Tag Archives: genealogy

Christmas on the Prairie, 1900

In the midst of all the overload Christmas has become, I admit to some nostalgia these days for a simpler time. Sometimes nostalgia for a simpler time is mere wishful thinking—the simpler time did not really exist. But in researching and writing Coming to America about my ancestors who came to settle the plains of Kansas, I did find a simpler, hardly commercial celebration to enjoy and share.

Although some families did have their own Christmas trees, that was not the general rule in Barrett, Kansas where my relatives lived. The tradition there was for a communal Christmas tree set up in the local school house, which in those days was much the heart of the community. There, mostly the school children would present some type of Christmas Entertainment. “There was a Christmas tree over at Barrett in the School house Saturday night. They had a good program and there were many there. They could not near all find seats.”

Christmas presents were exchanged among relatives. In my own family’s case, money was sent to my great-uncle John who was struggling to make a go of a farm he had bought in Missouri. He had two small children and actual presents (useful), sometimes handmade, were given to them:

“Wished to send you a little Christmas present, Two Dollars and a little package by mail but we had sent off for a few things and did not get them in time. Had sent for two pair of stockings for the Babies, but one pair was entirely to[o] large. Mama knit the little mittens some to[o] large too I think. Will send the package with this letter so you will get it during the Holidays.”

At the homestead in Kansas, the family “Had a nice time — a little surprise for everyone besides the nuts, candy and bratzel [a type of sausage they made themselves]. also roasted a pan of peanuts. We did not plant any [this year] but have plenty left over [from the previous year]. It was a nice day, a little snow fell the night before, not near enough to cover the ground, which was soon gone.”

John and his wife Lulu in turn sent products using express services such as Wells Fargo from their farm—molasses, nuts, apples and persimmons, the latter something that would have been particularly special as they could not thrive in the colder climes of Kansas.

About the molasses, my great-aunt Mary wrote “Opened it up. As it ran out looked like honey. Is fine and tastes nice. Is so different from the molasses we have here. . . .

“Mother sais to Thank You very much for the molasses but does not feel like accepting it as a Present as we think you need the money. You did not say how much molasses is there. It sold here for 35¢ and 40¢ per gal. At 40¢ per gallon and freight, would be about Five Dollars, which you will find enclosed and many thanks from us all. . . .”

Full-fledged Christmas cards were not used in those days. What were exchanged were Christmas postcards. At the beginning of the blog are a few from my family archive. Happy holidays to all!

 

Turkey Time

I have now finished the manuscript for Coming to Amerika and will be submitting it to the University of Kansas Press, which has expressed interest.  Keep your fingers crossed!

In reading over the letters I was able to vicariously participate in the major family celebrations centering around Thanksgiving, Christmas and July 4th.  As it is turkey time I want to share with you Thanksgiving on the Kansas Prairie in the 1890’s.  Wild turkeys were plentiful at the time and as my great-uncle Will wrote to his brother in Missouri, farmers would herd, pen up and fatten the turkeys for feasting.

“I wish you would [have] heard [herded] those wild turkeys and git them good and fat til I can come down but then I don’t know how long that would be. Maby [maybe] you would git tired of feeding them before that time.”

But even wild as they were, they could be tamed. My great-aunt Mary wrote about some wild turkeys that became pets and then nuisances:

“We had some queer pets this summer, three little Turkeys and they were so tame, could do any thing with them. Lena [another great-aunt] petted them so much they stayed right around the door, would sit in her lap and if we had any thing for them in our hands would all three eat right out of our hand at the same time. We still have them, three big cuss gobblers, they are cross to the chickens, but the worst is they don’t like to see strangers, especially children along the road, will run right up to them within three feet or so and strut and gobble and fly up around them, make a terrible fuss, and some time have followed people a long ways. They treat me the same way. I stay in the house so close they do not know me. Will have to sell them.”

The pictures below show my grandfather Louis (in a stylish bowler hat on the farm!) feeding two wild turkeys out of his hand and then two of the ornery gobblers.  Somebody got to eat them.  I suspect the family, having had them as pets, was reluctant to slaughter them themselves.  Besides they also had duck as an option for their Thanksgiving dinner.

IMG_5623Turkeys

How Do Old Family Letters Survive?

The flip answer is of course “very carefully.” But there is truth in that answer. If you think about it for a minute, for a family letter to even be written there had to be at least two people who were separated by enough distance to require written communication and who in fact wanted to communicate with each other. Today we routinely text or phone friends that we may actually be with shortly. Not so in the past.

This fact has led to some frustration in my research on Montgomery Ward.  He was never separated from his wife or daughter and not much given to writing personal letters in the first place.  So far I have only encountered one sent to a niece during a trip he and his wife took to Europe. It is a delightful, chatty letter revealing a great interest in seeing the sights and affection for this niece. I hope there are more such letters in the bowels of the Chicago History Museum.

Secondly, the people who are the recipients of the letters have to want to preserve them. My great-uncle John and his wife-to-be Lulu kept their letters to each other, but discussed in these self-same letters burning other letters to former love interests. These have obviously been lost to history.

Thirdly, once the original recipients have died, their survivors have to want to preserve them. Here as the letters pass down the generations are points where many are thrown out. Poor storage with possible insect, water and fire damage also take their toll.

So chances are that whatever survives is somewhat piecemeal. Of the hundreds of family letters which I have inherited I only have the (almost) complete correspondence between my grandfather Louis and grandmother Pearl in their courting days. So in this instance I can trace how they responded to each other’s feelings and concerns.

In other instances I unfortunately cannot. In writing Coming to Amerika,on which I am working now, I have letters of my great-great uncle Friedrich in Terryville, Connecticut to his relatives on the Plains of Kansas, but I do not have their responses. No one in Terryville saved the letters. The relatives in Kansas saved his even though they were written in Old German which they could not read. My grandfather Louis and my father saved them out of emotional attachment in the case of the former and an interest in genealogy in the latter. They have now been translated and once the book is finished, the letters and other documents will be donated to academic institutions to make sure they are preserved for the future.

 

 

Working with Family Documents and Other Primary Sources

If you are interested in your family’s history and are fortunate enough like me to have family letters, photographs and other documents available, here is some advice gleaned from my own experience about how to mine them for the interesting information about your family that they contain.

  1. Read Everything

And I mean everything.  I am in the process of writing Coming to Amerika which is based on family documents spanning over one hundred years. Just recently in looking over old photos I found one of my great uncle John in his 60’s wearing a uniform. On the back of the photo was the notation “Columbian Guard.” Obviously, he had not been in the Army of Columbia! I knew, however, that as a young man he had been to the World’s Columbian Exposition—the Chicago World’s Fair—in 1893 as I had a booklet he had collected at the time. Further research revealed that the law enforcement authorities at the time felt they needed to beef up security and so hired from around the country about 2000 young men to help keep the peace and deal with pickpockets and other such offenders. They were called the Columbian Guard.

I checked to be sure that the uniform great uncle John was wearing in the photograph matched the uniforms in the other photographs of Columbian Guards on the internet. It did. So great uncle John not only attended the World’s Fair in 1893, he was part of it—a good story to include in Coming to Amerika.

  1. If You Have Documents in a Foreign Language, Get Them Translated!

Such documents are mute unless people today can read them. It may be that you are fluent in the language in which they are written. If not, there are translation services available and a professor or graduate student in a foreign language at a local college might be a good resource. In my case, although I have studied quite a few foreign languages, including German, I could not read the letters written in Old German script. Before his death my father had had some of the letters translated, but there were many more. My brother and I researched translation services, finding it difficult to locate someone who could read the script. Then through perseverance on his part, my brother located a German professor in a small college in South Dakota who in fact taught the old German script. She and her institution were willing to have her translate the remaining documents for a relatively small fee and the donation of some of the original materials for use by students in her classroom. Translations done, she is now serving as a consultant for Coming to Amerika. Without her the book would not have come alive.

  1. Put the Documents in a Historical Context

Just from the content of the documents themselves, it is not always clear just what a reference means or how typical a particular circumstance is for the time when a document was written. So now you must dig. I am a historian by training and nature and have written a great deal about United States history, but I find myself learning new and surprising things as I try to place the documents in context. For example, a number of the letters speak of going to Pike’s Peak. As I researched this I learned there was a brief gold rush in the Denver area in 1858-1860. In fact, this was how Denver got its start.

My great-great grandmother in 1850’s Germany was deeply in debt.  She had only 150 Gulden to pay them off. I could find no solid information about the value of a Gulden so I looked for amounts for comparisons. It later cost her 300 Gulden to travel from Germany to the United States, funds raised by selling possessions and receiving money from a son who had already emigrated.  So 150 Gulden was not much.

  1. Go Through Your Letters and Documents Again and Again

This is important because what might have had little meaning when you first read the material may now be a significant piece of the puzzle. In my case, as I was riffling through some materials I came across, for the second or third time, a business card for an inn in New York City. With the information I had now gleaned I realized it was for the inn my newly arrived relatives stayed at when they first disembarked.

  1. Verify, Verify, Verify

Just because a document is a primary source does not make it accurate. It was written by a human being with a certain amount of knowledge, which might have been limited, and a certain perspective, which could be quite biased. So be sure to check statements out with other available sources. In my case, in addition to writing Coming to Amerika, I am currently researching a biography of Montgomery Ward. I encountered his brief memoir in the files of the Chicago History Museum in which he asserts that his name came from the name of a general who fought in the French and Indian War. Just a little research showed that there was no such general.

  1. Not Everything is on the Internet

There is of course much information on the Internet today.  Ancestry.com and familysearch.org as well as other sites have much family data as does fold3.com for those wanting to search military records. Many important historical books have been digitized and made available, often for free, through GooglePlay and other sites.

It is a mistake, however, to limit research to just the Internet. In gathering information about Montgomery Ward I have followed his path from Chatham, Massachusetts, where he was born, to Niles, Michigan, where he lived as a youth, and finally to Chicago.  All along the way there have been resources available that are not on the Internet. Local historical societies, run often by committed volunteers, as well as public libraries are amazing founts of information. The public library in Niles has an extraordinary genealogical section with information on Ward which I am not finding at the much larger and fancier Chicago History Museum.

 

Going off the Internet grid was most important for my book Examined Lives, which will be coming out this fall.  It is a no-holds-barred look at mental illness, narrated around the lives of my mother and me. I had family letters but I ferreted out much more by locating medical records and sources for information on Walter Freeman, the man who gave my mother a lobotomy and who famously botched the lobotomy of Rosemary Kenney. I was fortunate in having a major research library at hand at the University of Chicago, from which I graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in history. They had copies of materials written by Freeman which had been destroyed by many other institutions as well as the only copy of a work by another neurologist who was Freeman’s inspiration.

Special Collections at the George Washington University where Freeman had taught, archives his donated papers, which include an unpublished autobiography, which I paid to have digitized for myself and future scholars.

I hope that these pointers will make your own family research more fruitful and thus in the end more exciting and amazing!  Happy digging!