52 Ancestors - Heirloom - My great-grandmother's Bible

Researching my paternal grandfather's maternal lines has meant starting over to a greater degree than I realized at first and I've found myself examining everything, including the few heirlooms I have from this branch.

I've shared photos here before of this Bible that belonged to my great-grandmother, Ada Merritt Hobbs, but it's been quite a while since I've examined it. Probably since I photographed it in 2015. The inscription reads:

Ada Hobbs
Elm
November 1867
E.M.H.

Looking at it again, I realized that this inscription was likely made by Ada's mother, my 2nd great-grandmother, Elizabeth Merritt.

Elm is a town in the county of Somerset in England. Baptismal records show, I believe, that at least two generations of Hobbs lived in Elm for at least part of their lives. Ada would have been twelve in November of 1867, so I wonder if this was a gift for her Confirmation. Although it seems a bit formal to me for a mother to inscribe her daughter's Bible with her initials (E.M.H. for Elizabeth Merritt Hobbs), I can't really say what the custom would have been 150 years ago.

This Bible must have been very special to my great-grandmother, especially since she lost both of her parents the following year and had to leave England not long after to join her siblings in Pennsylvania.

My grandfather was 18 when his mother died, I believe that a lot of Ada's possessions naturally went to her older children, but I'm very glad that this Bible found it's way to those musty book shelves in my dad's house and eventually to me. And I highly recommend examining your treasures every so often. You never know what might "click" after more research.

52 Ancestors - Earning A Living

In 2017 PBS and BBC aired a short reality series called "Victorian Slum House." Despite the title, it was a fascinating recreation of life in London's East End. Each family group that participated was faced with different challenges and viewers had the opportunity to see some of the ways that semi-skilled and unskilled laborers earned a living in the Victorian era; how much they made, how the families lived and what could happen when they were faced with various obstacles.

If you've never seen this series and are in the US, you can still watch the five episodes with a membership to PBS Passport, it looks like they will be available until May and each one is just under an hour.

When I first started researching my family it was enough for me to know that my 2nd great-grandfather, Joseph Elijah Hobbs of Somerset, England, was an edge tool maker and that my 3rd great-grandmother on another branch, Elizabeth Louden, was a straw bonnet maker. I've been able to find a pretty detailed description of how Elizabeth would have made her straw bonnets and a less detailed description of edge tool making, but now I want more detail.

How many days a week did they work? How many hours per day? Did Joseph work for himself, a local smith, a larger factory? Was it noisy, hot and smelly? What kind of income did he earn? What kind of home could the family afford? Did Elizabeth make the bonnets at home? Was it enough to support herself and her three children after emigrating to Canada from Scotland? Did she work around the clock? Did she sell her bonnets directly to her customers, or was she doing piece-work for a local milliner, or was there some other arrangement? Who were her customers?

This type of research is new to me and Google hasn't given me much. Since Joseph Hobbs is in one of the lines that I've already committed to researching this year, I'm starting with a locality guide for Somerset and hoping that this will give me some leads. Once I get into that, I plan to make inquiries at local libraries and archives to see if anyone there can point me in the right direction. I think there are trade directories that I can look for?

Anyway, that is the plan for now, it may change as I learn more, and as I learn, I will share my outcomes with you.

Image from: The New York Public Library. "New England bonnet makers" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1866. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-20ce-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

52 Ancestors - Witness to History

If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that your name doesn't have to make it into a Wikipedia article for historical events to have a great impact on your life. The same obviously applies to our ancestors and will apply to our descendants. Anyone who has spent any amount of time on this planet, has been a witness to history.

In some cases we may have heard stories and anecdotes about those impacts, like my grandmother's choice of wedding dress in the midst of the Great Depression, or my mother's first trip to the butcher after the end of WWII rationing. Maybe they were a little bit closer to events, like my grandfather who worked at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and rode "the night train to Washington" with Enrico Fermi and others on "matters of a secret nature" during the Manhattan Project.

One of the reasons I've decided to research my paternal grandfather's maternal lines this year is to see if I really do descend, as I was told by another Ancestry member years ago, from Sir Edward Bayntun, Vice Chamberlain to Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleaves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr and close friend of Catherine of Aragon. It's not the royal connection that intrigues me so much, but the history. And if there's a historical period that is well researched, it's the reign of Henry VIII.

If Ancestry hadn't shown me my 2nd great-grandfather's bounty application, I likely would never have heard of the Fenian Raids, much less understood the anxiety they provoked in many people living close to the border, possibly including my ancestors. If I hadn't read some of the horrifying details of the Great Famine, I never would have understood the lives, the trauma and even the bequests of some of Donald's immigrant Irish ancestors.

The grinding poverty that pushed my great-grandfather Anderson to come to America was certainly the result of his father's death, but did Sweden's last famine, in the year that he was born, also have an impact? I may never know, but learning about it may still give me some context for the lives of his family. 

I've become quite passionate about digging into the history that my ancestors lived through, the events that shaped them, perhaps even fascinated them as well. I've been keeping my public library busy, my bookshelves full and my podcast queue is never-ending. And just like I'll never run out of ancestors to research, I'll never finish placing them in history.

52 Ancestors - Family Lore

Before I started researching my family, I accepted family lore as fact. If my maternal grandmother said our Scottish ancestors were members of Clan Campbell, then they were, if my paternal grandfather said his parents were Welsh, then they were and if my maternal grandfather's father said his proof of Mayflower ancestry was lost when he emigrated from New Jersey to Canada, then it was.

With fifteen years of genealogical research under my belt, of course, I am now a little more skeptical of these claims. I do believe that most family lore contains at least a kernel of truth, but any story passed down through generations of ancestors has the potential to become distorted like the results of an epic game of telephone.

I still don't know if my Scottish ancestors aligned themselves with the Campbells and I'm not even sure how you would go about researching that.  I do know now that neither of my grandfather's parents were born in or even very near to Wales and none of their parents appear to have been either. I'm pretty surprised that this turned out to be untrue since my grandfather was very much a straight arrow and he wrote in his story/autobiography that his parents spoke Welsh, but even his own father listed his and his siblings' birthplaces as in England. And the Mayflower claims? Well, I'm not sure what papers the youngest, still single child of the family, with older married siblings would have been entrusted with when emigrating to Canada that would have proven our connection to that ship. If anyone in the family had such proof, my money would have to be on his sister, who was accepted as a Daughter of the American Revolution; proving, to the standards of the day, that she was descended from a minute-man and a private in the militia during the Revolutionary War.

Since it is January 1st as I write this, I guess the next question is whether or not I will try to find evidence of any of these stories in 2024. I'm still not 100% sure which lines I will be researching this coming year. Certainly, I plan to pick up where I left off with finding Donald's Calma ancestors in Italian church records. And I did finally just send off Donald's and my DNA to Ancestry this afternoon. I'm pretty sure that I'll be concentrating on the paternal side of my tree. I've become newly intrigued by my paternal grandfather's maternal lines in England the past few months and also my grandmother's paternal ancestry in Sweden. Family lore or not, there is plenty of interesting material in those lines to keep me busy, and plenty to learn about doing research in those places as well.

As I mentioned in my last post, the next couple of months look chaotic; they include another surgery for Donald who is still in physical rehab and a house move for me, so while I do want to see if I can commit to keeping this blog alive, I have to be realistic. I'm fairly certain that I can manage two posts each for January and February, using Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestor prompts for 2024, so that is my commitment for now. Sometime in mid-February, I'll see where things are and plan from there.

Again, Happy New Year, may it be healthy and genealogically satisfying!

52 Ancestors 2024 - Bringing this blog back to life?

It is December 29th as I begin writing and this will only be my 6th post of 2023. In 2022, I published only 9 posts. While it is true that my family experienced major, disruptive life events in the last two years and my research has been as inconsistent as my blogging, I've decided as I'm writing this that it is time to make a renewed commitment to blogging, or let it go.

I sat down to write today because I'd seen a few people talking about Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors and I decided last night that I wanted to give it a go. This may seem a bit delusional because the outlook for early 2024 is just as chaotic as the last couple of years has been, but the great thing about Amy's prompts is that there are no hard and fast rules to participate. We are all free to choose our own way, our own interpretation of each prompt and to post as often - or not - as we would like. That said, I'll be going over the list of prompts over the next couple of days, deciding on my research goals for year and where they might intersect with these prompts and consider what the next couple of months look like for us and then decide what type of commitment I can reasonably make.

As of now, I do plan to post something for the first week's prompt, so I'll be back then.

Wishing you a happy, healthy, prosperous and genealogically significant New Year!

I am very sad to report that my little buddy, our Basenji, DJ, who curled up in his bed behind me and the day-bed next to me through many blog posts, webinars and countless hours of scanning and research, crossed the rainbow bridge a few days before Christmas. He was just a few weeks shy of 17. He is greatly missed.

Dipping My Toe into Italian Research

 

Thank goodness for the recent release of the 1931 Census of Canada. The search for my ancestors in this census couldn't have come at a better time for me personally and has really reignited my passion for research, something that, like my blogging, had been sporadic at best for some time.

Donald, my partner, is still in the midst of what is likely to be a long recovery from his last surgery. Moving my focus from my Canadian ancestors to his Italian ancestors has given us both something to look forward to, something positive to focus on when things aren't going his way or just feeling like a slow grind.

Pictured above are Donald's father (the baby) and his parents, Charles Salvatore-Nicholas Calma and Marie Teresa (Tessie) Scalise. The Calmas are from Bisacquino, Sicily (also the birthplace of the director Frank Capra) and his Scalise ancestors come from Serrastretta in Calabria.

Over the last weeks I have found many records online for his Calma ancestors; census entries, passenger lists, naturalization forms and even church records from Bisacquino on FamilySearch.

In a case of perfect timing, Legacy Family Tree Webinars had webinar last week on Italian research given by Margaret R. Fortier for the Board for Certification of Genealogists. It was excellent and I am now reading Melanie Holtz's The Family Tree Italian Genealogy Guide and I have a list of other books to check out as well. Just deciphering and translating the church records (from Latin) is going to keep me occupied for quite a while, but it is so much fun.

I cannot wait until Donald is well enough for trips to Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum and some more searching at Calvary Cemetery. In the meantime, I'll be gathering as much documentation as I can thanks to the spark which is finally back and the lifeline genealogy has given me.

Don't Forget Those Enumerator Instructions

Dorothy Irene Dean and Marjorie Elizabeth Dean;
my great-aunt and grandmother who I have not been able
to find in the 1931 census just yet.

The 1931 Census of Canada was released on June 1st as anyone reading this probably already knows and I am so grateful. I have needed something positive to concentrate on lately and this census has kind of given me permission to stop and do something for myself for a little while every day.

Today over my morning coffee I took a few minutes to read complete entries for my great-grandmother's household and her eldest son's household next door and was reminded why it is important to remember that in addition to the census records themselves, we also have the instructions that were given to commissioners and enumerators. You can find them and download them if you like, from Internet Archive, where they are available in English and in French, one set for Canada and another for the Northwest Territories, parts of the Yukon, and other remote areas.

By 1930, my maternal grandfather's mother, Isabella Frances Parker Smith, was a widow. She was still living in the house that belonged to the Bell Asbestos Mine which my great-grandfather, George Robert Smith, had managed for decades before his death. Living with my great-grandmother were her three youngest children, including my grandfather, all of whom also worked for the Bell Mine.

Curiously, under the category Occupation, for Isabella it said "Revenu", French for income. Knowing she was left in a financial position where she did not have to work after her husband's death, I knew this entry probably referred to the fact that she had some pension income, investment income or savings, but I wanted to be sure. I was about to turn to a Facebook group when I realized I should be consulting the enumerator instructions instead and sure enough, there was my explanation for the term in this context:

If you have Canadian ancestors in this census I wish you happy hunting!