Passing It On

Names have the power to transform relationships

Almost exactly 40 years ago today, I bought my first brand new car – a 1969 AMC Javelin. The Javelin was a “pony car,” the same class as the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro.

As you might suspect, the Javelin was one of my favorite cars, so much so that upon graduation from Aircraft Maintenance Officers school in Illinois, I appropriated the name “Ferelda” for it from a classmate, who used the name for his car.

From that moment on, I felt I had a special relationship with the car. Now I learn that my experience wasn’t unique, that giving something a name transforms our relationship to it. Blogger Michael Margolis writes that a study by Newcastle University found that cows that were given names produced more milk than unnamed cows.

It all makes sense. You wouldn’t feel the same about an animal called “dog” as you would if the same animal were known as Lucky or Muffy. My son lived in a house in Durham, England, that was known to the postman as Coronation House. Surely that’s better than 123 Avenue XYZ.

When a friend and former colleague of mine, Chuck Offenburger, and his wife, Carla, bought a farm in Greene County, Iowa, they named the place Simple Serenity Farm which is a hoot and a holler better than Rural Route Whatever.

When we humans attach a name to something it’s our recognition that this is something special, something worthy of our special label. There’s no way of determining exactly when we started calling one another with something beyond a “Hey you” grunt, but it was a welcome change. Just imagine your family tree without names.

Writing prompt for the day: What names did your family use to identify animals or objects? How did they pick them?

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo courtesy of James Cridland.

Even too-good-to-be-true stories sometimes are

Jonathan Dillon, an Irish jeweler who emigrated to America during the 1845 potato famine, was fond of telling family members of his secret connection to President Abraham Lincoln.

Dillon’s tale of engraving a secret message in the president’s pocket watch may have seemed a bit far-fetched to some, but it was true.

Dillon was repairing the president's watch on April 13, 1861, when he learned a shot had been fired at Fort Sumter and the Civil War had begun. Dillon claimed to have opened up the watch and engraved a message of support to the president inside.

Two of Dillon's great-great-grandchildren, Laurie Stiles Daynes and her cousin, Doug Stiles of Waukegan, Ill., set out to prove Dillon’s story. Doug Stiles found a watch matching Dillon’s description that the Lincoln family left to the Smithsonian Institution half a century ago.

Stiles persuaded the museum to open the watch in March. Inside, they found Dillon had engraved his name, the date of April 13, 1861, and "Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date" and "thank God we have a government."

After the discovery, the watch display in the "An Extraordinary Life" exhibit in the museum was changed to reflect the new chapter in its history.

There's a lesson to be learned from Dillon's tale, Stiles Dayne told Laura Ory in an Associated Press story.

"Family stories should continue to inspire," she told Ory. "Keep passing them on."

Writing prompt of the day: What are some of the more far-fetched stories in your family history?

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo of pocket watch courtesy of Andreas Falk.

Five We Like: Another week of family history goodies

There’s a lot of good family history information available on the Internet. Here are five places we’ve enjoyed visiting this week:

Who'd a thunk it? (finding "out of place" records). Genealogist Meri Rees of Albany, New York, writes about several cases where brick walls are serendipitously overcome. As she writes, "The records are out there ... You just have to keep searching for them."

Original photos from the Civil War. A visually stunning collection of one of the pivotal moments in American history.

Getting baptized. Brenda Mantz – “risk manager by day, writer at night” – writes such elegant prose that it’s sometimes difficult to realize that it’s personal history she’s writing about. For those aspiring to polish their own writing skills, check her out, especially her precise attention to detail.

Timeline: Faking it. Ancestry Magazine goes back more than 300 years to offer up this entertaining list of great ruses in the world’s history. Great reading.

Vicks helped many in '18 flu pandemic breathe easy. OK, this is a puff piece for Vapo-Rub, but, honestly, did you know that the pungent-smelling salve played a big role in the flu epidemic of 1918? Lots of businesses come of age in times of crisis and I found the historical perspective of this product to be fascinating.

Writing prompt of the day: Write about your most memorable Independence Day.

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo courtesy of burningkarma.

Will your great-grandchildren even know what a car was?

Do you remember the advertising slogan, “It’s not your father’s car anymore?” Never mind that the “not your father’s” tagline has been co-opted countless times since its inception, it was originally employed by General Motors’ Oldsmobile brand.

There’s some dispute as to whether the saying was first used in the late 1960s to tout Oldsmobile’s version of the muscle car – the 442 – or two decades later, but there’s no dispute that Oldsmobile – once the No. 3-selling brand in the United States – is no longer cranking out vehicles, for dads or for anyone else.

Oldsmobile is hardly alone. The U.S. industry is down to just a handful of brands and the purging of the industry is far from over. Which raises the question: Is automobile brand loyalty, once something shared by many generations in some families, dead?

There are certain factors that tend to appear on succeeding branches of a family tree – like political leanings and church affiliation, for example. Many families pass occupations to the next generation and others hand off their automobile preferences.

As I was growing up, you were either a Chevrolet person or a Ford person. It was a seismic shift when my Dad went from General Motors products to Ford products. Like many others of his generation, he refuses to buy a foreign-made vehicle.

But what to do, now that so many U.S. brands have bit the dust? To read about one family’s decades-long relationship with the Ford Motor Company, check out Design Milk.

Keep in mind, too, that America’s fascination with motorcars is only about 100 years old. That’s a relatively short period in anyone’s family history. As unlikely as it may seem today, it’s possible that your great-great-grandchildren will be as unfamiliar with Fords and Chevies as you are with the great buggy makers of the 19th century.

Writing prompt of the day: Write about your family’s preferences in motor vehicles over the past 100 years.

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Photo: Jack Lehmer rests on the running board of his family's car in 1941. (Walter B. Lehmer collection).

What do you think about social media sites?

Hi there. Come on in, have a seat. Comfy? Can I get you something to drink? Now, let’s get social for a few minutes.

We may not have been properly introduced, but I feel like I know a bit about you anyway. You’re interested in family history or genealogy, right? Of course, you are. That’s why you’re here.

You may be an accomplished genealogist with carefully researched and verified lines dating back centuries. Or you may be more interested in uncovering the stories behind those names that populate your family tree. On the other hand, you might just be curious or new to family history, which is now the No. 1 global hobby.

You obviously use computers and have entered the sometimes scary world of weblogs. What about the other social media, like Facebook and Twitter? Many of you have drawn the line there for your own reasons. I understand that. I was drawn into both by others in recent months and have been evaluating them ever since. Here are my early conclusions:

For awhile I was posting the same information on Facebook and Twitter but have recently separated the two. For now, Facebook is for my “Facebook friends.” Facebook friends are not the same as my real friends but are people I have met and want to keep in contact with. We both have to agree to that premise, therefore they get more personal treatment.

On Twitter, though, anyone can choose to “follow” you. This is much more impersonal to me but has a viral quality Facebook doesn’t have. This is where I post links to interesting family history or genealogical sites I run across. You don’t need to be my “friend” to get this, but you do have to “follow” me. I’m still looking for the real value to me.

Some people treat Facebook and Twitter as a numbers game, accumulating as many friends or followers as they can. I don’t, although I would love to have thousands of people following me on Twitter. But there’s no way I would follow more than a few dozen folks on Twitter. It would be just too hard to manage it all without adding another program to sort it all out.

Then there’s the privacy issue. My marketing friend Drew McLellan – one of the savviest and most generous social media folks around – had a recent post with some great tips on preserving some of your privacy on Facebook.

What do you think? I’d be curious to hear about your experience with Facebook, Twitter or any of the other social media sites out there. Please share in the comments section.

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Five We Like: Another week of family history goodies

There’s a lot of good family history information available on the Internet. Here are five places we’ve enjoyed visiting this week:

• Italian Grandma Survives Depression, Strikes Gold. Elaine Underwood introduces us to “Clara Cannucciari, a 93-year-old grandmother and star of Great Depression Cooking, a web series on which she shares recipes and describes, with great charm and humor, how she and her family survived – gained weight, even – during the Great Depression.”
• Ross residents create 'diary' for township. This story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes how a community is celebrating its bicentennial by collecting photos, documents and family memoirs for the township’s historical society archives.
• Slave Surnames: Where Are They From? Robyn on her Reclaiming Kin blog reports on a spirited discussion about the origin of slave names. As she points out, white owners rarely recorded slaves names but “you really get a sense that the slaves had coherent family structures, surnames and all, even in the midst of slavery’s frantic desire to stomp them out.”
• Meet my Great Aunt Lessie. Alysa writes in her Little Things in Life blog about her 89-year-old great aunt’s willingness to share stories – happy and sad – as her family’s last living member of her grandmother’s generation.
• Superbowl of family reunions. That’s my description of the World Acadian Congress which includes up to 90 family reunions each year. This post at Franco-American News & Events is about Louisiana’s bid to lure the event back to that state for the first time since before Hurricane Katrina.

Writing prompt of the day: Make a list of the three oldest members of your family and five questions you would like to ask each of them. You can figure out the next step.

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo courtesy of jlcwalker.

H.O.G.S. blogger No. 1 takes on a new challenge

I’m proud to say that I’m an H.O.G.S. blogger.

I was inducted into that privileged group a while back by Terry Thornton, the innovative and prolific Mississippi blogger who coined the term. Terry explains the acronym like this: “a little History, a few Observations, a tad of Genealogy, and a lot of Stories to present and preserve local history.”

Terry, a retired university professor who calls Fulton, Mississippi, home, is the creator and author of the excellent Hill Country of Monroe County Mississippi blog. Although he’s been recovering from eye surgery the past few weeks, he’s been as busy as ever, adding blogs at a dizzying rate.

His latest project is the Book of the Dead for Monroe County.  With links to 28 chapters already, Terry’s goal is to index all of the area’s cemeteries into a single list. Pictures, tombstone inscriptions and other information will be included in the indices and Terry welcomes volunteer help to collect and input the information.

This is a daunting task that is in capable hands. Without people like Terry, much local (and personal) history would be inaccessible at best, possibly even lost.

Writing prompt of the day: Call your local historical society and volunteer to help create or work on a project similar to Terry’s Book of the Dead.

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Sometimes the facts don’t fully support the story

How much of your family history comes from your imagination?

“None” is the typical – and expected – response. Most of us, after all, meticulously research our families before accepting something as gospel. We check every type of record imaginable and collect stories from responsible, trusted family members. If we have questions, we ask them. We leave no avenue unexplored.

True, true, true. Then we fill in the gaps ourselves. We make assumptions based on what we know (or think) to be true and create the best, most accurate – and complete – scenario we can in our own mind.

I thought of this as I read Rich Remer’s recent story in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Remer spent 25 years researching his family’s history through deeds, wills, letters, newspaper clippings, maps and diaries. He traced his roots to a Philadelphia-area butcher in the mid-1700s.

A recent highway project uncovered parts of that butcher’s shop and an archaeological excavation began. Exploring six trash pits on the property, researchers found a bowl, broken teapot, a domino, a peach pit, apple seeds and animal bones, among other things.

Remer, whose research hit a brick wall about a decade ago, was ecstatic about the find, which was clearly indicated on maps he already had discovered. From the article:

“The site, Remer said, already has shown what his documents could not. Bowls the family might have used for dinner. A creamer that perhaps sat on their table. Bones from a meal, maybe. A peek inside their lives.”

"This completes the record," he said. "I'm touching my ancestors."

Hmmm, maybe. Maybe not. The man was a butcher, after all. The lesson here, I think, is to be careful about reaching conclusions based on ambiguous, flimsy evidence.

Writing prompt of the day: What, if any, part of your family’s story are you skeptical about? Why do you doubt it? How can you confirm or deny it?

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family stories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Baby Jenette’s tombstone reset in Iowa family plot

Jenette Bissell’s tombstone is finally in Iowa.

As I wrote previously, Gina Wysocki of Illinois was to deliver the long-lost tombstone to descendants of Jenette’s brother, Richard, in Iowa. Julie Bissell Tupker, the great grand niece of Jenete Elizabeth Bissel, brings the story up to date, plus makes a couple of corrections to the original post:

“A couple corrections to your shortened version of the story. … Jenete was the daughter of Pierce B. Bissell, who was my gg grandfather.  I am descended from his son, Richard P. Bissell.  Jenete wasn't the daughter of Richard P. Bissell ... she was his sister.

“Also later on the page, you alluded to the cemetery where Jenete's tombstones were found as being a farm or family plot burial.  That wasn't the case.  The land was donated to the city of Joliet by a resident for the purpose of being a cemetery and there were many burials there of the first pioneer residents of Joliet, IL.  Later, after another cemetery was opened nearby, the residents moved ~some~ of those burials to the new cemetery, Oakwood, but the old cemetery continued to be used to bury a lot of the city and county poor, thus it became known as a potter's field.

“Update:  Last weekend, on the 159th birthday of Jenete Bissell, her tombstone left Joliet for the trip back to SW Iowa and on Saturday, June 13th, it was reset into the cemetery plot of her brother, Richard P. Bissell, with 13 people in attendance.  We had a small service honoring the people who made it possible and the memory of little Jenete.”

Gina and Julie have shared the following pictures of the event. Adds Julie, “This has been a VERY big event....and I'd say once in a lifetime, but I'm not sure of that just yet.  I heard from other parties involved with this that this has only occurred twice for the state of Illinois where a tombstone has been found, descendants identified, the descendants could document their lineage,  the state has given custody of the stone to the family and it has been reset into a family plot.”

 

Carrying the tombstone into the cemetery

 

Gina Wysocki helps prepare the plot

 

Julie Bissell Tupker (right) with relatives

Five We Like: Another week of family history goodies

There’s a lot of good family history information available on the Internet. Here are five places we’ve enjoyed visiting this week:

A piece of shea. I found this post by Richard Legault seeking a memento from Shea Stadium to be intriguing because it was written before the stadium was demolished earlier this year. Legault’s father was a steelworker who carved his family’s initials into a column of every project he worked on, including Shea. Legault was trying to retrieve the section with the initials, but was unsuccessful. Although the web site probably won't be around much longer, it's definitely worth a visit.

Olga’s Daughter. When Marie Campbell’s mother was seriously ill in 1994, she realized there was much she wanted to know about her mother’s life, especially her Jamaican roots. Her book, “Olga – A Daughter’s Tale,” is the result. She offers vividly written excerpts on her web site.

Strictly Vintage Hollywood. You may have never heard of June Mathis, but she was an extraordinarily gifted talent scout (Rudolph Valentino is among her discoveries) whose career was cut short by her death at age 38. Check out this fascinating essay about her.

Koffords In Colorado. Denise Kofford writes about her family picture wall and the lessons she has learned from one of her mother’s high school friends.

Family Tree Magazine. Check out FTM’s latest “101 Best Web Sites for 2009.”

Writing prompt of the day: List three things you want to know about your father and seek the answers during this Father’s Day weekend.

Larry Lehmer is a professional personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo courtesy of woodleywonderworks.