Researching at the Library of Virginia: A Tale of Slaves & Bacon

1st President, Liberia

Following my several days of intensive research at the Library of Virginia after the Virginia Genealogical Society’s conference in Richmond late last month, I’ve been spending much of the past week transcribing pre-1850 deeds, wills and estate settlements from Madison County, Virginia. I’m up to my neck in piggins, gruntels, hilling hoes and shovel ploughs – all things that rural Virginians left behind as parts of their estates.

Years ago, I learned the importance of not just looking stuff up, but rather of actually reading will and deed books, even when the entries didn’t directly relate to the people I was investigating.  Yes, it’s labor-intensive, but it’s hardly a waste of time.  In the process of random reading about those other friends and neighbors, you often learn a lot about your own ancestors’ lives and times.

Tonight, let’s consider Joseph Early, whose will was directly after the one I needed to solve a relationship problem.  Early was a neighbor who called upon a member of the family I was researching to witness his will. Finding it was entirely serendipitous. Here are the high points.

(From Madison County Virginia Will Book 9, pages 421 -422)

I Joseph Early of the County of Madison in the State of Virginia do make this my last will and testament in manner and form to wit:

My will is that my executors hereafter named send my Negroes that I know¹ have to Libery² give each of the men 3 in number fifty dollars each and Verindy and all her children one hundred dollars to take with them besides getting them out, and bacon enough to last them six months after they get to Libery.

                                                                    1. i.e. “…that I now have…”

                                                                    2.  “Libery” is Liberia

Early, a well-to-do farmer with $8,000 in real estate holdings listed in the 1850 census, then directs that his land be sold and that the proceeds from the sale be divided among his 25 nieces and nephews, who are not named in the will.  His will (dated 22 December 1852) was proved in Madison County Court on 24 August 1854 on the testimony of the witnesses Joseph Good, Willis H. Carpenter, and William J. Sparks.

In the course of several days researching in the Madison County will books, I came across a number of references to slaves being freed upon the deaths of their owners, but none as fascinating as this.  

Not only was Early directing that his slaves be freed upon his death, but that they be given cash and passage money to Liberia, along with enough bacon to tide them over upon arrival in Liberia. 

Liberia is one of those places we learn about in high school history class and then promptly forget about.  Chances are, most Americans would be hard pressed to say much about Liberia, other than it was a country somewhere in Africa established by freed slaves and their descendants from the United States and that its capital (Monrovia) was named after US President James Monroe.  The photo above is of Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the first president of the Republic of Liberia, born free to a former slave mother in Norfolk, Virginia.  His father was believed to be a Welsh immigrant planter who was his mother's former owner.

Most present-day Americans probably think that most present-day Liberians are descendants of freed American slaves. In fact, the freed slaves and their descendants, known as “Americo-Liberians”, established their American-style communities with their American-style government mostly along the coast, keeping their distance from the inhospitable inland areas and from the indigenous people already living there.  

Those indigenous tribal people called the newly arrived freed slaves “white men”, both because of their ante-bellum southern American values and because many new arrivals were classed as mulattos in Virginia. Today, the descendants of those original settlers from America make up only about 5% of Liberia’s population and are looked upon as the “elite” class.

The story of Liberia is long, complicated and not the focus of tonight’s tale.  And actually, most Americans couldn’t find Liberia on a map if their lives depended on it. 

Tonight, the issue is: whatever became of Joseph Early’s slaves after his death in 1854?  Are they identifiable?  Are they findable? Did they ever get sent from Madison County, Virginia to Liberia with their bacon?

I thought I'd try to find out.

From the 1850 slave schedules, we learn that Joseph Early owned six slaves: three males aged 27, 22, and 15 as well as a 21 year old female – who is likely Verindy -  and a five year old female and 2 year old male, who are most likely Verindy’s children.  None of those people are actually named in the 1850 slave schedules, and only Verindy was named in the will.  No last names were given in either document. The ages given are likely only “best-guess” estimates to get the census taker on his way.

At first blush, it might seem that tracing these folks out of Madison County in 1854 could be an almost impossible task, an exercise in futility.

Enter the “Virginia Emigrants To Liberia” website. 

There’s a good chance that this is a resource you may never have heard of, but it’s an example of one of the best genealogy PLUS history PLUS internet combinations that you’ll find anywhere.  The website is a collaboration of the Afro American Historical Association of Fauquier County, the Virginia Center for Digital History and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. 

Here you’ll find detailed information about approximately 3,700 freed slaves from Virginia who went to Liberia.  And, to make it simple, a search engine, found under the heading "Resources".

The search engine lets you search on one or more key data points relating to the freed slave: Last name, first name, county or city of origin, name of former owner, destination in Liberia or ship name.  You can also search by the name of the emancipator, the emancipator’s county of residence and the year of emancipation.  You’ll also find a timeline about the Virginia – Liberia experience and a helpful bibliography. A vast amount of the data comes from the American Colonization Society papers in the Library of Congress and other primary sources.

So, what can we learn about Joseph Early’s slaves from the database?

By searching on “Early” in the “Emancipator” box and on “Madison County”, we learn that six of Early’s former slaves sailed on the ship “Cora” to Buchanan, Liberia in 1855.  They were: Leroy Early, age 28 and the Walden family, consisting of Viranda Walden, 25, Cora Walden, 11, Thaddeus Walden, 8, Susan Walden, 5, and Henry Walden, 3.  Viranda Walden is obviously the “Verindy” mentioned in Joseph Early’s will. 

We also learn that another of Early’s former slaves, George Garth, age 28, sailed on the “Euphrasia” the year before.  We further learn that $240.00 toward the “Cora” passage for the Walden family was paid for by Capt. J. A. Early of Madison County, Virginia, who I’ve learned from other sources was one of Early’s nephews as well as his business partner and executor.

A few years ago, before the advent of the “Virginia Emigrants to Liberia” website, few people would have pursued this kind of research because of its difficulty.  Now, the story of thousands of former Virginia slaves has much more richness and detail.  Finally, many of those formerly anonymous inventoried slaves have real names and histories.

Final thought:  the amount of Virginia bacon – enough to last the family of “Virindy” Walden for six months – that was sent along to Liberia is not mentioned anywhere in the “Emigrants” database or in Joseph Early’s estate settlement.  

I guess some things will have to remain a mystery, at least until the cargo manifests for the “Cora” can be located. 

Still, I wonder about how much bacon would be considered a six-month supply.

That’s the fun of genealogy: no matter how much we know, there’s always more to learn.

Decoration Day 2011. Grave 10467, Now in Zip Code 31711, Etched Forever In Memory

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part

To murmur name upon name . . .

- Five lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem, Easter 1916

Today is Memorial Day 2011.  That’s what they officially call it now. In some parts, it’s usually prefaced by the word “Huge” and followed by the word “Sale.”

My mother, born during the Great War, still calls it “Decoration Day”, and remembers the elderly relatives – women, mostly – who faithfully visited cemeteries to tidy up after the ravages of winter and to place flowers on the graves of the dead.

My grandmother’s sister Mame was one of those women.  Every Decoration Day, Mame would gather her things together into a large brown paper bag and take the mid-morning city bus to the Catholic cemetery about four miles away from home.  The bag contained her lunch, and along with it, some flowers, her grass clippers, a paintbrush and a small can of paint.

Mame always went to the cemetery alone on Decoration Day.  She never asked for company, help or even a ride.  This was Her Job and everyone in the family knew and respected that. More than seventy years old, Mame had been doing her annual Decoration Day ritual longer than anyone could remember.

The bus stopped across the street from the cemetery’s great stone gates just long enough for Mame and her bag to get off.  From there she walked. First, there was the quarter mile stretch along Cemetery Avenue, past the monument company’s office, past the florist’s greenhouses and past the cemetery’s main office.  From there, her route took her past the old receiving vault that was used in earlier times when the ground was too frozen for men to dig winter graves by hand. Then she walked uphill for another half mile, along the winding roads to her two family plots far in the back.  

The Redmond plot was marked with a large granite stone that had been purchased shortly after her father’s death in 1901.  Mame’s mother Mary Ann Horan Redmond and her father Joseph Redmond were buried there, along with eight of her brothers and sisters.  A few hundred yards away was the Horan plot, where Mame’s mother’s parents, Martin Horan and Margaret Buckley Horan, were buried with some of their own children.

After placing a few cut flowers from her bag on top of the Redmond headstone, Mame set to work.  She clipped the grass around the stone where she knew the lawnmower men pushing their old-fashioned reel mowers would never try to reach.  She picked up the fallen twigs and branches and put them in neat piles along the cemetery’s back fence. 

Finally, she opened her can of paint.  It was silver-colored metal paint, and just the thing to give a fresh look to the small open-mesh metal bench that was part of the Redmond family plot. It was also just the thing to freshen up the metal planter urns that flanked the Redmond stone on either side.  In about six weeks’ time, Mame would return with geraniums for those planters.  

That bench and those urns are gone now, removed by the cemetery management as hazards to the men who operate the cemetery’s modern industrial-strength lawn mowing equipment.

Back in the 1950s, Decoration Day was about getting cemetery things fresh again, a kind of rebirth and resurrection of memories of dead men. 

When her painting was done, Mame sat down on the grass and ate her lunch.  Then, she moved on to the Horan plot and repeated the clipping and the tidying up.  The Horan plot took much less time, since the old marble stone was smaller and there was nothing to paint there.

In late afternoon, she began her trek down the hill to the bus stop for her return trip home, her Decoration Day job complete. 

Mindful of the origins of this day of remembrance, Mame would no doubt have wanted to tidy up and decorate the grave of her grandfather James Redmond, a black-haired man with grey eyes that she had never met.  However, she could not take the city bus to his grave; it was much too far away.

Her grandfather had been a Civil War soldier.  James Redmond joined the 43rd New York Volunteer Infantry as a private in 1861 and was assigned to Company C. His wife Ellen had died the year before, and he left his two young children, 11 year old Joseph and 4 year old Catherine, in the care of his brother-in-law Michael Conley until his return from the war.  At least that was his plan.

However, things rarely go as we hope or as we plan, and so it was with James Redmond. 

On May 6^th 1864, James Redmond was captured while fighting in Virginia, at what is now known as the Battle of the Wilderness. From there, he was sent as a prisoner of war to Camp Sumter, Georgia.  Camp Sumter was its formal military name.   

History calls it by its more familiar one:  Andersonville. 

Andersonville was a prison built in a hurry, on the cheap and without actual barracks, the Union prisoners left largely to their own devices for shelter and clothing.  Although built to contain less than 10,000 men, it held nearly four times that number in the worst of times. Food was a luxury, and always in short supply. The only water came from a small stream that flowed through the camp. Medical care was virtually non-existent. The prisoners wore only the clothes they had on when they were captured.

During its short 14 month span as a prison camp, Andersonville held more than 9,000 New Yorkers.  Of those New Yorkers, nearly 2,500 men died, mostly of starvation and scorbutus, as scurvy was then called.  

James Redmond was one of those men, sick with scurvy and slowly starved to death. Whatever fitful and feverish dreams he might have had of his youth in County Kildare or of his own children, they all came to a sudden and painful end about four months after his arrival at Andersonville. This could not have been the end he had imagined when he left Ireland years earlier, having then survived the Great Hunger. How could a man starve to death in the land of plenty?

James Redmond died far from home surrounded by strangers on 6 October 1864 and was buried without ceremony in a trench grave shoulder to shoulder with others who died around the same time. Buried without coffins and reduced to little more than flesh-covered skeletons from lack of food, the Union dead took up little room in their makeshift Georgia cemetery. Years later, those trench graves became part of what is now a national cemetery, marked with row upon row of simple white markers, tightly set and almost touching, each bearing a name, a state abbreviation and a number.  

His grave number is, and will forever be, Number 10467, in the Andersonville National Cemetery in Andersonville, Macon County, Georgia, now Zip Code 31711. For some folks, those last three digits – 711- is a “lucky” number combination.  Not so for James Redmond.

Had Mame been able to travel to Andersonville by bus, she would have surely decorated her grandfather James Redmond’s grave on Decoration Day. 

For Mame, Decoration Day would have been Private James Redmond’s special day, and, after all, Decoration Day was Her Special Job.

When they ended their late-night newscasts last night with a cheery “Have a great Memorial Day holiday tomorrow, everyone!”, the perky young newsreaders on the local TV station demonstrated that they don’t quite get it. Memorial Day is not about mattress sales, cookouts and the start of lazy, hazy summer.  It’s not even about parades.

It’s a day about dead men, many of whose lives came to a sudden, brutal and unplanned end in horrific circumstances that, even a few years earlier, they could have scarcely imagined. 

On this Decoration Day 2011, and in particular in memory of my grandmother’s grandfather James Redmond, and all the men who suffered fates like his – I offer the lines from Yeats above and this simple Irish remembrance:  

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.  (“May his soul be on God’s right side”)

Quiz: What Does Sex, the IRS and Bristol Palin Have to Do With Genealogy?

It's All Adam & Eve's Fault!

When it comes down to basics, genealogy is all about sex.  

Not just any old garden-variety, backseat-of- Dad’s-Chevy sex, but that highly successful reproductive sex that results in brand-new human people being born.  

Generally, that’s how our ancestors got their descendants.  

Society likes to regulate sex, deciding who can have it, with whom, when and under what circumstances.  Religion also likes to get into the act, so to speak. 

According to the logic, regulated sex makes for stable families, which in turn makes for stable societies.  Or at least that's how the story goes. 

 In case you hadn’t noticed, stable societies tend to have pretty stable political systems.  And stable political systems are much, much easier for political elites to control than political systems that are, well, unstable.  

Still, it all comes down to sex.

Good, highly regulated sex – at least the kind that society and religion have determined is “good” – gets a big thumbs up from our modern post-industrial societies.  Bad sex – the kind that is unregulated - well, that’s a horse of a different color.  

Which is why the Candie’s Foundation hired Bristol Palin way back in 2009.

You may vaguely remember Bristol Palin.  She’s Sarah What’s Her Name’s oldest daughter.  She and her high-school friend Levi had highly productive sex together and produced a cute little kid named Tripp.  They’re not married and have no current intention of doing the marriage thing.  Neither Bristol nor Levi have finished high school.

In general, society says that this is not a “good thing.”

As far as society is concerned, the highly successful reproductive sex that Levi and Bristol had was “bad sex.”  Bad sex – the kind that results in unmarried teen pregnancy, for example – will, according to common societal wisdom – have drastically negative consequences for its participants.  

 Just look at Bristol.

Bristol dropped out of high school.  Bristol is a “single mom.”  The current societal narrative would strongly suggest that Bristol’s life is ruined, both socially and economically.

Well, maybe not so much.

Bristol landed one of those “do as I say, not as I did” jobs with the Candie’s Foundation, whose purpose, according to their IRS 990 form,  is “To educate America’s youth about the devastating consequences of teen pregnancy.”  

Bristol’s own “devastating consequences” of her unplanned teen pregnancy are pretty interesting.  According to the Candie’s Foundation’s 990 form (Schedule O, page 27), Bristol – who was born in 1990 - made a cool $262,500 to preach the message of the devastating consequences of teen pregnancy in series of TV commercials for the foundation.

Apparently, the Foundation couldn’t find any other teen-aged single mom in the United States who could successfully convey that message for any amount of money less that that somewhat north of a quarter million dollars amount.  Good thing Bristol was available and agreed to work for such a piddling amount.

I’m not making this up.  The information is easily available via Guidestar.  Here’s the relevant section from the Candie’s Foundation 990 form:

So, what or who is Guidestar, you ask?  Guidestar is an organization that provides information about not-for-profit organizations. Here's the link to the Guidestar website.     Guidestar provides “one-stop-shopping” for all those 990 forms that the IRS requires to be filed annually by all not-for-profit organizations, including your favorite genealogical and historical societies, large and small.  

To peruse the actual forms, you’ll need to register, but there’s no charge to register for the “basic” level of information – i.e., to look at the publicly available IRS 990s.

What can you learn from an organization’s 990 form?  Well, for one thing, you can learn how much money they received from all sources in a given year.  And how much money they spent. And what they spent it on.  And how much they have in the bank. And who their 5 highest paid employees earning more than $100,000 are.  And how much those folks make.

Just to whet your appetite – Guidestar has a search engine where you can search for organizations by name.  If you enter “genealogy”, you’ll get 312 hits.  If you try “genealogical”, you’ll get 1,256 hits.  How about “historical”?   A whopping 24,612 hits.

These are the organizations that we all know and love.

Genealogists are by nature nosy.  That’s why we’re good at what we do.

With that “nosy” quality in mind, here’s the link to the Guidestar registration page.  

So, go ahead.  Go sign up and poke around. 

It’s free and you know you want to.

And, by the way, the “sex and Bristol Palin” thing was just the "bait" to get you to read about Guidestar, which you probably didn’t know much about until now.

The Mirror Is Clear Again - With An Example of Why History Is Rarely Simple

As I indicated in my last post on May 19th, I had just arrived to exhibit (as Jonathan Sheppard Books) at the Virginia Genealogical Society’s Spring Conference at the Library of Virginia in Richmond which took place a week ago today. 

We timed our trip so as to guarantee a full day of library/archives research on the Friday before the conference, some Library/Archives time on Saturday during the conference and also two full days of research following the event.

There are many great reasons to like researching at the Library of Virginia.  There’s the friendly and helpful staff.  There are open local history stacks and easy access to microfilmed county level records.  Plus, there’s also free visitor parking, which almost makes up for the 75 cents a page charge to make copies of microfilm images.  (Truth be told, they now have a half-dozen or so of those neat digital reader/printers if you don’t want paper copies.)

We planned our research day arrivals so that we could get to the Library at least 15 minutes early to take advantage of the parking and also to insure being able to get a microfilm reader with left-hand workspace.

Every day, as we waited for the Library to open, we spent our wait-time examining the fascinating Union or Secession: Virginians Decide exhibit in the display cases of the Library’s main floor lobby. 

Kudos to the Library/Archives staff for a job well done!

(By the way, just in case you were wondering, “kudos” is not a countable noun, as in “one kudo, two kudos…” It’s a Greek word - κῦδος -  that means “praise” and it’s singular.  I didn’t spend a year in a classical Greek class at university for nothin’)

Anyway, back to the exhibit…

Maps, broadsides, and a variety of documents from the Library’s collection had been faithfully digitized and put on display.  One part of the display focused on the abolitionist John Brown and his October 1859 raid on the United States Arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

Brown’s capture and subsequent trial stirred strong emotions in both north and south alike, resulting in a barrage of letters to the Virginia governor’s office. 

The then-Governor of Virginia, Henry A. Wise, was flooded with correspondence about the fate of John Brown.  One of the letters on display in the Union or Secession exhibit was signed by Maria Brown of Rock Island, Illinois.  The letter was written after the trial and shortly before Brown’s scheduled execution on December 2.

We transcribed the letter on our last day at the Library.  Our transcription of the letter follows:

                                                                        Rock Island

Illinois

Novr 30th '59

Gov'r Wise
Dear Sir
My two daughters have left with a party of young women who purpose to effect the rescue of John Brown.  They number about sixteen & wear large petticoats filled with powder, having slow matches attached.  If caught they intend to set themselves off & (so effective is the inflammable material about them) the consequence will be awful.  In fact, Virginia will be blown sky high.  My anxiety about my two children aforesaid & my affectionate concern for your welfare induce me to forewarn you of the imminent peril that awaits you.  If you find the girls, send them back before the blow up & send some chivalry along.  There is none of your kind up north.
                                                                                    Truly yrs
                                                                                 Maria Black


[Note: the “slow matches” referred to in the second sentence are synonymous with what we would today call “fuses.”]

While interesting in its own right (especially Mrs. Black’s sarcastic observation about Southern “chivalry” in the last two lines), my first thought upon reading this was not about the events of 1859 leading up to the Civil War, but rather about the events a century later.

In fact, the day after we transcribed Maria Black’s letter was the day the USA Patriot Act was renewed by the United States Congress and autopenned into law by the President. 

Food for thought:  if Mrs. Black had sent her letter to the Virginia governor today, would the sixteen young women from Rock Island whose petticoats were filled with explosives and fuses simply be sent back home by the authorities, as Mrs. Black requested? 

Or would the young women be treated today as domestic terrorists?

That’s the thing about history – nothing is ever quite as simple as it first appears.

Why Mnemosyne's Mirror Is Fogged Over Tonight

We headed south on our research trip/ conference this morning at around 8 AM after making two strategic decisions.  First decision:  Drive the Coast Road (I-95) or the Valley Road (I-81) south to Richmond?  The Valley Road's more scenic and less truck-y, but a lot longer in miles and time;  the Coast Road's shorter  and faster but can be a harrowing drive unless your vehicle weighs 4 or 5 tons and looks like an armored personnel carrier (I'm talkin' to you, Jersey and Delaware drivers... sheesh!).

Second decision: (a.) stop at Dunkin Donuts for breakfast close to home or (b.) stop at Dunkin Donuts for breakfast on the road farther south?

Strategic choices made:  Coast Road and (a.) close to home.  The second part was a good choice - the first part, not so much.

The car air conditioner must have decided it was almost summer, so it took its own vacation and shut down in central New Jersey.  Seems it didn't much like where it went because it came back on in northern Virginia.  The GPS suggested that it was a Good Idea to drive east on the Beltway around Washington, so I followed the nice lady's directions.   It worked pretty well until we got to that southern part of the Beltway, where it joins back up with I-95.  By then it was around 4 PM.

It appears that rather a lot of people work in the greater DC area.  A very high percentage of them seem to have decided that the areas south of the city offer superior residential opportunities.  Most of them also decided - at least today - that 4 PM was a great time to get the heck outa DC.  Via I-95.

No one seems to know any other way home.

So, we sat.  And crawled.  And sat and crawled some more.  We crawled south and about two hours later we reached Lorton, which is, in some folks' mind, a bicycle's ride away from the White House, barring rain.  I decided to bail and try Route One, the original Coast Highway in the days before interstates.

That too was Not A Good Idea, since Route One is now the epicenter of American chain stores, chain restaurants and fast food places, give or take a muffler shop as well.  Also, Route One is home to more Mexican restaurants in a five mile stretch than can be found in all of upstate New York.  (Note to self:  Google "pupusa" and find out what the heck it is and why it's on all the Mexican restaurant signs. See, when you can only drive 8 miles an hour, it's pretty easy to read all the stuff on their business signs.).

It was getting late.  I realized it was time to get counter-intuitive, so I bailed again and drove northwest toward Manassas for about a half-hour, made a great arc, and an hour later was heading south again on back roads in Virginia horse country, where nobody commutes to DC.

At around 10 PM, we reached our Richmond destination. Four hours late.  Having driven about 100 miles out of our way.

It was actually a welcome sound when that nice GPS lady said, "Arriving. At Destination.  On Left."

And that's why Mnemosyne's Mirror is all fogged over tonight.  And that's the Truth.

So, If it's The End Of The World, Who's Gonna Get My Tax Refund????

Direct From the Family Radio Website (see below)

Genealogists need to keep in mind – especially when talking with older relatives – that even the unlikeliest verbal references or the most casual of off-hand remarks can act as “memory triggers” for family stories. Here’s an example –

This afternoon, we picked up my mother (who will be 94 next Christmas) at her apartment for her weekly mid-day excursion to the grocery store, the pharmacy and to lunch.  As we drove down the road toward the shopping center where the grocery store is located, we came upon one of those temporary electronic road signs that highway departments put up alerting motorists to “coming events.”  The sign flashed three messages in rapid succession over and over again: 

ROAD CLOSED/

CONSTRUCTION/

SAT MAY 21 6 AM – 6 PM.

In an off-hand joking fashion, I remarked, “Why bother? After all, everybody knows that the world’s coming to an end on Saturday!”

I then proceeded to tell her about the May 21 “End of the World” story that’s been making the rounds on the national news media and about which I blogged way back on March 28^th.  (In case you missed it, you can catch up at the official Family Radio site here.  They’re a religious radio station and are promoting the” event” and have a countdown timetable on their website.  Apparently, all those “Gay Pride” events are the telltale signs that this is all coming to pass…) 

Anyway, back to the story:

“That reminds me,” she said, “about when your grandmother called me on the telephone to say that the End of the World was coming, so we all needed to come to her house to be together as a family when it happened.”

I nearly drove off the road. 

It was a story I had never heard, no matter how many times we had talked about the small, quirky things that she remembered about the woman who was her mother-in-law and who she always called “Mrs. Wolfgang.”

That “end of the world” phone call from her mother-in-law. As we talked, it slowly came into place.  She vaguely remembered that it was probably before my grandfather’s stroke and death in 1947. It was probably after she was married, so it was post-August 1943.  It was probably a radio program of some sort that my grandmother had been listening to, but it was too late for Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” which aired in 1938. 

She couldn’t remember the specific details, but remembers going with my father to her mother-in-law’s house because of that phone call.  So they could be together as a family when the End came.

For me, it’s more than just a story.  In a way, it’s more insight into my grandmother’s world view.  My grandmother grew up as one of the youngest of the five surviving siblings of her mother’s 13 children. She was an Irish Catholic with minimal education, and with an Irish peasant’s deep and abiding faith in magical things.  She faithfully put the statue of St. Anthony in the upstairs window every laundry day – you could be sure it wouldn’t rain, since St. Anthony wouldn’t let her down.  She had “relics” that had been touched to the garments of St. Therese of Lisieux that she fervently believed would bring my grandfather back to health.  She believed in curses and incantations and that if you did things in a certain way while saying certain things – just as night follows day, the thing you wanted to happen would happen.

Then something untoward happened.  Apparently it was a radio program, but I can’t be sure until I research the story in the newspapers of the time.  In any case, it generated a phone call from my grandmother to my mother with the message that the world was coming to an end and it happened sometime between 1943 and 1947.

A while later, after listening to my mother’s story, I asked another question.  I wanted to know about my father’s sister and her family – my grandmother’s only daughter. 

“What about Mildred?” I wanted to know.  “Was she there?”

“I don’t think so,” my mother said.  “I don’t think she invited her.”

Getting Ready For A Research Trip: On the Road to Nottamun Town

Woman With Dulcimer - 1917

As a researcher, I consider myself truly fortunate that I can work on my grandchildren’s New England and New York family lines and also on their ancestral families with deep roots in Virginia and West Virginia - roots that go back to Jamestown. 

First of all, the kinds of records that are available for colonial New England and colonial Virginia are vastly different, so it’s a challenge. Despite being on the same coast and continent, 18^th century New England and 18^th century Virginia were places worlds apart. Historian David Hackett Fischer described those worlds in exquisite detail in Albion’s Seed, a must-read for anyone working on 17^th and 18^th century families in either location.

I’m always on the lookout for things that can make the research experience easier or more fun.

A while back, I discovered that the Virginia Historical Society put up a great online exhibition loaded with information called “The Story of Virginia: An American Experience”  You can check it out here;  there are all kinds of things to see and if you don’t come away richer for the experience, I’d be greatly surprised.  

The neat thing about the site is all the material for teachers.  One of the things that caught my eye was a pdf file designed to be used to develop lessons about early Virginia history.  The file told the story of “Becoming Virginians” in language that even grade schoolers could understand. 

One of the things I zeroed in on was the quotation from 17^th century Virginia Governor Sir William Berkeley that succinctly expresses one of the key differences between researching families in New England and in Virginia.  In 1671, Berkeley said:

“But I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these for a hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both.”

On the last page of the pdf file, you will find a single page that summarizes these New England – Virginia differences.  It was adapted from Fischer's Albion's Seed mentioned above.  You can check it out here:  http://www.vahistorical.org/sva2003/sov_virginians.pdf

I always look forward to these research trips, and it’s not just in the anticipation of great new finds. 

It’s because right about now, a day or so before we’re on the road, the music starts in my head, softly, incessantly, drawing me into the worlds of the backcountry Virginia and West Virginia counties I study.  It’s that clear, crisp sound of the mountain dulcimer (now you know the point of the picture above) and the story-ballads that were passed down through the generations of folks raised far from “free schools or printing.” 

These are the kinds of songs that singer-collector John Jacob Niles (1892 – 1980)   gathered in the hills of West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee and in other parts of the rural mountain south as well.  These are  the songs and ballads with roots in the Middle Ages of the British Isles that crossed oceans and mountains -  songs never written down, that, committed to memory, carried the story of a people, their melodies hummed and whispered by generations of grandmothers shelling peas and rocking cradles. 

All over the world, people without “free schools or printing” transmit their fragile cultures this way  -  by word of mouth, by story and also by music. 

One of my favorite “transmitters” of this kind of music has always been Jean Ritchie, the remarkable voice from Viper, Kentucky who has been able to capture the essence of a people and culture unlike anyone else I’ve heard.

Here’s the link to an MP3 cut of Ms. Ritchie telling the story of, and performing, the song “Nottamun Town.”   It’s on the website of the Florida State Library and Archives – specifically, the music from the Florida Folklife Collection.  The song – its track number 16 – has its ancient roots in England and was recorded in 1976.  Even though it’s here on a Florida website, it’s the kind of ballad that can be found in Virginia and all over the mountain south. 

It’s well worth a listen.  Even if you have no Virginia or Appalachian roots.