This week's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks prompt, Dig a Little Deeper, was truly a challenge. If there were any loose threads to pull, surely I had already impatiently given them a big yank. What digging did I have to do?
But then I got the nicest email from Linda, a woman who is the granddaughter of the couple pictured alongside my own grandparents in a photo I used in last week's post, talking about Friends. According to the helpful (and rare) labeling on the back, my mother, her half-sister and my grandparents had visited Linda's grandparents, mother and brother in Cleveland in 1932, but neither of us knew how our relatives knew one another. Linda provided several suggestions but we agreed that we just might never know.
And yet... were there perhaps some threads I could pull in an effort to figure it out? Yes, there were! So, this week, I'm going to shine a light down the rabbit hole of tangential genealogical research, which just may be the vehicle whereby I have acquired any knowledge of actual world history that I possess. It has also provided all kinds of fun exploring my own 'theory of relativity' (which turns out to actually be the concept of Universal Connection), the idea that no bit of information is ever actually useless; if you can just put it somewhere safe so you can find it later (!), you will almost certainly have a use for it (even if it's just trotting it out randomly to irritate the shit out of your friends).
The Picture That Started This Hunt:
Among the hundreds of family photos I inherited, this is one of about 10 that actually has a legend on the back. The handwriting is not that of my mother or either of her parents, and likely not to be that of her half-sister, Jean, because of the way Jean was identified, with the parenthetical "Thomas" (her surname was "Holmes"). So it was most likely labelled by someone in the Booth family and sent to Shug ("G. Wayne" in the photo) and Inez after the fact. It also tremendously helpfully has a date, albeit just the year, and location. Not much real "detective" work was required. Clothes, leaves on the trees and grass give the image a late-spring/early summer feel to me, but "warm weather" is probably closer to the mark, which might be useful to know later on, hard to say.
I searched Ancestry and happily found that George Hamilton Booth with wife Rae, daughter Margaret and son George W. were in the 1930 census in Lakewood, Ohio. George and Rae were both born in 1890 and he was a photographer. This same man conveniently appeared in the family trees of several Ancestry members. A couple had lots of source material and some photos on his profile, which usually means he was someone relatively important to the tree creator, like a direct ancestor. The details in one such tree showed that George and his family had been living in Perry, Iowa, during the 1920 census; in fact, Margaret was born there. According to the tree, George Sr. had been born in southwest Iowa, near Omaha. He married Rae McGrady in 1915 in Boone, Iowa, which is not far from Perry, but George Jr. was born in 1917 back in George Sr.'s hometown of Omaha. The family was living in Perry by 1920 but in Des Moines by 1925 and then in Lakewood by 1930. It seemed to me like Rae's Boone County childhood and the family's time in Perry were the most likely places to look for a connection.
I used Ancestry's messaging service to write to Heather, the owner of one of the family trees. Although her details and those of her mother were private and not shown in the tree since they are both still living, it looked as though she might be the great-granddaughter of George and Rae. I sent her the picture and told her what little I knew. Heather responded promptly, confirming that she was Margaret Booth's granddaughter, but saying that her mother, Linda, likely had more details and would reply when she returned from vacation. And, a week or so later, just before I published last week's Friends essay, Linda emailed me.
Linda thanked me for the picture but admitted she'd never heard of my grandparents any more than I'd heard of hers. She provided a succinct outline of her grandparents' lives and called out potential avenues of exploration -- locations, professions, fraternal organizations -- but agreed we might never know the answer. I drafted a "thanks anyway" response, but then realized I hadn't checked with my faithful friends, the old newspapers. Did they perhaps show a get-together between the Thomas and Booth families, or even talk in their lovely old newspaper nosiness about the 1932 excursion?
Sadly, my Newspapers database didn't have much for me about the Booths, and definitely nothing that cross-referenced them with my own family. Dang! Linda's email had such a nice biographical outline of her grandmother, Rae -- it made me jealous! Linda mentioned that Rae had been a teacher as well as worked in the office of a state senator. Maybe teaching was the connection? Inez was a teacher also. But if Rae had worked with a Senator, perhaps there was more about her online. I Googled her name and found that she had written the absolutely delightful "Memoirs of an Iowa Farm Girl" that was published in Annals of Iowa magazine and is now available online courtesy of the University of Iowa Libraries. Her "memoirs" provide great genealogical background as well as the kind of fascinating details I tuck away to ponder over later. For example, she said they usually had "mash and milk" for supper on Saturday night unless her father rode seven miles to the nearby village for oysters and then they had oyster soup with little crackers from the store's big barrel. Mashed what? Why was Saturday night special? And oysters? I'm generally afraid to eat those today almost anywhere that isn't seaside, and then it still seems quite a gamble -- rural Iowa circa 1900? Yikes! But, apparently, oysters were "the hamburger and fries" of the 19th century. Who knew?
Rae's memoirs were very evocative of the book I helped my step-mother-in-law publish in 2008, Footprints of Our Ancestors. Ione also grew up in rural Iowa, and provided many similar details of farm chores and mealtimes. Both Ione's and Rae's stories provided sharp contrast to the memoirs published by Jean Doolittle Henry, the reason for my (sad trombone) research trip to the archive library at UC Berkley a couple of weeks ago. Rae wrote that her father remembered times when all they had to eat was cornbread spread with lard while Jean said "The Jennings, Goldsmiths and Doolittles... lived the grand gesture, four-in-hand matched horses, large houses and twelve course dinners." The disparity and the absolute chance by which one set of ancestors experienced luxury while the others did not continues to amaze me. Life, huh?
Sadly, Rae's memoirs didn't contain any further hints as to how she and her husband might have known my grandparents. I returned to my reply to Linda, intending to say I just had no idea. But then I thought of one more thing to check.
(Herein lies in part the tale of the refurbishment of significant parts of Perry, Iowa, and the salubrious effects it has had on my life and research, too. Caffeination is recommended.)
In 1912, Harry Pattee and his brother announced plans to build a hotel in Perry. It opened in 1915 and was Quite The Thing. Mom remembered going there for teas or special occasions and I am sure the Booth family patronized it, as well -- George Booth's studio was on the next block over. The hotel operated continuously under various names and management until 1987 when it went up for sale for back taxes. In 1992, it was purchased by wealthy philanthropists Howard and Roberta Green Ahmanson; Roberta was a Perry native. The Ahmansons poured $20 Million into renovating the hotel, the old Carnegie Library and other downtown buildings in the 1990s. Doug and I were married in the beautifully-restored library of the Hotel Pattee in 1998. By 2006, however, the Hotel had yet to break even, and the Ahmansons ended their financial support, forcing the hotel to close its doors again. Happily, new investors stepped in and the Hotel has since been re-opened. If you make it to the vicinity, you should definitely visit!
The Ahmansons also put funding behind a project called "Hometown Perry," intended to be an immersive look at what it had been like to live in Perry in different time periods. When Mom died, I donated the vast collection of books that Inez's Aunt-in-Law, Julia Grady, had left her to Hometown Perry, along with pictures of the Grady family. But when last I checked in with those folks, the project all seemed to have stalled when the Ahmansons abandoned their investment.
Still, I thought it was worth checking in with the project. They'd had a small database of historic photos that was indexed and available online. Perhaps some of George's pictures were there -- if the database still existed.
It did! In fact, was bigger and nicer! And there was NO sign of the Booths anywhere in it.
However, I noticed that the Hometown Perry site had been transformed into Hometown Heritage during my several years of inattention, and was now funded by The Fullhart Carnegie Charitable Trust. In addition to the photographic archive, their menu included a link to a (thus far blank) page for Perry High School Yearbooks, "history books" in the catalog at the Perry Public Library, and "Newspaper Archives." Hm. Would that just link to Newspapers.com that requires a subscription and which I'd already checked?
Amazingly, it did not. It led to an entirely new digital capture, organized through Advantage Archives of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was SO EMBARRASSED! During the last 3 years of reliance on subscription newspaper databases, I had completely forgotten about Advantage Archives. In the meantime, they have digitized a WHOLE BUNCH of Iowa historical newspapers, including Perry, and these are made available FOR FREE, typically through the website of the local library. But would they have anything the subscription databases didn't?
Oh, my, yes they did. According to a January 20, 1920 article in the Perry Daily Chief, my grandma, Inez, and Linda's grandma, Rae Booth, were both charter members of the Alpha Gamma Delphians. The Delphian Society was a national organization founded in 1910 to promote education for women. In 1913, they published the 10-volume "Delphian Course," a structured reading program covering "history, literature, philosophy, poetry, fiction, drama, art, ethics and music." In fact, the ten volumes of the Course were all still in Julia's collection that I donated to the Hometown project! The article notes that the Delphians met in rooms at the Carnegie Library, one of the buildings lovingly restored thanks to the Ahmansons and now operated as a museum in a partnership between Hometown Heritage and the Perry Public Library.
So, while we still haven't determined exactly how the Thomas family came to visit (and almost certainly stay with) the Booth family near Cleveland in 1932, I feel safe in saying that the Delphian chapter was likely how Inez and Rae made a connection. Based on a little further newspaper research, the Perry Delphian club seemed to dwindle away, but within 5 years of the founding, both Inez and Rae had moved away from Perry, anyway. Inez's new hometown of Woodward did acquire a Delphian club in the early 1920s but it was soon subsumed into a "topic" for the Women's Club meetings. That club was a member of the Iowa Federated Women's Clubs, which was a member of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (who has a fabulous website I've barely begun to explore). Was Inez perhaps a delegate to a national convention of one club or another, and the Booths put them up in a nod to their former fellowship? The number of newspapers missing or incomplete across the board for 1932 make the searches disappointingly mute on this possibility thus far, but, as I just re-realized, you never know what new resource may pop up around the corner.
And, in the meantime, this marvelous new database by Advantage Archive has provided ALL KINDS of things that I'd not seen previously -- news that mysterious Maud was shipped off to Fremont, Nebraska, after her mother's death, even more hints that Dora struggled financially after her husband died, troubling tidbits about family health issues... there are weeks of loose threads to pull and a plethora of rabbit holes in which to become lost!
Doug asked how it is that this new digitization effort has things that the other repositories like Newspapers.com don't, and it's a good question. They seem to largely contain the same issues and papers, but I suspect that the real difference is in the Optical Character Recognition they use, making some (Advantage!) better at interpreting the old newsprint.
All I can say is that I hope they keep exploring -- I'm going to!
Comments