryan (1858 – 1932). Fortunately, these two guys lived in different counties. Nor should he be conflated with her first cousin Joe Ryan’s son Charles Ryan. Or with her OTHER first cousin Charles Ryan. Or even with the “Charles In Question’s” own son Charles Ryan.

Each of these five Charles Ryans lived within the boundaries of an imaginary corridor snaking through the mountains, switchbacks and hollers of Virginia and West Virginia, a narrow stretch of land about 175 miles long and 40 miles wide, straddling a number of small, largely rural Virginia and West Virginia counties.

Of course, also living in this imaginary tract of Almost Heaven were any number of probably-unrelated Charles Ryans. See? When it comes to sorting out Ryans, nothing is simple.

Fortunately, the state of West Virginia has gifted those of us who do West Virginia research with a wonderful website: The West Virginia Division of Culture and History’s Vital Records Search site.

Unlike other state governments who’ve hidden away their vital records inside the forbidding Dark Castle of Secrecy, allowing entrance only to those with a Right To Know and a sufficient amount of CASH (I’m talking about you, New York State…), West Virginia provides researchers with a functioning vital records search engine and with digitized images of the actual records. All For Free.

So, off I went to download Ryan births and Ryan marriages and Ryan deaths. And thereby hangs a tale.

Newbie genealogists (especially if they’ve heard the talks about the primacy of “primary” sources) believe in the sacrosanctity of government records. Frankly, they’re not alone; lots of government officials feel the same way. Give ‘em a government-issued certificate printed on fancy paper with a raised seal and all the truth in the world cannot prevail against it.

And so we come to Charles Ryan’s death certificate, issued in Summers County, West Virginia in 1934.

It’s straightforward enough and looks like all the other certificates issued there in 1934.

For your amusement, here it is, courtesy of the website cited above:

(Hint: if you click on the image, it gets bigger)

If you were just starting out in this genealogy thing, you might seize upon all the information found on the certificate as Gospel Truth. You would, of course, be wrong. At best, some of it is apocryphal.

What can you be sure of? Well, the date and place of death are probably correct. Chances are, Dr. Percy P. Pharr, the attending physician, may have been competent enough to document the primary and contributing causes of death correctly. The funeral home’s name and address are likely correct, as is the deceased name. After that, it’s largely hearsay information, some of it correct and some of it…not.

For example, unless Charles Ryan fell into a particularly garrulous autobiographical mood shortly before his death, it’s likely that the attending physician who filled out his death certificate asked his surviving spouse for the rest of his personal information. The “Mrs. C. L. Ryan” identified as the informant was either his second or third wife and hardly an expert on her husband’s early life.

While she identified his place of birth (Montgomery County, Virginia) and his father (W. G. Ryan) correctly, either her memory or her knowledge failed when she mistakenly identified Charles Ryan’s first wife’s mother (Alice Lilly) as his mother. His actual mother, Mary Jane Barnett, died shortly after little Charles was born, probably from the complications of childbirth.

How do I know all this?

Simple. I’ve been tracking various branches of this particular family across these two states for more than 35 years, collecting documents and verifying information. For better or worse, I’m kind of an expert on these Ryans.

The point?

Beginning genealogists often assume that all the information on an official document is correct. They need to adopt a whole new attitude: CIAO. Or “Check It ALL Out.”

Always ask what is “likely true”, what is “probably true” and what is “maybe true.” Take nothing on faith, even if the document looks terribly official and reliable. Human error and/or fallibility can crop up in places you least expect it.

My high school journalism teacher – an aging nun who was a member of the order known as the Sisters of Mercy – showed no mercy to journalism students who failed to question their sources. Guided by her, and as the editor of my high school newspaper, I quickly learned to doubt pretty much everything. My “reporters” got used to me asking, “How do you know this is true?” before their writing could appear in print.

That skepticism – taught to me by a woman who took an amazing amount of other things in her personal life on faith - has served me well as a family historian.

One of the first things beginning journalists learn is to verify the information that they get from “sources.” Simply citing a source isn’t enough: you need to check it out for veracity.

Or, as they used to teach brand-new reporters in the City Rooms all of the country: “if your mother says she loves you, check it out!”

CIAO, baby!

And Still I Write

2011-08-31T09:00:00.000-04:00

The very first post went up on Mnemosyne’s Mirror one year ago today.

And still I write. But why? Why bother with all this in the first place?

Let me clear the air. I don’t write because I want something to do; my life is already filled with enough activities. I don’t write because I’m looking for recognition; I’m well past that, and I have had recognition enough. I don’t write to be read, even though it’s nice when readers stop by from time to time.

I write because I have to.

Mostly, it’s either about the stories that need to be told or about the ideas that need an airing. Sometimes, the writing itself is a mental exercise in organization and clarification about my own ideas or points of view. Sometimes, it’s about a new research discovery. Occasionally, it’s about something inconsequential that just struck me as funny, interesting or worth writing about.

I write because I have to.

Researchers who “do” family history collect bits of bare-naked data – lots of it – often like Imelda Marcos collected shoes. These days, because many family history types tend to be “early adopters” when it comes to new technologies, the internet is filled with data – some of it good, and some of it, well… let’s just say that it’s “lacking.”

Plus, now there are programs to record all this bare-naked data, organize the data, store the data, access the data from remote locations and share the data with other data-hounds. Then there are the social networks and the social networking tools that enable folks interested in family history to talk about and share stuff with other like-minded people.

In fact, sometimes I think that some folks are more interested in talking about doing their genealogy with all the new tekkie tools than in actually DOING their genealogy.

Of course, most of this glitzy high-tech stuff wasn’t around when I started doing serious family history and genealogy, including hands-on archives research, back in the early 60s. And back before the advent of social networks, family historians quickly learned that only a handful of people that they knew had any interest in hearing about those latest discoveries relating to some obscure early 19^th century ancestor that nobody remembered, anyway.

So, with all this great new stuff, including the tekkie toys, the instant-access to digitized records, the social networking and a web-ful of enough vital information about dead people to choke all the African war elephants that Hannibal marched over the Pyrenees to attack Rome, what’s missing?

In my view, it’s the stories. There just aren’t enough of them.

I know, I know. It’s fun to look stuff up. Still, it’s probably much more important to write stuff down. Not just the properly cited and thoroughly vetted bare-naked data, but the hundreds of stories behind those thousands of data points.

For example, it’s a fact that my own great-great grandfather James Redmond, a private in the NY 43^rd Infantry during the Civil War, was one of the soldiers captured in Virginia during the Battle of the Wilderness. It’s a fact that he was sent to the notorious Andersonville prison. It’s a fact that he died there about Oct 6 or 7, 1864 and what was left of him after starvation and dysentery had taken its toll was buried there. Those are the facts. That’s the bare-naked data that we collect and document.

But it’s not “the story”.

James Redmond’s actual “story” would not be found in his military record. Rather, it would tell of his life as a laborer before the war and how his 32-year old wife died in mid-October in 1860, leaving him alone with three children under 10. And how he left those three children with his wife’s brother and his family while he went off to war on the 3^rd of December 1861. And how the two youngest children were placed in an orphanage after word of their father’s death reached their uncle less than three years later.

Why did he enlist? Was it the money? Was it the adventure? Was it an escape from something?

I doubt that I will ever know. Frankly, I doubt it was “to preserve the union” or “eliminate slavery.”

There’s not much surviving evidence that Irish Catholic immigrant laborers who lived on the edge of poverty thought much about those things. Plus, the New York City draft riots strongly suggest that those same Irish laborers who rioted lived in fear that, should the war be successful for the North, the newly-freed slave population would leave the South for the industrial Northeast, thereby taking their jobs and further depressing wages.

No, I strongly doubt that my great-great grandfather was any kind of abolitionist or deep political thinker at all.

James Redmond’s story is largely a blur and a mystery. No one else in my family ever heard of him. He left no papers or letters; chances are, he could not read or write. His own children barely knew him – my great-grandfather, his oldest child, was only 10 when his father left for war. His enlistment records – more bare-naked facts – tell me that he was not very tall - about five feet, nine inches - and had grey eyes, black hair and a “fair” complexion. Still, that’s enough to help form a mental image of the man. But that’s all it is…a mental image. No photographs, if they ever existed, have survived.

And I doubt that my grandmother (who was his granddaughter and actually had his grey eyes and black hair and fair complexion) even knew his name. She was only 12 when her own father died, and likely not much interested in family history.

And yet, still I write about James Redmond and others like him… because even their sketchy stories still need telling.

Family history is more than bare-naked data. It is frozen memory that needs capturing before it melts into oblivion. It is that dried rose preserved in a family Bible that is meant to awaken a long-ago memory of a lover long gone. It is a tale passed from mother to daughter, from grandfather to grandson. It is the rebuilding of our own ancestors’ lives from those tiny shards of evidence that we find while sifting through all that data.

So, why do I write?

I write because I have to. I am compelled, and I seem to have no choice in the matter.

I guess it’s simple, really: I write to raise the dead.