In Black and White: Cross-Cultural Genealogy

The Christmas Tea    When I was a child, growing up in Southern Tier New York State, my mother would attend the annual Women's Society in Christian Service Christmas Tea at our church. Hostesses would bring their best table linens, china service, sterling silver flatwear and a special Christmas dessert to be shared with all the ladies . . . and my mother was ALWAYS a hostess. I remember her baking and gathering all her finest, wrapping them in towels and packing them in boxes to take to church. I had always wished I could attend . . . . Years later while living in Western Massachusetts, I longed for such a tradition to begin in our local church, but the people there were not accustomed to such elaborate celebrations as an English Christmas High Tea, so we opted for a Christmas Cookie Exchange instead. But even that wasn't what I was accustomed to, where women in the church brought several dozen of their family's favorite home-baked Christmas cookies and enough copies of...

Tua Bethlem Dref /  On To Bethlehem Town: a traditional Welsh Christmas carol Music by: David Evans  (pseu. Edward Arthur) (1874 - 1948) Lyrics by: Will Ifin When I saw the footnoteMaven's challenge to go Blog Caroling, I took the oppo rtunity to find out more about my Welsh roots. While I was unable to find any history on this carol, the words are presented here in both Welsh and English, and you can listen to them in both languages in the videos posted here.  I hope you enjoy them! Tua Bethlem Dref (Welsh) On To Bethlehem Town (English)

Beginning on Thanksgiving afternoon, watching Christmas movies together had been a long-standing tradition in the Carter household when the children were growing up in the 1990s . . . especially for our daughter and me. It began with the original 1947 version of Valentine Davies' Miracle on 34th Street , starring Maureen O'Hara, Edmund Gwenn and Natalie Wood. Then we'd watch Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life , starring James Stewart and Donna Reed. But one Christmas story has grown beyond tradition to a season-long event, and that is the viewing of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in as many versions as possible, starting with Albert Finney in Scrooge: The Musical (1970) . According to Darcy Oordt, author of The Haunted Internet , there have been "over 50 versions and that does not include foreign versions or television episodes." And over the years, it has become a seasonal pre-occupation to expand my collection of all things Ebenezer Scrooge ...

As a child, my mother taught me that if I was good , Santa Claus would visit our house on Christmas Eve night and fill my stocking with lots of goodies and leave presents under the tree. I would write a letter addressed  to Santa Claus, North Pole , and leave it in the mailbox. And on each Christmas Eve night, as I lay in bed half asleep, I could hear the sound of bells going down the hallway toward the place where our Christmas tree stood.  I believed it was Santa . . . but if I had really analyzed the sounds, I would have realized that if Santa came down the chimney, he would've landed in the basement and walked up the stairs into the living room, rather than come through the trap door from the attic which was just outside my bedroom door.  But as I grew older, my list grew longer, and I soon discovered quite by accident that if I didn't send Santa a letter, I received more than I would have asked for. That continued for several years, until one year I received a rude...

Harriet (JONES) NEWTON T ill the time I was five years old, my Grandma  Newton would send us a Christmas parcel which faithfully included the traditional tin of Crosse & Blackwell's English Style Brandied Plum Pudding. Christmas Pudding had been a tradition in Dad's household as a boy, his father's family being English farmers and his mother's Welsh coalminers. On Christmas night we would have steamed plum pudding with Grandma's hard sauce, which Mom would make strictly from the recipe, found in a handwritten letter in Mom's recipe tin. I say the parcels came till I was five years old, because Grandma died tragically on October 19, 1966. She had already purchased and wrapped our gifts, and Grandpa mailed them off to us that December. Our tradition, however, continued all through my childhood. W hen I went away to college, some friends wanted to share a Christmas dinner, and I was asked to prepare a traditional family dish. Of course, Christmas Pudding ...

The Carter Christmas Tree, 2003 Our family has always had an artificial tree. Allergies . . . Over the years our family's Christmas tree took on various shapes and sizes. My first tree was given to me by my grandfather, Mark Silverman. The two-foot tree made of silver tinsel boughs came with small, blue, glass balls to hang on them . . . sort of a Hannukah bush. When our first child was born in 1984, I ordered a four-foot tall artificial spruce tree from the JC Penney Catalog along with wooden ornaments. In 2003, our daughter asked, "Why is our tree so small?" Dad answered, "Because when we got it you were so small! We didn't want you to get overwhelmed by it." So that year we replaced it with this six-foot tree. After the death of our youngest child in 1990, we went to the Yankee Candle factory store in Deerfield, MA and each selected an ornament that reminded us of her, which are displayed on this tree along with some of the original ornaments. Now t...

Personal Genealogy Library While I have participated in some of the past genealogy challenges presented by GeneaBlogger's  52 Weeks To Better Genealogy even before I started blogging, this is the first prompt I have participated in that got me excited enough to actually write about. The challenge this week was perfect for those of us well-intentioned organized folks who have accumulated so much stuff that it seems nearly impossible to get it all together, but here it goes . . . The challenge was to examine three online tools for cataloging our personal genealogy library -- LibraryThing ,  Good Reads and Shelfari -- "and see how genealogists use them".  LibraryThing I started out by taking the tour on LibraryThing. I liked the way books were presented as covers on a shelf; but I was impressed even more as I discovered its versatility in customizable lists. The site boasts that it "helps create a library-quality catalog of books." Many times when I am wri...

Letters from Aunt Helen, Part 6 O P Q contained the PARKER family letters. Alright, now we've departed from tracing the Gertrude Ellen (WALTER) lineage and have gone back to her husband's NEWTON ancestors. Let's take a look at the NEWTON generations to see where Aunt Helen may have been going with this: George Ulysses (8) Newton md. Gertrude Ellen WALTER, 1 July 1895 in Binghamton, NY Francis Louis (7) Newton md. Elizabeth Mary RILEY, 5 Nov. 1854 in Maine, NY Nahum (6) Newton md. Thankful PARKER, 22 Oct 1818 in poss. Worcester County, MA Nahum (5) Newton Jr. md. Damaris BRIGHAM, 6 May 1778 in Marlborogh, Middlesex, MA Nahum (4) Newton Sr. md. Tabitha SANDERSON, 30 Feb 1741 in Leicester, Worcester, MA Joseph (3) Newton Jr. md. Abigail ---- Deacon Joseph (2) Newton md. Katharin WOODS, abt. 1670 in Marlborough, Middlesex, MA Richard (1) Newton md. Amy LOKER, 9 Aug 1636 in Bures, Essex, England R held the RILEY family history letters. W provided letters relating to WALTER...

Little did I know that I would find my 5th great grandfather, Col. Asaph Morse's Revolutionary Song lyrics in time for submission to:   THE SECOND GREAT AMERICAN LOCAL POEM AND SONG GENEALOGY CHALLENGE! While it is not a mid to late 19th Century poem, it fits every outlined requirement. Here is a transcription of the original posted in Letters From Aunt Helen, Part 5 . Revolutionary Song. ____________________________________ Composed by Capt. Asaph Morse, an old Veteran of the Revolution, who was at the capture of Burgoine, battle of Monmouth, and with Sullivan at the siege of New Port in Rhode Island. Age 92 years. Groton,  April, 1852. This is a copy from the original print, by his great grandson, B.S. French, of Susquehanna,  Pa.  February, 1896.  __________________________________________ Washington the father of our Country, Quelled the British riots in this North America. By the help of his Aids, Greene, Schuyler, Hamilton, La Fayette, Gates and Putnam t...

Letters from Aunt Helen, Part 5 A ttempting to reconstruct a genealogist ancestor's research path can be quite a challenge, but the more time I spend with Aunt Helen's letter file, the more I am beginning to see the course she had chosen. Tracing allied ancestral families The next file, H I J , revealed the HOWARD family ancestry, tracing back to Thomas HOWARD of Lynn, MA. A pattern began to emerge. Looking at a fan chart of my great grandmother's family, I realized that this is my aunt's research on her grandmother's family and collateral lines. Ancestors of Gertrude Ellen (WALTER) NEWTON  If this theory is correct, then I should also be able to find the surnames KINGSLEY, MORSE, WARD and CHAPMAN.  The K   L file revealed responses to KINGSLEY queries for Sarah KINGSLEY in CT; Nathan and Warren KINGSLEY in Franklinville, Machias, Rushford and Ellicottville, NY; and, a letter from Mrs. M.L. Palmerlee of Detroit, MI, the granddaughter of Warren KINGSLEY, da...

Letters from Aunt Helen, Part 4 An update on the West Clasp Letter Filing System The next section of the file provided the answer I needed. Instead of each tab being a divider followed by that letter's surnames, the previous section was actually the "D" section with the letters lying on top of the the dividers.  Therefore, the previous section represented the DARLING Family. . . . . . . . and now, on to the next section in use: "F" for FIELD. All roads lead to Northampton, MA The first letter came from a Mrs. Hugh Victor Mercer from Minneapolis, Minnesota, dated October 23rd, 1940.  My dear Mrs. Beers: Your letter via the Times has reached me and since I visited our Historical Library last Wednesday, I looked for the Field-Stanley reference about which you inquired. The Field Genealogy does not give Mary Stanley as the wife of Zachariah Field, but I found other references which do name her as his wife viz; Daughters of the American Colonists National Num...

George Dewey, Francis Allyn, Richard Allen, David Francis NEWTON. Chester Jr. and Harrison David CARTER Thank you to all our family Veterans! Your service to our country is deeply appreciated. Herb SILVERMAN, Ralph CANGSON, Robert & David SILVERMAN

Letters from Aunt Helen, Part 3 T he first section of the LETTERS file to hold genealogical correspondence was the "C" section. As I read through the letters found there, I began to wonder about my aunt's filing system. I had expected each letter found there to focus on surnames beginning with "C", or at least from correspondents whose surnames began with the letter "C." But it appears that was not the case. The surnames found there were BLISS, ENGLISH or ENGLIS, and DARLING. The only "C" connection I found was a series of letters from Carlos Darling. One researcher from New Lebanon Center, NY wrote on August 28, 1930 that John Darling's name appears in their charter. "The Columbia County history states that John Darling owned mill property on the stream in West Lebanon but doesn't mention store or Hotel. States that first place of meeting of No 9 was held at the home of Casporus Hewson and John Darling was S.W."   Morri...

Letters from Aunt Helen, Part 2 G enealogical research was a whole different world in the 1930s and 40s. Behind my aunt's baptismal record was this letter dated March 12, 1941, addressed to the Hartford Times: Whenever correspondence was communicated through the genealogical section of a newspaper, each researcher was identified by an assigned number and their initials. In this case, Dorothy A. Y_____ requested to communicate with my uncle, R. L. B. [Ralph Loren Beers], who had answered Query 8010 on the Howard family on March 8, 1941.  A portion of my Aunt Helen's legacy was a binder with the original genealogical newspaper clippings attached to paper with cellophane tape, which had yellowed and become brittle. The pages smelled musty, so I photocopied them to acid-free paper and placed them in archival presentation sleeves in a new binder.    As I paged through the HOWARD section of the clippings, I found the original query dated 12-21-1940 and it's reply, dated 3-8-19...

Letters from Aunt Helen, Part 1 O n 17 November 1990 my grand aunt, Helen Gertrude (NEWTON) BEERS, daugh ter of George Ulysses and Gertrude Ellen (WALTER) NEWTON, and the widow of Ralph Loren BEERS, died in Garden Grove, California at the age of 89. She had been the NEWTON family historian since about 1930. Before she died she had her family history archive divided between my Dad, her oldest brother's oldest son, and my Dad's cousin Doris, the oldest child of Aunt Helen's only surviving sister.  Dad had no interest in family history, so he passed the information on to his younger brother, David. Eighteen years later, on March 1, 2008, Uncle David and Aunt Sue stopped by our apartment in Asheville, NC to hand-deliver to me the legacy my Dad had forsaken. Among the file boxes of handwritten and typed family group sheets and notes was a West Easy Clasp File marked, LETTERS. The spine of the file is imprinted: Frank A. West Co., Inc. Office Equipment and Supplies 130 State...

My 4th Great Grandparents A grave marker doesn't leave much space to tell about a person's life. While there may be an engraved picture or memorialized photograph on the stone, most grave markers leave only enough room for two dates and a hyphen.  And while the hyphen takes up the least amount of space on the marker, it comprises a whole lifetime. One day my daughter asked,  "Mom, why are you so interested in people who are dead ?"   "It's not that I'm interested in the dead," I replied. "I'm interested in how people lived ." About five years ago I came upon a title in the Bargain Books section of Barnes and Noble that caught my attention. By that time I had already been researching our family history for three years. I walked away from the book and continued browsing, but then found myself returning to it.  It's title, Leaving a Trace: The Art of Transforming Life into Stories , reminded me of that hyphen. I had journa...