Military Monday: An Unexpected Tradition

 My husband's draft number was about to come up in 1970, and not wanting to go to Viet Nam and not wanting to go to Canada, he signed up for U.S. Coast Guard officer candidate school.  Nearly all Coast Guard personnel who served in Viet Nam volunteered for that duty.  We got married when he completed his officer training, emerging as a newly-hatched ensign with a reserve commission.  Later on, when I saw what fun he was having in his many and varied assignments, I said I wanted to sign up, too.  I had a desire to serve our country since I was 10 years old, squashed by the ridiculous objections of a too-traditonal family.  I was finally able to fulfill that desire.  So both of us ended up in the Coast Guard Reserve.

We thought my husband was the first in his family to serve in that branch of service.  However, when my father-in-law died in 2004, my husband went through his papers and found a surprise.

During World War II, there were two types of Coast Guard reservists:  the Regular Reserve and the Temporary Reserve.  The Temporary Reserve consisted of both paid and volunteer personnel, serving only for the duration of the war or any part of it.  They provided coastal patrol and port security personnel.(1)

The surprise was that not only my husband's father(2), but also his grandfather(3) had served in the Temporary Reserve of the U.S. Coast Guard.  My husband was not the first to serve in the Coast Guard; he was, in fact, the third member of his family to do so.  It was a proud tradition, indeed.

(1) United States Coast Guard Reserve, "Reserve History," https://www.reserve.uscg.mil/about/history/ (accessed 25 March 2024).

(2) U.S. Coast Guard, Volunteer Port Security Force, letter of 27 September 1944, congratulating VPSF member L. M. Rhodes, Seaman First Class, on his marriage.  Family papers.

(3) U.S Coast Guard, Certificate of Disenrollment as a Temporary Member in the United States Coast Guard Reserve (honorable conditions; without pay), Andrew L. Rhodes, 30 September 1945.  Family papers.

"Let's Have Accurassy!"

That expression was on a sign my mother displayed on her desk when she was a medical secretary, a field in which accuracy is vitally important.

Accuracy is also important in genealogy, so that we connect the correct people to our family trees.

I just had an encounter on Ancestry, where two different cousins attached an Ohio teaching certificate dated 23 February 1852 . . .

. . . to a person born 24 April 1879.(1)

There is another indication of this document's inappropriateness for the ancestor in question, Mary Anna Fry, wife of Herbert Roy Packard, a grand-uncle of mine.(2)  The Ohio teaching certificate was issued to Mary E. Fry.  Was that a mistake, or was the certificate in fact issued to a different Mary Fry?  Mary Anna Fry was born in Maine.  She married Herbert Roy Packard in Ontario, San Bernardino County, California, 19 August 1902.  She died in California.(3)  Was she ever in Ohio?  Of course, all that is moot in the face of the glaring date discrepancy.

The idea is to examine a document rather than just glancing at the name and saying, "Oh, this must be grand-aunt Mary's, so I'll just hook it up to the tree."  And thus begins a false trail.

In that same block of hints is a newspaper article on the new officers of a civic organization in Pasadena, California in 1932.(4)  The name "Annie Packard" appears in the article, and Ancestry has suggested the article as possibly related to Mary Anna Fry.  Again, questions arise:  Did Mary Anna Fry ever go by the nickname "Annie?"  Was she a member of the subject civic organization?  Was there another woman named Ann, Anne, Anna, or some other name in Pasadena who used the nickname "Annie?"  The date of 1932 is not a problem.  Mary Anna Fry died in 1947 in Pasadena -- four days after I was born, in fact.(5)  I have "Ignored" this hint for now, giving as the reason the fact that it requires further corroboration.  Not sticking that one on my tree unless I know that it does refer to the correct individual.  I may never know that.

Let us indeed have accuracy.

(1) Unfortunately, I was unable to find the source for this Ohio teaching certificate.  Sources do not appear when the object is posted by another Ancestry member, probably out of privacy concerns.  That may also depend on the level of security the owner has given their tree; i.e., whether it is public or private.  The document appears authentic, but then it is not possible to judge with certainty its authenticity without the source.  In any case, it does not belong attached to Mary Anna Fry (1879-1947).

 (2)  "California Marriages, 1850-1945", , FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:4188-4WMM : 24 March 2020), Mary Anna Fry in entry for Herbert R. Packard, 1902.

 (3)  Ancestry.com. U.S., Find a Grave® Index, 1600s-Current [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012. 

 (4)  https://tinyurl.com/bdd98sm4 (goes to article on newspapers.com; scroll down to the bottom, article headline mentions a Mrs. Jeffs being elected president of the organization.)

(5)  "California, County Birth and Death Records, 1800-1994", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:CSWV-6VPZ : Sat Mar 09 04:49:33 UTC 2024), Entry for Mary Anna Packard and Holland Fry, 16 Apr 1947.

Military Monday -- a Deserter in the Family? Or a POW?

 I found out that my 2x great grandfather, John P. Taylor, deserted from Union forces on 24 December 1864, leaving his unit, Company I, 8th Tennessee Cavalry.

Deserted?  At the end of this file, which is his compiled service record, there is a form regarding prisoners of war.  Problem is, it doesn't mention him having been a prisoner of war.  The only comment is that he was formerly enrolled in Company K, 10th Tennessee Cavalry.  No date for the change of unit is given, but it may have been on the expiration of his original enlistment and the beginning of re-enlistment.  

On other pages, there are notations that he had not been paid for several months.  Having been through something similar as a Coast Guard reservist on special active duty, I can tell you it gets you pretty crazy when the bills keep coming in, there's little food in the house, and your pay is fouled up.  I, for one, would not blame him if that's why he deserted.  If he did.  Finally, there is in the file a notation dated about twenty years after the end of the Civil War that his charge of desertion had been removed by order of the Secretary of War.  Yes, indeed -- military efficiency!

When I have time, I'll have to order great-great grandpa Taylor's full service record.  I hope there will be more information that will answer this research question:  Did John P. Taylor desert, or was he a prisoner of war?

A to Z Challenge: Theme Reveal

 I have been looking for a blog carnival or challenge to participate in, as a means of helping resurrect this tired old blog that has been neglected for the past several years.  I found it.

Each April comes the A to Z Challenge for genealogy bloggers.  Posting a Theme Reveal post is not required; we aren't even required to have a theme.  But it helps focus the mind.  So my theme for the 2024 A to Z Challenge is:

Professionally Speaking.

In this series of blog entries, I'll talk about the occupations and professions of my ancestors.  I have one line stretching all the way back to 1638, so there should be a goodly amount of fodder for this theme in that bunch, my father's line.  I haven't got my mother's line back that far yet, but it was a pretty big family, so there should be a selection of occupations and professions to write about.  I'm just wondering how I'm going to handle the letters Q, X, and Z!

Throwback Thursday -- A Matter of Opinion

 The jaunty fellow in the photo below is my father, Lieutenant Arden Packard, USN.  The uniform is that of a Navy officer of the 1930s.  He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1934, but he has lieutenant's stripes on his sleeves, so the photo was probably taken about 1940 or 1941. It looks like his attendance had been required, in full dress uniform, at some hoity-toity event or ceremony, and the uniform being a fussy thing, he was not subtle about expressing his opinion of it.  The photo may have been taken by my mother.  They were married in 1937.

LAND, HO! Or, Give Me that Old-Fashioned Research . . . sort of

I have had contact with a couple of people showing, through DNA, something along the line of 4th cousinship with me.  Nice!  They are both, oddly enough, related through an affiliated family of my mother's Nave lineage from East Tennessee, of the surname Taylor.  So to help all three of us, I am delving deep into Tennessee Land Records from the late 1700s and the early 1800s.  It is a good thing I am trained as a paleographer, that is, a reader of old handwriting.  

I went to Ancestry (okay, so this isn't totally old-fashioned genealogical research, but slogging through old land records and transcribing them is -- so there!) and typed in an ancestral name and came up with a very long list of records of East Tennessee land pertaining to John Nave, a brother of my 4th great-grandfather Abraham Nave.  I'm reasonably sure it is my particular ancestor, as the area was rather sparsely settled in the late 1700s, and Nave was not a common surname at all, the family having emigrated a generation earlier from Switzerland.  They settled in Pennsylvania, then Abraham and John's father, Teter Dietrich Nave, moved on to Tennessee.

So now I'm in the throes of transcribing a huge number of land records so I can go through them and gather what gems there may be in them, and then the same for the surname Taylor, to see who of that surname may have intersected with John Nave or his brother Abraham, or any of Abraham's descendants.  Then I will be off in search of any wills that may exist.  There I hope to find names of children, siblings, and spouses, to further investigate through whom my new cousins and I are related.

These land records are reminding me once again what a confounding sort of land recording metes and bounds is, to my thinking.  This is the sort of land record where you read something along the lines of "Beginning at a gum tree [which could live 150 to 300 years, but your ancestor's survey was done in 1677 . . .] south N poles [or rods; 16.5 feet, or one-fourth of a chain] to a stake [which could rot in a few years or be otherwise dislodged], then west N poles to a rock [which may erode or wash away in a flood] where John Doe's line begins [Well, where did John Doe's line begin?  There are more land records to slog through . . . ], then north along Whatsisname Creek [which may have dried up decades or a century ago] . . ."   In other words, a system that depended on quirky landmarks the existence of which into the 21st Century was chancy, at best.

My oldest line in the United States, that of my father's family, settled in Massachusetts in 1638.  Massachusetts uses the metes and bounds system.  I'm not sure where my mother's line came in, sometime probably in the 1700s, but both lines ended up in Indiana and Illinois, thence both headed to California.  Illinois, Indiana, and California are federal-land states (also known as public-land states), which use the much more rational, to my mind, system of township and range for measurement of land.  This system results in, as far as is possible, rectangular measurement that depends on a grid imposed on the land map, rather than on ephemeral landmarks on the land itself, or in it.  I live in Florida, which, unlike the rest of the states on the Eastern seaboard is also a federal-land state (Virginia uses both; that's got to be confusing).  Illinois, Indiana, and Florida are perfect for the federal-land system:  they're flat.  Imagine having to deal, in metes and bounds, not only with landmarks that are not there anymore and haven't been for quite a long time, but also with mountainous terrain, such as in Tennessee.  

One part of a land parcel description in one of these records, a parcel belonging to John Nave, mentions that it is "lying in the County of Carter in said district on the north side of Stony Creek on the south side of the mountain.  Beginning at a stake near a gum tree . . . "  My question is:  "Which mountain? There are many mountains to the north of Stony Creek.  One could go slogging to and fro along Stony Creek for a goodly distance looking for a gum tree that may or may not be there, and it's a fair bet the stake isn't there, either.  Of course, what happens is you end up following this parcel of land through the years, the decades, the centuries until it was last sold, and hope the land description was somehow updated.  

I have found two software packages designed to plot land parcels from metes-and-bounds descriptions.  There are other packages, but they are mainly for surveyors, real estate offices, and other land-related professionals, and are priced as such.  The two I'm discussing are aimed at a more general sort of customer, including homeowners and genealogists.  One package is reasonably priced, and even has a free version.  Information about its features and its price are all on one page.  However, if you want to keep it updated, there is an annual fee for that, though the website says that updating the software is not absolutely necessary.  They will both plot rectangular (federal-land) parcels, too.  The one thing I did not see on any of the second package's descriptions was the price.  They are not up-front with the price anywhere on the website, unlike the first package.  You can download this one for a 30-day trial, but may not find out how much it is until you've done that.  You might want to brace yourself for sticker shock, but I'm not sure if that is necessary, because, of course, I have no idea what the price is, since it isn't mentioned if you're just browsing to find out information about this software.  To find information about the features of this software, you have to go to another page of the site.  I am not mentioning the names; but if you Google "deed plotter," you'll find them.   

Caveat emptor.  And good luck if you have ancestors who lived in a metes-and-bounds state.