Kids on summer vacation.

Proof that Death is Not the End of the Month (Part 1)

Charles Henry Foster, the “Salem Seer,” was one of history’s great charlatans. Imagine Johnny Carson as “Carnac the Magnificent,” tapping the sealed envelope on his forehead and divining the hidden contents. That was Foster’s shtick. He invented that, more or less. He performed for Dickens, Thackeray, and Napoleon III. Arthur Conan Doyle was a fan.

He was my second cousin, many times removed. But who isn’t? That’s not why I’m writing about him. I’ve got a better reason.

When my 3x great-grandfather Ned—no relation to Foster—died of pneumonia in 1900, he left behind a massive estate and two well-worn scraps of paper. He’d carried them around the world in his pockets for twenty-seven years. He died in Liverpool but the scraps made it back home to Hackensack. With the body, of course.

If you were a prosperous white collar worker in 1873, before the global financial PANIC! of the same year, you lived like a software engineer in 2026. In some ways, your life was even better. No Slack, no Zoom, no email, but you could still leave the sweltering city for your summer cottage, then escape again for warmer climes in the winter. Ned ran a Manhattan dry goods commission business and dabbled in banking, but he still had plenty of time to take his wife and son Jimmie (one of many…sons, not Jimmies) on a two-and-a-half month leisure tour of the South in December 1872. You can follow them in the local papers by tracing their arrival at each grand hotel along the way. First they took the train to Washington, where they celebrated Jimmie’s tenth birthday at the Arlington Hotel. Then onward by rail to Charleston, stayed a few more nights, and either traveled by rail or steamer to Jacksonville.

In Jacksonville they encamped at the opulent St. James Hotel. Ned formed a baseball team with some other traveling businessmen— “The Awkward Nine.” The Brooklyn Eagle wrote it up, amused. He played against Boss Tweed’s spokesman and the ex-governor of Maine. Ned was a proponent of good government.

Then, leaving Jimmie and Mother to enjoy the weather, he took the steamer to New Orleans, where, naturally, he checked into the finest establishment in the American Quarter, the St. Charles Hotel. He must have traveled with a friend, or the friend met him there, because it was a friend who convinced him to spend the evening with Mr. C.H. Foster, the “Salem Seer.”

Sounds pretty nice, right? Ned was—relative to his contemporaries—the most privileged ancestor in my family tree. He was not born to great wealth. His father died suddenly at the stroke of the divine hand—they were trying to make “apoplexy” stick at the time—still working at 69, still trying to regain his third or fourth lost fortune, to leave something for his children. They found him on the floor after lunch. Ned was a product of Boston’s public schools, about seven years of them, anyway, before he went to work. He was a talented and genial man, and he made his way in the world. In 1872 he was still rising and he was living just about the best life postbellum America could offer.

But even the Gilded gentlemen of a Gilded Age faced reversals we would surely find incapacitating. Ned was only 63 when he died. But he outlived all ten of his siblings by twenty-eight years. Imagine your friend, just thirty-four years old, was the only surviving child of eleven, both parents also dead. And these weren’t infant deaths, either. The youngest sibling to die was seven, and the rest were at least seventeen. You’d think him cursed. You’d discuss his tribulations in hushed tones. But Ned wasn’t cursed.

Ned’s last surviving brother, Horace, who lived with him, died at twenty-three in January 1872. Ned must have been haunted by that in New Orleans, as the anniversary of Horace’s death approached. He was the last one standing.

You could say that Ned owed his worldly success to his family tragedy.

More next month. Which is in three days.

Good News of the Month

This whole thing, which you’ve probably heard about if you’re in the very bad habit of scrolling Substack notes on your phone.

I’m very confident in my ability to eyeball lazy AI writing. By lazy, I mean the “writer”—Godzilla-sized scare quotes there—just copy-pastes the first output he gets and lets the subscriptions roll in. I’m not sure I’d be able to pick out a more fastidiously edited or revised Opus-output. I’m also not sure I care. If you put in a good deal of effort, that’s good enough for me.

I’m not so worried about my own writing generating false positives. First, obviously, because I know I wrote it. And second, because my prose is so goofy and ungainly that any self-respecting AI behemoth would have RLHF’d it straight into Erewhon. Try getting Claude to spit out a sentence of such especial unsightliness.

Film Reviews

A Complete Unknown (2024, dir. James Mangold) ⋆⋆½
Accurately portrays the fundamental unknowability of Bob Dylan. Or does it?Film was meandering, but not on purpose. Strong characterization for its male leads. Gentle with Pete Seeger as could be hoped. I could have done without the character assassination of Alan Lomax, but I guess you need a bad guy. The Joan Baez and “Sylvia Rossi” characters were mere foils to aid in Dylan’s development from “liar” to “famous liar.” I love Bob Dylan, in case it’s not obvious.

Read more

I’ve got a picture, and I’m going to write about it. And I know it’s poor form to tell people everything you learned in your research. Poor form? Boring. That’s the word I was looking for: boring.

But you couldn’t possibly find this boring.

Photo above is from the wedding album of my wife’s grandparents. They were married in 1950, in Norfolk, Virginia. All three partygoers are unknown to me, and the photograph is, naturally, unlabeled.

Perfect candidate for Ancestry’s AI-boosted “Face Search.”

The tall fellow on the right didn’t pan out. Ancestry doesn’t know him. I think I do, and I think he has no living descendants, which is probably why his photograph isn’t on the internet.

The other two, linking arms, could have been just about anybody. Ancestry had nothing for me on the lady. There were two hits, but they didn’t match her chronologically, and only a computer would think they looked alike.

But the guy on the left! You know, the one holding two drinks. Check this out:

On the high school yearbook photo alone, I was already pretty sure we’d found our man. And it’s pretty impressive, isn’t it, that the computer connected the dots? The facts fall into place. Mr. Newburger (actually Richard L. Newburger) graduated the University of Virginia in 1934, two years after the bride’s stepfather. They were in the same line of work, both of rarified German Jewish background. And some Newspaper’ing.com pulled up Newburger’s 1979 obituary with a more contemporaneous photo. And, again, it’s him.

The obituary led me to Elizabeth (Allman) (Hano) Newburger, his wife, who I’m quite sure is the lady in the middle. She was first married to a Lester Hano, the Newburger firm’s primary competitor in the Philadelphia brokerage business, divorced Hano, remarried Hano, divorced Hano again, then Hano merged his firm with Newburger & Co., becomes Hano’s partner himself, then she married Newburger. I’m sure there were many jokes.

We’ll give the last word to Richard’s first cousin, Bob Newburger, who started on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1933 and lived to 102.

Gwynne Fishin’

More importantly, do you remember The Munsters? Then you’ll remember the paterfamilias, Hermann Munster. And of course you also remember Fred Gwynne in My Cousin Vinnie, the southern gentleman judge with the long face who couldn’t understand Joe Pesci’s Brooklynese. In real life, Fred Gwynne was a New Yorker through and through, albeit one who’d spent some childhood years in the deep south. I’m sure he knew what a “yoot” was.

Fred’s father was a stockbroker, of Gwynne Brothers. There were many little firms like Gwynne Brothers on Wall Street. They all crashed or merged or descended into the boiler room and got disbarred by the SEC. It’s its own form of genealogy, tracing these partnerships and brotherhoods through the dark Dutch streets of downtown Manhattan and then back home to the open lawns of Westchester, Long Island, Greenwich, and Monmouth County. Some people are really into it (weirdos).

My wife’s step-great-grandfather, who was really her great-grandfather for all purposes save biological—so we’ll call him that—had one of those twentieth century firms himself, called Marx & Co. He founded the firm in 1946, after he came home from The (capital-t, capital-W) War. In The War, he was the first officer, then commander of a submarine-chasing patrol boat, the USS Manville, then commander of a destroyer, the USS Reybold.

As a yoot, Fred Gwynne was a radioman on the USS Manville.

Among the partners founding Marx & Co. was one Raymond de Clairville, formerly of Gwynne Brothers. Madame de Clairville was the former Gwendolyn Knowlton Gwynne, daughter of one of the Gwynne brothers, and Fred’s first cousin.

Where was Fred while his former commander and first cousin went into business together? He was at art school, then Harvard College, where he contracted “acting” and played Nick Bottom in a Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Brattle Theatre while my children’s third cousin (2x removed) played Puck.

What’s this all have to do with anything?

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Well, I blame them.

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Enter “Reasonable Blackman.” Reasonable Blackman, so say some historians of Elizabethan England, was a Southwark silk weaver, flourishing, if you can call it that (at least two of his children died of the Plague) in the 1580s. His home parishes, St. Saviour and St. Olave, were on the south bank of the Thames. It was a few minutes walk from the Globe and Rose Theatres. Keep that in mind.

Let me show you how much the people want someone like Reasonable Blackman to have existed:

The guy is fascinating. Don’t get me wrong. An artisan of African ancestry with enough status to qualify as a “householder” in Shakespeare’s London. That would be an incredible find.

To whom do we owe this rare discovery? Reasonable’s life was first fleshed out by Duncan Salkeld and Imtiaz Habib, Shakespeare scholars, in 2013, under the title The Resonables of Boroughside, Southwark: an Elizabethan black family near the Rose Theatre.

The Argument

Here’s what they say.

• 14 parish record entries between 1578–1596 document a Black silk weaver named Resonable/Reason in Southwark, with a wife (”Widdowe Blackmore”) and children.

• We know he was Black because the parish records call him "a blacman silkweaver” and “a blackmor.”

• The authors propose he came as a child servant to Huguenot silk weavers Nicholas and Annis Reason based on Dutch dominance of the trade and Southwark’s “stranger” (what we’d now call immigrant) population.2

• His status as a rent-paying householder purchasing church tokens shows unusual stability. Maybe he was named “Reasonable” because of his personal qualities.

• He lived near the Rose Theatre, and appeared in the same parish books as Philip Henslowe, Edward Alleyn, and 26 other theatre figures, so perhaps he even worked in the business.

Then they make some wild speculations about Reasonable being referenced in The Merchant of Venice. Had to connect it to Shakespeare somehow. I’m going to skip that one. One inference too many, not worth engaging.

Really, I think all of the speculation in the article is wild, but we’re going to stick to the genealogical core of the matter. I am, after all, a humble genealogist, and I prefer not to wander far afield from the sheepfold of my expertise.

One thing they don’t do is call the guy “Reasonable Blackman.” That’s a later innovation.

Instead, here’s what they did, as best I can reconstruct it. They read about a man with a strange name appearing in the parish registers of Southwark (St. Saviour and St. Olave), probably from earlier published writing by Roslyn Knutson. They reviewed those records themselves (maybe?), and noted varying references to a “John Reason,” “Reasonable Blackmore, silk weaver” “Reasonable, a Blackmor” and “Reasonable, a Blacman.” They deduced, if that’s the word, that there was a single Black silk weaver living there, who understandably flitted from name to name. He was from a foreign land and probably had no fixed surname. I see the logic. If the guy has no fixed surname, but merely a descriptor (“Reasonable, a black man”), then you’d expect to see variations on the theme of "Reasonable.” Habib & Salkeld saw this guy “John Reason” nearby in the church books and surmised it was the same man.

A leap. But you might say it’s not unreasonable.

I’m not familiar with Duncan Salkeld’s work. But this wasn’t my first encounter with Imtiaz Habib. One of my long-term research projects involves a woman by the name of Elizabeth Blakemore who obtained a marriage license in 1620 London. I don’t know her parents, and I’ve o’erturned many a stone to find them. Over the years I’ve looked at a whole slew of Blackmores, Blakemoors, Blackamoores, etc., in exactly Reasonable’s period and neighborhood. That’s how I came across the now-deceased Professor Habib.

Habib wrote a book called Black Lives in the English Archives: 1500-1677. Some of the people I was researching appeared in that book. And for a brief moment, maybe lasting all of three minutes, I thought: wow! these people were Black, or at least “Moors.” Surely this credentialed professor wouldn’t put them in his book without a strong foundation. Right?

Well, those three minutes passed. And it dawned on me that the only evidence Habib could produce for so-classifying a large portion of the historical Londoners in his book was their surnames.

You probably don’t need me to explain this to you—and that’s exactly the problem—but here it is anyway. Habib reasoned that, in Tudor times, the English used the term “blackmoor” where we use “Black person.” Then he dug into the church books and pulled every family by the name of “Blackmoor” or its variants. He also pulled any reference to [Name], a blackmoor, which is a different beast entirely. That latter group of people, I am happy to agree, were probably of Moorish or African heritage.

That first category, though. I can understand going into this project being unaware of the not-at-all-rare English surname “Blackmore.” Maybe he wasn’t a fan of Deep Purple. But how do you pore through thousands of pages of church registers (most of which were unindexed at the time) and still not suspect there’s something off about your methodology? That’s harder to fathom. There was a whole family of “Blackamores” in the 1580 Visitation of Cheshire! If you know what a Visitation is, you will see the absurdity.

All that is to say that I was immediately suspicious of poor Reasonable Blackman, as presented by Professor Habib. Was he back to his old ways?

I doubt the article, published in the journal Shakespeare in 2015, made an enormous splash. The Reasonable Blackman Wikipedia page wasn’t created until 2019. What changed? Well, the times changed. The market for knowledge changed. And a more prominent book took up the argument: Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors, of 2017. Kaufmann, as best I can tell, was the first to call our guy by the highly memorable “Reasonable Blackman.” Salkeld later cited to personal correspondence in which Kaufmann defended her choice as “the most modern composite of the variations in which he is recorded.” Read: it’s the catchiest.

Don’t just make your product. Market it.

There are many bad genealogy books out there. Sometimes I write about them. Black Tudors is not a genealogy book, and frankly, where it touches on the subject, it isn’t even bad. Here’s what Kaufmann had to say about Habib’s “everyone-named-Black-was-Black” approach:

A surname alone cannot confirm a person’s ethnicity. Although Reasonable’s surname would seem to indicate the colour of his skin, it is in fact an old English surname . . . ‘Blackman’ may have originated in reference to a dark complexion, but by the sixteenth century it cannot be assumed to signify African ethnicity . . . The names could also refer to dark hair (Black), or to someone who came from a place called Moore (in Cheshire), More (in Shropshire), Blackmore (Essex), Blackmoor (Hampshire, Somerset) or Blakemere (Herefordshire), or even to someone who lived on or near a moor. In Scotland, the surnames ‘Muir, Mure, Moor, Moore, More’ referred to ancient ‘residence beside a moor or heath’. It is only because Reasonable Blackman was also described as ‘blackmor’ and ‘a blackmore’ that we know he was African. ‘Blackamoor’ or its variants was the most popular term Englishmen used to describe Africans, appearing in some 40% of references to individuals in the archives, and in literature from at least 1525.

Bolded the key part. Kaufmann, again to her credit, reviewed Habib’s book in 2008 and found it wanting for the same reason:

However by my calculation, 122 of the 448 records presented are of what Habib describes as ‘fluctuating ethnic clarity’. This phrase is typical of the author’s tendency to use the high-flown register of the American academic literary theorist, which means that readers will require a dictionary to decipher some of his prose. What he means is that he has chosen to extend the benefit of the doubt to all persons with surnames such as ‘Blackmore’, ‘Moore’ and ‘Black’. By these standards, the origin of Sir Thomas More should also be interrogated.

She was also dead-on in disputing the Habib & Salkeld identification of “John Reason” with “Reasonable Blackman/Blackmore.” Absolutely zero reason to presume they were one and the same, and in fact there’s genealogical proof they were not. “John Reason” is never described as a “silk weaver” or “black man” in the records and—this seems to have gone unremarked—both Reasonable Blackmore and John Reason appear separately, in different neighborhoods, in the 1579 token books. Finally, the two men had children baptized within months of each other in late 1579.3

Case closed, then. Habib & Salkeld got a little overexcited. John Reason was probably a different dude. But they’ve got that strong evidence, remember? “It is only because Reasonable Blackman was also described as ‘blackmor’ and ‘a blackmore’ that we know he was African.”

The Parish Records

They said they found fourteen records. Those records were in the church books—that’s baptisms, marriages, burials—and in the token books. Tokens were basically a fundraising tool. Every head of household was to buy a sacramental token for Easter communion, one each for every household member over 16 years of age. They function as a snapshot census of the parish, and they don’t exist for many parishes outside of St. Saviour. Cool source, and they’re digitized.

At least some of those 14 records were for “John Reason,” and I’m ignoring those. We’re dealing here with a handful of references.

You know what, I’ll just quote the article:

Of the 14 citations that make up the documentary database of Resonable, 10 are from St. Saviour’s church token books and church registers, and 3 from St. Olave’s church registers. In St. Olave he is called ‘‘Resonabell’’ and ‘‘Resonable’’ and identified as a ‘‘blacman silk weaver’’, and as a ‘‘blackmor’’. In St. Saviour’s he is identified once as ‘‘R-E-S-O-N blackmor’’, and multiple times with the Christian name ‘‘John’’ and the surname Reason spelled variously. He has two sons in St. Saviour’s, and two sons and a daughter in St. Olave’s. Their fates are generally untraceable, except for the fact that two of them (a son and a daughter) die in their infancy in St. Olave’s, one certainly from the plague.

The “John Reason” thing hopelessly confuses the record, so let’s ignore the “sons and daughters” for now. The key information is in St. Olave’s church registers, because that’s where he’s identified as a “black man” or “blackmor.” Let’s review for ourselves in rough chronological order.

Token Book, Easter 1579 [St. Saviour]

The earliest appearance. It looks to me like a man named “Reasonable Blackmore” moved into the dwelling formerly occupied by a Thomas Bait and bought two tokens (not pictured). One for himself, one for his wife. Makes sense.

Note what this does not say. It does not say “Reson a blackmore.” The scribe has contracted the name into a single word, a not-uncommon trick at the time, though you rarely see it with names. It says “Reasonablackmore.” If we had any reason at all to think the guy’s given name was “Reason” instead of “Reasonable,” I might give this a second thought. But as you’ll see, we don’t. He appears as some variant of “Reasonable” every single time.

[Note 6/2/26: A perceptive reader pointed out two things, though they do not change the conclusion. First, this says “Resonablackmore,” not “Reasonabl…” More importantly, it’s unlikely the scribe purposely contracted the name, because, among other things, as written it would no longer be pronounced correctly. The last syllable of “Reasonable” would be swallowed. So this is more likely a simple scribal error. He just skipped a letter.]

Baptism, 26 Oct 1579 [St. Saviour]

A son is born. John Blakemore, sone of Reasonable Blakemore.

Baptism, 1582 [Kingston-upon-Thames]

This may be the baptism of Jane, and I’m including because a man named Reasonable Blackmore was buried in this distant parish. As you can see, the digital image is mostly unreadable. A transcriber at some point, probably working with the original or a better copy, recorded the child as “Jane Blackmore” and the father as “Resonable Blackmore.” I have no reason to doubt that’s correct.

Burial, 14 Jan 1587/88 [Kingston upon Thames]

Reasonable Blackmore was buryed the second sunday.

Note that none of the Reasonable Blackman authors appear to have been aware of this entry. Thanks to an Ancestry.com user for this one, which is transcribed there as “Roasonabel Bluckmon.”

Baptism, 19 Feb. 1587/88 [St. Olave]

Another son is born. Edward the sonne of Resonabell Blackman silkweaver.

This is supposed to be one of the three key records, indeed, the one quoted above as “blacman a silkweaver.” You tell me. Is that what this says?

This is also the only record where he’s called “Blackman” instead of “Blackmore.” But that’s well within the usual variation. This is likely the first time he appears in the St. Olave records. Quite possibly the scribe was not yet familiar with his name. Or quite possibly it’s something entirely different: we’ll never know. That doesn’t give you license to speculate that it signals something incredibly unlikely.

Burial, 13 Oct 1592 [St. Olave]

Plague visited the parish this year, and probably killed young Jane.

Jaine d of Resonable Blackmo[re].

That stray dot is not a comma, because the scribe never uses a comma to separate name and occupation/description. Note above, where it says “Resonabell Blackman silkweaver.” No comma between name and occupation, and that’s how it appears for every other name in the book.

Burial, 16 Oct 1592 [St. Olave]

And a few days later, son Edmund. Edmund s of Resonabell Blackmor.

Another key record. Does it say “Reasonable, a blackmor?” There’s no space between the first and last names, but the scribe does that in various places in the records with no evident intent other than to save space. And of course, it’s the same handwriting as the record concerning Jane, which does have a space.

Those are all the records I could find, and they appear to correspond to the evidence Habib, Salkeld, and Kaufmann cite (along with two new ones).4

The Predictable Conclusion

You’re reading the same records I am. None of these say what they’re telling us they say. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And this is no evidence at all.

Reasonable Blackman was not a Black man. He wasn’t even a Blackman. He was an English silk weaver named Reasonable Blackmore. He left almost no trace in the records. That wasn’t because he was a “blackmoor.” It’s because almost no one left more than a trace on the records.

Genealogical Addendum for the Nerds

Did you notice something? Reasonable Blackmore, with an incredibly rare name, was buried in early 1588, even though a child of Reasonable Blackmore was baptized a month later in a different parish. I’ll tell you something. As a general rule, if your father is dead at your baptism, that is a notable fact and the vicar will record it. He will not name your father by profession (silk weaver), as if he were still alive.

Here, there are a couple possibilities:

1. There were two men named Reasonable Blackmore: one in Southwark, one in Kingston-upon-Thames. One may have been father to the other, an uncle, or a cousin. It is highly unlikely that these two hypothetical men were completely unrelated.

2. There was one man named Reasonable Blackmore. He was a silkweaver, he was itinerant, and he died in 1588, shortly before his last child was baptized and perhaps born. A few things would probably need to be true as well: his widow had a strong attachment to Southwark (which is why she returned for Edmund’s baptism), and the St. Olave parish priest would have to record his name in 1592 as if he were still alive (quite uncommon).

And another thing. Kaufmann names four children in her sketch: John, Jane, Edward, Edmund, and finds a potential marriage record for Edward years later. I very much doubt there was an Edward. Edward and Edmund were often interchangeable in this period, so the Edward baptized in 1588 was almost certainly the Edmund buried in 1592.

Let’s learn an important lesson. Genealogy is almost never simple, and records are always spotty. You’re always looking under streetlights. Never assume that because you find the same name twice that they are the same person. Don’t assume that because you only see x marriages or y children that they’re the only ones. In the 1500s, most of everything that ever happened went unrecorded.

That’s one lesson. I can draw others. Don’t get history lessons from TikTok. Read the primary sources. That goes triply if you are a professional historian and your job is to read primary sources.5 And of course, if you really really want something to be true, that’s a reason to double your skepticism, not your credulity.

Do you disagree? Am I missing something? I’d love to hear it.

4

Just so we’re clear, here’s what a letter “a” looks like:

Nevermind.

Photo of the Month

File this one with the all-time classics.

What composition! Guys & dolls, a girl and her dog. The girl (the human one) is great-grandma. Born in early 1910, I’d say she firmly dates this photograph to 1912 or 1913. The back of the photograph says “[girl] and two sailors.” Can’t argue with that. I don’t recognize the old salts, though. They look like Swedes to me: am I allowed to say that? Claude tells me, more plausibly, that they are both wearing U.S. Navy uniforms for enlisted men of the period—gentleman on the left in his whites, gentleman on the right in his working blues.

The family lived in Norfolk, Virginia throughout the nineteen tens. Great-grandma’s father was posted on shore during that period, a lieutenant (j.g.) posted aboard the “receiving ship,” an old hulk anchored at the base which handled the administration of incoming and outgoing personnel. Enlisted men, some long-serving, would have worked aboard the hulk to keep her running. Claude paints a touching image here—I’d like to believe it’s true—so I’ll just give you the quote:

My guess: these two were her favorites, "her" sailors, probably men she called by name and who gave her peppermints when Daddy brought her around the ship.

I checked the 1910 census. There were about fifteen enlisted sailors posted to Norfolk Naval Base who were at least fifty years old. I won’t lie to you. I proceeded with my “Swede” hypothesis. Among those fifteen enlisted men, there was one proper Swede, one Norwegian, and one “Russian” who I took to be a crypto-Swede (in the event, he was a Baltic German). And would you believe it worked? Not only did I identify one of the sailors, but I identified the dog!

Mike Ewald

Michael Ewald was born in Riga in 1855, or thereabouts. He was from the German minority in the Russian Empire. Riga, on the Daugava, was a seafaring town, as it remains today. Young Michael, or Mike as he was later known to his American mates, was probably surrounded by sailors from a young age. He went to sea at 11.

Mike was probably a merchant mariner of some sort when he joined up with the U.S. Navy. He later claimed to have fought in the Crimean War, but…well, we’ll get to that.

That’s him enlisting in 1887, a 32-year old mariner, 5’4”. And he must have liked the Navy life, because he never left.

Old Mike, to hear him tell it to the credible local newspapermen, was present at many important battles. Why, he’d been on the Maine when it exploded!1 And young, handsome Ensign Bagley died in his very arms!

The biggest whopper of all was that venerable Mike had been present with the Russian Fleet at the Battle of Sinope, a major engagement in the Crimean War. Now, I’ll believe a lot for the purposes of a good story. But even I can’t swallow this one. Mike would have been negative two-years-old.2 I know those cabin boys could be young, but even the Tsar would not stoop so low as to draft a mere human potentiality into service.

When the man from the Norfolk-Pilot came to interview Mike about his service in 1911, the gruff old fellow puffed on his pipe and said: “Ugh. No. The newspapers have printed too much about me already. Yes!”

Which sounds to me exactly like a guy who gets carried away telling tales on shore leave and has to answer for them the morning after.

Gunner’s Mate Ewald had an important job at Norfolk. For about fifteen years, he fired the 9 o’clock PM gun. The local folk, his obituary tells us, set their clocks and put their children to bed by its reliable boom. Only once was Mike not precisely on the mark. That was the evening he took took his regular post-prandial nap only to be roused by the urgent jostling of a “scamp.”

“It’s 9pm!” the scamp shouted.

Mike flung himself out of his stupor, ran to the gun, and fired away. It was 7:30.

He died in 1917, the papers say, a friend to all, with “much fat,” a “vast deal of sense,” and a “wheeze.”

Spot

Now to the dog.

This is no ordinary dog. This dog, like his owner Mike, was a local celebrity. This dog got his own obituary.

Spot passed in 1915, at 11 years old, and he was buried with full military honors. He was a fox terrier. He’d been littered on the destroyer Stewart, and handed over to Mike at nine months old. They were inseparable from that moment.

Spot was a champion ratter. He once slaughtered 26 rodents in six minutes. Spot was also, for a dog, a pretty good gunner. His master would let him pull the trigger on the 9pm gun every so often. When not firing himself, Spot would try to catch the muzzle flash, then jump on the ejected shell, though it burned him every time. Eventually he went deaf.

In February 2015, Spot, not so spry as he used to be, jumped at the muzzle flash and fell over the rampart. He never recovered.

Mike dreamed about Spot every night for weeks after his death.

The Other Guy

Still a mystery. The Swede didn’t pan out. His photo is on FamilySearch and it’s not him. My next best guess is one Richard P. Bennewitz, a German, who at 48 years of age is probably a bit young for our match.

Richard may not be exactly the type of character an Edwardian gentleman would want hanging around his children. He was an artist, for one thing. And in 1892 he was charged with larceny for stealing a nude photograph (he returned the photo and the charges were dropped). Back then, Bennewitz was a portrait painter for hire in Seattle, only a few years off the boat from Germany.3

Bennewitz soon sought a steadier paycheck, but he never gave up his art. In 1909, the Norfolk papers reported that he had painted a portrait of Rear Admiral Sampson hanging in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, as well as of one Captain Sharp of Virginia.

Claude loves this theory. It sends the LLM into a swoon. They hired Bennewitz to paint the little girl! This photo memorializes the magical occasion. I don’t know about all that. But it seems fair to say that if Ewald was a local personage, the other guy must’ve been as well. The ships painter who paints rear admirals on the side? Capital! What a character.

Film Reviews

The Fisher King (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1991) ⋆⋆
Makes you miss Robin Williams. It’s very Hollywood, in its way, which when combined with the Gilliam surreality makes for an unsettled tone. The way Hollywood schematizes “trauma” for dramatic purposes has undermined the mental health of the suggestible. Signal example here.

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I have no personal connection to Hawaii. But I have an uncommon number of ancestral connections.

One of them—or two of them—is to two separate Oahu county attorneys (that is, what is in most places called the '“district attorney.”) One of them, John Wilson Cathcart, long dead, is my kids’ fifth great uncle. Another, who is alive and well and so shall not be named, is my kids’ second cousin. And they both have oddly similar Scottish names. We’ll leave it at that.

J.W. looks like a bulldog, doesn’t he? Based on appearance alone, but you’ll also see the words “forceful” and “vigorous” thrown around in the newspapers of the day. In the heat of election season a hostile newspaper called him a “legal beast of prey.” He was to be elevated to the federal bench when he died suddenly at 63. That’s quite a bit further than his namesake got in a much more dangerous time and place.

Just Spitballin’ of the Month

Ever wish you could exchange your boring old ancestors for someone shiny and new? Someone you haven’t spent thirty years researching?

Well now you can!

With RootCommute™, you give your ancestor to some other genealogist to research, and in return you get one of theirs. You each look at the ancestor with fresh eyes and understand them from a novel perspective. When you’re all done with your cool, new forbear, just trade them back.

* * *

You’ve heard of the DAR, the SAR, the Mayflower Society, and maybe even the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames. We invite you to check our registry to see if any of your ancestors were horse thieves.

You must be a direct descendant of a horse thief to qualify for the Ancient American Society of the Descendants of Horse Thieves (AASDHT).

* * *

Perhaps you’ve had this surprising thought:

Wow, my spouse/child/sibling/neighbor doesn’t seem nearly as interested in my 17th century peasant ancestor as I am. I must not be explaining myself very well!

Good news. Now you can natter endlessly to Claude about missing baptismal records. I had a very edifying conversation (for me) about a random Dutch peasant who happens to be my ancestor, consisting mainly of me feeding the poor robot endless Dutch notarial records and chatting about their import. Do not feed your neighbor endless Dutch notarial records.

Don’t Trust Wikipedia for Genealogy of the Month

I saw Blue Moon this week, Richard Linklater’s paean to the golden age of American theater and to existential loneliness. I took an interest in the ancestry of Lorenz Hart, as one does. He was from a German Jewish family, prosperous, raised uptown. Wikipedia notes that his mother was a niece of the poet Heinrich Heine. That’s plausible, but let’s kick the tires.

First, we track down the source. It was in Gary Marmorstein’s 2011 biography of the lyricist, where he said, contra Wikipedia, that it was Hart’s father with the Heine connection. And indeed, a little research shows that Max Hart, nee Hertz, was the son of Israel Meyer Hertz and Täubchen Heyne, from Hamburg.

Heinrich Heine was from Dusseldorf, which is close enough to Hamburg that the relationship remains plausible. He was born in 1797, and Täubchen, per her tombstone, was born in 1832: of age for an uncle/niece relationship. Heine had two brothers, Gustav and Maximilian. Gustav converted to Lutheranism and was ennobled by the Austrian crown. So he couldn’t be Täubchen’s father—she seems to have been relatively humble and certainly still Jewish. Maximilian moved to St. Petersburg. Not likely him either.

Back to the Harts. Lorenz Hart’s grandparents Israel Meyer and Täubchen appear in an Ancestry tree, married 11 November 1855 in Friedrichstadt, Schleswig-Holstein. No source cited, but that’s suspiciously precise. I dug up the records from the Friedrichstadt Jewish community on FamilySearch, and lo and behold:

Note that Israel was from Flensburg, but Täubchen has no other location listed. Was she born in Friedrichstadt? The community vital records don’t go that far back, but in 1845, when Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire were still quibbling about who owned Schleswig-Holstein, the Danes commissioned a census.

Hard to read, but that’s the widow of Herz Heine, 44, with a whole raft of children, including Täubchen, aged 14. The dates and ages line up almost too well.

Heinrich Heine had no brother or first cousin named Herz from Friedrichstadt. The Heine name goes all the way back to the 17th century, plenty of time for ramifications and geographic dispersal. So I’m afraid it’s the same old story. Grandma had the same last name as a famous guy and came from roughly the same part of the world. They must be related! True, but probably distantly. Over time, “related” feels a little boring, so Täubchen is upgraded to “niece.” And once Lorenz Hart is famous as a lyricist, the connection to a prominent romantic poet becomes too good to pass up.

Wikipedia is wrong again.

Film Reviews

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (dir. Rainer Walter Fassbinder, 1972) ⋆⋆⋆
Since I’d just seen All that Heaven Allows, figured I’d check this one out. Riveting and ugly stuff. Petra is an ego monster, totally insensate to the needs of others. It makes you think that suburban conformity maybe wasn’t so bad after all. I assume that directors, being artists whose art is all-consuming, find such characters sympathetic. To me they are like sociopathetic aliens.

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File this under “at least something survived.” You probably have a similar situation in your family.

These are survivors, and not just because they grew up in log cabins.

You’re looking at a married couple from nineteenth century Pittsburgh: William (1791-1871) and Elizabeth (Scott) Dilworth (1797-1883).

I’d guess they are middle-aged here. Let’s say in their fifties. But the caption (which you can’t see, thanks to my poor clipping) says “painted by Mathews in 1860.” That would make William almost 70 here, and I don’t believe it. The man pictured here is worked-an-office-job 70, not born-in-a-log-cabin-and-built-bridges-for-a-living 70.

They must have gone to a daguerreotype studio, maybe together, maybe at separate times, in the 1840s. That’s when these images were captured. Then in 1860, a portraitist named Mathews painted from the photographs. Perhaps it was a gift from, or for, their children.

So you’ve got your daguerreotypes, let’s say from 1848. Those dags are probably lost. If you have them, please raise your hand.

Then you’ve got your oil portraits from 1860. As far as I know, they too are lost. I don’t see any hands raised.

Next, perhaps in the early twentieth century, someone took a photograph of the oil portraits and had it printed in a book. I don’t know what the book was, and I can’t find any trace of it online. Could have been an estate catalog. For all I know the book is lost.

But before the book is lost, someone took a pair of scissor, cut the portraits reproductions out, and pasted them to the back of a different family portrait. Maybe, by the looks of it, they xeroxed it first. Made a “ditto,” as people used to say, and I’m just realizing I haven’t heard it used in twenty years.

Finally, a couple years ago, the descendant with that portrait took an iPhone photo of the back (now a bit worse for wear) and attached it to the couple on FamilySearch. That’s where I found it, of course.

So: (1) daguerreotype; (2) oil portrait; (3) photographed and printed for a book or booklet; (4) photocopied from the book; (5) pasted to the back of a framed photograph; (6) digital photo of the xerox; (7) uploaded to FamilySearch.

It’s a wonder anything survives at all.

Agnes Moorehead of the Month

I watched All That Heaven Allows this week.

It’s a rather attractive film. Rock Hudson earns his stage name, as he resembles nothing so much as a small mountain looming over the other players. Agnes Moorehead is one of those loomed over, hair and eyes ablaze, playing a sort of suburban sidekick role. I watched a lot of Nick at Nite as a kid, so to me she’s eternally the hexing mother-in-law from Bewitched.

I think most of us have a “we’re related to x” in our family, where x is some minor celebrity or historical figure. In my case, there was a family story that we were related to Agnes Moorehead—you know, the actress—and I spent an inordinate amount of time as a child trying to trace the connection.

She’s partially Pennsylvania Scots-Irish, as am I. But that’s as far as I got.

Years later—twenty, in fact—I solved the mystery. It should have been obvious all along. My fifth great-grandaunt married a man named John Moorhead in County Tyrone at a rural Presbyterian church. They settled in north Philadelphia a few years later. John was a freemason and a laborer.

So how was John related to Agnes? He wasn’t, of course. They just had the same last name.

Annoying Reminder of the Month

I made some music. It’s not really about genealogy but it sort of is.

If you like it, that’s great! Would you mind hitting the little save buttons and whatever other thumbs up, pluses, and follows you see? It’s a cruel algorithmic world and we humans need to stick together. Other streaming links here.

If you don’t, that’s great too. Let’s talk about our new ancestor.

New Ancestor of the Month

John Smythe of Hillmorton, Warwickshire, born, say, 1520, buried at Hillmorton, 24 December 1580.

And his daughter Elizabeth (Smythe) (Bailey) Gater is also a new ancestor, as far as I’m concerned. If all you know about someone is their first and last names, and then you learn that the last name was incorrect, you’ve just changed 50% of the person. Switch out 50% of a person and I call that a new ancestor.

Anyway, welcome to the family. Are they your ancestors, too? Caution that Wikitree is not hip to the new research.

Film Reviews

All That Heaven Allows (1955, dir. Douglas Sirk) ⋆⋆⋆⋆
If suburban life is so stultifying and cruel, how come it looks so beautiful? Actually, Cary’s friends at the club weren’t the problem here. Her children were. And that’s a much harder issue. Your superficial, gossipy friends are judgmental jerks? Let them be! I get it’s not as easy as all that, but the moral case is clear. They’re wrong and you’re right. Your children, on the other hand…you owe them something, don’t you? This film lets us all off the hook by showing the children to be self-centered and thoughtless. But what if they weren’t?

Weapons (2025, dir. Zach Creggar) ⋆⋆⋆⋆
Exhibit A in why film is far superior to TV for this kind of “mystery box” set-up. You either resolve it in 2 hours or you don’t (with a purpose). You can’t accidentally string the audience along for six years. Hard not to compare this to Sinners, another critically-lauded “elevated” horror from 2025. Weapons was much better: stylish, well-executed, with some deft comedic touches (including an It’s Always Sunny reference, I’m quite sure). It has personality—a single, unified personality, whereas Sinners had two or three, and they didn’t get along.

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1. Charles McArthur Ghankay Taylor, *28 Jan. 1948 in Arthington, Liberia. Currently in prison, sent away with some finality: “[T]he accused has been found responsible for aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes in recorded human history.”

2. Neilson Carr Philip Taylor, * 15 Jan. 1921 in Arthington, Liberia; + July 1990 in Monrovia, Liberia. Cause of death: “got killed in the war.”

3. Yassa Zoe Louise, * of Daranga City, Bong County, in 1997.; + 25 June 2003. She was of the Gola tribe and as a young woman was a domestic servant in the household of Neilson’s parents. The Gola had become a servant class to the so-called Americo-Liberians, descendants of the American emigrants. Per Taylor, his mother and father got “frisky” and ran off to marry. The Americo-Liberian Taylor clan did not approve.

4. Philip Andrew Taylor, * 15 June 1896 in Arthington, Liberia; + 18 May 1959 in Arthington. Married, 15 Mar. 1918 in Arthington:

5. Serena Ann “Surianna” Bracewell, * 24 Oct. 1888 in Arthington, Liberia; + 10 Dec. 1950 in Arthington.

That’s it.

That’s about as far as I could get. The names of Taylor’s maternal grandparents are, I assume, known to the immediate family, but I couldn’t uncover them whilst cowering behind a computer.

As to the paternal grandparents, the Americo-Liberian Taylors, we can be reasonably sure that Surianna Bracewell was one of the many grandchildren of a man named Jefferson Bracewell.

Let me tell you what I learned about Jefferson Bracewell. Jefferson Bracewell was a formidable man.

He was born into slavery in Georgia, about the year 1823. On June 25, 1867, Jeff Bracewell registered to vote. That’s a 44-year gap, but it’s all I had (to start). When he registered to vote, he informed the registrar that he’d lived in Georgia his whole live, but in Lowndes County for only ten years.

That means he moved shortly before the Civil War. It’s very unlikely he was sold “down the river,” because by 1870 he and his wife Rhody (or Rody, or Rhoda) headed an intact household of ten children, the eldest of which was born about 1850. More probably the entire household had moved together in 1857 with the slaveowner’s household. At the time, that would have been Jefferson, Rhody, and four young boys.

Lowndes County borders Florida, at the extreme southern end of the state of Georgia. If a County could be said to have likes and dislikes, Lowndes County decidedly disliked Reconstruction. The situation was bad enough that many of the former slaves of that place cleared out for Africa in the 1870s. You know about the African Colonization movement, right?

Bracewell and another man named Elias Hill were the leaders of the Lowndes County group. Bracewell, owning $6000 worth of real estate, and by all accounts a man to be reckoned with, was surely targeted by revanchist elements.

To find the Bracewells in the 1860 census, when they were still in slavery and therefore would not be enumerated by name, we’d need to find a slaveholding household in Lowndes County with one male, ~37, one female, ~30, and four boys, 10, 8, 5, and 3. Rhody and the eldest son were listed as “mulatto” in the 1870 census, but we can’t trust the 1860 census-takers to adhere to the same, very hazy, definition. Given all of the children were likely Rhody’s, she and the eldest son, Jeff, Jr., may have simply been lighter skinned than the rest of the family.

I found eleven slaveholding households in 1860 that might qualify.

• William Ashley

• Archibald Averitte

• D.E. Butler

• James Folsom

• Rebecca Jones

• Benjamin Lane

• Remer Y. Lane

• William Robuck

• John Snider

• James Wisenbaker

• Remer Young

• Jacob J. Zeigler

Next step is to check the other sources. You may think you’d have to be very lucky to find a former slave mentioned by name in a local newspaper during the Reconstruction Era. And that’s mostly true. But Thomas Jefferson Bracewell wasn’t just anybody. Recall that a mere five years after Appomattox he was a substantial landowner. And in the 1870s, most of your neighbors did not sell their property, gather their entire families and immigrate to West Africa. So let’s follow him after 1870 and see what we find.

First, from the Savannah Daily Constitution, 19 Feb. 1871:

The Valdosta Times says that a party of seventy-one colored people of this county are encamped at Converse’s Mill, near Valdosta, with the intention of sailing from Savannah on the Golconda for Liberia about the middle of April. They are now jobbing about in order to make all the money they can before starting. The leader, Jeff Bracewell, is quite an intelligent colored man, and seems to be well posted as to the nature of the soil and climate of Liberia.

They sailed that November for Arthington. Note below that there were nine Bracewell men and boys who would have been of age to father Surianna fifteen years later, in 1888. That is, if malaria didn’t kill them in the interim.

What was waiting for them in Arthington? Not much. Dark, dense forest. A small cleared area prepared by the first settlers from North Carolina two years earlier. The settlement of the American west is an apt comparison. The Colonization Society had “purchased” the land from the Dei tribe, but it’s hard to say in what sense the Dei “owned” it in the first place. The Americans arrived with their starched collars and hoop skirts and they commenced building the kinds of churches and houses they knew from back home.

In Arthington, Jeff Bracewell received 15 acres as head of household, and each member of the family got six months food rations. Per later reports, “everyone” went down with malaria soon after arrival, and some never got up again. The Bracewells, this time, were lucky. They lost no kin in the first wave.

If the malaria didn’t kill them, the work might have. By 1873, Bracewell had cleared thirty acres of jungle, he’d imported a sugar mill, he was growing more than a 1000 coffee trees, he was growing rice, potatoes, and eddoes for his family’s sustenance, and he was tanning “some of the best leather used in this country.” He built his own house, a storehouse, a tanning house, and weaving and loom-house for his wife and daughters, who were just as industrious at their own craft. He constructed a fish trap over the Saint Paul River.

Observers in those years found Bracewell a strong and enterprising man, the richest settler in Arthington. Of course he was. His achievements speak for themselves. Those first few years of sweat and toil must have been an optimistic time.

By 1876 it appears the dream had soured. Bracewell’s son, T.J. Bracewell, Jr. wrote back home to “Captain W.H. Briggs” of Valdosta in a letter postmarked from the Saint Paul River, May 7, 1876:

Dear Sir:

I write to you and to Mr. Albert Converse to please send me $200, for I wish to come home to the U.S.A. My father and my mother, and three of the children, are dead. The rest of us want to come home. I wish to come home myself and get my money, $1842.50, in the Bank in Baltimore, and then get my people home.

I have lost $600 and interest since 1873. I want to get back to Lowndes County. My friends can’t you help us. I will pay the money back or farm with you until it is paid. I am not well and have not been in 18 months. * * [ellision in original]. Many of our people have died.

We have had a war with the natives and were defeated, and it is likely to be fought over again.

Please my friends raise me the money, and help us back to our people and to the homes of our birth.

Please answer care of C.P. Wildes.

Jefferson Bracewell, Jr.

The letter was reprinted “verbatim,” in the Valdosta Times, but with some orthographic and grammatical changes. The editors couldn’t resist some words of warning “to all negroes who think they can better themselves by leaving this country.”

That gives me pause, of course. The Valdosta Times was very much a Democratic, anti-Reconstruction organ. Its editors clearly did not relish the idea of the county’s oppressed labor force leaving for even warmer climes. It was a propaganda war, in a way. On the other side, the publications of the American Colonization Society eagerly trumpeted every success, no matter how temporary, and they played down the setbacks. Was the letter legitimate? On balance, I’d say yes. But would the paper have published it if it brought better tidings? Probably not.

It’s worth noting that the recipients, Captain Briggs and Albert Converse, were both northerners by birth. They may have been somewhat more sympathetic to young Bracewell’s plight. But that didn’t stop them both from owning slaves in the 1860 census, nor did it stop Briggs from volunteering in the Confederate Army.

T.J. Bracewell, Jr. never returned to Georgia. But he and Captain Briggs must have kept up a regular correspondence. Eleven years later in 1887, the situation had much improved, with the Atlanta Constitution reporting that Bracewell had written Briggs that he was “doing well and is contented.” The newspaper added that he was “the first” to express anything positive out of Liberia, and that many other settlers had since returned to Lowndes County.

We know a little about about one of those returnees. In fact, it’s the most detailed account yet, published in the Valdosta Times on 26 July 1879. One Laura Lane, who you’ll see at age 16 on the passenger list above, traveled half the western hemisphere to get back to Lowndes, and she came back with a story.

Laura was raised in slavery on the same plantation as the Bracewells, the “R.Y. Lane farm.” She was only 10 at the close of the Civil War. She must have remained closely associated with the family, maybe even working in their household, and at age 16 she followed them in passage to Liberia. The voyage took several months, and one member of the party died.

Because nearly everyone was sick with malaria once they got to Arthington, Jeff Bracewell—or Uncle Jeff, as Laura called him—hired natives to work the land. Per Laura, even Uncle Jeff himself decided to give up on Liberia. This is presumably after the first flush of success. But both he and his wife Rhody died before they could leave.

Once through the first bouts of illness, conditions started to improve. They raised crops and traded with the natives for fresh game. The natives, Laura recounted, treated infractions with great harshness. One of the Lowndes county men stole from them, and his sentence was to be tied to a heavy stone and thrown into the river. It was swiftly carried out.

At some point, Laura started writing to her former master for money so that she could return. He, rather callously I think, “ignored her appeals.” She saved $20 for return passage by “nursing for a Jew” (the only white people in Liberia, she wrote), and made her way to Brazil. There, she found an American captain and got herself hired as a nurse for his wife. She traveled with them to more places than she could remember and finally disembarked in Savannah in July 1877.

Our final report on the Bracewell party comes from one “S. Bracewell.”1 Dated August 29, 1892, the letter was printed in the Thomasville Times in 1893. The letter is on the whole a positive picture of Liberian life, and the newspaper yet again can’t resist a little editorializing: “many colored men have gone to that country and returned with a different story.”

The letter was addressed to Richard McKinney, a former slave then farming in Lowndes County. S. Bracewell writes:

I am sorry to hear or see you write me that our colored people are yet renting land to farm on. Why can’t they find some where on earth that they may buy and own land of their own? . . .

I would advise you to come to this country if I thought that you wanted to be a free man and respected . . . People don’t have to work hard to live in this country like they do to live in other parts of the world . . . I want you to go to B.F. Jones or Henry Jones’ place and find out our ages. All of Rhody’s children and write to me. . . I and T. Jefferson Bracewell and the old man Seaser, white, lives close together. We are close neighbors . . .

S. Bracewell reveals that he has ten children and that many of the settlers have become “rich and wealthy.” And of course, there are important clues here. Two men named Jones, presumably white, would have documentation regarding the ages of the Bracewell children. And Laura Lane was raised on the R.Y. Lane farm with the Bracewells. There were slaves on both the “Rebecca Jones” and “Remer Y. Lane” estates who were of the right age in 1860 to be the Bracewells. So let’s take a closer look.

R.Y. Lane—that’s an uncommon couple of initials. In 1870, we find him as Remer [Young] Lane. I did some rooting around, and his connection to the Bracewells is not immediately apparent. But we like old photos, so here he is:

Benjamin Lane, who also appears in the 1860 Slave Schedules, was Remer’s uncle. Benjamin died very shortly after the census, and it’s his estate papers that gives us the best clue about the Bracewells.

There in his will, made and executed in 1860 but not recorded until the early 1880s, we find them, unmistakably, by name:

Jim, Cynthia, Mary, Harry, Little Ned, Rhoda, Isaac, Littleton, Little Cynthia, John, and Big Jeff. They all went to Lane’s wife, Jane (Bonnell) Lane.

Later in the will, Benjamin bequeathed more people to his son, Harry Lane. Bob, Sam, and Little Jeff.

That covers all of Uncle Jeff’s older children, except Joseph. But with two Jeffs, Rhoda, Littleton, and Cynthia all appearing, there can be little doubt these were the Bracewells.

How did they become the “Bracewells?” And not the Lanes, that is. One of Benjamin Lane’s sons, Benjamin Franklin Lane, Jr,. married a Braswell from North Carolina, and I wonder if the families had a longer association. The elder Benjamin Lane—oh wait, there he is:

As I was saying, the elder Benjamin Lane had been in Lowndes County since the 1840s. If Jeff Bracewell moved there in 1857, he and Rhody must have come with a different family. Where did he come from? Maybe some Bracewells elsewhere in the south. A project for another time.

Jefferson and Rhody Bracewell founded an enormous family in Liberia. Indeed, you can still find a number of people in the country named exactly that: Jefferson Bracewell. Some have even returned to Georgia. One of the family happened to be President Charles Taylor, who was, let’s be clear, a very bad man.

Often, in 2026, I find people judging a man by his ancestors. Don’t do that. I never see anyone judging a man by his descendants (other than his children). But let’s not do that either. Here’s to Jefferson and Rhody.

Here it is. I think it’s worth a listen even if you’re an outlander. But it’s possible I overestimate the general public’s interest in NJ content.

At one point, the topic of local writers came up.

David: On to some literature questions: You wrote that Stephen Crane is from the state, but somehow doesn’t count in your eyes as a New Jerseyan. Why is that?

Tyler Cowen: Well, as you know, he died very young, so he could have done much more. But the key work he wrote—which I think of as more important than the short fiction, though they’re both quite good—is about the Civil War. And New Jersey is a Revolutionary War state, not a Civil War state. So you don’t connect him with New Jersey that readily. Not intended as a criticism, but just as an observation. It’s like you have to remind yourself he’s from New Jersey. You don’t really have to remind yourself that Vince Lombardi is from New Jersey.1

David: True, true.

I don’t think that’s exactly true. And I believe I’ve come up with the real reason Stephen Crane doesn’t feel like a New Jersey writer. I wrote a short comment in response and tried to post it on Marginal Revolution. But it bounced: maybe because I included an outside link? I rewrote the comment without the link and submitted. It bounced again. I’m not rewriting that comment a third time. So now I’m blogging it instead. They say that’s how Montaigne got his start.

Point I: Stephen Crane Was From New Jersey.

As a matter of heritage (this is a genealogy blog, after all), it’s undeniable. His earliest known paternal ancestor was one of those New Haven Colony Puritan diehards who founded “New Ark” in 1667. Other ancestors were amongst those Long Islanders who settled neighboring Elizabethtown, now Elizabeth. Newark and Elizabeth: those are very New Jersey places.

Yes, the writer’s mother Mary was a Pennsylvanian. But she moved to New Jersey after marrying Rev. Jonathan Townley Crane, an inveterate hater of fun (not very NJ, I concede), and lived there for most of the rest of her life. There was a three-year excursion to Port Jervis, NY, where the Reverend was posted and died, but take a look at Port Jervis on a map. It’s got an NJ Transit stop.

After she was widowed, Mary moved back to NJ. If your spouse dies, and you immediately pack your things and go somewhere else, that somewhere else is your heart’s home.

Now, to Stephen himself. He was born in Newark. He moved with the family to Port Jervis when he was about five. When his father died, he moved in with his brother, a rural school teacher in Sussex County. Then a few years with another brother back in Port Jervis, and finally the rest of his childhood in Asbury Park. That’s where he learned journalism. And when he made his momentous forays into the dirty hovels of the Bowery, it was from a brother’s country house in suburban Paterson.

That’s enough on that front.

Point II: Stephen Crane’s New Jersey was Slip Sliding Away.

Crane was descended from the earliest English settlers of the province of East Jersey. When he was born, the governor was Theodore FitzRandolph, descended from the same people. The senators were John Potter Stockton, descended from the same people, and Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen, descended from the even earlier Dutch and Huguenot settlers. Newark’s congressman was George Armstrong Halsey, who was, again, descended from the earliest English settlers of the province of East Jersey.

That was in 1871, right in the middle of a massive shift, still gathering momentum.

In 1850, and still to some extent in 1871, NJ was dominated by “Old Stock”2 Americans like Stephen Crane. To be sure, the city of Newark was already full of Germans and Irish. But they didn’t quite run the place yet. You know what happened after that. Until the Congress imposed quotas in 1924, immigrants arrived in wave after wave. Their first sight was the Statute of Liberty (geographically in New Jersey), their first stop Ellis Island (geographically in New Jersey), and their place of departure to all points west was the Central Railroad Terminal (legally in New Jersey). Not surprising that many plopped down right there to find a job. By 1930, nearly 72% of Newark’s residents were either foreign-born or first-generation Americans. The total equivalent figure for the state of New Jersey rose to over 50% by the time quotas took effect.

In 1930, the governor was a Dane. One senator was the grandchild of Scots-Irish immigrants. The congressman was German. And one senator, Mr. Hamilton Fish Kean—well, that one is self-explanatory.3 He was a hold out from the old guard.

III. Stephen Crane’s New Jersey is Gone with the Wind.

I would argue that given its size, location, and rapid industrialization, New Jersey’s pre-immigrant “Old Stock” past was more rapidly and more totally effaced than any other state’s. Other, similarly positioned Northeastern states were either much larger, with vast hinterlands (such as New York or Pennsylvania) or had much more firmly rooted traditions, with their own major cities and cultural production centers (Massachusetts, Connecticut, or even Rhode Island). New Jersey, the keg tapped at both ends, doesn’t seem to have had a strong cultural sense of itself before the immigration wave. Like New York, it was split, with a pseudo-Yankee contingent, Dutch in the center and far north, Palatine Germans (descendants of 18th century settlers) to the west, and Quakers to the south. Today, none of those groups has any cultural or political power to speak of. They exist, if they exist, to maintain historic house museums.

Pity poor Stephen Crane, Asher Brown Durand, Richard Stockton, and George Inness (a Crane cousin).4 They will never feel as “Jersey” as Frankie Valli, Bruce Springsteen, Lauryn Hill, James Gandolfini, Jesse Eisenberg, or Queen Latifah. Or even, going further back, Abbott & Costello, Frank Hague, Frank Sinatra, Paul Robeson, William Carlos Williams, or Allen Ginsberg. I could go on. The twentieth century was New Jersey’s century. We lit the fire (Edison), we stoked the flames (Einstein) and we doused them (Schultz). If you like, we opened the door to the twenty-first century by inventing the transistor.

Sorry, what was I saying? I always get grandiose about twelve paragraphs in. Usually a sign that I’ve lost the thread.

Let’s dive back into the genealogical specifics. Keans aside, is there any twentieth century New Jersey figure whose dominant ancestral strain (either quantitatively or qualitatively) predates the Potato Famine, or even the Civil War? The few I can think of are very similar to the Keans—political dynasties with inherited wealth, who in some sense could “afford” to maintain their ancestral ties (Millicent Fenwick or Rodney Frelinghuysen—a descendent of Frederick T.). It’s no coincidence that Fenwick, Frelinghuysen, Kean, Jr. were or are all moderate Republicans representing overlapping swaths of central/north Jersey horse country.

A more representative example is de baas, Bruce Springsteen, who cashes out at about 1/32 pre-Revolutionary War Dutch: real Rip Van Winkle types. They gave him a surname but not much else. For all intents and purposes, he is mid-century homo Jerseyensis: one half Irish and one half Italian.

IV. Stephen Crane Does Not “Count” as a New Jerseyan.

Look to similarly situated states. Does Herman Melville still feel recognizably “New York?” Oliver Wendell Holmes still “Massachusetts?” Harriet Beecher Stowe still “Connecticut?” Robert E. Lee still “Virginia?” I’d say yes to all of them, reserving a resounding “of course” for Robert E. Lee.5

Meanwhile, George McClellan? Yeah, he was the governor. But he’s pure Pennsylvania.

These states, and most others, have a strong sense of cultural continuity. The people who lived there in 1870, whatever their ethnic background, are in a fundamental sense “alike” to most of the people who lived there in 1970, or today. New Jersey doesn’t have that. Let’s sum it up:

1. NJ’s pre-industrialization population was too varied. Puritan descendants in the East were basically Connecticut people. Dutch in the middle and north virtually New Yorkers. Germans and Quakers in the west and south were Pennsylvanians. Free Blacks were a tiny percentage of the population. There was no unified cultural identity.

2. To this thin gruel came the Irish, the new Germans, the new Dutch, the Italians, the Poles, the Jews, the Ruthenians, the Scots, the Danes. All of Europe, more or less. They overwhelmed the pre-existing culture, such as it was, and blended into a much stronger flavor, giving the state, for the first time, a compelling identity.

3. That stew continued to cook through the twentieth century, as suburbanization led to even more growth, the working and middle classes leaked in from Philadelphia and NYC, the Great Migration from the South.

4. Any New Jersey figure predating that reformation does not “feel” New Jersey, because our entire conception of New Jersey was formed in the twentieth century. Unless you maintain a historic house museum, the third oldest state in the union might as well have been founded in 1899.

QED, eh?

I.

Imagine being so bent out of shape about a 500-year old lawsuit that you name your son after it. If you find that reasonable behavior, you would have gotten along with Victor Grosvenor, Earl Grosvenor, and also with his son, “Bendor” Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster. And bully for you, because your new friends were filthy rich, and their descendants still are, owning as they do a significant percentage of the choicest real estate in London.

As you will have noted, “Bendor” was just a nickname, but it’s what everyone called him. His real name was Hugh Grosvenor.

Here’s how his wife Loelia put it in her memoirs:

[T]he mediæval Grosvenors are chiefly famous for being involved in the great Scrope v. Grosvenor case in the reign of Richard II. It began in 1385 when Lord Scrope, being with the Army in Scotland, complained that Sir Robert Grosvenor was using the Scrope arms, Azure, a Bend Or, (a gold diagonal stripe on a blue ground). He had already accused one Carminow of Cornwall of the same offence, but the Cornishman had been able to convince a jury of six knights that he had borne this device since the days of King Arthur and had continued to use it. Sir Robert was not so fortunate. The case was tried in the Court of Chivalry presided over by Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, and it went on for four years and in the end Sir Robert had to pay the costs which amounted to £466 13s. 4d. Depositions were taken from witnesses all over England who attested that they had seen the arms used in battle or on seals or in stained-glass windows. John of Gaunt was caught at Plymouth just as he was about to embark for Spain and he gave evidence in favour of Scrope. So too did the future Henry IV, and also Harry Hotspur. One knight aged 105 deposed that he had seen Scrope bear the arms at Crécy and Poitiers and other battles. The poet Chaucer, who had a finger in every pie, came down on the side of his old friend Scrope, though he candidly admitted that he had once been walking down Friday Street in London and had seen an inn with a sign on which was painted the disputed arms and had been told that they were put there, not for Scrope, but for Grosvenor.

Lord Scrope was an important person at the Court and had been Chancellor of England and his opponent was a comparatively unknown country gentleman, but all the same, nearly sixty people were found to testify in Sir Robert's favour, including Owen Glendower, the great Welsh nationalist, who stoutly affirmed that it was well known on the Welsh border that the arms belonged to the Grosvenors. In the end the Duke of Gloucester decided that Scrope should keep the Bend Or and that Grosvenor could have an inferior version, Azure, a Bend Or, with a Plain Bordure Argent for Difference. This was not good enough for Sir Robert, so he appealed to King Richard II, who ruled that the arms were too similar to be borne by families which were not related by blood and that the Grosvenors should change to Azure, a Garbe Or (a gold sheaf). The arms of the Scrope and Grosvenor families remain to this day as King Richard decreed.

But the decision rankled. In 1880 the first Duke of Westminster won the Derby with a horse called Bend Or and his baby grandson, Hugh Richard Arthur, Lord Belgrave, got called Bend Or too—though why I have never heard explained. There must have been some family joke that has long since been forgotten. Of course everybody, even his parents and sisters, would normally have addressed the baby as 'Belgrave', so they may have thought that any nickname was preferable. At all events it stuck, and my husband's friends never called him anything but Bendor or Benny.

The name has since graduated to legal status. Rather unsporting of the richest peers in England, I should say. The Grosvenors made out far better in the last seven hundred years than the legal victors, the Scropes, and there’s no need to rub that in. The modern-day Scropes (pronounced “Scroop,” of course) have no hereditary titles, let alone title to most of Mayfair.

Sir Robert Grosvenor had to demonstrate the antiquity of his family before the heraldic courts. That’s the game, after all—whoever used the insignia longest is the winner. And he was up against a formidable opponent. Politically powerful, yes, but also of ancient name. The demonstrably antique “le Scropes” claimed descent from a pre-conquest magnate named Richard FitzScrob.1 Lord Scrope, an old soldier, also had John of Gaunt, the King’s very powerful uncle, on his side.

Sir Robert, however, could count on the support of his dutiful hometown friends, lords, and vassals. Sir Robert Grosvenor’s liege lord was the Abbot of Vale Royal (now a wedding venue, naturally), and in his learned opinion the first Grosvenor was a companion of the Conqueror—“my ancestors came over with the Conqueror” being the posh English version of “I was at Woodstock.”2

So, per the Abbot, one Sir Gilbert Grosvenor was at Yazgur’s farm—I mean, the Battle of Hastings. And was Gilbert himself some Norman parvenu, lacking distinguished kin? Au contraire. The abbot and other Cheshire luminaries had more to offer: Gilbert was nephew to none other than Hugh Lupus, the earl of Chester. Hugh Lupus, bosom buddy to William the Conqueror, was a magnate of great historical stature. These are the big genealogical guns.

Hugh Lupus was a Norman, no doubt. His mother was even reputed to be William the Conqueror’s half-sister.3 We know he was an imposing gentleman. Fierce, yes, hence “Lupus,” but, to quote Cokayne, “his career was chiefly notorious for gluttony, prodigality, and profligacy.” And so, during his lifetime, he was Hugh le Gros. “Lupus” was bestowed posthumously, perhaps in an attempt to restore a little dignity, or at least what passed for dignity in the Middle Ages. But remember that: Hugh, earl of Chester, was also known as Hugh le Gros. And it was a family tradition amongst the Grosvenors, a knightly family in Cheshire three centuries later, that their first English ancestor was Hugh’s nephew.

From there, the Grosvenor witnesses were able to trace a descent through eight generations to Sir Robert, the defendant. But at least up to Sir Robert’s great-grandfather, another Robert, the pedigree rested entirely on tradition, with no primary source forthcoming or even alleged to exist.

Tradition was good enough for the Grosvenors and everyone else for many years. Even though they lost the case, they treasured their descent from a nephew of Hugh Lupus.

That’s until modern genealogy came along.

II.

Scrope v. Grosvenor is more than an obscure heraldic squabble. It’s more, even, then the foundational historical wound of a very rich family. It is, in fact, one of the deepest foundational texts of modern, scientific genealogy. Recall that the ancient descent from Sir Gilbert was based on oral tradition. But Sir Robert’s line back to his own great-grandfather (another Sir Robert), was firmly founded in written sources, such as monastic charters, and indeed, it withstands scrutiny even today.

The English were using written records to prove their genealogies before 1385. There were land disputes, inheritance disputes, and of course other heraldic litigations. But Scrope v. Grosvenor gives us one of the earliest records of that method of genealogical argument to survive.4

The Abbot wasn’t all hot air. When he identified that first Grosvenor in England, he cited to the Domesday Book.

You can’t beat the Domesday Book for evidence of familial antiquity and distinction. And lo, “Gilbert Venator,” a lord of Cheshire, sure looks like the founder of the family. “Venator” is Latin for “Huntsman,” more or less, and “Grosvenor” is very plausibly a Norman French rendering of “Great Hunter.” So far as good. But alas, the Abbot commits one of the cardinal sins of genealogy: same name, same person.5

Gilbert “Venator” was not a mystery man waiting to be claimed. He was lord of several well-known properties in Cheshire (the text above refers to Newbold, which was just one of them), and those holdings can be precisely mapped to the known later holdings of one Gilbert de Venables and his descendants.

Venables is “veneur” + “abilis.” Able hunter. There was no Gilbert Grosvenor. There was only Gilbert de Venables, and there is no obvious reason to connect him to the Grosvenor family. He already had a name, and his family, or their vassals and successors, have carried it into the present day.

III.

There are genealogists, and there are genealogists. I’m the former. W.H. Bird was the latter. He was one of the great English researchers of the Edwardian era, limited, perhaps, by their exclusive interest in the nobility, but when you’re dealing with medieval records you don’t have much choice. W.H. Bird carefully but brutally dismantled the Grosvenor pretensions to Norman roots in April 1902, in the pages of the short-lived journal The Ancestor. I encourage you give it a read. It’s wonderful.

These guys were exquisitely bitchy about their disagreements, in the way that only people who care a whole lot about something that doesn’t matter at all can be.

One word of warning here to the author of Armorial Families. Strange to say, in his immaculate pages the bende dore still figures without protest as a paternal coat of Grosvenor; it is quartered also by descendants of a doubtful line, who differenced their sheaf with bezants. Is this wilful contempt, or can it be ignorance? Mr. Fox-Davies is, we know, a stickler for authority. Probably therefore it merely shows that he cannot boast the marvelous memory of Sir Bernard Burke, and is not aware of the two judgments I have mentioned. The Marshalsea has no more terrors; but I tremble to think of the vials of wrath ‘X’ may open upon his devoted head, should he become aware of the offence in all its enormity.

If that all sounds a little esoteric…well, of course it does. Did you get lost on your way to a different article? I’ll tell you what’s going on here, as best I can tell. But you probably had to be there.

Fox-Davies was a major heraldic authority in his day, and Armorial Families was a magnum opus if there ever was one. Bird is alleging that Fox-Davies ignored Scrope v Grosvenor and accorded the Grosvenor family the original bende dore in his heraldic dictionary. Outrageous! Then Bird notes acidly that Sir Bernard Burke (of Burke’s Peerage fame), who would famously print anything, with minimal regard to accuracy, would never have made the same mistake, thanks to his “marvelous memory.” Indeed, “X,” the pseudonym of another contemporary genealogist, would be filled with rage to hear of the oversight. But as the readership would have known, “X” was none other than Fox-Davies himself.

Anyway, exquisitely bitchy, like I said.

The bottom line is that Bird got his talons in the Grosvenor family traditions and he tore them apart. When he was done, the only line left standing was Sir Robert Grosvenor’s back to his own great-grandfather, another Robert, who died around 1386. No “Gilbert le Gros Venator,” no Hugh Lupus. It was all a fiction, says Bird, and he proved it.

IV.

Back to Bendor “Benny” Grosvenor. Benny’s real name, recall, was Hugh. Benny was a hard man, but he had a soft spot for the Nazis. He wasn’t alone among 1930s aristocrats, but I’m just saying. Don’t feel too badly for him. Benny had no male heirs, so the current Duke of Westminster, the head of the Grosvenor family, is a cousin, descended through his half-uncle. The current duke’s name is Hugh. The Grosvesnors are partial to the name Hugh.

I told you that Sir Robert Grosvenor contended that he was descended from a nephew of Hugh Lupus. And I told you that Bird demonstrated, definitively, that there was no evidence for that claim. That was in 1902. Benny was the duke in 1902. His father’s name was Hugh Lupus Grosvenor. So you can see the family had taken the tradition rather to heart. Some time between 1386 and the birth of Hugh Lupus Grosvenor in 1825, the stories started to blur together, and Hugh Lupus became the founder of the family, not just a illustrious relation. It’s easy enough to make the switch. Hugh le Gros, also known as Hugh Lupus. Hugh is a wolf, Hugh is “great.” He’s the great hunter! Le Gros Venor. If you have a family—I’m guessing you do—you know how these things go. Ornate, semi-accurate tradition (uncles, half-sisters) is not very memorable. Over the years, data is lost. You flatten it to the essentials: fathers and sons.

Thus, by the time Bird was writing, and probably long before, the Grosvenor family founder had morphed from Gilbert le Grosvenor, a nephew of Hugh, to Hugh himself. The Grosvenors themselves had risen from humble country gentry to the richest peers in the British Empire. Perhaps they felt a higher class of origin story was called for.

You may wonder whether Bird’s research had any effect. Did it squash the Grosvenor claims to Norman antiquity once and for all?

V.

When Gerald Grosvenor, the sixth duke of Westminster, died in 2016, here’s what the Guardian said:

The Duke’s ancestor Hugh Lupus – the king’s head huntsman or grand veneur, a tubby man nicknamed gros veneur, from which derived the family surname – came across with William the Conqueror and was granted a chunk of Cheshire to protect the region from the Welsh.

He once delivered a great line that appeared in multiple of his obituaries:

Asked what advice he had for young entrepreneurs, Mr. Grosvenor told The Financial Times, “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror.”

You’ll find the old tradition in Wikipedia, duly citing some published biography or history:

Every generation of the Grosvenor family had served in the military dating to the time of William the Conqueror and Hugh d'Avranches, Earl of Chester, whose nickname, le gros veneur, gave the family its surname.

You’ll find it repeated on Substack by otherwise highly respectable bloggers:

The late duke’s forebear Hugh d’Avranches, nicknamed ‘le gros veneur’ or the ‘fat huntsman’, had been given lands by Duke William in Cheshire, and in the 1170s his descendent Robert le Grosvenor was granted the manor of Budworth in the county. The Grosvenors still have their seat, the Eaton Estate, in Cheshire and when the duke passed away in 2016 he left £8 billion to his son. A very good friend, indeed.

Don’t these people read esoteric Edwardian genealogical journals? I mean, it’s outrageous. The story was obviously spurious in the first place, but set that aside for a minute: it was thoroughly debunked in print over 120 years ago. And still, today, supposedly distinguished outlets with an ostensible respect for the truth are printing it without a second thought. How dare they?

Don’t be such a stiff.

It’s just a story. And it’s more fun. You’ve seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, haven’t you? Hugh “le gros veneur” Lupus shot Liberty Valence. What’s the alternative for the Grosvenors? That the family was founded by some nobody whose name is lost to history? That’s no fun.

1000 years later, what’s the difference?

VI.

What’s the difference, indeed. Go on Ancestry.com. Take a look around. It’s not just the Grosvenors. It’s not just the Normans. It’s the Saxons, the Jutes, the Jats, and the Javanese. It’s your own family. Riddled with errors and improbabilities, misattributed parents, unlikely origin stories. They spread and they refuse to die. Because they are fun, because they are interesting, because we like a good story.

Because in genealogy, the truth doesn’t matter. In medicine, the truth matters. Administer treatment for the wrong disease and you won’t cure the patient. In rocket science and engineering, the truth matters. O-rings don’t seal and the rocket blows up. In investment, the truth (eventually) matters. Company can’t do what it says it does, you (eventually) lose your shirt.

In genealogy? Get it wrong in 1385, compound the problem in 1850, and it’s still wrong in 2026. Nothing happens. There is no cost to being wrong.

In any given field, if there is no cost to being wrong, then in that field, the truth has no value. This is a harsh reality for genealogists. It matters who your parents were. It matters some who your grandparents were. And in a cosmic butterfly flaps its wings sense, yeah, it matters who your great-great-great-great grandparents were. But, in 99% of cases, it doesn’t matter whether you are right about who your great-great-great-great grandparents were. That is what I mean when I say genealogy doesn’t matter. Genealogical truth doesn’t matter. Genealogical truth doesn’t pay. And when the truth is less fun or less interesting than the lie, the lie, in the long run, triumphs.

But first, the mausoleum.

I have, at various times, alluded to my children. I may even, I hope on the rarest of occasions, have alluded to my job, for which I humbly beg your forgiveness. Genealogy is not my life.

Would I mind if my life were just genealogy and family? I think I would like that very much, actually. But that’s a strange desire, isn’t it? Genealogical research: entombing yourself with your ancestors, away from the messy living. Alone with the dead, who, as difficult as they may have been in life, are now cozily ensconced within their parentheticals. It’s like wishing to be buried alive.

No, “buried alive” evokes frantic scratching on pineboard, bleeding fingertips, screaming yourself hoarse on precious, dwindling oxygen. There’s a better analogy aboveground.

It’s like living in a mausoleum. Your ancestors are there, all orderly on their shelves. There’s a nice snug spot waiting for you when you’re ready (or not). But there’s no urgency, no visceral terror. It’s just quietly and agreeably creepy.

I’m telling on myself here, but it sounds lovely. At least as a 9 to 5.

And yet, here I am writing about genealogy in public. That’s not in the mausoleum. It’s out in the bright, harsh light of the forum.

I’m forced to conclude that maybe I wouldn’t be perfectly content in a mausoleum. Or a dusty archive, for that matter.

There’s a part of me, a big part, that wants to make things for other people so they can enjoy those things and pat me on the head. I find that desire intensely embarrassing. You can blame my ancestors, who by and large were not showy types. I wish that part of me would just shut up.

It won’t though, so I might as well admit the obvious. I want you to read my stuff.

And now it gets worse. I want you to listen to it.

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Given exponential growth and all that, a family tree is an overwhelming thing. You simply don’t have time, not in your day, not in your whole life, not on your whole life, to run down every mystery. So let’s pin this butterfly down for someone, someday, to investigate. Might be me. Might not.

My great-great-great grandfather was widowed in June 1902. He was a retail butcher in Newark, New Jersey. Let’s call him Herr Metzger. About a year after his wife died, he ran off to be married with a longtime “customer,” Frau Eliza, who ran a nearby cafe after her husband died. Two months later, Herr Metzger died too, but not, of course, before redrafting his will to leave his house and $4000 to Eliza, the new wife. Metzger had done pretty well for himself, so the money was material. The children were up in arms, but eventually they all compromised. So far, a classic plot.

115 years after that I came across a mysterious 3rd cousin on AncestryDNA. No obvious overlap, but her great-great grandmother happens to be Eliza—the longtime “customer.” And her great-grandfather was the only child of Eliza’s union with her own first husband.

Photo of the Month

Ted Montgomery, the perfect ancestor, is not an ancestor at all if you’re being pedantic. But that’s what makes him perfect.

1. He had no children.

2. He lived a fascinating twentieth century life: the kind of guy who’d easily qualify for a Wikipedia page if he were born the year he died (1980). But born in 1901, he’s got no chance.

3. He is the source for one of the origin stories of a popular brunch item.

He really deserves his own post. And that’s what he’ll get. But on the off chance I instead while away the hours consulting with the flowers (know thyself), I’ll seize this opportunity to tell you some more.

Ted Montgomery was a 10 year old Manhattan child of privilege when his father, an admiralty lawyer, died suddenly following an appendectomy.

He was a 12 year old American Boy Scout marooned in London during World War I when he got a job running messages for the American ambassador, Walter Hines Page. Per his mother years later, he felt “like the hero of a wild west film.”

After the war, he was a 21-year old naval cadet, fresh out of Annapolis, and he spent a few years in the Navy seeing the world.

He quit the Navy to become a playwright, a 30-something London playwright. I should say that he first made a rather advantageous marriage (always a smart move before you quit your day job) to the daughter of a Puerto Rican sugar magnate. The sugar was Puerto Rican, not the magnate. The magnate was a Back Bay Sewall.

He “found” success as a playwright, as they say. One of his plays (maybe the only one ever produced, as best I can tell) was a West End hit adapted into a pre-Code Hollywood picture starring William Powell and Ann Harding.

Once that lifestyle lost its charm, he joined the staff of the London News Chronicle as a diplomatic correspondent, and soon “found” himself again—this time in the middle of the Blitz. Trapped in London for another world war.

Again, he came out the other end. He became a 48-year old State Department recruit, where his first job was to help set the United Nations on its feet. He took a few more posts in Europe before he became a middle-aged consul general in Malta. Then back home to the U.S. for the first time in a quarter decade before he retired to Paris.

And it was from Paris, at age 66, that he wrote to the great food columnist Craig Claiborne with the true story of Eggs Benedict. But I’ll save that for next time. Don’t look it up.

LLM Use Case of the Month

This month I had Claude go into Notion (my note-taking app, it’s really good, no they’re not paying me, don’t be ridiculous) and reorganize my to-do list of family interviews.

1. Make the format uniform: 👍︎

2. Create new pages with draft interview outlines: 👍︎

3. Link the completed interviews to audio recordings: 👎

4. Link the new pages to the to-do list: 👎

So, a mixed bag. I have my Google Drive linked to Claude, but Claude couldn’t find the audio files. I could have just fed it the direct links, but that would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

And then instead of linking the pre-existing to-do list items to the new pages, Claude created new shortcuts to those pages and also linked to those pages separately at the bottom of the to-do list. I know this probably makes no sense to you, but it was not what I had in mind, and we weren’t able to fix it with the back-and-forth.

If you want it done right, you still have to do it yourself. Some of it.

Sinner of the Month

Talk about a victim of its own success. If I had come into this totally ignorant, not having read the critics, not knowing it’s the most nominated film in Academy Award history, I would have enjoyed it for what it is: an expertly-made, but fundamentally silly, genre film with some great performances. It tried for some more transcendent significance, but who doesn’t these days? Every horror plot is a metaphor for something. The attempt was solid, the execution a bit muddled.

I could nitpick the historical accuracy of Sinners, but why? Its a vampire movie. And I should be pleased that any film, let alone a Hollywood blockbuster, is referencing Charlie Patton and Stack-o-Lee.

A long time ago, fifteen years or more, I had an idea for a genealogy blog: the family trees of early bluesmen. I still think its a great idea. It’s about as difficult as twentieth century American genealogy gets.

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Mortality rate of children under 5,
1855, Massachusetts:
285 per 1000 live births1

Mortality rate of children under 5,
2023, Somalia:
103 per 1000 live births

This is a story about five kids falling through the ice and four kids climbing out.

Birth to death, baptism to burial. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Genealogists look at these meager ranges every day. Ten kids, seven surviving to adulthood. The carved little lambs in the churchyard. The consumption, the croup, the grippe.

Sometimes I read of the bygone worlds my ancestors inhabited, and I think “gee, what a wonderful place.” I know I’m not supposed to, but I do. Then I look to their children, two dying in infancy, one as a teen, one in his mid-30s. And I reconsider.

Spy Pond
West Cambridge, Massachusetts
December 1853

Spy Pond is a “kettle hole” pond. Its very old, about 10,000 years older than any ancestor you could possibly name. My own ancestors made their homes about 1000 feet from the pond for about 100 years, which isn’t very long in the life of the pond, and maybe not very long in the great span of human history. But that’s a long time for a human being.

In 1853, Spy Pond was in West Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now it’s in Arlington, Massachusetts. Same place, new name. The residents were fired up about the Civil War (it was a strongly unionist, abolitionist town) and voted to rename in honor of the dead at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1853, West Cambridge was bucolic, rural, and hard by Cambridge proper. In 2025 its still hard by Cambridge, but that makes it a very pricy inner ring Boston suburb.

I think about this story often, because I found it very early in my genealogical research. I was maybe fifteen years old, and it was a first taste of “real life” among my ancestors. Not just names and dates, but some indication that they had been people just like me: people whose kids might crack through a frozen pond and not come out again.

SAD ACCIDENT AT WEST CAMBRIDGE. Last evening about 9 o'clock, as a number of young people were engaged in sporting on the ice of Spy Pond, at West Cambridge, the ice suddenly broke through, precipitating six of them into the water.

The cries of alarm soon brought Mr. Charles Griffiths to the spot, who succeeded after strenuous efforts in rescuing four boys and girls, and getting them safe to land; but one, Miss Persis Ann Peck, after holding on the ice until her strength failed, called to her friends that she could hold on no longer, bade them adieu, and then sunk beneath the cold element, was lost, and her body could not be recovered until an hour or more had elapsed.

The deceased was a lovely and interesting young lady about 16 years of age, daughter of Abel G. Peck, Esq., a merchant of this city. She was a pupil in Rev. Mr. Wilde's school, and her sudden and melancholy death will be deeply felt by her classmates as well as family and many friends.

The Boston Evening Transcript, 21 December 1853

That’s the earliest account, and it was carried in newspapers as distant as Alton, Illinois, and even in Allentown, PA’s German-language outlet Der Lecha Caunty Patriot, with more or less detail, and varying dates and times.2 1853 was an era of high mortality, but it was not so horrible or callous a time that the accidental death of a 16-year old girl wasn’t a national news item.

That evening—midwinter, St. Thomas’s day, the solstice, whatever you want to call it—there was a party at one of the merry estates along Spy Pond. Let’s call it a Christmas party. Dickens wrote a Christmas Carol in 1843, so pick your favorite adaption and imagine that Christmas party. For me, they were gathered around the piano, mugs of spiced cider in hand, singing “Barbara Allen.”3

I know the names of a few of the revelers, because their children were out disporting on the pond.

• Mr. and Mrs. William J. Niles and their six children, with three more—the eldest three—at rest three miles away in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Niles the father had parlayed his Boston livery business into a small real estate empire, and was locally renowned for “Cleopatra’s Barge,” a gargantuan eight-horse open sleigh carved into the form of a pleasure yacht.

• Mr. David W. Horton, whose wife, Mary, had died of cancer at 39 the year before. David was a hardware salesman with a shop in Boston, but unlike William Niles, he lived full time in West Cambridge. Horton had six children, the youngest scarcely out of diapers. His only daughter had nearly died from a blow to the head—from a piece of her own house!—during the freak West Cambridge/Medford tornado of 1851.

• Mr. and Mrs. W.J. Lane, who lived across from the Unitarian Church. W.J. was a furniture maker with his office in Boston, but also the town “auctioneer.” At the time, an auctioneer didn’t just sell cattle and farm equipment. He assisting in liquidating estates, selling real property, and acting as a commercial broker. Indeed, as some of our characters moved or passed away, they or their heirs hired Lane to sell their houses. The Lanes had five children, the youngest a girl of fourteen. Their youngest son died in infancy, in 1848.

• And finally—that we know about—Mr. and Mrs. Abel G. Peck. Abel, like W.J. Lane, was 46 years old. He’d spent his youth peddling dry goods to Massachusetts farmers, but he was an enterprising man, like his neighbor Niles. He was soon managing thirty peddling teams around the region, before settling down as a wholesale dealer in Boston’s North End. By 1853 he was well settled into a prosperous middle age. Abel’s first wife died at twenty. Mrs. Peck’s youngest son had died in infancy in 1851.

Was the party at the Peck mansion? Certainly possible. In 1853 it was a brand new Italianate pile, built and decorated in the latest fashion. Wouldn’t you want to show it off to your neighbors?

Though a recent arrival to West Cambridge, Abel Peck went right to work. He was one of the founders of the Spy Pond Water Company, which aspired to supply the town’s water. The pond was already a major economic engine in winter thanks to the Spy Pond Ice Company.4 Under the leadership of neighbor Addison Gage, crews of up to 300 men spent 12 hour days on the ice, sawing and harvesting huge blocks to be shipped to sunnier climes, Georgia and the Caribbean, mostly.

Charles Griffiths, surely also present at the party, was an Englishman by birth, from the industrial city of Birmingham. He’d brought his own industriousness to Boston and then West Cambridge, where he’d established Welch & Griffith’s saw factory.

If you think working at a saw factory sounds rather dangerous, you’d be right. There was at least one fatality at the factory, in 1851, when the grindstone split in half and bludgeoned one Charles Dudley. The saws, needless to say, went right out onto the ice of Spy Pond to start cleaving away blocks for the Caribbean.

Finally, what of the children?

Though I knew on some dim level it was a winter house party, I always pictured the children ice skating in the wan daylight. But it was 9pm on the Winter Solstice. They were skating in the dark, under a crescent moon. Persis Peck was on a sled. Pulling the sled was one of the eldest two Horton boys, Charles or David. Elsewhere on the ice were two other Peck children (William, 12, and Angie, 5),5 one of the five Niles girls, and Eben Lane, 15. In fact, all of the Horton, Peck, Niles, and Lane children were probably out that night, and other neighborhood kids besides, but we only know the names of the ones that went under.

Persis was sixteen year old, a student under the tutelage of Rev. George Dudley Wildes in Boston.6 The girls’ school, “the School for Young Ladies” in downtown Boston, only lasted a few years before its headmaster took a post in Brookline. Wildes, though a Harvard graduate from an old Puritan family, was an Anglican priest. He was also a mathematician who’d turned down an academic post in Kentucky to remain in Massachusetts. His school was intended to “enable young ladies who desire a higher course of instruction than the usual school limit, to pursue it to advantage, without material interference with their domestic and social duties.”

When Persis and young Horton fell through the ice, the other five children came running in the dark, perhaps following the splashes or screams. They all fell in, too. Given later reports, we can be fairly sure that Persis and the Horton lad went in first, and may have been in frigid water alone for some time.

Mr. Griffiths was probably at the party, but he may have gone out for a walk. Or maybe he was alone at his home on Spy Pond. But it was the sawmaker who first heard their outcries. They were lucky Mr. Griffiths was a man of fashion, for he came running in his “tippet.”7 He was able to use the tippet to fish out all of the latecomers, with only Horton and Persis Peck still in the water. Horton barely made it out, but he managed to hold on. Persis was too exhausted, too cold, and too benumbed to grasp the means of her rescue. The reports said her last words were, “I cannot hold it any longer. I am going.”

You can imagine the entire party was outside at the Spy Pond as soon as they heard. And you can imagine the human tragedy of it all. None of these families was a stranger to cataclysmic loss. But the sudden death of Persis, in the full bloom of youth, was of a different order.

These people were at the absolute peak of human living standards in 1853. Children and grandchildren of the American Revolution, they themselves had known no war, no extreme hardship and privation, at least not by the standards of their day. They lived a cozy and convivial life in a beautiful, quiet village, close enough to the metropolis to partake in its economic opportunities, but distant from its supposed “unhealthful” properties. William Peck married into the Gage ice business and became a real estate force in West Cambridge. Angie Peck was a future first lady of Massachusetts. Eben Lane—well, Eben’s life was to take a strange turn into piracy, but we’ll get to the extraordinary experience of my 4th great-granduncle another time.

By and large, they were, by the standards of most of the world, immensely wealthy. And yet to us, their lives seem sorrowful, even brutal.

Were they content? Standing around piano singing Christmas carols with their neighbors, drinking hot spiced cider, the fire crackling, I think you know the answer. They were at least as happy with their lot as we are with ours, and probably more so. There’s no riddle there. They were living as their ancestors had for two hundred thousand years: in the immediate presence of immeasurable loss.

The only riddle is us. We, with our vaccines, our air-conditioning, our OSHA violations, and our civilizational discontent, are the ones crying out for explanation. It seems we insist on discovering new ways to make ourselves miserable.

But I’ve been thinking that “encyclical” is a little too high pressure. I’m not trying to pontificate from on high. I just wanted to get into a good habit: writing and distributing at least one thing every month, no matter how paltry. And, of course, to give me a place to dump my one paragraph movie reviews, which are unaccountably—in both senses of the term—behind a paywall.

Failure is a good opportunity to adjust. Not grandiose metamorphoses. Little tweaks. I’m going to adjust to my failure by rechristening these monthly letters as “Notes.” An encyclical is polished, possibly even infallible. A note is just a note. It doesn’t have to be right. It doesn’t have to be good. All it has to be is written down.

So this will be my last encyclical. And yes, everything I wrote up to this point was and remains infallible, at least to the extent it appertains to matters of genealogical dogma.

Picture of the Month

A bona fide ancestral dance card from 1907. It goes without saying that you can discover some magnificent YouTube accounts searching for these bygone tunes. Of the composers, I only recognize Strauss and Victor Herbert. Interesting to see the popularity of East Asian themes (or “Oriental” as they would have been known).

The dance partners, incidentally, were all the ancestor’s classmates at the Naval Academy. If there are any girls at this hop, they weren’t signing on.

“Togo” was not a relative of the Japanese emperor, but the nickname of a deep-voiced lad from Colorado Springs. He died tragically young, six years later. They shipped his body home to Colorado from the Naval Hospital in Boston.

I don’t like to end a section with “and alas, he died.” That’s cheap theatrics. But alas, that’s also genealogy.

Great Moments in Compiled Genealogies #3

Source: Genealogy of the Brownings in America from 1621 to 1908

Genealogist: Edward Franklin Browning

Kind of beautiful, actually.

Source: A memoir and genealogy of John Poore, Ten generations 1615-1880

Genealogist: Alfred Poore

This is my second time dipping into the Poore well for strange, accidental deaths. This poor gent was blown away by a cannon fired in honor of General Butler in 1863. The gunner believed Butler and his staff had moved out of range, and wanted to give him one final, resounding salute. Woodhull was “loitering,” and that’s why you don’t loiter.

The son, who should be Maxwell Van Zandt Woodhull, had a storied military career himself. One of the two flagstaffs at Arlington National Cemetery is dedicated to the father and son. The first Maxwell’s father was, furthermore, the founder of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Source: The Bulkeley Genealogy

Genealogist: Donald Lines Jacobus

I pause over this one not because there’s anything particularly picturesque or discordantly worded. Instead, I happen to know that:

• 3760: Samuel Phillips Prescott Fay is an ancestor of George H.W. Bush and all those other Bushes.

• 3764: Maria Fay was stepmother of my great-great-great grandfather’s business partner. I think stepmother is right: whatever you call your father’s first wife if she died before you were born.

Now, you may say “who cares?” And—mmm, well, I’m afraid you’d be right. Nobody cares. But a leopard can’t change its spots. I’m never not going to love this stuff. To me, it’s magic. I don’t care if its statistically inevitable. Yes, the only unlikely thing going on here is that I would happen to know both the names of the 41st President’s ancestors and the names of my ancestors’ friends and associates. Equipped with all of that “useless” knowledge, you’re primed to find serendipity everywhere. But that is the use of useless knowledge. Life feels a little more purposeful and a little more like magic.

Substack Notes

One clever wag described these notes as “methadone for Twitter addicts.” I was never a Twitter addict, but I got hooked on that methadone all the same. It’s a shame, because I actually want people to read my writing. But I can’t dip my toe into the marketing stream. The current always carries me away.

Instead, I will continue writing into the void. No notes, no tweets, no regrets.

Movie Reviews

Grave of the Fireflies (1989, dir. Isao Takahata) ⋆⋆⋆⋆½
If you have children or you’re not an emotionless cyborg, I can’t recommend this film in good conscience. Devastating is overused, but you will certainly be devastated. Obliterated. A messy puddle left wondering how to clean yourself off the couch. Sorry, that was gross.

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No, it’s the fact that we ourselves are finite that makes all the difference. Even after we’ve stuffed our brains to the rafters with family anecdotes, there are more out there. Stuff a new one in and an old one pops out the back. As someone once said, each human life is a whole world. And genealogists try to contemplate a whole galaxy one planet at a time.

This, for instance, from 1817. Entirely new to me. You’ll recall1 I was researching this “Joseph Noble” character a while back. He was the boaster who claimed he and Andrew Jackson were old pals.

Joseph Noble was a Pennsylvanian but he was no Philadelphia gentleman. That wouldn’t be Andrew Jackson’s type. Noble was exactly the sort of fellow Jackson would have consorted with. He was a man of the frontier. A frontiersman, you might say. Western Pennsylvania, when Noble was born during the Revolution War, was a wild place.

His parents were Southerners, plantation owners, and slaveholders. Indeed, in 1780 Virginia still held a viable claim to the Noble properties in Fayette county. Back in 1767 a couple English gentleman, Messrs. Mason and Dixon, had surveyed the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania. But they’d stopped short of the Nobles, who were west of Fort Pitt, because their Native guides would go no further. Were the Noble plantations in Virginia, or were they in Pennsylvania? Depends who you asked. Borders in those early days were nebulous and squiggly.

That was all settled in the 1780s, and by 1817, Joseph Noble’s hometown of Brownsville was solidly under Pennsylvania government. And Pennsylvania passed an act for the gradual abolition of slavery in 1780. I know that because they called it “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” No forced acronyms in those days.

And yet, here’s Tiney. In 1817, 37 years later. Who was she?

Do not pay for a subscription if you think I’m going to solve this.

I’m not.

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Let me tell you what I did here. This was a cased photograph—the kind that you open and close with hinges and a little hook. My cousin showed it to me, I didn’t have a scanner, and I didn’t have time to remove it from the frame (many more pictures waiting in line). So I took a photograph with my iPhone, and I asked Gemini’s photo editor to remove the frame.

I specifically told Gemini to only remove the frame. Do not touch up the imperfections in the original. But Gemini cannot help itself. It cleaned it up anyway. I checked the face carefully, because LLMs have an interesting habit of making faces more symmetrical (is that what we secretly want them to do?) but it seems to have largely left her face in peace. But all the dust marks and scratches are gone.

I asked Gemini again, pointing out to the old fellow that he’d fixed things up more than I preferred. So it gave me a new image. And I bet you can guess what happned. That’s right, it hallucinated new imperfections. It added a bunch of scratches that weren’t in the original, including where the frame would have covered the photograph. And while it did reintroduce some of the old bits of dust, it missed several of the original scratches.

So just be careful with that.

Anyway, this is Eliza (Bigelow) Johnson, looking young and healthy, probably around the early 1850s. She was orphaned at 15, by which time she’d already been packed off to Miss Emma Willard’s school in Troy, New York. Emma Willard is worth covering another time, but for now I’ll just note that Eliza seems to have picked up her fashion sense there. Anyone else see many of these flower-garlanded bonnets? That’s a new one for me.

Skinny Lines

Do you have any ancestors with very few descendants? I mean someone who in theory could have hundreds or thousands, but instead has dozens or fewer? It would require a series of “only children” to work. More likely, given the circumstances of all of human history before modern medicine, it would require generations where every child died young or had very few children of their own.

I’ve got a couple of ancestors like that: Eliza (Bigelow) Johnson and her husband. They were born way back in the 1810s, and by the year 1960 only had three great-grandchildren. Three great-grandchildren may sound like plenty to you, but you live in an era of declining birth rates. To a mid-19th century farmer, three is a rounding error for zero.

This has an interesting effect on their web presence. That is: they might not have one. Genealogy has become so popular and so accessible (not unrelatedly) that any couple with a sizable descendancy is bound to boast a few family historians. A nineteenth century couple with an average number of modern-day descendants will be in the crosshairs of at least 3-4 researchers. If your ancestors had very few descendants, you’re quite likely the only person interested in their lives. It’s a special charge.

Links

• Morgan Wallen Issues Apology After Genealogy Report Reveals His Family Never Owned Slaves

  Yeah, it’s a joke, but given his family was from Appalachian Tennessee its not completely out of the question.

Film Reviews

The Parallax View (1974, dir. Alan Pakula) ⋆⋆
Felt like a series of threaded paranoid vignettes. And the thread was thin. Plot not airtight, not even watertight. But it was a convincing portrayal of the rat stuck in the maze, ushered to his doom by invisible handlers. Warren Beatty is befuddled. He’s handsome I guess, but I prefer Hume Cronyn.

He was a Labatt, you know. Hume Cronyn was. People like to joke about nineteenth century American names, and yeah, they’re pretty funny. But there’s something peculiarly Canadian about an aggressively Scots-Irish/lowland Scots name like Hume Cronyn.

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Fred Hassan Alderman (died 1936, aged 77)

Fred seems like he’d be genuinely fun at a party.

How many lies can you fit in one tiny obituary? Fred was just one of many descendants of the Munson family of New Haven. Descendants of Yankee great Thurman Munson might want to look into that earldom.

Fred, pardon my French, sounds like your classic small-town bullshitter.

But it’s not just pseudo-royalty that made such a claim.

Countess Vespucci (died 1910, aged 84)

A few errors in this one. Anyway, her grandnephew would beg to differ. This is from 1975:

Cotton A. Mather (died 1956, 76)

This one is particularly humorous given (a) Mr. Mather was not a descendant of Rev. Cotton but instead of his first cousin Rev. Timothy; and (b) there were at least two other guys named Cotton Mather alive in America in 1928. Not that he would know that.

The Last of the Stuyvesants (died 1970, aged 34)

The strange tale of the last of the Stuyvesants. An instructive example. The locals must’ve thought, hey, this is the only descendant we know of here, in Bridgewater, New Jersey, so let’s call him the last direct descendant. Now, I can tell you right away he’s not the last descendant, because the Wainwright family of musicians are descendants. Maybe they meant the last descendant with the name “Stuyvesant?”

That’s been covered elsewhere. But the upshot is that the Stuyvesant name died out twice. Once in 1953 with Augustus van Horne Stuyvesant, who was the last descendant in the agnate line to carry the name. And again with Peter here, whose grandfather Rutherfurd Stuyvesant was born Stuyvesant Rutherfurd and flipped his name to inherit under a will. He was a Stuyvesant descendant, but not purely through the male line.

Sometimes There are Exceptions

Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith was actually the end of the line. His second wife would eventually claim that her son, legally by another man, was actually Beckwith’s, but there’s no evidence. And rather a good deal of motivation to lie. Beckwith left a sizeable estate courtesy of his grandfather Robert Todd Lincoln.

Sometimes They Just Don’t Know What the Word Means

I guess what they’re trying to say is that she was the last living child of the latest living Revolutionary War soldier?

In classic fashion, the whole Lafayette story seems to be a crock, too. At least according to the 1850 census, Isaac, 88 at the time, was born in Santee River, a Huguenot parish in South Carolina.

Portrait of the artist as a young man: Henry Mosler.

That’s my kids’ step-2x-great-grandfather’s grandfather.1

Wikipedia tells us he studied with James Henry Beard in Cincinnati before the Civil War. You can tell by the hair he had artistic aspirations.

One fun thing to do is to hunt down the birth places of nineteenth century mitteleuropa types. Mosler is sometimes called a German-American or Polish-American artist. But he was really neither. He was born in a little village called Tropplowitz, which in 1841 belonged to Prussia. Half of it did, anyway. The village was cleanly bisected by the border with Austria, and had been since the Silesian Wars of the 1740s. Nowadays, the same village is called Opawica/Opavice, and is instead split between Poland and Czechia.

Why split it in the first place? I wondered. That’s surely because the town itself was historically split by the Opavice River, which is where the powers-that-be drew the line between Prussian and Austrian Silesia:

Links

• Ancient Wisdom: Why I Dug Into my Family’s Past (paywalled)

  • “I can’t think of anybody I know under the age of 50 who has this obsession. . .” Hmm. Apparently I am supposed to have been “swept up in the drama of [my] own life,” that is: “leaving home, making a career, creating a family.”

• Why 18th-Century Americans Were Just as Obsessed With Their Genealogy as We Are Today

  • Rather overstated, but interesting stuff in here. Like the woman who submitted a sampler as evidence for a Revolutionary War pension. Most of these examples, however, are people documenting their immediate families. Not what we’d call “genealogy.”

Reasons to be Thankful We’re not Our Ancestors

“When Louie XIV had a tooth pulled at Versailles, his dentist yanked at his jaw with such zeal that he tore a hole through the palate and into the nasal passage. For a while after that, any liquid the King drank would come spraying out of his nose. To plug it closed, his surgeon had to cauterize the hole with a red-hot iron.”

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Ripe genealogical mystery in the New Yorker last week:

Another biographical challenge is that the source for a lot of what we know, or think we know, about Baldwin’s life is Baldwin. He told many stories about himself, particularly in the book-length essay “No Name in the Street” (1972), and also in interviews. The difficulty is that Baldwin tended, as we all tend, to dramatize—not to dissemble, necessarily, but to highlight the significance of an experience. When most of us do this, it doesn’t matter. If an event wasn’t quite the way we’ve chosen to remember it, who cares? But we’re not James Baldwin.

The flight to Paris is an example. Baldwin frequently said that it was after a Black friend, Eugene Worth, jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge that Baldwin realized he had to leave America before he killed someone or was killed himself. He claimed that he picked Paris at random, knew no one there, and arrived with forty dollars, which was gone in two days. He avoided Americans, he insisted. “My friends were Algerians and Africans,” he told an interviewer for Essence in 1970. “They are the people who befriended me when I arrived here broke. In a sense, we saved each other, we lived together.”

This version of events is hard to verify. Baldwin gave the suicide of Eugene Worth a prominent place in his writing: Rufus, the central character in Baldwin’s third novel, “Another Country,” also jumps off the George Washington Bridge. But Douglas Field reports that although Worth appears in the 1930 census as an eight-year-old, there’s no record of his death in city or Social Security files. There is no reason to doubt that Worth existed and was Baldwin’s friend; what actually happened to him, though, is unclear.

That’s Louis Menand reviewing Nicole Boggs’ new book on James Baldwin. There are many books on James Baldwin. Douglas Field wrote another two, and I found the one discussing Eugene Worth.

Worth appears in on the 1930 Federal Census (New York City, Brooklyn Borough) as an eight-year-old but is thereafter something of a mystery. There are no records of his death in the Social Security Death Index and the Commissioner’s Office, City of NY, confirmed that his name does not appear in records of deaths reported between 1946 and 1947, and there is no record of his death in the records of the Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

I’ll be honest. I read that, and my first reaction is: “he made it all up.” Not that I have any reason to doubt James Baldwin in particular. But I’ve seen this movie before.

Well, I was wrong. Douglas Field was doing his research in 2011 at latest, and probably long before that. 2011 was a different world, genealogically speaking. Easy enough for him to search the Social Security Death Index. I remember doing that back in 2001. But would we expect a 23-year-old man who died in 1946 to be enrolled? I would not. Everything else however—as reflected by the fact that Field had to call up the NYC agencies directly—was not so easily searchable.

Things like, for instance, the New York state death index, which records the death of a Eugene Worth in Yonkers on 5 November 1946. For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of the Hudson River:

The thick grey line across the river is the George Washington Bridge. Any body discovered in the river from Riverdale and down would have “died,” for administrative purposes, in the city of New York. But north of that and you’re in Yonkers.

You might think this casts doubt on the GWB suicide story. Wouldn’t a body float downriver, toward the harbor? But the Hudson is a tidal estuary. At high tide, it flows upriver.

From the Yonkers Herald Statesman of 11 November 1946:

The body of a Brooklyn man missing from home five days, was taken from the Hudson River at noon yesterday by two employees of the Yonkers Seaplane Base at Ludlow, police report.

The man was identified by his mother as Eugene Worth, twenty-four, of 666 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn.

There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.

A couple months ago, I wrote about the “Heiress and the Manslaughtering Merchant Marine.” Do I have many readers? No, I do not. But I have the right readers. And when you have the right audience, the internet can be a magical place. A very generous cousin of a cousin (there should be a word for that. But wouldn’t it just be everybody?) somehow found the essay, and she commented on my post with very welcome news.

As I wrote, the Parmlys had no descendants. When the last of them died, all the family material related to their mother’s family went (I think) to my great-grandfather’s sister. Everything else went to distant relatives on the Parmly’s father’s side. Unrelated to me.

One of those distant relatives is alive today and maintains a great family history blog. She is the cousin of a cousin, and she was kind enough to send me photos from an entire photo album full of Parmlys.

So, without further ado:

That’s Elizabeth, the “heiress” of the title, many years before her Village days and even more before Burt Christie came into her life.

Interesting to note the Parmlys had a long history in Greenwich Village. Their great-grandfather Rev. Duncan Dunbar, a Scottish Highlander, came to America in 1823 and took a post at the MacDougal Street Baptist Church. There he pastored the flock for forty years. Daytonian in Manhattan has got the old house covered.

Thanks, Cynthia!

Links

What I Inherited from my Criminal Great-Grandparents - The usual topic if you want to get your genealogy published in a legitimate outlet (“my ancestors had a tough time, what does that mean for me?”) but with much more nuance than usual.

Winter writes of her great-grandfather that “he seems to have left no footprints behind in Germany, nor can I locate any trace of his parents or siblings. For all the records show, he could have been entirely self-invented, the first of the family line: the ur-Winter.”

That’s a challenge if I’ve ever seen one.

The most distinctive thing about Anton is in his Ellis Island passenger manifest: he tells the officials he’s a “bicycle rider.” Imagine immigrating to the New World in 1896 and calmly informing the uniformed staff that you ride bikes for a living.

You’re gonna trust that guy? I say this as a fellow descendant of German velocipedists.

So here’s Anton as “club editor” of a Munich bicycle club, shortly before his immigration:

How do I know it’s him? How about this item about the unfortunate Bertha, the “newspaper editor’s wife,” abandoned by said newspaper editor? This shows up about a year after Winter came to America:

And here’s their marriage notice, from another few years before that. Anton was a “schriftsetzer”—a typesetter:

And he was “von hier,” hier being Munich.

Anyway, if you know Jessica Winter, drop her a line for me, would you?

Film Reviews

The Trip to Italy (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2014) ⋆⋆⋆½
Again, I watched the six-part TV series. Began in a desultory imitative funk but perked right up after a few caffé. Do I enjoy the mimicry and Romantic recitations? Yes, I do. I would probably watch if it was nothing but. But ultimately we’re just watching two very entertaining guys have lunch together and I find that to be a damn fine excuse for a feature film.

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The hat, obviously. What is that thing?

I think this is my kids’ great-great-grandmother. The whole setting is a little surreal. Kid in the dirt with a big white hat. Toys on the ground, I think. A barrel of something. A defoliated tree looking just about ready to grab her if she walks too close. And the middle distance looks like it was pasted on from an expressionist painting.

My Ancestors Were More Conscientious Than Yours

Family tree enthusiasts just want to brag about their ancestors. Isn’t that what they say about us?

As a characterization, its outdated and unfair. A cheap shot at best. But I still hear it. Lately its taken the form of an accusation of some sort of ethnic chauvinism or even racism. Why won’t this old canard just die?

In my experience, genealogists are some of the most humble people around. They carry a deep sense of the capaciousness of human experience and the power of historical contingency—that is, dumb luck.

Anyway, what’s the saying? Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb?

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