Summer 2012 Road Trip

After a very long hiatus, i am once more feeling inspired to return to the task of digging around in the family history. What changed? I've recently had the good fortune to become cyber-acquainted with some of my second and third cousins who are interested in finding out more about the Lyons side of the family, and so it seemed like a good opportunity to post some of what i've collected (and ignored) over the past year and see what else i can find. 

The main event of the past year was a road trip to coal country last summer. With the help of an excellent and very patient friend, who drove me around all day, i took a lot of pictures of the area, had a few productive chats with some very friendly older gentlemen at the Schuylkill County Historical Society, and got to refuel on ice cream at the fabulous Heisler's Cloverleaf Dairy in Walker Township.  Sadly, i soon thereafter got sidetracked by my everyday responsibilities and have not done much follow-up since then. But somewhere in my very messy home, the notes i took that day still languish, waiting for my attention, and one of these days, i'll locate them and get back to business. 

Although admittedly the trip wasn't as productive as i'd hoped, it was still a powerful feeling to see the towns and the hills where my ancestors lived and worked when they first came to America. Here are a few pictures of those places:

On his WWII draft registration, my grandfather, John Alphonsus Lyons, lists his birthplace as "near Tremont Schuylkill County." The census records for 1870, '80, and '90 show the Lyons family in Frailey Township, a mile or two up the road from Tremont, and list the nearest post office as Donaldson.

Tremont Fire Department on Clay Street

View of Tremont from the parking lot of Most Blessed Trinity (formerly Immaculate Conception) Catholic Church

I was directed to this cemetery by a volunteer at the Schuylkill County Historical Society. I found a few Lyons headstones but none of the given names were familiar. It's a nice old cemetery, just the same, and would like at some point to go through their records to see if anyone in my clan is there, possibly without a grave marker.

Donaldson is listed as the nearest post office on the 1870 census  record for the Lyons family.

Dotted line shows the outline of Frailey Township; Tremont is the more developed area near the center of the southern boundary.

The cemetery that i visited is the clearing in the upper middle of this image.

When in Doubt, Buy a Book

Coal miner's library

The Plot Thickens

Back on 8 June I wrote about discovering that my mother's parents lived around the corner from each other in 1900 ("Small Town in a Big City"). At the time I wondered if my great aunt, Nell O'Brien, might have actually gone to school with her future brother-in-law, my grandfather, Peter Miller, since they were about the same age. I took another look at the census records tonight and discovered that fourteen-year-old Nell was already working in 1900 as ... drum roll please ... a candymaker. Just like young Peter Miller. Could they have worked together in my great grandfather's confectionery shop? Did Mom Mom fall for that cute boy who worked in the sweet shop with her big sister?

Elusive Ancestors and Interesting Work Histories

My maternal forebears continue to elude me. I spent much of yesterday determined to find the German side of the family that my mother always spoke so highly of, concentrating on the parents of her paternal grandfather, George Miller. According to the census records, George's parents both came from Germany, so i've begun to suspect that my mother's recollection of her German grandparents was off by a generation. That side of the family seems to have married young, so it's not unlikely that she might have spent some time with her great grandparents when she was little. Her stories were too geographically specific to be fanciful (like some of those fabulous yarns of my father). She didn't just say they were German: the (great?) grandmother, as already noted, came from Hamburg and spoke high German; her husband was from Alsace and supposedly looked French but spoke some form of German (probably an Alsatian dialect). I'm looking forward to the day when I track down the emigration records of my ancestors and can start further unraveling some of these complicated histories. 

Despite my obsessive search of old census records, at the end of the day I'd discovered very little about my ancestors. I did, however, learn something about myself: i desperately long to be descended from people with interesting names. At one point i came across a woman named Cunigunda Miller and found myself praying: "Dear god, please, please let her be my great grandmother! I can't take another Mary or Annie." Alas, it was not to be. Neither was young Orpheus Miller. But i haven't given up hope.

George Miller dedicated most of his life to the production of sweet and fattening treats. His occupation at the time of the 1900 census was running an "ice cream saloon;" the marble-top tables from his sweet shop can still be found in a few family living rooms. In 1910 he was listed as a confectionery manufacturer. The 1920 record is difficult to read, but as nearly as i can make out, it says that he was a laborer for an ice cream supplier. In her inimitable way, Aunt Eleanor used to say that her grandfather was the reason she'd always been chubby. When she was little, she explained, he'd sit her on the counter and have her taste-test the latest batch of chocolate candies that he'd made. "Here, bunch [short for honeybunch], try this one," he'd say. And of course she did. I love the idea of having ancestors who made ice cream and candy for a living. Truth be told, if i'd been born forty years earlier, i'd have been right up there on the counter with Aunt Ellie, sampling the chocolates. 

Peter (left) and George (right) Miller making a fresh batch of ice cream. I just wish they looked like they were enjoying themselves a bit more.

Judging from his expression in this photograph, young Peter Miller was not all that thrilled with the family business, and he did not long remain in the ice cream and confectionery trade. The 1900 census lists the occupation of the fourteen-year-old Peter as candymaker, but after that he went on to work at a variety of other jobs. By 1910, he was married, the father of two (with a third on the way), and working as an automobile finisher. I never knew that the early auto industry had a presence in Philadelphia, but after extensive research (oh, okay, a thirty-second Google search), i've learned that Packard was building cars in Philly at the time. The Packard Motor Car Building on North Broad Street, which is now a luxury apartment building, opened in 1910 as an assembly plant and showroom. So Grandpop went from making chocolaty sweets to building sweet rides. 

1910 Packard Roadster

According to his draft card, in 1918 Peter was working as a floorman at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Two years later, he was back working with his father as an ice cream supplier. By 1930, he had a job as a guard at Eastern State Penitentiary, at least i assume that's where he was since his job is described on the census as a penitentiary (rather than prison) guard. Al Capone was incarcerated at Eastern State for eight months during 1929-30, so it's possible that they crossed paths. Now there's a thought worth entertaining!

At some point, my grandfather lost his job at the penitentiary under circumstances that are a bit murky, and i'm not sure what he did afterwards. He passed away in 1940. 

The Dangers of Digging

Much like my coal mining ancestors, i've been doing a lot of digging lately, and now i'm beginning to fear that the carefully constructed family narrative is in danger of collapse. First the German great grandmother turns out to be Irish, and now the most romantic story in my family history has been called into question. I was always told that the aforementioned not-German great grandmother died of influenza during The Great Pandemic of 1918-1919, and that her husband died of a broken heart a few days later. Being somewhat inclined to cynicism, i've always assumed that he probably just died of the flu too; but i never questioned the basic fact that they both died during the pandemic. So imagine my surprise to find both George and Irish Annie listed on the 1920 census six months after the pandemic ended! The frustrating thing is that this is the side of the family i thought i knew something about.  I'm having much better luck with my father's side of the family, but i'll save that for another post.

Birthday News

Happy 125th or 131st birthday to my grandfather, John Alphonsus Lyons (he shaved off a few years between registering for the draft in WWI and WWII).  He must have been an imposing figure: 6'2" and 220 lbs. according to his WWII draft card.  I was very surprised to find a WWII draft registration for a man in his 60s and am curious to find out more about what the regulations were at that point.

He died before i was born, but from the stories my father told me it sounds like he may be the source for our somewhat perverse sense of humor. One day, he was walking down Market St. in Philadelphia, back when all the major department stores were there. As he passed a window display of slender mannequins in fashionable dresses, he noticed an overweight, middle-aged woman looking  in the window. "Reminiscing?" he asked her.

He worked on the waterfront. My father used to talk about how he would come home from work half-frozen in the winter. He'd stand in front of the kitchen stove stripping off layer after layer after layer of clothes. My dad was a great storyteller; when he would tell this one, i would always get such a vivid picture of this huge man, made even bigger by all those clothes. I would shiver imagining how cold he must have been after working a long night on those frigid docks.

Here he is as a young man with his brothers Pat & Mike. He's the one on the right.

***UPDATE 08 January 2013 ***
As i noted above, i was surprised to discover that my grandfather had registered for the draft in WWII, since he was almost 62 years old at the time (he's listed as being 55 years old, born in 1886, on his WWII draft card, but his WWI draft card, which agrees with most of the other records i've found,  gives his date of birth as 1880). With only a little digging, i learned a valuable lesson in U.S. history: The 4th Draft Registration of WWII--the so-called "old-man's draft"-- took place on 27 April 1942, the date of record on Grandpop's draft card. This draft targeted men between the ages of 45 and 64, not with the idea of sending all those poor old geezers into battle, but in order to get a better sense of the available labor pool.

Ephemera and Oddities

I came across this tale of a clever John Lyons while poking about in the Pennsylvania USGenWeb Archives. I'm fairly certain he was not a relative since he is described as "a gentleman," although he could be a descendant of Richard "bad meat" Lyons (see entry for 5 June 2011). The story is a good example of the peculiar stuff you find when you go digging for ancestors. I wonder if it was a slow news day or if this was the kind of thing that usually made headlines in County Clare in 1749.
http://files.usgwarchives.net/pa/schuylkill/newspapers/doctor.txt