Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland: Oakland's Bethel A.M.E. Church (Part III)

The "main road" in this part of Garrett County is US Rt. 219. It runs roughly north-south and through the high Allegheny Plateau that lies between the higher Appalachian ridges. In the summer, there is wonderfully green farmland all around. In the winter, well...let me put it this way: Garrett County averages around 130 inches of snowfall per year. Of course, we are there in July, and it is lovely.

As we head south, Backbone Mountain rises to over 3,000 ft to our left/east; wind turbines that look like pinwheels for a race of giants line the ridge-top. Backbone Mountain is the Eastern Continental Divide in these parts. The water in the creeks along Rt. 219 flows into the Youghiogheny, thence into the Monongahela, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond the wind turbines on Backbone Mountain, the water flows into the Potomac, the Cheseapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland: Oakland's Bethel A.M.E. Church (Part II)

Our second mission in Garrett County was to try to track down what was known of the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Oakland. So far as I knew, it was the only African-American church in Garrett County. Because we had already spied out the Quilt Corner of the TriState Relief Sale and had bought a quilt, we weren't too worried about missing any more gems there, as it were.

Our first stop in the second mission was the Garrett County Historical Museum on S. 2nd Street in downtown Oakland.We had of course been there before; it was there that I saw the exhibit of memorabilia from Oakland's great hotels that set me off on the trail of the African-Americans who worked at those hotels. Our visit this time was to see what the Museum might have on the old Bethel A.M.E. Church that served Oakland's small African-American community from around 1900 to 1930.

Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland: Oakland's Bethel A.M.E. Church (Part I)

Some time back, I wrote about our explorations in Garrett County, MD, starting here, and continuing here, here, and here.

I mentioned in Part III of those posts my discovery in the 1900 census the name of an African-American minister living in Oakland (MD): Rev. William Walker.

Oakland's African-American community grew: the 1900 census for East Oakland shows a black minister, the Rev. William H. Walker, living in East Oakland with his wife, Virginia, and his mother-in-law. Because the 1880 census didn't show a minister, the presumption is that by 1900, there were enough African-Americans to have formed at least one congregation.

And the on-line archives of the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper confirm that there was indeed an A.M.E. church in Oakland around this time: Bethel A.M.E., part of the Baltimore District, along with Frostburg and Westernport. Preliminary indications are that Bethel A.M.E. was located near the corner of 5th and E. High Streets in Oakland. 

Cheesy Grits: An Unexpected Postscript

At the risk of sounding like a commercial for ancestry.com, I've found their service to be tremendously useful. Not only are there lots of historical materials to be pored over, once one has constructed a family tree at their site, automated software runs behind the scenes to ferret out possible connections and links to documents and other trees. I constantly get "hints" about possible relatives or documents that may contribute more to my tree.

The "hints" also contain suggestions pointing to other family trees on ancestry.com. I've looked at some of those trees from time to time, but it simply hadn't occurred to me that other people might be being pointed to my tree as well, even though I haven't made the contents of the tree broadly available.

Cheesy Grits: Grandmother Ralston—Occupation: "Gentlewoman"

And so we come full circle. We've been on the trail of Jane's missing grandmother, her mother's mother. Of whom we dared not speak and of whom a single, simple inquiry by Jane caused her mother to burst into tears. It was the first time Jane recalled ever seeing her mother cry.

We followed the only trail we had: her grandfather, George Ralston. That trail led us first to Westchester County (NY), then to Brooklyn's Midwood High School, then to Savannah and thence to Charleston, SC, where we found the bill of sale documenting the purchase by John Stocks Thorne, Jane's 4th great-grandfather, of her 4th great-grandmother and their son. We found that Jane's mixed-race Charleston ancestors were members of the ante-bellum elite Free Persons of Color, including membership in the Brown Fellowship and Friendly Moralist Societies. We found that her great-great-uncle, John S. Thorne, would become known during Reconstruction as one of the "two black kings of Edisto Island."

We followed the trail back to Savannah and then back to Manhattan, where we found Jane's grandfather again, now a young married man with his wife and two young daughters, the eldest of whom was Jane's mother. We discovered that the missing grandmother's name was Audrey, the same name that Jane's mother went by. Then we discovered that Grandmother Audrey's roots were in the Danish Virgin Islands (mostly St. Croix), and that her ancestors included a former slave named Adeline and a Danish policeman named Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen.

The mystery remained: what became of Grandmother Audrey? Why was she not spoken of?

Cheesy Grits: Things to see in St. Croix

The Wall at Cane Bay

I mentioned earlier that we found something quite fascinating on St. Croix that was completely unrelated to our family history searches. It has to do with the geology of the area, more particularly, the fact that St. Croix and the rest of the Virgin Islands are on the edge of the Caribbean plate. If you remember your plate tectonics, which of course you do, Planet Earth's crust is divided up into huge and more or less flat pieces called "plates" that are moving around and bumping into each other. The places where the plate edges touch are quite lively, geologically speaking, and that is where we generally find "faults" and/or "rift zones," which are the places where most (but not all) earthquakes and volcanoes happen.

Cheesy Grits: What We Know of Adeline's Story (Part II: The Fireburn of 1878)

At some point between 1870 and 1880, Adeline and her family moved away from Frederiksted, where she had lived a great portion of her life, to Christiansted. It's quite tempting to think that her move had something to do with the events of 1878 on St. Croix—events that must have been terrifying for a mother with young children.

The "events of 1878" are often referred to now under the name of the "Fireburn," mainly because much of the town of Frederiksted and many estate houses, sugar mills and sugar fields were burned during the first week of October, 1878.

Cheesy Grits: What We Know of Adeline's Story (Part I)

I don't remember how I first ran across David Lynch's wonderful blog about his Crucian roots. It's called "200 Years in Paradise" and has long been a model for me for its careful documentation and clear writing. If I were smarter, I'd be able to get his home page to appear here on this page, but I had to settle for making the title a clickable link.

Dave gave very generously of his time in helping me piece together some of the stories of Mathilda Dagmar and her mother Adeline/Edlin/Adelaide.

After the jump is another look at the branch of the tree we're currently exploring.

Cheesy Grits: Mathilde Dagmar's Island Haunts

After having spent parts of two days with Ricki Marshall in Christiansted's public library and the St. Croix Landmarks Society Library and Archive at Estate Whim, we thought it was time to explore more of the island itself and look for the some of the places mentioned in the various records.

But in looking back at my earlier posts, I realized that I haven't yet posted a good map of St. Croix so that readers can orient themselves a bit. (Although Mathilda Dagmar was born and baptised on St. Thomas, we had no plans to go there: it's about forty miles north of St. Croix and at that time, one either flew or took a slow ferry across infamously choppy seas—the ferry wasn't nicknamed the "Barf Barge" for nothing. But that's all past tense because the ferry ran aground and service has never resumed.)

Anyway, after the jump, a map.

Cheesy Grits: More about Adeline Deguizen and her household

Having found Mathilde Dagmar Christensen's brother's baptismal record in the parish register for Frederick Lutheran in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Ricki, my guardian angel, went back to the 1880 St. Croix census. There, we found that Adeline/Edlin had moved from Frederiksted in the west end of St. Croix to Peters Farm Hospital, which was indeed a hospital on the south edge of Christiansted, nearer the east end of St. Croix.

Cheesy Grits: "God Bless King Frederik V of Denmark!"

My Crucian guardian angel, Ricki Marshall, had suggested we reconvene at the Estate Whim library and archive just outside of Frederiksted, about twelve miles west of the public library in Christiansted. We were in search of the larger story behind Mathilde Dagmar Christensen and the houseful of siblings she lived with at 40 Strand who had several different family names: two Christensens, one Watlington, and two Iversens.

As it turned out, what Ricki was going for was the parish records of the various churches on St. Croix and St. Thomas. And how those records came to be in the first place is something we owe to Denmark's King Frederik V.

Cheesy Grits: When in Doubt, Find a Library

Not knowing where any records were on St. Croix, my first destination was the public library, because reference librarians generally love queries and quests like the one I was on. I asked at the front desk of the Florence Williams Public Library on King Street in Christiansted and the person there (alas, I didn't note her name) knew exactly who to point me to: "Oh, you need to talk to Ricki Marshall. She knows all about those things. She'll be here in an hour or so...."

Cheesy Grits: And Onward to the Beaches of St. Croix [Updated]

Truth be told, I hate the beach. You get slathered up with suntan lotion and are all sticky. Sand gets into everything and sticks to everything. There are flies. They bite. Hard. It's too bright to read. If you have food, the seagulls steal it. You go into the water to try to get into the spirit of things, but you've been baking in the sun so the water feels like ice water. Your parts pucker and retract. You step on something underwater and—Egad!—it moves! The water washes all the suntan lotion off. When you come out, you have to put it all back on again. Now you've got a paste of lotion, salt residue and sand all over you. You lie down on your sandy towel again, only now it's all wet, too, and you shiver until you notice that your feet are turning pink because you forgot to put lotion on them. The sandy crud is everywhere: in your shoes, your socks, your underwear, your ears, your hair, your personal crevices. It's all over your car seats and floormats. Gremlins come into your hotel room and sprinkle sand all over the bathroom floor and into the bathtub. And you're supposed to get up the next day, find clean towels, and do it all over again. What fun! Give me a library or an archive any day.

Cheesy Grits: To the Caribbean and Beyond!

As if Savannah and Charleston were not sufficiently exotic in our family tree, we'd turned up a line—Jane's maternal great-grandmother, Dagmar McCabe—that appeared to lead to the West Indies. And not only the West Indies: Dagmar told the 1930 census taker that while her mother was West Indian, her father was Danish!

And here I thought that with Augustus Walbus/John Anderson (Remember him? The Dane who converted to Amish and married the bishop's daughter?), my side of the family had the corner on Danish ancestry. Not to mention that I wasn't completely sure which of the West Indies we were talking about.

Cheesy Grits: To the Caribbean....And Beyond?!

You'll remember that the person that started the whole Cheesy Grits exploration was Jane's missing maternal grandmother. You'll no doubt further remember that Jane's mother burst into tears when asked about her mother.

So here we are, some sixty-one posts later and we still don't know who Jane's grandmother was. Well, we did know from the 1920 census that her name was Audrey—same as her daughter/Jane's mother—and that the family was living on W. 99th Street in Manhattan. But where to go from there?

A Tale of Two Cemeteries: Part II—Cheesy Grits on Pitt Street

I wrote earlier about Charleston's Brown Fellowship Society (BFS). Founded in 1790 by Free Persons of Color who were members of St. Philip's Episcopal, the BFS primarily provided for burials for its members because while they were of white descent and attended white churches, they could not buried alongside white folks in thechurchyards where they were members.

In 1794, BFS purchased a lot on Pitt Street just south of Boundary/Calhoun Street for its cemetery. At that point, Bounday (the name was changed to Calhoun in 1851) marked the northern boundary of the city, meaning that the BFS cemetery was just within the city limits.

A Tale of Two Cemeteries: Part I—Shoofly Pie in Baltimore County

This is the tale of two cemeteries, one rural and one urban. The immediate communities that anchored both have disappeared. The rural cemetery has continued. The urban one has disappeared, but it did not merely fade away: it was destroyed by being paved over.

The rural cemetery is the Long Green Mennonite Cemetery in the heart of the Long Green Valley, about 15 miles northeast of Baltimore, Maryland. An Amish Mennonite community was started there around 1833 and endured until the early 20th century. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother were part of this community and this cemetery is where my great-grandfather was buried.

The urban cemetery is the Brown Fellowship Society Cemetery at 54 Pitt Street, Charleston, SC. The property at 54 Pitt Street was purchased in 1794 by the members of the Brown Fellowship Society, who were the elite of Charleston's antebellum Free Persons of Color. Burials began almost immediately and continued at the Pitt Street location until the 1930s. Jane's great-great-great grandparents were buried there.

Cheesy Grits: "The Two Black Kings of Edisto Island"—What Happened to John Thorne's "kingdom"?

The 1900 federal census finds John Thorne, his wife Sarah Ann, and their two daughters, ten-year-old Rhea and eight-year-old Sadie at home on Edisto Island. When the next census was taken in 1910, however, the Thorne family had disappeared completely from Edisto Island.

What happened? And where did all the properties go?

Cheesy Grits: A Visit with the Bard of Edisto

Jane is always on the lookout for interesting places to run, and wouldn't you know it: she found a 5K Run on Edisto Island. I of course was always up for a return trip to Charleston—especially if going on down to Edisto was sure to be in the mix.

Part of the reason I was eager to return was that the previous time Jane and I visited Edisto, I had wanted to call on the Bard of Edisto, Nick Lindsay, but was too shy. Ever since then, I had deeply regretted not looking him up to introduce Jane to him, as I doubted that he ever thought he would meet a living relative of Johnny Thorne, one of the two Black kings of Edisto. Perhaps this time, I could fix that—after all, nobody in my part of the world—or his—is getting younger.

Cheesy Grits: "The Two Black Kings of Edisto Island"—John Thorne's Real Estate

According to Charles Spencer's history of Edisto, there were sixty-two full-fledged plantations on Edisto Island in 1850, and most if not all of them were growing Edisto's most famous crop: Sea Island Cotton. Comes now the Civil War: all the plantation owners and their families left the island in 1861 and the now-former slaves left in 1862. Edisto Island was mainly left empty aside from a few Union troops.

Cheesy Grits: Going Down to Edisto Island—Main's Market; Thorne's house

Jane and I first visited Edisto Island in May, 2012. We were on the trail of her great-great-granduncle, John S. Thorne, one of the two "Black Kings of Edisto Island." It was Sam Gadsden who named him so in Nick Lindsay's And I'm Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island, and the reason Sam had done so was because John Thorne had engineered the purchase of a former plantation, Baynard's "Seaside," and then resold plots (at reasonable prices) to the now-freed slaves who lived on Edisto and had worked this land. Thorne had kept some land for himself and had built a house, a store, and several cotton gins to process the famous Sea Island cotton that was being grown on Edisto.

Sam Gadsden had further remarked that John Thorne's house and store were still standing, so that was where we were going to start.

Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—Who was John Thorne?

One of the challenging puzzles of doing family history is tracking down adult children. The federal and state censuses are great for snapshots of families on a given date. But after a family starts to disperse, locating the children can be a challenge—especially the daughters who many times have married and abandoned their birth names in favor of their husbands' family names.

With John Thorne, however, the problem was reversed: how do we establish that someone is the adult son of (relatively) distant parents? More specifically, can we tie John Thorne, our Black King of Edisto Island, to Philip and Elizabeth Weston Thorne of 7 Henrietta Street in Charleston?

Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—His name was Thorn

From Nick Lindsay's And I'm Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island:

"There was another man who came here from Charleston during Reconstruction. He was half-Spanish, but he passed for a Black man. His name was Thorn.

Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—Edisto Gumption

Nick says in And I'm Glad that living on Edisto requires a special kind of resourcefulness and determination. He calls it "gumption." Listen:

"There are all kinds of gumptions on Edisto, big ones and little ones...Anytime you can't get a nail, you use a black locust peg instead and it lasts a hundred years—that's wood-peg gumption. Or, you chop your leg and you know it will take you a half a day at the very least to get to a doctor and the wound will have got cold and won't knit so you sew it up yourself—that's needle-and-thread gumption. You load your pulpwood truck so heavy that the front wheels rise up off the ground and you can't steer so you pile sand bags on the front bumper to bring them back down—that's sandbag gumption.

Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—A Collision of Worlds

Edisto Island near Botany Bay
Taken by GCM, May 2012

When I first met Nick Lindsay, I had no idea that some forty years later, I would be sitting with him and his wife Dubose in their house on Edisto Island, forty-odd miles southwest of Charleston, talking about one of the two "Black Kings of Edisto Island." I wonder, too, if he ever imagined he would meet a great-great-grandniece of one of those two black kings of Edisto Island, which would of course be my wife, Jane. A descendant of Amish Mennonite bishop Jacob Hertzler, a relative of Edisto royalty, and the Bard of Edisto and his wife, chatting in the living room while Spring freshens up her frock outdoors on a March afternoon on Edisto. Talk about a collision of worlds.

Cheesy Grits: "What Did You Do During the Civil War, Grandpa Howard?"

Oh Robert Howard Robert Howard you're really breaking my chops here. As hard as it has been to get my head around the idea that former slaves would turn around and become slaveowners, I now am faced with a document you put your signature to the day after cadets from the Citadel fired on a Union vessel, the Star of the West, attempting to resupply Fort Sumter. It was about a month after South Carolina had seceded. In three months more, the Confederates would open fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and the Civil War was fully on.

Excursus: "What Did You Do During the Civil War, Grandpa-from-Wisconsin?"

I've written almost nothing about Jane's Wisconsin ancestry, which is her father's side. The "cheesy grits" reference is strictly to her mother's ancestry. Her father, Ron Godfrey, nevertheless could be called some sort of "cheesehead," for he was a farm boy from Wisconsin, who, after getting a degree in engineering from the University of Wisconsin (Madison), enlisted in the Navy. While helping to outfit a ship in New Jersey, he met Jane's mother at an Officer's Club dance in Manhattan, and they went on to make history, as it were.

Excursus: "Did You Help with The Underground Railroad, Grandpa?"

Shoofly Pie

My childhood home near Gap, PA, was about five miles from Christiana, PA. I remember Christiana for two things. The first thing is that it was the home of my mother's sister and her husband—my aunt and uncle—and we often visited them. I particularly liked visiting them because they had television before we did, so I could get to watch that captivating box. I mostly remember watching cartoons and Lassie.

Excursus: "What Did You Do During the Civil War, Grandpa?"—The Shoofly Pie side

Shoofly Pie

I'm not quite sure exactly when our Hertzler ancestors moved from Bern Township (near Hamburg), in Berks County, PA, to Caernarvon Township, in the northeastern corner of Lancaster County, PA. Certainly one of the reasons they moved was because of the Hochstetler Indian massacre in which the mother and two Hochstetler children were killed and the father, Jacob, and two sons were kidnapped by the Delaware Indians. The Amish (Northkill) community dispersed over time, with our ancestors moving south, while other Hertzlers headed west to Mifflin County.

Excursus: "What Did You Do During the Revolutionary War, Grandpa?"

I thought it might be interesting to recount how some of our ancestors responded to the various wars in the times that they lived. Since we haven't talked about the Shoofly Pie segment of our history for quite some time, let's go there first.

Cheesy Grits: The Charleston Howards

 So far, we've been tracing the Thorne branch of Jane's great-great-grandparents. Now it's time to turn to the Howards. Here's a graphic refresher:

Cheesy Grits: Slaveowners in the Family Revisited—Do I Owe Great-grandmother Thorne an Apology?

Having given vent to my Yankee self-righteousness by shaking my finger at Great-grandmother Thorne for owning slaves, I've subsequently calmed down a bit and tried to understand her situation a little better. After she inherited those three slaves from her common-law husband, her options may have been far more limited than we might think, and keeping the slaves might have been the best of a bad lot of choices.

Cheesy Grits: Slaveowners in the Family?

In an earlier post, I wrote about Jane's great-great-great-great-grandfather, John Stocks Thorne and the estate he left behind in trust to provide for his children by his former slave, Rebecca Thorne. After listing all of the financial instruments in his estate, I mentioned that there were "other listings" in his estate that I would return to later.

Cheesy Grits: Brown Fellowship Society Membership Roll (1790-1844)

This is a listing of the Brown Fellowship Society membership roll that was published by the Society in 1844. It includes all the names of those accepted as members through 1844 along with the date that they were accepted. It also identifies those who were subsequently "excluded" or who resigned. I regret to report that I'll have to delay an accounting of the reasons for which a member could be excluded until I return from my next trip to Charleston.

The original is in the archives at Charleston's Avery Research Center.

Cheesy Grits: The Brown Fellowship and other Societies

I've already mentioned the Brown Fellowship Society and, more recently, the Friendly Moralist Society. Although both of these benevolent societies were nominally burial societies, the fact of their existence along with the details of their practices tells us a great deal about the social history of Charleston's Free Persons of Color, especially before the Civil War.

Cheesy Grits: "We Come From People": Philip M. Thorne, Sr.

Philip M. Thorne of 7 Henrietta Street was not without stature himself. Although he of course married well when he married Elizabeth Weston, we know that he was recognized within his community as a leader both before and after the Civil War.

Cheesy Grits: "We Come From People!": Elizabeth Weston Thorne's brother Furman

Before going on to an exploration of some of the benevolent/social societies amongst Charleston's Free Persons of Color, I thought I'd write up what I know of Elizabeth Weston Thorne's brother Furman Weston.

During one of Dr. Henry Louis Gates's PBS Finding Your Roots programs, he talked about his own heritage in Cumberland, MD and Piedmont, WV. He related how the accomplishments of his ancestors was borne to him when he was young: "We come from people!" —meaning that his heritage included people of the dignity and stature that comes with achievement, and that he should conduct himself in a manner that befits an heir to that heritage. Or, as my mother used to say to me "Remember who you are!"

In researching Jane's family history, it rather quickly became clear to me that she could also say "I come from people!" regarding her Cheesy Grits heritage. Furman Weston and his descendants are but one example.

Cheesy Grits: Philip and Elizabeth Weston Thorne of Charleston

And now we reach Philip and Elizabeth Weston Thorne of Charleston. Philip and Elizabeth are Valeria's grandparents. Valeria is Jane's great-grandmother, who took her son (Jane's grandfather) and daughter and left Savannah for New York City around 1906, presumably seeking a better life. She died in Queens in 1947 and was buried in Flushing Cemetery. Here's a look at Valeria's family tree again to refresh your memory.

Cheesy Grits: John Stocks and Rebecca Thorne's Children

To refresh: we're exploring Jane's great-great-great-great-grandfather's family in Charleston. His name was John Stocks Thorne and his common-law wife was Rebecca, whom he purchased (along her child who was John Stocks Thorne's son) for $600 and then three weeks later, set free. She lived with him as his wife and bore him four more children. So in total, John Stocks and Rebecca Thorne had five mixed-race children: John, Thomas, Philip, Caroline, and Susan.

What do we know so far of what became of their children?

Cheesy Grits: Rebecca Thorne, a Free Woman of Color, Goes to Court

In an earlier post, we saw that John Stocks Thorne purchased a slave named Becky and her son Tom and then freed them. Becky lived with John Stocks Thorne as his common-law wife (legal marriage between the races was not permitted then) and bore him at least four more children. I say "at least" because there is a clear question about the maternity of one of the heirs in John Stocks Thorne's will. Let's have a look.