Moving and family keepsakes

 

                                                      A view of the immigrant ship Jeannie Johnson in Dublin

Packing, I've gotten used to it over the years. As I remember it, I started packing for myself at the age of 6. My family travelled a lot and I continued to travel over the years. But it's one thing to pack and know that you are coming back home. What if home is moving with you?

Travel changes us but none so much as that which changes our surroundings permanently. I almost wrote "for good" and had to alter that wording because some of those moves weren't travel towards something new they were looking forward to. Rather they were looking for sanctuary after being evicted from their homes. How would you pack for a journey like that?

The temptation would be to take important family keepsakes with you, if you still had them. Only there would be limited ability to take furniture, especially things that were heavy and bulky. That was certainly true in early days with people crammed below decks on immigrant ships. At later dates, movement of household goods was more easily managed if you had the means to pay. I think that our family furniture followed by ship when we immigrated to Canada from England. We came by airplane, a far cry from those earlier immigration treks across the ocean. Not as easy as in this day and age though as there were no jets in those days.

It's interesting to think of the dynamics of our ancestors moving from place to place particularly when it involved immigration. Nice to think that some may have been able to take family keepsakes with them. And really, those were the lucky ones who weren't displaced by war or evacuation due to natural disasters. After those events, I suppose, choosing what to take with you may have been made easier because time was of the essence or perhaps there was little left to choose from. 

Plotting family on maps

 

                                                                 Google map of the United States of America

In Canada, we are used to the large land masses that make up our provinces and figuring out where places, like states, are in the US can be a challenge. The other day a friend asked me what the state under Alberta was. That one I knew, having once lived in Calgary. "It's Montana," I said having gleaned that knowledge from my time working in oil industry offices in downtown Calgary. Even though the name of the state came to me automatically, I wasn't sure if it was the only state directly under Alberta.

That's where maps, like the Google map of the United States above, can come in handy. It also helps when I try to figure out how far my ancestor, Alexander Matheson and his family moved as I work on his timeline. According to one of his letters, he and his wife moved about 800 miles since they were married. They started out in Freeport near Chicago then in May 1870 moved to Iowa. Looks like good timing as the Chicago Fire of 1871 probably caused a lot of disruption in the areas of Illinois surrounding the city. Later, in early April of 1883, Alexander and his family moved to South Dakota.

Until I looked at the map, I had no idea where Iowa or the Dakotas were. In my mind, I had conflated North and South Dakota with North and South Carolina which I was familiar with having traveled through them on my way from Montreal to Florida by car. My mental map had the Dakotas parallel to the Carolinas. Now, looking at the map, I can see they are much further north. That means that the farmland and crops would have been similar to those in Illinois. As a farmer, that would have made a difference to Alexander Matheson. Looking at a map really did enhance my understanding of his story.

 

Sources:

Google maps: map data ©2023 Google, INEGI

Letter 6 from Alexander Matheson to his sister, Margaret Thomson

 

Did historic events actually affect your family?

 

                                               This is just a portion of the magazines stashed at my place

Just as I threatened to, I've finally gotten around to going through my stash of magazines. The thing is that I've discovered other caches of them on the different floors of my living space. But I spent good money for these publications so I'm giving them a once over if they look interesting and most of them do. My tastes haven't changed that much.

An article in an old issue of Harper's made me think. It was the June 2014 edition which isn't that old considering that I still have barely touched magazines with bonus CDs attached. Remember those? But I digress, the Harper's article was an account from their archive which had been written 70 years prior, in August 1944. Their correspondent, Vernon Bartlett, had written about the non-event that D Day had been from the point of view of someone on the ground just getting on with their daily tasks with the, by then, accustomed complications that being in England in the middle of the war added. 

In a way the feeling the article conveyed was similar to the text I received from someone in Nova Scotia asking me if the wild fires in BC were affecting me. In return, I asked her if she had been flooded out by the torrential rains in Halifax in July. The answer was no in both cases. Because that's the thing, when something momentous happens, the immediate thought is that it is widespread affecting everybody in the area. But that is not always the case. 

It's nice to include historic events in our ancestor's stories but are they as all-encompassing as we think? Unless there is written proof, perhaps it is best to look at the people known to have been affected and see if there is any link with our past relatives. It could be that nothing changed for them after the event so maybe that piece of history was not noteworthy in their lives. 

Sources:

“Invasion Diary” by Vernon Bartlett. Harper’s Magazine. Harper’s Magazine Foundation, New York, New York, June 2014. 

Letters and family history

 

                                                                     Family letters can fill in some of the gaps

Letters can be a wonderful window into ancestor's lives. I'm lucky enough to have access to two collections of correspondence; one from my maternal grandparents and one from a 3 x great uncle, also one of my mother's relatives. Both sets of letters were one sided though. There were no copies kept of the answering letters. Still, there was enough information to fill in some blanks about their lives.

Placing them in context can make their actions more understandable. It can also lend depth to the narrative of their stories. My current task being, of course, getting one correspondent's tale down on paper. Readers of this blog will know I'm working on Alexander Matheson's story. He was my 3 x great uncle and led an interesting life. He outlined some of it to his sister, Margaret, after he finally discovered where she was living after 40 years. She must have kept those letters that he wrote.

He started writing to his sister in 1895 but I know from his correspondence that his use of the postal system started much earlier than that. In his letters to her, he mentioned the different post masters he had written to in Canada seeking news of the family he had lost. He was in a different country because, when he couldn't find his family, he moved across the border to the US in the late 1850s. 

But, although we now take postal service for granted, even call it disparagingly "snail mail", back in the 1850s it wasn't the same as it is now. So, as part of the research for Alexander's story, I decided to find out more about the postal system while Alex was using it. Not only was that the US postal system but also the postal system in Canada as well.

In Canada, new post offices tended to pop up where the rail lines went. It took a while for the railways to head west. The US had other events that opened up their postal system. According to a book that I read about that country's postal system, it really expanded with the California Gold Rush, followed a few years later by the US Civil War. Apparently, many soldiers kept up regular correspondence. Which makes me wonder who Alex wrote to while he was fighting in the Union Army. That correspondence would be an interesting find if it still exists. 

Sources:

Correspondence of Alexander Matheson – 1895-1920

Gendreau, Bianca; Willis, John; Brousseau, Francine, Special Delivery: Canada’s Postal Heritage, Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, N.B., 2000

Henkin, David M., The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006 

Researching ancestors lives and other subjects

 

                             Interior of Dr Williams Library in London where I researched my Congregational minister

In depth research into an ancestor can take you a lot of places. For some, there is the need to find out about the places where they lived and/or the occupations that they had. That information can inform the researcher about the reasons for some of their actions and, in turn, provide a better understanding of what they lived through. As someone who loves history, I enjoy trying to picture my ancestors in time and place. I've even been lucky enough to find information written about particular ancestors.

In the case of my ancestor, Thomas Strange, who lived from 1723 to 1784, I was even more fortunate to find something that he had written. He was a nonconformist minister in Kilsby, Northamptonshire, so a learned man. I was lucky enough to find information about him at Dr. Williams Library in London which included some of the sermons he had written. They were long! I wouldn't have wanted to sit through one especially as, according to one of the accounts written about him, he had a speech impediment.

The Reverend Thomas Strange would be an interesting ancestor to write about. At the moment, I'm focusing on another relative. One closer in time. Alexander Matheson, who fought in the US Civil War. There has been a lot written about that war, so the main problem with finding out information is weeding through all that is out there.

There was another aspect to Alexander's story besides the war, however. That was his search for his family, his father and siblings. It was a search that took place from another country because he had last seen them in Canada. It meant that he had to search by mail. Can you imagine? Only, it wasn't quite the mail service we know today. Which leads me to more research, this time about the postal service in two countries during the time of his 40 year search. It's strange the places that family history can take a researcher. 

Mapping timelines in a family's history

 

                                               Some maps and timelines from my collection

Timelines, I have quite an assortment throughout my family history collection. I often draw one up when about to embark on a research trip, especially one to the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City. The list reminds me of the family lines I want to concentrate on during that trip. But it does more than that. Not only does it pinpoint an ancestor or ancestral family in time but it also shows gaps that need more research. Timelines also serve as an excellent backbone when piecing together a family history story. A case in point is the story of my 3x great uncle, Alexander Matheson. I was able to weave together a timeline of his movements from his letters and military records. Those movements showed the important events in his life which underpin the framework of his story.

I'm looking forward to adding the data from his timeline to my Family Historian software so that I can use their mapping technology to follow his movements. That should prove interesting. Unfortunately, the places are just pinned on the map of the world, there appears to be no line that indicates the person going from point A to point B. Not that I've gotten far with my inputting. I'm still working on the first person I've entered, which is me. I'm one individual whose timeline would benefit from lines going from one place to the other to show how many times I've moved back and forth from place to place. Still, showing where a person has been, adds a sense of whether they lived their life in one community or many. If they put down firm roots or drifted from place to place. 

Even better than maps, of course, is on the ground research; actually visiting the places where ancestors lived. It gives a better idea of the lay of the land and how long it presently takes to get from one place to another. If you know when your family made the move and you do a bit of digging into the available transport at the time, that should give you a better idea of the effort to get from the initial spot to the next. Having a timeline with the date, might also be able to give you a head start when looking for a reason to up stakes when you plug the family's dates in to the history of the locality. Timelines and maps really complement each other when you add in the history they were living through. 

Getting my family tree back in order

 

                                                                             My family history binders

At times I think I'm really slow at getting stuff done, especially when it involves my family history. But, sometime between dealing with fixing my travel ticket to my upcoming writers retreat as the airline had decided to nix one of the flights I'd booked and updating the list of all the deadlines and to do items necessary before I leave, I realized that I have so many things on my plate that it's a wonder anything gets done at all.

A case in point is using family tree software to enter my tree the right way instead of the slap dash method I employed before. I downloaded the Family Historian Trial which allows you to try out the software for a 30 day period. The user has the choice of downloading a GEDCOM file to Family Historian or entering individuals one at a time. I've decided on the one at a time method to finally get everything recorded the right way. Yesterday, I finally entered the first person in the tree, me. But, if I want to start as I mean to go on, I need to find the document to cite to verify the information I know off by heart.

I'm hoping data entry will be easier with more immediate relatives. But I think that things will get trickier as I go along. I'll need to pull information from my family history binders, the research logs I've kept from various trips, the photos of records on my phone and those unlabeled thumb drives with family data that I've brought home over the years. It looks like it will be something to chip away at over time which means I should probably buy the software before I invest too much time into it. But, exploring the software further, it has maps and timelines which makes me wonder if that means a person can be tracked over time and space through their life. That would be so cool, especially with my family who weren't known for staying in one place. That would take the timelines I've drawn up to the next level!

 

Sources:

Family Historian software https://www.family-historian.co.uk