Not Happy Thanksgiving, but Happy Evacuation Day

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Eric

Tearing down the Union Jack on Evacuation Day

Eager Americans tearing down the Union Jack (nailed up to a greased flagpole by the petulant Lobsterbacks) on Evacuation Day. In subsequent commemorations boys would compete to perform this feat themselves!

In the U.S. late November has long been defined by the Thanksgiving holiday and its message of gratitude. But in New York for the first half of our history the defining holiday of November commemorated not this 1621 Pilgrim harvest feast, but an arguably more seminal moment in the country’s establishment: the long-overdue evacuation of the British from New York City in 1783, more than two years after the Revolutionary War’s last major engagement at Yorktown. It wasn’t just soldiers who evacuated on that day, though. 1,500 Loyalist civilians, the last of a months-long exodus that may have numbered 40,000, departed as well. We know how the story continues for the Patriots who built our country. But what of the evacuees, who risked everything simply for their desire to live under the same form of government that had been in place for generations?

Their story begins at the start of the war, when the British had conquered New York in August 1776. Shortly thereafter, a huge and mysterious fire destroyed much of the city. Of those who remained in town, those with Patriotic leanings were left in the slums of the “Tent City,” while British officers and prominent Loyalists occupied the choicest residences, regardless of ownership. As a result, after the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781, New York City was the most obvious destination for Loyalists from across the thirteen former colonies. But Patriot New Yorkers returned in droves, and the passage of 1783 Trespass Act gave them a legal pathway to make claim on properties utilized by Loyalists during the war years. Patriot claimants were even indemnified against counter-suits by known Loyalists! Add to the mix thousands of nervous African Loyalists, whose freedom was unclear, and an unknown number of bounty hunters, and you’ll understand how occupied New York City became increasingly chaotic as the peace negotiations in Europe dragged on.

An honorable Redcoat? Carleton freed the slaves who fought with the British and safely evacuated Loyalists.

After numerous brawls and a few coordinated attacks against the hated Tories, British General Sir Guy Carleton declared it his intention to protect the life and property of loyal subjects, and he wouldn’t relinquish the city until his job was complete. He helped establish a joint Board of Claims, the first in a long list of ways Loyalists would attempt to win reparations for their lost property over the next fifty years. He also remained steadfast against General George Washington’s objections to freeing the slaves who had run away from their owners when the British promised emancipation to any who would fight against the Americans. And during that last summer of the occupation, the British government gave free passage to Loyalists to other ports in the empire, primarily Canada — a promise that flabbergasted those in charge of the retreating military’s logistics! In the end approximately 40,000 Loyalists, including 3,500 Black Loyalists, were evacuated safely to Canada or Nova Scotia.

Washington’s triumphal entry into NYC on Evacuation Day.

All of this is a lot to take in! Americans who hated the Declaration of Independence…a New York teeming with enemy soldiers…our most heroic Founding Father tarnishing his reputation to keep men who risked their lives for their own freedom enslaved. Also unexpected for students of American history is the pride Canadians take in their Tory forebears:

United Empire Loyalists monument, Hamilton, Ontario

United Empire Loyalist monument in Hamilton, Ontario. The accompanying plaque reads:
This Monument is Dedicated to the Lasting Memory of The United Empire Loyalists who, after the Declaration of Independence, came into British America from the seceded American Colonies and who, with faith and fortitude, and under great pioneering difficulties, largely laid the foundations of this Canadian nation as an integral part of the British Empire.
Neither confiscation of their property, the pitiless persecution of their kinsmen in revolt, nor the galling chains of imprisonment could break their spirits, or divorce them from a loyalty almost without parallel.
“No country ever had such founders — no country in the world — no, not since the days of Abraham.” — Lady Tennyson

Proudly Tory Shelburne, Nova Scotia, also the site of race riots against Black Loyalists in 1784. Half of this group took the opportunity offered by the British government to begin anew in Sierra Leone in 1792.

Loyalist genealogical associations began to blossom, particularly in Canada, with the 1847 publication of The American Loyalists, or, Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in the War of the Revolution by Lorenzo Sabine, a New England businessman and politician with no familial connection to Loyalism. Coining the term United Empire Loyalists, Sabine invigorated descendents of Loyalists to honor their ancestors and acknowledge the hardships they endured. Sabine’s work is now regarded as a starting point in Loyalist genealogy. It gives the most attention to those prominent men who often managed to transfer their wealth and/or power from one imperial outpost to another: an example is Charles Inglis, the rector of New York’s famous Trinity Church and author of The Deceiver Unmasked; or, Loyalty and Interest United: in answer to a pamphlet entitled Common Sense (as in, Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense), who became the first Bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787.

Today there’s a lot more you can read about these families, whether you are researching your own roots or fascinated by this lost chapter in U.S. history. Genealogists such as Gregory Palmer and Paul Bunnell have updated and vastly expanded Sabine’s work, taking more systematic and scientific approaches to tracking all Loyalists, regardless of economic circumstances, political stature, gender, or race. Between them they have mined tens of thousands of Loyalists claims and found evidence of Loyalist migrations to the furthest corners of the British Empire. Historian Philip Ranlet provides remarkable depth to New York loyalism in particular, outlining the continuum of these British subjects’ political activism, which ranged from passive obedience, to militant Toryism via regiments that weeded out disloyal neighbors and took on Continental soldiers (loyalist New York City troops alone made up four battalions!). Further complicating the range of Tory identities, Richard Ketchum argues that many New York Loyalists began as active reformers against onerous Parliamentary acts in the 1760s, but ultimately drew the line at full-fledged revolt. And Black Loyalists get special attention from James Walker, who researched their arduous journeys from the 13 colonies to Nova Scotia and onto Sierra Leone in a protracted effort to gain true freedom.

There is so much in this history that complicates the straightforward narrative we Americans are typically taught about the founding of our nation. Like Evacuation Day, Thanksgiving certainly comes with its own troubling questions — the harmony between Pilgrims and Native Americans did not last much beyond that one meal, as is well known — but regardless of which holiday we observe this week, nothing is more American than thinking critically about our history to make a better world. Let’s be grateful we live in a country where we can do so!

Pretends to be Free

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Eric

Pretends to be Free As genealogists broaden their interests beyond their most illustrious forebears to include their least, specialized kinds of records must be sourced to flesh out the story of people who were overlooked in their own time. The descendents of enslaved Americans, who never even had birth certificates, marriage records, or proper tombstones, face a rather extreme version of this challenge. But personal records do survive in unexpected corners. One underutilized resource that provides insight, and perhaps inadvertent dignity, to early American slaves is a collection of runaway slave ads reprinted in Graham Hodges‘ 1994 book Pretends to Be Free: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial & Revolutionary New York & New Jersey. The “top of an ill-defined iceberg,” the 753 fugitive slaves described in these ads stand out as individual personalities representing a forgotten and largely unmemorialized group.

Take, for instance, the ad placed in the loyalist New York Gazette and the Weekly Mercury for Betty, a rare example of a female runaway, who left her master while New York was under British occupation in 1777.

A NEGRO WENCH, RUN-AWAY, supposed to Flatbush, on Long-Island, where she was lately purchased of Cornelius Van Der Veer, jun. is about 2[ ] years old, call’d BETTY, can speak Dutch and English, is of a stubborn disposition, especially when she drinks spirituous liquors, which she is sometimes too fond of; is a pretty stout wench, but not tall, smooth fac’d and pretty black; ’tis probable she may be conceal’d in this city. Whoever harbours her will be prosecuted, but such as give information to Wm. Tongue, her owner, in Hanover-Square, shall receive FIVE DOLLARS with thanks. She usually wore a striped homespun pettycoat and gown.

Here’s the context lacking from the ad: Much of the city had burnt in a massive September 1776 fire, and the Van der Veer family, her former owner, was particularly reeling: several of its men were serving in what was to become known as the Continental Army, and one Van der Veer, a military surgeon, may have already been captured. This information, readily available to any history buff, likely explains why Betty was sold.

But the biographical details about Betty are unique to this source. Though the description of her character is tainted by the frustrations of her owner, it’s also likely the only assessment of her personality that exists. Between the lines one can detect her positive qualities — her opportunism, commitment to the family she was taken from, and her determination to gain her freedom — as well as clues with research potential. For example, the fact that she is bilingual in Dutch and English indicates that she must have deep connections to her destination, Flatbush, as this agricultural corner of Brooklyn retained its Dutch character for generations after Peter Stuyvesant’s surrender in 1664.

Another ad, also in a 1777 issue of the Gazette, seeks the return of 25 year old Harman. In it, one can almost sense the indignation of the person writing the ad after Harman’s second disappearance.

TEN DOLDARS Reward. LEFT Brigadier General De Lancey’s service, from his farm at Bloomingdale. a negro fellow named HARMAN, of a yellowish colour, broad face and shoulders, hollow back, big buttocks, and remarkable strong well shaped legs, with a very large foot, is about 25 years of age, understands farming. Had on a Dutch Thrumb’d cap, a blue sailors jacket, speckled or white shirt, good trowsers and shoes, with a spare buckskin breeches. This is his second elopement, and by his dress may induce masters of ships to entertain him, who are requested to deliver him to New-York goal. Whoever takes him up shall have the above reward paid by General DeLancey, the printer, or Mr. Joseph Allicocke.

Harman’s fine dress was atypical — most runaways had only the standard slave attire of buckskin britches and tow cloth shirts. As the ad notes, this advantage gave him an unusual form of cover… or is the writer insinuating something more about his character and intentions?

It would have been well-known to readers that Harman’s owner, the notorious loyalist General Oliver DeLancey, was away at the front with the regiments he personally financed, and Joseph Allicocke, another prominent loyalist, was responsible for collecting him. It turns out Harman’s timing was prescient as well as opportunistic: the DeLancey manor house was ransacked by patriots a few months later.

Harman and Betty were part of a dramatic increase in the number of runaway slaves during the war. Some even fought for the country’s independence — or against their former masters. The most famous of these is the subject of his own ad: “Run away from the subscriber, living in Shrewsbury, in the county of Monmouth, New-Jersey, a NEGROE man, named Titus, but may probably change his name..” Indeed, Titus, became Colonel Tye, a Loyalist commander who led raids against the Americans. (You can read more about the fate of these Black Loyalists here.)

From these examples one gets a sense of the valuable information that these runaway slave ads can provide genealogists. They are rich in both names and stories; masters, slaves, agents, printers, and locations are all described. More than that, the perverse level of detail in which owners documented their lost property ironically gives us some of the most complete human portraits we have of enslaved Americans. Ads routinely list scars, bad habits, skills with animals, farming, trades, languages spoken, and even musical aptitude (42% of runaways were musicians!). Family and geographical connections are at times made plain, shedding rare insight into a group of people for whom a more traditional paper trail does not exist.

As genealogists we always need to keep in mind that resources are always most useful when used in conjunction with each other. How do these ads compare to family records? Do bills of sales or receipts in ledgers help us paint a broader picture of the lives of both slaves and masters? And what of the family burial ground? If you’re one of the rare genealogists who has been able to trace your enslaved ancestors to the Colonial period, comparing your existing records to these ads might reveal a lost chapter of courage in your family’s history. And for those without a traceable connection to these people, the glimpses into slave culture and masters’ perceptions of their property reveal details about this period that history books too often gloss over.

Though Pretends to Be Free is a difficult and expensive book to purchase, much of it is available on Google Books, and it is held by many large public libraries. Search WorldCat.org to find a copy near you, or your local librarian can help you utilize the interlibrary loan network.

Witches in the Family

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

My first Halloween in college, my new friends and I celebrated in Salem, MA, where we toured the Salem Witch Museum, visited the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, and enjoyed a number of lighter activities more in the spirit of Halloween revelry. I was surprised to see that not only had so many locations related to the trials been preserved three centuries later, but also that the scene of such terror had been turned into a sort of giant Halloween fair.

When my friend Robert Riger (he of the wayward cows) visited Salem more recently, he paid his respects to his ancestors, who had been accused, convicted, and executed for their alleged participation in witchcraft.

Robert (and Lady) at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial.

Each stone jutting out of the wall, or “witch’s seat,” bears the name of one of the nineteen people executed from June to September of 1692.

Rebecca Nurse may be known to us from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the famous dramatization of the trials, but to Robert she is his 9^th great-aunt. Of the hundreds more involved, 25 are ancestors of Robert’s. Moreover, when Robert began to trace his husband Dick’s family tree, he discovered that many of these people were their shared ancestors! Rebecca Nurse’s father, William Towne, is both Robert’s and Dick’s 10th great-grandfather. The table below lists shows their connections to the Towne sisters and others of their 42 ancestors involved in the trials, including ⊕ those who appear in The Crucible.

Ancestor	Involvement	Relationship to Robert	To Dick
⊕ Rebecca Towne Nurse	Hanged on July 19, 1692	9^th great-aunt	9^th great-grandmother
⊕ Elizabeth Proctor	Convicted, but was granted a stay of execution, because she was pregnant. Her husband, John, hanged on August 19, 1692. Both of their children were accused, too. Their third child was born in prison.	1^st cousin 9 times removed	–
⊕ Thomas Putnam	The main accuser behind the trials. His wife and daughter were also accusers.	–	2^nd cousin, 9 times removed
⊕ Joseph & George Herrick	Magistrates for the trial	8^th great-uncles	–
Mary Towne Estey	Hanged on September 22, 1692	9^th great-aunt	9^th great-aunt
Sarah Towne Cloyce	Convicted, but escaped	9^th and 10^th great-aunt	9^th great-grandmother
Ann Foster	Tortured, convicted, and died in prison after 21 weeks of incarceration at age 75.	9^th great-grandmother	related distantly
John Alden, Jr.	Accused, but escaped to NY	Son of Robert’s 9th great-grandparents, Mayflower passengers John Alden & Patricia Mullens	–

Excerpts from July 12, 1692 warrant for the execution of Rebecca Nurse (and others) (via)

This may be a bad time to write this post, as leading genealogists Dick Eastman and Megan Smolenyak have lately been fomenting a backlash against all the “Surprise, they’re cousins!” press releases. Smolenyak explains:

Colonial times in North America constitute a famous cousin sweet spot. They’re long enough ago that genealogical math has had a chance to work its magic, but recent enough that there’s often a paper trail to follow. That’s why…the touted connections almost always involve a shared colonial American or French-Canadian ancestor. And the living celebrities will rarely be more closely related than seventh cousins. In fact, they’re most often eighth, ninth or tenth cousins.

And indeed, despite sharing 16 direct ancestors, Robert & Dick do not meet Smolyenak’s standard for notability — before marriage they were only 9th cousins (though many times over), and their common ancestors, “witches” and others, are all Colonial Americans. But still, it’s cool for them to know they share a personal connection to this oft-invoked chapter of Puritan zealotry.

Robert at his ancestor Rebecca Nurse’s house.

These People Can Trace Themselves to Adam

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

Today begins International Jewish Genealogy Month! This past Sabbath appropriately happened to be the week synagogues around the world recited the world’s earliest genealogy in Genesis Chapter 5. When my friend M. listened to the reading, he heard the earliest ancestors on his family tree:

Excerpted generations from Adam to Noah at the end of M.’s tree. (Hebrew spelling of Biblical names used. At times this tree uses “descended from” to span large periods of time, hence the surprisingly low generation numbers.)

M. is not my only friend whose family tree connects him to Biblical figures. The earliest ancestor on Dan Smokler‘s family tree is King David!

The earliest generations of Dan’s tree. King David is listed next to the star.

How can these people make these claims?!, I wondered, when these friends told me about their remarkable trees. Thus was I introduced to a fascinating subset of Rabbinic genealogy focused on descent from King David. It turns out there are five so-called primary families who are traditionally considered to have descended from the Davidic royal family. Both M.’s and Dan’s families are descended from Rashi, an 11th c. French rabbi whose writings remain well-known today. Other such families include the descendants of Judah Lowe, the 15th c. Elder of Prague, whose great-great-grandson, Judah Lowe, the Maharal, is said to have created the Golem, and the Abravanel family, known best for descendant Isaac Abarbanel, who advised Ferdinand II and Isabella of Spain until he failed to stop their expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

Compared to their counterparts in non-Jewish genealogy ranging from royalty to Mayflower descendants, these prominent, rabbinic families are a very rare example of published genealogies of Jewish families well-documented for centuries, comprising multiple sub-dynasties themselves. So, the work of family historians is to trace back not 500 or 1000 years to one of those primary families, but a much shorter distance to one of the derivative lines. In Dan’s case, a distant cousin in Israel reached out to his family to explain their connection to Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz (1728-1790), the famous Chassidic rabbi who is Dan’s eighth great-grandfather!

It took two 10′ tables to unfold Dan’s entire tree! His family is in the bottom-left, Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz is bottom-center of the top sheet, and Rashi and King David are at the very top. Click to enlarge the image to make out the various family groups.

As this enormous tree documents, Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz descended from Nathan Neta Spira (1585-1633), a prominent Polish rabbi. And here’s how we make the subsequent leaps:

Derivative to primary: The Spira/Shapira family traces back to Shmuel Shapira (b.1345), who descended from Rashi’s grandson, Isaac (1090-1130), better known as the Ribam, another famous rabbi whose works are still studied.
Primary to Hillel: Isaac’s grandfather, Rashi (1040-1105), is traced 38 generations over 1100 years back to Rabbi Hillel the Great (110 BCE-10 CE), who lived in Jerusalem during the time of King Herod and Emperor Augustus and whose teachings are recorded in the Talmud and studied to this day.
Hillel to David: Jewish tradition connects Hillel back 35 generations to King David’s son, Shephatiah.
David to Adam: The Bible documents the 32 generations between King David (1043-973 BCE) and Adam. Done!

The other primary families follow different routes back to David. The Abravanels, for example, are descended from the Davidic Babylonian exilarchs, the hereditary leaders of the exiled Jewish community founded in 586 BCE after the destruction of the First Temple. Their dynasty lasted until the time of Rashi.

At this point you must be dying to know how we know all of this?! As you might expect, the sources become sparser as we go further back in time. We start with the genealogical sources most often cited today, published starting in the late 18th c., that trace derivative families back to primary families (#1 above). They are generally considered reliable, though there are sometimes gaps between generations.

These more recent sources were based on earlier sources that only rarely survive. In the case of Rashi, there was a genealogical record going back to Hillel’s great x 3 grandson (covering the period of #2 above) which was destroyed in the Swabian War of 1499. “Johanan Luria mourned the loss of his genealogy more than the material goods he was robbed of,” wrote Abraham Epstein in his early 20th c. work, Mishpachat Luria. What genealogist would not weep with him?

To get from Hillel to David (#3 above), the source here is more modern than you might expect, a 10th. century work by a prominent Babylonian gaon (leader), based on a work purportedly from 68 CE, just after the Second Temple was destroyed. The Talmud also reports that Hillel descended from Shephatiah. But in the case of the Abravanels, who descended from the exilarchs, there is a chronicle from the 9th c., which extends a 2nd c. source to trace the exilarchs back to Adam through the first exilarch, Jeconiah, who is mentioned not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also in cuneiform tablets excavated in Iraq!

Certainly we are now well beyond the territory of trustworthy historical sources. And even the more recent sources can’t entirely meet a genealogical standard of proof. Personally, I view these sources in the context of the unbroken line of religious teachings passed down faithfully by people like the authors of these works, who believed they had a holy obligation to do so. In both genealogy and religious instruction — and there’s an overlap between the two that starts with Genesis and continues through many traditional Jewish sources — oral tradition only belatedly became written texts, and while a tension between preserving truth and embellishing may have come into play, I suspect truth won far more often given the mindset of the authors, steeped in a tradition-obsessed culture, who dedicated their lives to its preservation.

So now you understand how my friends M. and Dan can trace themselves back to Adam, but what about me? I have no connection to these rabbinical dynasties that I know of. But when I found my great-grandmother‘s tombstone a couple years ago, I discovered that her father was a Kohen, a member of the priestly class patrilineally descended directly from Moses’ brother, Aaron. Only 26 generations from him to Adam…

Does any of this matter if we can’t be sure? There is proof, the work of genealogists, and then there is meaning, a goal of more casual family historians. Learning his family tree did not make Dan a genealogist, but he was so moved by the knowledge that he named his first-born after Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz in the hope that he would emulate his pious ancestor’s virtues. At the close of the circumcision ceremony, Dan inscribed his son’s name on the family tree in front of all the gathered friends and family, the second of what I’m sure will be many ways in which he will raise his son with an awareness of his illustrious lineage and the example set by his ancestors. Whether the entirety of their enormous tree meets a genealogical standard of proof is irrelevant if it helps to raise a boy to be kind and good.

My Twenty-First Anniversary in Genealogy

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

Inscription The frustration of being the genealogist in my family is that I’m always the one reaching out to relatives, close and distant, to learn more about our family. I long for the reverse: to be found myself by a relative who has the stories, photographs, and connections to break through my toughest brick walls or add much-needed color to the barest areas of my tree. But I sometimes overlook that twenty-one years ago that did happen to me:

7/9/91 letter

I cannot adequately express the excitement the arrival of this letter generated. Though my father did as poor a job of keeping in touch with family as a person could, he raised my sister and me on stories of his beloved grandparents and favorite cousins. He immediately reached out to Frances, who told him that we were the long-lost branch of the family! (As my father still jokes, “But we always knew where we were!”) She found us just in time to include my father’s recollections in her book all about my great-grandfather and his seven brothers and sisters, which she sent to hundreds of relatives in October 1991.

The Hepps Family book: 80+ pages of trees, stories, & photographs!
(Food stains courtesy of my father.)

Naturally, Frances’ book filled my head with many stories I had never known about my family — but unexpectedly, it confirmed many of the tallest tales my father told: that my ggf brought over his siblings from Hungary to Homestead, PA and founded a synagogue and Jewish cemetery there.

By bringing the shadowy past into focus in the present, the book changed my entire perspective on my family, their legacy, and my responsibility towards that legacy. It taught me that the unbounded curiosity I had always had about previous generations wasn’t just a way to pester my parents and grandparents, but meaningful inquiries that could actually be answered. It showed me that even though the people around me weren’t all that interested in distant family history, there were people besides me who were. Before the book I was a kid with a strange interest in dead people; after the book I had a sense of purpose as a fledgling genealogist.

Less than two months after we received the book, I became a Bat Mitzvah. My newfound understanding of just how hard my great-grandfather worked to establish and support Jewish institutions in his little corner of this country made my coming-of-age ceremony even more meaningful for me.

Many years later when I self-published my own family book for my maternal side, I dedicated it to Frances Fleshin for “inspiring my enduring interest in genealogical research. Her work showed me how the task is done.” You can draw a straight line from Frances’ book to my creation of Treelines. If people enjoy this site once it launches, they will have her to thank, too.

Happy Family History Month!

The Care and Feeding of a Newborn in 1945

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

I get such joy from the many wonderful things my grandmother saved during her life, from the rose she carried at her wedding to her letters from a European trip. My latest fun find is a set of doctor’s instructions from my uncle’s infancy in February-May 1945, which provides a fascinating window into state-of-the-art baby care, 1940s-style. Primarily her doctor is instructing her how to mix her own formula using a variety of brand-name supplements. Though the mid-century decline in breastfeeding is usually tied to the introduction of formula in the ’40s, it appears that the proliferation of such supplements also contributed. Though we now know that breast is best, this baby was born when better living through science was the national religion.

You’ll also see instructions for cleaning the baby’s navel, which respond to a different innovation from the ’40s: the introduction of newborn nurseries in hospitals, which increased the risk of cord infections. Judging by the dates, mother and baby were in the hospital for a week post-birth. Though the duration put baby’s belly-button at risk, overall the length of stay is one way in which the ’40s had it right.

Here are some of the highlights. Click on any image to see it full-sized:

: First ingredient of the formula recipe is Karo (corn syrup)

: “Widely used as a carbohydrate supplement to milk in infant feeding” (source)

: “Mother can’t always get Karo for my rations”

: The other main ingredient is irradiated milk (fortified, condensed milk). The card lists “Pet milk,” once a major brand, though this doctor seems brand-agnostic. The instructions for the navel mention mercurochrome, which is now banned for containing mercury, which is poisonous!

: “Many thousands of babies are building sound and vigorous bodies from these extraordinary qualities of Pet Milk.”

: Addition of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and Navitol (Vitamins A & D). The navel is now treated with Phemerol (Benzethonium chloride), still used today in anti-bacterial products.

: “Convenient for Mothers”

: Addition of Pabena (pre-cooked oatmeal)

: “Oatmeal enriched with vitamin and mineral supplements…requires no cooking”

: First food! Cereal, hard boiled egg yolk, and bananas!

: New food! Soft-boiled egg yolk, canned vegetable soup, and strained fruit!

Traces

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

In response to last week’s 9/11-related post my sister sent me this article about the Scott family, who learned just before the ten-year anniversary how their father/husband really died:

“I spent 10 years hoping that Randy wasn’t trapped in that building,” Denise, 57, said Friday from a front room in her Stamford home with two of her three daughters, Rebecca, 29, and Alexandra, 22, at her side.

“I thought he was killed instantly,” Rebecca interjected.

“It was so close to impact,” Alexandra concluded.

In a steady tone, their mother explained the power of the note. “You don’t want them to suffer. They’re trapped in a burning building. It’s just an unspeakable horror. And then you get this 10 years later. It just changes everything.”

Last week I mused about how we genealogists use research and imagination to connect the few facts we have about a person into a coherent life story. But my sister reminded me that a life story is based more on the information we can pin down than the spaces we fill in. And however we reconstruct them, the narratives only hold so long as they aren’t disrupted by an unexpected discovery, like Randy Scott’s letter. Whether we actively research or merely make ourselves available, as Denise did, answers find their way back to us against the odds.

Marla is related to the Lieblings named in the letterhead

It happened to genealogist Marla Raucher Osborn when, during a visit to her ancestral town, she unexpectedly found physical traces her family left behind during the Holocaust, also in the form of scraps of paper, the poignantly normal vestiges of lives that were completely destroyed in an age of unprecedented madness. Randy’s letter was “tenderly preserved as it traveled from hand to hand and through time to reach” his family. Marla’s papers owe their survival to a school director who understood what he found when the school was renovated and trusted that one day a recipient would appear. She reflects:

So, what remains of a life after that life has ended?

Here is my answer. That physical traces can be found—sometimes by pure chance, or by being at the right place at the right time; sometimes by persistence and repetition and by gaining the trust and friendship of those who work the archives, run the libraries, conduct the Church services, or are local historians or personalities. In all cases, these traces, whether they be records, shreds of paper in a box, notes from an oral history, or forgotten headstone fragments, are like a muffled voice calling out to you from far away, saying, “I was here. I too had a life that was real and meaningful.”

Marla left Ukraine “feeling the ties of the past—ties that now bind [her] forever to the place” her family called home for generations. Even Denise found comfort that her husband’s message, now in the 9/11 museum, “tells people the story of the day.” For them to hear the muffled voices just a bit more clearly justifies the years of effort or waiting.

There are so many more traces out there, waiting to be found, from the lives that matter to each of us. That’s what I always tell friends who are on the fence about starting their family’s genealogy: you will be surprised by how much you’ll find, even for the most seemingly hopeless of cases.

How We Remember a Life

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

My father once recounted how he and his father listened to the radio for the latest progress of the war in the Pacific to guess where his uncle might be fighting. The subsequent years impressed upon him the enormity of what he had lived through to such an extent that while raising my sister and me during a time of peace and prosperity, he would sometimes express sorrow that we didn’t live through history.

Then I was in New York City on 9/11.

Like so many I turned on the TV after the first plane hit and watched the second fly into the South Tower. The anchorwoman didn’t see it — maybe the fuel tank of the first plane exploded?, she wondered — and I gaped at the screen until her co-anchor confirmed I hadn’t imagined it. I remember walking on the streets during those morning hours while we were still under attack and hearing every kind of crazy rumor about what else had been hit. I got caught in a crowd running down 44th St. when there was a bomb scare at Grand Central. Everyone frantically called everyone else; there were no social networks then, and the mobile networks failed under the load. Days later I passed through armed barricades into the Financial District, walked through the snowy ash, and saw with my own eyes the smoldering ruins we still thought contained survivors. I cheered the rescue workers on the West Side Highway. I joined a vigil outside a neighborhood church. I was turned away from an overstocked blood donation center with no recipients. I watched a mountain of flowers grow in front of my neighborhood firehouse. Beneath the long column of smoke that hung over the city, the acrid smell in my nostrils, I eventually returned to work. And for weeks everywhere I went were the missing person fliers — clustered on lamp posts, spread across park gates, even layered atop the small bulletin board in the lunch place opposite my office.

My memories will pass with me, but hundreds of years from now people will still look at photographs of these things I saw with my own eyes.

***

So much of genealogy is understanding lives in context. Faced with the task of connecting the few dots we have about distant ancestors — records, stories, pictures, mementos — we turn to the history they lived through to guess the overall shape of the lives connecting those dots. Where were they when—? How were they affected by—? Large-scale disasters are especially useful, because you can be most sure that they impacted your ancestors in some way. An entire website, GenDisasters.com, helps you sort by date and place.

Here’s how this works: From records and stories we learn that a great-grandfather of mine escaped violent pogroms as a teenager, after a few serious missteps became successful during the roaring ’10s and ’20s, and died just before the crash reduced his widow to begging. In this way we both elevate and reduce the lives we reconstruct: I’ve made my great-grandfather into a brave survivor and blind victim of history all at the same time. This narrative is meaningful to me. But would he tell his life story this way?

Surely he didn’t think of himself as just another immigrant fleeing Russia. He always came home singing happy songs he made up, my father claims. Maybe he never saw, as I do, that his life was book-ended by adversity and marked by obstacles. Probably the events he would say most defined his life left no trace.

***

There are people whose whole lives are altered by the tragedies they live through. That uncle who fought at Guadalcanal returned prone to fits of rage. My closest NY friend at the time of 9/11 suffered PTSD. Then there are the vast majority of us who live through terrible events, but emerge unaltered, though affected. My father, who sat by the radio. His daughter, who lived in the city. How can you know which way your ancestor was touched by events so diffuse and yet all-enveloping?

And how can we know for ourselves, when only the distance of time can clarify the larger forces shaping our lives?

In generations to come one of my descendants might notice that there was a person in his tree who lived in New York City in the early 2000s. He’ll do what I do and bend the arc of this ancestor’s life to trace the trajectory of history, speculating how this recent college graduate was shaped by experiencing the tragedy firsthand as she embarked on adulthood. Thus my connection to 9/11 might endure longer than any life experience that I believe defined me or I want to bequeath, just as the real account of my great-grandfather is permanently lost behind the archetypal immigrant’s journey. Though 9/11 is in my life story, I don’t organize my version of my narrative around it. But eventually the telling will be in the hands of a person looking for his own meaning amongst the fragments.

Update: Traces

A Tale of Two States

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

Yesterday I found myself emailing with two state archivists — the amazing Bette Epstein of the New Jersey State Archives, and a beleaguered manager at Pennsylvania’s Division of Vital Records. Bette is a shining example of what an archivist should be — prompt, helpful, intuitive, and thorough. The PA manager seems competent, but represents an organization so maddening that I almost got kicked out of a restaurant when I reacted to her latest missive.

I met Bette at a genealogy fair hosted by a Philadelphia society (noteably not attended by her PA counterpart). Beyond merely locating the birth certificate I requested, she cross-referenced the address to federal and state censuses (the latter not yet online), deducing in one case that the family listed was mine despite numerous errors. Though outside her purview, she even included a number of New York City vital records to fill in the details. Within days I received the birth certificate I requested and the state censuses she brought to my attention. Her helpfulness was no fluke. Within hours of yesterday’s request, she provided me with the answer even though the index in question just came online, pointed out additional information of interest from this census, and again consulted the relevant NJ and NYC vital records for me.

Why am I so amazed by Bette’s helpfulness? Because for the past two-and-a-half years I have been beaten down by her counterparts across the Delaware. Through inaccurate instructions on their website, bureaucratic inflexibility, and long turn-around times, it took over a year and three sets of returned forms before I received even one record. Shortly after I submitted my second set of requests, the state law changed to open up the records I needed, and thank goodness, because when I eventually received “No Record Certification” responses, I could go into the indexes to see for myself. In the worst case the archivists were just plain wrong — a death they claimed they could not find between 1930 and 1940 was clearly listed in 1936. Other cases — two people with rare last names, one whose first name was listed as “Male,” another whose death year I had slightly off — reflect the difference between a sharp archivist who aims to solve problems and an uninterested clerk who does not. The worst part is that their turn-around time means I must wait another six months for the fixes. And the reason why I’m now corresponding with a manager? I demanded a refund.

To some extent, my experiences aren’t comparable. Who knows if I would have gotten a personal touch had I gone through NJ’s usual channels, and maybe the PA archivists, when consulted directly, are helpful and fast. But it just goes to show the difference a personal touch and service-oriented outlook make. Here’s to the archivists who care as much about solving our problems as we do! And three cheers for Tim Gruber, whose work opened up the PA records! Come 2014, they’ll be indexed on Ancestry, and I won’t have to wait on the state ever again!!!

Who are the archivists who’ve helped you break through your brick walls? Tell us about ’em here!

Update: I have since learned that PA has a backlog of 10,000 requests! They’re not helping themselves by fulfilling them incorrectly, that’s for sure. I’m still haggling with them about a refund, and meanwhile, the NJ archivist is still emailing me records in response to my previous inquiry.

When Genealogy Severed My Great-Grandfather’s Pinky

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

Abe Yorker's WWII draft card When I found my great-grandfather in the database of WW II Draft Registration Cards (the “old man’s draft” for civilian men between the ages of 45 and 64), the back of his card revealed shocking information: he was short a pinky!

I immediately forwarded my surprising find to three of Abe’s grandchildren. They talked amongst themselves, conferred with Abe’s son-in-law, and agreed they had no recollection of his missing a pinky. But who could fake such an injury to the draft board?!

The answer is simple: he wasn’t missing his pinky, but the previous guy in the pile was! More than a day after starting the controversy, I happened upon this explanation:

Note regarding the images for the states of DE, MD, PA, and WV: These four states were microfilmed at the National Archives in such a way that the back of one person’s draft card appears in the same image as the front of the next individual’s card. Thus, when viewing the scanned image of each person’s original draft card you will see the correct front side of each person’s draft card, but the back side of the previous person’s card.

Five years later, Ancestry still has not fixed the images. FamilySearch also has it wrong. Only Fold3 has it right, and now I know: The poor, pinky-less man is Wister Wellie Yorke, and Abe’s real defects are “moles on nose and left cheek.”

Caveat Investigator

Also in this series:
The Four Days Isaac Fine Went Insane from Syphilis