Archive for November 28, 2007

The World’s Smartest Sister

November 28, 2007 Craig Uncategorized

Later this week, my little sister will celebrate her 50th birthday. [Can that really be? Wow!]. When she was born, my father was a lieutenant in the Army, with the grand salary of $200.00 per month. We lived at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but at the time, housing was a critical issue at “Fort Lost-in-the Woods.” The Army had ordered double-wide trailers for the senior NCOs to live in. Junior commissioned officers, like my father, were given the crates the trailers came in for their families! So when my sister was born, we lived in a wooden box.

She was different from the beginning. She was the first girl in what was now a family of three children. When my mother came home from the hospital, my sister had to stay for a few days. My mother said to me and my younger brother, “Your sister is beautiful! She has long red hair!” And indeed she did.


My Little Sister, c. 1958

She seemed to take command of the household from the moment she arrived there. She had strange habits as she grew. She had a pink tub in which she was bathed; she carried that tub about the house with her constantly. When she tired of carrying the tub around, she would put it on the floor and curl up in it.

We moved from Fort Leonard Wood to Indianapolis, Indiana, and then to Germany while my sister was still a toddler. In Germany, my youngest brother was born, so my sister was no longer the “baby of the family.” She seemed not to resent this change in status. Later we moved again. She claims not to recall our transatlantic flight to McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, followed by a transcontinental train ride to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where we picked up a brand new Rambler station wagon. We drove from Wisconsin to Albuquerque, New Mexico, stopping in Kansas City to visit family.

In school in Albuquerque, my sister blazed her own trail. She got tired of her teachers saying “Why can’t you be like your brothers?” The question made her only more determined to follow the beat of a different drummer.

Left: Craig and Sister on the dock at Rockport,
Texas, 1962

My sister and I had a typically contentious big brother/little sister relationship. I thought she was ignorant and frivolous; she considered me a pretentious prig. One infamous bit of family lore involves the day that I, as Captain of the Safety Patrol, threatened to arrest my sister for her disorderly conduct on the playground. She, of course, mocked and defied my authority, until her teacher appeared. Thereupon, she broke into tears, and immediately had the teacher’s sympathy for whatever had been going on. (She had failed to line up at the bell and to be quiet in line). I was reprimanded for abuse of authority.

She was enamored of The Monkees, especially Davy Jones. By the time we moved to California, the Jackson Five commanded her attention. I’ll never forget holding her on my shoulders (for what seemed like forever) so she could see better at a Jackson Five concert in the Cow Palace [which despite the name is not in New Hampshire, but in Daly City, California.]

I was gone to college by the time my sister got to high school, so I don’t really know about her high school years. I gather these were somewhat difficult times. On the one hand, she was extremely popular and was elected to the spirit squad as the school mascot. (The school teams were nicknamed the “Toreadors.” The mascot was always a girl who wore a Mexican bullfighters’ costume, the key feature of which was a miniskirt and boots. It was a much sought-after position). On the other hand she paid little attention to her schoolwork. She changed her first name to something that evoked a Latin American Communist guerrilla. She called our father “Fred” (as in Flintstone, and not his name at all) and our mother by her middle name. She left the church that we had all been raised in.

Immediately after high school graduation, she and a friend moved to San Jose. She got a job and eventually got married. I was mostly not around her during this period, but we continued in our respective semi-contempt for each other.

It took a tragedy fro me to see my sister as she really is. In February 2005, her only child was killed in a car accident. He was 19 years old. As my sister grieved, she displayed a grace and strength that I had never seen in her or in few other people for that matter. I saw how her son’s high school and college classmates looked to her for guidance and assurance, and I saw how she comforted them. It made all the difference in the world to them and to me.

My sister is an executive at a Silicon Valley technology company despite not having finished college. She owns a home and other property in one of the nation’s priciest areas. She has more friends than I can count. And she did it all in her own unconventional way. She’s still never going to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, but she is in fact The World’s Smartest Sister. Happy Birthday, Sis!


Craig and Sister just before rehearsal dinner for our
brother’s wedding, Fort Bliss, Texas, 1982. Guess who looks exactly the same 25 years later?

7 comments ,

Detective Work: A Misplaced Headstone

November 27, 2007 Craig New York

I was trolling through Greenman Tim’s Cabinet of Curiosities [which I'll write about at a later date--for now suffice it to say, a day without Walking the Berkshires is no day at all] when I came across this curiosity:

Clarence Thomas

Delaware
PVT 52 CO
152 Depot Brigade
World War 1
December 13 1890
March 14 1956

It’s the inscription on a headstone that’s been “riding around” in the back of a pickup truck of Tim’s aunt’s handyman in Maryland. Tim reported that Aunt Peggy says:

In John’s opinion this was the stone of a black man, hence the Depot Brigade, as African Americans were not allowed into the regular army in the first world war. It is in good condition, and shows no sign of being hit by tractor or plow, as can happen around the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

I told Tim [in his comments] that it’s not the gravestone of a black man. How do I know? Well, the 152d Depot Brigade was stationed initially at Camp Upton, Yaphank, Long Island, New York, as part of the 77th Infantry Division. Like all Army units in WWI, the 152d was segregated and there were no black soldiers in it.

The early history of Camp Upton is told in a 1918 pamphlet by Roger Batchelder. He says that the 77th Division was known as the “Metropolitan Division” because “every man in the division was formerly a resident of Greater New York.” Batchelder notes that there were black soldiers at Camp Upton. But they were not in the 152d Depot Brigade. The black soldiers were in the 367th Infantry Regiment and the 351st Machine Gun Battalion. And these organizations, though barracked at Camp Upton, technically were not part of the 77th Division. Instead, they were part of the 92d Infantry Division (Colored), the so-called “Buffalo Soldiers” Division.

So how to find this Clarence Thomas? Notice first the style of the inscription on the headstone. This is basically the style of inscriptions on headstones provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs. See examples here. Given that, we should take a look at the VA’s Nationwide Gravesite Locator. This database includes veterans buried not only at National Cemeteries, but at private ones as well. [It's worth noting here that there are no National Cemeteries in Delaware; there are three in Maryland, one in Annapolis and two in Baltimore]. Of the 110 “Clarence Thomas” names in the VA database, none fit our dates of birth or death, although there is a Pvt Clarence L. Thomas, buried in New Jersey (DOB: 1/24/1890; DOD: 3/7/1952), who comes close. While the disparate birthdates may be of no significance, let us assume that a four year discrepancy in a death date isn’t close enough even for government work. Nonetheless, let’s keep this one in mind while we move on.

The next simplest search may be the Social Security Death Index. We should try several versions of the SSDI. I like the ones at Rootsweb and GenealogyBank best. In using the SSDI for this case, I would narrow the search to those named Clarence Thomas who died in 1956. I would consider a 20th century death date more reliable than a 19th century birthdate. I might also check a couple of years before 1956. Having done the SSDI, we don’t find any Clarence Thomas that comes close to our date parameters. (Why might that be? The data in the SSDI comes from the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File. The majority of deaths listed there are from 1962 or later. Our subject died in 1956. Second, not every person is in the Social Security system. This depends on the type of employment and pension arrangements a person has.)

The next tool I would use is Find-A-Grave. This site has 19 million user-contributed gravesites, and it’s easy to use. I’d follow the same procedures concerning dates as we did with the SSDI. There are a total of 168 individuals with the name “Clarence Thomas” in the Find-a-Grave database. Unfortunately, none of them appear to match our Clarence Thomas by dates or locations.

The tools we’ve used thus far are the “quick solution” tools. They’ve not given us an answer.
Before we move on to the more complicated tools, let’s consider all that we know, including the following:

  1. The headstone apparently was found in the area of Maryland known as the Eastern Shore.
  2. The person in possession of the headstone believes it may memorialize a black man.
  3. The deceased was in a military unit that was almost certainly segregated, limited to white soldiers.
  4. A chronicler of the military installation where the unit was stationed says that “every man in the division was formerly a resident of Greater New York.”
  5. The headstone indicates that the deceased either was born in, or entered military service from, Delaware.

With those things in mind, we’ll move on to the more sophisticated analysis next.

COMING: Detective Work II: Newspapers, The Census, and Other Tools

No comments , , , , , ,

DNA & Genealogy

November 26, 2007 Craig Genealogy

I’ve not joined in any significant way the discussions about DNA because I’m in the “wait-listen-learn” mode on the topic. I’m quite interested in the matter. And I have submitted a sample to the database maintained by the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, but no matches as of yet.

I mention the DNA issue this morning because there was yet another article about it in the New York Times yesterday. The articles in the popular press are interesting, but some of the most educational writing on this topic may be found right here in the blogosphere. Blaine Bettinger, “The Genetic Genealogist,” is the “go-to” guy for me. And recently, Tim Agazio has used his Genealogy Reviews Online to explain his personal experiences with DNA testing. These have been very valuable articles and I recommend them.

No comments ,

Ancestral Gleanings from the Dinner Table

November 24, 2007 Craig Uncategorized

Thanksgiving is a great time to learn a little or a lot about one’s relatives and ancestors. Unexpected things may pop up. I gleaned a fair bit from our Thanksgiving conversations, most of which I’ll share after some further processing.

But one of the surprising bits was this: I asked my father if he recalled ever talking to a census taker. He replied, “I was a census taker.”

In 1950, he answered a newspaper ad in Houston, Texas, to become an enumerator for that year’s census. He was assigned to Houston’s fifth ward (where he lived). He said it was hard work, involved a lot of walking. Most everybody was cooperative, including Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, who was awakened after just having gotten to sleep following a long night of work.

3 comments , , ,

Oh, Here’s One More Thing to Be Thankful For , , , ,

November 24, 2007 Craig Uncategorized

My father is a musician. He’s played the trumpet since he was a boy and has written some songs. But he’s never made dime, as far as I know, as a musician. I think he probably felt, as the son of a musician himself, that he wanted something different for his family.

Nonetheless, we enjoy Dad’s musical bent. He’s taught me a lot about 20th century popular music.

One way my father expresses himself musically is to serenade my mother with silly songs. She, for her part, rolls her eyes at lyrics like, “Open the door, Richard! I know you’re in there cuz I’m wearing the clothes.” By the way, for all of his talent as a trumpet player, Dad’s no singer.

Last night as they were getting ready for bed after our family Thanksgiving feast, I heard Dad’s voice warbling from down the hall. I couldn’t quite make out the song, but I was certain my mother’s eyes were rolling. I was also certain that I had one more thing to be thankful for . . . .

“Open the Door, Richard,” Words by Dusty Fletcher and John Mason, music by Dusty Fletcher and Don Howell, copyright 1947, Duchess Music Corp.

No comments

Happy Thanksgiving, All!

November 21, 2007 Craig Uncategorized

“They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.”

William Bradford’s Journal, Plymouth Colony, 1621

And now for something completely “21st Century:” The Thanksgiving Song

“The Thanksgiving Song” copyright 2006, Steve Merrick
performed by the Steve Merrick Band

One comment ,

More Minnesota News: Soldier Identified After 144 Years? Maybe . . . .

November 21, 2007 Craig Uncategorized

I like stories of this sort.

Nearly a century and a half after the Battle of Gettysburg, the body of a Minnesota soldier killed there may have been discovered in a Confederate cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina. The body may have been mis-identified in 1863.

The man buried as Private John O. Dobson of the 2d North Carolina Infantry apparently was really Private John O. Dolson of the 1st Minnesota Infantry. The error was discovered by Charles Purser, a retired Air Force officer, who had undertaken the renovation of the cemetery.

Read more here. The news story doesn’t tell all of Dolson’s story, so we had to do a little digging of our own [bad pun not intended, but I'll leave it in!]. John Dolson was born in Eden, Illinois, in about 1843, the fifth child of Charles and Elizabeth Dolson. Charles Dolson was a merchant; he and Elizabeth had come to Illinois from New York. Their other children were Albert, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Celia, all older than John; and Charles, Jr., younger than John. Sometime in the 1850′s, the Dolson family split up, perhaps due to the death of Charles, Sr.

John ended up in Minnesota with his older sister, Margaret, living in the household of William and Mary Moffett. He enlisted in the Army in October, 1861, when he was 19 years old.

Two things were missing from the news story. First, it seems to me that to be sure about this story, we need to eliminate the possibility that there was a John Dobson in the 2d North Carolina. In the various databases I checked, there were a number of John Dobsons in the Confederate forces from North Carolina, though none in the 2d Regiment. However, the Civil War databases are not complete and certainly not free from error. So it seems to me that there is some small room for the possibility that the man in the grave was properly identified the first time.

Second, although there are a number of Dolsons in Minnesota today, the story did not mention the reaction of any Dolson family members. This is a significant omission to me, especially in view of the first issue I raised. In this age of technology (exhumation, DNA), it seems strange to me that the family seems not to have been consulted.

No comments ,

Norway to End Occupation of Minnesota; Local Populace Outraged

November 21, 2007 Craig Uncategorized

The Government of Norway has announced plans to close its consulate in Minnesota, a move that has met with outrage among Norwegian colonists, er, uhm, Minnesotans. Norway says it’s a cost-cutting move, but that the consulates in New York, San Francisco, and Houston (?!) will remain open. About 17% of Minnesota’s population is of Norwegian descent. Read the story here.

No comments ,

Research Resource: The Library of Congress

November 19, 2007 Craig Uncategorized

If you haven’t been to The Library of Congress, get there soon! (Virtually speaking, of course). It’s been about two years since I visited the Library in person. But when I was there virtually the other night, I noticed things had changed online.

There are several ways to see the Library online. Let’s go first to the American Memory collections. There we’ll see collections by topic or we can browse all collections. Just for the thrill of it, let’s browse all collections. As we scroll down through some interesting collections, one in particular grabs me. It’s “Broadsides ad Ephemera, c. 1600-2000.” What’s that?

Well, it’s described as

28,000 primary-source items dating from the seventeenth century to the present and encompasses key events and eras in American history. The first release of the digitized Printed Ephemera Collection presented more than 7,000 items. This release presents more than 10,000 items. While the broadside format represents the bulk of the collection, there are a significant number of leaflets and some pamphlets. Rich in variety, the collection includes proclamations, advertisements, blank forms, programs, election tickets, catalogs, clippings, timetables, and menus. They capture the everyday activities of ordinary people who participated in the events of nation-building and experienced the growth of the nation from the American Revolution through the Industrial Revolution up to present day.

Here’s a German Sunday School card . . . and look, an 1852 ad for a cider mill . . . and here, a list of judges, attorneys, and marshals in the United States, probably from the 1820′s. . . a menu from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York City, dated October 19, 1903 . . . I could spend all day looking through this stuff! But, much to see, little time!

<----Who are these people?------>
Visit The Library of Congress to find out!

Still in the American Memory collections, we can view photographs, maps and documents from every era and every area of American history. I’m captivated by the collection of Coca-cola commercials over fifty years (one of them was filmed at my high school in the late 1960′s), the sheet music collections, the audio former slave narratives, and the nationwide collection of railroad maps. I’ll come back to the railroad maps and try to trace the route that Matilda Manson and her son Otis took from Hootenville, Georgia, to Rockdale, Texas, in 1884.

Next is the American Folklife Center with

over three million photographs, manuscripts, audio recordings, and moving images. It consists of documentation of traditional culture from all around the world including the earliest field recordings made in the 1890s on wax cylinder through recordings made using digital technology. It is America’s first national archive of traditional life, and one of the oldest and largest of such repositories in the world.

Only some of these are online, but, again, it’s a rich collection of collections, including the Veterans History Project and Folk Songs of America. Particularly interesting is the Local Legacies collection, which “includes photographs, sound recordings, videos, newspaper clippings, and more from communities in all 50 states, the trusts, territories, and the District of Columbia. The project was initiated by members of Congress commemorating the Library’s Bicentennial.”

We next can easily get to the Prints and Photographs Reading Room. And what a joy this is! It’s like being a kid in a toy store. There are about a million digital images here!

Next, on to the Library’s Webcast page. There are webcasts available on biographies, history, culture, literature, religion, science and much more.

Last month, The Library of Congress announced an agreement with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to create the World Digital Library. The announcement said


The World Digital Library will digitize unique and rare materials from libraries and other cultural institutions around the world and make them available for free on the Internet. These materials will include manuscripts, maps, books, musical scores, sound recordings, films, prints and photographs. The objectives of the World Digital Library include promoting international and intercultural understanding, increasing the quantity and diversity of cultural materials on the Internet, and contributing to education and scholarship.

The Library of Congress is America’s library. We’ve only scratched the surface in our quick visit. Check it out and find your favorite parts!

2 comments ,

Page 161

November 18, 2007 Craig Uncategorized

So I’ve been tagged by Chery at Nordic Blue for the “161″ meme. In this meme, one dislcoses the contents of the sixth sentence on page 161 of one’s current read. I’ve read a lot lately, but when the tag came in, I was in the midst of Dudley Taylor Cornish‘s The Sable Arm, which tells the story of black troops in the Civil War. This 1956 work was perhaps the first serious scholarly work devoted to this topic and as one reviewer said, it’s “readable, interesting, sound, with interesting insights.”

My great-great-grandfather, Zeke Johnson, served from 1864 to 1866 in Company D, 18th United States Colored Troops.

The prospect of Negro troops, while not overwhelmingly popular in the North at first, provoked outrage and fear of slave rebellions in the South.

Page 161, sixth sentence:

“I shall,” he [Jefferson Davis] told his Congress, “unless in your wisdom you deem some other course more expedient, deliver to the several [Confederate] State authorities all commissioned officers of the United States that may hereafter be captured by our forces . . . that they may be dealt with in accordance with the laws of those [Confederate] States providing for the punishment of criminals engaged in exciting servile insurrection.”

Cornish, Dudley T., The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865, (with Forward by Herman Hattaway) (Univ. of Kansas Press, 1987)

Darius, what have you found in your local library lately?

One comment , ,
« Older Entries