Category Archives: Genealogy

Searching for one doughboy’s Great War

23 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Genealogy, Governors Island, Great War centennial

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The American Legion Monthly, November 1936

The American Legion Monthly, November 1936

It is pouring rain outside here in Brooklyn. I have spent the last hour researching in Ancestry the details of a New York doughboy. It’s the perfect research endeavor for a winter night.

I don’t want to give the biographical specifics here, but I will say that he was born in Yonkers in 1886 and went on to serve in the Quartermaster Corps during the Great War. He was in St. Nazaire when the Armistice came in November 1918. This is for a project I am working on with others in which we are making a 15-20 minute documentary to be shown this spring, summer and fall at our college and at Governors Island. Our protagonist went on to become active in New York politics, and an ally of Al Smith. He had five sons who all served in the Second World War after him. Our doughboy was apparently a formidable presence, and the family patriarch until his death in the mid-1960s. It’s really a fascinating story, and a uniquely American one.

We have our first film shoot with his grandchildren this coming Saturday. As this moves along in the coming months I will divulge more.

(image/detail from The American Legion Monthly, November 1936)

Remembering my Aunt Carol

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in Genealogy, Those we remember

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Gettysburg was one of Aunt Carol's favorite places.

Gettysburg was one of my Aunt Carol’s favorite places.

My mother’s older sister died this past week and I am still trying to process it all. Some may note that Carol Zurlo was a regular commenter here on this website. My aunt was born in Washington DC in 1935, where my grandfather worked in the Navy Yard during the Depression and then throughout the Second World War. The family moved back to Boston in 1945. My own parents lived in Connecticut until we all moved to South Florida in the mid 1970s. My brother and sister and I were cut off from the extended family for the next decade and more. Remember: there was not internet, no cell phones, no text messaging, and no anything else in these years. When you were cut off, you were cut off.

Her last several years were a struggle health-wise but Carol never failed to keep in touch. And it was not just about genealogy. She had an interest in art, history, crafts and quilting, and numerous other things. She was elementary school teacher for so long that she ended her career teaching the grandchildren of some of her original students. After retirement she supervised field trips for her own grandkids’ visits to Gettysburg and elsewhere. Naturally she always filled me in about these excursions. She was also a great Boston sports fan. Over the past dozen or so years each of the four Boston teams have won at least one title. The biggest one, at least as far as my extended family went, was when the Red Sox finally broke through in 2004. I have always been thankful that everyone from these two generations lived to see it. That may sound funny, but it is no small thing.

One of the best things about moving to Brooklyn in the late 1990s is that I was able to reacquaint myself with much of the extended family. When I began tracing my family history about a dozen years ago the two individuals who helped fill in the most about their respective sides of my family were my father and my Aunt Carol. Others filled in gaps as well, and have even generously taken me to the old schools, houses, and final resting places of our relatives. My dad and aunt were the foundation though. This made sense, as they were both the oldest siblings and so had the most memory to fall back on. Now both my father and Carol are gone, but what they passed on to me has been saved.

Digitizing the Harlem Hellfighters

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in Genealogy, Libraries

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Earlier in the week I finished Richard Slotkin’s Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality. It is a dual history of the 369th Infantry Regiment and the 77th Division. Those looking for a triumphalist account of the war should look elsewhere. Slotkin tells a sobering tale of how and why men joined the Harlem Hellfighters and Melting Pot Division and what they hoped to get out of it. Briefly put, men joined for many reasons. The most important, though, was the idea that they were helping their people by by making this sacrifice. And understand, many of them made the ultimate sacrifice. The hope of the Armistice soon led to disillusionment with the failures of the League of Nations, the social and racial unrest, and the economic difficulties in the 1920s and 1930s.

The 369th was comprised of African Americans from many neighborhoods; the 77th was primarily immigrants who were new to the country. Fittingly Slotkin does not end the story on Armistice Day but takes the story all the way to the mid twentieth century. It was only then, after the Second World War, that social gains began to be made in any meaningful way.

The New York State Military Museum has begun digitizing the military records of the men of the 369th. So far staff and volunteers have digitized 2,500 of the 10,ooo documents. They can be viewed online. Reading them is addictive. The cards go all the way to 1949 and should be invaluable source for both military and social historians. Genealogists will find them useful as well.

(image/NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)

Calendar says fall, thermometer says summer

02 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Genealogy, Joseph Roswell Hawley, Libraries

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Dusk, Green-Wood Cemetery

Dusk, Green-Wood Cemetery

It was an unseasonably warm day here in the Big Apple, I just got back from a meeting of the Archivists Round of Metropolitan New York at Green-Wood Cemetery. It was a chance to see and hear about some of the behind the scenes activities of the 175 year old garden cemetery. A special treat was to behold the original hand-written list of men from the 14th Brooklyn wounded at Gettysburg. Many of the men from the 14th are now interred there, some having died of their wounds and others having returned from the war to live out the rest of their natural days before meeting again in Valhalla. As I said a few weeks back, I am trying to think holistically in my personal and professional endeavors. Yesterday I started Brenda Dougall Merriman’s Genealogical Standards of Evidence: A Guide for Family Historians, a primer on the basics of proper genealogy. It is part of my longterm plan to become BCG certified.

This morning I emailed a friend who agreed to critique my book proposal to see if he would read it and comment by the weekend after next if I got it to him one week from today. It is part of my plan to keep my feet to the fire. It is so easy not to do it. In a piece of serendipity, a colleague in the library where I work asked in the afternoon if I want to be part of a writing club she is founding. The idea is that once a week the group will get together to check our progress, read each other’s work, and that type of thing. I think this is going to work well.

One Tuesday evening . . .

24 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Genealogy, Media and Web 2.0

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I just got back from the SOHO Apple store, where I took a One-to-One session on how to use my new iPhone 5S. I am not the type to run out and buy the latest thing just to have it, but the Hayfoot especially need a new phone. I got them early Friday morning and am now realizing how fortunate I was to get them when I did, especially with the her coming home for the weekend and going back to DC today. It was almost too easy; I was in and out of the store in all of 45 minutes, counting the brief wait outside the store. This is my first iPhone and am trying to make the most of it, especially for the blog. I want to take better photos and incorporate sounds and video into my oeuvre. I am really excited about the phone but must say it was a little sad retiring my old flip phone, which was so old but served me so well for so many years. Putting it in the drawer felt like a betrayal.

Five generations of my father's family in a nutshell

Five generations of my father’s family in a nutshell

Over the weekend I received the above worksheets from a relative of mine who I have never met but contacted recently to see what information he might have about our family history. I knew who he was because a mutual relative. To be precise, my grandmother was his aunt. He, his brothers, my dad and his brothers grew up in Boston together in the 1940s-1960s. This information is a coup for me; not only does it corroborate some of the work I have already done, it adds a great deal I did not know. This is information that even my father did not know. I am sure of that because he would have shared it with me when we sat down in the late 1990s and hashed out the family tree to the best of his knowledge a few years before he died. Now I am trying to flesh out the details of this new stuff I have. It is my goal to become a professional-level genealogist and learn about standards, levels of proof, and that type of thing. Between this and what I received from an aunt on my mother’s side a few weeks back, I have got a lot of material to work with in the coming weeks. It is going to be a busy fall with this and everything else.

Thursday notes

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Genealogy, Historiography, Libraries

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It has been a long week; the semester at the college where I work is now in full swing. My favorites are the ones just out high school who have zero idea of what is going on around them or what they should do. I see many shades of myself at that age in them.

I just got back from a professional development event at The Center for Jewish History in the city. It was about how archivists and librarians can use modern research methods in their own scholarship and in the services they provide to others. One of my things for this academic year is to think holistically in all my endeavors. I want my volunteering with the Park Service to incorporate research into the book I am writing. Likewise, the geneaology will help me learn more about both digital storage and retrieval systems, along with what I have been learning abut my family history. I am thinking about joining a genealogy society to better learn the in-and-outs of the field. I know a reasonable amount about census and military records already, but I want to become more knowledgable about their provenance and the hows and whys of their usage over time. The online genealogy services are great. It is a wonderful time to be doing such research, and I have no desire to go back. Still, we lose a little something just looking at, say, an old birth certificate online, divorced from its context in a county courthouse where it sat for decades. The accessibility is a huge plus, but a little of the magic is gone on the computer screen.

Speaking of genealogy, I scored a major coup yesterday when an aunt mailed me a set of old family trees written out by her uncle decades ago. I spent a good part of last night comparing his and my work, and was glad to see that we matched almost exactly. Looking at the pencil marks he made all those years ago, I could not help but be impressed by his diligence. He managed to go back 4-5 generations in some cases. It was humbling to think of how he did it. We don’t give the people of the past as much credit as they deserve.

Embracing complexity

03 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Ellis Island, Genealogy

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Immigrants passing through Galveston's immigration depot might be held for further examination at the quarantine facility.

Immigrants passing through Galveston’s immigration depot might be held for further examination at the quarantine facility.

Once when I was a kid my grandfather on my mother’s side was telling me about his parents, both of whom were born in Italy and moved to the United States separately before meeting, marrying, and putting the family on the path that led to me. Despite my greatest efforts to corroborate this piece of family history, all my searching over the years has so far proved fruitless. I began having even greater doubts when I began as a volunteer at Ellis Island National Monument. Folks would come in and state confidently that “My great grandmother came through here in 1867,” or whatever version of their family story passed down to them. The trouble is, Ellis Island did not become an immigration station until 1892. And, even if one’s relatives did come to America between 1892-1924, there is still a good chance they passed through one of the many other immigration stations across the United States. Baltimore, Savannah, New Orleans, or in my great grandparents’ case Boston, are just a few of the other port cities through which the huddled masses were arriving in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I suppose people think “Ellis Island” because a) it was the largest and, b) it is now–quite properly–integral to our national story.

This came back to me a week or so ago when I forwarded this piece to some colleagues at work. It is about the 10,000 Jews who passed through Galveston Texas from 1907-1917 and eventually settled in the Lone Star State. Indeed many thousands from Eastern Europe had come before them. A spectacular exhibit on Galveston as an immigration station toured the country a few years ago, and made a stop at Ellis Island itself. Stories like this are important reminders that much of what we think we know is, at best, incomplete. Think “Immigrants, 1907” and the narrative shorthand in your head thinks “Lower East Side, tenements, crowded streets.” That is certainly part of the story, but as always the full story is more complicated and interesting. It is a scary proposition. Who wants to think that what they believe might be wrong? I know that fighting such simplifications is something a struggle with every day in my own writing and research. I saw Ellis Island visitors struggling with the same issue when processing that maybe their own history was not so simple. So what is one to do? There is not much to do but accept this and embrace complexity whatever the consequences.

(image/Library of Congress)

On genealogy and personal history

31 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by in Genealogy, Governors Island

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My grandmother's Navy Yard pass

My grandmother’s Navy Yard pass

I spent a part of my day today searching records on Ancestry and Fold3 for some upcoming oral history interviews at Governors Island. What makes GI so fascinating is that, given its location in New York Harbor and its longterm importance as a military installation, so much of American history can be traced back to it. The Revolution. 1812. The Civil War. The settling of the West. 1898. Both World Wars. Governors Island played a role in all of these, and I don’t mean tangentially; the island and the people who worked on it were central in all of them. One thing that gets lost on some people, including myself at times, is that the people who served on the island were just that, individuals. It is one thing to say that the First Minnesota rushed from Gettysburg to help put down the Draft Riots in 1863, or that the Big Red One left for Europe from the island after the United States entered WW1 in 1917. It is another thing to examine a Census or Pension record of a son or father who was part of it. That is why I love the oral history project so much, even though my role in it is not as large as some other volunteers’.

My growing interest in these projects runs hand-in-hand with my growing interest in tracing my own family history. Visiting the Frederick Douglass house in Anacostia last week intensified this interest. As I mentioned in a previous post, my mother lived in the neighborhood when she was a little girl. After seeing the Washington Navy Yard from the Douglass estate, I had to dig out the above pass that my grandmother once used to visit my grandfather, a civilian employee at the facility. An aunt had given it to me several years ago, along with some old family photos. My grandparents were originally from Boston but moved to DC during the Depression and stayed until 1945 when the Second World War was winding down. They had two daughters in the process before eventually moving back to New England and staying there for good. I would have gotten back to it eventually, but all this is what inspired me to-re-up my Ancestry account. Searching records has pretty much how I have spent my evenings over the past week. I have also emailed some distant relatives to see what they might be able to add. Thankfully, I have been able to answer questions they have as well.

I am old enough now (46) to realize that part of my interest in my family history is because my brother and sister and I were deprived of it. Taken by our parents from the Northeast to Florida when we were young kids, we lost touch with the extended clan. It was not hard to do in the 1970s and 1980s, when we all lived without the internet, cell phones, and everything else that makes the world more interconnected than it used to be. It is amazing how quickly you can strike up a conversation with family, even family you have never met before or seen in thirty years.

What I find most moving, when searching my own family or oral history subjects, is the capsulation of a life into a few documents. Half a decade ago this would not have meant so much to me. I had my perspective changed when my father died four years ago. You cannot helped being moved seeing the dash (e.g. 1938-2009) and wondering what the story was. Whoever we are, you are part of something bigger than ourselves.

What a phone call can do

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Genealogy, Joseph Roswell Hawley

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I had an extraordinary telephone conversation last night with a woman who I have never met before but, I learned late last week, is a distant relation. I began my genealogy in a casual way several years, beginning by sitting down with my father one summer evening to make sure that what he knew did not get lost to the sands of time. His health was in decline for several years and it was obvious his time was coming soon. With mom it has been more of a process. Let’s just say she is not the reflective type who enjoys putting the pieces together one by one. Getting details from my mother is done surreptitiously, usually a quick text or email to see if she can flesh out the outline of a life that to me is nothing more than a record on my computer. Done in this manner I have been able to get a fair amount of information. And at the risk of getting her mad I would dare say she enjoys it when kept to a minimum.

Some of you know that I am in the beginning stages of a biography of Union general Joseph Roswell Hawley. Hawley was a captain in the 1st Connecticut, a ninety day unit, and later a colonel and brigadier in the three-year 7th. Seeing where he fought at First Bull Run this pat Sunday was something special. He was something of a Zelig, always turning up where events were taking place. After the war he was the governor of Connecticut, and eventually a congressman and senator. The whole reason I found Hawley was because the urban legend in my family was that we were his direct descendants. If the legend had been true I would have been his great, great grandson. The short version of the story is that I am not.

That brings me back to the phone call last night. The reason for the family legend was that we indeed have Hawleys in our family tree, on my mother’s side of the family. We just never knew anything about them. As it turns out it was the other side of the Hawley family to which we are directly related. I had wondered how part of the family ended up in Nova Scotia way back when. From last night’s conversation I know that they were Loyalists during the Revolutionary War and that they fled shortly after the upstart colonists declared victory. I would label my own proficiency as a genealogist as high-beginner. I had put it aside for awhile, even letting my Ancestry account lapse early this month, because I had hit a wall. Sometimes when you least expect it the door opens again.

The biography is still very much in the early stages but is proceeding nicely. It is a story worth telling, and one that fell into my lap wrapped in a bow imploring me to tell it.

From Brooklyn to Harlem

15 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Genealogy

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The transition from Brooklyn to Manhattan has been a subject of novelists, filmmakers, and essayists for well over a century. The culture shock that can overtake a person with such force was especially marked in the twentieth century, before gentrification came to our fair borough and rendered us bridge and tunnelers more like our cousins across the river. This is not to say that the shock does not exist even today; nothing will ever replace or equal Manhattan. Pete Hamill, Woody Allen, and Alfred Kazin are three artists who captured the confusion, joy, and wonder that inherently come with leaving behind the old neighborhood and everything you know to find your place in the Big City. Filmmaker Monique Velez is making  a documentary about the move from Brooklyn to Manhattan. In her case, however, the story begins in tiny Brooklyn, Alabama where her great-grandmother Lucille lived before coming to Harlem during the Great Migration. I have been following the evolution of this project for some time, and am happy to report that things are moving steadily. Velez was in Alabama filming earlier in the spring and is now getting ready to shoot in New York. Ironically, she is part of the reverse migration in which African Americans are moving back to the South; Velez was born in New York and now lives in North Carolina. Watch the trailer. This should be something special. I will be certain to announce when the film is released.