The Book of ME: Part 2

This is the second of the series of memes devised by Julie Goucher of Angler's Rest.  This week it's all about the natal day:

This week's prompt:
   Prompt 2: Your Birth
    Do you have any baby photos?
    Where were you born?
    Who was present at your birth?
    Dimensions?
    What day was it? Time?
    Did you have hair? Eye colours

Do I have baby photos?  You bet!  Here I am in a photo taken in Hollywood, so it's a true glamor shot!

"And I want to thank my parents, and my brother and sister, and my agent . . ."

All right.  Enough of that.

I was born at the United States Naval Hospital in Long Beach, California.  It's no longer there, at least not as a Navy hospital.  I have two birth certificates: one from the State of California and another from the Naval Hospital.  The latter one is filled out in my mother's handwriting, and has my little baby footprints on the back!

I would imagine my mother was present at my birth.  (Pardon the Packard-Reed sense of humor.)  I don't know if my father was there or not, and there's nobody around to ask who would know.  I think he probably was, though, even though by that time it was all old hat -- I was the third and last.  Also present was the doctor who delivered me.  My documents are at home, and I am not, so I cannot look up the doctor's first name, but his last name was McNulty, and he was the brother of a popular singer of the day (1947), Dennis Day (whose real name was Dennis McNulty).

I do not know how long I was, nor specifically how much I weighed, which was somewhere around 6 lbs.  The time of birth was around 6 p.m.  I am a Saturday's Child -- supposedly, I work hard for a living.

From the photo above, you can see I had a little hair.  My eyes then were probably the usual baby blue-grey, but my eye color now is green.

The Book of Me: Who Am I?

This comes from Julie Goucher's Angler's Rest blog. She is beginning a series of weekly blogging prompts. Who knows? It just might get me back up and running again (while I'm inundated with a ton of reading and several projects in grad school). (With thanks to Julie Goucher, and to Bill West of West in New England , on whose Facebook post I saw this.)

Every so often, we in genealogy need to pause in our hunt for others and take a look at ourselves.  After all, the procedure in genealogy -- what I teach to people in my presentations on beginning genealogy -- is to begin with ourselves.

"This week's prompt: 

1. Ask yourself 20 times “Who are you?”

Each time you should give yourself a different answer, and if you can easily go beyond 20 then that is fine too. . . . This is the sort of prompt that you can re do at various stages of your life, perhaps after some changes or at the start of the New Year.

This prompt is about how YOU see YOU."



Okay.  Me.

I am:

A writer.
A graduate student.
A wife.
A lover.
A mother.
A grandmother.
A person who loves cats and dogs.
A Floridian (a "Floridated" Californian).
A historian.
A research nerd.
A lover of books.
A fan of reading.
A former Coast Guard officer.
A former nurse.
A former librarian.
A person who has had to reinvent herself several times in her life.
A genealogist.
A maverick.
A funny woman.
A friend.
A person with arthritis.
A stubborn woman (I don't give up).
A supporter of the arts.

That's 23.  Let's see what next week's prompt brings.
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What's in a Name, or: Who was Juana Salom Marrying, Anyway?

I am in Washington, D.C. until nearly the end of July doing research in the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, for my master's thesis on marriage in Second Spanish Period St. Augustine, Florida (1784-1821).  These documents pose a variety of problems, one of which can get downright amusing: the various spellings of names.

I just transcribed one record, the petition of a soldier named Francisco Macharely and Juana Salom.  Well, that's how their names appear on the cover page of the file.

His name is also spelled Macarely, Machareli, and Bacharely.

The awful thing here is, he did not write or sign any of the documents in the file.  One of the things I am attempting to do in my research on St. Augustine in this period is to determine just what people's names were, and what spelling did they themselves prefer.

This is made difficult, if not impossible, by the fact that a number of inhabitants of the town were illiterate.  Or, in this case, by the complete absence of any input by the individual himself.  So, with four choices -- none of which may have been how the name was actually spelled -- there is not much chance I can come to a conclusion in this case.  For all I know, he may have been an Italian, and the proper spelling -- as close as there ever was in those days, at any rate -- may have been Macciarelli.

But I doubt I will ever know.

Even Juana's name appears in two different spellings:  Salom and Soloma.  Testimony in the file is given by her brother, Juan Salom -- who, according to the Spanish marriage law, the Real Pragmática de Casamiento, had to give his consent to the marriage.  In that document, Juan's sister's last name is spelled as Salom.  Salom is the generally accepted spelling among historians who write about St. Augustine during this time.

However, we really cannot know for sure if this was the spelling.  Juan Salom was illiterate, as was his sister Juana.

The task of determining what is in a name in this time and place is made easier by the literate, who signed their own names to documents.  Most of the time it helps, anyway.  But not always.

For instance, there is one individual who was associated with the Minorcan population of St. Augustine, who rose to some prominence.  His name is represented in Spanish documents as Domingo Martinely or Martinoly.  However, he was literate -- at least, he could sign his name.  He was Italian, and he signed his name as Domenico Martinelli.

The problem is when someone was inconsistent in signing his name.  There is another marriage document in which one man's name is spelled three different ways:  Juan Genopoly, or Gianopoly, or Yoannoply.  He signed his name Juan Gianopoly.  On one document.  On another, he signed it as Giovanni Gianopoly. 

So sometimes you just have to choose one!
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Blog Caroling 2012

A blogging tradition in genealogy is Footnote Maven's Blog Caroling.  I am going to enter a Christmas carol I learned in high school when our choir decided to present an international program of carols at our Christmas Eve service.  We sang "Adeste Fideles" in Latin, "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht" in German, sang "Jeannette Isabella" but not in French (we didn't have the words in French), and we sang this Spanish carol, "Pastores a Belén" (Shepherds to Bethlehem).

Pastores a Belén
Entrad con alegría,
A ver a nuestro bien,
Al hijo de María.
Allí, allí, allí nos espera Jesús.
Allí, allí, allí nos espera Jesús.

Entrad, entrad, pastores entrad,
Entrad, entrad, zagalas también.
Vamos a ver al recien nacido,
Vamos a ver al niño Manuel.
Vamos, vamos, vamos a ver,
Vamos a ver al recien nacido,
Vamos a ver al niño Manuel.

[Shepherds to Bethlehem,
Enter with gladness,
To see our Good News,
The Son of Mary.
There, there, there, Jesus awaits us.
There, there, there, Jesus awaits us.

Enter, enter, shepherds enter,
Enter, enter, ladies also.
We're going to see the newborn baby,
We're going to see the child Emanuel.
We're going, we're going, we're going to see,
We're going to see the newborn baby,
We're going to see the child Emanuel.]
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