Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland: African-American Schools in Garrett County

The 1880 and 1900 federal censuses for Oakland, MD, showed a number of school-age children, so the natural question that immediately arose was "In this era of segregation, where did these African-American children go to school?"

My first clue came from a more-or-less off-hand mention on the Western Maryland Historical Library website about the opening of an African-American school in Oakland. The entire mention was this:

From "The Republican" newspaper, November 29, 1884: "A colored school was opened in Oakland last week, with Mr. Patrick Stanton as teacher."

Paying Our Respects in the Potter's Field

Having paid our respects to Dagmar at the Riverside Columbarium, we had a wonderful dinner on the upper West Side with our son, Jake, and one of my oldest and dearest friends who lives on the Upper West Side. We then retired to our digs in Stuyvesant Town for the evening.

In closing out the evening, I had mentioned to our son, who lives in Williamsburg, that we were planning to drive out to Long Island to pay our respects to Jane's grandmother (and his great-grandmother) Audrey McCabe Ralston, who had been buried in a potter's field near Mt. Sinai, NY. In planning for this trip, I had learned that the train ride (LIRR) was about two hours one-way, plus we would have to rent a car or take a cab from the Port Jefferson terminus to drive to the eight-plus miles cemetery where Audrey is buried. So I had decided to simply rent a car in Manhattan so we could dispense with the train, etc., and have a nice excursion exploring parts of Long Island Jane and I had not seen.

Whereupon Jake protested and offered us the loan of a vehicle for the day—not his, to be sure, but his roommate's. It was a generous offer and we gratefully accepted it.

Paying Our Respects at the Riverside Columbarium

A second mission in our trip to New York City was to pay our respects to the McCabe sisters: Jane's grandmother Audrey (our Socialist cheesecake), and Audrey's younger sister, Dagmar. It seems a long time ago that I wrote about the unexpected appearance of a member of Dagmar's family. Audrey had been born in 1898 and Dagmar in 1900, both in the San Juan Hill section of Manhattan. But because I was most interested in Jane's line, I simply never followed up on the two references I had seen in the 1900 and 1910 federal censuses to the younger sister—especially given how mangled the spelling of the younger sister's name apparently was. I mean, "Degnan" for "Dagmar"?

The appearance of one of Dagmar's descendants changed all that. Dagmar had lived a long, full and apparently happy life in New York City and had two daughters who were both accomplished in their fields.

A Trip to the Big Apple to look at Socialist Cheesecake

Doing family history can take you to lots of exotic places, both geographic and emotional. Our recent trip to New York City had some of both. One moment, we were in the Rare Book Reading Room of New York Public Library's Schomburg Center struggling to stifle ourselves over the photo on the cover of the May 1919 issue of The Crusader, and then a few hours later, we found ourselves ensconced in Riverside Church's cozy columbarium, surrounded by marble plaques marking the final resting places of ash-filled urns. We weren't just being weird: the ashes of two of Jane's relatives are in there.

What a trip—but first things first: our Crusader cover girl.

Hamlet's Grandchildren!

One of the long-unanswered questions about Jane's ancestry was the Danish connection via the then-Danish-now-U.S. Virgin Islands. To recap a bit, Jane's great-grandmother, Mathilde Dagmar Christensen, was born in St. Thomas to a local woman of color, Adeline Diguise (the spellings vary), and a Danish police officer serving in St. Thomas. That story was told earlier in this blog.

But at that point, I could go no further than the name of Mathilde's father, Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen.