Jerry and Merry Athearn and their friends on board the S.S. President Grant.
A previous Vita Brevispost featured the story of how my grandfather[1] went to sea after college and eventually became a station master for Pan Am’s flying boat operations in the South Pacific. It concluded with my family dropped off in Gladstone, Australia, after being evacuated from Noumea, New Caledonia, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. At least a couple of folks wondered what happened to them after that, so here’s the rest of the story, plus a contemporary epilogue. Continue reading War stories→
Many of our long-sought ancestors remain elusive despite our best efforts to find their hiding places, creating those inevitable brick walls. “Usually if the spirits want you to find something, you do. And if they don’t want you to find something, they don’t let you into the secret. Trust me.”[1]
One such “spirit” is my father’s step-grandfather, Fred A. Hayward.
Born in Vassalboro, Maine about 1860, one of six children of William C. and Margaret Fletcher (Lynn) Hayward, Fred in 1903 married my widowed great-grandmother Nellie (Ellen Frances Cony Church) as her second husband. I know little about Fred, and most of what I know I draw from what Fred left behind. Continue reading Dead Fred→
The forged baptismal record for John Shipway in Charfield.
On 31 May 1619 John Shipway, the son of John Shipway, was baptized in Charfield in Gloucestershire.[1] Or so it the record shows. However, in 1897, this record was found to be part of an elaborate fraud which ultimately resulted in the desecration of several historical relics, one unfortunate death, and a three-year prison sentence for its perpetrator. Continue reading A man of information→
A recent quiz in The Weekly Genealogist asked readers to share the nature of any secrets they’d uncovered about their ancestors. More than one third of respondents indicated that they had not uncovered any secrets – to which I say, “Hah! You just haven’t discovered them!” Of those who had uncovered ancestral secrets, the greatest number had to do with hidden marriages.
I suspect that most hidden marriages have been contracted by relatives who might be characterized as “the usual suspects”: those folks in every family who provide a long list of colorful anecdotes. Continue reading An ancestral secret→
There is a remote area in the study of family history. Some will call it a myth, or say it has no proper place in the field of study. It hides from anyone who would study it like a registrar, and rarely cloaks itself in any vital records. I’ve taken to calling it existential genealogy, and while hardly essential, I believe it is something all of us who study or experience family history encounter from time to time.[1]
As a young boy there was no one more revered in my family than my great-grandmother “Mrs. Ogle.” You may have heard me mention her before – with deference being given to her feelings concerning my grandmother’s adoption.[2]Continue reading A tale of two Ogles→
Regina Shober Gray by [Edward L.] Allen, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item PP231.236The Civil War was drawing to a close, but there remained much suffering in store for Regina Shober Gray[1] and her circle:
61 Bowdoin Street, Boston, Sunday, 12 February 1865: Tomorrow Huntington Wolcott[2] goes off, as Lieutenant, to join his regiment, and enter on his new career. He is only 19, and leaves an indulgent and affluent home, a life of the most sheltered & cultivated refinement, for the rude privations of camp life. God protect him, the brave lad, morally and bodily.
He is but 8 or 9 months older than my Frank;[3] how thankful I felt when the war broke out nearly 4 years ago that my boys were all too young to go – but now, it lingers on so wearily & yet so necessarily, that I often think I may yet have to send my treasures in faith & trust as so many brave hearted mothers have done ere now. Dr. Gray however says Frank’s college course must be finished first – then will be time enough for him to think of the army if needed – now, he has not the physique for it either – and is only 18 last fall too. Continue reading ‘The flower of our manhood’→
As Hurricane Harvey headed for the Gulf Coast of Texas this past month, my thoughts turned toward a distant connection of mine commemorated in an old Indianola, Texas, cemetery: Continue reading A name and a history→
During a recent reorganization effort of my squirrel files, those slightly more organized companions to my squirrel bins, I came across newspaper clippings entitled “Frozen Gold.” The title probably caught my eye because of all the things I’ve found in My Old House, gold is not one of them (not even one measly coin).
However, this frozen gold referred to ice blocks, those huge chunks necessary for the true “ice boxes” of early refrigeration days. Ice harvesting was once big industry on the Kennebec River in Maine, as I discovered by reading old newspaper clippings liberated from my files. Continue reading Frozen gold→
Recently, I was prompted to take a ‘second look’ at my wife’s grandfather, Horace Fenton Bloodgood. Fenton married my wife’s grandmother, a young Spanish girl named Magdalena Murrieta,[1] in Buena Vista, Sonora, Mexico, in 1908 while working for the railroad.[2] (He was 41 and she 16.) Family lore was that the senior Bloodgoods were so outraged by Fenton’s errant disrespect of the status quo that he had already been largely disowned prior to his parents’ deaths and his marriage to Magdalena. Indeed, Fenton was left only the proverbial $1.00 in the will of his father Julius Bloodgood. Continue reading Seduction’s double→
Pan American Airlines routes in December 1941. Courtesy of the Pan Am Historical Foundation (panam.org)
As my grandfather[1] prepared to graduate from college, he was ready to cast off academics and explore the world instead of following his father into a law career. Generations of his sea-faring family had literally charted the way, and the possibilities beckoned to him every time he gazed out the windows of his home towards San Francisco’s (then bridgeless) Golden Gate.
He signed on as an ordinary seaman aboard the Hollywood, a World War I-era freighter in McCormick Steamship Company’s Pacific-Argentine-Brazil Line, and his salary was $45 a month plus room and board … such as it was. Continue reading Pacific Clipper→
