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?

The 1930 federal census was available, so I pored over it, looking for the Ralston family in Manhattan. Couldn't find them, although I looked and looked. It turned out that I was looking for them in the wrong place: they had moved out of New York City and into New Rochelle in Westchester County. Number 22 Clinton Avenue, to be precise. George Ralston, of Charleston by way of Savannah, was still a schoolteacher in the public schools, and there was no occupation listed for, Audrey, his wife. By 1930, they had three daughters: "Rebbecca", Myrtle and Vera. (We had already known that Jane's mother's given name was Audrey Rebecca; the census made clear that for some time, she went by "Rebecca" rather than "Audrey" as she was known in later life. Given that her mother was also "Audrey," it made some sense to have been called by a different name.)

Ralstons in New Rochelle, NY
1930 federal census

You must remember that the census during this period recorded the birthplace of each person enumerated and recorded the birthplace of their parents as well. Those were in fact the clues that had helped lead us to Jane's Cheesy Grits lineage in Savannah and Charleston. So there were no surprises regarding Jane's grandfather, George Ralston: we already knew that he had been born in South Carolina as had his parents.

But what's this? The 1920 census for Audrey (Jane's grandmother) said she was born in New York and that her parents were also born in New York. But the 1930 census, as you can see above, has some startlingly different information. While Audrey's birthplace is again given as New York, it reports that her parents were not born in New York at all: rather, both her father and mother (Jane's great-grandparents) were born in the West Indies!

Whoa! Really? Is somebody pulling our legs?

Well, as it turns out, no: look at the bottom line of the screen grab for this entry: the name given is "Dagmar McCabe" [later searches confirmed that the census taker had not entered her name properly and that "Dagmar" was indeed her given name] and her relationship to the head of the house, Jane's grandfather George Ralston, is given as "mother-in-law." That means that Dagmar McCabe is in fact Audrey's mother and Jane's great-grandmother! And she gives her birthplace as "West Indies," and her father's birthplace as "Denmark" and her mother's as "West Indies."

The West Indies?! Denmark?! Jane has ancestors from there?! As the late great Phil "The Scooter" Rizzuto of the New York Yankees would have said "O Holy Cow!"

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