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I have been thinking a lot about what home means lately, which made coming across this passage in The Long Way Home by Louise Penny especially significant:

Here, around him, was his heritage. His country. His history. But it was more than that. Here on the walls, were his insides. Out.

The brightly painted homes. Red and mustard yellow. The smoke tugged from the chimneys. The church spires. The winter scenes, the snow on the pine boughs. The horses and sleighs. The soft light through the windows at night.

The man with the oil lamp. Walking a path worn through the deep snow. Toward home in the distance.

Gamache turned. He was surrounded. Immersed. Not drowning, but buoyed. Baptized.

My mother was a classic military brat, growing up all over. But my father was born in a very French Canadian town in Rhode Island, son of two French Canadian parents and even though he left home at 17 for the military, he never strayed far from his heritage; he was always implicitly of his people and thus my brother and I, grew up in Florida with a peculiarly strong affinity for what it means to be French Canadian from New England.

When I explain that some people they do not believe me (how could it be possible?), and yet it is very true. As much as I am fascinated by my mother’s family history (almost entirely Irish Catholic) and adored her parents, aunts and uncles, it is still French Canadian that I primarily identify with. I am certain this is true entirely because of my father and much of his heritage he imparted upon us (hockey! hockey! hockey!). It’s something I am still thinking about and trying to write about. It is something I want to understand, not only for myself but to better know who he was.

Another passage from The Long Way Home, mostly for the Béliveau reference:

Treasures from childhood. Old keys to old homes he no longer lived in. Pennants from races won. A particularly fine chestnut. A piece of wood someone assured him was from Jean Béliveau‘s hockey stick. Relics from the saints of childhood. Talismans.

[Post pic of Clarence Gagnon’s “The Yellow House.”]

Joni Tevis has an article in the Sept/Oct Poets & Writers (not online I’m afraid) about how she finally broke through the flatness of an essay she had been working on about her hometown. She was specifically writing about the textile mills in South Carolina, which she knew very well. As I have been working on an essay about a particular town and its history for several years, I found this piece extremely appealing (and ordered a copy of her recent essay collection because of it). From her article:

Then one day, as I was driving around town, Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” came on the radio. That summer had been unusually rainy; at one point, Greenville’s rainfall totals were higher than those of Seattle. Creeks flooded, bridges washed out, mountainsides bucked. The strange weather unnerved people, and we started joking about rain lasting forty days and forty nights, animals boarding two by two. It hit me then that the essay I’d been toiling over might be about something more than just the mills. In part, it might be about rebuilding after a crisis—one that people outside the region had forgotten, if they ever noticed it at all.

I love Led Zeppelin and I love “When the Levee Breaks” and the place I have tried to write about, my father’s hometown, suffered a massively destructive flood at one point. The song is not the spark I need to break through the flatness of my writing however (as much as I wish that listening to it over and over would do it for me), but this article has made me think a bit deeper about what I’ve been trying to write about. On the surface, it has always been the ethnicity of this particular New England town and why the immigrants came there and the somewhat amazing work ethic they created and adhered to.

But there’s more than that to it and now I am understanding better where I have not dug deep enough. The last line of that excerpt is what really got to me: “…it might be about rebuilding after a crisis—one that people outside the region had forgotten, if they ever noticed it at all.”

The “crisis” was not a flood in my case, but the less obviously dramatic and long drawn-out crisis that made it necessary for my family and many other people to come to a town in the US and leave their country (Canada) behind. I wish I had a song to play along to that but I haven’t found it yet. This article is a good substitute though; an unexpected perspective that is making me reconsider some writing I had very nearly given up on.

I have written about my grandmother’s cousin Evelyn in two other posts. I wrote about her death, at almost 24, in November 1940 from diphtheria, about two weeks after her toddler son died from the same disease. I also wrote about my continued search for Evelyn’s two older daughters, Joan and Barbara, and for Evelyn’s final resting place. She has been, if not an obsession then certainly a serious preoccupation in my life for decades. I promised my grandmother nearly 30 years ago that I would find out what happened to the two little girls.

And now I know.

Last month Joan, who was six when her mother died, visited the east coast with her daughter and granddaughter; they stayed with Joan’s niece and her husband. That nephew-in-law, Ricardo, is a genealogist fiend and over the course of a conversation with Joan they discussed her mother and how the girls had lost track of their mother’s family. When he had a chance Ricardo plugged the information Joan gave him into ancestry.com and it matched my family tree. He then googled my name, found my website, looked through my Family History links and found the posts on Evelyn. He knew, of course, that this was Joan’s mother and sent me an email with his phone number. I called him within hours and we talked and talked and talked. It was amazing and honestly, it all felt a little unreal.

My grandmother and Evelyn were very close; they appear in many photos together in the 1930s, always having a wonderful time. The shock of losing her never faded away and even 45 years later my grandmother would tear up at the thought of her cousin. She knew they had moved away with their father and she just wanted to be sure that they were happy; she wanted them to be sure that they knew their mother was never forgotten.

As it turns out, the girls and their father ended up in Nicaragua. He married again, he built a new life, there were more children and marriages and grandchildren. Joan has four children; Barbara has five. I talked to Joan’s daughter, also named Evelyn, on a later phone call. They are wonderful people and it was such a grand thing to talk to them about our family; to share what I knew and listen to their stories.

This long separation was never due to any dark drama; it was probably just distance and poor communication. We are still working out when and how things happened in the 1940s but there was the war of course and they were all overwhelmed with what was going on in their lives. It was just very easy to miss each other back then; a simple thing to become lost for decades.

Moments like this, I miss my grandmother very much; she would have loved to talk to Evelyn’s family. But still we found each other and that is something special; really, it’s the kind of miracle that shines no matter how long it takes.

[Post pic of Evelyn and Joan at the beach, 1935.]

I have been reading Women in Clothes, a fascinating book the includes the thoughts of literally hundreds of different women about what they wear, why, how it makes them feel, the clothes they remember, the clothes they have longed for and on and on. It’s really quite the piece of cultural history and I highly recommend it.

It was fortuitous that while I have been reading this book, I uploaded another round of family photos including the one above. The older woman was my great grandmother’s sister Marie who moved away from NYC with her husband and owned and operated a motel in California. The other woman is her daughter Ernestine, known as Ernie. She shows up in several photos over the years, a class picture with my grandmother, at the beach, etc. However, although she and my grandmother were only a year apart, they were not close. In fact my grandmother rarely spoke of her. She was much closer with Ernie’s older sister Evelyn, who I’ve written about before. (She died tragically young of diphtheria with her little boy after sleeping on an infected mattress.) My family also knew Ernie’s brother Arthur quite well, until his death in the 1990s. I can remember he & his wife visiting us in FL when I was a kid.

Initially I found this picture interesting mostly because of Ernie, who has remained a fairly absent family member in my research. But after posting it to facebook yesterday, I had a bit of a shock. This picture was taken in 1959 and Ernie was born in 1918. So, she was 41 in this photo which is 5 years younger than I am right now. Look at her again – she’s only 41!

I was wearing a pair of torn jean shorts and a Pawtucket Red Sox t-shirt as I loaded this picture. I wear an ankle bracelet made of fishing hardware, (and have since my father died 16 years ago), and I have tattoos on both of my wrists. Basically, I was sitting here looking more like my 20-year old self than the mature woman in this photo and it got me thinking about what my clothes say about me, and what Ernie’s say about her.

Granted, I’m at my dining room table dealing with a stack of family photos and it is summer and hot and I’m not seeking to impress anyone. Maybe Marie & Ernie had just gotten home from dinner out somewhere when they posed for this picture. Maybe they were just about to go out somewhere – maybe they were going to church. I have no idea of the context of this picture other than the note on the back with the date: “Marie and Ernie at my house”. Marie sent this to my great grandmother along with some other photos of other relatives from the same visit; maybe she only sent the ones where they looked really nice.

Ernie just looks so mature – so old. I thought she was in her 50s when I saw this snapshot; I could hardly believe she was the same girl from the beach so long ago. Of course I might have the same shock if I look back at my own beach pictures right now. We all grow up; our style changes. She’s the girl on the right below – picture taken in 1935 when she was 26. I have no idea if she ended up with Walter, the fellow who is has his arm around her. (Pretty racy pose for 1935!)

Honestly, after not thinking much about Ernie at all over the years, now I am dying to know more – I also wish I could peek in her closet and see if she ever got wild again of if the dress shoes and chunky necklace were the new her.

I don’t know what happened to Ernie, when she passed away (I don’t think she had any children). I’ll find out though – I can’t resist her now.

During World War II my maternal grandfather, Pete Hurley, received Seabee training in Port, Hueneme, California and apparently (from this postcard anyway) had a bit of time to take in the sights.

Read about the Seabees and the naval base here. My grandfather worked in a shipyard in NYC before the war so was a perfect fit for the “Construction Battalion”.

He sent this to his mother-in-law, my Nana, who not only kept the three photo albums I have been sorting through but also all of the postcards ever sent to her (plus some she picked up on her own and wrote “I was here” on the back of along with the date of her visit). I’ve sent the postcards out to family members they belong to but for obvious reasons kept this one for myself.

You can see a great WWII pic of my grandfather here. He served in the South Pacific for more than a year, until the war ended.

Oh – the “girls girls girls” bit was not a worry for my grandmother. My grandfather never cheated on her and was actually fanatically paranoid about the whole idea of cheating. (He had a friend who suffered from syphilis and it was pretty awful from the stories I’ve heard.) However, GrandDads did love to flirt!

In the very back of one of the three photo albums that belonged to my great grandmother Julia, my mother and I found an unexpected surprise. Most of the photos were family (of course) but on these three pages were multiple rows of Julia’s girlfriends in small 2×2 or 2×3 inch photos.

I have no idea who most of these women are. A few have names penciled on the back and a couple are of Julia’s younger sisters, Carol and Tina. They were taken by professional photographers in studios and cut down as they were placed in the album. Together, they form a record of working women in New York City shortly after the turn of twentieth century.

What is most surprising to me is how impeccably they are all dressed. Julia came from people who took in boarders and changed jobs and apartments constantly in search of higher wages and cheaper rent. These young women are her friends and yet all of them look amazing — you would never think they are factory girls.

According to the 1910 census, Julia worked at a textile factory as did her younger sister Tina, who was 15 years old at the time. Julia was married in February 1910 and along with her husband and three younger sisters, she lived with her mother who served as head-of-household in an apartment. Two years later, her first child, James, was born.

From Jimmy’s birth forward there are few friends in the pictures. Mostly the album is occupied with the children, who arrived with clockwork regularity about every two years, until a five year gap between 1926 & 1931 (when her last child was born). Julia’s became a widow in 1933.

I assume that these young women were all busy with their own families in that same period; married off, having babies, occupied with their lives at home. They didn’t have money or time for visiting studios anymore and exchanging photos with friends.

I have a book on order, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the Century New York which I hope will give me some insight into what Julia’s life was like before she was married. It will hopefully provide some information on places to look for more details about her life, although these photos alone provide me with much more than I expected. My grandmother (who was born in 1919 and the oldest daughter), had no memory of her mother’s friends. Julia was known to her children as a very strict, no-nonsense person; a woman who had precious little time for herself. Yet she carefully preserved evidence of all of these friendships, decades after any of them would have seen each other.

There is not much known about female friendships among the working classes in the early 20th century. My grandmother had several close friends whose images are present throughout the photos from the 1930s. Like her mother, these relationships vanished after she married and were replaced with children. I find something rather poignant in all this although, looking at my own photos from high school and college, it is not unexpected. We all become separated by marriage, family and geography as we grow up. At least modern technology helps us to stay closer now then our ancestors could.

These women are just images in a scrapbook now, but once upon a time, they were everything for Julia Lennon. They are evidence of who my great grandmother truly was, when she was young and anything was possible.

Julia (far right) with friends circa 1915

Pete Hurley, WWII, 1944

My grandfather died a few days before my 5th birthday but I have some huge memories of him. He was not a big man, but had a very big personalty. More than anything, he embodied all the classic characteristics of the Irish Mick – fair skinned, fair haired, blue-eyed, a great dancer and storyteller, talented in a thousand different ways. He wasn’t perfect – he had the Irish demons as well – but he was unforgettable.

This is one of my favorite photos of him – if you follow me on twitter (@chasingray), my grandfather & grandmother are in my profile pic.

Sometimes I feel like my need to know more about my ancestors is impossible to explain. I am sure that while much of my extended family enjoys reading the revelations about our previous generations, they are somewhat mystified by my dogged determination to learn more.

I am currently writing an essay about my father for a contest and struggling against the urge to dive into his French Canadian past of which little is known beyond the most basic of names and dates. But I know I’ll go crazy if I don’t stay focused my mother’s family which is already proving to be more mysterious than I ever imagined. (This is what keeps me going back for more, I think. My inner teen detective can’t let all these mysteries go.)

But there is also the need to know about all of them so I can know more about myself. In that type of search, I am not alone. From Katharine Norbury’s The Fish Ladder on her struggle as an adoptee to find her true story:

Genealogy allows us to construct our identities from our own myths and legends, to know who we are, and where we have come from. Or we can use the stories as a starting point for where we might like to go, a legacy to be built on or rebelled against. Sara Maitland describes the tradition of storytelling as a ‘very fundamental human attribute, to the extent that psychiatry now often treats “narrative loss”—the inability to construct the story of one’s own life—as a loss of identity or personhood.’ The stories I had inherited were fascinating, but they weren’t mine. I had never met anyone who shared my blood, or who looked like me. There was no genetic starting point from which I could begin my narrative. I didn’t even know my nationality.

My narrative begins with these people who I still know so little about. In finding their stories, I am able to write more about my own. It’s an obsession perhaps, but I think a worthy one.

[Post pics: Top picture – my grandmother on left, her sister Agnes & brothers Jimmy & Jackie, circa 1925. Bottom pic is 1935 – my grandmother on the far right, great grandmother standing center. The boys are all her brothers, the girls include my great aunt Irma and some friends.]

Of my great grandmother Julia's three younger half sisters, Ernestine seemed to be the least mysterious. She was born in NYC in 1895, eventually married a man named "Mac" MacLeod and moved to Santa Barbara where they bought and ran a motel. I knew they were in California in the early 1930s as my great uncle Robie made a rather crazy motorcycle trip cross country then to visit them in a story I heard many many times. We have a few pics from that trip. And my mom remembered visiting the MacLeods in the 1950s, and we also have pictures of that.

Aunt Tina and Uncle Mac did not have children and I knew she passed away, after him, in the late 1990s. My genealogy goals were thus pretty small: get the marriage certificate for them, get death certificates and likely just move on. Nothing to see here, right?*

The biggest problem with Tina is that I don't know Mac's first name. Obviously, he went by a nickname derived from MacLeod, so that's a bit of a puzzle. But I figured Ernestine Pressl (her maiden name) was odd enough that a marriage certificate shouldn't be too difficult. So I set them up at ancestry.com, did a search and there you go, a 1915 marriage certificate in NYC for Ernestine Pressl.

And William A. Wilson of London.

I paid to get a copy because I had to know if this was our Aunt Tina. How many Ernestine Pressls can there be after all? So after a few weeks it showed up and there she was, with the correct names for her parents (Marie Filak and Rudolph Pressl) and there was lovely William A., born in 1889, with his parents Pattie Clark and Arthur Wilson. It was a first marriage for both of them and took place in the same church as Tina's parents. This was definitely my family, I just didn't know a thing about what I was looking at.

First, I told my mother and she spent some time being shocked. ("No, Aunt Tina's husband was Uncle Mac. I met Uncle Mac, I remember Uncle Mac. Who in the world is William A. Wilson?")

Then I looked for a marriage between Ernestine Wilson (as that was her name for the 2nd marriage) and a MacLeod which came up with nothing. No idea what happened there. I'm thinking I'll have to spring for an international search as I've heard from family that Mac might have been Canadian. Maybe they went up there to get married? And beyond that, what happened to William? I looked in the records for British WWI deaths and there are, no surprise, more than a dozen William Wilsons. I'll have to find a way to search through those and see if my William is one of them (with a widow named Ernestine and middle name "A" which I bet is for Arthur). (How hard could it be to find him, right?!)

In the meantime I am looking at these pictures of Tina, taken around 1915, and wondering why on earth this had to be such a secret. There was never a mention of Tina as a widow, or divorced or with a man other than Mac. I can't help but think he disappeared from the family history simply because he was little known to all them. He was there and then he was gone and I guess didn't make enough of an impression.

Poor William A. Wilson; he didn't even rate a mention let alone a memory. And poor Aunt Tina, whose story, though a bit sadder, has just gotten a heckuva lot much more interesting.

[Post pic of Ernestines around 1910-1915. She was born in 1895, I figure she is in her late teens in these.]

*When am I going to learn to stop thinking that way? (Rhetorical question - genealogists never expect the kind of surprises that seem to be coming my way left and right lately.)

Due to an epic failure between the funeral home and local newspaper, my stepfather's obituary will not run this weekend as promised to us. I am loading it here in the hopes that I can spread the word at least a bit this way.

Edmund B. Everette passed away on December 28, 2014. He is survived by his loving wife Maureen and children, Edmund Jr, Donna, Patrick and Colleen and grandchildren Hannah, Ben, Pierce and Emma.

Ed was born on a farm near Lake City, Florida. He attended the University of Florida with plans to teach and farm but the Korean War changed that. He enrolled in AFROTC and upon graduation was commissioned as a lieutenant in the USAF. He completed flight training and served in the US and Japan before being stationed with the Tactical Air Command and later attended Command and Staff College. He was assigned to the Fourth ATAF in Germany and was then sent to Vietnam where he was a squadron operations officer and commander with Forward Air Control. He flew more than 600 hours of combat time and was awarded numerous air medals and the Distinguished Flying Cross. He then was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in operations and was briefer to the Chairman. His last assignment was Chief of Operations Air Base Group at Patrick AFB.

Ed then obtained his FAA flight instructor ratings and was employed by Florida Institute of Technology as a flight instructor and professor. He earned an MBA there and held various positions until appointment as Dean of the School of Aeronautics and President of FIT Aviation. During his tenure, the School of Aeronautics grew to over 850 students and averaged 50,000 flight hours a year.

After Ed obtained an FAA grant, a new building, now called the College of Aeronautics, was constructed on campus. After leaving FIT he was named Professor Emeritus and became the Florida representative for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

During the course of his career, Ed logged over 10,000 hours of flight time and was recognized by the FAA with the Wright Brothers Master Pilots Award for more than 50 years of accident-free flight.

A celebration of Ed Everette's life will be held at Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Indialantic on January 7 at 1:30 PM with reception following. In lieu of flowers the family asks donations be made to the Wounded Warriors Project.

I have one Bridget in my family. She was my great grandfather's grandmother (my great great great grandmother). I have only the most tenuous of paper links to her thus far, finding her name on death certificates and in census records for 1900 and 1910. It appears though that Bridget is one of my immigrant Irish relatives, arriving in New York City in the late 1850s. I know that my great grandfather's (he was born in 1888) aunts and uncles were all born in NYC starting in 1860, so Bridget looks to be the one* who made the journey across the Atlantic.

The really weird thing about Bridget though is that she is our only known Bridget. The Irish are notorious for using the same names over again and we have a ton of Johns, Catherines, Roberts, Jameses, etc. When Bridget first popped up I didn't think she was one of mine because we have no Bridgets at all - not as a first or middle name, not as a deceased child - and my grandmother never ever mentioned this name. It's been a little puzzle and then I read the novel So Far Away by Meg Mitchell Moore a couple of weeks ago and I think I found my answer. (Loved the book - highly recommend it.)

In the novel, Massachusetts teen Natalie is working on a family history project while dealing with some horrible cyberbullying. She becomes friends with state archivist Kathleen who helps her read a diary found in Natalie's house. In those pages, they learn about the trials of Bridget O'Connell, an Irish maid who worked for a family in 1920. Here is the bit from the diary that gave me pause:

Ah, Charles had said when I first arrived at their home, a Bridget named Bridget. Because that was the name they gave to all the girls over from Ireland, they called them Bridgets, and while I should have been able to laugh that off, the terrible coincidence of my name, the way it made something I always thought was individual to me common and everyday, I often felt a flame of anger when I heard it. How funny, Charles said. We got the actual Bridget!

Moore listed a reference in her afterword, The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America 1840-1930. Obviously I'm planning to read this and see what I can learn, but I'm also wondering if this was why Bridget's name was not repeated. Maybe my family found they did not want to use it again when they discovered how other people used it. I honestly don't know, but at least I have an idea now of what might have happened to it.

Now it's back to tracking my Bridget, and seeing what I can learn about her life and how she came to America, an endlessly fascinating mystery!

*Bridget's husband was Michael John or Michael or John (sigh) Lennon, my great great great grandfather. I have next to nothing on him though, so I don't know yet if they were married when she arrived, or if he was NY born.

[Post pic via Times Higher Education.]

I have been, as they say, away for a bit.

I can definitively report that sunny Florida is still, even as the country freezes, sunny Florida. The beach was fab, the oysters tasty and much fun was had by all. As always, I am amazed that I could have grown up someplace so very different from where I live now. Life does take us all in the most interesting unplanned directions, doesn't it?

The best thing about going home and eating your mother's cooking is the time you end up spending thinking about your life. It happens, even when you don't plan it. Just driving all those roads that still hold the ghosts of your childhood (and yes, we visited the cemetery), makes you think about who you were and might have been.

It makes you think about who you are trying to be and if you are doing a good job at that. Or not.

What am I planning now? First, as soon as I got home I cleaned out my closet. (It needed to be done.) And now I am working on some long overdue aviation articles, (the news in Alaska has, not surprisingly, been terribly overwhelmed by politics the last couple of months).

I have learned some more amazing things about my family in recent weeks--an unexpected marriage, names from a past generation, (I can confirm we had a Bridget! My great great great grandmother!), the nationality of a great uncle that does not match what I thought I knew about him and more. I have found a 35 year old aunt (great great great aunt) celebrating her marriage in 1910. How unexpected to see a woman waiting so long back then to marry.

I have so many more questions to ask, and so many questions I still don't know to ask.

There are books beside me to be reviewed and submitted to several different venues. (I might be turning up in unexpected places in the coming months.) There is a site redesign that is desperately overdue here. And there is so much writing to do; so much writing that should have been done by now.

I don't know who these two ladies are or where the picture was taken or when, (the 1930s I think from their outfits), but it was in one of my great grandmother's photo albums and I couldn't resist it. This one I love even though it will likely forever remain a mystery. I defy you not to love it too.

Appreciating small things like this is something I am resolved to do more of in the future. Going back home will do that to you; it reminds you of all you didn't take time to appreciate when you should have.

Five (!!) years ago, I posted about my grandmother's cousin, Evelyn. She died relatively young of a disease (I thought typhus) that was caught from a used mattress. Her toddler son died as well. At the time, I did not know Evelyn's married name nor her husband's name nor her year of death. All I knew was that she and my grandmother were quite close as evident from the many photos of them together.

Soooo...a couple of months ago I decided to get serious about Evelyn. Her mother was one of my great grandmother's younger half sisters and I hope to track down this missing branch of the family and learn more about my great grandmother's childhood from them. Also, I just wanted to find out what happened.

I searched through census records and found her with her married name. I found two marriages for her, both to Joseph Baranello. One was in 1933 which makes sense as her first child was born in 1934. The second was in 1937. They are the exact same names so I think it's unlikely that one of these marriages was a different couple. I have no idea why they got married twice but I'll run this down eventually, if only because the weirdness can't be ignored.

With her married name I easily found her death record and also that of her baby boy, Richard, who died two weeks before.

As it turns out, Evelyn died on my birthday in 1940. That kind of freaks me out a bit because I come from people for whom signs are everything. (Blame Catholicism and all those saints.) Evelyn and I had more in common than I thought.

She did die from a communicable disease. It looks like diphtheria from the certificate although I will have to follow up for another report apparently to know for sure. Her coffin however was ordered hermetically sealed (written in hand down the side of the certificate). This was established practice for communicable diseases at the time. And now I have the cemetery where she was buried although I won't be following up on that. (Because really - $105 to find out who she is buried with is just a bit high to me.)

Evelyn was 23 years and 10 months old when she died. She had two older daughters, Joan & Barbara Baranello. According to my grandmother, their father took them away and they were never seen again. I was told he was from South America or "someplace like that," except from census records he seems to be have been born in NYC in 1916. Finding Joan and Barbara (and their descendants) will require some more work, I know but finding them might mean more answers about my great grandmother's mother who is the real mystery in all this. So I'll keep looking but at least now I have Eveyln, and that is something good.

Just look at how happy she is in that picture. She smiles in every photo I have of her.

[Post pic from l-r, my grandmother Catherine, Marie Gonzales, Evelyn Baranello. Marie was Evelyn's mother and my grandmother's aunt. Taken 1935 - my grandmother was 16, Evelyn was 19, Marie was 38.]

This is the marriage certificate for my great great grandmother and her husband (who was not my great great grandfather). It has given me a lot of information including, on the 2nd page (which I did not scan), her signature. That finally proved her true name was Maria Filak. As her first and last names are spelled differently in all sorts of census records, it was nice to have that proven. (Even here they screwed up though--as you can see the clerk wrote in "Mary Filak".)

My problem is Maria's address. It is listed under her name and the number, "59", is clear but the street name gets unclear. Starts with an "M", has an "h", maybe a "c". It looks like a "St" at the end--a capital cursive "S" is pretty clear. But what street is this? Marchallow St? Hmmm - doesn't show up I'm afraid.

I just don't know.

The groom's address is 2913 8th Ave and the clergyman who married them was from 405 W. 125th St in Harlem, which I found out online is St Joseph of the Holy Family. (The oldest church in Harlem as it turns out.) But Maria's place of residence is a mystery to me and she is the one who matters most. Her whereabouts between 1886, when she arrived in NYC and 1895, when she married Rudolph, are unknown. In that period she gave birth to my great grandmother, whose father is also unknown. So pinning down any hint as to where Maria was is a very valuable clue in my family history search.

If any of you recognize the street, give me a shout. I'd appreciate any help I can get.

This ranks as the weirdest thing I have discovered thus far in my family history research.

My great grandmother had three younger sisters: Marie, Ernestine & Carol. All three of them were born in NYC (1895, 1897 & 1900). I knew they were born in NYC because all of their birth certificates are available online. These are not "people we heard were born in NYC" or "people we thought were born in NYC" but 100%, no doubt, for sure, born in NYC.

So imagine my surprise when I found Carol's naturalization papers.

I tracked Carol through the census records in the early 1900s, just as I tracked her sisters. I knew her husband's last name was Redmond and he showed up with her in the 1930 census (first name Frank). (I have no idea why they aren't in the 1920 census but I'll worry about that later.)

I knew Carol's son's name was Warren (I actually have a postcard he sent my great grandmother when he was in WWII) and there was was Warren, born in 1927. Everything about Carol was lining out as I expected, and I was just filling in the necessary blanks.

Then ancestry.com sent me a hint about Carol with a link to a naturalization record. This made no sense but I looked and there she was, my great great aunt Carol, with her place of birth in NYC applying for citizenship in the US in 1939. There is no doubt about this being my Carol (how many Caroline Freida Redmonds can there be in the world?), but it made no sense. The one thing that really jumped out at me was that the application stated she and Frank were married in Barbados and he was born in NYC in 1903.

None of this made any sense.

It got more complicated when I searched for her marriage certificate online and found it in 1919 in NYC. (Which is clearly not Barbados.) So....I think the clerk on the naturalization papers might have flipped it--Frank was born in Barbados and they were married in NYC. (According to the 1940 census, Frank was born in the British West Indies.)

But that's all Frank and not Carol and where Frank was born should not affect Carol's citizenship except....it actually did.

According to the National Archives website, there was a lot of confusion at the turn of the century over female citizenship. Just as foreign women became citizens upon marriage, the courts began to decide that American women could lose citizenship upon marriage to a foreigner. It finally became law in 1907. Under the act of March 2, 1907, all women acquired their husband's nationality upon any marriage occurring after that date.

If a husband eventually filed paperwork and naturalized into a US citizen, the woman then became an American....again. But if the husband did not obtain US citizenship for whatever reason, then the woman couldn't either because it was all totally up to the man. Basically, a woman born in the US, who lived her whole life in the US and never ever left the US could still cease to be a US citizen if she married a man who wasn't an American.

(My inner historian is screaming all about the 14th Amendment right now.)

Frank must have been British still at the time of their marriage and when Carol married him, she lost her US citizenship. Now why she applied in 1939 is still a mystery. I can find no record of Frank applying for citizenship however so perhaps Carol applied to get hers back after the laws changed again (and got rid of this insanity). Oddly enough, I think when she became a citizen in 1939, that would automatically make Frank one if he had never sought citizenship before. (Because, after all, he was then married to a US citizen. AGAIN.)

Maybe. Honestly, I have no clue at this point.

The key bit in all this is that Carol was born in America, fell in love in America, got married in America and then lost her American citizenship.This happened because Carol was a woman. It really makes all this immigration stuff today seem even crazier when you realize that once upon a time in this country even being born here wasn't enough.

I have ordered a copy of Carol & Frank's marriage certificate. Can't wait to see what that reveals.....

[Post pic of Carol, about age 15.]

One of the foundational stories in my mother's family is that of my great grandmother Julia's immigration from eastern Europe. Growing up, I was told many many times of the miracle of her survival as a small baby while traveling from Hungary (or Austria or the Hungarian Empire--we were a little fuzzy on that), to New York City. Her mother Maria Falk was a teenager, her father was unknown and Julia was only a few months old. They arrived in either late 1890 or early 1891.

There were many things about this story that I found fascinating, from how Maria paid for their passage to the identity of the man who got her pregnant and abandoned her. (My mother and I wistfully decided she must have been taken advantage of by royalty of some kind.) Julia never expanded much on the story; if she knew anything else it was not revealed to my grandmother or her siblings. Everyone knew she was illegitimate and an immigrant and that was the end of that. I honestly never expected to learn anymore about the start of Julia's life and haven't spent much time looking.

After Maria and Julia arrived there was a gap of 5 years before we know anything concrete. In 1895 Maria married* Rudolph Pressl, a naturalized American citizen who emigrated as a child with his family from Vienna. Later that year the first of their 3 daughters was born. Rudolph died sometime between the 1900 and 1910 censuses. I have many pictures of Julia and her sisters, Ernestine, Marie & Carol who worked in the garment industry before they were married.

Although I have researched my family tree quite a bit over the years, most of my focus has been on Julia's husband Tom, my great grandfather, and his family. I do have a copy of Maria & Rudolph's marriage certificate from NYC however and a little while ago I came across it and noticed that Maria had signed the back and her maiden name was not Falk as we thought. She signed the form Maria Filak. This was different from the maiden name listed for her mother on Julia's marriage certificate in 1910. (My grandmother repeated the error when providing info for Julia's death certificate in 1972.) Looking at Maria's signature, I wondered if a clerk's error on Julia's marriage certificate had given us bad information for all these years and we just never paid attention to it. I decided to look a bit for Maria Filak.

I went to the immigration records on ancestry.com. (I sound like a commercial for the site, but it's true.) There was only one Maria Filak listed on a ship's manifest but she didn't fit what I knew of the family history so I didn't get too excited. I went back and searched every census record (federal and state) for Maria Pressl from her 1895 marriage to Rudolph until her death in 1934. (Maria does not appear in a census prior to that under Filak or Falk.) In every one I noted her age at the time and saw that she shifted her year of arrival in the US on every form from 1890 to 1893 to 1894. Her birth was consistently in October 1872 however. (This also matches the age on her marriage certificate to Rudolph.) Then I went back to the immigration records with this date and there was no longer any denying what I found there.

Maria Filak, age 15, arrived in NYC on the SS Eider from Bremen, Germany via Southhampton, England on April 24, 1886. Her country of origin was Hungary. She was 15 years old and alone. My great great grandmother was in America 4 years before we thought and more importantly, 4 years before my great grandmother was born.

Julia, apparently, was born in New York City.

I don't know why Maria told the family the story she did. I don't know why it was so important that Julia be presented as an immigrant baby. Maria never hid the fact that she was an unwed mother--she lists herself as "single" on her marriage certificate to Rudolph--but apparently there was something to the immigration story that needed to be altered to fit her life. Now I have Maria here four years earlier than we knew, Julia born in the city and the wedding still 5 years later. How Maria survived all those extra years and how Julia came to be born is a total mystery. I don't know if I will find out more about those years or ever get the name of my great great grandfather, but this is still something.

Julia Filak Pressl was American-born, which plants our feet even deeper in the American story. That alone, is really pretty damn cool.

*Maria & Rudolph were married in January; their first daughter Ernestine was born in June.

[Post pics: Maria & Rudolph Pressl with daughter Julia (standing) and new baby Ernestine, taken late summer/fall 1895. Julia was almost or just turned 5-her birthday was September 14. I think this is the baby's baptismal photo. The ship is the SS Eider, which brought my great great grandmother to America. More info on it here.]

Standing in the center of the photo, with the large brimmed hat, is my great grandfather Thomas Lennon. I believe that those are blocks of ice they are lifting. I know that Thomas worked for a beer wagon at one point (I have a photo of him with the wagon) and this ice might be associated with that job. I also know that he worked at some point as a painter and, according to the 1910 census, as a "laborer".

This seems to be the same crew as the top photo - several of the men are in both pictures. Tom is seated in the front, center, with the pot in hand; his hat is off here.

My grandmother told me that her father worked many jobs, wherever he could get work actually. At one point in the 1920s they earned money storing liquor in their apartment for a speakeasy downstairs. They lowered the bottles through a dumbwaiter and she remembered helping her father load it. (Every time she told this story it made her laugh)

Tom was an Irish American through and through, born in New York as were all of his brothers and sisters. He is about 22 in these photos; they were likely taken right about the time he married my great grandmother, Julia.

Tom Lennon remains one of the more compelling and confounding parts of my family history. He is the hero and the disappointment in so many stories. In these photos he is simply a man on the job; in some intrinsic way a central part of what it has always meant to be American.

My grandmother, age 3, and her older brother Robie, age 6. I have a series of photos taken this day, with their two older brothers, parents and some sadly unidentified friends or family members.

From the way they are dressed it seems it must have been a special day and with no snow on the ground I'm inclined to think it is Easter. We always received new clothes for Easter and I'm sure the tradition was true for them as it was for us. (Even when Catholic families have little money, at the very least a new bow or gloves turn up in Easter photos.)

These two ended up bickering as the years went by - too close in age probably. Robie went on a motorcycle trip across country to California as a young man - pictures from that period will make you positively swoon.

I have just reread Joan Didion's Where I Was From - giving it a "deep" read this time. It is a collection of related essays about Didion's personal history and the history of California, where she grew up. Reading it has made me realize how confusing my own answer would be to the question, if asked, of "Where are you from?"

I grew up, from age 3, in Florida.

We lived in Jacksonville (in a haunted house) and then Orlando and then, from my 5th birthday, in Melbourne. Very nearly all my childhood memories are of the beach and palm trees and flat roads and hot sun and ceiling fans and sweet ice tea and hush puppies and rocket ships. (They call it the Space Coast for a reason.)

Yet this is not really, truly, where I am from.

My father was born and raised in a solidly Catholic and most assuredly French Canadian town in Rhode Island and although he left at 17 he was so much a part of his home that he received the local newspaper for the rest of his life. When we go back to Woonsocket it is to hear his voice in the speech of everyone around us, to be surrounded by my father's people. To be surrounded by our people.

I have a maple leaf tattooed on my right wrist for my French Canadian heart which still, even with him 15 years gone, beats for my father.

My mother was raised in an air force family and she would tell you she was from everywhere and nowhere as most military families would say. But both of her parents were from the Bronx and their roots go back years there in Irish American households and families, in song and dance and laughter and a thousand kitchen conversations.

The shamrock on my left wrist is for my Irish soul; it's something you are born with and stays with you no matter where you live.

I have never been to the Bronx and only once to New York City. But most of my grandmother's family is still in New York State (all over including the city), and all of my genealogy research has involved NYC. My future may not be there but a large swath of my past most certainly is and it continues to be the center of learning who we are as a family and how we came to be Americans.

So you can see how this whole "where are you from" question is sort of confusing.

I do not have five generations in any one place; I have Florida and Rhode Island and Quebec or Florida and the Bronx and Ireland. My parents, remarkably, met and married in Madrid, Spain (my father was in the air force, my mother was there with her family as that was their latest station). The deep roots that Didion writes of are totally foreign to me and yet so much of her emotion for California, for exploring how the land formed who she became, resonated with me.

After the death of her mother (In California) she writes of going through her things:

I had my grandmother's watercolor framed and sent it to the next oldest of her three granddaughters, my cousin Brenda, in Sacramento.

I closed the box and put it in a closet.

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

And that was it. My grandparents gave up the Bronx when they committed to a military life and my father left Woonsocket behind partly out of desperation to see some other part of the world. And I left Florida for Alaska because as much as I love the beach, I wanted to go away. (It's funny - I still don't know why I wanted to go away.) But when I consider who we are - who I am - the answers are all found in Rhode Island and New York. I am surrounded by pictures of those places, by accents, by the memories of food and traditions, by the locations of so many weddings and funerals, all in Woonsocket and the Bronx.

Everything about the family I have known and loved is in those two places. Dealing with what we left, with what we lost by leaving, means immersing myself in places where I actually never lived. Florida gives me no answers on that score and so I have to wonder, is that the place where I am from or somehow, some way, am I more from places where I never lived?

The raw satellite imagery shown in these images was obtain from NASA and/or the US Geological Survey. Post-processing and production by www.terraprints.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Taking a day away from usual activities helps to restore a semblance of order to one’s life. Perspective is gained. Appreciation is elevated. New knowledge filters through the mind to lodge in memories.

Yesterday was a day of exploration into places unknown and challenging facts known. For me, it was also a time to take away snippets of useful information; the kind used in a twisted kind of way for story elements and character development. Those are the kind of relaxed and fun days that begin with one purpose and turn out as gold mines. Also, the experience felt much like going home to my dad’s family for the day.

We met up with friends, Sister’s distant cousins, in a small-town restaurant about an hour south of our locale. We had a nice lunch before heading south again to their home in an even smaller town. Our entire purpose for going on this jaunt was so that Sister could shoot the eclipse in an area where she could get good water-reflection shots.

During our scouting adventure, I was taken to places I’d never seen before; places that had escaped my notice when I’d lived in the area twenty years ago. As well, the cousins constantly pointed out places that related to their family histories.

“So and so built that ranch. Who is the latest owner, honey?” Cousin #2 asked as she pointed to the left to a grouping of buildings amid lush pastures. “The original barn’s gone now, of course.”

Gravel roads, dust flying from under the wheels of passing ranch trucks and cars, we made our way from reservoir to reservoir; each with points of interest. On the first we found swans that had been introduced to the waterways. The second, though smaller, was far more serene, more relaxing. Native ducks, muskrats, gulls, all played in the placid water. Further into the hills, we found rock chucks guarding their homes and new calves cavorting among adults.

At last we wound through forested hills up to MacDonald Lake, nestled in the Mission Range; a smaller lake than it used to be, only because it isn’t allowed to fill up the way it used to years ago. The deep teal, crystalline waters, surrounded by pine-covered slopes, beckoned to us. Trails radiated from its sides for the explorer who would challenge grizzlies in the area for prime fishing spots.

From the south-end approach I could only envision one scenario. I saw a scene straight out of 0 Comments on Family Histories on the Side as of 1/1/1900