Cheesy Grits: Updates on the sailmaking business and the DAR application

W.H. Auden ruefully observed somewhere that "poems are never finished; only abandoned." He should have tried family history, which you can't possibly finish but can't really abandon either because of all the new information that keeps coming along.

Cheesy Grits: How Did Freedom Come to the Thornes?

The story of freedom for the Thornes seems to start in New York City—at least, that's as far back as I've traced it to date. (I'm still working on it, of course; family history never really ends.) Around 1785, a white New Yorker named John Gardner Thorne moved from New York to Charleston. I don't yet know if he fought in the Revolutionary War, although he would have been of age to fight. All we know is that his epitaph notes that he lived in Charleston for "...about thirty five years." Since he died in 1820, my arithmetic says he arrived around 1785.

Cheesy Grits: Charleston's Free Persons of Color

Who were Charleston's "Free Persons of Color"? A simple description works well here: "Free Persons of Color" were those persons who had African ancestry but who were not slaves; they were free.

Free Persons of Color were found wherever there were slaves throughout the "New World." According to the U.S. census, in 1860, there were very nearly 4 million slaves in the U.S. and nearly 500,000 Free Persons of Color. A surprising number of them lived in the South in the very heart of chattel slavery. In 1861, Charleston's population totaled 48,409: 26,969 white, 17,655 slaves, and 3,785 "free colored."

Cheesy Grits: The Thornes of Charleston before the Civil War

Having found Rebecca Thorne's parents, Philip and Elizabeth Thorne, and several siblings in the federal censuses for 1880 and 1870, it was time to see if we could break through the wall of the Civil War and find them in the 1860 federal census for South Carolina before that state seceded from the Union in December, 1860.

Cheesy Grits: The Thornes of Charleston in 1880 and 1870

Once we knew that Jane's great-grandmother's parents were Robert Howard and Rebecca (Thorne) Howard, it was a piece of relative cake to look them up in the 1880 census. And here's what we found:

Cheesy Grits: The Holy City

So we're back on the trail of Jane's ancestry again. Our major focus thus far has been her great-grandmother, Valeria Thorne Howard Ralston Wilcoxson. Although the federal census sheets had told us she was born in the state of South Carolina, it wasn't until we got a copy of her death certificate that we discovered that she had been born in the city of Charleston, and that her parents were Robert Howard and Rebecca Thorne.

Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland: Frostburg: an apartheid of memory.

As I mentioned in the previous post, my search for Garrett County's "missing persons" led me to Prof. Lynn Bowman's work recovering the history of African-Americans in Frostburg (MD), which is in Allegany County, the next county east from Garrett County.

Like Garrett County, Allegany County has long been overwhelmingly European—yet with an enduring African-American presence that had been almost completely forgotten. What Prof. Bowman has documented is the depth of the roots of that presence in Frostburg, as well as the hornswoggling that simply pushed nearly all of them out, removing them from the landscape and, ineluctably, from modern memory.

Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland—Missing Persons in Garrett County (Part III)

I've long been interested in railroads, and learning about the B&O's climb up the Appalachians to Oakland and thence to the banks of the Ohio was no exception. But a whole new chapter of understanding the history of railroading in the U.S. opened up when I discovered Theodore Kornweibel's Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey. (Johns Hopkins: 2010) That this is history in photographs makes it all the more powerful—to me, at least. I mean, I've read about A. Philip Randolph and the organizing of the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters, but Kornweibel has found pictures that put faces to these stories and more.

The book is encyclopedic: from the slaves—both men and women—who built the railroads, to the porters and Pullman maids, who babysat for and read bedtime stories to little white children on the luxury trains, to the recurrent use of railroad themes and imagery in popular song and folk art, to the role that the trains played in the Great Migration so thoughtfully described by Isabel Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House: 2010): the railroads are an essential piece of this history.

Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland—Missing Persons in Garrett County (Part II)

Last July, Jane and I went to the Garrett County (MD) Fairgrounds overlooking Deep Creek Lake for the Tristate Relief Sale, an auction sponsored by local Amish, Mennonite, and Brethren churches to benefit the work of the Mennonite Central Committee. They sell all kinds of things, including—inevitably—shoofly pie. Jane was interested in the quilts. I had intended to do some fishing, but it was raining off and on, and, since I was feeling less waterproof than usual, I had given up on fishing for the day.

Deep Creek Lake (Garrett County, MD).
The Garrett County Fairgrounds are near the head of
the lake, which is at the top left corner of the photo.

Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland—Missing Persons in Garrett County (Part I)

Smith Island Cake
from Wikipedia

It was surely the oddest of coincidences that on the one day of my life I visited my state government representatives in Annapolis, they—or at least a committee of them—were hearing testimony on the merits of making Smith Island Cake the official State Dessert of Maryland. Being a pie man myself, I have never tasted Smith Island Cake, although the pictures do make it look wicked good. Since we have Amish in both eastern and western Maryland, I would have thought shoofly pie or apple dumplings would also have been in the running, but they weren't. The Smith Island folk did themselves proud and carried the day, which is something the Amish would not have undertaken on the grounds that it is prideful.

Shoofly pie: Dad—Postscript

It’s interesting to note that in his taped memoir, Dad makes no mention of the heart disease that eventually took him. Here is what I remember.

I had gone to Europe in 1972 with the first Euroterm from Eastern Mennonite College (now University) under the leadership of Dr. Al Keim. When the rest of the Eastern Mennonite group returned to the U.S. in April, 1973, I elected to stay on in Paris.

Shoofly pie: My Dad—Jake's Granddad; Transcript of Tape 2

I had to change tapes so, we’ll start in again now there...Silvis, Illinois¹...Bill Anderson got on the train. I started to get on and the police caught me. And they held a gun on me till the caboose came along. And then they swung on the caboose and left me standing there. Here it was night-time, alone and Bill had all our money. I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know whether to go home, or go on out to Illinois,² or go out to Kansas.

Shoofly Pie: My Dad—Jake's Granddad;Transcript of Tape 1

How does one go about talking about your life?¹ What can a person put in and leave out to make it interesting to somebody else?

I think I’ll go back to 1932. At that time, I was 19 years old.² There was a Depression on in the United States. There was no work for married men, let alone single. I had worked previously three years at Western Union, and they were just in the process of expanding, and I was to go to Buffalo, New York, to learn to operate the teletype.³ Instead of that, I got laid off. I had no income at 19 years of age. My father had other children at home–a brother and two sisters⁴–and he couldn’t find any work at all. Finally he got a job cleaning rabbit pens at a dollar and a half a week. I felt perhaps that at my age, I could go out and earn some money someplace in the world.

Shoofly Pie: My Dad—Jake's grandfather

My father, Alvin E. Miller, was born in Fair Oaks, Indiana on January 22, 1913. His parents were Old Order Amish and he was raised in that tradition. Being raised Amish, however, is not the same as being a member of the Amish church. Part of what is called the "Believers' Church" tradition is that only adults can comprehend the gravity of the decision to join church, so only adults are permitted to join. Although the modern TV presentations are almost invariably wildly over-hyped, Amish youngsters so sometimes spend time "running around," before they join the church and settle down to the kind of sober life that is expected of Amish adults.

Dad was no exception; however, it just happened that the Great Depression coincided with his time of "running around," so most of his time was spent "running around looking for work." He left two tapes of memoirs, and the first one covers the time he spent running around looking for work. I transcribed those tapes and later annotated them and inserted headings to help with the text flow. What follows in the next post is the annotated transcription of the first tape he left.

Dad passed away in March, 1978, so neither Jane nor Jake ever met him.

A technical note: if you put your mouse on the footnotes, you should get a little pop-up with the footnote text in it. You must, however, open the jump to the full post for them to work. Grateful thanks to Ruth Kitchin Tillman, whose HTML fu is very strong, for making these work.

From L-R: unknown, Allen Fisher, my dad, Sylvester Fisher, Elias Fisher
The picture was taken in 1940 in front of the Millwood Mill,
where Dad was working then. Sylvester Fisher and Dad traveled together sometimes.
Sylvester would marry my mother's sister,thereby becoming my Uncle Sylvester.

Cheesy Grits: Valeria's Final Resting Place

As I mentioned earlier, the death certificate for Jane's great-grandmother Valeria was a great find because it had so much information about her. One of the final pieces of information was the place where she was buried: Flushing Cemetery. So it seemed a reasonable thing to see if we couldn't find her grave—after all, to this point, we had so few actual tangible signs of this part of Jane and Jake's ancestry.

I contacted the main office at the Flushing Cemetery (old style, FLushing 9-0100; new style, (718)359-0100) and the young woman there was quite helpful, confirming that Valeria Wilcoxson was indeed buried there. As it turns out, many people go to cemeteries looking for graves and headstones.

Cheesy Grits: Valeria's life in Savannah

Before I pursue the Charleston clues that figured so largely in Jane's maternal great-grandmother Valeria's death certificate, I should spend a bit more time on what we know of Valeria and George's life in Savannah, even though it is not very much.

Cheesy Grits: What Became of George Ralston of Savannah?

After having located Valeria and the two children in New York City, we wondered for a long time what happened to her husband, George Ralston, who remained in Savannah when Valeria moved north. He was in the 1910 federal census, but not in the 1920 census. Savannah city directories showed him residing at 625 E. Broad until 1914, but not thereafter.

As it turned out, Jane took a trip to Savannah in 2009 with one of her friends whose son was a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. On a whim, I suggested that she take an excursion out to one of Savannah's largest cemeteries, Laurel Grove, to see if there was any record of his having been buried there.

Cheesy Grits: Why Did Valeria Leave Savannah?

Above is a graphic depiction of where we've been so far in our exploration of Jane and Jake's cheesy grits heritage. That's Jane's mother (Jake's beloved Nana) highlighted in blue, with her father, the track coach at Brooklyn's Midwood High School, above her and her paternal grandparents, George and Valeria next. Robert Howard and Rebecca Thorne are the names of Valeria's parents that we didn't know until we saw her death certificate. (Although her name doesn't appear on this chart, we have learned Jane's maternal grandmother's name—Audrey—but nothing more so far.)

Cheesy Grits: Valeria's Death Certificate leads us to Charleston

Every now and then, we family historians hit what feels like the "mother lode" of information. After finding only small hints or, worse, nothing at all, a document appears that clears the path for years of future work.

Humble Pies

An old friend reminded me of two other humble/peasant pies that I grew up eating in addition to the shoofly pie I mentioned earlier: vanilla pie, and milk or "poor man's pie," as my father used to call it. Vanilla pie is well-known amongst the Pennsylvania Amish, while the milk, or "poor man's pie" seems to be known much more broadly.

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.

Shoofly Pie: Amish Homesteaders in Colorado, Part II

Grandma Miller in her kitchen in Nappanee,
Indiana in the late 1950s. Being Amish, 
she is not pleased that her son is taking her
picture. I don't know what to make of the
overhead light and the curtains on the window,
as they seem un-Amish to me.

My paternal grandparents, Phineas and Elizabeth ("Bettie") Anderson Miller and their two children were part of a group of Amish families that homesteaded in Cheyenne County, in eastern Colorado, not far from the town of Kit Carson. (I believe it might have been closest to the unincorporated town of Wild Horse.) My grandparents left Indiana for Colorado in the fall of 1909 but came back to Indiana permanently in 1911, as the possibilities for farming were not what they had been led to believe by the land developers.

I only remember my Grandma Miller visiting us once when we lived at Millwood (near Gap, PA), and that was in 1957. Grandpa Phineas had passed away in 1953, so of course he wasn't along. My dad managed to get Grandma to sit down with him and his tape recorder and he interviewed her about their experiences homesteading in Colorado. I transcribed that interview a few years back and here it is.

Shoofly Pie: Amish Homesteaders in Colorado, Part I

We left off the Shoofly Pie historical narrative with the Dane in the family, Augustus Walbus, having changed his name, joined the Old Order Amish church and married an Amish bishop's daughter, whose name was Lovina. John (Augustus Walbus) Anderson and Lovina (Hochstetler) Anderson settled in Mt. Ayr in Newton County, Indiana, where John farmed and Lovina gave birth. Ten times. My grandmother, Elizabeth Anderson, was born in 1884. She was number three and was always called "Bettie."

Shoofly Pie: Amish Historiography

We've been spending some time with the Cheesy Grits side of the family, so now it's back to the Shoofly Pie side.

I should first say something about Amish historiography. Because the Amish don't place a high value on the higher levels of formal education for themselves, they don't generally invest themselves in producing what the rest of the world thinks of as historical scholarship. (There is one notable current exception, David Luthy, although he also represents a different kind of rarity: someone from the "outside"—a Roman Catholic with a Master's degree from Notre Dame—who joined the Amish as an adult.) The lack of formal training emphatically does not mean that there is no interest in history among the Amish; rather, and for various reasons, they simply refrain from producing what academics think of as historical monographs. Modern scholarship about the Amish is generally produced by ex-Amish and Mennonites, with the late John A. Hostetler, and the still very-much-alive and prolific Don Kraybill amongst the leading lights.

Cheesy Grits: A Ralston in New York City: One Question Answered

After we had run out of Soundex-based census searches to be made in Savannah—and we still had no clue about any South Carolina ancestors even though both Granddad George and his mother, Valeria, were born there—we nevertheless had one more fruitful census search: George Ralston in New York in the 1920 federal census. That find brought us to Granddad Ralston in New York City, as well as our first piece of information about Jane's grandmother.

Still working from the old Soundex index cards and the microfilm reader at the National Archives, we started to look first for Valeria Ralston in New York City. Nothing in 1910 or 1920. Where had she gone?

Cheesy Grits: The First Visit to Savannah

Savannah had never been on our travel radar before. Jane has long been a baseball fan and wanted to go to spring training in Florida, so one spring, we packed our bags into our car, drove our car to the Auto Train and headed south, with the intention of taking in a baseball game or two and then making our way slowly back north by car—with a stop in Savannah, of course.

Cheesy Grits: A Ralston in Savannah: Part the Third: More about Great-grandfather George Ralston

Having discovered that Jane's grandfather, George Ralston, was documented by the 1900 federal census as an eight-year-old boy living in Savannah, GA, with his family—father George, mother Valeria, and sister Mirtle—we discovered that, as usual, answering one question raised at least three or four new ones. Now we were on the trail of what we could find out about Jane's great-grandfather George Ralston in the other federal censuses, starting with 1870. (His birthdate was given as 1867.) Was he kin to the Cherokee Ralstons, or did he spring from some other Ralston family line?

Finding Great-grandfather George in the 1880 census wasn't so hard, although what we found of course raised even more questions: in 1880, he was a 13 year old boy, living on East Broad St., and with a family with several other family names, none of them Ralston, The head of the house was a white man named Frederick "Lapin" (it turned out to be "Lapham"), age 60, who was born in Maine—Freeport, as we found out later. Frederick Lapham's parents were also Maine-born. (We still have no idea what brought him to Savannah, although we do know now that he arrived before the Civil War.)

Cheesy Grits: A Ralston in Savannah, Part the Second, or "I Don't Think We're in Southport Any More..."

There was a lot of information in the 1900 federal census sheet regarding Jane's grandfather, George Ralston, and of course it was—besides his name and his date of birth—all new to us. It's best to start at the beginning, except that the beginning—the family—itself was a puzzle, as the family name appears to have been crossed out on the census sheet and a variant spelling given, but it is impossible to tell from the image which was the original and which the correction. The two names? "Ralston" and "Rolston!" Shades of Norma Dell Smith and the Cherokee Ralston/Rolstons! Of course, the fact that a census taker had stumbled over a family name isn't documentation of anything other than the fact that the census taker stumbled over a family name.

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.

Cheesy Grits: Midwood High School

Who, where, or what was Midwood High School in Brooklyn? Being an Amish Mennonite originally from Lancaster County, I of course had no idea. Even though I had lived in Manhattan for two years while completing my alternative service at NYU Medical Center in lieu of serving in the military (maybe I'll get to that story sometime), I had never gotten out of Manhattan much, and had no idea where Midwood High School might have been. My New York stretched from Chinatown to Lincoln Center on the West Side and the Guggenheim on the East Side. I was tabula rasa about anywhere else. Never once went to see the Mets or Yankees play.

Jane wasn't sure either, although she remembered driving to Brooklyn with her mother to see her grandfather when she was very young—so young that she remembered no details.

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.

Cheesy Grits: Here Be Dragons

As I mentioned earlier, my shoofly pie heritage was a commonplace in our family. Every family had a family Bible that charted the family vital records: marriages, births, and deaths. And getting to know someone in that setting meant finding out which branch of which family you were talking to. "Oh, you're Abe's Gid's daughter..." meaning that you were the granddaughter of Abraham and your father was Abraham's son, Gideon.

So, naturally enough, when I met the brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty I would eventually marry, I soon asked her about her family, too. Doesn’t everybody have fragile books, crumbling photos, and batty aunts full of family lore? Doesn’t everybody know this stuff?

Shoofly Pie: A Dane Amongst the Amish?

Although Jake's background through me is a long line of Amish and Amish Mennonites from the upper Rhine, there is at least one fairly recent wild (sort of) card in my ancestral line: my father’s grandfather, a Dane who left Copenhagen around 1870 reportedly to escape conscription. Setting out impossibly across the North Sea in a small open boat with several friends who also wanted to avoid conscription, they were picked up somewhere by a larger vessel on its way to America.

Excursus: Maryland's Eastern Shore: The Two Johns

The "Two Jakes" trope from my "Two Jakes" post came from my having read about Maryland's "The Two Johns," in the WPA Guide Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State, published in 1940.

"The Two Johns" were both people and place: as people, they were two vaudevillians from the late 1800s. While most sources agree that their given names were John and John, the sources don't agree on their family names, which are given variously as Crossey, Stewart and Hart. Some sources have them as father and son. The sources also agree regarding their heft—enormous—with Hulbert Footner's account below being typical.

Shoofly pie: The Two Jakes

The First Jake

Our son Jacob was named for two Jacobs from my history. The first Jacob was my fourth great-grandfather, Jacob Hertzler. This Jacob was born in Langnau im Emmental in Canton Berne, Switzerland around 1703. I don't know what his situation was in Langnau im Emmental aside from the fact that he was involved with the Amish. Just to be clear, the Amish were followers of Jacob Amman, who had split from other Swiss Anabaptist Brethren over issues of church discipline.

Because of the ongoing persecutions of the Anabaptists by the Swiss, Jacob Hertzler and his family left the Emme Valley and made their way first to the Palatinate in southwestern Germany, where there were others who shared their views on how to do church. Jacob may have been ordained a bishop in the Amish church while in the Palatinate. From thence, the family went on to Rotterdam, where they caught a ship, the Saint Andrew, for the New World.

Introduction, with things to eat

Cheesy grits and shoofly pie is a pretty good description of our son Jacob’s pedigree: cheesy grits from the South Carolina Lowcountry and shoofly pie from the Old Order Amish and Amish Mennonites of Indiana and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. My family always knew about our shoofly pie part, but discovering my wife’s South Carolina Lowcountry and other origins has been a real eye-opener. She has always thought of herself as more or less entirely a Yankee—an athlete, cheerleader, and prom queen, no less—born in Norwalk, Connecticut and raised in nearby Southport. All that’s true, of course, but it turns out to be far from the whole story. I’m going to have a crack at telling more of that story here, but I’m going to start with food rather than relatives.