OnLines
Where genealogy and technology collide
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Monday, February 16, 2015
Fantasy Genealogy
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Wednesday, July 30, 2014
All About the Silicon Valley Computer Genealogy Group, 2014 edition
Reprinted by permission of the Silicon Valley Computer Genealogy Group
Sunday, October 27, 2013
When You Find that Your Ancestors Misbehaved
From PastFinder newsletter, September 2013, pp. 1-2 (subscribe: www.svcgg.org/pages/ordermembership.html )Reprinted by permission of the Silicon Valley Computer Genealogy Group
Friday, February 11, 2011
Life of a Young Army Family 1929 – 1938
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!"
Historical timelines and resources: ehistory.osu.edu/osu/timeline/TimeLineSearch.cfm, www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005248.html, animatedatlas.com/timeline.html.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Our Stories: A Short Biography of Blanche Stedman Keyes
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
Friday, April 16, 2010
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.