Today motherhood is a choice, many women both married and unmarried live fulfilling lives without children, but what about our ancestors.  In the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth marriage was the norm and children were Social Security. For women without children the end of life was often difficult. I like to find the stories of these women in our past and be sure that they are remembered

Here are two very different stories from my husband’s side of the family.

Amy and Jessie Martin:

Jessie and Amy Martin

Jessie and Amy martin

I have written before about Jessie and Amy Martin.  They were born in Michigan in 1873 and 1881 and moved to Oregon with their parents.  They spent decades as schoolteachers in Oregon.  The end of life was very difficult for them.  They struggled with financial hardship and poor health, as Amy wrote in a letter to my mother-in-law in 1959, “There were so many things she would have liked to do but lack of money was the drawback for all of us.”  They both passed away in the Methodist home in Salem, Oregon, Jessie in 1959 and Amy in 1982.

Eliza Jane Cole

Eliza Cole Thorpe

Eliza was born in Ireland in 1870 and came to America with her family in 1873.  The family moved to Nebraska and then to Oregon.  Eliza became a Seventh day Adventist Minister.  She married for the first time at the age of 50 to George Thorpe. I believe it was the first marriage for George as well. Eliza seemed to thrive as a minister and was well cared for by the Adventists.  She was visited several times a week by her niece and nephew.  A letter to my husband’s grandfather from Eliza’s nephew states, “We see Eliza once or twice a week.  She always speaks so fondly of you.  You know, of course, that she has not been in her own home for this past year.  The conference has substantially increased her allowance and that plus rental from her home leaves her well provided for.”  Eliza died in Vancouver, WA in 1955.

There are many more examples on both sides of our families. This is a busy time in my life and I have had little time for research.  I expect things to slow down a bit in September and I also intend to find out about these women’s lives and bring them back, if not to life, to remembrance

Briefly, what I know about the family is that Joseph and Zissel Scheier had 9 children, 8 of whom were living as of the 1910 census, and 6 of whom I have found at least names for. The Scheier family came from the Dubno, Russia, area, possibly the smaller town of Verba. The 6 that I have found (Julius, Sam, Pearl, Ida, Louis, and Abe) were all in the US, along with Zissel, by 1902. Father, Joseph, may have come earlier and died before the whole family arrived. I have names for the grandchildren of some of these Scheier children, although I am still searching for a married name for Ida. I also am not sure about whether some of the children had any children of their own, or for some of the female grandchildren what their married names might be.

Here is what I have done so far in my quest to contact them: I have contacted (via letter, Facebook and a phone call from my sister-in-law) one relative with no success; I have found two other individuals who are likely relatives and am trying to figure out how to approach each of them to maximize the likelihood that they might respond to me. In addition, I know there must be others out there, so while I keep looking for names, part of my strategy needs to be broadcasting my search.

Broadcasting

I think this is the easier part to describe, so I will start here. This post is a kind of broadcast. It includes the names of the furthest generation back I know in the title. I am tagging the post with the family name as well as the location of Milwaukee which was the central point for the immigrant generation and often their children. I will post publicly on my Facebook wall that I have published this post. I will try to remember to tweet about it. This morning while I was walking and talking with a friend, it occurred to me (duh!) that I could/should post a general inquiry on any Scheier listserv I can find. Now what avenue have I missed?

Contacting

This is the more difficult step for me, since I am somewhat shy by nature and especially since I haven’t had very good luck so far. I have a suspicion that I am so obsessed about interested in getting information that I haven’t thought through how a cold contact might appear to someone not as interested in family history. It also occurs to me that I need to think through just what I am looking for from any of these folks. And along with that, it occurs to me that I need to think about what I can offer in exchange.

I feel like I don’t have much (that is the big picture reason why I want to find others who know more) but I do have some information and a picture or two, and the family tree as I know it. And I’m willing to share with anyone who is related and interested.

Now I need to figure out how to approach these people in a way that makes them want to be in contact with me. I find myself wondering what I would think in a similar situation and how I would respond. Would I be skeptical? Would I think it was a scam or a nutcase or someone trying to get information from me to steal my identity? What would my concerns if I assumed it was a potential relative? What would intrigue me? Unfortunately, in this world, I can think of many negative responses and it is harder to think of positive ones.

Am I the only genealogist in America who finds Who Do You Think You Are boring?  I love the idea of having family history shows on television, but this one just doesn’t hold any interest for me.  We follow celebrities going needlessly from place to place to replicate work that has already been done by others.  Then we watch them look surprised.  Then we listen as they attempt to say something profound, sometimes only managing to say something offensive.

On the other hand I am a fan of Henry Louis Gates American Ancestors on PBS.  First of all, there are several stories in each program.  Each episode has a theme; one was religion, another African American history.  The three guests are presented with information about their ancestors, sometimes traveling to see places or meet cousins.  They also make extensive use of DNA to tell a story.  Sometimes it seems that the evidence is a bit thin, but the stories are interesting and draw the listener in.  There are three or four stories intertwined in an episode to make an interesting human story about American history.

I do research in family history because I love stories.  Like everyone I have ancestors I admire and some I don’t.  I love to discover their stories and understand where I came from, but ultimately I am responsible for my own decisions and my own life.  A lot of people sacrificed to give me the opportunities I have and a little luck hasn’t hurt either, but I am neither a better nor a worse person because of the deeds of those who went before me.  I am just the lucky one, who has had a lot of chances and made mostly good decisions.

Organization
* This is the same item I’ve been *very* slowly chipping away at. Go through and enter every piece of information stored over the year in Research 2011 folder for husband’s side. Source in RootsMagic database. [In April I made it through about half of another folder. There is the rest of that folder and one more to go. I'm much better at gathering information than I am about organizing it and putting it away in its permanent home.]
* Go through the remaining piles from the middle inbox on my desk, and see what is lurking there to be put away, entered into the database, etc. Ditto the two boxes of treasures saved from the Great Attic Cleanout (my own attic). [Little additional progress has been made in April. I seem to be better at adding to the piles than at reducing them. Sigh.]
* Go through the Snow estate papers and compiled Minor genealogy found on the recent Connecticut State Library trip and integrate into datebase.
* Back up the blog. Putting this on my monthly to-do list reminds me, when I look at the post to see that it got published and this helps me remember to actually do the back up. Otherwise my memory doesn’t always work.

Education
* Learn more about finding living relatives and how to persuasively contact them.
* Watch one online video or webinar about genealogy. [In April I watched Megan Smolenyak present about finding living relatives and learned some new possibilities. I also participated in a two-week course via JewishGen that introduced their website and gave us some experience with some of the resources available there.]

The news is always reporting about one or another anniversary. The sinking of the Titanic is a big one, getting a lot of coverage right now. And in my area, Boston, it is also the One Hundredth Anniversary of Fenway Park, home of our Boston Red Sox. It is also the one hundredth anniversary of the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence Massachusetts. Textile factory workers, many young immigrant women, went on strike for more than 2 months looking for higher wages in response to a new law shortening the work week. Massachusetts had passed a law limiting the work day to 8 hours. And the first cherry tree saplings which inspired the annual Washington DC Cherry Blossom Festival were presented by the City of Tokyo to the City of Washington one hundred years ago.

So what does all of this have to do with Aunt Freda?

Freda as a baby

Freda started school as a five year old, speaking only Yiddish and being left-handed. This was probably the Fall of 1917. The teacher tied her left hand behind her back — all the while speaking English to her. What an introduction to formal education!

Nevertheless, she must have liked school, and she was a good student. When she was about 12 years old, the family moved from Syracuse to Buffalo, New York, in about 1924. So she went to high school in Buffalo.

Freda's high school picture

We think she finished high school in 3 years. Her high school quote was: “And still they gazed and wonder grew that one small head could carry all she knew.” We know she had aspirations to more education, and she went on to college, even though it was the Great Depression.

Her brother, Iz, remembered this disruption during her college days: “When she was in college, we were subject at University of Buffalo to a tuberculosis check. You know, they gave everybody this tuberculosis check and they inject it, stuff under your skin and if you showed a positive reaction, then you were told to go and get x-rays, have your lungs x-rayed. Well some crazy x-ray specialist in Buffalo sent her a written report to the effect that he had never seen one so young with so much infection, TB infection in her lungs. Now you can imagine how horrified my parents were. And the family doctor read that report and said, “Look, she’s got to drop —” She was majoring in chemistry. She’s gotta drop out of college right away and, you know, rest in bed for months. Maybe we can forestall having to go to a sanitarium.” Well, we found out that night that the Arbeiter Ring, which had a great deal of strength in New York City among the garment workers, and TB was rampant among them and they worked in sweat shops and there was all sorts of lint flying around. The Arbeiter Ring had established a TB sanitarium in Liberty, New York, in the Catskills and he got the bright idea of sending my mother and my sister up to the Catskills for vacation. And in the meantime — somewhere near Liberty — and in the meantime they would make an appointment to have her examined at the TB sanitarium. I remember I drove up there, I drove them up. And I went to the sanitarium with my mother and my sister and there was — the doctor in charge of the sanitarium was extremely understanding and very nice and said, “Well, now, don’t, don’t get too upset, Mrs. Greenberg. I have had TB myself. That’s why I am in this work. I’m going to take your daughter away and give her some x-rays and so forth.” He came back in about a half an hour and said, “The guy was all wrong. She doesn’t have the slightest case of TB. What she has is some calcified spots on her lungs.” And he said, “Everybody over the age of 21 — practically anybody — cause we all come in contact with some TB germs, bacilli. And what happens in the normal body is that, as a defense, the lungs form calcified spots around there and that’s the end of it. That’s all she’s got.”

Freda, college graduation

There was no more family history about this possible disruption to her college days. In fact there is some thought that she managed to finish in 3 years rather than the usual 4. We do know that she graduated in June 1932. (I wrote some about this a couple of years ago – click here if you want to go back to the first post about education in this family.) She was just 20 years old. Freda had aspirations to medical school – she was the scientist in the family. But because it was the Great Depression (and perhaps because she was expected to help support her brother’s additional schooling) the family could not support her in this. No matter the reason, it was a bitter disappointment to her.

It seems likely that the family hoped/expected that she would go to work as soon as possible and help support the family. I was told by the registrar’s office at University of Buffalo that it was not uncommon for young adults to stay in school as long as they could due to the scarcity of jobs during this time. Her first job out of college was at DuPont in Buffalo. She had competed with a huge group of people for one of two jobs they had available. She worked in a lab testing the permeability of what was to become cellophane. We don’t know exactly how long she held this job, but it was a major feat that she got it.

Visited grumpy son–bailed him out of relatively minor credit card debt.

Spoke to grumpy daughter-  Navy boyfriend has just left for 9 months in Qatar.

Finished the taxes–more or less.

Grumped a lot.

Had a glass of wine.

Wrote a big check.

A really big check.

Then wrote another one to the state of Connecticut.

Had another glass of wine.

Sat down to write the blog.

We’ll see how it goes.

Yes, I procrastinate filing my income tax, especially in years when I know it will cost me a bunch.

My first personal recollection of tax time is from my childhood.  Every year my dad would finish his taxes somewhere around midnight on April 15th, load the entire family into the car and drive to the main post office in Philadelphia to put the envelope in the mail.  It seemed like fun to us.  I have no idea why he didn’t go alone and leave my mother at home with my brother and I asleep, but he didn’t.  My brother and I looked forward to April 15th every year.

I did the same thing with my kids when we lived in New Haven.We would drive to the Brewery street post office where Uncle Sam himself would receive the envelope from one of us.  It did ease the pain and help us remember why we pay taxes.

There were temporary federal taxes at various times in U.S. history, but with the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment in February, 1913 the income tax became a permanent part of American life.

Later in 1913 Congress levied a one percent tax on net personal incomes above $3,000 with a six percent surtax on incomes of more than $500,000. On November 3, 1913, American citizens received information about the new national income tax including the fact that a married man living with his wife, with an income of $5,000 will pay $10 a year and if his income is $10,000 he will pay $60 a year. There were three pages of forms and one page of instructions.

What about my ancestors? Did they procrastinate?  Did they pay?  Did they cheat?  How did they feel about taxes?  How much did they pay?

Hmm… 1913… all of my grandparents were married adults by 1913, I wonder what they thought about this new tax. I can’t ask them, but I can look back at general reaction in 1913.

This from the Saturday Evening Post, May 13, 1913:

“The income-tax question is one that will not down. For the best of reasons this is true. Way down in the hearts of the masses of mankind there lurks a strong sense of justice, on which is founded the opinion that vast accumulations of wealth in the hands of individuals or corporations should help to support the Government under which they are acquired, by which they are protected and without which they would vanish.

And why not? Why tax the widow’s mite and the orphan’s bread, and not tax these accumulations? Why lay tribute on what we eat and wear, and leave untaxed millions in the hands of those who can never personally consume it, and with whom it is surplus?

If there ever was a time when the concentrated wealth of the land should bear its share of our enormous expenses of government it is now.

There is a necessity of an income tax now that did not exist when our Government was conducted economically. In all the history of the Government of the United States there never was such an era of prodigality as that on which we have fallen. The Prodigal Son in his most prodigal day was parsimonious when compared with some exhibitions of extravagance that have characterized our Government in recent times.”

And this from the Detroit Free Press:

“The conference committee has concluded to report the Senate’s amended provision of the income tax and the measure in that form will almost certainly go to the president and become law.  This is highly unfortunate, for of all possible forms of the income tax the graduated scale is the most vicious.

Under the system now to be the policy of the United States the more diligent and enterprising a man is the more he will be taxed.  If he is satisfied to make little he will be exempted from supporting his government.  If he tries to do better and increase his wealth, part of what he makes will be taken from him, and the more he makes the more will be taken.  It is a penalty on success and a premium on failure.”

My absolute favorite is a cartoon.

Our opinion on economic policy often depends on where we sit on the economic ladder.

My grandparents were close to the bottom of that ladder.  I am sure they paid no income tax in 1914 and I suspect they thought the whole thing was a grand idea.

The Denman family was living in Canton, Ohio during this time. Canton was a northern industrial city, although there was farm land nearby, dependent on such companies as Hoover and Republic Steel. My mother’s description of Canton was of many mills burning lots of coal, so that there was coal dust everywhere and you couldn’t open windows without enduring a layer of fine grit on everything.

The family had moved to Canton in 1925, first renting a house on one side of town, and then in 1928 buying a house in a new development across town on 22nd Street. There were about 8 houses when they moved in and my mother remembered playing with the other children, on a street with little enough traffic that they sledded down the big hill on the street.

Her description of the Depression: “We lived there for about six years [the house on 22nd Street] during the Wall Street Crash, the Bank Holiday, and first few years of

Mom and Uncle Dick, Canton 1931

To continue what my mother wrote about her memories of the Depression: “The whole country seemed to be in trouble. The big farm belt in the middle of the country was enduring the “dust bowl” years when the wind, and sun, seemed determined to completely remove all the topsoil from the land. The weather was hot and dry and families lost farms. These were the days of the “Okie”, when families and all of their possessions loaded into a broken down car to head for a city and hope of a job. They were the days in the big industrial states when plants shut down and unemployment was high and just kept getting higher. Young people without jobs could not marry. Without jobs they couldn’t rent rooms let alone apartments. Many of them left home to wander around the country looking for work because there simply wasn’t enough food at home to feed one more. “Riding the rods” was a phrase understood by a generation that stole rides in box cars on the trains or in some cases rode beneath the cars.”

“I remember one fall when one of my friends was happy because the shoemaker could put lower heels on a pair of her mother’s old shoes so she would have something to wear to school. Her aunt had an extra coat and her mother was making her a skirt out of another old coat. Another friend wore her spring coat all winter because there was not always money for food let alone a coat. There were times when Mother made cocoa and buttered toast for us and a couple of school friends in the afternoon when she suspected there wasn’t sufficient food at their house.” [I also remember my mother telling about a friend wearing cardboard in her shoes when the soles developed holes and her family couldn't afford another pair for her. This was very common it seems, and a way for a child to be able to continue to go to school since you had to have shoes to go to school.]

I never asked a lot of questions about my mother’s experiences growing up in the Depression, and am left with impressions that the family was among the luckier ones with a job that kept a roof over their heads and ways to get enough food. My grandpa Lyle’s family lived not too far away and farmed, so I suspect that some food came from their gardens. My grandparents probably also had a garden. I know my grandmother canned all sorts of fruits and vegatables when I was a little girl and I think she must have done so from her earliest married days and certainly during the Depression.

I recently finished reading Ted Gup’s book, A Secret Gift, which I had bought because it was described in the review as being about the Great Depression in Canton Ohio. I knew my mother had grown up in Canton during the Depression, so I had to have it. Once bought, it sat – as other books do – in my to-be-read pile for a year or more, but there was always something else more intriguing to be read first. When I got the copy of my mother’s high school yearbook, and decided to write about her high school days, Gup’s book percolated to the top of the pile and I began reading it. I had expected a description of what The Great Depression was like in Canton and got that plus much more. Of course there have been other books written about the Depression but this one struck home for several reasons. His descriptions, using transcriptions of original letters written at the time, show just how bad it was for many families. They also show how proud people often were, and how difficult it was to ask a stranger or organization for help. I was left with a better understanding of why so many who lived through the Great Depression didn’t talk much about it, wanting to move on and wanting to protect the next generation from its deprivations.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I am still without access to most of my genealogy stuff. I am, however, occasionally able to read other genealogy blogs, although usually long after their original posting, and I saw that Bill West at West in New England had asked folks to write about what they would place in a genealogical time capsule.  This is a post I can write without any actual data, so I’m all over it.  It is also helpful to have missed the requested deadline and have read all the other actually thoughtful and interesting responses.

My first thought is that my time capsule is MINE and will be a twisted reflection of the oft-repeated phrase “history is written by the victors.”  My family history research has made it clear to me that all of my ancestors were liars.  They lied about everything, to my great frustration as a researcher, but who am I to mess with family tradition. So, my time capsule will contain pictures of me and my offspring, but only the best looking ones, with a little help from Photoshop. If it appears to my descendents that the body simply does not match the head, that’s their problem.

It would be nice to include a well-sourced, extremely accurate version of my family history to date.  Unfortunately, such a document does not exist.  What they will get is the poorly sourced, mostly accurate, and occasionally incomprehensible current version. “Hey descendents, if you think you’re so smart, you figure it out.”

I would have to include personal mementos of life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, including:

1.  One of each of the various pills that have been prescribed for me during my life, only to be withdrawn from the market after we learned that they actually kill people.  No wonder I’m dead.

2.  My favorite recipes. No wonder I’m dead.

3.  All of my exercise equipment.  Oh wait, there isn’t any.  No wonder I’m dead.

4.  My report card from the fourth grade.  My kids didn’t want it, now you’re stuck with it.

5.  All of the TV and internet ads of the 2012 presidential campaign.  Please tell me it doesn’t sound familiar.

6.  The story of my life.  It was fun, really, almost all of it.

Now, how to insure that my time capsule is found in a hundred years or so.

First, be sure to bury it somewhere that will not be under water due to global warming.

Second, put it anywhere but inside this house.  I know this house is going to fall down no matter what we do, hopefully without us inside.

Lastly, provide a series of intricate and painfully difficult to decipher clues to find it.  Intricate, painfully difficult to decipher clues will make it appear that there is actually something valuable inside.  I have no doubt greed will survive the twenty first century.

It’s been fun thinking about my time capsule.  I know that the goal of family historians and time capsules is to preserve the past.  I think I have achieved the more common human result, reinventing the past.

Click on the photos to link to the websites of their creators.

Organization
* Back up the blog. Putting this on my monthly to-do list reminds me, when I look at the post to see that it got published and this helps me remember to actually do the back up. Otherwise my memory doesn’t always work. [I am finding that having this reminder on my to-do list does make me follow through and back up - so it will stay as a semi-permanent item for now. I do hope that it will become enough of a habit that eventually I'll be able to take it off the list.]
* Go through the remaining piles from the middle inbox on my desk, and see what is lurking there to be put away, entered into the database, etc. Ditto the two boxes of treasures saved from the Great Attic Cleanout (my own attic). [Little additional progress has been made in March, and I added to the mess with those last 2 boxes. But I found my old elementary school days scrapbook!]

Education
* Watch one online video or webinar about genealogy. [I watched one about obituaries which taught me a couple of new tricks, and may inspire me to use newspaper obituaries more in my research.]

I recently pulled “Angela’s Ashes” off my to-read pile and read it. At about the same time I was going through the emails in one of my research folders, trying to add sources to my husband’s family tree and clean up that pile. I ran across a series of emails back and forth with his cousins about their grandmother, Nora, on their father’s side. Ok, so no direct relation of my husband’s, but an interesting collateral line. Nora and their grandfather John were Irish, Catholic, and had their own life stories – mostly only known to us as bits and pieces, but which surely contributed to what Uncle Jim’s early life was like.

The couple’s life story started, as told by their son, when Nora got pregnant and John escaped back to Ireland only to have her brother come after him. He was brought back to the US and they got married. Maybe not until after the baby was born, since Jim told people he was “illegitimate”. (This sounds a lot like the beginning of “Angela’s Ashes”.) Nora had been married before, and had a son from that marriage. Story went that this son was put in an orphanage or otherwise put out of the family after John and Nora married.

We had other tidbits of information. I was originally told that Nora’s maiden name was McNamara. She had a brother Thomas and a sister Mae, who later lived in Buffalo too. She was said to have came from Quilty, County Clare, Ireland. John was said to have came from Kilmorna, County Kerry, Ireland. Not a lot to go on, but some hints. I think these places were what John and Nora actually said about where they came from.

When I started looking into this family, I started with the censuses. And the 1910 census provided some interesting information. There was the family, living in Buffalo where I

John Hunt family, 1910

The next thing I found was a World War I registration card for John McGowan in Buffalo that looked like the right one. He was 24 in 1917, and had a wife and child. He also listed a birthdate and place: Hamilton, Ontario. So I looked on familysearch.org for McGowan listings in that location. And I found the indexed record of his birth, listing both parent’s names, including Nora’s maiden name of McNamara. With his father’s name in my pocket I looked for their marriage record in Canada

McGowan-McNamara marriage

The most recent searching I have done was also on familysearch.org – looking for children born to John and Margaret Madden McNamara, Nora’s parents. I have found five so far, all daughters except for one. And the son I have found is named John, not Thomas. So I clearly have more searching to do. I did find the daughter I think is our Nora: named Honora, and born in September 1867. That would have made her about 37, for the New York State census of 1905, where she was enumerated with her father and mother and listed as 32. And about 42 for the 1910 census, on which she was reported to be 35. On the 1920 census she was listed as 45. And on the 1930 as 50. My theory of the moment is that, in a time-honored tradition for women, Nora shaved years off her age each time she gave information for an official record, and a few more years each time. It will be interesting to see what age is listed for her when the 1940 census comes out in just a week.