As the outreach coordinator for a museum, I spend a lot of my time thinking of ways to make our museum and the stories we tell accessible to our visitors.  The process by which a museum’s knowledge base is transmitted to the general public is called “interpretation.”  This can be accomplished in a visual, auditory, or tactile fashion, and the best museums employ all three to varying degrees.

When we work on genealogy, we are both museum and visitor.  We possess all this raw information and have to interpret it ourselves, FOR ourselves.  I try to use my own experiences to enhance my understanding of my ancestors, but I sometimes I need outside help.  Because I’m an unabashed bookworm, I often turn to historical fiction to help me fill in the gaps.

I have an uneasy relationsip with historical fiction.  As one who has received degrees in the study of history, I fully appreciate how difficult it is to understand a past event relying on the sources available.  Additionally, our own life experiences color our perception and comprehension of historical events.  The “TRUTH,” if there even is such a cut-and-dried concept, is desperately hard to pin down.  The harder we look at it, the blurrier it becomes.  Historical fiction takes history that extra step towards speculation as an author uses his or her own imagination to flesh out events, or characters’ mindsets.  But there’s a bravery there that appeals to me, a willingness to open one’s mind to the possibility of being completely and utterly wrong about history–or perhaps being more right than anyone could know.  Authors often take risks in interpretation that historians wouldn’t dare.  I admire that courage.

At the moment I am reading Kevin Baker’s historical novel Paradise Alley, set in New York City during the Civil War.  Most of the characters are Irish immigrants who came to America in the wake of the Famine.  As this was my family’s experience as well (though they didn’t end up in New York City), I have been reading Mr. Baker’s interpretation of souls damaged irreparably by the gross trauma of the Famine with morbid interest.  His description, flashback-style, of a family’s slow death by starvation and fever in a ruined cottage on the Burren is vivid to the point of gruesomeness and since I read it I have been haunted by it.  Was this what my family was fleeing from?  Was it like this, truly like this? 

In the end, I suppose it really doesn’t matter how pitch-perfect and accurate Mr. Baker’s descriptions are.  What matters to me is that his book is making my ancestors real to me in ways I might not have though of on my own.  He could be right or wrong, or perhaps somewhere in between, but his book is making me think.  It is making me think hard about history and how it was lived out by real people–real people who, though they didn’t know it then, were day by day, slowly creating me.

This has been two months of constant motion for us.  We are (mostly) moved in to our new country, new state, new city, new apartment, new places of employment.  Contributing to the surreal feeling of starting a new life has been the bizarre weather that has plagued New England this “summer.”  We had less than a week of sunshine in June, and many, many days when the temperature barely scrabbled out of the 50s.  I had the coldest birthday I have ever had in my 33 years:  on July 8th our high for the day was 58 degrees (a new record for our city). 

Driving home from work with the radio tuned in to Maine’s public radio station last week, I listened with equal parts of fascination and horror as the news report announced that the cold and wet weather, coupled with a batch of infected seedlings sold in local big-box stores has brought about a resurgance of the crop disease known as “late blight.”  This is the self same fungus that triggered the loss of the potato crop during the Famine in Ireland in the late 1840s.  Because my mind works in odd ways, it occurred to me that in a strange way I owed my very existence to late blight, as it brought my Irish ancestors to the States and into each others’ company. 

That was all the inspiration I needed.  That night I was back messing around on my favorite, long-neglected genealogy websites.  Isn’t it curious that we sometimes don’t realize how much we’ve missed something until we encounter it once again after a long hiatus?  And in my case, a great surprise was waiting in a source I felt I’d scoured months before.

I was watching the Red Sox on TV and enjoying the freedom of our fancy new wireless internet connection by paging lazily through the 1865 New York State Census on Family Search’s pilot site.  I became engaged in the game and failed to notice that I had advanced through to the end of all of the census pages available for the first election district of the town of Niagara, New York.  When I turned my eyes back to the computer, I was confounded.  The final page on the screen read that the census was of all inhabitants living in Niagara on the first on June, 1875.  Huh?  I jumped to the first page of the district and read 1865.  Perhaps the microfilmer had added a few pages from the next decade’s state census by mistake at the end of filming the 1865 census.  I paged through again, carefully, to check.  As it turned out, this was more than a few pages worth of snafu.  To my elation, I discovered the entirety of the 1875 state census for the first district appended to the end of the 1865 census!  This is mentioned nowhere in the description of the source on the site, which lists it only as the 1865 New York State Census.  And sure enough, the second district yielded the same results.  Abandoning the ballgame, I went on a hunt for the Gavins and McCabes in 1875, and found them all, waiting patiently for me to cop on to the extraordinary genealogical good fortune that had fallen into my lap(top).

The moral of the story?  We have heard so many times that reexamining an old source may open up new avenues of research.  In this case, that genealogical adage proved more true than I could ever have hoped.  You can be sure I will be reading my way through the entirety of my sources from now on.

 In honor of Memorial Day, here’s a shot of my wonderful grandfather, Gus Erikson’s engineering group of the Army Air Corps 368th Fighter Group, 397th Fighter Squadron (Jabo Angels).  Grampa is in the middle row, second from the right.

Anders Gustaf Erikson 1916-2000

Miss you, Grampa.  Miss you every single day.

The new LDS Family Search Pilot has just posted the 1865 New York Census in a “browse images only” format!  Wow!

And I haven’t fully recovered from the joy of discovering the 1892 NY Census there last week!

This is the gravestone of my great-great-great-great grandmother Helen (Ellen) McCabe.  The stone is in St. Mary’s Cemetery, Niagara Falls, New York.  She shares the stone with her husband, Thomas, and her son, Owen.

I was lucky to be at the cemetery on a day that favored reading her inscription, as the sandstone marker is quickly becoming illegible.  Here’s what it says:

“Helen McCabe

Native of Co. Sligo

Ireland

Died June 27, 1884

Aged 76 Years”

After a long and involved trip back to New England to find an apartment and interview for a handful of jobs, I have finally returned to Canada to help my husband pack up our apartment.  I found a great little place in Maine for us, and there are some job prospects on the horizon, so things are sloooowly coming together.

I finally had a chance to sit down and do some genealogy work a few days ago, and discovered that the pilot site of the new LDS Family Records Search recently added the 1892 New York State Census in an “browse image only” format.  This is a dream come true. 

Within fifteen minutes of searching the second voting district of the town of Niagara, I found my great-great grandfather Michael Gavin Jr. and his family (with his second wife Annie):

And little fourteen year old Nellie Gavin is my great-grandmother.

In the fourth voting district I found my great-great-great grandparents, Michael Gavin Sr. and his wife Elizabeth.  Their adult son Patrick is there as well.  And a wonderful bonus:  a few entries beneath them I came upon my great-great-great grandmother, Ellen McCabe.

The interface of the image viewer is super easy to use and for the most part the images are fantastic quality.  I don’t mind not having an index, because I find the “browse only” format forces me to search more slowly and to observe the families living around my ancestors.  Some of these families are becoming familiar to me, and this summer I am planning to construct a “neighbor map” for my ancestors.  Who knows–it could lead to a few brick walls being busted down.

What a treat!

In Swedish, the words for one’s grandparents delineate which side of the family each grandparent comes from.  For example:

Your mother’s father:  morfar

Your mother’s mother:  mormor

Your father’s mother:  farmor

Your father’s father:  farfar

My mother is a first-generation Swedish American, so she always referred to her grandparents this way.  She still does.  It only recently occurred to me how incredibly useful this system is.  When she talks about “Mormor,” everyone always knows which grandparent she is speaking of:  her mother’s mother. 

When I speak of my grandparents, I have to use their last names to differentiate, and now because I’m deep into genealogy, confusion arises.  I was recently asking my mother a genealogical question about her mother, who was always “Grandma Erikson” to me.  But my mother inadvertently skipped back a generation in her mind and began telling me about her “Grandma Erikson,” her father’s mother.  We went back and forth for a while, each of us confusing the other more and more, until I realized the problem and said, “No, no–not your farmor, MY mormor.”  “Oh,” said my mother.  “Now I understand.”

Oh English.  Why can’t you be more like Swedish?

My morfar and mormor, Gus and Margaret Erikson, and me, 1979.

Somewhere in this photo of the Niagara Falls Police Department from 1910 is one of the more colorful characters in my family tree, Detective George H. Callinan.  He was my great-great grandfather Michael Gavin’s sister Mary (Gavin) Callinan’s son.*  I still don’t know what he looks like, though I know someday I will.  In the history of the city of Niagara Falls, he’s unavoidable.

Leaf through any Niagara Falls Gazette from the 1920s or 1930s and it’s nearly a certainty a mention of George Callinan will be there.  In a time of Prohibition and Depression, when desperate men turned away from the law, Callinan was Niagara Falls’ very own Dick Tracy: larger than life, ever ready with his revolver, always “getting his man.”  He was free and easy with the local media, perennially candid and a delight to interview: a reporter’s dream.  The story of his greatest case in 1921 deserves a post of its own, and that will come.

But even before he became a local celebrity, back around the time when the above photo was taken, Callinan still managed to make the papers in what would become a familiarly dramatic fashion in the decades to come.  Any introduction to this article from the New York Times on June 24, 1907 will only detract from its delightful bizarreness, and so for your perusal I simply present:

FEAR-CRAZED IN BALLOON.

——–

Subdues Policeman Who Would Have Jumped Into Niagara Rapids

 

NIAGARA FALLS, N. Y., June 23—Detective Callinan and Patrolman Roeder faced death for twenty minutes to-day 400 feet up in the air in the basket of a captive balloon.  The mechanism which brings the balloon to earth went wrong, and the gasbag shot skyward.

      A sudden gust of wind carried the balloon out over the rapids of the Niagara River just above the Falls, and the anchor went tearing through chimneys and roofs, which were considerably damaged.  Roeder, crazed with fear, wanted to jump, but Callinan drew his revolver and threatened to shoot him if he attempted to go over the side of the basket.

      As the last effort was being made to bring the wild bag down to earth, the basket ran against the high-power cables which carry electricity from the power-houses across the gorge, and the men narrowly escaped being shocked to death.

      The rope which held the balloon to earth threatened to burn against the cables, but by careful handling of those on the ground the bag was finally brought down and the two men were released.

 

 

(This ballooning image can be found in its original context on this webpage.  The text below the image is not my own.)

 

*His mother herself had begun life in a colorful fashion, as she was, according to her 1915 obituary, “born at sea, when within ten days of the shores of the U. S., on one of the old time sailing vessels.”

There are times when I adore the internet.  One good click leads to another and I find a gem of a blog via a gem of a blog.  This morning was one of those occasions.

Tim Abbot (or Greenman Tim), on his truly unique and ridiculously readable blog Walking The Berkshires, recently posted that the “Cabinet of Curiosities” carnival he hosts will postponed indefinitely due to a concerning bout with serious illness.  May he get well soon!  As a gift to his readers he offered a link to another “cabinet of curiosities,” the blog Morbid Anatomy (a word of warning, though, before you click:  Morbid Anatomy contains graphic medical images of the human body).  The tagline of Morbid Anatomy is “surveying the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture.”  The medical historian in me practically did cartwheels.

Now granted, some, or perhaps most of you do not get as thrilled as I do about 19th-century wax antatomical figures with severe physical malformations (I’m willing to bet I’m pretty much alone in this), but this site may also be helpful to the genealogist and family historian hoping to learn about the types of diseases our ancestors suffered and the variety of medical treatments available to them.  There is much to learn about death on this blog as well.

It’s so worth a click, but leave any squeamishness at the door.

Thank you, Tim!

Larry Lehmer over at the excellent blog Passing It On, offered the following family history blogging prompt on 15 April:

“Writing prompt of the day: Make a list of ambiguous or unusual words you’ve found in your family history research and verify that you’ve interpreted them properly.”

While I haven’t made a list of all the wacky things I’ve read in my research (or all the wacky things I myself have written during the course of my research), I do have one particular word that’s been bugging me for a while.

The word is “helper,” and it refers to the profession of my great-great-grandfather’s eldest brother.

Not much to go on, is it?

Here it is in an original context, from Waite’s Directory of Niagara Falls, 1889:

So the first Michael is my ggg-grandfather.  He was a day laborer who owned a house on Falls Street in Niagara Falls, N. Y., near the Erie Railroad tracks which ran through town from north to south.

The second Michael is his son, my great-great grandfather.  He is also listed as a laborer, but by this point was also serving on the Niagara Falls police department as a patrolman.  The directory tells us he owned a house on Third Street, near Niagara Street.

Patrick Gavin is Michael Sr.’s eldest son.  The directory tells us he’s living with his father in his father’s house.  And here his profession is listed as “helper.”  What is he helping with and who is he helping?

By 1892 the directory provides specific addresses for the men, but Patrick’s occupation is no less baffling:

Patrick’s obituary gives a wee bit more information about what he did for work:

 

Niagara Falls Gazette

Saturday Evening, 22 July 1893

 

OBITUARY

­­———————-

Patrick Gavin.

 

Patarick [sic] Gavin, aged 48 years, died this morning about 10:30 o’clock at his home on Falls street near the Erie railroad tracks.  The deceased came here in 1850 and has worked on the New York Central.  He was born in County Clair [sic], Ireland, and leaves a mother, four sisters and one brother as follows […]

 

So we know he worked for the railroad–the New York Central–for enough time to have it mentioned in his obit.  But what exactly does a “helper” do in the context of a railroad?  I’m stumped.  One gets the feeling that it was a common enough occupation that it needed no further explanation to someone leafing through the Niagara Falls directory in the early 1890s.

Is anyone out there enough of a railroad buff to shed some light on this mysterious profession of railroad “helper?”  I’d love a hint!