GeneaBlogie Photos
Well, we find ourselves among some august company indeed! The folks over at the MyHeritage.com blog have selected their top 100 genealogy blogs, and we are on the list! And all the same day I got some good Smart Matches too!
Check out the list at the link above.
By the way, Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage.com is coming to this year’s Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree. Another good reason to be there in Burbank!
[We were about to board the California Zephyr in Sacramento for the beginning of our Grand Genealogy Journey. But first, for the occasion of the third edition of the Carnival of African-American Genealogy, let's backtrack in time and distance. The theme of the Carnival is "They served with honor~In Memoriam~African-Americans in the Military, 1914-1953." Here, we follow the route of the train back to the story of black sailors, the names of some known but to God. The east-bound Zephyr passes Suisun Bay on its route from its origin in Emeryville, California, to Sacramento. On Suisun Bay in Contra Costa County, not far from the Zephyr's present route, there once was a little town called Port Chicago.]
Port Chicago, Contra Costa County, California, had been known as Bay Point until 1931, when its local business leaders renamed it Port Chicago. They apparently believed that a new name might herald a new future for the Depression-struck town. They couldn’t have had any idea what was to come.
Just a decade after Bay Point became Port Chicago, the United States entered World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The West Coast naturally became the logistics points for the war in the Pacific, with many Naval installations along the length of California.
One such installation was Naval Ammunitions Depot Mare Island, near Vallejo, California. But the tempo of the Pacific war was so great that by mid-1942, the Mare Island facility had run out of capacity for storing and shipping munitions. The Navy turned to the town of Port Chicago to build another munitions handling depot. As a Navy rteport later said, “Port Chicago was remote from industrial activities, in a sparsely settled area, had deep tide water along the northern boundary, and was served by two transcontinental railways. There was room for further expansion.”
The U.S. Naval Magazine Port Chicago was completed in May 1944. It had a ship-loading pier that could handle two ships at a time, designed so that explosive munitions could be handled directly from rail cars onto deep-water ships.
Although the design was 1944 state of the art, the handling of munitions still had to be done by human beings. It was extremely hazardous work. As the Navy later admitted, its personnel had “no clear definition” how best to handle the task. The men doing the actual work were almost all African-Americans; the officers directing the work were all white. Neither the laborers or the officers had received adequate training in this dangerous endeavor. Compounding the situation at Port Chicago was a lack of adequate houisng and recreational facilities.
To improve morale and to speed the work, the officers encouraged competitions between loading crews to see who could transfer the most bombs in the shortest time. These competitions increased the hazards, since shortcuts wre often taken with what few safety regulations there were.
On the night of July 17, 1944, two merchant ships, the E.A. Bryan and the Quinault Victory, being loaded at Port Chicago. According to the Navy’s official history, the two ships held a total of 4,606 tons of “high explosive and incendiary bombs, depth charges, and ammunition.” More than 400 tons of munitions remained aboard railcars on the pier.
The Navy’s history recounts that:
At 10:18 p.m., a hollow ring and the sound of splintering wood erupted from the pier, followed by an explosion that ripped apart the night sky. Witnesses said that a brilliant white flash shot into the air, accompanied by a loud, sharp report. A column of smoke billowed from the pier, and fire glowed orange and yellow. Flashing like fireworks, smaller explosions went off in the cloud as it rose. Within six seconds, a deeper explosion erupted as the contents of the E.A. Bryan detonated in one massive explosion. The seismic shock wave was felt as far away as Boulder City, Nevada.
A report from the Associated Press the next day said that “almost every house in the little town of Port Chicago was wrecked.” The AP described the Bryan as “literally shredded;” indeed, the biggest piece of the massive ship intact was no larger than a suitcase.
The Navy’s official investigation by a Court of Inquiry found that smoke and gases from the explosion reached 12,000 feet into the sky. This fact has led to some speculation that Port Chicago was secretly handling atomic weapons. There has been no credible evidence produced yet that such was the case.
In the end, 320 men–202 of them African-Americans–were killed and nearly 400, mostly African-Americans, were injured. The tragic incident accounted for 15% of all African-American casualties in World War II.
The Findings of Fact and Opinion of the Naval Court of Inquiry is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the Court concluded that the dead and wounded “were killed or injured in line of duty and not as a result of their own misconduct.” [This is an important legal finding in military law which allowed the surviving members and the survivors of the deceased to receive proper government benefits].
The Findings of Fact also set forth the following problems on the Navy’s part:
a. A general failure to foresee and prepare for the tremendous increase in explosives shipments.
b. A failure to assemble and train the officers and crew for their specialized duties prior to the time they were required for actual loading.
c. A failure to provide initially the collateral equipment so necessary for morale.
d. A failure to provide an adequate number of competent petty officers or even personnel of petty officer caliber.
But then the Court seems to take a different direction, stating that
[T]he officers at Port Chicago have realized for a long time the necessity for great effort on their part because of the poor quality of the personnel with which they had to work. They worked loyally, conscientiously, intelligently, and effectively to make themselves competent officers and to solve the problem of loading ships safely with the men provided.
. . .
[T]he enlisted personnel [meaning the black sailors] comprising the ordnance battalions at Port Chicago were poor material for training in the handling and loading of munitions, and required an unusual amount of close supervision while actually engaged in this work.
. . .
[A] very sustained and vigorous effort was made to train these men in the proper handling of munitions. Despite this, there was a considerable history of rough and careless handling by individuals. . . .
And then the Court tacks yet again in a different direction:
[I]n the months immediately preceding the explosion real progress had been made toward a better training program for officers and men. This work had been retarded by a lack of competent senior officers.
So the Court seemed to walk a tightrope between blaming the white officers and blaming the African-American sailors. The Court, however, did note that “the behavior of the officers and men after the explosion was exemplary and reflects credit on them and on their commanding officer,” and also concluded that “the explosions and the consequent destruction of property, death and personal injuries were not due to the fault, negligence or inefficiency of any person in the naval service or connected therewith or any other person.”
The surviving sailors were reassigned to other bases, many to the depot at Mare Island, which the Port Chicago facility had been built to supplement. They were assigned to other duties.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Just weeks after the Port Chicago explosion, three hundred of the “poor quality” enlisted sailors were ordered to resume loading munitions and explosives at Mare Island. More than 250 of them refused the order. They made it clear that they had not received any more training than before and stated that they were prepared to follow any order except one to load explosives.
The men were accused of mutiny, which at that time carried the death penalty. In the face of that circumstance, all but fifty returned to work. These fifty were put on trial in the largest mass criminal proceeding in U.S. military history and the very first U.S. mutiny trial.
The trial was held on Yerba Buena Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel of the NAACP attended the trial as an observer. According to the Oakland Tribune of October 11, 1944, Marshall praised the Navy officers who were the defense attorneys, but asserted that the prosecutor was “prejudiced” especially against “Southern Negroes.”
The trial ended on October 25, 1944, but the verdict and sentence weren’t announced until three weeks later. All fifty were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to various terms ranging from eight to fifteen years in prison, with dishonorable discharges from the Navy.
The longest term actually served by any of the men was 17 months.
For years after the explosion, the Government paid claims to those people who lost their houses or businesses in the town of Port Chicago. Nothing was done for the surviving sailors who were imprisoned.
In 1967, the Congress effectively put an end to the claims process by essentially allowing the Navy to exercise eminent domain over the affected area. With that act, Port Chicago, California ceased to exist.
A number of individuals and groups called for a review of the trial of the fifty men convicted and finally, in 1994, the Navy conducted the review. It concluded that the verdict was just because military personnel cannot pick and choose which orders to obey.
In 1999, the President of the United States pardoned the last known survivor of the Fifty, Freddie Meeks of Los Angeles, then eighty years old. He died in 2003.
In the early 1990s, Congress authorized a memorial to the dead on the Port Chicago site. In October 2009, the President designated the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National memorial as a unit of the National Park Service.
The Port Chicago National Memorial
Photo Credits: U.S. Naval Historical Center
Yes, a genetic genealogy remembrance of Mitochrondrial DNA Day!
Here are my mothers (my matrilineage), as far as I know them, with their spouse’s name in [ ]:
Lillian Gines (living)[H.V. Manson]
Annie Florida Corrine Long (b. 1902, Kansas City, MO; died 1986, Kansas City, MO)[Wm. E. Gines
Mary Elizabeth Johnson (b. 1870, Clay County, MO; died 1946, Kansas City, MO)[James W. Long]
Sarah Gilbert (b. 1849, MO; died btwn 1880 and 1 Apr 1885) [Ezekiel Johnson]
==============BRICKWALL=============================
(There’s nothing more that I would like in the world than to find Sarah Gilbert’s parents!)
I’m within Halpogroup L3d. L3 originated in East Africa about 85,000 years ago according to GeneTree.com, and is the predecessor of many other haplogroups. It is said that L3 “is also the haplogroup from which the haplogroups M and N have arisen covering the mtDNA pool of all non-African lineages.” [Source]
I am aware of several matches via Ancestry.com and GeneTree.com, but have been unable to make contact with them.
Join us here Saturday p.m. for the start of the GeneaBlogie Grand Genealogy Journey! It’ll kick off with a tour of the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento, located at one of the most historic sites in American railroad history. Then, we’ll learn some more history about Sacramento and the Sierra foothill communities that are nearby. Finally, we board Amtrak’s California Zephyr for the ride to Salt Lake City.
The Zephyr travels between Chicago, Illinois and Emeryville, California. Our ride is 15 hours from Sacramento to Salt Lake City.
Don’t miss the train!
George Geder, Pat Salt, Elizabeth Saunders, and Deborah Andrew have each honored me with the “Ancestor Approved.” My backlog has kept me from ackinowledging them sooner. The terms are that the recipient must list ten things I have learned about any of my ancestors that has surprised, humbled, or enlightened me and pass the award along to ten other bloggers who you feel are doing their ancestors proud. Well, here are ten things:
1. SURPRISE! My maternal family is connected to the Clarke family of New Jersey Revolutionary times.
2. SURPRISE! My father appaers to be a direct descendant of the Birdsong family, originally from Virginia, but very prominent in antebellum Georgia.
3. SURPRISE! My father’s uncle, Elias Bowie, was the first African-American to participate in a NASCAR event (1955).
4. HUMBLED: Despite a life in the bondage of slavery, my second great-grandfather, William Sanford, survived to the age of 106. In 1854, according family lore, his masters moved from Tennessee to Texas. William walked the entire way, pushing a wheelbarrow in which rode the sons of the master.
5. HUMBLED: My second great grandfather, Ezekiel Johnson, escaped from slavery at age 17, and immediately enlisted in the Union Army.
6. HUJMBLED: By all the achievements of my ancestors!
7 . ENLIGHTENED: By the realization that my family is like many other American families with a variety of races and ethnicities in our family tree.
8. ENLIGHTENED: To learn that human relationships are a lot more complicated than they seem on the surface–and that’s been true for many generations.
9. ENLIGHTENED: To fully understand that where I am has been determined by where they were.
10. SURPRISED, ENLIGHTENED, & HUMBLED: To comprehend that all my ancestors, African, Scots, English, French, and Native American, were all the hardiest of their cohorts and ready to take enormous risks for the sake of future generations.
Please visit the blogs of my nominators:
George Geder: http://gedergenealogy.com
Elizabeth Saunders: http://elizabethsaunders.blogspot.com/
Pat Salt: http://www.genealogygals.com/blog
Deborah Andrew: http://debsresearch.blogspot.com/
Now for more recipients. I just chosen five, since during my recuperation. I haven’t kept up with as many as usal. Please visit these interesting folks:
I put my census form in the mail a little after the first of the month. I also scanned it, and I’m making some family group sheets to go with photographs. All these items together will constitute our family’s census 2010 documentation.
Seventy-two years from now, family researchers may conclude that I have lived in the same county for an uninterrupted thirty years or more. I was here on Census Day 1980, Census Day 1990, Census Day 2000, and Census Day 2010. Of the six censuses on which I should appear including the present, four of them show me living in Sacramento County. In fact, during that 30 year period of time, I have lived in Prince George’s County, Maryland; Pima County, Arizona; Suffolk and Norfolk counties in England; El Paso County, Colorado; Alexandria city, Virginia (twice); and Fairfax County, Virginia (basically in that order). But somehow, I always manage to be back in Sacramento County at census time.
At the time of the 1970 census, I lived in Monterey County, California. Before the 1970 census, I had spent more than half my life to that point, living in Bernalillo County, New Mexico. At the time of the 1960 census, I actually lived in Karlsruhe, Baden-Wuerttemburg, Bundesrepublik Deutschland [Federal Republic of Germany, then popularly known as "West Germany"], very near the French border.
So in 1960, my family was among the 1,374,422 Americans living abroad. (Oops, make that 1,374,421 –Elvis had left the Bundesrepublik on March 1 before Census Day). These consisted not only of military personnel and their dependents living with them, but included federal civilian employees stationed abroad and their dependents living with them; crews of vessels of the US merchant Marine at sea or docked at a foreign port; and private US citizens living abroad for an extended period and their dependents living with them. In 1960, none of these people were enumerated stateside, and hence were not included in the apportionment of Congress. (See Mills, Karen M., Americans Overseas in US Censuses, Technical Paper #62, US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1993, available at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/overseas/techn62-1.pdf ).
My dad, an Army first lieutenant at the time, received a form like the one below, and filled it out. He returned the form through his chain of command, and it, like all such forms, was eventually shipped to the Census Operations Center at Jeffersonville, Indiana.
Census form used by military personnel overseas in 1960 (front and back)
One result of the 1960 census for my family was that the government had two different domiciles for us: the Census Bureau said we were domiciled “overseas,” and the Army said we were residents of Harris County, Texas, a place I had only visited for less than a week in my entire life to that point. What a country!
The rule about where to count Americans overseas, i.e., as part of their “home state” population or some “Americans abroad” population, has been different from time to time. Starting in 1990, the rule was to count them as part of their home state population, which of course has an effect on congressional apportionment. In 2010, the pre-1990 rule will be back in effect: Americans abroad will not be counted as part of their home states populations.
At the time of the 1950 census, my dad was a high school senior, and a census enumerator. And I, well, I simply was non-existent.
No census shows me at the place of my birth or reflects the time I spent living in Marion County, Indiana.
Where were you during the censuses of the last fifty years? How well does the census document where you’ve been?
This note came from Justin Schroepfer, marketing director at Footnote.com:
I wanted to update you that we have decided to extend our Interactive Census Collection free to the public through the end of April. Since opening this collection a few weeks ago, we have received a very positive response. In order to view the images from the collection, visitors only need to register for free.
Go to www.footnote.com/census/.
Footnote.com has the “interactive” census images; that is, users may annotate or comment the census iamges. The 1860 and the 1930 censuses are 100% complete, while others are in various stages of completion on Footnote.
I found the notorious outlaw Bonnie Parker on the 1930 census, living under another name. If you want to know where and by what name she was then known, go to Footnote.com find my annotation on the 1930 census.
The following information was provided by the Digital Library of Georgia last week:
A new digital database providing online access to 14 newspaper titles published in Atlanta from 1847 to 1922 is now available through the Digital Library of Georgia, housed at The University of Georgia Libraries.
The Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive (http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/atlnewspapers) consists of more than 67,000 newspaper pages and provides historical images that are both full-text searchable and can be browsed by date.
“This site will provide users with a record of Atlanta’s history from its origins as a railroad terminus, through the devastation of the Civil War, to its eventual growth into one of the nation’s largest cities,” said Toby Graham, director of the Digital Library of Georgia and deputy university librarian. “Of great interest to anyone curious about Atlanta history, it promises to be invaluable to researchers on any number of topics.”
The archive includes the following Atlanta newspaper titles: Atlanta Daily Examiner (1857), Atlanta Daily Herald (1873-1876), Atlanta Georgian (1906-1911), Atlanta Intelligencer (1851, 1854-1871), Atlantian (1911-1922), Daily/Georgia Weekly Opinion (1867-1868), Gate-City Guardian (1861), Georgia Literary and Temperance Crusader (1860-1861), New Era (1869-1872), Southern Confederacy (1861-1864), Southern Miscellany, and Upper Georgia Whig (1847), Southern World (1882-1885), Sunny South (1875-1907), Weekly Constitution (1869-1882).
The Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of the Georgia HomePLACE initiative. The project is supported with federal LSTA funds administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Georgia Public Library Service, a unit of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.
Other newspaper archives available through the Digital Library of Georgia include the Macon Telegraph Archive (1826-1908), the Columbus Enquirer Archive (1828-1890), the Milledgeville Historic Newspaper Archive (1808-1920), the Southern Israelite Archive (1929-1958, 1984-1986), and the Red and Black Archive (1893-2006). These archives can be accessed at: http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/MediaTypes/Newspapers.html
Comment: I love old newspapers, and I do Georgia research. This collection covers very important times in Georgia and US history. I’m quite eager to dig into this collection and see what’s there. Of course we’ll report back. For more information about the Atlanta historical newspapers contact Toby Graham, tgraham@uga.edu, 706.542.7123, at the Digital Library of Georgia.
Each time I find myself flat on my face,
I pick myself up and get back in the race.
(That’s Life, lyrics copyright by Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon)
I continue to gradually emerge into the world as my recuperation from back surgery progresses. It’s been difficult not to have had the time to write. I will have, however, an article in the upcoming April edition of shades the magazine. And there are some original posts here on their way.
But even worse, I haven’t had time to read a number of blogs that I usually keep up with. So I felt like I’ve been on the wrong side of the universe. I’m making my way back, however.
There’s been a lot of news that we’ve not reported on and so the next several posts are devoted to catching up with the news.
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