Branching Out

Can't do it. My relatively-recently-developed obsession with family history feels like a different thing, and leaving it here, tossed in with everything else, just seems wrong, somehow. Besides, it offends my compulsion to have things neatly organized. This blog is already messy enough.

Mostly I'm learning to recognize the glazed look people get when I start off on a family-related tear.

So, henceforth, I'll be Stalking Dead People in a place I've set aside for the purpose. I call it Out on a Limb, and there's a link to it above. You can check it out if you're interested, or skip it if you're not. If you find it as engaging and fascinating as a textbook on advanced particle physics, well, you've been warned.

Everything else will go here. Dogs and books and living relatives and MS and whingeing about anything that strikes me as worthy of complaint. It will be as engaging and fascinating as it's ever been.

Well, you've been warned.

It's Been a Long Afternoon

The mailman, come to kill us all! (And to drop off a package.) The ever-vigilant whippet, barking fiercely, frightens him away! (The mailman left the package at the door, and went back to his truck.)

The whippet is really quite pleased with himself.

The package is sitting on my desk.

I can't open it until Scarecrow quits work for the day, but I know what's in it, at least approximately. It's stuff my brother found when he was cleaning 65 years of accumulated detritus out of my mom and dad's house. It's stuff he didn't know what to do with, so he put it in a box and sent it to me.

It's been a long afternoon.

Surname Saturday

This should probably be filed under 'When we get bored, bad things happen.' If it crashes your browser –– or your machine — apologies. Really. Sackcloth and ashes.

But if it doesn't, is this fun, or what?
You put some words into this Web app, kill much of a perfectly good Saturday afternoon messing with colors and sizes and shapes and all, and get something to take home for your mom to stick on the refrigerator door.

Cool, no?

Starting with my family surnames, I came up with a graphic that reflects the superior fecundity of the French-Canadian habitant over, well, pretty much everybody. There is one non-French-sounding name you don't need a magnifying glass to read (Baltes), but the rest are pretty hard to find.

OK, it doesn't really reflect any such thing. What it really means is that the Catholic Church in Québec kept voluminous records, a lot of them are online, and I'm lazy.

And that when we get bored, bad things happen.

Searching Cemeteries

There’s one nice thing about dead people. They’re not going anywhere.

Several of my mother's forbears are buried in the St. Philip Neri cemetery in Empire, Michigan. The parish still exists; they even have a website. The website even has a history page.

"The history of St. Philip Neri Church begins in the middle of the 19th century when the first Catholic settlers came to the Glen Lake/Empire area. Over 30 priests have served as regular pastors here, while the descendants of the first settlers have stayed to help build the parish.

"In the year 1855 Fr. Mrack traveled from Peshawbestown to attend to the settlers' spiritual needs.… Fr. Mrack continued to serve the people of this area until his appointment as Bishop of Marquette in 1869 to succeed Bishop Baraga. Following Fr. Mrack's appointment as Bishop. Fr. Herbstrit was assigned to Suttons Bay. Upon his departure, he was followed by Fr. Zom. Fr. Shackeltown succeeded Fr. Zom, and was then himself succeeded by Fr. Zussa. Fr. Zorn then returned and remained until 1877."

This list of pastors is starting to have the same effect on my attention as the lists of begats in the Bible.

"During this time the area was becoming more populated. Frank Payment sailed the Great Lakes and landed in Glen Haven."

Wait! Frank Payment? I know Frank Payment! (I'm using 'know', here, in the genealogical sense. Frank Payment is my mother's great granduncle.)

"Impressed with the area, he encouraged several people from his hometown of Ogdensburg, N.Y., to emigrate after the Civil War, and about the year 1867 they settled in East Empire."

Or something like that. For one thing, Ogdensburg, New York wasn't Frank Payment's hometown. Frank was baptized François Xavier Payment in 1842 in Ste-Geneviève-de-Pierrefonds, near Montréal. His three older siblings, and three (maybe four) of his six (maybe seven) younger sisters were also born there. Ogdensburg is on the St. Lawrence River, immediately across from Prescott, Ontario, and guessing from census records and where the youngest three girls were born it seems the family lived in this general area for some years, sometimes on one side of the river, sometimes the other. It's still a puzzle.

I know Frank was in Michigan when he registered for military service in 1863, but then he enlisted with the 76th New York Regiment and served with New York units for the duration of the war. After the war it's clear that somebody must have rounded up the in-laws and outlaws and herded them to Michigan, but I didn't know Frank was the instigator. I still don't know why they all left Canada, or why they left New York, or how Frank came to be in Michigan in the first place. But somehow, between 1865 and 1875, nine of Frank's 10 (maybe 11) siblings, and his parents, settled within a couple of miles of each other, east of Empire, Michigan.

"Soon Masses were being held in the homes of Pat Kams and Tom Deering."

(Tom Deering was Frank's brother-in-law.)

"During this time the only road of any sort was the Benzonia Trail. To arrive at the farms where Mass was being celebrated the early settlers blazed a trail through the forest. Often they remained overnight, returning home the next day so they would have the advantage of daylight to find their way.… In 1906 parishioners built a horse barn on the northeast comer of the property to keep the horses dry and warm. It could accommodate more than 20 teams. This was a necessity because Mass frequently would start two hours late because of the number of confessions."

Who knew a parish church website could be so darned entertaining?

Anyway, the reference to Ogdensburg as Frank Payment's home town sent me off to see if I could find anything more about the time the family spent in that area. No luck with birth or marriage or death or cemetery records, and no census records I didn't already know about. Then I stumbled onto an online archive of historical newspapers from northern New York State.

Newspapers were the Facebook of their day, full of items like:

"Alexander Poirier has returned to his home in DeKalb Junction from the Ogdensburg city hospital.

"Ms. Ella O'Leary of Ogdensburg is a guest of her mother, Mrs. Julia O'Leary, in Potsdam.

"A number of venturesome people have crossed the river between Brockville and Morristown on foot during the past few days, but they are taking long chances as the channel is very unsafe and the ferrymen frequently break through the thin ice covering where the current is strongest.

"John Hazen of Canton, a student at St. Lawrence University, is spending a few days with Harold Leonard.

"An unusual accident happened recently to one of Edwin Sweet's cows on his Massina farm…"

I don't usually think to check newspapers. What fun are they, if you can't read? Most of Frank's forbears, including his parents and several of his siblings, were illiterate. Frank could read, though, so maybe it was worth a look. In the St. Lawrence Republican, Wednesday, 5 January 1915, page 3, column 3, I found this:

"Mr. and Mrs. Frank Payment and Mrs. Matilda Scott of Empire Michigan, are visiting their sister, Miss Teresa Beau."

Virtual happy dance! Frank's wife was Louisa Bow, and her hometown was Ogdensburg, New York. Since Frank also had a sister-in-law and a brother-in-law in the Bow family (long story for another post), I've been trying to track these guys down for the best part of forever. Bow can be a tricky name. It can be Bow, or Beau. Or Bean. Or Boe, or Baye or Boh, or Boie, or Boye, or Bothe, or LeBeau, or Debow, or Vanderbow… They can come from France, via Canada or not, or Scotland, or Ireland, or Germany, or China… They might have changed the way they spelled it. In fact, they did.

"Miss Teresa Beau."

I'll find them. No rush. They're not going anywhere.

It Must Be That Time

A few leaves on one of the bigleaf maples outside my window have gone yellow, and the black cottonwoods are starting to look tattered and worn. Scarecrow is starting to whine about having to sweep the leaves off the deck. We've had an amazing summer, but it won't last forever. It must be that time. Fall is on the way.

Juvenile dispersal is a big deal to biologists. Where juveniles go affects population growth, resource utilization, the genetic structure of the population, all kinds of stuff.

It must be that time. Tuffy went off to Japan. One of her friends is in the military, stationed in Hawaii (that should count as dispersal, since she's from Seattle, and in the service there's no telling where she'll wind up.) A friend's son just left for a year in France. In a few days my oldest nephew, Arkman, is leaving for 18 months in Bahrain. They'll all be doing interesting things, in interesting places. I'm looking forward to sharing their adventures; it's one of the advantages of belonging to a relentlessly verbal family.

I recently discovered that Tuffy's relentless verbosity is all Scarecrow's doing. A couple of weeks ago, pretty much by accident, I stumbled across a couple of things written by Scarecrow's fourth great-granduncle, Walter Bates. One was a narrative concerning, among other things, the early days of the revolution, "with some account of the sufferings of the loyalists." I knew that Walter's brother, William (Scarecrow's fourth great-grandfather), was a sergeant in the Queen's Rangers during the Revolutionary war. After the war, being less than welcome in the newly United States, William went to Nova Scotia, and eventually settled in Ontario. I didn't know anything about Walter, who apparently became High Sheriff of Kingston, Nova Scotia, in which capacity he wrote the concisely titled The mysterious stranger; or, Memoirs of Henry More Smith, alias Henry Frederick Moon, alias William Newman, who is now confined in Simsbury mines, in Connecticut, for the crime of of burglary: containing an acount of his confinement in the gaol of King's county, province of New-Brunswick, where he was under sentence of death : with a statement of his succeeding conduct before and since his confinement in Newgate. He also wrote some really bad poetry. Who knew? Judging from his narrative, he was a man of strongly-held opinions; another trait he seems to have bequeathed to his descendants.

Family history explains so much.

Location, Location, Location

It worked. If Tuffy can come up with a blog post, so can I. Not that I’m competitive or anything.

A friend of mine is currently selling one house and buying another. This friend (call her Dorothy – ”There’s no place like home… there’s no place like home…”) put her place up for sale on a Friday. By Sunday, she had three offers, and had accepted one of them. The following Saturday, she found the house she wanted – a really cute little 1920s craftsman in North Tacoma. Offer made, and accepted. Sold one house and bought another in less than two weeks. Both transactions, knock wood, are proceeding smoothly. I’m still shaking my head.

My own experiences in the real estate market have always been considerably more painful than that, but I still like looking at the places people live. When I’m gawking at houses that I’m not going to buy, I don’t have to be practical. I won't have to scrub the bathrooms, or keep up the yard, or pay for heat, or deal with hundred-year-old plumbing, or make scary big house payments. I don’t care if the schools are terrible, and if it would mean the commute from hell, I won’t have to make it. I won’t have to deal with snow up to here in the winter, or black flies in the spring, or mosquitoes in the summer. Heck, I look at houses all the time that aren't anywhere close to being wheelchair accessible, but it's still fun to look.

People shape the places they live. Looking at a house, especially an old house, and speculating about the lives of the people who lived there is kind of like finding a seashell and wondering about the creature that created it.

In trying to find out about the people in my family, I find myself stalking places as well as people. After my mother’s forbears made the big leap across the ocean, they had apparently done about as much moving around as they were inclined to do for the next couple of centuries. They were farmers, mostly, and tended to put down roots. I spend a lot of time (virtually speaking) in 17th and 18th century Yamaska and St-François-du-Lac (Québec), in 19th century Provement/Lake Leelanau and Centerville and Kasson (Michigan), and in Toledo from 1870 to 1949. I can’t go there in person, but there are all kinds of resources on the ’net; local government websites, and libraries and historical societies, churches and cemeteries. And maps. So many maps. And maps are magic.

For example: How did my paternal grandfather in Racine, Wisconsin meet my grandmother in Chicago? It seemed like quite a stumper until my cousin (Tinker) suggested I look at a map. They’re right across the state line from each other. Duh. I’m not from around there, so I didn’t know that. I still don’t know the details, romance-wise, but location-wise, it’s not as unlikely as I thought it sounded.

Another example: In 1860, my gggreat-grandfather Maxime Payment, and his sister, my gggreat grandaunt Merceline, appear with their respective families in the U.S. Census of Ogdensburg, New York. Now, I knew they eventually wound up in Michigan, and I still don’t know why they left Canada, but New York? Turns out Ogdensburg is right across the river from the ancestral stomping ground in Québec. And getting from there to Michigan? Water all the way.

Over the course of the next decade or so, at least six of the siblings in this family, and their parents, claimed homesteads in Leelanau County, Michigan. They were spread over two townships, so it wasn’t until I looked at the whole map that I realized the Payments on the eastern edge of one Township were really close to the Payments on the western edge of the adjacent Township. Duh.

The 1851 plat (I love maps!) includes the surveyor’s description of the terrain, and the type of tree cover. It is a “township of rich farming lands – surface generally rolling – soil varies from sand to sandy loam; bottomed on clay and mixed with lime and coarse pebbles – soft and spongy – Principal timber sugar [maple] and beech with elm, ash, lynn (?), and on the ridges, hemlock. No waste land in the township.”

Maxime Payment took out a homestead patent on a 160 acre section in Township 28N 13W. His father, François Xavior, patriarch of this Payment clan, claimed an adjoining 40 acres.

Merceline and her husband, Julius Bow, settled on 120 acres in the next Township to the west, in “a valley of superior land.”

François Xavior (Frank) Payment took an L-shaped 160 acres nearby, including a “high hill giving a fine view of Bear Lake.”

Anastasie Payment and her husband John Deering claimed a 160 acre section of “level rich first-rate land.”

Mary Payment and her husband Thomas Deering (brother of Anastasie’s husband John), settled an adjacent 160 acre section.

Jules (Joseph) Payment established his homestead on the 160 acre section adjacent to that.

Superimposing the 1881 plat map on a contemporary satellite view of the same place (God I love technology!) and (roughly, because I don’t feel like messing with it at the moment) pasting the two township maps next to each other, you can still see the section lines marking the original land patents. Rose Hill Cemetery, where Merceline and Frank and their spouses are buried, is right across the road from Maxime Payment’s homestead. (Maxime, now called Michael, and Jules, now called Joseph, and their wives, are buried in the Saint Philip Neri Cemetery in Empire, a few miles away.) There’s still a clearing where the farmhouse is marked on the plat of Jules Payment’s homestead.

There’s no home there now.

Sunny-Side-Up in Seattle

Looks like we get eggs this weekend.

The "sunshine" icon on my desktop always makes me think of a sunny-side-up egg.

Crazy. On Monday morning, when I started this post, it was snowing.

wtf?

It was just the occasional flake and it didn't last long, but still, wtf? No snow all winter, and we get snow on the third day of spring? Does that seem right to you? OK, an hour later there was even a little blue sky and you could almost call it sunshine, like, oh wait, spring, yeah, sorry, my mistake, I'm with the program now…

Who knew that whining could exercise that much control over the weather? I'll have to remember that.

When it's supposed to be sunny the "sunshine" weather icon still looks to me like somebody's trying to fry an egg on my desktop. I think the association is left over from life in rural Michigan, long ago and far away. We had a big garden, and when we canned tomatoes we'd throw the tomato skins to the chickens, who seemed to enjoy them very much. A few days later, the hens, juiced to the gills on carotenoids, began laying eggs with the most amazing florescent orange yolks. Kind of like the sunshine icon, only maybe sunnier. It took some getting used to, but even now, dog's years later, I still think grocery store eggs look hopelessly pallid and a little sad.

Tuffy has been posting pictures on Facebook (even some videos, because even though she forgot her camera, she had her iPhone and holy crap I love modern technology!) of a sumo tournament in Osaka. Another case where it would be nice to have some words to go along with the pictures.

Last week, in the course of stalking Scarecrow's grandfather, I found out he was an inventor. His Abrasive Mounting for Grinding Devices was patented on August 30, 1932.

Scarecrow didn't know anything about it, and thought it was pretty cool. And I got to send the patent to Scarecrow's brother, Tinman, the engineer, who, as it happens, makes grinding devices himself. So that was fun. And technical drawings are all done on computer these days, but back then it was paper and ink and a straight edge, and the result was a work of art. So that was fun, too.

You never know what's going to turn up. I was just trying to find out when PD Bates died. Which, by the way, I still don't know.

Brothers in Arms

Brothers in Arms. Literally. Or at least as literally as you're likely to get with something like that. During World War II, my dad and his brother, my uncle Willie, were both in the Army.

On July 14, 1944, Willie was someplace in the Pacific. He was 25 years old, and had been in the Army for a year and a half. My dad was 23. He had just finished basic training at Camp McCain, Mississippi, and would shortly be deployed to Germany.

This is the v-mail, complete with censor's stamp, that Willie sent to my dad. My brother found it 67 years later, when he was cleaning my dad's office after he died.

Dear Ez,
As I sit here, with my pen in one hand and the other busily engaged in warding off all manner of insect life, I wonder: If you and I will ever do any of those many things we planned to do. If our interests and desires will still be as similar as they always were. If you will be able to wear my clothes and I yours. If I will still remain in the category of the "wolf of all wolves." If Gordon will still be as cynical and disgusted with mankind. If Red will continue to collect the classics and make music his heart's ease in life. If that girl from the flower shop will be as appealing as ever. If the Trianon will still be a hangout on Wednesday night for the Spevaks'. If this damned war will cease and I can give up letter writing and my thoughts see their answers. As all bad things, so this – it ceases.
Your brud,
Wilfred

It's Working

If a picture is worth 1000 words, Tuffy’s latest photo essay put her 17,000 words ahead of me, blog-wise, so I guess I’d better get cracking. Not that we’re competitive or anything.

Nothing much going on around here lately, as far as I know. Not that anyone would tell me if there was.

I’ve been using some really cool online utilities to tidy up my family history database, a long-term project which is both extremely tedious, and very satisfying, in an OCD kind of way. And last weekend Scarecrow helped me scan some of the documents my brother unearthed in my mom and dad’s house, so I finally get to look at them. A few answers, and a lot of new questions.

I saw the video the library put together from the stuff they recorded the other day. It’s not as horrible as I had feared. Scarecrow looks presentable, and the whippets are pretty darned cute.

Rogue's Gallery

Finally.

This was one of those projects that just took forever. OK, not forever, maybe, but 13 years. At least. Depending on when you start counting. Getting things hung on the wall doesn’t sound like a big project, but we just never seemed to get it together.

It’s not art, really. Photos, mostly. Family photos, although neither my family nor Scarecrow’s is what you’d consider particularly decorative. Some of them are just snapshots, and not particularly good snapshots, at that. Still, coming up with stuff to hang was the easy part.

You think, just by chance, that the occasional image would be a standard size 4 x 6, 5 x 7, or 8 x 10, but no. Custom mats and frames can be expensive. In fact, standard size mats and frames can add up pretty quickly. And there are so many choices! Too many.

But what the heck. This is not art. It’s not a museum. Let’s just do it.

I scavenged eBay for frames unloaded at estate sales, and got about what you'd expect. Nothing matches anything else. Well, a couple do, but that was purely by accident. Scarecrow loaded the frames with our stuff (in some cases replacing pictures of people who are far more decorative than our relatives, but hanging pictures of people we don't know just wouldn’t be the same, would it?) and hung them on the wall.

My dad's family, mostly.

My mom's family.

Products of the Milburn Wagon Works in Toledo Ohio, where my gggrandfather, ggrandfather, and ggrand uncle worked.

Scarecrow's family. The empty frame is a placeholder for a picture of Scarecrow's mom in her wedding dress. He keeps promising to ask his brother, Tin Man, about it

It’s been 13 years, but it’s finally starting to look like we’ve moved in.

Lucky Me

Sparky left this morning. It was a good visit. He's a good guy, and I always enjoy his company. The dogs accepted him as a member of the pack (as long as he didn't wear his hat – Bareit didn't like the hat). They pretty much abandoned Scarecrow and me, preferring to hang with Sparky. They even slept on his bed most of the night (well, he could've shut the door, couldn't he?). They're moping around by the front door now, waiting for him to come back. I guess if you're looking for a devoted, one-man dog, you wouldn't choose a whippet anyway.

Although I'm sorry to see him go, I can't wait to dig into the pile of stuff he excavated from the sediment that had accumulated on the floor of my dad's office over the years.

Shuffling through it once, quickly, with Sparky, I saw some pretty cool stuff:

• a receipt for ladies lingerie, which my dad sold door-to-door after he graduated from high school; 
• the invoice for my dad's first car, a used Studebaker, for which he paid $75 and put $5 down; 
• v-mail between my dad and his brother when they were in the service during WWII; 
• a picture of my aunt and uncle at their wedding, with a guy who I'm pretty sure is my grandfather; 
• a copy of an application my dad submitted for a fellowship, with a whole bunch of information on it that I didn't know.

And Sparky says there's more where that came from.

This will keep me busy for now.

Family Matters

My very favorite brother is coming up tomorrow from Southern California for a visit. Sparky is my only brother – my only sibling, for that matter – but even if that were not the case I'm pretty sure he would still be my favorite. He's a good guy. I'm looking forward to spending some time with him.

It should be easier to get him up here, now that his oldest son (Arkman) recently took a job in our neck of the woods. Fortunately, Arkman still has zero furniture, so Sparky will be staying with us, this time at least.  It'll be fun!

Sparky has agreed to fill any empty space in his luggage with family papers or photos or whatever other detritus he might have run across in his excavations of the house where mom and dad lived (apparently without ever throwing anything away) for almost 60 years. Who knows what kind of stuff might turn up?

You never know what you'll find. After trying, off and on for a couple of years, to find out when my paternal grandmother arrived in this country, I had pretty much given up. I knew she came from a shtetl near Bobruisk in what was then the Russian Empire, and that she was traveling with at least one sister. I knew she was born sometime around 1890, although my dad always said she lied about her age. I knew her surname was common in the area she came from – the local equivalent of "Smith" – and that it could be spelled about 8,967 different ways. I knew (I thought) the girls' given names, although it turned out I really didn't. I thought she came here before 1906, because my father said she would call my grandfather a greenhorn because she had been here longer than he had. I looked every place I could think of, or at least every place I could find on the Internet, but couldn't find documentation of any of this. So I pretty much gave up and went on to other things. Then, a month or so ago, out of the blue, I ran across this:

It is the passenger manifest of the S.S. Lituania, sailing from Libau in Russia on 26 October, 1911. On line 12 is Riwe Gorelik. It says she's 21 years old, so she would have been born around 1890. On line 13 is Sore Gorelik, age 23. Both young women gave their occupation as tailoress. They said they were unable to read or write. They were Jews, from a Russian town called Pariczi in Minsk. Their nearest relative was their mother, Liebe Gorelik, in Pariczi. Their final destination was Chicago, Illinois.

Riwe Gorelik is my grandmother, Eva. Sore Gorelik is my great-aunt Sophie.

So you never know what might turn up, or where you might find it. I just wish I could show this to my dad. He spent a lot of time looking for it, and would've been happy to finally see it. I'll show it to Sparky and he'll think it's cool, but it won't be the same.

This is the three of us, captured in my mother's inimitable photographic style, sometime around 1954.

One more thing: On line 15 of the manifest is Basse Gorelik, a 19-year-old from Kcsedrin, which is a village near Pariczi. No relation, I don't think. Gorelik was a really common name in those parts.

Fair's Fair

It occurred to me that my previous post might have left the impression that my mother served in the military during World War II, and my father didn't. That's not true.

This was my father's main contribution to the war effort:

Between 1941 and 1945, Willys-Overland Motors in Toledo, Ohio, built a small four-wheel drive utility vehicle called the Willys MB. Production of this vehicle, popularly known as the Jeep, was considered essential to the war effort. It was so essential that, as a machinist employed by Willys-Overland, my father
was granted three deferments from military service.

He was finally drafted in 1944, and served in the Army Corps of Engineers. It was not a good fit. Fortunately the war ended in 1945, and the Army spat him back into civilian life. He went to the University of Toledo on the G.I. Bill, where he met my mother, and on to grad school at Caltech, which is how I came to be born in California. You knew this would eventually turn out to be about me, didn't you?

When my cousin was here for a visit earlier this year, he told me that our grandfather moved from Chicago to the Detroit area to work for Ford Motors. The story goes that Ford was not hiring Jews, so he went to work for Willys-Overland. This must've been before May 1914, because that was when my uncle was born in Toledo. (If you're not from around here, Toledo, Ohio is very close to Detroit, Michigan.) My grandfather was a cabinetmaker, and at the time, much of a car's chassis and frame was made of wood. My dad said my granddad was proud of the fact that he worked on the showroom models, the ones that had to be perfect. I don't know how long he worked there. In 1915 and 1916, the Toledo city directory gives his occupation as woodworker. By 1920, when my father was born, he had opened a grocery store. So this has nothing to do with my dad's military service, and it's not like my dad and my grandfather worked shoulder to shoulder on the production line or anything. They just worked for the same car company, 25 years apart.

Another digression: From 1926 to 1931, without help from anyone in my family, Willys-Overland produced a small car called the Whippet:

This also has nothing to do with my dad's military service. It doesn't really have anything to do with whippets either, but there it is.

My mom's family worked in the auto industry in Toledo, too, but that's a story I'll inflict on you another day.

Veterans Day

Marie Helen Couturier Spevak

13 September 1921 – 13 January 2012

photo c1945, U.S. Navy WAVES 

(Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service)

Thanks, Mom.

Looking for Sparklies

Two of my blogger buddies have asked where I'm getting all this stuff about stalking dead people. Since two people probably constitutes a supermajority of the people who normally read this blog, it's like an invitation to write about something people might actually be interested in. What a concept!

Before I jump in, I should emphasize that I'm no kind of rigorous, by-the-book-type genealogist. In fact, I'm no kind of genealogist at all. Those are people who meticulously document the blood relationship between descendent X and ancestor A. I don't do that.

A Family Historian tries to understand what life was like for people in their family; where did they live? who did they live with? in what kind of house? what kind of work did they do? what kind of clothes did they wear? what did they eat? That's a little closer, but I don't really do that, either. Not in any systematic way.

I'm more of a magpie. I go after the sparkly bits. Rather than following one person's life from start to finish before starting on another one, rather than starting with my parents, then going to my grandparents, and carefully working my way back from there, I jump from wondering why my grandmother had her picture taken on a farm when she was 17, to wanting to know how much stuff a typical voyageur canoe held and how many men it took to paddle it, to being tickled to find that in the late '20s Willys-Overland Motors made a car called the Whippet, even though I don't think anybody in my family worked there at the time. Or wait. Maybe they did…

Nope. My paternal grandfather worked there (as a woodworker!) in 1918, but by 1920 he had a grocery store. My dad and my uncle Willie weren't there until later – Willie, the older brother, didn't graduate from high school until 1937. So, no.

You see what happens? In checking to see what years various forebears might have worked at Willys-Overland, I ran across a photo of a jeep in a museum exhibit that looked like it might've been designed by a place I used to work. The museum exhibit, I mean, not the jeep. Of course, I had to see if the place I used to work actually designed that museum, but the museum webpage didn't say, and the place I used to work is out of business now. So that was an hour spent chasing after something totally unrelated. And I never did find out.

It's not that I mind. I don't have any place I need to be, or any time I need to be there. I'm just not very focused about this, I guess is what I'm saying. I can't tell you how to do genealogy, or how to research family history. I can only tell you about being a magpie.

And a disabled magpie, at that. At some point, people doing this kind of stuff usually wind up going places, like libraries, or archives, or courthouses; and opening books, or turning pages, or scanning microfilm; and writing stuff down. On paper. I don't do any of that. If it's not online, I can't get to it, so I don't bother looking for it. I don't collect paper copies of documents, because I couldn't file or store them if I had them.

So, after all that, where do I find all this stuff? I've got to tell you, there's a ton of stuff out there, with more appearing online by the day. In true magpie fashion, I have about a million bookmarks, organized in a way that doesn't make a whole lot of sense even to me, most of which would only be helpful to someone whose family happens to come from the same places mine does. There are, however, a couple of good general places to start looking:

Cindi's List probably comes as close as anything to inflicting some kind of organization on the bewildering amount of genealogy information available on the net.

FamilySearch is the genealogy website of the LDS church. In addition to a lot of how-to information, it gives you free access to a lot of genealogy database resources.

And as always, Google is your friend. Cindi's List even has links to information about how to take advantage of it.

So, that's a lot of disclaimer for not very much information, but there it is. I don't know How It Should Be Done. I just look for the sparkly bits.

<Your Name Here>

“Block Card 902 Locust Street, c1937, courtesy of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, obtained from http://images2.toledolibrary.org/.” 

I just found this picture of the building where my dad's family was living when he was born. Turns out the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library has an archive of photos of buildings, many taken in the 1930s by the WPA for tax assessment purposes (and to give people jobs). This was obviously the same building that was there in 1920, when my dad was born, and the U.S. Census said the family was living here. Cool, no? Amazing, what you can find on the Internet.

My dad never liked the name Ezra. It always startled me a little when his brothers called him Ez, because nobody else did. Everybody else called him Charlie, after a trumpeter who led a big band in the 1940s. As long as I knew him, he introduced himself as Charlie. He used E.C. in correspondence and such like, but Charles wasn't his middle name. He didn't have one. He just picked Charlie, I guess because it was better than Ezra.

For those of us trying to untangle the limbs of the family thicket, a distinctive name like Ezra beats the heck out of a Charlie. In Scarecrow's family, I'm indebted to those old Puritans who gave their offspring names like Hachaliah Brown, or Preserved Reade. Or Philo Dibble Bates. As it turns out, the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut were way more creative in their choice of names than their contemporaries north of the border. How pathetic is that?

You'd think, with the big French-Canadian families of the previous couple of centuries, that you'd see a large number of very imaginative names, just to keep them all straight. I wish. What happened was that the first boy got his father's name, the first girl got her mother's, the next couple maybe got the grandparents' names, then they'd start handing out names of aunts and uncles. So even if 15 kids had 15 kids apiece, they were all drawing from the same pool of 15 names, generation after generation. They might be in a different order, but every family had an Antoine, a Joseph, a Pierre, a François, and so on. To further confuse the issue, everybody wss Marie-something or something-Marie. This was so common that they'd sometimes leave the Marie part out, without feeling the need to mention it. And they sometimes recycled names, even within the same family. If Jean Baptiste or Marie Louise died young, the parents may bestow the same name on a later child. So you frequently got several people with the same name, living in the same place, at the same time.

The cultural peculiarity of assigning dit names makes it both easier and more difficult to track down individuals. As I understand it, it was common in the military of 17th-century France to give soldiers a sort of nickname. Gilles Couturier, for example, might become Gilles Couturier dit Labonté, or Gilles Couturier called Labonté. Since many of the early residents of New France came from the military, it was a common thing. Another Couturier might use a different dit name, perhaps Couturier dit Verville, which would help tell the different Couturiers apart. Or not. It turns out Gilles might be referred to as Couturier, Couturier dit Labonté, or just Labonté. One (or more) of his offspring might adopt the dit name, or not. Or they may choose a different one. I guess you had to be there to understand it, because I sure as heck don't. In addition to spelling being flexible in a largely illiterate population, it's sometimes not clear, at least to me, what name they're trying to spell.

On the other hand, at that time women in France – and New France – typically kept their father's surname after they married. So there's that. One Pierre Couturier might be the offspring of Joseph Couturier and Gertrude Maugras (hopefully not Gertrude-Marie or Marie-Gertrude), and another Pierre Couturier the son of a different Joseph Couturier and Marie Allard. If they were both Mrs. Couturier, I don't know how you'd ever sort them out.

So it's a puzzle. Some future family historian may get stuck trying to figure out what happened to Ezra, who was born and lived with his family and went to school and then seemingly disappeared. And where did this Charlie-person come from, anyway? It will be a puzzle. Dad would like that.

And I don't blame him. I wouldn't want to be called Ezra, either.

Questions I Should Have Asked

I ran across a list of questions I've been meaning to ask my dad the next time we spoke. Nothing of world-shaking importance, no grand questions about life-lessons learned. Truth be told, my dad and I did not often agree on the message to be taken from those life lessons. I didn't expect him to impart great wisdom from the perspective of one who has lived  a long and eventful life. They were mostly just questions that came up when I was rustling around in the family shrub. Why did your dad never tell you what his name was before he came to the United States? What year did you buy the house you live in now? What was the first car you ever bought? I kept putting it off.

Dad died August 26.

It wasn't a tragic sendoff, as these things go. It was not unexpected. He was almost 91 years old. He finally accepted some drugs, so he wasn't in pain. He was home, with his family, the way he wanted. It was time. He was ready. Everybody should be so lucky.

Like most of us, I suppose, he didn't finish everything he meant to do. He was always going to write down what he remembered about his family, but he kept putting it off. He'd get distracted by trying to pin down exactly when the family moved from one house to another, when plus or minus 5 years would have been plenty close enough. He'd go chasing off after details, or get frustrated because he was such a crummy typist, and he never got around to telling the whole story.

Family history is all about the stories, isn't it? I'm not much interested in genealogy. My lineage is not so illustrious that proving it beyond all shadow of a doubt makes any difference to anybody. I don't need three original sources to confirm every detail. I don't agonize over getting every source citation exactly right. I don't really care all that much. I'm just in it for the stories. It's all about stories. It's history, the way it happened to one family. It's getting a sense of ordinary lives, the way ordinary people lived them.

Knowing that Louis Badaillac dit Laplante was born in Sorel, Québec in March of 1680 and died in Detroit in 1703 doesn't really say much about who this guy was, except that he was only 23 when he died. Finding that he accompanied Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, when he went off to found the city of Detroit, one might be tempted to imagine a rather heroic figure. Finding that between that convoy and his eventual demise he was busted a couple of times for "fait la traite de l'eau de vie avec les iroquois" and for "causé un bruit public", he starts to look a little grubbier. Not pretty, maybe, but more like a real person. (Did you know, by the way, that Cadillac had a really big nose? He was nicknamed the Falcon, and often compared — presumably behind his back – to Cyrano de Bergerac. Hey, I read it on the web, so it must be true.) See what I mean? It's all about the stories.

I need to write down what I remember about my dad. As best I can, I need to tell his story. I'm not religious. In the metaphysical sense, I have no idea where he went, or what he's doing now, besides a literal, obvious fact – he donated his body to science. He made arrangements for that years ago. Some med students at UCLA will get a skinny old white male cadaver. They will get to know my dad in considerable detail. In a different sense, he's here as long as someone remembers him. Those stories he told over and over? I should know them well enough by now to be able to inflict them on someone who never got a chance to hear them from the source.

I've been wondering whether this blog is the right place to do that. I initially set it up as a place to dump MS-related stuff. Going off on a family history tangent seems pretty seriously off-topic. I even got as far as setting up a template for a new blog, called "Out on a Limb" (get it? Am I witty, or what?). Then I decided it was a pretty stupid idea. If I had two blogs, I would post even less often on either of them than I do on this one now. Besides, the topic of this blog is whatever I want it to be. Whippets don't have anything to do with MS, as far as I know, and I write about them all the time. So I'll be stalking dead people, and I'll be doing it here. It's too bad, though. The new blog was looking pretty cool.

There's a barbecue/potluck/celebration of my dad's life/excuse to put away large amounts of tequila planned for this weekend at the old home place. I won't be able to make it down for the festivities, but here's the story I would tell if I were there:

So many times when I was a kid we'd ask, "Dad, do you have a ____ <fill in the blank with the most bizarre item you can possibly imagine>?" He'd think for a minute, disappear into his garage, rustle around for a while, and reappear holding said bizarre item.

I thought everybody's dad could do that.

Time Passing

I published the first post on this blog two years ago today. Having recently retired from my day job, my intent was to document the process of applying for SSDI, which I expected to be a long drawn out and frustrating experience. Six weeks later my claim was approved, and I was officially out of stuff to write about. Not having anything to write about does not appear to have held me up much.

I started out posting every day. That lasted about a week. Then it was every other day. Then a couple of times a week. For the last couple of months, posting once a week or thereabouts seems to be a comfortable compromise between feeling obligated to write something, and not having anything to say.

As if to mark the anniversary of the blog by reminding me of its initial purpose, I got an envelope from the Social Security Administration the other day full of stuff about applying for Medicare. I haven't been able to work myself up to look at it yet. It's sitting on the corner of my desk, looking ominous and threatening. I tell myself that applying for SSDI was a lot easier than I expected it to be. Maybe signing up for Medicare won't be that bad. Maybe.

Several times over the last couple of years, we thought my dad was dying. Each time, he defied the odds and confounded the authorities, stubbornly refusing to relinquish the place on the planet he has occupied for almost 91 years. He wasn't ready to go. Now, I think he is.

Spending so much time lately climbing out on limbs of the family shrub, I find myself thinking about all this birthing and dying stuff. I mean, duh? Although I may well think about it differently when I'm confronted with my own imminent demise, at least from this vantage point, dying doesn't seem all that scary. Pain, now, pain is scary. But if you can die without pain, you know, you've got to go sometime. I don't remember being afraid wherever I was before I was born, why should being dead be any worse? Dying is just part of the deal. It's inevitable, and while I guess it's always a little painful for the people you leave behind (at least you'd hope somebody is sorry to see you go), it's not always bad.

Stalking dead people in the parish register of Sainte Genevieve de Pierrefonds from 1782, so many of the burials are for babies only a few days, or months, or years old. Early census records note the number of children each woman bore, and the number currently living. The two numbers were rarely the same. And the record of a baby's baptism sometimes preceded that of the burial of a young mother. That's a different kind of death altogether. Those deaths are tragic. Although I don't know those people, reading about what happened to them makes me sad. And then there's what looks like a hastily-scribbled note stuck in the pages of the register that records nine names, "tué par les Iroquois." That doesn't sound exactly like a peaceful sendoff to me.

For my dad, dying is a process. He's getting ready to go, but in his own time, on his own terms. At home, with family and friends around him. He's not eating or drinking much. He refuses pain meds. He seems to be aware, at some level, of what's going on around him, but doesn't respond much (other than to spit out the pain meds). He likes sitting in the sun in the afternoons. Last weekend, his grandson's new bride brought her viola and played for him. He liked that. He is dying. We will miss him, but this death is not a bad thing.

My dad always said he wanted to live to be 100, and be killed by a jealous husband. I don't think he's going to make it to 100, but who knows? I guess it's still possible that a jealous husband will show up and send him on his way. He would like that, although I'm not sure my mom would be so crazy about it.

Maybe It Was a Day like Today

I don't know who these people are — the photo is just labeled "Paiement family." "Mount Royal Park, Aug 1908" is written on the front. Although the Paiements I've been stalking had left Montréal for Michigan by this time, becoming Payments in the process, they still had plenty of kin in the Montréal area. Mount Royal Park was probably a nice place to spend a summer afternoon.

I don't know anything else about this picture, and I don't really care if I can figure out who's in it (although I'll probably try, just for grins). It just makes me happy to look at it.

Standing out in a Crowd

A couple of days ago, I found myself looking over my dad's side of the family shrub. It doesn't take that long; there's my dad, and his parents. That's all I know. Well, almost.

Investigating my mother's side of the family offers so much more in the way of immediate gratification, and me, I'm all about immediate gratification. The Catholic Church keeps such obsessive records, French-Canadian women kept their father's surnames, I can almost read the original documents – well, I bet I could almost read them, if it weren't for the obscure handwriting and archaic language on scanned images of 300-year-old documents. With all the information available on the Internet, you sit down to trace a family, and 15 minutes later you're back to the flood. It's almost too easy.

Scarecrow's family is pretty much the same, easy-wise. Not only did the Puritans keep pretty close track of who married who, and who was born to whom, but the documents are even in English. Kind of seems like cheating. They didn't seem to make much use of those records to avoid consanguinity, though. I found at least one marriage between first cousins, which I've been telling Scarecrow explains a lot. < snrk! >

My father's family is more of a challenge. His parents were among the eight bazillion people who immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe in the first decade of the 20th century.

Beyond not having much to go on, everything seems more foreign, somehow. Even when they're written in English characters, the names of people and places sound so… ethnic. It's farther away from here, both geographically and culturally, but it's more than that. I can imagine 17th-century Québec, but a village in Minsk in 1900 eludes me.

I know nothing about my grandmother before she turned up in Chicago at her wedding to my grandfather in 1913. In contrast to the embarrassing abundance of documentation for my mother's side of the family, she didn't know for sure when she was born. She told my dad the name of the town she was from, but she couldn't write it in English, and by the time he told me what he thought she said, it could've been anything. Same thing with her name, when you get right down to it. It could be spelled any number of ways which, taken together, become the local equivalent of 'Smith.' I don't know when she came to this country – only that my dad said she called my grandfather a greenhorn, because she was here before he was. OK, I give up. Maybe I'll take another run at it next Mother's Day.

With my grandfather, I have a little more to go on. Not much, but a little. From Ellis Island, my dad procured the passenger list from the SS Petersburg, which made the crossing from Libau to New York on 27 December 1906. There's a name on it he believes is my grandfather. I don't know why he thinks that. The name doesn't match, but, like a lot of people, for a lot of reasons, we know he changed it when he came to America. We don't know what it was before.

According to the passenger manifest, the person my father believes to be my grandfather was 23 in 1906. In 1913, his marriage certificate gives his age as 26. Seven years later, he's only three years older. I wish I knew how he did that.

Here's what else the passenger manifest to us about him:

Birthplace: Karpilovka (a town in what is now the Ukraine, pretty close to where my grandfather said he came from)
Occupation: joiner (cabinetmaker, which is what my grandfather was)
Height: 5'2"
Eyes: blue
Hair: blue

If this is really him, I have no idea how he got from New York in 1906 to Chicago in 1913, or how he met my grandmother, or why they wound up in Ohio.

Really. How hard can it be to track down a little guy with blue hair?