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.



But eventually we did. And we turned to the other person Jane knew who had known Jane's grandmother: her maternal grandfather, the man whose wife was the person about whom we apparently dared not inquire.

What Jane knew of the facts of her grandfather's life was actually fairly little: she knew his name, of course—George Ralston—and that he was a schoolteacher somewhere, and that he lived in Mahopac, NY. And that he had died around the time of the first swine flu scare here in the U.S. in 1976—in fact, Jane suspected for a long time that the swine flu vaccine had something to do with his death.

There were no on-line databases then yet because there was no "on-line" in the sense we now know it. The language of the web, HTML, hadn't been invented yet, much less Mozilla. Finding information meant visiting archives, looking at old books and papers, spooling microfilm after microfilm, and working the telephones.

I did the last first: I worked the phones. After finding a print directory of newspapers in the Mahopac region of Westchester County, NY, I started working the phones and talking to their archivists, looking for an obituary or a death notice for a George Ralston who had passed away sometime in the fall of 1976.

I hit the jackpot with the Gannett Westchester Rockland Newspapers library, and, a few days later, I had a copy of an obituary for George Ralston of Mahopac dated Saturday, October 23, 1976 from the White Plains Reporter Dispatch. The obit is in agate type and the film image is reversed, so it's ungainly to reproduce it here as an image; I'll transcribe it instead:

George Ralston

George Ralston of Woodbine Drive in Mahopac died Friday at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco. He was 84.

Mr. Ralston was a health education teacher in the New York City School system for 30 years. He was also a track and swimming coach at Midwood High School in Brooklyn.

He is survived by two daughters; Vera Ralston of the home address and Audrey Gottfried of Chaska, Minnesota; three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

And we had our first big clue: Jane knew that her Granddad Ralston had been a phys ed teacher, but didn't know where. Now we had at least one answer: he had been a track and swimming coach at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. And Jane indeed remembered riding with her mother from Southport to Brooklyn to see her grandfather, but she was so young that the details of the trip were long gone.

So it seemed that a trip to Midwood High School was in order to see what if anything else we could find out about him. (Remember, this was years before email, on-line databases, and, of course, 9/11.)

P.S. The named survivors in the obit were Jane's aunt and her mother; the grandchildren, Jane and her two siblings. We never found out why Jane's mother's name was given as Audrey "Gottfried" rather than Audrey Godfrey. Perhaps it was dictated over the phone and the person taking the information just got it wrong? Who knows?

P.P.S. After Jane had gone off to college, her parents moved from Connecticut to Minnesota where her dad had found a job with Control Data. That's why Audrey's address is given as Minnesota in the obituary. Eventually, her parents would move to the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearer to their only grandchild at the time, Jane's niece.