Funeral Records, What A Find

Do you have holes in your family tree?  As you fill in the family tree, you may get lucky and find more family history hidden in the funeral record.  There is a good deal of information on cemetery headstones.  I found the headstone of my great grandfather.  (I didn't really find it, my cousin found it and posted it on our family web site)  If you get a picture of the headstone, you are in luck.  Most of us walk away thankful for what we have.  However, dig a little deeper, while you are there, and look at the possibilities.  I find my great great grand fathers name and my great great grandmothers maiden name.  This is huge information.  My great grandfather was from Ireland.  This opened up a new avenue of research.  Cause of death Apoplexy.  This is not much help.  In early 1900 apoplexy had a lot of meanings.  I you lost consciousness and then died suddenly they called it apoplexy.  It could have been a heart attack,  ruptured cerebral aneurysms, an aortic aneurysm may have been the case with this one.  Many in my family suffer from aortic aneurysms.  Some funeral records that I have found even tell you how long the person was sick.  The occupation is even interesting.  My grand father was a stonecutter.  John E Farrell was his father in law.  He may have worked with him at some point, maybe even learned the trade from him.  The family story is becoming more clear with every bit of information that we find.  This one document filled a lot of holes.  

Kevins Story, Part 4

Family history is made daily.  Take a look at your family tree, look back just one or two generations.  Three generations back they lived on farms and grew there own food.  There world may have been confined to two or three square miles.

The first television was introduced at the 1939 world’s fair.  RCA was petitioning the Government to allocate room for 13 channels to transmit television pictures into the home.  That was kind of silly because who could afford $500.00 for one of those picture boxes.  By the 1950's RCA had what they wanted, except channel one was taken back for local government broadcasts.  What’s this got to do with Maggie, you ask.

After graduation in 1950 what work was available?  You could go to college, if your family had a lot of money, you could be a waitress, maybe a librarian.  A woman’s role was to get married and raise a family.  They would look forward to Friday night and spend most of the week getting ready for the dance.  Sitting around the radio turned into sitting around the TV every night.  Baseball games never looked so good.  That opened a whole new industry repairing the picture boxes.  Maggie got a job keeping books for a small television and radio repair shop.  The commute was excellent, the TV shop was located directly below her apartment.  Maggie did not own a car.  Not much need, she didn’t know how to drive.  Winterport came by it’s name for good reason.

To be continued . . .

Kevin’s Hurdles “A Better Story” Part 2

I’m driving, I’m am so happy that I may have found him.  I pull into the parking lot.  Walk to the office.  “Oh, we are so glad you came to visit.  I have been out to the site personally and I think you were correct.  I can’ wait for you to see what we have found”

This is a huge place.  This amazing lady puts me into one of those electric carts and off we go.  As we drive up to the area where my brother is laid to rest, it is beautiful.  There is a huge old oak tree.  And below the gigantic oak is a thousand very small grave markers.  As I start walking, I notice each soul was only with us for a very short time.  Some for a week, but most only for a day.  As I got closer it was clear to see which site belonged to my little brother.  The little guy I never met, never got to torment,   These amazing people had spent the morning working around my brothers plot.  It was manicured to perfection.  It was clear that all the trimming had been done by hand.  To honor a little one that had passed over fifty years ago in such a loving and tender way is beyond the words I can write.

A lost brother is found.  History has been restored.  Yes these memories are painful to remember in our lifetime, but we need to save them, we need to honor them.  Matson Matthew would have turned 50 this past March.  He missed an awesome life.  So we take the time to ensure that those that follow us will know of the little boy with red hair, that made it only three days, was not forgotten.

I can highly recommend All Souls Cemetery and Mausoleum in Long Beach California.  I can’t thank them enough.

Kevin’s Hurdles “A Better Story”

This story starts a couple years back.  Maybe fifty years back.  I remember Mom and Dad coming home.  They must have been gone.  They had there coats on.  There were a few people in the house and I was laying on the floor watching Gunsmoke.  I turn around and see everyone standing in the kitchen.  Not much exciting going on there, back to Gunsmoke.  I always wore my cowboy hat when Gunsmoke was on.

A few years later I remember Mom talking with someone about Matson.  I leaned my right ear closer to the kitchen table thinking maybe my grandad was coming for a visit.  Nothing better in life that watching my grandad do the dishes.  He smoked Chesterfield’s that did not have a filter on them.  He never took that cigarette out of his mouth the whole time he was doing dishes.  The ash would get longer, longer, longer, and finally it would drop on the clean dishes.  I don’t need to spell out the words that followed.  Better than TV.  But, they were not talking about grandad, they were talking about a little boy, born with a full head of red hair and how his intestines had not formed properly.  At eleven pounds and ten ounces you would think he would have all the right parts?  Mom continues the explanation.  They had operated on him but the little guy just wasn’t destined for this world.

Fast forward 49 years and big brother has hit another hurdle.  I had a first name, a last name, parents names, age, but I could not find my littler brother.  As you do your research, you are going to run into hurdles.  Aunts and Uncles didn’t even know about the little guy much less where he could be buried.  I am planning a trip that will take me right past Los Angeles.  Where do I start?  I printed out a list of every cemetery in Los Angeles County.  We lived in Wilmington a the time so I got google earth on one computer and mapquest on the other.  I started closest to Wilmington and worked my way out.

Some cemeteries have a list of those people buried on the grounds.  Others do not.  I searched everything I could on line.  Then I started calling.  I can not believe how fantastic each person was that answered the phone.  They were all so helpful.  I eliminated the first two cemeteries with one phone call to each.  Three of the cemeteries would have to research there records and call me back.  They each called me back, but no little brother.  I put calls into two more cemeteries and then I got a call from back from one.  “What was your brothers name?”  Matson.  “I’m so sorry, but we don’t have him here.”  “What was your Dad’s name?”  “We have a contract with your Dad for about that same time but the name is Matthew not Matson” That is him, I can not believe it, his middle name started with an M and his other grandad’s name was Matthew.  They must have messed up the names????  Would it be okay if I came down to see?

“Please come”

Kevin's Hurdles

Most likely starting your family tree was the hardest part.  Now that you have started thinking about it and putting the pieces together, you may find some hurdles to overcome.  I am still trying to overcome one of my own.

I have an uncle that got lost.  Lost?  I guess, I really don’t know.  Neither does anyone else in the family.  One day 40 years ago he told his mom he was going to take a motorcycle trip to maybe Canada for a few days.  No one has seen or heard from him since.

I started looking two years ago, picked it up a year later, and again yesterday.  I spent 4 hours trying every trick I have learned and got to the same place I stopped at before.  The sad part is that he had a wife and a son.  He was married a short time and we do not even have there names.  Do you have a lost family member?  Maybe some family members don’t want to be found.

Do we give up?  You would think after finding thousands of family members I would be able to drop this one.  I am going to put this one back on the bottom of the pile and it will work it’s way to the top in another year.  Hurdle or brick wall, they are meant to climb and go over.  Just a matter of time.

Kevins Story, Part 3

Maggie’s world in the 1940's was probably full of war.  America needed hope but that was taken over by rage at our attackers.  That gave focus to life in America.  From rationing, to scrap drives to collect steel, rubber, and what ever they needed for the troops.  They still sat around the radio, but they listened to news of the war and not as much baseball.

It is real important to understand how hard life was in America.  American’s came from somewhere then.  Your family was from Italy or Poland, maybe Germany or England.  You were Jewish, Catholic, or of some faith.  You knew your roots.  You were proud of your heritage, your country, your town, and your team.  Dad wore the pants in the family.  He didn’t give too many atta boys.  You knew were you stood and if you messed up, you knew it was going to be bad.   You tried to avoid trouble if you could but, knew that you had better tell the truth when asked or it was going to be much worst.  Talk about family values, no they didn’t talk about anything.  If it had to do with boys and girls, you better learn the facts from a friend because you weren’t going to learn it at home.  Unless you made a mistake.  And then it still wasn’t talked about.

As Maggie became a teenager and the war started to wind down it was a great time to be alive.  American’s had jobs, they had hope, and manufacturing revolution fueled by war innovations was about to explode.  The advancements in medicine like Penicillin changed everything in the 1940's.  Note: The first electronic computer was made in the 1940's and it wasn’t called a PC.  It was called ENIAC and weighted 30 tons.  http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/ENIAC.Richey.HTML .

To be continued . . .

Ellis Island

I found a good article written by Laura about Ellis Island on the footnote blog.  I did not realize that Ellis Island didn't open until January 1st 1892.  There is so much information available for those ancestors that came through Ellis Island.  Unfortunately, none of mine did.  Laura writes that twelve million immigrants did arrive via Ellis Island over the course of six decades.  Was yours one of them?

Consider other ports of entry.  I found a few on the east coast.

Bath, Maine, 1825 - 1867
Belfast, Maine, 1820 - 1851

We think of the United States as 1776 forward.  What if your ancestors were here before that?  One that I researched was William Dyer.  He arrived in the new world in June 1629 at the port of Boston.