I am wondering about this subject because in the county where I live, tonight there is a little toddler who is someday going to find out, probably after he is grown, that his father was shot dead by his uncle. This happened Monday night, and the killer shot not only his own brother, but the brother's friend and his own parents. His parents survived and are now in the hospital; the other two did not. At this hour, that uncle is still on the loose. One of the places they think he is is in the state forest that our lot backs up to. Not an event that will lead one to sleep very soundly, and I'm not. So I am up wondering.
Black sheep can present a very thorny problem at times. They can present family history investigators with a dilemma: How does one record this black sheep whose actions still cause pain in the family? Or does one even bother? Would it not be better to just forget about that one?
While I can understand the motivation to sweep a really heinous black sheep under the rug, that is not the best policy. At the very least, one would record the basic genealogical information. If one does not want to go further than that, because of the pain this person has caused in the family, that is all right. That is what I tell my audiences when I give my talk on black sheep.
On the other hand, if one does want to find out about a black sheep one has found out existed, perhaps a hundred or so years ago, where does one look? Some state archives have prison records. I've blogged here about the prison records at the Florida State Archives. Like those in the Florida Archives, these records in other state archives are likely to be restricted in access. For more current information, including those presently incarcerated, the State of Florida's bureau of prisons has a website with all the information on it. Other states may have the same kind of information posted.
Newspapers are a great place to look for information about a black sheep. They make good copy. Likewise, you may find out about an infamous ancestor in a local history. And don't forget the censuses: prison populations are enumerated, too.
But tonight I wonder about that little baby, and what he is going to wonder about his father's fate, years from now.
.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
Mappy Monday: Property ownership? Why bother?
That seems to have been the question my parents asked each other. Today's blog post comes from the Mappy Monday mene from the Ravenna (Michigan) Area Historical Society's blog.
My parents never owned a house. When they married, my father was in the Navy, undergoing flight training at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, where my mother grew up. The peripatetic nature of military life, and their penchant for moving in civilian life, brought them to the decision, apparently, never to buy a house, but just to rent. Therefore, the avenue of tracing their exact whereabouts at any given time through county or municipal property records is not available to me.
I have used some city directories to find them, but that is chancy, as coverage is sometimes spotty. The variety of city directories of the nineteenth century got pared down in the twentieth. I have looked in many of the digitized directories online, and not found them.
Some tracking of their residences is in my father's Navy service record, which I obtained from the National Personnel Records Center. That has been a big help.
My own memory helps somewhat for the period during my cognizant life (from about four or five years of age onward), but sometimes an address is not to hand, even then. I remember our address when I was six and seven, when we lived in Tarzana, California. With that address, I have seen the house on the "street view" of Google Maps recently. Funny that I do not remember the house seeming as small as it appears on the street view photograph, nor do I remember the houses being as close together as they look in the photo. I guess everthing looks bigger when we ourselves are small.
The places where we lived in Pensacola, Florida, when I was four and five were rural in nature -- one of them being a working farm where we actually had crops of corn, watermelons, and blueberries. But they had rural-route or post-office box addresses, which I never did know. I only know them by the names attached to them by virtue of where they were located, but I have not been able to pinpoint them using Google Earth or Google Maps. I have found approximate locations where I think they were, but I cannot be sure. No correspondence addressed to my father or mother at those houses survives, and I have not found us in the city directories for Pensacola.
It is a little frustrating not to be able to go to county property records and find information about my parents, but I have used these other ways to glean a little more information, and once I finish my college degree, and the book I'm working on, I will get back to further searching for where they were all along the way.
I just wish they had stayed put a little longer!
.
My parents never owned a house. When they married, my father was in the Navy, undergoing flight training at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, where my mother grew up. The peripatetic nature of military life, and their penchant for moving in civilian life, brought them to the decision, apparently, never to buy a house, but just to rent. Therefore, the avenue of tracing their exact whereabouts at any given time through county or municipal property records is not available to me.
I have used some city directories to find them, but that is chancy, as coverage is sometimes spotty. The variety of city directories of the nineteenth century got pared down in the twentieth. I have looked in many of the digitized directories online, and not found them.
Some tracking of their residences is in my father's Navy service record, which I obtained from the National Personnel Records Center. That has been a big help.
My own memory helps somewhat for the period during my cognizant life (from about four or five years of age onward), but sometimes an address is not to hand, even then. I remember our address when I was six and seven, when we lived in Tarzana, California. With that address, I have seen the house on the "street view" of Google Maps recently. Funny that I do not remember the house seeming as small as it appears on the street view photograph, nor do I remember the houses being as close together as they look in the photo. I guess everthing looks bigger when we ourselves are small.
The places where we lived in Pensacola, Florida, when I was four and five were rural in nature -- one of them being a working farm where we actually had crops of corn, watermelons, and blueberries. But they had rural-route or post-office box addresses, which I never did know. I only know them by the names attached to them by virtue of where they were located, but I have not been able to pinpoint them using Google Earth or Google Maps. I have found approximate locations where I think they were, but I cannot be sure. No correspondence addressed to my father or mother at those houses survives, and I have not found us in the city directories for Pensacola.
It is a little frustrating not to be able to go to county property records and find information about my parents, but I have used these other ways to glean a little more information, and once I finish my college degree, and the book I'm working on, I will get back to further searching for where they were all along the way.
I just wish they had stayed put a little longer!
.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Talented Tuesday: Elizabeth Reed
My aunt . . . well, let me back up here.
My mother was an intra-family adoption, as I've discussed here before. So Elizabeth Reed, my mother's adoptive sister, was really her cousin, and my second cousin. But I always called her my aunt, and she was instrumental in raising me. So I'm going to continue to be "genealogically incorrect" in this post.
Elizabeth Reed was a registered nurse whose specialty was public health. She never married. She was a large woman, and never was successful at losing weight. But she was a character. She spent a lot of time on the lecture circuit, mostly within the state of Florida, where she was Director of Health Information for the State Board of Health (now the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services). And along with her serious speechifying about health and wellness, she would entertain her audiences with monologues.
The art of the monologue ranges from Robert Benchley to Johnny Carson and Jay Leno. Elizabeth Reed's monologues told a story, or presented a slice of life with a comedic twist.
She would present the natural history of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" as sung by a little girl at a recital, a honky-tonk singer, an operatic diva, and other variations on the theme. All of the variations were hilarious, and delivered with great gusto. Another of her monologues showed a hospital volunteer "cheering up" a patient by discussing the competence of the surgeon who operated on him, dietary restrictions, the sounds and smells endemic to hospitals, and other joys. She had a stock of monologues, and not a one was written down. They were all stored in her memory. She told me one day that she had tried to write one of them down, and it looked so dreadful on paper that she never tried to commit one to writing again.
Unfortunately, she died before the arrival of home videotape, and the usual home-movie 8mm that we had did not have sound. I would give a lot to have these monologues on videotape.
Not all of them were comedic, though the majority of them were. She surprised me one day when she appeared at my high school in 1964. The school's speech and drama teacher, Sabina Meyer, arranged for my aunt to perform a monologue for the speech and drama classes. My classmates were skeptical, and were making jokes about the whole prospect of a monologue performance -- and my aunt's size -- which were getting me angry. But then she started the monologue, which was a surprise to me in that it was not a comedy, it was drama, and it was one which I had never before seen.
The story was an old grandmother who had made the arduous overland crossing to the American West in a covered wagon, and had lost a child "on the plains of Kansas" counseling her teenage granddaughter about life and relationships. Before my aunt was one-third the way into the monologue, the joking and chatter had stopped and you could have heard a pin drop. There were even some tears glistening in the girls' eyes. After the performance, the kids couldn't wait to tell me how much they had thought of the monologue, and that my aunt was great.
Well, I knew that.
One modest individual in a small city in the middle of the Twentieth Century with a talent that could make people laugh or cry. That was my aunt, Elizabeth Reed.
.
My mother was an intra-family adoption, as I've discussed here before. So Elizabeth Reed, my mother's adoptive sister, was really her cousin, and my second cousin. But I always called her my aunt, and she was instrumental in raising me. So I'm going to continue to be "genealogically incorrect" in this post.
Elizabeth Reed was a registered nurse whose specialty was public health. She never married. She was a large woman, and never was successful at losing weight. But she was a character. She spent a lot of time on the lecture circuit, mostly within the state of Florida, where she was Director of Health Information for the State Board of Health (now the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services). And along with her serious speechifying about health and wellness, she would entertain her audiences with monologues.
The art of the monologue ranges from Robert Benchley to Johnny Carson and Jay Leno. Elizabeth Reed's monologues told a story, or presented a slice of life with a comedic twist.
She would present the natural history of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" as sung by a little girl at a recital, a honky-tonk singer, an operatic diva, and other variations on the theme. All of the variations were hilarious, and delivered with great gusto. Another of her monologues showed a hospital volunteer "cheering up" a patient by discussing the competence of the surgeon who operated on him, dietary restrictions, the sounds and smells endemic to hospitals, and other joys. She had a stock of monologues, and not a one was written down. They were all stored in her memory. She told me one day that she had tried to write one of them down, and it looked so dreadful on paper that she never tried to commit one to writing again.
Unfortunately, she died before the arrival of home videotape, and the usual home-movie 8mm that we had did not have sound. I would give a lot to have these monologues on videotape.
Not all of them were comedic, though the majority of them were. She surprised me one day when she appeared at my high school in 1964. The school's speech and drama teacher, Sabina Meyer, arranged for my aunt to perform a monologue for the speech and drama classes. My classmates were skeptical, and were making jokes about the whole prospect of a monologue performance -- and my aunt's size -- which were getting me angry. But then she started the monologue, which was a surprise to me in that it was not a comedy, it was drama, and it was one which I had never before seen.
The story was an old grandmother who had made the arduous overland crossing to the American West in a covered wagon, and had lost a child "on the plains of Kansas" counseling her teenage granddaughter about life and relationships. Before my aunt was one-third the way into the monologue, the joking and chatter had stopped and you could have heard a pin drop. There were even some tears glistening in the girls' eyes. After the performance, the kids couldn't wait to tell me how much they had thought of the monologue, and that my aunt was great.
Well, I knew that.
One modest individual in a small city in the middle of the Twentieth Century with a talent that could make people laugh or cry. That was my aunt, Elizabeth Reed.
.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The picture becomes clearer
I've been working in the baptismal records of St. Augustine during the early part of the second Spanish period (Volume I, 1784-1792) in the transcriptions available at the St. Augustine Historical Society research library. It is much easier to use these transcriptions, at least from 1784 into the fall of 1788, because the entries during that period were made in Latin, and I do not read Latin. It was in 1788 that Bishop Cirilo de Barcelona made his visita (inspection tour) of St. Augustine and he decreed that henceforth entries should be made in Spanish. He cites errors and other unacceptable conditions in the records, and prescribes a form which is preserved in the baptismal record.
I have also just finished transcribing from the original the 1786 census of St. Augustine taken by Father Thomas Hassett, the priest at St. Augustine. It is not a complete census, as Hassett himself points out in his introductory comment. He purposefully left out the government officials and the troops stationed at the Castillo de San Marcos. Spanish censuses frequently left out military personnel. For one thing, they were probably considered transient, even though other records I have examined show many of them participating in the daily life of the town.
These documents, along with marriage records, form the basis for reconstructing the family structure of the town, and I am beginning to see patterns of relationship. Another aspect found in the baptismal records is the godparent relationship, which I've mentioned previously.
It is necessary to bear in mind that with these Spanish censuses, however, the one consistent aspect of them is their inconsistency. There were no prescribed formats and no preprinted forms. Not all entries have all the information. For example, it is traditional in Spanish records (as it is in French records) for a woman, married or not, to be recorded by her maiden name. This is a boon to family historians researching their female lines. Most of the entries in the census and baptism records have the women by their maiden names, but not all of them. Then, too, it is careless to assume that because the woman's surname is the same as her husband's, that it is not her maiden name. Non-first cousins could marry, and sometimes did. It is also possible that, even in a town as small as St. Augustine, you could have two unrelated individuals with the same surname.
More information is necessary in these events, and the marriage records are the best source for that.
They're next.
.
I have also just finished transcribing from the original the 1786 census of St. Augustine taken by Father Thomas Hassett, the priest at St. Augustine. It is not a complete census, as Hassett himself points out in his introductory comment. He purposefully left out the government officials and the troops stationed at the Castillo de San Marcos. Spanish censuses frequently left out military personnel. For one thing, they were probably considered transient, even though other records I have examined show many of them participating in the daily life of the town.
These documents, along with marriage records, form the basis for reconstructing the family structure of the town, and I am beginning to see patterns of relationship. Another aspect found in the baptismal records is the godparent relationship, which I've mentioned previously.
It is necessary to bear in mind that with these Spanish censuses, however, the one consistent aspect of them is their inconsistency. There were no prescribed formats and no preprinted forms. Not all entries have all the information. For example, it is traditional in Spanish records (as it is in French records) for a woman, married or not, to be recorded by her maiden name. This is a boon to family historians researching their female lines. Most of the entries in the census and baptism records have the women by their maiden names, but not all of them. Then, too, it is careless to assume that because the woman's surname is the same as her husband's, that it is not her maiden name. Non-first cousins could marry, and sometimes did. It is also possible that, even in a town as small as St. Augustine, you could have two unrelated individuals with the same surname.
More information is necessary in these events, and the marriage records are the best source for that.
They're next.
.
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