This week's topic on "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" is Travel. It's been a busy week, full of, well, travel, so it's tempting just to say "we're in favor of it," and move on. But we all know I've never been that miserly with words, so... here we go!
In 2021, when Doug and I retired, we sold the big property in Iowa and moved to a little house in Arizona. But it gets very hot there for quite a bit of the year, so during that period, we load the dogs into the motorhome and head out on the open road, looking for adventure, but with a full kitchen and our own bed to look forward to each night.
We've already observed that our ancestors were generally quite a bit tougher than we modern folk. Travel has to be one of the biggest differentiators. I can get to Europe in 12 hours or so, but tend not to because it's expensive and I hate to be away from home for that long. My immigrant ancestors, on the other hand, often sold everything to buy "tween-decks" passage, i.e. cooking, toileting and sleeping somewhere in the cargo area of the ship, usually for 40-50 or more days. Then they started from scratch, sometimes literally able to only scratch at the soil when the "excellent farmland" they'd been told about turned out to be full of rocks, or frequently flooded, or already owned by someone else. They then sold up again, and kept on moving -- sure that property and prosperity were out there, somewhere, if they just traveled far enough.
As a result, their stories are dispersed across multiple continents. And as Doug and the dogs and I travel, it is a lot of fun to take the opportunity to look a bit more closely into the areas where these people I "know" lived and died. This spring, when we left Arizona, I'd hoped to visit Pueblo, Colorado, the last place that my grandfather's half-sister, Maude, was reported to have been in 1905. Late snow in the passes ruled out that route (much as it would have 100 years ago!) but we did make a detour up through Atwood, Kansas, where my great grandfather had built his last sod and log house. I was very glad to see the place where the homestead had been located, as well as his grave marker in a little cemetery in Cornell, Nebraska, only a few miles away from Atwood. The experience came in particularly handy a few months later when I was working with a woman who was trying to find her great-grandmother's burial location. The woman was last recorded in Iowa,
but her grave was not in the cemetery with the other Iowa relatives. One daughter had moved west to Arizona, but the woman was not buried with those family members, either. I saw that the western-bound daughter had lived for a year or so in Atwood, Kansas, but the researcher had searched Kansas cemeteries to no avail. However, as soon as I checked the Cornell cemetery, there she was. It looked like a magic trick; the only thing that would have made it better is if I'd managed to capture a picture of the great-grandmother's grave in the background of my own; alas, I didn't!
A couple of weeks ago, I realized that the route I had planned for a weekend jaunt from Battle Ground, Washington, where we were camped, to Florence, Oregon, would pass only a few miles from the cemetery where my great-great-grandparents, George and Margaret Umphenour Allison, were buried, at least according to their death records. The equivocation comes from the fact that the cemetery has been documented online, and the only Allison graves shown are allegedly those of a young girl and an unnamed baby. I asked Google Maps to take me to the cemetery but after a few miles on a gravel road, it confidently told me to "turn right" -- into a thick grove of pine trees! I drove around the space where I thought the cemetery must be, but found no signs or roads. Finally deciding to wing it, I began traversing the lanes alongside the farm fields, zigging and zagging while I watched the little blue dot that was "me" get closer to the cemetery. Sure enough, I finally made it to a locked gate. Abandoning the car and having a care for poison oak, I walked over a knoll and found the tiny, serene pioneer graveyard. Many stones were weathered beyond reading, often buried in brambles. Some "stones" were merely little cement rectangles and I learned that this was something done to preserve the information etched into more fragile wooden crosses or tablets.
At last, I found two of the little cement rectangles labeled Allison. They are side-by-side, with no notation of "baby" as was the case for many other markers. I've not gotten a response to my inquiry to the online cemetery listing as to why they believe these markers are those of (unrelated) children, but I think it's much more likely they mark the final resting places of my great-great-grandparents -- something I wouldn't have known if I hadn't been there.
A last-minute change of plans brought our "back home" route down the California coast to San Francisco, so I jumped at the chance to take a look at some of the places associated with my great-great-grandmother Libby. Setting up a one-night base in an RV park in Marin, just north of San Francisco, we loaded up the dogs into the car and raced across the Richmond bridge to Berkely and the University of California's Bancroft Library there, which holds the Doolittle family papers. Jefferson Doolittle was Rebecca Jennings' first husband. Her second husband, John Gue Barker, was the brother of my great-great grandmother, Libby Barker Salfield. I had to look, because I knew if it had been *me* archiving the images, there would be all sorts of tangential people
in there -- like Rebecca's sister-in-law, for example. It was a very... interesting experience, finding the discrete if not hidden stairway to the research library, the Dan Brown-esque wait while my box was summoned up from the basement and donning gloves to handle the papers. Sadly, I didn't learn much new at all except that Jeff Doolittle hunted waterfowl over a curly dog that looked a lot like a Poodle, and a re-emphasis of the fact that the Doolittle family really didn't like John Barker. But Doug and I got to see quite a bit of the historic Berkley campus (not least because preparations for a Golden Bear homecoming were underway, and the party tent suppliers were blocking every other roadway).
From there, we crossed the Bay Bridge back into the city and down to Colma, where Libby and Carl Salfield are buried. Why so far south, you might ask? Well, in 1900, San Francisco city leaders declared there would be no more burials within the town, citing sanitary issues with regard to the always-problematic water sources. Then, in 1912, they took the unprecedented step of saying that all burials within the city limits must be removed. For $10, they would disinter a grave and remove it south. However, many graves no longer had anyone to fund their transfer, and it appears from the regular appearance of headstones, caskets and bodies when residents are doing basement remodeling that the original impetus may have been more land grab than health concern; ornate mausoleums, crypts and plinths were broken up and tossed into the harbor to shore up eroding waterfronts where they are still visible today. In 1892, Charles Noble, who saw the writing on the wall, had begun setting up burial space a dozen miles south of the city, in Colma, and other entrepreneurs followed suit, opening cemeteries targeting different faiths and ethnicities. Today, Colma is called "the city of souls," with more than 1000 burials for each living resident of the town. Over 14,000 of the "evicted" San Francisco graves were moved to Cypress Lawn Memorial Gardens; fortunately, Libby and Carl died well after the main exodus and so were only buried the once.
It's astonishing enough to think of more than a dozen cemeteries side by side, but each of these is larger than any cemetery we'd encountered before. Thankfully, the online grave locator app provided by Cypress Lawn uses GPS to direct you precisely to the grave you seek, or I'm sure we'd never have found Libby and Carl's simple and dignified stone. I thought Cypress Lawn was quite grand until we crossed the street to the "east campus," where Libby's brother John Gue Barker is buried along with his first wife, Margaret Johnson. The monuments there are simply astonishing in their grandeur, with so very many detailed marble angels, and Corinthian-columned mausoleums. William Randolph Hurst is buried in this section; I thought his grave site would be easy to spot, but there are so many elaborate markers that it was impossible to say which was the most impressive.
Apparently, the chapel and other buildings at Cypress Lawn are famous for their architecture and historic stained glass but we dallied too long amidst the slow traffic in Berkley and missed seeing them. We did, however, trundle slowly -- not by covered wagon, but rush hour traffic in San Francisco doesn't move much faster! -- up to 1890 Page Street. Carl and Libby Salfield owned this house in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury district, only two blocks from Golden Gate Park, and one block from the Panhandle. They rented it out, furnished, when they left for two years in the 1890s to visit Libby's sister in New York and Carl's brother in Germany; the prominent family to whom they rented it figured years later in a tabloid scandal of epic proportion, with Carl drawn in as their landlord to testify. And a nebulous rumor remains that the house was somehow the site of medical services for unwed mothers, including abortion, although I've so far been unable to track the source of this idea. They were such champions for the just-developing neighborhood over 100 years ago. I think they'd have been proud to see the residential character and nearby parks had been preserved.
There was so much more to see and do, but it had been a long day and Doug, who did all the driving ALL DAY LONG deserved supper (we'd stopped to feed, water and walk the dogs several times throughout the day, priorities!) So we traipsed back to Marin for the sunset, bypassing Golden Gate Park (just a block from the Salfield home), and Belvedere, where John Gue Barker lived in such splendor. But we saw a lot of parts of the Bay area that we wouldn't have otherwise -- so many lovely houses, the enormous web of electrified trolley lines that still power much of the transit today; an incredible view of the city and the Bay from up on Twin Peaks; the historical Berkley college campus; and Colma, the amazing city of cemeteries.
A friend posted an apropos meme yesterday:
"Travel. As far as you can. As much as you can. As long as you can. Life's not meant to be lived in one place."
Memes are always facile and everyone's situation is different. However, I think there is an essential truth to this. Even as I consider relatives who lived a long time in one place, I run across correspondence that talks about train schedules and travel logistics -- it's not like they stayed at home all the time. For others, there are those awe-inspiring migration patterns, traveling less than a tenth of the (admittedly slow) speed we make in our motorhome, yet persisting for a lifetime in their quest to find out what's over the next hill.
Travel isn't always glamorous, of course. Sometimes, its no more exciting than a laundromat or grocery store. And, of course, locations like national parks or the ocean have their attractions just hanging out there to be enjoyed. But including stops with genealogical import has been far more rewarding than I could have imagined, not necessarily in terms of research results, but in a better understanding of the lives and times of the people who lived before us. It's not necessarily monumental but it adds color and texture and context to life in a somehow extraordinarily satisfying way.
Travel: We're in favor of it.
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