Cheesy Grits: Resuming the Ralston chase in New York City

So there we were, stuck in 1920 on W. 99th St. in Manhattan, with South Carolina-born George Ralston (Jane's grandfather) and his young wife, Audrey—Jane's missing grandmother—and Jane's mother herself at just a smidgen over a year old. We knew that George's father, also named George, was still in Savannah, GA, in 1910, but that the younger George, his mother Valeria, and his sister, Mirtle, had disappeared.



We stayed stuck there for a goodly number of years. Long enough for me to write my own book on the history of the congregation at Hyattsville Mennonite Church in celebration of our fiftieth anniversary. Entitled Taking Root in Strange Soil, it's the story of one of Mennodom's early urban churches. Dreamseeker magazine gave it a very nice review even if the review was written by my mother's cousin, Dan Hertzler. (We Amish Mennonites would be nothing without nepotism.) Mennonite World Review also liked it, but I don't know yet if I'm related to the reviewer. Hyattsville Mennonite Church still has some copies available as of this writing.

After my book was done, I discovered that several interesting things happened on the family history front: the 1930 federal census had been released in 2002, and I started discovering the various family history databases and search engines.

The "search engine" bit came first and was critical. With the old Soundex system, you could search for family names and that was pretty much the end of it. If you didn't know the family name, you were done. I didn't know Jane's great-grandmother Valeria Ralston's maiden name, so I had no clue where or under what name to look for her. It hadn't been difficult to find the Ralstons in Savannah, but there the trail had ended.

The biographical info for Jane's grandfather that the New York Public Schools had given us said that he had come to New York City at a young age, so we just assumed that his mother came along.  So with a good search engine, I could now construct complicated queries like "Show me all the women named Ralston who were living in New York City in 1920 and who were born in South Carolina around 1876." (These searches were all done on public library versions of Heritagequest and Ancestry, by the way.)

Good idea, but it came up empty. But then the happy thought came to me that her first name, Valeria, was far more distinctive than her married name, Ralston, so I reconstructed the search to be "Show me all the women named Valeria who were living in New York City in 1920 and who were born in South Carolina around 1876." Better idea, but it came up empty, too.

So then I posed this one to the search engine: "Show me all the Georges in New York City who were born in South Carolina in 1892." I expected a deluge, but the fourth hit down in the 1910 federal census was for a "George Royston" who was supposedly born in South Carolina in 1853. I don't know what made me look, but when I did, this is what I saw:

Haphazard indexers and indifferent census-takers notwithstanding, it looked like it was our George. He was clearly age 17 (not 57 as the indexer wrongly wrote) and his sister, Myrtle (no longer "Mirtle") was 12 and their names are "Ralston," not "Royston", as the census-taker wrote.

Two lines up from George looks very much like their mother, except that the census-taker wrote "Valerie" instead of "Valeria", which is likely why I couldn't find her initially. And she's no longer a "Ralston"; rather, she's a "Wilkenson."  Well, at least they got the part right about being born in South Carolina.

It seemed a solid lead, but needed corroboration. And why are George and Myrtle identified as "lodgers" and not "step-son" and "step-daughter"? And who is "Rebecca Hubbard," the 57 year-old female lodger, a widow who was also born in South Carolina?

Notice finally the racial designation: "Mu" for "mulatto"—mixed-race folks all.

The 1920 census gave a little more clarity to Valerie/Valeria and Fred:

The family name appears to be "Wilcoxson," not "Wilkenson." They were still living on W. 59th in Manhattan, where they were living for the 1910 census. And Granddad George's sister Myrtle had gotten married without managing to move out.

The 1930 census confirmed "Wilcoxson," although they were by then living on 8th Avenue.

Now that I was pretty confident that Valeria in New York was a Wilcoxson, I turned to the death indexes for New York City. And there she was:

Wilcoxson, Valeria      Age: 70      Date of death: June 29, 1947   Town/County: Queens.

Death certificates often give a lot of useful genealogical information: place of birth, parents' names, and so on. I was hoping Valeria's death certificate would be one of those, so we could find out where in South Carolina she was from. (Little did I know....)

Death certificates for New York City residents are kept in the Municipal Archive on Chambers Street in New York and that's where I sent my completed application and check.

Then there was nothing to do but wait. And wait. And it took forever.

OK, that's not true. I was really starting to feel my search engine oats, so I tracked down Granddad George Ralston and his family in 1930, too. But I'll save that for a future installment.