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.

Left to right: Jane's mother Audrey, Aunt Renee, Aunt Vera,
and Granddad George Ralston.
(Family photo)

I should mention here that we did have a photograph of Jane's grandfather, which you see here to the right. Her grandfather is on the far right; Jane's mother is on the left, her Aunt Renee is in the middle, and Aunt Vera is on the right. We don't know when the picture was taken and I don't know enough about old cars to be able to tell the make, model, or year of the car. But when I first saw this picture of Jane's grandfather, a perception struggled to make itself known somewhere in me. Somewhere, I had seen someone who looked like him, although I couldn't remember where.

Anyway, now that we had a date of birth and a state of birth for him, it was off to the proverbial races, although the "races" in this instance were actually the Family History/Genealogy Reading Room at the Library of Congress and the Microfilm Reading Room at the National Archives.

In the Family History/Genealogy Reading Room at the Library of Congress are many published histories of various families. At the time I was looking, the only Ralston family history they had was entitled More About the Ralstons, Kells, and Allied Families, by Norma Dell Smith (1979).

The Ralstons that Norma Dell Smith was writing about were from Georgia, not South Carolina. The key figure in this Georgia line was a Georgian named Lewis Ralston, who had married a Cherokee woman named Elizabeth Kell around 1823, which is to say, before the Cherokee removal to Oklahoma—part of the larger atrocity known as the Trail of Tears. I also learned that the Ralstons of this branch spelled their family name either as "Rolston" or "Ralston." Lewis himself was most famous for having discovered gold near Ralston Creek in Colorado. He knew gold, having prospected in Cherokee territory in northern Georgia before heading west. It appeared that there were other Ralston/Rolstons among the Cherokees as well, as both the Dawes Roll and the Guion Miller Roll contain the name. (These were and are important lists for determining tribal membership for legal purposes and are also principal tools for genealogists.)

And then it was off to the Microfilm Reading Room at the National Archives on 7th Street here in Washington, which was the best place to look at the federal censuses. You started with the film rolls of the Soundex index cards and if you found a name that warranted further investigation, the index card told you which part of the federal census to look in. So you pulled that roll of microfilm and scrolled through it until you found the name indicated on the index card. It meant hours of winding and unwinding rolls of microfilm, and watching the images go by under the hood of the microfilm reader.

A word about the Soundex scheme for indexing the census: it was a way of indexing family names that converted similar sounding/spelled names to the same index number, thereby condensing lots of searches. The conversion was done by taking the first letter of the last name, dropping subsequent vowels and assigning a numeric value to consonants. Thus, my last name "Miller" was M415 in the Soundex system; but "Muller" and "Mueller" were also M415. So for our purposes here, both "Ralston" and "Rolston" (remember them?) converted to R423 in the Soundex index.

The federal censuses from 1880 through 1920 were all indexed using the Soundex system, excepting the 1890 census, which was ruined by the water used to fight a fire in the Interior Department building.

Old school
microfilm reader.

Since Granddad George Ralston was reportedly born in 1892, I was looking in the federal census for 1900 and making myself seasick watching first the Soundex card images and then the census page images fly by under the dark hood of the microfilm reader. No match for our "George Ralston" in South Carolina in 1900, so I started checking the Soundex rolls to learn more about the Ralstons in Georgia that I had read about in Norma Dell Smith's book.

And there he was! In Savannah, Georgia, but born in South Carolina! In August, 1892! Looked like a match to me! Woo-hoo!

The census sheet, of course, had far more information than just his name and place and date of birth, but this post is too long already.