GFHC Open Thread: Names From the Family Tree I’m Not Allowed to Use (Girls Edition)

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Friday March 28, 2014 · 9:00 AM PDT

2014/03/28 · 09:00

Last summer Zwenkau wrote this of genealogy research in one of our open threads:

Lastly, a part of it was wanting to know what-to-name-the-baby (whom we were expecting).

That got me thinking, and I scoured my own family tree and my wife’s for names that we might use when we have a child of our own to name. Until a couple of years ago, my list would have been restricted, pretty much, to Michael, James, Joseph, John, Edward, Patrick, Catherine, Maureen, Agnes, Mary, Anna, Elizabeth, or Patricia, which show up over and over again in my Irish Catholic family. But marrying into another culture and learning I had New England Yankee ancestry going back to the 1620s broadened my options considerably.

I came up with what I thought was a great list, but my wife (for reasons I don’t understand at all) nixed every single name on it. I’m appealing to the court of public opinion, sharing with all of you these beautiful names and the case for using each of them. Today I’ll go through a small sampling of the girls’ names on the family tree. The boys’ names will come in a later edition.

(In case it’s not clear, this is largely tongue-in-cheek. Apologies in advance if any gentle reader bears one of these names.)

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Friday March 14, 2014 · 12:57 PM PDT

2014/03/14 · 12:57

no image description available — Lee in 1915, in happier times.

I planned to make this week's installment about something entirely different, then found to my horror that the other diary wasn't finished. Eek! So after lunchtime scrambling to get some photos together for this one, here it is. Better late than never.

My very first GFHC diary (GFHC = Genealogy & Family History Community) concerned colonial New England heritage I didn’t know I had. All of those ancestors are mine through my great-grandfather Lee, who was born 125 years ago in Taftsville, Vermont.

As I’ve mentioned from time to time, Lee was a mess of a man. He couldn’t hold a job, mostly because he was nearly always holding a bottle. Finally, when his three children all married in 1942, he left his wife entirely and spent the rest of his days wandering the northeast, from temporary job to flophouse. He would, on occasion, call my great-grandmother in a maudlin drunken stupor to express his everlasting regrets. In late 1960 a call came not from him, but about him: the hotel he was living in burned while he’d been passed out in bed. He died of smoke inhalation at 71. My family’s address and phone number were found with old photos in his wallet.

Lee in 1915, in happier times.

This is the story of Lee’s early life, which was troubled, and the fallout that may have come from that. Although Lee and his family suffered from circumstances personal to them – alcoholism in particular – their troubles were exacerbated by the difficult economic times in which they lived. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Republican efforts to bring us back to an 1890s-style economy limited government intervention in the face of vast wealth for the few, and terrifying precarity for the many, and I can’t help but consider Lee’s childhood when I think of that. Read More

GFHC Open Thread - From the Extended Family Tree: The "Dedham Decision"

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Friday February 21, 2014 · 8:35 AM PST

2014/02/21 · 08:35

A while back I wrote about Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, a distant cousin who in 1865 published a family genealogy containing some of my ancestors. In it, he erroneously killed off my 6x great-grandmother Martha Burgess before she could marry and have the child whose line leads to me. Shades of Back to the Future there. I also mentioned that Rev. Ebenezer was smack in the middle of a theological controversy known as the “Dedham decision,” but the story was too long for inclusion in that diary. So I’ll tell it here.

The “Dedham decision,” officially known as Baker v. Fales, was an eagerly awaited 1820 decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (the “SJC”), the highest court in the Massachusetts court system. It was the SJC that ruled in 2003 that the Massachusetts constitution forbids discrimination against same-sex couples in awarding marriage licenses. The Dedham case, another case implicating religious issues nearly two centuries earlier, pitted rival factions of the First Parish of Dedham against each other and was a watershed moment in the religious history of Massachusetts and perhaps the nation.

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Friday February 07, 2014 · 9:17 AM PST

2014/02/07 · 09:17

Last time I wrote about some historical events that had a direct impact on my ancestors, determining in a sense the future of the bloodline. I argued that, had these events not happened as (and when) they did, I would probably never have been born. Of course, there are millions, if not billions, of events and choices that determine such things. Someone moves across the country for a job, or to get away from overbearing parents. My friend’s parents, both from the urban northeastern United States, each ended up in Mexico somehow in the late 1960s. They fell in love there, married, moved to New York, and had two sons who’d never have existed if one of them had gone to Miami instead of Baja California.

My grandfather always used to tell a story of his young childhood. His father, an Irish immigrant who settled first in Albany, moved to Brooklyn for economic reasons (discussed below) and married there. But he yearned to move back upstate and, when my grandfather was a year old, he convinced his wife to do so. The experiment lasted a few months, but she panicked every time the neighborhood squirrels got into the attic and scampered just over her head.

These hinterlands were no place for a city girl. Entreaties that squirrel-free housing could be procured in the greater Albany region were dismissed as so much claptrap. A foot was put down firmly and back to Brooklyn it would be. Decades later, my grandfather would ride on crowded, graffiti-covered subway cars in Brooklyn muttering, “Those g—damned squirrels!” Nobody on the double-R train even looked up. And, of course, it was for the best. He needed to be in Brooklyn, not Albany, to meet my grandmother and create my mother, who had me.

But, once again, I’m looking not at those private forks in the road, but at major public events that directly affected the direction of my direct ancestors’ lives. Here are a few more.

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Monday February 03, 2014 · 11:06 AM PST

2014/02/03 · 11:06

Cross-posted at Blue Mass Group.

Over the last few days I noticed a number of outlets pushing a story that, were Peyton Manning's Broncos to lose yesterday's Super Bowl in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Manning would owe the State of New Jersey more in taxes than he would be paid for the big game. The Broncos did lose -- big time -- and for conservatives across the nation this nightmare scenario has become reality.

Frankly, this story sounded like bullshit to me. And so it is, but bullshit of a sneaky kind that exposes right-wing intellectual dishonesty and prompts me to write wonkish posts. Come with me across the orange garden gate to learn just how this really goes (WARNING: numbers ahead).

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Tuesday January 28, 2014 · 9:57 AM PST

2014/01/28 · 09:57

My wife and I recently received a pair of electronic photo frames as a gift, and decided that we’d put photos of family and friends on one of them, and photos from our travels on the other. In our spare time we love to hit the road and explore. Because we live in the Boston area, we’re stuck up in the corner of the country and it can be a challenge to get out of New England without taking a pretty long trip. Fortunately, there’s plenty to see and do right here in our home state of Massachusetts.

So much, in fact, that I’ve got about 20,000 photos of Massachusetts to pick from. Since I’m choosing photos for our new frame, I figured I might as well share them with you too – everyone out there who loves Massachusetts, or who has never been and wonders what it looks like.

I’ll be going by county, which my friends find strange. Unlike in some other states, people here don’t really think in terms of counties. We generally think in terms of regions like the North Shore, the South Shore, the Cape, or Central Mass. In fact, Massachusetts officially abolished counties as a functioning unit of government a while back. (Even though, out of tradition, we don’t name our state legislative districts by number, but rather call them things like the “Second Essex and Middlesex” or, even more absurd, the “Worcester, Hampden, Hampshire, and Middlesex.”)

Frankly, I find it easier to go by county than to devise coherent dividing lines between regions. And happily, also unlike some other states, Massachusetts only has 14 counties, which makes it manageable. So I’m doing it.

We’ll start in the top right corner of the state, in Essex County, which most locals would think of as the North Shore.

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Friday January 24, 2014 · 9:39 AM PST

2014/01/24 · 09:39

Last weekend, on a snowy New England afternoon, my wife and I had lunch in Cambridge with an old friend of mine…and his new fiancée. The engagement came as something of a surprise: I hadn’t known he was seeing anyone seriously. Over lunch they told us their story. A year ago, on New Year’s Eve, they each declined various invitations in favor of a quiet party in someone’s apartment. The host was my friend’s college friend; her sister went to school with his now-fiancée. They met and hit it off…

The story gave me reason to think again on how many little decisions can affect each person’s life in a huge way. A few years ago I was stuck in a job I hated in a city I wanted to leave. If I’d been able to leave there when I’d wanted to, I would almost certainly not be with my wife today. Our future children will owe their existence in large part to that delay. My family, and I’m sure yours, is full of such tales. My grandfather’s then-unheard-of divorce that paved the way for him to marry my grandmother. My great-grandfather’s job offer that led my grandmother’s family to move into a building right across the street from my grandfather.

Each of us exists only because billions of little things happened that led each of our ancestors to have the child who continued the chain at that precise time. Take away any link at all from our long, long lines of direct ancestors and – poof! – we’re gone. Studying my family’s history these past couple of years has given me a lot of insight into these private “but-for” moments, but also into certain well-known historical events without which I’d probably never have existed.

Of course, there were things like an Gorta Mór, which spurred massive-scale emigration from Ireland to the United States in the years after 1846, and England’s persecution of Puritans and Separatists, which led some of my ancestors to sail to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. Here, though, I’m going to talk about some famous events that – arguably – had a more direct impact on my coming into being. I won’t pretend that these were all good events, just that without them I’d likely never have been born.

(This was pretty long, so I split it in two. This post covers events up to the American Revolution, the next one will cover more recent events.)

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Friday January 10, 2014 · 8:45 AM PST

2014/01/10 · 08:45

Lately we've had a lot of great research tips from mayim and others. All I had in reserve was more stories about long-gone people, and I had no time to do anything else, so this week we'll make do with that. I picked this one in honor of lovely Dedham, Massachusetts, where my wife dragged me last night to get her 5 Guys burger fix.

Back in November I mentioned The Burgess Genealogy: Memorial of the Family of Thomas and Dorothy Burgess, Who Were Settled at Sandwich, in the Plymouth Colony, in 1637, by Rev. Ebenezer Burgess.

As the title suggests, that book (published in 1865) traces the descendants of my ancestors Thomas and Dorothy Burgess. I expressed my consternation that Rev. Burgess “killed off” one of my direct ancestors prematurely:

According to his book Martha Burgess died at almost fifteen in February 1718. According to the Ashford, Connecticut town records, she married George Cheadle in 1721 and had several children, including my 5x-great-grandfather John Cheadle, a very early English settler of Pomfret, Vermont.

Here I’m going to take a closer look at Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, who in addition to writing the definitive Burgess family genealogy was the pastor of the First (Allin) Congregational Church of Dedham for its first forty years. His life, his town, and his book all contain things that piqued my curiosity, and on occasion my anger. Read More

Ten Years Ago Today: The Massachusetts SJC Declares Marriage Equality

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Monday November 18, 2013 · 11:12 AM PST

2013/11/18 · 11:12

I’ve long been proud of my roots in Massachusetts, one of our most liberal states and a place that has been in forefront of many important social and political movements in our nation’s history – including the one that created our nation in the first place. In my own lifetime, though, I’ve rarely been more proud of Massachusetts than I was ten years ago today: the day the first United States court decision mandating marriage equality was issued right here in Boston. As we appreciate how far things have come in a decade, it's worth taking a look back at how we got there.

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Friday November 15, 2013 · 9:00 AM PST

2013/11/15 · 09:00

As I recounted in my very first GFHC diary, I learned almost two years ago that my great-grandfather Lee was not Irish Catholic as claimed but instead descended from the earliest New England colonists. Once the initial surprise wore off, I excitedly started to follow the trail back, as far as I could on as many lines as I could. On some lines I hit brick walls, mostly in the 1700s, but in most cases I was able to trace the lines to the early 1600s and beyond.

What struck me is how much English immigration to New England slowed between about 1650 and the early 1800s. This shows up in my own ancestry. I have literally hundreds of direct ancestors who came to New England between 1620 and 1655 or so, but after that I’ve only found one immigrant from England who came about 1663 and one other who came in about 1718. By and large, the New Englanders of 1800 were descended from people who were here early. Both in my personal story and Boston’s larger narrative, the unwashed hordes of Irish in the nineteenth century and the Ruthenians and such in the early twentieth century came well after those original immigrants.

In early New England, unlike in some American colonies, communities generally kept good records. Most towns in this part of the country have published versions of their vital records from Day One, and virtually all of those volumes can be found at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston. As many of you have mentioned in earlier diaries, published family genealogies (mostly from the late 1800s and early 1900s) can be another excellent resource for this type of research. But hose books, helpful as they are, can contain some errors. This is the story of how a couple of those errors led to my being “disowned” by some distant cousins from a century ago, and how those late-to-the-party English immigrants left a nice brick wall and a disputed lineage for me.

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Friday August 30, 2013 · 9:20 AM PDT

2013/08/30 · 09:20

A number of people in my extended family are firefighters in Massachusetts and New York. Today I’d like to remember a member of my family who served in the FDNY many years ago and made the ultimate sacrifice to protect others.

His name was John Joseph Ennis. I’ve already posted about my 3x-great-grandmother Catherine Ennis, who was John’s sister, and James Seferen Ennis, Jr., the grandson of John’s younger brother James who died in WWI. Now it’s time to tell John’s story. Read More

GFHC Open Thread: A Most Interesting Cemetery

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Friday August 09, 2013 · 9:19 AM PDT

2013/08/09 · 09:19

Back in January I wrote several diaries about my great-grandmother Eva. She came to Brooklyn from what is now Ukraine in 1911, when she was 16. In October 1912, when she was 17, she married my great-grandfather. Their first child, a boy named Adam, was born ten months later, in August 1913, a century ago this week. He lived only a few hours. They later had four more children (including my grandmother), all of whom lived to adulthood.

My aunt, one of the most tender-hearted people I know, often thinks of their first child, Adam, who was born, and died, more than 40 years before she was born. It always bothered her that we did not know where Adam was buried. My great-grandparents are buried in a plot in Queens, but that wasn’t purchased until my great-grandfather died in 1940. Nearby, in the same cemetery, is a section for babies who died and my aunt always mentioned Adam when we went there.

Last summer I took from my grandparents’ house (which we’re preparing to sell) a metal box full of documents. It contained all sorts of insurance policies and other assorted legal documents, but it also contained…a folder of cemetery deeds. In that folder was a 1929 letter from a Brooklyn funeral home specifying the exact plot where Adam is buried. It’s in Most Holy Trinity Cemetery, in Brooklyn near the Queens border. At Christmas my wife and I went there, and it was well worth the trip.

This letter told me exactly where Adam was buried

It’s a fascinating place, one of thousands of hidden nooks and crannies in New York City that even most lifelong residents have never heard of. The cemetery is at the end of a long avenue, but in a dead-end block covered in cobblestones and reached only by passing under a dark stone railway arch bearing tracks for the elevated subway. The only things on the other side of the arch are the gate to Most Holy Trinity Cemetery, a service entrance to another cemetery, and one industrial business. Tucked away like that, it’s largely unknown. But it’s one of the most unique cemeteries I’ve ever seen. And I've seen a lot of cemeteries. Read More

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GFHC Open Thread: Names From the Family Tree I’m Not Allowed to Use (Girls Edition)

GFHC Open Thread: Hard Times

GFHC Open Thread - From the Extended Family Tree: The "Dedham Decision"

If That Hadn’t Happened…I Wouldn’t Exist (2 of 2)

Right-Wing Lie of the Week: New Jersey's "101.8% Tax" on Peyton Manning's Super Bowl Pay

Beautiful Massachusetts in Pictures, Part 1 (Essex County)

GFHC Open Thread: If That Hadn’t Happened...I Wouldn’t Exist (1 of 2)

GFHC - From the Extended Family Tree: Genealogist and Calvinist Crusader

Ten Years Ago Today: The Massachusetts SJC Declares Marriage Equality

GFHC: Ancestors I Can’t Find, and Ones Who Won’t Have Me

GFHC Open Thread: “Give Me Strength to Save Some Life”

GFHC Open Thread: A Most Interesting Cemetery