A lesson in restraint

I have this character flaw. I am compelled to correct anything that I see as being patently factually incorrect, especially when it comes to history and even more so when it comes to genealogy. It causes almost a physical discomfort and preys on my mind.

At the same time, there is the concept of asking oneself "Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?" before saying, well, just about anything. One person I found said that it's okay to speak if at least two of those criteria are present.

In an online community to which I belong, there is a place to discuss genealogy. A person posted yesterday that her 27th great grandfather was Julius Caesar and she is also a descendant of James Polk, the 11th president of the US.

I thought back to things I've seen about Rome -- I, Claudius and Rome -- and I couldn't remember Julius Caesar having had grandchildren. So I looked it up. Julius Caesar had a daughter Julia by his first wife. Julia had one child who died, unnamed, after only a few days. Caesar also had a son Caesarion by Cleopatra, but Octavian (later Augustus) had the boy killed at the same time that Mark Antony had to fall on his sword and Cleo made an asp of herself. There seems to be a suggestion that Brutus (you know, the "honorable man" who killed Caesar) was actually Caesar's son from a dalliance with Brutus's mother, but Brutus only had one child, too, who died in infancy. Therefore, there are no progeny of Julius Caesar. It possibly could be that the descent is through an adopted child (those Romans adopted people left and right, even when the adoptee still had parents), but even so, the idea that any line could actually be traced back to 44 BC stretches credulity.

Since I was already Googling, I thought I'd take a look at James Polk. That's only going back 200 years or so, and we do have records from then, so there's a possibility this could be true. One visit to Wikipedia was enough to tell me that Polk never had children and was believed to have been sterile because of an operation he had as a teenager.

So.... I can post this on the message board or not. Using the criteria above, yes, it is true. Necessary? Probably only to ease my own discomfort about having unchallenged wrong genealogical information on the 'net. Kind? Probably not, no.

The devil's advocate (or maybe just the devil) in me suggests that, maybe this was intentional, to see if anyone would challenge her. For her to have picked two people that have no progeny seems to be quite a coincidence. Her claim for a source is "a relative who pretty much makes her living by genealogy" and maybe she's saying that professional genealogists are not worth paying for. But overall, I think this argument is just me trying to make up a justification.

I'll get over it, but it will likely bother me for a while. I have to keep telling myself that not giving in to my compulsions will make me a better person.

Genealogy stuff: the Irish

Sorry. This is really rambly. I started to write one thing and ended up in a completely different place. A well. It's my blog. :-)

I've been going back and filling in some of the data I was missing on some folks. In particular, I was focusing on Jim's Irish ancestors who were in Boston from the mid 1850s. I'm used to having grown up in your basic middle-class household and it's odd for me to be looking into families where the norm was abject poverty. I have a great deal of respect for these people and admire the fact that they just managed to get from day to day.

One was Jim's great-grandfather, John McLaughlin. He was in the first generation of American-born children, his parents, Jeremiah and Catherine (McKeon) McLaughlin, having come from Ireland sometime before 1853. Neither of John's parents could read or write, although Jeremiah may have learned later on in life. At the age of 14, John was finished with school and working as an errand boy. He must have learned his way around the city in that job, because the next time he appears on a census, he was 24 and listed as a "hack driver." I have a very Dickensian sort of image, transplanted to America, of a man in a tall black hat with a frock coat. He first was listed as having that occupation in 1880 and was still driving a carriage forty years later.

John McLaughlin must have done pretty well at his job. He managed to raise eleven children and at one point there were seventeen people living in the house that he owned. There was John, eight unmarried adult children, one married child, her husband and six of John's grandchildren. It must have been a large house, although it would have been incredibly crowded.

The other one that has touched me recently was John's mother-in-law, Ann McKee Vass. I don't know a whole lot about her, except that she came from Newfoundland with her husband William and at least one child Catherine. I stumbled onto a bit of information just by chance the other day. I was trying to find the Vass family in the census, but they just weren't there for some reason. There was a listing for Ann Vass, though. I investigated and found that, when the census was taken in 1870 she was in the "House of Industry" (a prison) on Deer Island in Boston. I contacted the office of the city archives in Boston -- spoke to a very nice young man -- who found the record for poor Ann. She was there from May through August of 1870. She was charged with being a "common drunkard."

Poor Annie. I really feel for her and can imagine how she would try to escape the squalor around her by drinking. I wonder what the precipitating event was that landed her at the "House of Industry." Maybe she refused the advances of the cop on the beat or was involved in some sort of brawl.

She lived for eight more years after she got out of jail, dying in 1878 of "apoplexy." That was the term used for any sudden death that began with a loss of consciousness. It's likely that she had a sudden fatal heart attack or a stroke.

It just occurred to me that there is a real connection between Ann and my brother-in-law, Michael. Of the four boys, Michael was the one who was an alcoholic. He went through a very difficult time. But he came through it. He went to AA and worked the program better than anyone I've ever known. He was the one person who truly had that "serenity to accept the things I cannot change" that is in the AA prayer. I would have long conversations with him on the phone, complaining about all sorts of things. He would understand and never make me feel small for my petty complaints, but yet he managed to pass on just a bit of that serenity to me. And then one day, as he was getting ready to start work (he was a chef at a big hotel in Boston), he suddenly collapsed and died. He was 38 years old. They called the paramedics immediately, but he was just gone. Apoplexy. They said it was a heard defect and there was murmuring that it was caused by all his hard living before he went into AA. It never seemed right, though.

I wonder if there was a genetic connection between the alcoholism and whatever the specific heart problem was. Could there be a linked gene? If there is, then this particular condition would likely been seen in other alcoholics and passed off as being caused by the alcoholism. (Which could lead me into one of my stock tirades about people attributing causality to correlation, but that's a whole 'nother subject.) It makes logical sense. I wonder if there's any way to ever find out.

The Phelps name is vindicated

One of my great-great-great grandmothers was named Dorothy Phelps. I've been able to trace her ancestry back to an immigrant ancestor, William Phelps from Crewkerne in Somerset, which is cool. The Phelps family has the single nicest given name I've ever come across. One of my ancestors had a sister named Delight. With all of the bad stuff that has come down from my repressed and oppressive Puritanical New England progenitors, that was a nice surprise.

William Phelps, the immigrant, was one of the founders of Hartford Connecticut. I once read a list of the laws from that city and they would go very well with my previous post. The list of things that were punishable by death is astounding and children were not exempt from execution.

Not long after I found out about my connection to the Phelps family, I heard about Fred Phelps, that sleaze that runs godhatesfags.com (I won't link to it) and is known for going to the funerals of AIDS victims, celebrating and carrying their hate in signs. These creeps even demostrated at the funeral of Mr. Rogers (of "the neighborhood") because he never came out on his children's show condemning homosexuality to little children.

I've been a bit reluctant over the years to claim my Phelps heritage, both because of William of old and Fred in contemporary times. I don't know whether Fred is from my same family, at least. There were five apparently unrelated Phelps immigrants from England to America. My hope is that Fred is from one of the others.

Today I found out about another Phelps descendant, though, which gives me a great deal of hope for the family. Again, I don't know if she was a descendant of the same progenitor that I am, but she's someone I would be pleased to claim as my own.

Mary Phelps Jacob was the inventor of the modern bra, for one thing. It seems that she got a new dress that was quite revealing and the whalebone stays of her corset showed through. So she, with the help of a servant, sewed together some silk handkerchiefs and pink ribbon to make a more attractive undergarment. The resulting style was a big hit among her ritzy friends and everyone wanted one. Her bra had no support, however, resulting in a rather flat-chested look. It was the impetus for the popularity of the non-buxomness of the flapper era.

She created a business and used the name Caresse Crosby (she was married to a man named Crosby then). Although she went through a number of different surnames through the rest of her life, she kept the name Caresse as her given name.

As for the surnames, her first husband was Richard Peabody who, it is said "had only three real interests, all acquired at Harvard: to play, to drink, and to turn out, at any hour, to chase fire engines." She had two children by him and then fell in love with Harry Crosby. She divorced Dick (apt name) and married Harry. Her second marriage was quite tumultuous and ended when Harry committed suicide in a lover's pact with a young mistress. She later married Selbert Young, who was nearly 20 years younger than she, but she eventually divorced him and lived on her own.

While she was married to Harry Crosby, she started the Black Sun Press in Paris, which published books by Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Dorothy Parker, among others. She was friends with Henry Miller and took over as a ghost writer for him when he felt he could no longer fulfill a contract he had made to write pornography for an Oklahoma oil baron. "Caresse's smut was just what the oil man wanted-no literary aspirations-just plain sex. In Caresse the agent had found the basic pornographic Henry Miller. Caresse churned out another 200 pages, spending her time writing while her husband, Bert Young, fell into a drunken stupor every night."

Part of me wishes I could have lived a romantic, avant-garde sort of life like that. I don't think I'd manage it, though. It's a nice thing to think about, but I really don't think I have the temperament for it.

Still, Mary Phelps Jacob is a nice contrast to Fred.

Glad I'm Living Now

It's sometimes fun to romanticize about the past and wish that we lived in a simpler time, but then things about that simpler time come up and we realize that maybe the modern world ain't so bad after all.

In doing some genealogy research, I found the following about a brother of one of Jim's ancestors:

In a court record dated 7 September 1642, "Thomas Granger [Jr.], late servant to Love Brewster, ... was this Court indicted for buggery with a mare, a cow, two goats, divers sheep, two calves and a turkey,

at which point I laughed out loud. I think the turkey was the thing that set me off. Then I kept reading.

and was found guilty, and received [a] sentence of death by hanging until he was dead."

This was a boy who was 16 or 17 years old. He was a servant, as were his parents, so nobody cared exactly how old he was or anything else about him.

I daresay (is that one or two words?) that a lot of people I know would not have made it to adulthood -- including myself -- if we had lived in the 17th century.

Sometimes people are really cool

I've been working on my genealogy site and trying to find some more information. Every once in a while, I just toss in a relative's or ancestor's name into a Google search to see what comes up. It's pretty surprising what you can find

A couple of weeks ago, I entered the name of a cousin of my father, whose maiden name was Areta Wolters. I was surprised to get a hit at all. A woman had posted a message back in 2003, saying that she had picked up a baby book in an antique store that had belonged to Areta. She was looking for relatives who would be able to "give it a good home."

I wrote to her and, after she verified that I really am one of Areta's relatives, offered to send it to me. She wouldn't take any money to reimburse her for either the original cost of the book or the shipping. She said that all she wanted was to get it to where it should be.

It came in the mail yesterday. It's just great to see all the names of people that I know so well and more pictures to identify. Mostly, though, it's nice to get reassurance that there really are cool people in the world who are willing to give of themselves while asking nothing in return.