Shoofly Pie: Amish Historiography

We've been spending some time with the Cheesy Grits side of the family, so now it's back to the Shoofly Pie side.

I should first say something about Amish historiography. Because the Amish don't place a high value on the higher levels of formal education for themselves, they don't generally invest themselves in producing what the rest of the world thinks of as historical scholarship. (There is one notable current exception, David Luthy, although he also represents a different kind of rarity: someone from the "outside"—a Roman Catholic with a Master's degree from Notre Dame—who joined the Amish as an adult.) The lack of formal training emphatically does not mean that there is no interest in history among the Amish; rather, and for various reasons, they simply refrain from producing what academics think of as historical monographs. Modern scholarship about the Amish is generally produced by ex-Amish and Mennonites, with the late John A. Hostetler, and the still very-much-alive and prolific Don Kraybill amongst the leading lights.

Cheesy Grits: A Ralston in New York City: One Question Answered

After we had run out of Soundex-based census searches to be made in Savannah—and we still had no clue about any South Carolina ancestors even though both Granddad George and his mother, Valeria, were born there—we nevertheless had one more fruitful census search: George Ralston in New York in the 1920 federal census. That find brought us to Granddad Ralston in New York City, as well as our first piece of information about Jane's grandmother.

Still working from the old Soundex index cards and the microfilm reader at the National Archives, we started to look first for Valeria Ralston in New York City. Nothing in 1910 or 1920. Where had she gone?

Cheesy Grits: The First Visit to Savannah

Savannah had never been on our travel radar before. Jane has long been a baseball fan and wanted to go to spring training in Florida, so one spring, we packed our bags into our car, drove our car to the Auto Train and headed south, with the intention of taking in a baseball game or two and then making our way slowly back north by car—with a stop in Savannah, of course.

Cheesy Grits: A Ralston in Savannah: Part the Third: More about Great-grandfather George Ralston

Having discovered that Jane's grandfather, George Ralston, was documented by the 1900 federal census as an eight-year-old boy living in Savannah, GA, with his family—father George, mother Valeria, and sister Mirtle—we discovered that, as usual, answering one question raised at least three or four new ones. Now we were on the trail of what we could find out about Jane's great-grandfather George Ralston in the other federal censuses, starting with 1870. (His birthdate was given as 1867.) Was he kin to the Cherokee Ralstons, or did he spring from some other Ralston family line?

Finding Great-grandfather George in the 1880 census wasn't so hard, although what we found of course raised even more questions: in 1880, he was a 13 year old boy, living on East Broad St., and with a family with several other family names, none of them Ralston, The head of the house was a white man named Frederick "Lapin" (it turned out to be "Lapham"), age 60, who was born in Maine—Freeport, as we found out later. Frederick Lapham's parents were also Maine-born. (We still have no idea what brought him to Savannah, although we do know now that he arrived before the Civil War.)

Cheesy Grits: A Ralston in Savannah, Part the Second, or "I Don't Think We're in Southport Any More..."

There was a lot of information in the 1900 federal census sheet regarding Jane's grandfather, George Ralston, and of course it was—besides his name and his date of birth—all new to us. It's best to start at the beginning, except that the beginning—the family—itself was a puzzle, as the family name appears to have been crossed out on the census sheet and a variant spelling given, but it is impossible to tell from the image which was the original and which the correction. The two names? "Ralston" and "Rolston!" Shades of Norma Dell Smith and the Cherokee Ralston/Rolstons! Of course, the fact that a census taker had stumbled over a family name isn't documentation of anything other than the fact that the census taker stumbled over a family name.

Cheesy Grits: A Ralston in Savannah, Part the First

It was really a surprise to learn from the brief biographical information supplied by the NYC school system that Jane's grandfather, George Ralston, had been born in South Carolina—I mean, it was one of those "no inkling" things. Although Jane's mother had told stories about where her family was from, none of those stories mentioned South Carolina.

In retrospect, Jane does remember one time when she couldn't have been more than six or seven years old and her grandfather telephoned them at their home in Southport. The young Jane picked up the phone and heard what she now recognizes as a deep, Southern drawl: "Is your momma there?" She was so astonished that she simply hung up the phone.

Cheesy Grits: Midwood High School

Who, where, or what was Midwood High School in Brooklyn? Being an Amish Mennonite originally from Lancaster County, I of course had no idea. Even though I had lived in Manhattan for two years while completing my alternative service at NYU Medical Center in lieu of serving in the military (maybe I'll get to that story sometime), I had never gotten out of Manhattan much, and had no idea where Midwood High School might have been. My New York stretched from Chinatown to Lincoln Center on the West Side and the Guggenheim on the East Side. I was tabula rasa about anywhere else. Never once went to see the Mets or Yankees play.

Jane wasn't sure either, although she remembered driving to Brooklyn with her mother to see her grandfather when she was very young—so young that she remembered no details.

Cheesy Grits: The Search Begins...

Jane's encounter with her mother, which I blogged about earlier, made clear to us that her part of the family history was off-limits for discussions, to say the least. If we wanted to know about Jane's grandmother, we weren't going to be able to ask the one person in our family who knew her personally.

So that meant taking a more circuitous route in order to find out what we could without provoking any intra-familial wars. I don't mean that jokingly: Jane's mother's feelings obviously ran very deep about this matter. Jane's mother did have a sister, but, as sometimes happens in families, the sisters were not on good terms with each other, so going that route seemed unwise. And, given the strength of feelings surrounding the question, Jane herself was very unsure about whether we should undertake any further inquiries at all.

Cheesy Grits: Here Be Dragons

As I mentioned earlier, my shoofly pie heritage was a commonplace in our family. Every family had a family Bible that charted the family vital records: marriages, births, and deaths. And getting to know someone in that setting meant finding out which branch of which family you were talking to. "Oh, you're Abe's Gid's daughter..." meaning that you were the granddaughter of Abraham and your father was Abraham's son, Gideon.

So, naturally enough, when I met the brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty I would eventually marry, I soon asked her about her family, too. Doesn’t everybody have fragile books, crumbling photos, and batty aunts full of family lore? Doesn’t everybody know this stuff?

Shoofly Pie: A Dane Amongst the Amish?

Although Jake's background through me is a long line of Amish and Amish Mennonites from the upper Rhine, there is at least one fairly recent wild (sort of) card in my ancestral line: my father’s grandfather, a Dane who left Copenhagen around 1870 reportedly to escape conscription. Setting out impossibly across the North Sea in a small open boat with several friends who also wanted to avoid conscription, they were picked up somewhere by a larger vessel on its way to America.

Excursus: Maryland's Eastern Shore: The Two Johns

The "Two Jakes" trope from my "Two Jakes" post came from my having read about Maryland's "The Two Johns," in the WPA Guide Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State, published in 1940.

"The Two Johns" were both people and place: as people, they were two vaudevillians from the late 1800s. While most sources agree that their given names were John and John, the sources don't agree on their family names, which are given variously as Crossey, Stewart and Hart. Some sources have them as father and son. The sources also agree regarding their heft—enormous—with Hulbert Footner's account below being typical.

Shoofly pie: The Two Jakes

The First Jake

Our son Jacob was named for two Jacobs from my history. The first Jacob was my fourth great-grandfather, Jacob Hertzler. This Jacob was born in Langnau im Emmental in Canton Berne, Switzerland around 1703. I don't know what his situation was in Langnau im Emmental aside from the fact that he was involved with the Amish. Just to be clear, the Amish were followers of Jacob Amman, who had split from other Swiss Anabaptist Brethren over issues of church discipline.

Because of the ongoing persecutions of the Anabaptists by the Swiss, Jacob Hertzler and his family left the Emme Valley and made their way first to the Palatinate in southwestern Germany, where there were others who shared their views on how to do church. Jacob may have been ordained a bishop in the Amish church while in the Palatinate. From thence, the family went on to Rotterdam, where they caught a ship, the Saint Andrew, for the New World.

Introduction, with things to eat

Cheesy grits and shoofly pie is a pretty good description of our son Jacob’s pedigree: cheesy grits from the South Carolina Lowcountry and shoofly pie from the Old Order Amish and Amish Mennonites of Indiana and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. My family always knew about our shoofly pie part, but discovering my wife’s South Carolina Lowcountry and other origins has been a real eye-opener. She has always thought of herself as more or less entirely a Yankee—an athlete, cheerleader, and prom queen, no less—born in Norwalk, Connecticut and raised in nearby Southport. All that’s true, of course, but it turns out to be far from the whole story. I’m going to have a crack at telling more of that story here, but I’m going to start with food rather than relatives.