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

Small Town in a Big City

It's been really difficult to find any records of my mother's family dating back before she was born, especially on her mother's (Mom Mom Mom's) side. Do you have any idea how many Mary O'Briens there were in Philly in 1900? On top of that, i wasn't sure of her parents' names. Last night i finally had a breakthrough: i remembered the names of a few of my grandmother's siblings. It's amazing how your memory kicks into gear as soon as you make that first connection! I started out by remembering that i had an Uncle Jim whom i thought was her brother, then i remembered Aunt Jule, next came the name of an uncle by marriage that i'd always heard spoken of as being a royal jerk.

I finally found a 1900 census record with the right kids' names and with both parents born in Ireland (as I knew they were). This was surprisingly tricky. It turns out that there were two O'Brien families on the same page of the census, both sets of parents were born in Ireland, and both mothers were named Mary. Not only that, but there was a daughter named Mary in the other family (although the census taker inexplicably labelled both Mary and Margaret from the other O'Brien family as sons). So to return to my earlier comment: there were an awful lot of Mary O'Briens around in 1900! The first Mary was too young to be my grandmother and the names of the other kids in the family didn't sound familiar, so i looked down the page to the second set of O'Briens. When i saw that the father's (my great-grandfather's) name was Cornelius, it rang a bell. Oddly enough, my grandmother's name wasn't listed, but since all the other names were the names of her siblings, i'm assuming that it is the correct family. It's possible that, for whatever reason, she was not living at home at the time the census was taken. I've run across this in the records for my father's family, where at one point two of his brothers were living with their aunts rather than their parents. At any rate, I started out looking for one Mary O'Brien (my grandmother) and found three others, even though she herself seems to have been hiding from the census taker. This has been a real challenge, but i've finally broken through to one more generation in the family tree.

Now here's the really cool part. Since i've always been a map-geek, when i find old census records for people in the family, one of the first things i do is see if their address is legible, then look it up on Google maps.  I already had the 1900 census record for my mom's father's family (the candy-making Millers from whom i inherited my sweet-tooth). So i plotted the two addresses and discovered that my mother's parents grew up about a block away from each other in Fishtown. I'd always known that my dad's side of the family lived in or near Fishtown, but i was really surprised to discover that my mother's family did too! I wonder if the families knew each other. They may have gone to the same church, or Grandpop Miller may have gone to school with Aunt Nell (his future sister-in-law), since they were about the same age.

A. 210 E. Allen St. - Miller
B. 914 Beach St. - O'Brien

Even though their houses gave way to urban renewal long, long ago, it's so exciting to know that this is where they lived, these were the streets they walked. And, in a strange coincidence, i lived just a few blocks from there ninety years later. It's an odd feeling to know that i walked the same streets as my great grandparents and probably passed where their homes had stood a hundred times.

C. My little house on Crease St. (1990)

Oh, and since i mentioned that my father's family lived in that area too, here's where his grandparents lived.

     A. 933 N. Mascher St. - Lyons (1900);  B. 210 E. Allen St. - Miller (1900);  C. 914 Beach St. - O'Brien (1900);  D. my house (1990)                                      

In 1900, Philadelphia was the third largest city in the United States. But to our family it was practically a village. I've now found the homes where three of my four grandparents' families were living at the turn of the last century...and they were all within walking distance of each other.

We Can't All Be Descended from Napoleon or Pocahontas

I've always wanted to fill in some of the details of my admittedly sketchy knowledge of my ancestors. The facts were few and often contradictory. Among the smattering of things that my sister Peg and I knew for certain was that our mother's paternal grandfather came from Alsace-Lorraine and her paternal grandmother was from Hamburg and spoke high German. Our mother would tell us this in such reverential tones that, even though we had no idea what was so high about high German, we knew this was, for her, a source of great pride. We even used this as a way to explain how different our mother was from her shall-we-say "earthier" sister Eleanor. Aunt Eleanor was loud and likely to chop up the furniture for firewood or refinish all the floors in the house without asking for--or even wanting--anyone's help. Our mother was soft-spoken and partial to wearing white gloves. She was more refined, we surmised, because she had spent much of her childhood with her Hochdeutsch-speaking German grandmother. Now, thanks to a few old census records, I've learned that my revered high German great-grandmother was named Annie and was apparently the daughter of Irish immigrants. Go figure!

About my father's family, I knew even less. He always told us he was Irish, but when mom would get mad at him, she'd occasionally refer to him as a "damn limey." Again, go figure! Of one thing I am fairly certain: when my father would tell me that we were descended from Sir Richard O'Lyons of the Third Royal Fusiliers, he was bestowing a bit of the blarney. I use the term "blarney" in the belief that, despite my mother's epithet, he was in fact a son of the Emerald Isle (the census records seem to support this). Are we descended from Sir Richard? Who knows. I rather hope not if he's the Sir Richard Lyons (an Englishman whose name lacked the O') that I stumbled across in my research, the one who was "killed in a riot--possibly for selling bad meat to the troops" back in 1383. 

As you might imagine, it was with some trepidation that, after this initial foray into genealogical research, I decided to see what more I could find out about my roots. Who knows what other parts of our cherished family history would turn out to be more accurately described as family mythology. So far it's been pretty frustrating: there's not an uncommon surname in the batch, and the given names of four generations seem to be limited to Johns, Marys, Catherines, Patricks and Bridgets. These were, mind you, people who had enormous numbers of children, but apparently they subscribed to the George Foreman school of child-naming. Nevertheless, I intend to forge onward and use this blog to occasionally post updates on what I find. I can't guarantee what form this will take, though given my own inclinations and familial tendencies, I expect that it will veer more towards storytelling than the recitation of hard data. I will try not to lie or turn any Germans Irish or vice versa. But I won't promise not to add some imagination to the mix in an effort to give life to what little I find about these people whose lives perhaps went largely unnoticed by the movers and shakers of history, but with whose lives my own is so thoroughly entwined.