Grave matters

I finally fulfilled a longtime dream of visiting a particular cemetery in Newark, New Jersey.

Before you think I am off my rocker, recall that I love family history and have done extensive research on both my father's side and my mother's side. (If you don't recall that, then please take it on faith -- I do and I have.) Cemeteries are a significant source of family history.

For many years I have wanted to visit the family graves in Fairmount Cemetery. Unfortunately, it isn't the safest place in the world. The Central Ave. side of the cemetery is pretty much okay, as is Central Ave. itself. But the South Orange Ave. side of the cemetery is, apparently, a thief's paradise. As is South Orange Ave. itself at that end of the city. And, of course, it was the South Orange Ave. side of the cemetery that I was going to be needing.  So today I finally had the opportunity -- after some 20 years of waiting -- to drive up there, get a staff escort, and take photographs of the family graves.

I die happy.

Well, that's an exaggeration, but it really has helped my research by confirming many facts and giving me a couple new clues.

All but one of the graves were on my mother's side of the family.

This is the grave of my great-great grandmother.

See the birth year of 1840? Ha! 1833 is more like it. Mary Ann made herself younger by a few years with each census that was taken -- she claimed to be 78 years old in the 1920 census. By the time she died, her children weren't sure what year she'd been born. So they made a guess.

Wrong.

In reality, she was 90 when she died. I have other documentation to prove it.

There is one lone grave at Fairmount that is from my dad's side of my family -- he was my great-great grandfather and he is buried in the Soldiers' Plot (row on row of government-issued headstones).

He was a Civil War veteran who served for three years, coming home from the War in 1864 to find his wife had died some eight months earlier, leaving their young son motherless. Within 10 years, he married a second time and fathered two children in that relationship, but the marriage ended in divorce and those children were lost to the family after that.

Wounded four times during the war and plagued with dysentery, he apparently became an alcoholic. His wounds, of course, went with him for the rest of his life, along with kidney disease and heart trouble. He bounced in and out of the NJ Veteran's home three times in the first decade of the 1900s, finally passing away in January of 1910 at the Little Sisters of the Poor charity home in Newark. The U.S. Government buried him.

It's a sad tale, but when I talked about this man's checkered existence with the historian at the cemetery, he was not at all surprised at how things had turned out. The 54th Ohio fought at Shiloh, at Gettysburg and at other incredibly bloody battles. That my great-great grandfather lived through it all is a miracle in itself.

They misspelled his last name on the headstone, although it is spelled correctly in the burial records held by the cemetery association. No dates, but that's okay -- I already know them.

I feel sorry for this man. I wonder what kind of temperament he had naturally and how it was changed by his experiences in the Civil War (did I mention that he was also captured at one point and then escaped about two weeks later?)  I think about how his son, my great-grandfather, must have wondered about his father. It seems, from the documentation that I've seen, that theirs was never a close relationship. I feel bad about that too -- my great-grandfather lost his mother when he was less than three years old and then grew up with a father who retained terrible injuries and problems from his service to our country.

Despite the desolate childhood that he endured, my great-grandfather was remembered fondly by his grandchildren (my father among them), so he must have been one of those people who could "re-write the script," as it were.  Good for him!

I love a cemetery on a beautiful, Fall day -- especially when there are family history treasures to be discovered.

- Catherine

More treasures?

I briefly lost my mind today.

In my Uncle Bob's office there were two audio cassette tapes -- one of my grandfather's last celebrated birthday (he was 88 that birthday) and one of a visit made by his children (including my Aunt Muriel) during his final months in a nursing home, about nine months after the first tape.

I cried.

And cried.

To be able to go back 29 years in time to hear the voices of my grandfather and my aunts and uncles is a priceless treasure. Instantly I was transported back to my childhood days -- especially Christmas when all the family would gather in our home (we were the only children on that side of the family, so my mother had ample reason to insist that Christmas was at her house). I was not allowed to participate in the adult conversations back then, but I certainly heard them. Listening to this tape was like an immediate re-visiting of my childhood.

Hence the losing of the mind. I lay on the living room floor of my aunt's house, crying, laughing, and talking back to the tape.

The birthday tape is mostly conversation among the siblings. But I caught the remnants of my grandfather's native British accent, which he had worked hard to lose in his younger years, but which crept in occasionally anyway. For instance, "married" was pronounced "marrid" and "Cathy" was pronounced "Kethy." I heard my Uncle Norman's very broad North Jersey accent -- by far the most noticeable among all the siblings, that's for sure. No ambiguity about where Uncle Norman had been brought up!

The second tape is of my grandfather playing the little organ in the chapel of the nursing home. Mostly he played hymns, but he also played  -- and SANG -- "O Danny Boy," a song he'd sung many times as a professional tenor (his side job when his kids were growing up). It is obvious that his vocal cords were totally unused to singing by then -- he was 89 at the time of the tape -- but I can still hear the WAY that he sang and, occasionally, a note that rang true both in intonation and tone quality from his youth.  Fascinating!

I sang along with him on "O Danny Boy" and reveled in the virtual duet.

Over and over again through my lifetime, my mother and her sisters would try to figure out just whose voice I had inherited. One aunt swore that I had their mother's voice  -- but Grandpa put an end to that when he noted that his wife (my grandmother, whom I never met due to her early death) had been an alto. In my classical years, I was a lyric soprano. So, not Grandmother's voice.Listening to these tapes, I'd say that I really inherited the female version of my beloved Grandfather himself -- a lyric tenor in his professional days.

The pop group ABBA had a song in the early 1980s (or maybe late 1970s) called "Thank you for the music." It is most appropriate for me to say to my Grandpa Newark -- thank you for the music.

Treasure indeed.

- Catherine

Treasures

No, this is not the long promised vacation post with pictures.

It's not even a post about my 35th high school reunion, although I will eventually write about that too.

This is where I tell you that I am cleaning out my aunt's house in preparation for selling it. And I have found many treasures, including a sterling silver napkin ring engraved with the name of my great great Aunt Ada, along with the year 1896; including a tintype of one of my great great grandfathers; especially including a photograph of a soccer team of young men in England in 1911, featuring my own grandfather - who played so well that they wanted him to play for England and who gave it all up to come to America. The photograph was presented to him on the day he sailed, never to return to England and never to play soccer again. It must have been a hard choice, but I sure am glad he made it. Here's to you, my wonderful "Grandpa Newark!"

-Catherine

Adoption

It runs in our family, apparently.

My daughter is adopted. 

My cousin is adopted. 

My great-great grandfather was adopted. 

Yep, that's right.  In mid-19th century Great Budworth, England (in Cheshire), my great-great-grandaddy, Thomas, was adopted.  There are no legal papers -- these things weren't done with legal procedures back then, so I've learned.  But my research clearly shows that he went from being Thomas Starkey Wilkinson (his name at the time of his christening in 1837) to Thomas S. Sunderland, sometime between 1841 and 1851.  In 1841, he was still Thomas Wilkinson, living with his elder brother and his mother -- who was, possibly, a live-in housekeeper to one John Sunderland or possibly rented rooms from him.

By 1851, John had married Emma (Thomas' mother) and Thomas' last name was Sunderland, as were all the brothers and sisters who came after him.

I hope his adoptive relationship was a happy one. There is no way of knowing, of course, But he did keep the Sunderland name for the rest of his life and he bestowed it on his offspring. That puts a good light on the outcome of John Sunderland's marriage to my great-great-great grandmother, Emma Wilkinson, and his adoption of little Thomas Wilkinson.

- Catherine

Mouga Schouch

I love family history research. I started working on my family tree back in the 1980s – when you had to travel to far flung official places in order to research the various and sundry records that are now gathered so neatly together on Ancestry.com. Thank you, LDS Church. Yes, I have the deluxe Ancestry.com membership, and I am amazed at how much information is available now for research.

One blogger, in a comment yesterday, said that family history research is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. She’s right -- and that combination of puzzle and family history is what makes it so intriguing to me. The thrill of the hunt – and what you turn up are your very own ancestors!

My great-great-great grandmother was Mary Ann Schanck, nee Hall. She was married to Jacob Schuyler Schanck, a farmer in Monmouth County, New Jersey. In trying to trace their son, William Gordon Schanck – my great-great grandfather – I must, of necessity, trace Mary Ann and Jacob as well. A specific thorn in my side is that I’ve had no luck locating William in the 1860 U.S. Census, so I pushed back further to look for Jacob and Mary Ann in that same census – for perhaps William, then unmarried, was still living at home in 1860. Alas, I could not find Jacob and Mary Ann through an Ancestry.com search, either.

I knew they had to be there because another record had told me so – but that record came from a compiled index, so you can't view the original entries. I was going to have to access the actual 1860 census schedule in order to see the names of everyone living in the household. So I went back to my old sleuthing techniques, pulling up – through Ancestry.com -- the entire census schedule for Freehold, New Jersey, in 1860. 98 pages long. That’s a lot of people to read through (and they aren’t alphabetized – the census was written down house by house).

But I was equal to the task.

Lo and behold, I only had to go a mere 16 pages in, and there they were, plain as day on line 27: Jacob S. Schanck and his household. No William, although the other sons, Nelson and Schuyler, were still there. Ah well. I did notice that Mary Ann’s name was rather badly handwritten, but that didn’t explain why Jacob’s household didn’t come up in a regular search of Ancestry’s database for the 1860 census.

What you must realize is that Ancestry.com, bless their little hearts, has transcribed EVERY individual entry of EVERY census into their own database, and then cross linked each and every entry to an image of the original census schedule (all of which are handwritten). So, when you search in Ancestry on the name of someone specific, you are actually searching Ancestry’s own database. Once you have located the entry, you can click on a link that will show you the image of the original census schedule page. I can promise you that this was a time-consuming process for the LDS volunteers and staffers who do this on behalf of their church. They’ve had to transcribe millions and millions and millions of handwritten entries from hundreds of years of records from all over the civilized world.

So, I guess they can be forgiven for turning “Schanck” into “Schouch.”

You see, now that I had the original census schedule, I still wanted to know why the entry wasn’t coming through the Ancestry database. I finally searched on Jacob's son’s first name of Nelson (which was clearly written), using no last name, specifically in that town in 1860. The search yielded two Nelsons.

One of which was Nelson..... Schouch.

Huh?

Schouch is not even close as a "spelled like" or "sounds like" kind of thing (which Ancestry does provide when you do a search). Thus, Jacob had never appeared, even in the broadest of searches on his last name.

And so we come to the title of today's blog entry. Guess who got transcribed as “Mouga Schouch?” That’s right. My great-great-great grandmother, Mary Ann. Really, an educated guess at the original handwriting would arguably have yielded “Mary A.” And a guess by someone inexperienced might have yielded a literal “Mosf A.” at worst. But “Mouga?”

Mouga Schouch.

I laughed until I cried.

- Catherine. (Great-great-great granddaughter of Jacob and Mouga Schouch.)