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

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!)

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

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!

“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!