2019--Week 5--At the Library

As a child, I was pretty indifferent about the library.  I didn't like to read, so a place with books and a "hush up" policy just didn't appeal to me.

Ironically, for the entire 4 years of my college career, I worked in a specialized economics library.  I learned about cataloguing books, repairing damaged books, ordering books, and, of course, shelving books (making a yucky face here).   I also helped with a little bit of research for professors and economists working on my campus.  But I wasn't an economics major, or even a business major, so while I was aware of the titles and subjects of our contents, I couldn't have cared less.

That's me in the foreground in the Economics Library where I worked all four years of college.  Circa 1971.

In the late 1970's, when I started graduate school as a young professional, I was grateful to find I didn't have to go all the way into Washington, DC to the library of American University to research my papers.  My local library had a large business section and microfilm of a variety of periodicals and newspapers, and I spent many a Sunday afternoon there. I still hadn't fallen in love with the library at this point though.  However, I must not have been totally asleep at the wheel, and all those experiences primed me for being the library groupie I am today.

Time passed, and somewhere in my middle age, I suddenly became enchanted by our local libraries.  I'm sure it wasn't really "suddenly", but it took a while before it dawned on me that I enjoyed just spending time there.  I love to research...not just genealogy...but just about anything.  The thrill of the hunt! Most likely, this nascent skill emerged  as we accumulated enough financial stability and work seniority that we began traveling on vacations to places other than our hometowns in Tennessee and Texas, and I was the chief trip planner.

Before the internet, the library was the best place to find information about places to visit throughout the world: Fodor's, Frommer's, Lonely Planet........I get giddy just thinking about the possibilities.  I love being surrounded by all that information waiting to be found.

And as I visited more frequently, I found more and more of interest to me.  There are at least 3 public libraries within a 5 mile radius of my house, and a fourth only slightly farther away. I have attended Spanish language classes and conversation groups there; I have listened to jazz performances and  well known authors.  I've gotten copies of my tax forms there.  I've bought used books on sale from the library's "friends" events (sometimes worried I'm buying back my own donations).  I've used their computers when I've had internet problems at home.   Before the advent of cheap 3-way home printers, I spent lots of coinage at the copy machines there.  Now I don't even have to physically go to the library to check out books of interest; I can download e-books to the Kindle app on my iPad.

One nearby library is the home of the Virginia Room which holds lots of resources for those with ancestors hailing from the Old Dominion as Virginia is sometimes called.  It's possible, even probable, I have relatives who came through Virginia on their way to other places, but I've not made my way back to them yet.  Nevertheless, the Virginia Room is also the repository for a variety of genealogy resources on other topics.  Further, the special interest groups of my local genealogy society meet at the library.  The librarians have helped me with an interlibrary loan from a local university to check out a book about the history of vaudeville, so I can learn something about my great-grandmother's background.  I can access Ancestry.com from any library in our county!

Perhaps the libraries of my youth offered similar (low tech) opportunities for learning, but I really don't think so.  The library is now so much more than books.

Last year, in 2018, I attended my first ever National Genealogical Society (NGS) Conference in Grand Rapids, MI.  One of the optional excursions was to the Michigan Library and Historical Center in Lansing, and even though I wasn't sure what to expect, I signed up for that day long trip.  I was not disappointed.  The Western Michigan Genealogical Society did a fantastic job of organizing a fun day.  Besides getting to spend a day with other people who didn't roll their eyes when I talked about looking for my Dutch 3rd great grandmother, I learned a lot from the experience.  Our time in the Archives was limited to ensure we all had equal access, and we could then spend whatever time was left in the library.  I perused the local city directories and found entries for my 3rd great grandmother (yes, the Dutch one), under the several married names she had.   Michigan has made excellent efforts to digitize their records, but I enjoyed the process of looking through the stacks at this library to see what I could find!

I have at my doorstep the wonderful resources of the Library of Congress, but I'm still a relative novice at genealogy research, and I've only recently reached a point where I think I could benefit from a trip there.  I've started making notations about which ancestors I might find fruitful to search for there. It's on my list of things to do this summer when I get a chance to attend one of the monthly orientation briefings.  I might never come home.........

2019--Week 4--I'd Like to Meet Jane

There are many ancestors I would like to meet, but, at the moment, none so much as my great-grandmother, Jane Reiss......or Jenny Leary......or Jeanette Lipp......  I'm not sure I've completely uncovered all the names she used in her life.

Mrs. Jane Reiss

Jane Reiss (1874-1948) is the name she last used from the time she married Charles Reiss (1867-1917) prior to 1910 until her death. This is the name she used in her last will and testament.  It's the name I  started with when I began my family research, and indeed, I found she's listed by this name for many years in every city directory for Niagara Falls.  She and Charles owned a lovely home there, and after his death, she turned it into a boarding house, presumably to make ends meet. It was sold upon her death, and as best as I can ascertain is no longer standing.

1517 Whirlpool St., Niagara Falls, NY

My mother only met her grandmother once when she and her mother traveled from Bastrop, Louisiana to Niagara Falls around 1936.  Searching through my mother's papers, I found she had made a feeble attempt in the 1970's to collect some information on Jane by writing to the attorneys who had probated her estate.  My mother had a copy of Jane's will, as she was a beneficiary of $2,000 and a savings bond!   In her letter to the law firm, she mentioned that she had also heard her grandmother referred to as Jeanette.  The law firm responded that they had no records of the probate, and no partners remained from that far back in time.

My mother's papers also included a death notice for Jane/Jeanette's mother, Mrs. Mary Henning (1856-1936)  and, fortunately for me, that notice included Mrs. Henning's maiden name, Hanick.  I've since researched that name to death, and besides having a gazillion variations in spelling, it seems a relatively common Dutch name, with everyone named Mary/Maria or Henry/Hendrick.  But I digress.

Using Mary Henning's name, I eventually tracked down census documents where Mrs. Henning is living in Buffalo, NY with her two daughters: Jenny Leary and Charlotte Deacon.  Charlotte Deacon (1878-1965) is my mother's namesake, and I have 50-60 letters from her written to my mother, so I knew I had landed on the right family.  My mother's maiden name was Leary, her father, Dick (1893-1928), being a product of Jennie's 10-year marriage to Patrick Edward Leary (1867-1902).

I went for a long time believing that Henning was Jane's maiden name, until I came across the marriage records for her daughter, Frances (1890-1918).  It appeared instead her maiden name was Zipp.  Later, once I finally located the correct Patrick Leary, I was able to clarify the name was actually Lipp based on their marriage documents.  Mary Henning divorced John Lipp in 1879. 

 In the 1900 census, young Jenny lists herself as a "stage artist", and she and Patrick are already divorced.  Thanks to a DNA cousin from Buffalo, I found out about the Old Fulton Postcards web site, and located many old newspapers with advertisements or reviews about Jenny Leary performing at this or that theatre, sometimes billed as the "Leary Sisters" when her sister, Charlotte, aka Lottie, performed with her.  There's also at least one occasion of her performing with "Pat" Leary.

Weds., July 5, 1896, Buffalo Evening Journal

If I could meet her, I first would want her to regale me with stories of her life as a singer/dancer on vaudeville. (I suspect it wasn't all that glamorous, but still...)  Perhaps she could even sing a song or two for me, and show me some of her dance steps.  Being an introvert, I would like to know what it's like to be a professional "show off".  Is this how she met her husband, Patrick? 

And then I would want to get down to brass tacks!  She would need to explain to me why her two young children are not shown living with her in the censuses.  Where are they?  Who's taking care of them while she travels about the region performing?  How did she support herself after she and Patrick divorced?  Why did they get divorced in Grand Rapids, MI rather than in Buffalo?  Had they been living with relatives there?

Why did her son, my grandfather, run away from home as an adolescent?  Did that coincide with her marriage to Mr. Reiss?  Was she worried about him, or was it a relief to not have that responsibility?  How long was it before she heard from him and knew that he was still alive?  How many years passed before she saw him again?

Why did she begin referring to herself as Jane?  Was she trying to erase her past as a performer, or was it an effort to sound more mature and befitting her role as the wife of a well known telegrapher from a prominent family?  Or perhaps both?

What was her relationship like with her brother, Eugene Henning (1879-1946), that he bequeathed her only $1 in his will, with the statement "for reasons well known to her"?

Yes, Jane/Jenny/Jeanette, it seems you remade yourself a couple of times over, and I'm sure your life wasn't easy.  I wish I could sit down with you and just talk about your life to gain a fuller understanding of the family I came from.

2019--Week 3--Unusual Name

JAN. 24, 2019 UPDATE:  I've continued to poke around on the internet looking for other de la O descendants, and I've found another interesting theory about the source of the name. I found this on a blog called "Cafe de la O: Origins of the de la O Family in the Americas".  This one was posited by Daniel de la O from Mexico College who had done some research on the family name while working on his masters' thesis.  In the French language, the French word "l'eau" means water (singular).  That would literally mean someone "from the water", as in a location.  He explains his research pointed to one of the origins of the surname in France, in the region of la Vierge de l'eau. This means Virgin of the Water, famous because the Virgin Mary appeared over a water spring.  None of this is confirmed in any way, but I find this theory more plausible.


In the distant past of my paternal grandmother, Papias Peru (1888-1967), is a woman named Maria Margarita de la O (1734-????), wife of Juan Bautista Peru (1727-????). I've been seeing this for a while on various family trees linked to other members of my grandmother's family.  I've added this lineage to my own family tree as "place holders" for the time being, with the expectation that I will do a thorough vetting and validation when I get back to researching this part of my family.  I'm worried that this is someone's wishful thinking to descend from this couple, as Juan Bautista Peru's military exploits from a local presidio in Mexico have been well documented.   All I need to do is find sources for the connections between Juan Peru in 1727 to my grandmother's birth in 1888.  (Tongue in cheek.......)

In the meantime, I've been puzzled by the name "de la O" wondering if that was a transcription blunder that had rendered the name untranslatable.  And then, just yesterday, I received a message on Ancestry from the wife of one of my Peru cousins.  Although I had not inquired about it, there was a link to a blog on the history of the "de la O" name in the larger message she sent me about our family tree.

From reading the blog, I learned the name "de la O" originated in Spain and refers to the O's sung in spiritual hymns.  Maria Margarita de la O was evidently highly regarded in her village for being the "madrina" or godmother to many children of different backgrounds, including mestizo, mulatto and español, and for children of unknown parentage. Just to keep it interesting, her name was also sometimes written “Margarita De Lao.”

Given that it sounds like she and her husband were both people to be admired, I hope I can prove my relationship to this woman with such an unusual name!

2019--Week 2--Charlotte's CHALLENGE

There are so many challenges in doing genealogy research, and my most enigmatic (so far) has been my maternal grandfather.  Since I could probably write just about every prompt about his life, and I've written about him several times this past year, I wanted to cover this writing prompt from a different angle.

My mother, Charlotte, was orphaned at age 13 when her mother, Ruby, died from tuberculosis.  Her father had died when she was just 2.  In reality, my mother had already been in the care of other family members for several years prior to her mother's death, while Ruby lived at the Modern Woodmen TB sanitorium in Colorado hoping for the best outcome. At least once, someone took my mother by train to Colorado to see her mother, and from what I can glean from my grandmother's diary, there was an expectation that my mother would stay and go to school there.  However, my mother was unhappy with that arrangement, and so she returned to her aunts and uncles in Louisiana.

Entry in Ruby's diary.  "Baby" is one of my mother's nicknames. She was also called "Gal".

Ruby writes about my mother's return to Louisiana.

Ruby is on the far right, snapped here with other patients at Modern Woodmen TB Sanitorium.

The death of my grandmother was something that my mother never got over, it seems.  Whenever she would get "blue", she would cry, and this devastating event would surface as one reason for
her low mood.

Over the years, she would occasionally get an inquiry from a distant family member who was interested in the genealogy of our family.  For whatever reason, my great Aunt Edna, who had been my mother's caretaker after Ruby's death, would always refer them to my mother, with the expectation that she had possession of a family bible. (She didn't.)

Digging through her mother's few belongings to attempt to answer whatever questions were posed to her was my mother's challenge.  In 1975, she wrote one cousin in response, "...the last time this came up...it tore me to pieces digging through the few papers of my mother's, trying to find any kind of record among the one scrapbook and the one picture album my mother left me...I cried and cussed on alternate days for 2 weeks".  Nevertheless, she wrote a 7-page typed response (with lots of colorful language), and added several hand written pages of a family tree.  As I compare her notes to the records I've found, I am amazed at the accuracy of her memory.

Let's try to remember as family historians that sometimes other people will have challenges, perhaps similar to my mother's, that will make it distasteful, or even traumatic, for them to share certain aspects of the past.

2019--Week 1--FIRST No More

I am the first and only child of my parents marriage. After they divorced, my father soon remarried and produced 5 more children with his second wife.  And although I didn't know those children as I was growing up, I knew I was the first and oldest. 

A few years ago as I began my genealogy research, the first thing I did was order a DNA kit from Ancestry.com. Of my four grandparents, 3 out of 4 were either first or second generation citizens. Only one had a long line of ancestors born in the US. I was anxious and hopeful to find some cousins who could help me learn more about the diverse backgrounds of my family. I anticipated the possibility of finding other offspring of my father's as he had a quite a reputation for being a ladies' man. 

So, on April 26, 2016, I logged on to my barebones Ancestry account and placed an order for DNA kits for my husband and myself. After I completed that task, I decided to take a look at my family tree and do a little research before turning in for the night. I noticed a "shaky leaf" on my mother's name, so I clicked on it. Her mother was one of ten children and I already knew there were cousins by the dozens who had Ancestry accounts, and I figured whatever clue was lurking was from this branch of the family. These connections were of little interest to me, as I had grown up hearing about the Littles and Wombles, most of whom had lived around the Arkansas-Louisiana state line since the mid 1800s.  I was far more interested to make a connection with my cousins who were descended from the Irish, Polish, or Mexican branches of my family. 

But to make the shaking leaf go away, I clicked on it, and went to the other family trees of people researching my mother's surname.  There was one family tree for someone whose name was not familiar to me, but, again, as the Little-Womble families branched out there were lots of unfamiliar surnames.  So I opened that tree and saw that it included my mother and father and me. However, the entry for me showed me as deceased, and having lived in Louisiana, a different Debra born also in 1950.  Further, there was another child born 3 years earlier than I, shown under my mother and a second unknown man. There was a birth index for the child's birth, and the mother's name was someone unknown to me. Someone had done some sloppy research just to fill out their tree, I opined. 

I whipped off an email immediately to the owner of the tree and informed her I was alive and well, and that I was an only child!  I pointed out the information from the birth index did not support her tree.   By now it was close to 11 pm, but I got a quick response from the owner, the now adult daughter of the second child.  She explained her mother had been adopted and the name on the birth index was the adoptive mother's name; the name on the original birth certificate was the same as my mother's. 

We exchanged a few more emails that night and the next day she posted the birth certificate so I could see it for myself.  My DNA kit could not get here soon enough!

You are warned when you buy a kit that there could be surprises in store. Sure enough, my DNA results matched with the owner of the tree, the highest DNA match I have.  I was supplanted as the first born.

Sadly, this newfound half sister passed away prematurely nearly 30 years ago as did my mother. But her daughter, my niece, and I have begun a nice friendship.