Lift Up Your Hearts!

What was Hallowe’en like when you were a little girl, Grandma? 

No one has as yet asked me that question, but if things run true to form for most Americans, someone will, someday, after I am past being able to respond.  So I will answer it now.

My Hallowe’en formative years were in the 1950s and early 60s, in a small village in upstate New York.  Contrary to what we’d like to believe, it was not an idyllic and crime-free time.  One of my first (and worst) Hallowe’en memories was of the teenaged thugs who thundered onto our porch, grabbed our carefully-carved jack-o-lanterns, and smashed them to bits.  I lived a sheltered life:  this was my first view of senseless, wanton destruction; my first encounter with people who get pleasure from breaking the hearts of little children.  Our tiny village did not escape teen gangs and vandalism, which seemed to be more widespread, if much less dangerous, in those days.   At least they attacked property, not people.

That was the only scary thing about our Hallowe’ens.

The most important difference between Hallowe’en then and now is that the occasion was first, last, and always for children.   A few adults dressed in costume for the neighborhood parade and party, but the purpose of the event was to entertain the children.  The only excuse for anyone over 12 going out trick-or-treating was to escort the younger ones—every once in a while a compassionate homeowner would give us a piece of candy, too.  Now, when high schoolers come to my door, I give them candy if they’ve made any attempt at a costume, but I pity them, that at their age they are begging door-to-door for candy instead of helping younger children to have a good time.

On the other hand, teenaged trick-or-treaters is a clear improvement over teenaged vandals.

The Hallowe’en season began several weeks in advance of October 31.  No, not because Hallowe’en stores began popping up all over town, and shelves everywhere sprouted candy in yellow and orange.  Because of the costumes.  Store-bought costumes were largely unavailable, and anyway, who would have wanted one?  Hallowe’en was an occasion for great creativity.  Merely deciding what to be could take a month.  (Decisiveness, I’ll admit, was never my strong suit).  Those who come to our door today are mostly beings—a cat, a princess, a Star Wars character—but we favored things:  one might be a rocket ship, a pencil, or the whole Mad Hatter’s Tea Party (no relation to the present-day Tea Party, as mad—in either sense—as they may be).  The challenge was to create a costume from whatever we could scrounge around the house without actually having to spend money.  No problem—we had not yet forgotten what any five-year-old knows:  the cardboard box is the most universally useful of all materials. (More)

Providence, Rhode Island.

My college roommate was from Providence.  I drank an Awful Awful at the Newport Creamery on one visit, and worked for a day in a Brown University chemistry lab on another.  I have pleasant memories of visits with her family, and of driving there from Boston, years later, when my brother's job took him to Providence one day and we met at an Indian restaurant for dinner.  I've passed through T. F. Green airport countless times.

My allegiance to that New England city was cemented by the discovery that the founder of Providence, Roger Williams, is my tenth great-grandfather.  He's Porter's ninth great-grandfather as well.  So you might say Providence is in the family.

Thus I was thrilled to learn that the town charter of Providence, brought from England by Roger Williams himself in 1648, has been found, after some 140 years of "missing and presumed dead" status.

It was discovered by Paul R. Campbell, the city archivist, who "spends his days burrowing in the very attic of City Hall amid peeling paint, stacks of ponderous tomes and dusty boxes shielding secrets of the past, from the humdrum to the historic."

As he tells it, one recent Friday afternoon, a group came seeking certain records. As Campbell poked around material stored on a level above his office, he came across an open box. Inside sat a pocket folder from the 1960s, containing miscellaneous records of the now-defunct Providence Board of Aldermen.

But in the box there also reposed “a very old document, on vellum [animal skin],” he said. “I recognized right away the writing style of the 17th century — I did some research some years ago on 17th-century writing. It began to look like something more important than a deed. It was governmental in nature.”

The signature of “John Warner, Clerk of the Assembly,” caught his eye. It dawned on him that here might be something momentous.

“I figured this was the John Warner, one of the early arrivals. The document, in a nutshell, is from when Williams came back from England in 1643 after he had obtained a charter from the king for the Colony of Rhode Island. He needed to get a charter for the Town of Providence, so he went to the Colonial Legislature of 1647-48, and asked for a town charter. This document is the town charter issued in March 1648. This is the Town of Providence creation document.”

What's in your attic?

It's not the New York Times, or even the Hartfort Courant, but I'll thank the East Haddam-Haddam Patch for their article on the quilt show, and their mention of Phoebe's Quilt.  (H/T PJS)  As is true with most newspaper articles I've known the truth about, this one manages to tell gist of the story accurately while erring in the details.

One of the most interesting ... had to be Prudence Sloane’s quilt.

“I inherited a trunk from my mother, this was in the bottom of it,” Sloane said. The quilt contained the names of family ancestors stitched into it.

It turned out the quilt belonged to Phoebe (Burr) Scovil, Sloane’s first cousin four times removed. It was most likely a wedding present from friends and family around 1849. Sewn into each square section of the quilt was a different person’s name.

Sloane’s sister-in-law, Linda Wightman, who was very interested in the family’s genealogy, did research on all the names of the people on the quilt. Wightman even went to Boston to investigate the names in a genealogy library.

Wightman made a booklet and gave it to Sloane as a Christmas present with information on Phoebe and how each person sewn into the quilt was related to her.

The quilt actually belonged to Phoebe L. (Scovil) Bonfoey, who is, indeed, Prudence's first cousin four times removed (and my fourth cousin four times removed, for that matter).  Phoebe (Burr) Scovil was her mother.  The creation of the quilt was most likely around 1849, the year one of the signers died and one, who signed with her married name, got married.  Phoebe herself married Horace A. Bonfoey in 1852.

To say that I "even went to Boston to investigate the names in a genealogy library" sounds rather pathetic unless you realize that I, unlike the quilt, don't live in Connecticut.  In any case it's not something to be impressed about; whenever I make the (all too rare) visit to Boston, New York, Hartford, or other research hot spot, it's for a lot more than just the quilt.  Most of my research for this project was done using the amazing resources available online.  That's not to say I couldn't have walked to Boston in the time it took me to gather the information—not true, but at times it felt like it.

And, hey—they spelled my name right!  I'm sure I have Prudence to thank for that.

I created a Wordle picture of all the surnames I have associated with the people who made Phoebe's Quilt:  maiden and married names, names of parents, spouses, and spouses' parents.  (Click on the image for a larger view.)

The project that consumed my life since mid-January has now reached—not completion, but a stopping point.  Deadlines can be a blessing.

This particular deadline was the Haddam Neck Congregational Church Annual Quilt Show, coming this Saturday, April 9.  Phoebe’s Quilt will be exhibited there, meaning the real thing, not my book about the signers of this Friendship Quilt.  Fortunately, the quilt owner gave me plenty of notice, because when she asked for a few copies of the book to have at the show, I knew I couldn’t simply print them off.

The first edition of Phoebe’s Quilt had bumped up against its own deadline, which was Christmas 2009.  I hadn’t thought much about it since, but the knowledge of what had been left undone would not let me rest until I had completed a revised version for the quilt show.

Amazingly, much of what is in the second edition could not have been done two years ago, even without the Christmas deadline.  Many of the new facts became available online only in the last few months; even as I was buttoning up the revision more data was appearing, making a third edition inevitable. (More)

Too many short nights.  'Way too many long days.  I'm currently babysitting the printer as it struggles with the second edition of Phoebe's Quilt, which I plan to take to Office Max tomorrow later today to have covered and bound.  Then I'll pack it off to my sister-in-law so she'll have a few copies when she shows the real thing at the Haddam Neck Congregational Church's Annual Quilt Show this coming Saturday.  Hopefully that will generate interest among local folks who might be able to shed light on Haddam 160 years ago and the families I've come to know through this Friendship Quilt.

The printer is silent.  Four copies printed.  I won't bore you with why it took so long to get four measly copies done, but it almost makes Office Max's charge of 50 cents per (color) copy look reasonable.  Almost.  Anyway, they're done.  Tomorrow I'll change out the exhausted black ink cartridge and hope the (already replaced once) color lasts through one more printing.

Then bind ... ship ... and I'll be FREE!  Um, not exactly.  There's still some work to do on the pdf version, and of course more research I want to do—eventually.  But I'm looking forward to scaling back, a lot, and tackling all the stuff that's been ignored for the last several weeks, including the very lovely Florida spring days that will soon pass into not-so-lovely summer.

Anyway, that's why you haven't heard much from me lately.

The Vintage Bradbury: Ray Bradbury's Own Selection of His Best Stories, by Ray Bradbury (Vintage, 1990) (original copyright 1965)

I picked this book out from my son-in-law's collection because my nephews had recently read Something Wicked This Way Comes for their book club, and I realized I hadn't read any Bradbury in a long time.

Now I'm probably done for another five years or so.  Some of the stories were enjoyable, but most I found too weird and depressing for me.  Tales of bizarre "healers" whose treatment of choice turns out to be rape, and of children plotting to kill their parents—not to mention babies murdering their mothers!—are not worth spending precious reading time on.  I'm very sensitive to the content of what I read and watch—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest troubled me for years—and find it better not to give my mind too many dark ideas upon which to brood.

On the other hand, nobody writes like Ray Bradbury.  I wish he had put his imagination and incredible descriptive skills to a more uplifting purpose; he’s a genius, without doubt.  His stories are about as close to poetry as prose can get—at least not without falling into the outlandish world of James Joyce.

And family is family.  Ray Bradbury is my sixth cousin twice removed. 

Our census form arrived.  In a word:  B-O-R-I-N-G.

It's a good thing for future genealogists that we have so many other forms of record-keeping, because they won't get much from the 2010 census.  Name, sex, date of birth, race in excruciating detail if you're Hispanic, Asian, or Pacific Islander (Dominican? Hmong? Fijian?), relationship to head-of-household (now inoffensively called "Person 1" — also in excruciating detail, distinguishing, for example, between biological and adopted children, which genealogists will love, if no one else).  That's only if you're one of the first six people in the household.  For Persons 7 through 12 they don't care about your race or exact relationship.  And if you're the 11th child in the family?  Apparently you're out of luck, but I suspect that may be covered by the "we may call for additional information" caveat that goes with the questions for Persons 7 - 12, since there's also a place to indicate the total number of people in the household.

I wrote before about the interesting information in previous censuses, but I'll repeat it for this occasion. (More)

Article 1, Section 2 of the U. S. Constitution lays the groundwork for conducting a periodic census in order to provide proportional representation in the House of Representatives.

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States.... Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons....

This was modified somewhat by the 14th Amendment, to wit (More)

I had to watch it, since my genealogical organizations, websites, and contacts kept bringing it to my attention:  NBC's new genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are?  My reactions?  Mixed.

Each week, apparently, the show will present an investigation into the family history of one person.  Supposedly these are famous people; I haven't heard of any of them, but that helps me concentrate on the data, which I find more interesting anyway. (More)

UPDATE:  The Second Edition of Phoebe's Quilt, corrected and expanded, is now available.

My sister-in-law found it in a trunk: an old, handmade quilt. Each block was inscribed with a name, often a city, and sometimes a Bible verse. The cities and many of the surnames were familiar, but no name was identifiable as that of someone in the family. Who were these people? Whose quilt was it, and when was it made? And how did it end up in Prudence's trunk?

Far be it from me to resist a genealogical puzzle, especially when it can be turned into a Christmas present:  I would use my genealogical resources to decipher the quilt, and turn my research into a book to put under the tree.  Little did I know how much of my life this little project would consume; I'm certain the quilt itself was completed in less time.

Did I say completed?  I doubt I've ever used that word in a genealogical context unless accompanied by "not" or "never."  But Christmas will come whether or not we are ready, and thus I was saved from my perfectionist tendencies.  The project is as done as it is going to get, barring a second edition. (More)

Like many people, I have mixed feelings about Facebook, finding it simultaneously useful and annoying.  But here's a funny thing about Facebook, as reported by Eric Schultz, who is the Chairman of the Board of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and writer of The Occasional CEO. (The NEHGS library, both online and in person, is one of my favorite and most helpful resources for genealogical research.)

This last summer, in the midst of its 164^th year, NEHGS had the single greatest month of membership growth ever.  Ever.

The reason?   Facebook.

Yep, that surprised the board, too.

If you were given an unexpected two weeks in New York City (actually 8.5 weekdays), how would you spend them?  Not the way I did, it's a safe bet.  While I did manage one or two obligatory tourist trips (more on that later), most of my time was spent at the New York Public Library—you know, the place with the magnificent lions out front, where everyone goes who wants to film something in a library because it's so beautiful.  Though in truth I never saw the main part of the building.  I made my home in Room 121, the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy.  One of the best resources in the world, a perfect complement to my beloved New England Historic Genealogical Society Library in Boston.

As with February's research trip to Boston, this was an intense time.  I estimate I spent 40 hours of those eight and a half days in the library itself; it turned out to be more blessing than bother that it didn't open till 11 a.m., as I needed the morning time to prepare.  The library is less than half a mile, a mere eight minute walk, from the Times Square Hilton hotel where we stayed, and what a pleasure it was to sling on my backpack, descend via the Hilton's two elevators to 42nd Street, walk past Bryant Park, and enter the cool, dark research room with its intoxicating smell of old books; then to re-emerge—after gentle prodding by the librarians, who reminded me that the building was about to close—and reverse the trip with a head swimming with new data, and my sweet, hard-working husband and a late dinner to look forward to.

Researching, writing, sitting for hours at a desk poring over books—that which was anathema during my school years gives me such great pleasure now.  Who'd have thought?

I never could keep cousins straight.  First cousins—the children of my parents' siblings—I understood, but I was lost when it came to second and third cousins, let alone those with the "removed" designation.  Not that I cared; it was rarely an issue for me.  When genealogy entered my life, however, family relationships suddenly needed to be a whole lot more specific.

After much puzzing over confusing definitions and tables, I gained enough head-knowledge to create the following algorithm.  My gut instincts in the matter are still a bit fuzzy, so I fall back on the strategy of the confused high school algebra student and rely on formulas. (More)

A common theme over at the Front Porch Republic is a respect for place: for home and community, for not only eating locally but being locally, staying in (or returning to) one's hometown rather than venturing off to "better" places.  The article Root Hog or Die is where I chose to ask a question that has been bothering me about this approach to life, much as I like some of the ideas. (More)