Grieving for Dead Infants

I found myself in the strange position today of grieving for children who died over 200 years ago.

I have been studying the family structure of St.  Augustine, Florida, for over two years now.  I have six file boxes of files on the people of St. Augustine during the Second Spanish Period (1784-1821).  Actually, I have not got much beyond 1790 on most of these people, so I have only a fraction of what will be the total when I'm done.  With all those dossiers on all those individuals, I feel like the J. Edgar Hoover of old St. Augustine!

And in studying these people, I have come to feel attached to them in some way, even to those whom I have a feeling I would not like were I to meet them!  So in reading the burial entries in the church records of 1784-1809, I felt grief, and found myself shedding tears for these little babies and their parents.  One couple lost two children in the space of a few months, and another couple lost two children in the same day!

It was a hard life, when diseases which today we have vaccines to prevent were routinely taking away these little lives.  I felt particularly sad to learn that a little waif whose parents were unrecorded, an orphan who was taken in by a St. Augustine couple, did not live very long.  I had hoped to find her in the records, married and with babies of her own, but that was not to be.

We historians can become involved in the periods we study, in the people whose lives we examine and analyze and try to make sense of.  The danger, of course, is the loss of the necessary distance we should and must maintain between us and our subjects, in order that we dispassionately examine and order our facts and come to the most logical conclusions.  I do not think that means we cannot at times put ourselves in their places, for in doing so, we may gain insights we would otherwise miss.

At the same time, we have to maintain that distance so that we can reach sound conclusions.  There is a time to feel emotion at the impact of events on people in the past, whether in the general past population, or in our own family histories, and there is a time to put the emotions aside and focus on the facts at arm's length.

The trick is to know when to do each, and when not.
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The "Bull" Connor of His Age

This post does not intend to advocate any particular political or social stance, but merely to comment on a similarity I have noticed between the "uprising" of the 1960s, which came out of the Civil Rights movement, and that phenomenon's direct descendant, the Occupy Wall Street movement. I am a historian-in-training, and this is intended merely as a comment on history.  It is, however, history to which I have been a witness, at both times, though from a remote distance, through television and now through the internet.  And, as a genealogist, I am keenly interested in the historical milieu in which my ancestors lived, as well as in commenting on the historical milieu in which I, now an "ancestor" myself to my daughters and grandson, have lived.

In the Civil Rights movement, there was an iconic figure: Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama. Connor became infamous for ordering police to use fire hoses to disperse peaceful black demonstrators, including children. The rest of the nation got a shocking look at what went on in the "Jim Crow" nation, as they saw on the television news reports helpless, peacefully assembled people whose skin happened to be dark tumbling down a city street, propelled by the powerful wash from a fire hose. It was a wake-up moment in which "Bull" Connor became a household name and a symbol of the violence, repression, and hate which blacks had suffered for centuries.

University of California, Davis, campus police officer Lt. John Pike has become the "Bull" Connor of his age for an unnecessary and arrogant act: pepper-spraying peaceful student demonstrators who had shown no overt act of violence. Pike is now also an iconic image, like "Bull" Connor. He is a symbol, unwittingly appearing as a bully, and, as the Occupy movement no doubt holds, a lackey of the corporate state. It is unlikely that he gave any conscious thought to what might be the consequences of his action in spraying those students. It is highly doubtful he had any notion of being compared to, much less becoming as iconic a figure as,"Bull" Connor.

In that moment, Lt. Pike lost control of his public image. A report on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" yesterday (21 November) illuminates just how completely that loss of control has been. The story discussed the "casually pepper-spraying cop" meme which has swept the internet. In this meme, a photograph of Lt. Pike using the pepper-spray has been "photoshopped" into classic paintings, including one showing him at the assembly of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence, pepper-spraying the document.

The actions of "Bull" Connor have been credited (in the article linked above at Connor's full name) by a historian writing for the Alabama Department of Archives and History, as having led to the passage of the most sweeping Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  It remains to be seen where the actions of Lt. John Pike may lead.
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A True Vocation

All my life, I have heard and read of people who had a true vocation, a calling to this or that field whether it be medicine or the priesthood or public service, among other fields.  I have rattled around in life looking for mine.  I was not ready when I went to Florida State University in 1965, after graduating from high school.  I have always been an academic overachiever, but I went to university without a clear plan or a clear calling.

I have been a librarian, a nurse, a member of the armed forces.  That latter was for a number of years the closest I have come to feeling that I had a calling  I enjoyed the Coast Guard, and felt like I was part of something that made a difference.  But after that was done, after arthritis took me out of active participation, I felt once again like I did not have a calling.

Another reason I was not ready out of high school to find my vocation was that I had been raised in a traditional family in the 1950s.  Girls were not "supposed" to aspire to more than either being at home or being a secretary, a teacher, or a nurse.  I broke one of those taboos many years into my adulthood by enlisting in the Coast Guard, and I also shattered my family's notion of the character of women in military service.  However, what I had really been discouraged from pursuing was my desire to be a journalist.  Girls just did not do that (never mind Nellie Bly or Margaret Bourke-White or Adela Rogers St. John).  It was a long, long time before I was able to revive that dream.

My first attempt at actually being a writer was in fiction, since I had lost the dream of being a journalist.  I was a member of a local writing group and an online writing group.  I tried various genres and methods, having some short stories published in little magazines, but just not finding a fiction voice.  Then I turned to non-fiction.  After my first book, a history and critical review of a television series, I floundered for subjects, and then I found genealogy.  After getting a genealogical education through the National Institute for Genealogical Studies in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, I then found a subject: a guide to sources for Florida's colonial, territorial, and state censuses.  That book was published last year. 

Work on that book led me to the University of North Florida, first to brush up on my high school Spanish from forty some-odd years before, and then one thing led to another, and I found myself on a path to a second bachelor's degree with a double major in history and Spanish.  Now I am about to finish that up.  I will graduate at the end of the 2012 spring term.  And as I have blogged previously, I will be starting work on a master's degree in history in the fall.

This path has been something strange and wonderful. Associations, opportunities, nearly all my class work has in one way or another led me to study the history and families of St. Augustine, Florida, during the second Spanish period (1784-1821), or has contributed in some way to my investigation.  I have become enchanted with the place and the people -- though some of them at times behaved in less-than-enchanting ways.  But even rascals should have their stories told.  All my education, including the genealogical education, seems to have led up to this area of study.  I feel like I have been taken up by an inexorable current, and cannot escape from it.  Nor do I want to.

I have found my vocation.
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In for a penny, in for $14,000?

Next spring, in April, I will graduate, with my second bachelor's degree, from the University of North Florida with a double major in history and Spanish.  I am contemplating, with the enthusiastic support of my family, friends, and professors, applying to the graduate school at the University of North Florida, for a Master of Arts in history.  I am just about decided I am going to do it, but I am also wanting to make very sure that I am doing it for reasons that are mine, and not to live up to the expectations of others.

With that in mind, I will soon be taking a little bit of a "retreat" at the home of friends who have eminent good sense, and cats to pet.  The cats will offer their own wisdom, which I shall take into consideration as well. 

Reasons to do it:

• I am already doing original research into the family structure of St. Augustine, having begun that under a grant from the university for independent undergraduate research.  Why not get another degree out of it, one which can open more doors?
• As my major professor pointed out, the structure of a master's program can only help strengthen my work on that research.
• The master's program may also open doors to sources I would otherwise not have access to, and provide contact with historians I might not otherwise have an opportunity to meet.
• The credential of a master's degree may help me in getting published.

Reasons not to do it:

• Money.  But my husband has said we will find it.
• My health.  That is a bit of a sticking point, and I intend to talk to my doctor.
• Three dreaded letters:  GRE (the Graduate Record Examination).  However, according to an e-mail from the Graduate School at UNF, since I already have a master's degree (Library science, Florida State University, 1970) and took the GRE for that, I do not have to take it again.

So that last negative comes off the list, leaving a puny two in contrast to the four very solid points on the plus side.

Another reason to do it is that my research into the family structure of St. Augustine is based not in history, strictly speaking, but in genealogy.  Genealogy is slowly making its way into the academy.  Of course, Brigham Young University has had a degree-granting program in the field -- the only one in the country -- for a long time.  Now Boston University and other institutions are offering courses in genealogy.  I hope that my project, and the future work I do with that master's degree in history, will make a contribution, however small, to genealogy's acceptance as an academic discipline.

That alone would be worth it to me to do the work and take the time that getting the master's degree will involve.

The Chocolate Widow

In Sunday's entry about beginning to see some patterns in my transcription of records from St. Augustine, 1813 through 1815, I mentioned a phrase that had me puzzled -- and amused. It is "la viuda de chocolate" -- the chocolate widow. Was this a reference to skin color? Was it a "modismo," what we call an idiom or colloquial expression for something? Or is it just what it purports to be?

I asked my professor for his opinion, and his response was that it looks like it means what it appears it might mean: the widow of the man who ran the chocolate shop. I find that fascinating for two reasons:

1. That they even had a chocolate shop in St. Augustine in 1813-1815 is interesting to me. It was not a very large nor an extremely prosperous settlement. But they had their luxury goods, by golly!

2. That the product in this instance was mentioned at all. It is the only mention of the product of a shop that I have found in transcribing the three years of records. All the other entries are by the merchant's name, with no mention at all of the products sold in any of their stores. But I can think of one way this might have gone:

Maybe the individual writing these entries was not the one who regularly did it at this particular time. Perhaps he was the new guy, just taking over the recording of his ward's store taxes. He doesn't know everyone very well, maybe he just arrived in St. Augustine, because I had not seen his name much before this. He has the list in his head . . . "Don So-and-So, Don Such-and-Such . . . and the widow who runs the chocolate shop that she took charge of after her husband died. Oh, what is her name? Um . . . Oh, heck, I'll just put her down as 'the chocolate widow' and figure it out later!"

And the record remained, for the amusement of those of us who like to poke around in dusty old documents.
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Connecting the Dots

I have been working on my grant project, for which I have been gathering information from the East Florida Papers, of which I use the microfilm copy at the Jacksonville Public Library. I have been transcribing the municipal accounts of St. Augustine, Florida, from 1813 and 1814, including taxes paid by shop owners, salaries of some city employees, fines collected, and other such matters. I'm looking for names -- I'm fixing people in place and time and looking for some family relationships. I am finding some preliminary information, which will need to be verified in other records as far as family relationships are concerned. But I have found some instances of three or four people with the same surname. These are generally men, but there were some female shopkeepers in St. Augustine in that period. One of them is listed with the compound surname Pons y Arnau, so I have her maiden name and may be able to find her marriage in the church marriage registers. Unless, of course, that took place somewhere other than in St. Augustine.

I also found a phrase that really has me curious: La viuda de chocolate -- the chocolate widow. Now, what in the world does that mean? Was that one way to refer to skin color? It was written below the name of one of the shopkeepers on a tax list. Sounds to me like a great name for a shop!

But I see the beginning glimmers of family relationships, and this gets me excited. My professor is very excited about my project, and is getting me into contact with some of the names in colonial Florida history.

I'm excited about that!
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I got the grant!

A few weeks ago, I mentioned applying for a grant to conduct research in the family ties of St. Augustine in the Second Spanish Period (1783-1820) and examine how those family ties influenced and were influenced by the events of the period.

In my university e-mail this morning, I received word that I have been awarded the grant! I think what I'm going to do with it, or most of it (it's $500 for me and $1000 for my mentoring professor) is go to Washington, D.C., to use the originals of the East Florida Papers, which have most of the censuses I need to use, as well as letters, tax lists, and other documents. The originals, so one researcher has commented in his works, are better than their reproductions on microfilm.

I am going to look at the microfilms anyway, and maybe make note of those which are too hard to read (due to faded ink, over- or underexposure, or other factors), and which might be more readable in the original.

What a nice Christmas present!
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Journey of a Thousand Li

An old Chinese saying is: A journey of a thousand li begins with a single step. I've taken the first step on a journey that could literally cover a thousand miles before I'm done.

I have plans for my next book, to be an examination of the history of St. Augustine, Florida, during the second Spanish period of Florida's history (1783-1820) through the lens of genealogy, as I have mentioned before. I haven't yet heard about the grant I have applied for, but I do have one step toward the goal accomplished. The Chair of the Department of History at the University of North Florida has approved my proposal for a Directed Individual Study (DIS) which will be an examination of the family structure of St. Augustine. I will have only one term, from January into May, to complete the study, so I cannot do the entire ball of wax I plan for my eventual book during that limited time. So what I propose to do for the DIS is to produce a series of short genealogies of the families of St. Augustine just during that 37 year period.

I want to see how the families were related during that time. Who married whom will be an important question. I will be examining censuses, land and tax records, and birth, marriage, and baptism records. For these, I will be looking at the East Florida Papers on microfilm, which can be very difficult to deal with due to issues of faded ink, poor microfilming, tearing of the original documents, and other damage to the documents, as well as some instances of absolutely atrocious handwriting! Other documents I will be using will be some land records at the Florida State Archive in Tallahassee, so that will be another visit to that repository. I previously spent three days in Tallahassee at the state archive for my forthcoming book on the sources to the colonial, territorial, and state censuses of Florida.

I will also be examining records at the Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine, at their archive. These will be the birth, marriage, and baptism records.

If I receive the grant, I am thinking of using it to go to Washington, to the Library of Congress, to examine the originals of the East Florida Papers, which may be better than the microfilms. One thing I'm going to try with the microfilm is to take digital photographs of the screen image on the microfilm reader. The problem with my local source, the Jacksonville Public Library, is that their scanning microfilm reader produces only .pdf files, which I don't like for this particular purpose. I prefer .jpg files, which I can manipulate and work with to improve the readability of the image. Some genealogists have said that they have had good results from taking digital photos of the image on the screen, so I'm going to experiment with that over the holiday break.

This will be a new approach to the history of St. Augustine, and I hope I will be able to make some definitive statements from this new perspective. I also hope it will make just one more little step -- in a journey that could take more than a thousand miles -- toward bringing genealogy to the academy in a meaningful way.
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Getting Genealogy Into the Academy

I have come to be of the opinion, in the last few years of my serious pursuit of genealogy as a profession, that genealogy is a social science and should be classified with the other social sciences on an equal footing. Genealogy has its own theoretical base, propounded by Donald Lines Jacobus and Val D. Greenwood. It has its own methodology, made more rigorous by the work of Elizabeth Shown Mills and others. And it produces -- and has for many years -- academic-level work product in professional journals.

And we're getting there. Boston University has recently begun offering coursework in genealogy, though not yet a degree (and, of course, Brigham Young University has been offering a degree in genealogy for decades in an ever-improving program). And there are individuals out there who are both qualified historians and certified genealogists, and who are breaking new ground in combining the sources and methodology of genealogy with the pursuit of historical inquiry of academic quality.

One of these is Carolyn Earle Billingsley, with whose work I became familiar today, when my copy of her book Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier arrived. I found out about the book last week, through a curious set of circumstances which had put me on a similar path as Dr. Billingsley, though on a smaller scale, before I knew about her work.

As I am down to the wire with my present book, Non-Federal Censuses of Florida, 1784-1945: A Guide to Sources, I was casting about for an idea for a subsequent book. I really cannot describe the process by which I arrived at this idea. I'm not sure myself how it happened, as the events of the past couple weeks have been fast and furious. Anyway, about two weeks ago, while I was crossing the campus of the University of North Florida on my way to a quiet uninterrupted morning of study in the library, I saw a sign announcing an undergraduate research grant. I inquired into it and decided to apply, but needed a subject.

At times, we have various ideas amorphously formed in the back brain, where they stew and percolate, and come pouring out in what seems a concatenation of events pushing us in a particular direction. That is what is operating here. I am at UNF studying history and Spanish, and having taken two courses in learning how to read very old Spanish documents, because I have decided based purely on my location to study the old Spanish lineages of Florida. I wrote my book on the colonial, territorial, and state censuses of Florida as a means of familiarizing myself with the extant sources in my area. So to apply for the research grant, I thought I would take a genealogical approach to the history of St. Augustine during the second Spanish period (1783-1820). I want my approach to be one not often used -- to first establish the family relationships of the population of St. Augustine, and then examine the historical events during that thirty-seven year period through the lens of those family relationships.

In perusing the literature as part of preparing my grant application, and as part of a personal inquiry into further educational opportunities for myself, I came across mention of Dr. Billingsley's book. I ordered it from Amazon.com. Turns out that my idea is quite similar to hers.

Dr. Billingsley studied the kinship of one family, and its allied lines, through a longer period of tiem over a larger geographic area, but the basic idea of studying history though the lens of genealogy is the same for her as it is for me. I read the introduction of her book today (I'm home in the process of becoming increasingly miserable through the process of having a cold), and with every paragraph, I liked the lady more and more. She and I are thinking along extremely similar lines! It's exciting.

The professor I have chosen to direct me in my study, as the grant will be used in a directed individual study next term, is the professor who taught the paleography courses. He seems to think I have a solid idea with considerable potential, and is on board with the genealogical angle of it. This is a logical approach for colonial St. Augustine, as kinship ties were very important to the Spanish in those days (not to say they are not important today).

Well, it's quite a feeling being a pioneer.
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