Lift Up Your Hearts!

I recently read the answers to a genealogist's request for people's "top three genealogical regrets," and discovered that I am not alone.  Hands down, the greatest frustration and sorrow reported was over not recording stories and asking questions of those who died taking irretrievable history with them.  I'm far from the only one who developed an interest in family history too late to get easy and accurate answers to the family mysteries that are now taking so much time and effort to unravel, and which may never be made clear.  From bare-facts birth, death, and marriage information, to photographs of people and places once dearly loved by those whose love made us what we are, to the unique, intimate, and irreplaceable stories of a family's daily lives, thoughts, feelings, and culture—these personal connections with history all too often mean little to the young, engrossed as they are in the here and now.

Even those fortunate young people who take an interest in their elders' tales are rarely forward-thinking enough to make sure the stories are recorded, nor do they often know at the age of 20 what questions they will wish answered when they are 50.  It must, therefore, be the responsibility of the older generation to assemble, record, and save what information they can, keeping it safe "against that day" when their children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren will be grateful for their efforts.

When I speak of elders, I do not necessarily mean old folks.  Trust me, when you try to remember events for which you have no written record, you discover you can recall but little of many momentous occasions you were certain you'd never forget, so don't think you can easily delay the project till the time when your kids are all grown, or when you retire.  Here are some lessons I've learned, mostly the hard way, about how to avoid genealogical regrets.

• Keep a diary. I speak as one whose own journal-keeping has become exceedingly spotty in the last couple of years, and who wishes she'd started it sooner than after her youngest child was already two years old, so I'm no role model.  But what have managed to record has been an invaluable memory aid and a source of many great family stories that otherwise would have been lost.  The thought of keeping a written, daily journal can be intimidating, but almost anything is better than nothing.  Even brief notes, such as "Today Bill, Joan, and Tiffany came for dinner," or "Jeffrey swam the full length of the pool," can trigger memories for later expansion.  The more detail the better, especially if it includes thoughts, feelings, and philosophical musings, but good enough is better than perfect if perfect isn't going to happen.


• Take pictures, and label them.  Digital cameras make it easy to take photographs, but all too often that means 100 times more unlabelled photos to puzzle over.  When I look up to the shelves above my desk and see album after album of photos. most of which will lose all meaning if I don't identify them, I become Dorothy, watching the sand pour inexorably through the hourglass and trying not to panic.


• Identify family heirlooms.  You may treasure your great-grandmother's teacup, but if your heirs don't know it was hers, it's just another non-microwaveable dish.  Take pictures, label them, and make sure your kids know where the information is stored. 


• Write down the stories from your past, especially where they intersect other people's.  As important as I believe my genealogical work to be, always nagging at the back of my mind is the realization that I am the eldest in my family, and if I get killed by a car as I bike along the trail (as happened to one woman here recently), many stories will be lost that my siblings and children would rather hear than know the identity of their great-great-great grandparents.


• Find a safe place to keep your irreplaceable information.  The three most important words in data storage:  backup, backup, backup.  Don't trust to one medium, either; CDs deteriorate over time, hard drives crash, papers get moldy.  Determine the person in your family most interested in taking over your family history collection after you die, and include that bequest in your will.  If you can find no one who cares enough to save it for future generations, consider bequeathing some of it to a long-standing and reputable genealogical society.


• Document your sources.  Facts and stories are of minimal value when stripped of source information.  Does Great-Great-Grandpa Jim's birth date come from a family Bible, an unreliable Internet genealogy, his birth certificate, or the failing memory of Aunt Jane?  Who told the story of Uncle Dick falling out of the apple tree—Dick himself, or his second cousin who wasn't there but heard the story from his sister?


• Organize, organize, organize.  All the data in the world is useless if no one can find it, or if it fills 20 large books no one else will want to store, much less read.


• Distribute your work.  Don't wait till it's perfect, or even half done, to share your discoveries with others.  Several short stories now are much more likely to bless your family than a masterpiece unearthed only after your will is read.  Put your unfinished (but organized) work where it can be seen:  you'll gain proofreaders and contributors, you may inspire others to record their own family history, and you'll have established another level of backup for your data.


• Don't be overwhelmed, but start today and be consistent.  Find five minutes at the end of each day to jot down a few notes and you'll create a priceless legacy for your children.  Can you spare twenty minutes instead?  Choose one project—photo identification, writing your children's birth stories, whatever inspires you at the moment—and apply the Daffodil Principle. Dedicate a mere 15 minutes a day to that project—consistently, four days a week, for a just 40 weeks out of the year—and by this time next year you will  have put in a full work-week's worth of time and accomplished wonders.  Maybe even have moved on to another project or two.


• Don't allow the knowledge that the future is rapidly closing in on your ability to document the past take away from your life in the present.  I'm still working on this one, too.

Earlier this month the Seattle Times ran a heartwarming genealogy story by Jan Burak Schwert about her husband's accidental meeting, in a German pub, of a man who shared both his interest in genealogy and his great-great-grandfather.  The meeting itself was not planned, but the ground well-prepared, since they were in Germany, and that particular small town, searching for  information on his ancestors.  ("You fly down the street on a chance that you'll meet, And you meet—not really by chance.")  Despite the dilution of so many generations, the two looked like brothers.

I'm not likely to have such an experience in a small, foreign town, since I must go back one generation further still to find my first ancestor not born in this country, and I don't think anyone would look at me and say, "Irish."  Nonetheless there's something wonderful about connecting with long-lost relatives, even first cousins.  :)

Today's NEHGS eNews includes the following lovely passage written on July 4, 1632 by New England Puritan leader John Winthrop. (The website version the eNews link will take you to is currently a few issues behind, but will eventually catch up to the one to which I refer, which is Vol. 10, No. 19).

I have much difficulty to keep John Galloppe here by reason his wife will not come [to the New England colony]. I marvel at the woman’s weakness that she will live miserably with her children there, when she might live comfortably here with her husband. I pray persuade and further her coming by all means: if she will come let her have the remainder of his wages, if not, let it be bestowed to bring over his children, for so he desires: it would be above £40 loss for him to come for her.

Say what you want about the difficulties of family separation, and the desirability of reunion, and I will agree with you.  But I marvel at the arrogance, duplicity, bullying, and blackmail from a leader who was loved and respected by so many.  (Actually, it reminds me of a modern-day religous leader some of us know. Let the reader understand.  Perhaps more strong, innovative leaders than we'd like to believe are a curious admixture of high intelligence, charismatic personality, stubborn will, and arrogant self-righteousness.)

I won't pretend anything other than a highly selfish interest in my dismay at the decision by the Catholic Church to forbid digitization of their parish records.  I disagree with the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), but genealogists and other historians owe them a great debt for the records they have kept and assembled over the years, records which they make freely available to people of all faiths.

Anyone who has tried to find their European ancestors knows that the parish baptismal records are critically important, often the only record of someone's birth.  This is not an issue of privacy concerns, as the records of interest are for several hundred years dead.

The concern of the Catholics is with not wanting to facilitate the Mormon practice of posthumus, vicarious baptism for their ancestors—which for those of European descent means ancestors who were baptized by the Catholic Church.  I have a problem with that practice, too, but my own faith is strong enough to be assured it's a meaningless ritual, and finding that some of my ancestors have been vicariously baptized into the Morman faith bothers me no more than hearing that some voodoo practicioner had posthumusly hexed them.  They are in God's hands, far beyond the reach of either Mormon or witch doctor.

This action by the Catholic Church says to me that they grant the Mormon ritual more efficacy than I would hope they really believe.  Jewish leaders have chimed in as well, calling the practice arrogant and insulting.  Perhaps, but only in the sense that it's arrogant to believe that I'm right and you're wrong, of which Catholics and Jews are also guilty.  I would hope that the faith of both Jews and Catholics was robust enough to handle this.  If they are so certain that they are right and the Mormons wrong, they can afford to be patient with those who are erring.  If they doubt their own faith, that's all the more reason not to slam the door.

With polygamy in the news these days, it seems a good time to report on my discovery of one of our stranger cousins. Fourth cousin five times removed to both Porter and me (through different lines), Aaron Johnson, born in 1806, the tenth of the thirteen children of Didymus and Rahuna (Stephens) Johnson, was just another name in my genealogical database, discovered during a convoluted search for the ancestors of Stephen Johnson, husband of Lucina Burr (sister of Porter's great-great-great grandmother) whose grave we found last summer in a small cemetery in Haddam, Connecticut.

Just another name, that is, until I found Aaron's entry in Paul Franklin Johnson's invaluable Genealogy of Captain John Johnson of Roxbury, Massachusetts. It's not unusual to find ancestors with more than one spouse, thanks to disease, war, and complications of childbirth. Large families were also not uncommon. But Aaron's entry stands out for covering two pages with his eleven wives and forty-three children! A perusal of the data makes all clear: although born in Haddam, Aaron died in Utah. Although the book presents only bare-bones genealogical data, Aaron's pages read like a history of the Mormon Church; in fact, he was apparently one of the church pioneers and was even a bishop.

That's a long way from Haddam.

Our newly-found Smith Genealogy manuscript, which I mentioned in a previous post, is proving a treasure not only of facts but of stories.  Here's one about my great-great-great grandmother, Margery Irwin, who was the author's grandmother.

Grandmother was born east of the mountains we think, in Lancaster County, Pa.  She was brought west of the mountains when five years old, packed in a wallet on a pack saddle.  Grandmother on one side and her sister on the other and a bottle of milk and skillet with them. 

As with much of my life, my genealogcial work goes in spurts; I love to get deeply into a project and run with it until the demands of life pull me, reluctantly, away—or until I get heartily sick of it and must set it aside for a while.  Genealogical research is not all success and great discovery; documentation and data entry are mostly tedious gruntwork, and mining for new data produces much more gangue than ore.  I'm now at a stage where what's needed most is organization and the above-mentioned gruntwork, so naturally I'm finding other projects more attractive.

Thus it is amusing as well as delightful to find myself showered last week with more new data than I can do justice to in a month.  Perhaps it's a case of casting one's bread upon the waters, for it began when, as part of my e-mail backlog reduction project, I organized and cleaned up my data on the descendants of Louisa Curtiss and Benjamin Wells for someone who had requested it.  (That was one of the e-mails from 2005!)  In the process I happened upon a piece of information that led to a major breakthrough in my Rice line, about which I will write later.

The very next day I heard from a cousin the amazing news that she, doing some housecleaning after my aunt's death, discovered boxes of pictures (alas, mostly unlabelled) and two exciting documents:  a professional genealogy of my Vick line created in the early 1940's, and a genealogy of my Smith ancestors done probably in the early 1890's by a family member.  The Vick information is almost totally new and pushes that line back quite a ways.  I already knew much of the direct-line Smith information, but there's much that is new on the collateral lines, some great details and family stories, and gratifying confirmation of several guesses I'd made from existing data.

Wiping the drool from my mouth I rushed over to my cousin's house to borrow the treasures, thinking I could scan the pages and the useful photos and return them in a day or two.  Ha!  I'm doing what I can to get the material back to them in a timely fashion, but I'm up to 150 scans so far and not halfway through.  This is just scanning; analyzing and entering the data will take much, much longer.

Not that I mind in the least.

I've added a new category to this blog:  Genealogy.  This won't be the first post, as I've reclassified some earliers ones to which that designation applies.  I haven't said much yet about this hobby of mine, but this may be the best way to keep family members up to date on what I'm discovering.  While you're waiting for another Christmas CD, that is.  :)

If this is the first of my genealogy posts you see, click here for a is a quick summary of why I found myself, against all odds, caught up in a hobby that is not only delightful and challenging, but also would have shocked my younger self.

As Smithical well knows (we all laughed when she tagged me), I find most memes silly, so I'm breaking the rules by breaking the chain and not tagging anyone.  But I respect her and love reading her blog, so I'll play along a little bit.  Besides, it's easier than writing about more important matters, and all I feel up to in the 40 minutes I have before going to the dentist.

Five random and/or odd things about me:

• I grew up thinking that genealogy and family history were unutterably boring, and that anyone who cared about such things must be a snob.   About five years ago I discovered that genealogical research is more fun than a World of Puzzles magazine, and learning about my ancestors has made history (once an exceedingly dull subject) come alive for me.

• Make that history and literature.  My direct ancestors (nth great-grandparents) include Duncan I of Scotland (think MacBeth), Edward I of England (Braveheart), King John of England (Robin Hood and The Lion in Winter, and the Magna Charta), King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine (Becket and The Lion in Winter) as well as William the Conqueror and Charlemagne.  I suppose that makes me one of those snobs I despised, if it counts as bragging to be related to so many scoundrels.  :)  However, this is nothing particularly unusual; such ancestry is common to many people with early New England ancestors.  Eminent genealogist Gary Boyd Roberts (formerly of the New England Historic Genealogical Society) has said, "Living Americans with 50-100 immigrant ancestors in New England (or Long Island), in Quaker (but not German or Scots-Irish) Pennsylvania, or in the Tidewater South (but often not the Piedmont, Shenandoah Valley, or mountainous "backcountry") can expect to find a royally descended forebear."

• Nonetheless, I have not yet been able to find any for Porter, despite his extensive New England ancestry.  He has at least three separate Mayflower families in his line, however. 

• We have friends in France who live on the site of one of the above-mentioned Henry II's fortifications, and not far from where he and Eleanor of Aquitaine are buried.

• Ancestors aside, We have the best family and extended family in the world!  (None of them scoundrels.)

That's it.  No tagging, no pressure for anyone else.  But it was fun to think about.

Apologies to those of you who are waiting for the story of last weekend's adventures in Sarasota.  That will come, but in the meantime it's been a while since I posted, and I just came upon the essay I wrote for a genealogy contest with the less-than-inspiring title of this post.

The circumstances were interesting, however.  Because the sponsoring organization was Irish, I thought my story might be of interest to them.  Maybe it was, but not enough to win. However, a blog owner can be her own publisher, and since they didn't want it, I'm sharing it here.  :)

Why My Family History Is Important to Me

A few special people develop an interest in history and family early in life.  I was not one of them.  As a child, I was interested in what was close by:  the present, the near future, our immediate family.  Distant things—the past, the future, relatives I didn’t know—impinged little on the circle of my interest.  Most especially and deliberately I was not interested in my ancestry, who my forebears were and where they came from.

A child’s natural self-centeredness played a large part in my lack of interest.  So, too, did a kind of reverse snobbery.  I did not want to be classed with those who bragged that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower, nor with those who joined the Daughters of the American Revolution.  My parents must have had some of the same attitude, because the subject certainly wasn’t of any interest to them, in spite—or because—of the fact that my mother’s grandmother was herself a member of the DAR.

What opened the world of genealogy to me was my college-age daughter's sudden and intense interest in Irish music and dance.  After an exhilarating music seisiún, she would find it disappointing to have no answer to the oft-asked question, "What part of Ireland are your ancestors from?"  As far as any of us knew, she had no Irish ancestors.

But we really didn't know anything at all, so I began to dig, hoping not for gold, but for green.  Lo and behold, there on my mother's side was Robert Henry, born about 1740, in Ireland!  That's all it said on his tombstone, but at least my daughter could claim one Irish ancestor.  In another branch I found Nathan Smith, from County Tyrone, and though I haven't yet found an origin for my Cunninghams and Daughertys, their names give me hope.

Finding Irish ancestors was the goal, but I became hooked on the process.  For someone who loves puzzles as much as I do, genealogy research is more fun than a cup of tea, a new World of Puzzles magazine, and a free afternoon.  The map of my origins now comprises many countries, and each name, city, and date I add is a treasure.

Age and experience have a way of changing one's perspective.  I still have no interest in joining any of the hereditary societies for which I qualify—sometimes many times over—but at last I realize that genealogy is only Honor thy father and thy mother writ large.  Contrary to what I learned in school, history is not dull!  It is the fascinating story of ideas and their consequences worked out in the lives of human beings.  Our people—our ancestors and descendants, whether by blood, adoption, marriage, or some other deep connection—provide our link to that story.  We stand at the point of Now; it is our family that gives us the past and the future as well.

Throughout my school years, I hated the study of history.  Perhaps that's not quite accurate; I remember in elementary school enjoyable units on Indians and on Early Settlers, and a large and informative project on Ethiopia.  Progress after that was mostly negative, however.

A 10th grade World Cultures teacher was fairly inspiring, despite his other incarnation as a baseball coach.  Other than that I'd have to say that my history teachers could hardly have done more to make the study of history dull and tedious.  On top of that, I somehow picked up the idea that one was either a "math and science person" or a "history and English person," and it was not possible to be in both camps.  I staked my claim squarely in the math and science camp.

It was not till well after I graduated from college that I discovered that the story of our past is vital—in the sense of being full of life, as well as in the sense of critical importance.  I also learned the foolishness of limiting one's interests by someone else's categories.

I'm most definitely hindered by my lack of historical background. Dates and events are lost on me that are so ingrained in Porter he has difficulty imagining my ignorance.  To be fair, I believe it was more his own interest than his school experiences that gave him that knowlege, but in any case, he has a clear historical framework into which any new information neatly fits, which makes it easier to remember.  I have none of that.

But the foundation is growing, brick by brick and fact by fact, even though the required mortar seems to be many repetitions.  I can live with that—I'm learning, and that makes me content.

Perhaps the greatest help in my quest into our past has been my recently-acquired hobby of genealogy.  I, who had previously had no interest even in relatives beyond my immediate circle, now delight in dredging up information on even the remotest ancestor.  That I have discovered some to be famous, royal, and/or historically interesting thrills me.  To the best of my ability to determine, my joy is not that of snobbery; in fact, one of the reasons I eschewed any ancestor interest in the past was my annoyance at such organizations as the DAR and other people's bragging about their ancestry.  I truly would rather have found Native American ancestors than Mayflower immigrants.

But now I talk about them all, myself.  What excites me is having a connection to historical times, be it through my late-19th century Western Pennsylvanians, or distant kings of England.

Which brings me, at last, to the inspiration for this post.

Don't ask me why I'm reading a 1000-page book on the history of the Crusades.  I'm not sure myself, except that the Christianity Today review of Christopher' Tyermans' God's War was intriguing, and the book was available at our local library.  I'm currently on page 19 of the Introduction, and so far, it's fascinating.  Especially when I'm struck by passages such as the following.  Don't worry about understanding it, since it's completely out of context:

As a result of dynastic inheritance and a military and political victory in a long English civil war, in 1154 the situation was further complicated when Henry, count of Anjou, also duke of Normandy by inheritance from his mother and duke by marriage of Aquitane, became king of England.  Henry II, the first of the Angevin (i.e. Anjou was his patrimony) kings of England, was overlord to far more of France than his supposed French sovereign Louis VII:  Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Brittany, Poitou, the douchy of Aquitaine, the Limousin, Gascony and parts of the Auvergne, with unachieved claims to parts of Languedoc.

Sounds pretty dry, right?  Not if Henry II is your distant grandfather, Eleanor of Aquitaine your distant grandmother, and Maine a part of France you visited last spring, where you stood on the mount of one of Henry II's fortifications. Which just happens to be on part of the home of some friends of yours.

Connections!  That's what it's all about.  The more you learn, the more you know; the more you know, the easier it is to learn, and the more you want to learn.  The very best part of education is to inspire that victorious cycle.

In honor of Flag Day, I give a salute not only to our own flag, but also to those of our ancestors (so far discovered).

                 

These aren't entirely accurate, as they represent modern countries that did not exist when our ancestors came here (e.g. Germany), but it's a good general picture.  Also, some of the flags represent countries that were separate but are now joined.

The purpose of Memorial Day is to honor those who have given their lives in our country's wars.  The advantage of a blog is that I can do that with a link, so this year I'm doing something different, and give the day a genealogical bent.

According to no less an authority than Wikipedia,

The southeastern United States celebrates Decoration Day as a day to decorate the graves of all family members, and it is not reserved for those who served in the military. The region observes Decoration Day the Sunday before Memorial Day.

Therefore I will metaphorically decorate the graves of all our family members who have gone before,

From my most ancient documented ancestor (so far)

Pepin d'Heristal (abt 635 - 16 Dec 714)
(You can follow the line back further from the link, but despite what I said above, I'm waiting to consult another authority than Wikipedia.)

To our beloved

Isaac Christopher Daley (21 Nov 2002 - 23 Nov 2002)

Any extravagance around the time of a birthday counts as part of the celebration, and thus comes without guilt. Thus when Porter wanted to attend the Mad Cow Theatre Company's It Was a Very Good Year, part of the Orlando Cabaret Festival, and even suggested we get the special dinner package, who was I to complain?

Enter into a Time Machine as you walk thru the doors of Club Moo, Mad Cow Theatre's intimate nightclub room. Grab a chair at your table as you sip a cool drink and enjoy...a celebration of one year in the life of America: the news, the lifestyles, the gossip, and most important—the music.

The package including the show, dinner, parking, and a glass of wine to take into the theater. Porter had chosen the year 1925 (other options were 1935, 1945, and 1955), and as we relaxed at our excellently-situated table I thought (as any genealogist would) about relatives who were alive in 1925. I tried to imagine myself as them, until I realized how extremely unlikely it would have been for any of my grandparents to be sitting in a cabaret drinking a glass of wine. So I just enjoyed the show. I'm sure they would have known the music, anyway. The cast comprised four singers and a pianist, and the show was simply some of the songs popular in 1925, held together by a minimal story line. The music was well done, and we were relieved that the era was presented straight, with no looking-back-from-the-future, mocking humor. My knowledge of the popular songs of any era is abysmal, but found I knew about half of these.

• I'm Sitting on Top of the World (Joe Young & Ray Henderson / Sam M. Lewis)
• Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue (Joe Young & Ray Henderson / Sam M. Lewis)
• Looking for a Boy (George & Ira Gershwin)
• Oh! Lady Be Good (George & Ira Gershwin)
• It Had to Be You (Gus Kahn & Isham Jones)
• Tea for Two (Irving Caesar / Vincent Youmans)
• Everybody Loves My Baby / Yes Sir! That's My Baby! (Jack Palmer/Spence Williams, Gus Kahn/Walter Donaldson)
• Always (Irving Berlin)
• Charleston (Cecil Mack & James P. Johnson
• Sweet Georgia Brown (Ben Bernie / Maceo Pinkard & Ken Casey)
• Clap Hands! Here Comes Charley! (Joseph Meyer / Billy Rose & Ballard MacDonald)
• Sweet and Low-down (George & Ira Gershwin)
• Shake That Thing (Papa Charlie Jackson)
• Keep Your Skirts Down, Mary ann (Robert King & Ray Henderson / Andrew B. Sterling)
• I Never Knew (Gus Kahn / Ted Fio Rito)
• Who (Hammerstein & Kern)
• Manhattan (Rodgers & Hart)
• Save Your Sorrow for Tomorrow (Al Sherman / B. G. De Sylva)

We had some time between the end of the show and our 5:30 dinner reservations, which we spent in the library. Porter found a book to check out, and I spent my time in the genealogy section, where I found Gary Boyd Roberts' The Royal Descents of 600 Immigrants. (Gary was the New England Historic Genealogical Society librarian who helped me get started on my research.) I didn't get very far in the book before we had to leave, but I did find that Robert Abell (a 9^th great grandfather on my mother's side) is the 11^th great grandson of Edward I, King of England (1239-1307). This is "Longshanks," who had William Wallace executed, and though Braveheart depicts him inaccurately and unfairly, he was nasty enough. You can't go very far in genealogy without running into both heros and villains, often in the same person, which is why I take as my genealogical motto Aslan's words in C. S. Lewis' Prince Caspian: You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, and that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.

Dinner at the nearby Napasorn Thai restaurant was wonderful. Because it was part of the package, we had to choose form a smaller menu, but that was no hardship. The spring rolls and gyoza we had for appetizers were perfect, and our dinners of pad Thai and panang curry were nearly as good. Next time we'll save money by making our own package—but this was definitely worth the cost because otherwise we'd never have discovered Napasorn. It also really felt like a date, because Porter made all the arrangements, and that was heavenly.