Life of a Young Army Family 1929 – 1938

By Suzanne Hastings

Life was good. Young First Lieutenant Wallace Howard Hastings and his wife, Virginia, were at Fort DuPont, Delaware, where he was in the Army Corps of Engineers and they were expecting their first baby. Shortly before the baby was born on 29 October 1929, what today is known as Black Tuesday, the stock market crashed

. Of course this did not affect them personally, as they were young and had no money invested in the stock market. Nothing could detract from their excitement. On 7 November 1929, their baby was born at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC. They had a boy and named him after Papa, Wallace Howard, Jr. Their dream was for him to follow in his father’s footsteps.

In 1930, Lieutenant Hastings was ordered to West Point where he taught in the school of engineering. They were here for the next four years. While there they had their second son, Charles DeRosear (my husband) in 1931. This was a very happy time in their life. It was a beautiful place to be, and they had lots of friends there. This was the time of the Great Depression, but this did not directly affect them. Papa was not going to lose his job, they had a place to live and good food to eat, and were well taken care of, living in the protection of the U.S. Army as an officer’s family.

In 1934, it was off to Fort Logan in Denver, Colorado. This was a long and difficult trip for this couple with two small children. They had to sail from New York to San Francisco and then take a train to Denver. All this for just two years, and then they were traveling again.

In 1936, now Captain Hastings and his family were going to the Panama Canal Zone. They sailed from San Francisco and were stationed at the Army Post in Corozal, which was not far from the Pacific Ocean and Panama City. The two boys, 4 and 6 years old when they arrived, have lots of memories from the time spent there. They both had horses, Freckles and Jimmy, to ride, and someone to help them with the horses. They remembered going to the beach, playing in the jungle, and, on occasion, going to Panama City. Life was still good for this family, despite the financial devastation at home, the darkening clouds of impending war in Europe, and the invasion of China by the Japanese. This was all far away and someone else’s problem!

In 1938, Captain Hastings was assigned to duty as the assistant to the district engineer in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was to go directly there, leaving Panama by ship to Charlston, South Carolina. Virginia decided that she wanted to visit her family in southern California and let the boys spend some time with their grandmother, aunts, and uncles. They sailed on an Army transport ship to San Francisco, and with great excitement entered the waters of the San Francisco Bay, going under the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, as it had just opened a few months earlier.

This is the account Charles wrote of that trip from Panama to San Francisco, written a few months before his death in 2005 (with ages corrected):

"I’m Charles, 6 years old. My mother, 8-year-old brother, Wally, and I sailed from Panama to San Francisco on a rather smallish Army transport ship. Father had gone more directly to his new duty station in Mississippi, but mother wanted to visit family in California.

"I felt anxious and confused embarking from Panama City – a small band, good-bye wishers, porters, and boarding officers. I remember walking up the creaky, swaying gangplank and being led to a tiny, dimly lit stateroom, and finally throwing paper streamers over the side as we left. There was one bunk bed, the bottom for Mother, and the top shared by us boys, Wally on the outside. A round port hole looked from the upper bunk, the only outside light. Mother ordered, “Don’t ever open that! Ocean could come in!” (Occasionally water did splash up over the port hole during heavier seas.)

"The cabin was almost completely filled by a huge black steamer trunk, opened side-to-side like a book, with drawers on one side and Mother’s hats and hanging clothes on the other. Not to mention all the other suitcases. Navigating the room was a challenge, especially with the ship’s motion. In addition, the small “potty room” felt weird with the tossing sea.

"We were warned that we might become seasick, and many passengers could be seen hanging over the rails during the rougher days, or missing at meals. Everyday there was mandatory lifeboat drill, with a three-blast alert, and we all had to report to our designated tarp-covered lifeboat from wherever we were, don our life vests, properly fastened (mine never fit right – came half-way up my face), and be counted! No excuses! Once we were allowed to peer into the lifeboat, rows of benches, and a stack of oars along the sides. And thy let us taste hardtack, a very, very hard survival biscuit.

"Finally we arrived outside San Francisco Bay. Everyone was excited! Everyone was top-side! Everyone was ecstatic, because the Golden Gate Bridge had just been finished!

"After long hours of anticipation, a pilot boat came out, and a special pilot boarded up a ladder to bring the ship into the harbor.

"Hello, California! As we went under the bridge, the ship listed dramatically. My brother, who was standing on a ladder, almost slipped off because of the tilt, and he remembers this vividly to this day. I held tightly onto a rail. I believed for many years that the pilot had to tilt the ship to get it under the bridge. Only after returning to San Francisco 25 years later did I realize that this was a myth, deep in my mind.

"Boy – I wish I could remember my recent trips as well as that one 68 years ago!"

Sources

Military Personnel Records for Col. Wallace Hastings, National Archives and Records Administration, St. Louis, Missouri.

"Hastings Family Migrations,” outline by Charles and Wally Hastings.

Historical timelines and resources: ehistory.osu.edu/osu/timeline/TimeLineSearch.cfm, www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005248.html, animatedatlas.com/timeline.html.

Our Stories: A Short Biography of Blanche Stedman Keyes

Our Silicon Valley Computer Genealogy Group members come to know their ancestors well. This is the first in a series of accounts of ancestral lives.

By Susan King

In 1852, Millard Fillmore was President. The Missouri Compromise had been enacted a couple of years earlier, temporarily holding back the forces of civil war. Important as this development was, another event occurred in 1852 that overshadowed the Missouri Compromise for those of us who wouldn’t otherwise exist, that event being the birth of Blanche Stedman. Blanche, the oldest of five siblings, was born in Portland, Ohio, to Lyman Stedman Jr. and Emily Jewett Stedman .

Blanche’s father, Lyman Stedman, had attended Marietta College, a center of abolitionist sentiment. According to Blanche, who kept a diary later in life, her father had wanted to be a lawyer, but had had to give that up “to save his life” due to having “consumption.” So, he settled for rural life and became a farmer. The family eventually settled on an island in the Ohio River called Brown’s Island, in Hancock County, West Virginia, where they had a farm. Lyman was civically engaged, served in the West Virginia Legislature, and was asked to teach school, which he did.

Family legend has it that Blanche’s father participated in the Underground Railroad, helping slaves to escape up the Ohio River. Abraham Lincoln took office just a few weeks after Blanche’s eighth birthday. She was old enough to experience something of the Civil War. Lincoln was assassinated when Blanche was 12 years old. If she was personally affected by these events, we do not know; she did not allude to it in her diary. It seems that she had loving parents and was well cared for. As an older woman, she reflected that she had had a happy, carefree childhood, “knew only constant, tender sympathy” from her father, who was always a source of help for any problem. She said she wished she were “as sweet and beautiful” as her mother, and as “pure in mind” as her father.

Blanche graduated from Scio College, a seminary in Ohio; she was president of her class. Letters between Blanche and her future husband, John Keyes, show that she was already at Scio by age seventeen, which was in 1869. She chanced to meet John, who became a Methodist-Episcopal minister, at Scio, although he may not have been a student there at that time, being almost eight years her senior. Blanche seems to have been a religious idealist who felt the world would be a better place if everyone followed the Golden Rule.

On April 4, 1871, when she was barely 19 years old, she married Dr. John Riley Keyes, age 26, at her parents’ home on Brown’s Island, and so embarked upon the life of a minister’s wife. She remembered her wedding as a small but very happy affair. Her recurring diary entries on the anniversaries of her marriage are like a refrain, referring to the unseasonably warm weather. Though only April, “It was a summer-like day; the apple trees were in full bloom and the grass was green.” After a short honeymoon trip to Cleveland, the couple visited relatives, then made their way to Noblestown, Pennsylvania, where John had a new charge as minister. There they lived in a four-room house for which they paid $25 per month. Their income was $800 per year.

At age 20, Blanche had her first child, Laura. She had 5 children in all: Laura, Edith, Raymond, Paul, and Lucille, the last being born when Blanche was nearly 39. She seemed to find her boys more demanding than her girls. Her mother commented, “I never saw you nervous, until your boy came." Her first son, Raymond, was very strong and active from the beginning. At one month, he caught whooping cough; she feared it would kill him, but said he didn’t mind it much more than most children would mind a slight cold.

The family moved several times around Ohio as John was transferred to various churches. From 1875 to 1877, John served at Finley Church in Steubenville, Ohio, at $600 per year, and in 1877 went to a church in Bridgeport, Ohio. In 1880, they lived in Salem, Ohio. By 1900, they had moved to Cambridge, Ohio, and by 1910, had settled into a house in Cambridge, where Blanche and John remained for the rest of their days. I visited this house in 1961 when Lucille, the youngest and last of their children, still lived there. The house badly needed exterior paint at that time. A photo of the house was taken in 1988, after subsequent owners had refurbished it.

In late 1911, when she was 59, Blanche’s husband, John, died. By that time, only her youngest daughter, Lucille, and a friend and household helper, Annie Burke, lived in the home with her. John had asked Blanche to never sell the house, so that their adult children would always have a home to return to. Blanche honored that promise, but it was not easy. Money was scarce, and she would have preferred to move to a small home nearer to her sister, who was caring for their aging and quite debilitated father. She had a widow’s small pension from the church, as well as a small investment, which later was lost due to poor management by one of her sons-in-law. To make ends meet, she opened a boarding house for teachers.

In 1916, her house taxes were $100 per year. Coal was $2.50 per month, and water was $1.25. It was a struggle to maintain the house and buy necessities. As she put it, she had to turn every penny over and over in her hand -- there was “no margin." She paid a young man, who apparently was pretty badly off, for shoveling snow; for his work, she gave him a basket of potatoes, cornmeal, and bacon, and $.25, hoping he wouldn’t spend it on drink.

She mentioned that a roomer paid $3.50 a week. She tried to give her boarders variety in meals, with fruits, vegetables, and desserts. A sample meal was: potato soup, baked beans, cold meat, lettuce, plum butter, bread and butter, and prunes with whipped cream and nuts. She mentioned a breakfast consisting of cream of wheat with prunes and cream, fried mush, maple syrup, poached eggs on toast, and coffee. She kept chickens, remarking that her four chickens had given her 272 eggs. The family did their own sewing, cleaning, some painting, and minor plumbing, and Blanche was said to be cutting her own grass into her 80s. As she put it, “I have all of the physical culture any woman needs."

She was active in church activities and Jewell Band. In 1917, she remarked on the war and suffering in France, Belgium, Poland, and elsewhere, saying that “mothers’ hearts are breaking to see their sons go.” When she had a little extra money, she contributed $5 to a poor mother with children, and another $5 “to make the world go dry.”

In 1918, she had a telephone! By October 1918, the so-called Spanish Influenza was becoming serious. She mentioned that friends’ sons had died in military camps, and that “Cambridge is full of influenza.” Multiple city nurses had thrown up their hands and left due to being overwhelmed and having meager resources, although some doctors and nurses came from Columbus, Ohio, to care for the rural poor and coal miners. Blanche nursed people in several homes where entire families were down with the flu, but she never caught it.

In 1919, her older son, Raymond, a Naval Officer, died suddenly at sea, which was a big blow. She remained devoutly religious and did her best to try to accept this loss within a religious understanding.

In 1920, she was glad when Prohibition passed into law, and attended a city-wide church service to celebrate it. Church bells rang out at midnight all over her city of Cambridge, Ohio, to mark the beginning of prohibition, and she said, “Thank God.”

In 1926, money still tight, she complained about rich lawmakers, high salaries, and a President (Coolidge) who was unsympathetic in not helping the Civil War widows. She was such a widow, her husband having served in the Ohio Volunteers. Still, she counted her blessings. In 1929, at age 76, she credited her good health to resting in the afternoons and “learning to eat Battle Creek health foods and fruits and vegetables."

Although she lived for another eight years, the last entry in her diary was on March 25, 1929, when her oldest, and very dear grandchild, Charles Stewart, was killed in a the crash of a small plane. He had taken a plane ride from Columbus, Ohio, where he was a student at Ohio State, to New York, for the fun of it. The pilot got lost in fog and crashed. My grandmother, Bertha Keyes, lived in Columbus at the time, and had happened to see Charles in downtown Columbus. He had told her that he was going for a plane ride. Later, when Bertha heard the newspaper boys yelling the news, she was pretty sure it was about Charles and didn’t want to look at the newspaper.

Blanche died in 1937 at the age of 85. Incredibly, she had witnessed the Civil War and the Lincoln Administration, and had lived into the years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Sources

Dumars, Virginia Keyes, and Garrett, Mary Keyes. Personal knowledge.

Keyes, Blanche Stedman. Unpublished journal.

Keyes, Blanche Stedman. 1869, 3 January. Unpublished letter to John Riley Keyes.

Keyes, John Riley. 1869, 6 May. Unpublished letter to Blanche Stedman Keyes.

Keyes, Robert. 1987, December. Unpublished letter.

Notes

Depiction of Lyman Stedman’s farm and residence found online at David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, http://www.davidrumsey.com/, specific link for this image is: http://www.davidrumsey.com/maps1015.html Image (lithograph) is part of composite cartographic image in "Residence of John A. Warden... Sewickley, Pa. (with) Farm and res. of Lyman Stedman...Brown’s Island, Hancock Co., West Va. (with) Bakery & Confectionary, J.M. Weber, Prop’r., ... East Liverpool, Ohio. (with) L.H. Oatman’s Saw & Planing Mills, Rochester, Beaver Co., Pa. (with) Residence of Benjamin Musgrave, Reminton, Beaver Co., Pa. (...compiled and drawn for the publishers of E.L. Hayes, assisted by E.F. Hayes, C.M. Beresford, assisted by S.A. Charpiot, F.L. Sanford, J.H. Sherman. Published by Titus, Simmons & Titus... Phila. 1877...Printed by H.J. Toudy & Co. ...Oldach & Mergenthaler Binders...) Author: Hayes, Eli L. Date 1877."

Photos are property of Susan King.

Contact the author at: siliconvalleygroup(at)earthlink(dot)net

Focus on Barry Ewell

(Note: The Silicon Valley Computer Genealogy Group will feature Barry Ewell in a seminar on 8 May 2010, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., at 875 Quince Avenue, Santa Clara, California. Information, maps, and directions are at http://www.svcgg.org/. )


By Janet Brigham

Barry Ewell's middle initial is J, but it might as well be F for Focus. Although a relative newcomer to genealogy circles, his emphasis on focus and effective organization has launched him into a position of prominence among presenters.

Barry is part of a team preparing to launch a new website designed to make genealogy research more accessible and easier to share. Most of the material on the dot-com site will be free, including some 40,000 how-to articles, 2,500 videos, a million links, and 10,000 maps covering the 1600s to early 1900s. The team's goal has been to make information easy to find and use. Barry brings his own experiences to the development of the website.

His interest in collecting family histories dates to the late 1990s, when he began doing family research at his mother's encouragement. He collected numerous oral histories before commencing any lineage research. He spent time studying local newspapers and histories to acquaint himself with the communities in which his ancestors lived.

He "regathered the record" of the branches of his family by picking a point in time for a key ancestor (such as 1860), tracking each descending family line, and gathering information from each line. The reason for this is that when an ancestor dies, his or her documents, artifacts, and information are subdivided among descendants and others. As this process continues across generations, the record disperses, and must be regathered to become as complete as possible.

This systematic, organized, and fruitful approach to conducting family history research is the hallmark of his presentations. By collecting recommendations and methods from mentors and experts, he has developed a list of the top 20 things new and experienced genealogists can do to foster successful research.

The top item? Focus. Focus on one ancestor, one question, one generation. Learn everything you can about the community in which they lived. "Learn the circle of life they lived within,"
he urges. "The clues are rarely in a record, but are in the community."

And the top 20 things a genealogist should learn? Here goes:

1. Verify, verify, verify data you receive.
2. Document your sources.
3. Check multiple sources.
4. Hit a brick-wall? Be patient and persistent.
5. Talk to your family—NOW!
6. Share your time, research and interest.
7. Organize your data.
8. Learn about your ancestors.
9. Keep your genealogy research focused.
10. Expect the unexpected.
11. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
12. Bring ancestors to life with photographs.
13. Effectively use the message boards.
14. There are many ways to spell your last name.
15. Conduct field research.
16. Learn to read old script.
17. Back up your data.
18. Use genealogy software.
19. Learn to use the census.
...and...
20. Learning genealogy is a process.

Archive News in Santa Clara County

By Pat Burrow

I am part of a volunteer group who index records from the Santa Clara County Archives. We index and summarize old ledgers and put them online so that others who cannot travel to this area will have access. County Archivist Dr. Michael Griffith has allowed us access to some very interesting material, and I would like to ensure that the word gets out so that those researching Santa Clara County can look for their family.

Here is the website of the Santa Clara County Archives
http://www.sccgov.org/portal/site/rec/agencychp?path=%2Fv7%2FCounty%20Clerk-Recorder%20%28DEP%29%2FCounty%20Archives
They have recently added some new collections including Probate and Coroner Reports. We hope to get the Naturalization index up within the next month.

The collections are:

County Probate Cases Collection
The County Probate Cases Collection consists of approximately 2,100 cases heard by the Probate Court between May 1893 and September 1908. Each case includes those papers filed with the court as part of the proceedings. Files may include wills, detailed lists of property, collections of claims by creditors, and various legal papers. Files may provide extensive information about the decedent, about costs for the period, and about the operation of a farm, business, or profession. This collection does not include all cases heard by the Probate Court in the period 1893 to 1908; there are a number of gaps and missing cases.

Coroner Inquests Collection
The Coroner Inquests Collection consists of 9,300 reports of corner inquests from 1891 to 1932. Coroner inquests were made to establish a cause of death. Each inquest record includes basic information about the subject of the inquest (name, age, country of birth, and residence at time of death), date of death, and the cause of death established by the inquest. Additional remarks or notes also are sometimes present.

County Wills Collection
The County Wills Collection consists of approximately 10,000 wills filed with the County Clerk. The wills date from the early twentieth century into the 1970s, with the bulk of the wills from the years after 1940.

Henry B. and Raymond W. Fisher Surveys Collection
The Henry B. and Raymond W. Fisher Surveys Collection consists of approximately 1,700 surveys made by Henry B. Fisher and by his son, Raymond W. Fisher, from the 1890s until the 1960s, primarily in Santa Clara County. The surveys are of private property, both rural and urban, and typically include one or more maps or drawings and pages of calculations and/or written descriptions of property boundaries. Many surveys are plans for subdivisions in Santa Clara County, and the collection also includes many plans for capital improvements such as sewer systems and roads improvements.

County Photographers' Collection
The County Photographers' Collection consists of over 57,000 images which depict a wide array of the County's activities and development between 1950 and 1993. The pictures include aerial photographs of rural and urban parts of the county; portraits, award ceremonies, and retirement functions of county officials and employees; interior and exterior construction progress of various county buildings, such as the county government center, county service center, juvenile center, public and mental health centers, county jails and hospitals; and a variety of photographs that include the airports, schools, courts, and parks throughout the county. Of the 57,000 images, approximately 50,000 are negatives, 2,500 slides, and 4,500 prints.

(Material from the archives website used by permission.)

Aunt Trails

By Janet Brigham

On my father's side of the family, several aunts invariably made sure that we children got Christmas and birthday presents. Two of these aunts -- Joyce and Ruth -- were married to two of my father's brothers. They wrote friendly letters, keeping us updated and trying steadily to heal a longstanding rift between their husbands and my father. Neither aunt had children of their own, so they spoiled us.

Both of them died within the last few decades, along with their husbands. I hadn't spent much time with either aunt, but their existence was a constant in my young life. I always knew that I had aunts who seemed to relished sending us trinkets, goodies, and cheerful notes. I still have the congratulatory notes they sent my parents when I was born.

So imagine my horror when I was looking through my genealogy database and found that I had never recorded more about either aunt than their given names. No surnames. No birthdates, no parents, no birthplaces, no notations of their education or religion. What's worse, when Aunt Ruth died a decade ago, she left her small estate to her husband's son from a previous marriage, and her handful of nieces. She gave the executor our names. He found us all and dispersed her gifts.

Aunt Ruth had remembered me as she approached her death, but I had never done more than cash the check. I knew considerably more about immigrant ancestors from the 1600s than about these women who enriched my childhood.

We decided to rectify this oversight. After seven hours of brute-force searching last weekend, however, we had learned little. Our relatives have no information at hand. None of our accessible newspaper archive services listed their obituaries. The next step was to call specific newspaper libraries and ask for copies of the obituaries (not free, but cheaper than driving to Texas or Washington). We'll soon know if this has worked. Then we will take what I expect will be bare-bones obituaries and begin to reconstruct their lives.

It's the least we can do.

Eureka! Lessons from a gold mine

By Patricia Burrow

EUREKA!

Did you hear my whoop? It had to have been loud enough to hear all across Silicon Valley. I was doing some mundane census work on Ancestry.com when some incredible pictures showed up. My second-great-grandparents!!!! Oh, and my great-grandfather!!!!

I don't usually do a generic search on my surnames but was looking for census people with nicknames. I just put in Stallings, born in Georgia. About 30 hits down were these pictures--two family photos, one taken about 1895 and the other probably 30 years later. This grandmother was married to a man who was killed in the Civil War and then married Nathan Stallings. She had four children by the first husband and then five more with Nathan.

When I did my initial census work on them, I had to do a spreadsheet because the ages of the kids did not make sense, and I knew that there was something off. She was 11 years older than Nathan, and the kids were too old to be his (it is usually the other way around, the woman is too young to have the kids). It took some time to sort them all out, as they all took the name Stallings on the 1870 Census. Anyway, now I have some faces to add to these kids, too.

My genealogy high was just too much to contain. So I looked for the person who had submitted and posted the photos. Turns out he is actually from another "branch," but he told me he got the pictures from a lady on another website, findagrave.com. I had not been on Find-a-Grave in a while, so I trotted right on over to it and found my ancestors just waiting for me. Judy Brantley/Wilson has submitted more than 18,000 postings to Find-A-Grave.

In reading her bio, I found out that, in addition to posting photos and writing short bios on each of her own ancestors and their families, she is documenting a cemetery that is all but abandoned. It is on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, all covered in weeds and kudzu to the point that it is almost impossible to see the markers; many markers are buried in the undergrowth. The owners are not interested in doing anything about it, so it is listed as "non-perpetual care" (oh, REALLY?).

Judy is not only indexing each headstone but getting the death certificate of each person and researching each family enough to do a write-up on Find-A-Grave. It is a mammoth project, but she enjoys it so much. Her email address was in her bio, so I clicked on it and sent her an email asking if she were related to my family. We figured out that we are second cousins. She is a fount of information. She has sent me more than 30 photographs of family members that I have never seen before.

Several lessons can be learned here, but mainly the classic lessons can be relearned:

1. Even though you did a Google search several years ago, repeat it every now and then. Go back to sites you searched last year and search them again.


2. Do a generic search on your favorite sites every now and then to see if there is something new from the last time you looked.


3. When you find the name of one of your ancestors posted on a website, click on the submitter's email address and email to ask the submitter if he or she is a family member and where he or she got the information. I don't like user submitted-family trees that I find online, as they often are from a name collector or are junk genealogy. But every once in a while, it will be a distant family member who has done some very good research. It is easy to upload a GEDCOM; it is difficult to find and document quality evidence.


4. Get and maintain the best quality photos you can. I downloaded the photos I found from both Ancestry.com and findagrave.com, but they were very low resolution. If I had tried to print them, they would have been grainy. I asked Judy to rescan the best photos so that I would have a good quality digital copy. Remember to scan your photos to TIFF with at least 300 dpi. Label them on your computer as well as on any printouts you make. You don't want your great-grandchildren to say, "Who was that funny-looking lady with the big hair?" Also, back up your photos and genealogy files!

It has been more than a week since my wonderful find, and I am still on a high. It will take me a while to sort through all of the things I have learned and apply them to my other surnames. Meanwhile, I have these wonderful pictures to look at: Nathan and Sarah and a family photo that was taken more than 100 years ago, before I was born, before my mom was here, before my grandmother had a name. But, this is my family.

I share this as a lesson to remember. When you are doing your own research, keep in mind that this is your family history, and that you may be the only family member who gathers and organizes the stories and pictures of four or five generations. You are, or will be, the oldest member of your own line and, by virtue of that position, you have the responsibility to ensure that the family history does not get lost, and does get passed down to future generations.

*****

Photo caption: Nathan Vinson Stallings and Sarah Ann Frances Cochran Sykes Stallings and family. Front Row L to R: Nathan Vinson Stallings, Sarah Ann Frances Cochran Sykes Stallings. Back Row L to R: Francis M. Chambers, Mary Rosanna Sykes Chambers, Sara Margaret Sykes Green, Harriet Ellen Sykes Cobb, Eliza Adeline Stallings Conner, Charley E. Stallings. L to R, the three girls are by Sarah's first marriage to Darling Sykes. Eliza and Charlie are Nathan's and Sarah's children. Francis M. Chambers is the husband of Mary Rosanna Sykes. From photo collection of Judy Brantley Wilson, http://www.FindAGrave.com.

Save the Library of Michigan

By Janet Brigham Rands

It’s 2,003 miles, or 3,224 kilometers, from here to Lansing, Michigan. When we flew there a few years ago on a genealogy research trip, we stayed in a Lansing motel. Ate in Lansing restaurants. And spent a couple of days at an amazing facility—the Library of Michigan.

A library is more than books, manuscripts, documents, photographs, microfilms, and photocopiers. Even a library with a priceless collection such as the Library of Michigan is more than its holdings: It is librarians and volunteers, and an attitude of reaching out to the broad community of those millions of us who have ties to the Midwest— even those of us in California.

Staff and volunteers at the Library of Michigan have earned a reputation as being unusually responsive and helpful. Before we visited Lansing and spent two days at the library, I visited its Web site to search for information about my Michigan ancestors. The site featured an online chat with a librarian. I used the chat feature to ask about an article that I thought might have been published in a small Michigan newspaper in the 1800s. The librarian turned my inquiry over to the library’s volunteers, who not only found the article but tracked down the other articles in the series.

They soon sent me photocopies of articles recounting the life of my second-great-grandfather. I learned that as a 14-year-old, he served on a privateer ship in the War of 1812. He was nearly killed one night by prisoners he was guarding on the ship, before one of the prisoners took pity on him because the frail, bespectacled boy reminded the prisoner of his own children.

The newspaper was obscure, published only for a short time and not included in any online newspaper archives. I asked the volunteers how to repay their kindness, and they suggested a donation to the library.

Donations weren’t enough, evidently. We were unprepared for the recent news that the governor of Michigan had ordered the library closed, to be replaced by a non-library facility that might bring more traffic to downtown Lansing. This is part of a supposedly budget-cutting move that eliminates the state’s entire Department of History, Arts, and Libraries.

The only group who can save the library from this absurdly draconian fate is the Michigan legislature, which convenes August 5. That morning, genealogy enthusiasts inspired by the Michigan Genealogical Council will stand outside the library and encircle it by holding hands. We wish we could join them.

My second-great grandfather survived the War of 1812 and later moved to Michigan. He never forgot that even as a youngster, he faced imminent death. As the hands of the living encircle the library, we can imagine another circle nearby—a circle of the millions of ancestors whose stories come alive in the Library of Michigan.

*****

Online video of the August 5 demonstration at the library:
http://gannett.a.mms.mavenapps.net/mms/rt/1/site/gannett-lansing-051-pub01-live/current/launch.html?maven_playerId=articleplayer&maven_referralPlaylistId=playlist&maven_referralObject=1205798001

Editorial from the Toledo Blade: http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090730/OPINION02/907300319

The content of this blog post does not necessarily reflect the views of the Silicon Valley Computer Genealogy Group or its members.