Season of Memory, Season of Forgetting

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.

When Food is Family and Family is Food

“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)

Censuses Behaving Badly: The Case of the Two Therman Lockharts

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.

Our Storied Lives And Our Big Box Of Hats

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

(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.

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

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!

When The Taxman Cometh

There’s an interesting conversation going on today over at the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) member listserv about the need for professional genealogists to collect (and remit) sales taxes on professional genealogical “services.”  Last year, New York State, and specifically the Department of Tax and Finance, made it almost clear that “genealogical services” were sales-taxable.  There are still some shaded areas to be worked out, but that'll take time.

In other words, if you run a business in the State of New York, and that business does genealogical research for paying clients, then that business is in the “information services” business.  That means, plain and simple, that the bills that get sent to clients for research need to have NYS sales tax added to them (both state and local.)

But... but... should a state like New York be forcing “mom and pop” genealogy businesses to collect sales tax from their research clients?  After all, it’s a professional service.

Turns out, that’s the wrong question, because it doesn’t matter.

It’s just like selling books.  Whenever we send a book to a New York State address, the law requires us to collect the appropriate state and local sales tax, not only on the price of the book itself, but also on the shipping costs. 

That’s the law in New York State.

Of course, we also have to file periodically – usually quarterly - with a bunch of other states where we are required by law to have sales tax permits. It’s one of those costs of doing business that nobody ever thinks about when they hang out their “open for business” shingle.

Of course, nothing is ever simple.  You can’t just start a business doing research for clients, add the appropriate sales tax to your client’s bill, collect it from your client and then send it the State of New York.  Before you can do any of that, you need to register with the State Department of Tax and Finance as a business, get a “tax number” (also known as a “Certificate of Authority”), and only then can you collect and remit the tax to the state.

(Personal aside: a few years ago, New York State wanted all those of us with “old” Certificates of Authority to get “new” Certificates of Authority.  There was a $50 fee for that…)

Note that State tax people tend not to kid around.  The NYS Department of Tax and Finance makes it crystal-clear on its official website what’s likely to happen if you fail to register:

If you are required to register for sales tax purposes but fail to do so and you operate a business without a valid Certificate of Authority, you will be subject to a penalty. The maximum penalty for operating a business without a valid Certificate of Authority is $10,000, imposed at the rate of up to $500 for the first day business is conducted without a valid Certificate of Authority, plus up to $200 per day for each day after.

Of course, they wouldn’t do that to little ol’ you, right?

Welcome to the “Cautionary Tale About Sales Tax Collection”:

More than 30 years ago, I sub-leased about 200 square feet of not-so-great retail space from a friend who had just started a retail business and was selling all kinds of interesting jewelry, clothing and other objets d’art made in Asia.  I used the space to install about 15 six-foot bookcases, stocked with interesting and unusual (non-genealogical, non-historical) books. Art, science, medical history, that sort of thing.  The arrangement was simple:  I paid her for the space (and a bit extra) and she agreed to handle the sales of the occasional book, using my receipts, etc., just so it was clear that it was two separate businesses.

This all lasted for about six or so months.

Then came The Day.  The day that I found out that my friend was collecting sales tax from HER customers for HER stuff, but not sending any of it on to the State of New York.  (Because we used separate receipts, my stuff was properly accounted for and I paid the state directly.)

However, that didn’t stop the NYS sales tax agents from visiting the shop one morning, padlocking the doors and plastering huge bright orange stickers with the words "SEIZED BY THE STATE OF NEW YORK FOR TAX VIOLATION" all over the display windows. 

It took lots of calls, document production, and smooth talking to convince the tax folks that there was no problem with the thousands of out-of-print books in the bookcases and storage boxes (mine) in the two hundred square feet in the back.  My book business was current with sales tax filings. Finally, an agent allowed me inside to retrieve my stock and my bookcases.

My friend’s merchandise, however, ended up being sold at a tax auction for pennies on the dollar.

The moral here is simple:  no matter what your personal beliefs about government or taxes, if you run a business, it’s your responsibility to know what’s required in your state and then, to do what’s required.

Sure, it may not seem logical or fair.  Doesn't matter.  No question, it complicates your life.  Doesn’t matter.  If you mess with the tax folks, there’s a very high likelihood you will lose - big time.

These days, states are broke and looking for revenue sources. “Information services” businesses are easy targets when states are looking for new taxable services.  Genealogists research and sell information to clients.  Ergo . . .

If you do this sort of thing, it’s a good idea to find out if the service you provide for a fee is taxable in your state.  Here’s an interesting “advisory opinion” from the State of New York tax people about the tax-ability of “information services.”  (Not “genealogical – but close enough for government work…)

When it comes to collecting sales tax, you need to be on top of stuff like this if you run a business, not only because it is the law and you’re responsible for knowing what it is, but most of all, because –

Bright orange “tax violation” stickers on your place of business 

are not good advertising for your business skills!