Summary Sunday – NERGC 2013 Day 3

I’m home from my trip to the New England Regional Genealogical Consortium 2013 conference.  Before I settle back into day to day life here at home, I wanted to take a few minutes to review my final day there.

Fortunately, I was feeling better yesterday than I had the day before, so I was able to attend the full day.  I started with David Ouimette, CG, going through a case-study of finding a woman’s parents in upstate New York in the 1850s.  His research led him from New York, to Vermont, Massachusetts and Canada.  It was interesting to listen to his process, and I learned a new term that I hadn’t heard before.  He considered the family he was researching to be a “sparrow”, or people who “flit from place to place”, leaving records in many places.  I have a sparrow of my own in post-revolutionary New Hampshire that I’d like to track down someday.

My next seminar was about records located in the VermontState Archives in Middlesex, Vermont.  The folks there have been helpful to me in the past when I’ve emailed requests to them, and it sounds like a visit to the facility would be no different.  Many Vermont records are already online, but it might be fun to spend a day there anyway.

In the afternoon I attended a similar session in regards to the New Hampshire Historical Society library’s collections.  I made a note to look into joining the Society.  With the amount of family that I have who migrated through New Hampshire, I’m not sure why I’d never thought of it before.

The next session was an interesting look at researching and setting up an online document repository for a community, presented by David Allen Lambert.  Lambert set up a website for his hometown of Stoughton, Massachusetts.  He spoke about the process of gathering material, posting it, and most importantly, selling the project to townspeople to help get them on board and volunteering time and information.  I chatted with him quickly after the presentation to see if posting material online had helped to create a snowball effect of more information coming to him.  He nodded and told me a quick story of how someone that had heard him speak about the site at another conference had found him at NERGC and given him some tintypes that she had found.  The important take-away from this seminar, for me, was to put your research online, even if it’s not “complete”.  It could help with future research.

My final seminar for the day was a presentation by DonnaWalcovy, PhD, who showed examples of gravestone art from the colonial period up to the present.  It was clear that she loved the subject, and she was fun-going and relaxed throughout the presentation.  My wife and I, a several years ago, had talked about putting together a book about gravestone art.  After attending this session, I may have to look into the project again, though I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at another flying-skull carving without thinking about “Light-bulb Head”.

Overall, I had a great time at NERGC 2013.  I’m definitely going to look into attending the conference again when it heads to Rhode Island in 2015.

Sunday Survivor - 1941 Bus Schedule

Among the various papers and mementos that passed to me when my mother died was the bus scheduled pictured here.  The card is small, about the size of a standard business card, and would easily fit into someone’s wallet.  This is a case of an heirloom that was passed along, but no story has ever been attached to it.  It probably was never significant enough to need a story, but it somehow survived all these years, tucked in with my mother’s papers.  Even though I don’t know who the original owner was, I’ve held onto it for its historical value.

There’s a scene in the Indiana Jones movie “Raiders of The Lost Ark” where the rival archaeologist brings out an ordinary pocket watch, then talks about how it is just a trinket now, but left buried in the sand for hundreds of years it becomes a priceless artifact.  My little bus card is sort of like that watch.  At the time, it wasn’t significant for anything other than its intended use.  Now, though, 70+ years after it was printed, it can tell me a lot about the Capital District of New York in the early 1940s.

The first thing you notice when looking at the card is the bus itself.  While to some extent it helps to date the schedule, what it does for me is to transport me back in time some, when city buses weren’t giant monsters prowling the streets.  I can almost hear the “AHOOOGAA!!” of car horns as the bus makes its rounds, picking up and dropping off passengers as they deposit their dimes with the driver.

The next thing that stands out on the card is the name of the bus company, Albany-Schenectady Bus Lines.  It appears to be a private company, available not just for daily use, but also for “Tours, - Excursions, - Charter.”  The president of the company, C. Bohl, has his name listed right at the top, just before the name of the town of Guilderland, NY.  Guilderland is a suburb of Albany, and Schenectady is just to the northwest of Albany.  These town names give a good indication of which the towns the bus route likely covered.

Next on the card are the fare rates.  I was curious to see how these rates compared to today’s rates.  While it’s not easy to compare a private bus line from the 1940s to a public bus line in 2013, I could do some rough estimating.  Running the fare of 10 cents through an inflation calculator, I found that in today’s economy, 10 cents in 1941 would have the buying power of about $1.57 today.  Looking at the website of the Capital District Transit Authority (CDTA), I found that they sell a 10 trip pass for $13.00, or $1.30 per trip.  It appears that bus fare in Albany is actually cheaper today than it was 70 years ago.

Two other things about this bus schedule stand out for me in a historical sense.  The first is the phone numbers: 2-1010 and 6-1010.  For someone who grew up dialing either 7 or 10 digits to make a call, it’s weird to see a 5 digit phone number.  It’s a small thing, but again, it helps to bring me back in time to an era where phone service was drastically different than it is today.

The second item is the mention of the “General Electric Subway”.  This one had me puzzled, since, as far as I knew, there had never been a subway system in the city of Albany.  A Google search turned up information about a “pedestrian subway” that led to the General Electric plant in the city.  Workers at the plant would use this underground entrance while arriving or leaving work.  Apparently the entrance has been closed down for many years, and the tunnel itself filled in, but the small entrance building and stairs still remain.

Small mementos like this interest me, even if I can’t find a defined family connection.  They show me everyday life as it was during the times of my ancestors.  While it’s always fun to see something like an 18^th century musket or a civil war cannon, items like bus schedules can give us large amounts of information about the past, and how life was at the time.  It also helps when the item is dated, like this small card, so that they can be put into historical context.  The rates of this bus schedule, for instance, went into effect on November 10, 1941.

Just 28 days later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered World War II.

What Is It Wednesday – Mystery Chain

Sometimes our ancestors leave us the strangest things.  As a kid, I remember walking into my grandfather’s tool shed, looking at all the weird implements tucked into corners and hanging on the walls.  Occasionally my father would explain what they were for.  “That?  It’s a cant dog.  Used to use that to move logs.  Those?  Ice tongs to carry chunks of ice for the icebox.”

One item that was handed down to me by my mother is the chain pictured to the left.  The story she told is that they belonged to her father, who had been a cop.  The chain was used to restrain prisoner’s hands, similar to modern-day handcuffs.  The narrow T on one end of the chain fits into a groove in the wider T on the other end.  The handles are locked together by another groove, and then the chain is twisted to control the prisoner.

I never questioned the provenance of this item till I began seriously researching my family.  So far, I’ve found my grandfather’s occupations listed as a hired man on a farm, a general laborer, a laborer in an electrical plant, and a worker in a grocery store.  No documentation of police work anywhere.  He moved around a lot between western Massachusetts, eastern New York, and southern Vermont.  He was married a few times, and never really seemed to settle down.  He just doesn’t seem like he was the “protect and serve” type.

Lacking any printed evidence that my grandfather was a police officer of some sort, I decided to research the item itself.  After some false Internet searches on “handcuffs”, “chain restraints”, and so on, I found that this particular artifact is called a “chain nipper”.[1]  They were first manufactured in the late 1800s, and continued to be used until the late 1950s, and early 1960s.  It appears that there were several types made by a few different manufacturers.  I’ll need to do some more research to see if I can identify the particular type that I have, but the timeframe of the late 1950s would fit with my grandfather’s timeline.  I have documentation of him on the 1940 Federal Census, and the newspaper story of his death in a car accident in 1959.  It’s possible that he did some form of police work between those two dates.

The trick, of course, is finding documentation.

[1] Matthew G. Forte, American Police Equipment: A Guide to Early Restraints, Clubs and Lanterns, (Upper Montclair, NJ: Turn of the Century Publishers, 2000), chap. 5.

Sentimental Sunday – Road Trips

Amos Batchelder with his 6th-great-grandaughter in 2009.

First, I’d like to thank the Geneabloggers for the warm welcome.  Originally I was going to post about my Davis line next, but a few people mentioned their own Batchelder lines, which made me think back to the research I’ve done on that side of my family.

For those familiar with the Batchelder, Batcheller Genealogy by Frederick Clifton Pierce[1], my line is the one listed in the second half of the book, those descended from the brothers Joseph, Henry, Joshua and John.  The family came from England in 1636, settling in the area of Salem, Massachusetts.  They lived in the Salem/Wenham area until the time of the American Revolution when the family migrated to Mont Vernon, New Hampshire.  In the 1800s, the family moved again, this time to Peru, Vermont, where Batchelders lived until my great uncle, the last Batchelder in town, passed away in 2006.

The Batchelders were the first family that I began researching with my mother when I was a child.  I have memories of walking the two town cemeteries while she pointed out the gravestones of various family members.  I also recall visiting a cemetery in another state, though I didn’t realize until many years later that it was the cemetery where her father was buried in New York.

Road trips like that to the cemetery were a constant when I was growing up.  I remember many trips to see family, and to visit old homestead sites, or even road trips just for the sake of taking a road trip.

As an adult, I still enjoy road trips, and I still enjoy going to cemeteries, visiting my ancestors.  Like many genealogists, visiting the burial sites of my ancestors gives me a sense of their lives and their communities.  Small towns seem to be in my bloodlines.  Most of the towns that I’ve visited haven’t changed much since my ancestors lived there.

One example of such a place is Wenham, Massachusetts.  Several years ago my wife and I decided to visit the Wenham Museum.  While we were in town, we took a tour of the cemetery, looking for Batchelder headstones.  We found the grave site of my ancestor Amos Batchelder.  About a year later my daughter and I took another road trip, again passing through Wenham.  As we drove past the cemetery, I said, “Hey, let’s go visit Grandpa Amos.”  Though not interested in genealogy, my daughter was a good sport, letting me capture the above photo of ancestor and descendant together.

Every time I see this photo now, I think of all the road trips I’ve been on;  visiting Washington, D.C. with my oldest daughter, or going to Stephentown, New York with my mother, or those solo road trips that I’ve taken to places like Mont Vernon, New Hampshire.

[1] Frederick Clifton Pierce, Batchelder, Batcheller Genealogy (Chicago, IL: W.B. Conkey Company, 1898).