Sleuthing

 

One of my western New York stops was in Lockport, where I spent time with my father's cousin, Rick Heenan (I think that makes him my first cousin, once removed, but keeping track of that stuff is like the subjunctive conjugation in Spanish, or trying to pound out a text message on a teeny cell phone keyboard: Frustrating, Difficult, and Not Worth It).

Rick is one of those guys you're glad to know.  He's a gifted singer-songwriter, who performs all over western New York.  He is deeply involved in his community, spending his summers as an Official Greeter at the Erie Canal Discovery Center, an interactive museum near the historic locks that give his hometown its name.  He's been in the military, and he's worked the line at Harrison Radiator, one of the plants that drove Niagara County's economy for most of the 20th century.  He runs the annual "Erie Canal Songwriting Contest", and lives in the house he grew up in: "I've been mowing the same lawn my whole life," is how Rick describes it.

The image above is a copy of a portrait that hangs in Rick's study.  He was kind enough to make a copy for me.  "This is your great-grandfather, James Ocean McMurray," Rick explained as he offered me the print.  "I've been told that he's in his British military uniform, but beyond that, I don't know much about the details."

There is something about seeing an ancestor that gets you fired up.  I left Rick's home and drove a couple of miles down the road, pulling into the parking lot of the Niagara County courthouse.  I took another look at the image, the young man with the solemn expression and all the gold braid, and decided that I would find out as much as I could.

I already knew a little bit about James Ocean.  A couple of years ago, I tracked down his birth certificate:

I knew from the 1871 English census that he had an older sister, Sarah, who was born about 1859.  His mother died sometime between 1862 and 1871; his father is listed as a widower on the census.  I knew that the family lived for at least a little while in Quebec.  The following comes from the Drouin Collection of Quebec Vital and Church Records:

"On the thirteenth of September one thousand eight hundred and sixty two James Ocean McMurray born the second day of September  one thousand eight hundred and sixty two son of James McMurray Lance Corporal Royal Canadian Rifles and Sarah Frances Fellows his wife was privately baptized in the presence of its father and mother by me, C. A. Wetherall, acting military chaplain, Lacolle, Quebec."  (The original document includes the witnessing signatures of both parents.)

I knew that he married Charlotte Hanson in March 1890, and that they immediately left England for Antwerp, Belgium.  From Antwerp, they sailed on the ship Noordland, bound for North America.  Charlotte was 18; James Ocean was 27.  They arrived at New York on 24 March 1890, but their final destination was Toronto.  In April 1891, the McMurrays -- James, Charlotte, and 2 month old Edward James -- were living in Toronto's St. George's Ward, its boundaries Dufferin Street on the west, King Street on the north, Younge Street on the east, and the waterfront on the south, then an neighborhood of wharves and railroad tracks, today the home of the CN Tower, Rogers Centre, and the Air Canada Arena.  By 1893, they had emigrated to the United States, living for a time at 362 Walnut Street in Buffalo (a house which still stands, of Google Earth is to be believed), before settling at 137 Stenzil Street in North Tonawanda.

Those are facts, data culled from census records and official certificates.  They offer hints, but they do not tell the whole story of the young man in the military tunic.

The morning after my meeting with Rick, I visited the Historical Society of the Tonawandas, and found in their painstakingly collected obituary catalog another piece of information.  James O. McMurray died 2 September 1919, on his 57th birthday.  That entry led me to the North Tonawanda Public Library's microfilm collection, which includes every edition of the Tonawanda News.

There I found his full obituary:

"James Ocean McMurray, 57 years old, died yesterday at his home at No. 137 Stenzil street after a long illness.  McMurray was born on the British troopship Himalaya, hence his unusual middle name.  He spent seven years in the East Indies and was awarded a medal by the British government for mastery of the Hinudstan language.  He served 12 years in the British army and was riding school instructor for the Royal Horse artillery.  Besides his wife, three sons, Edward J., Alfred H., and Richard U. McMurray; three daughters, Mrs. H.A. Gierke, Eleanor E. and Myrtle M. McMurray and three grandchildren, all of North Tonawanda survive.  The funeral will be held Wednesday afternoon from the late residence at 2:30 o'clock and burial will be made in Elmlawn."

 

The original document, 3 September 1919, Tonawanda News.  Click on the image to enlarge.

A little bit of research uncovered these images:

 

The uniforms perfectly match the one James Ocean wears in the portrait.  This is his regiment.  (The Royal Horse Artillery still exists, as an elite ceremonial unit of the British Army.  They still wear the same uniform, and are prominently featured at royal events.)

He was born on a troopship, sailing the North Atlantic.  He was a husband, and the father of six children.  He was a solider and a linguist and a horseman and a world traveler.  He died young.


Isn't this thrilling, to know this man, our ancestor?  Isn't it amazing to hear his voice, calling from the dust?

A Small Sampling of Photos

I realize that there are a lot of words on this blog.  And that for most of you, all those words devolve into a slow, low drone, until you're Ferris Buehler, and I'm that nebbishy teacher asking, "Anyone?  Anyone?"

So not many words today.  Instead, the first batch of scanned images taken from the Family Archives:

Some of the family, dressed in souvenir Hawai'ian garb, brought by Grand-Ma and Grand-Pa after their trip to the islands.  Photo taken at 66-6th Avenue, North Tonawanda, circa 1967.  Front row (L-R): Cousin Chris, me, Cousin Gregg, Cousin Jeff.  Middle row (L-R): Grand-Ma, Aunt Kathy, Unca Pete.  Back row (L-R): Grand-Pa, Mary Beth, Dad.

 First day of School, September 1972 or 1973.  Photo taken at the corner of Sweeney Street and Payne Avenue, in front of the Carney's chestnut tree.  L-R: Thad, Mary Beth, me (note the salmon shirt and the jaunty striped pants with fashionable bells), Todd.

Photo appears to have been taken in the back yard of the white house on Sweeney Street, 1975 or 1976.  Mom's thumb appears on left side of image.  The rugby shirts were handmade by Mom.  Front row (L-R): Mitchell, Thad.  Back row (L-R): Todd, Mary Beth.

Colonial Williamsburg, Summer 1974.  There is so much to like in this photo.  Mitch is in the foreground.  Thad is behind him, having just placed his tricorn hat upon the head of a seemingly agreeable sheep.  (I imagine the sheep at Colonial Williamsburg frequently have to put up with such impositions.  Such is the price of celebrity.)  Those little spots are sheep poop.

I have perhaps 150 more photos to scan.  This should be an interesting few weeks!

Little Miracles

I am ill today.  This is one of those classic illnesses, vicious and intense, my stomach churning like a family of badgers moved in and immediately began remodeling.  


This is somewhat unusual for me.  I don't vomit often: an important facet of My World View is that if you've taken the trouble to eat something, you hold onto it, right to the end, as it were.  I will spare you the details, Gentle Reader: suffice to say this afternoon's activities made up for several vomit-free years.

This has led me to an unassailable conclusion: Someone has poisoned me.


That's not really what I wanted to write about today.


There is a little cemetery in Tonawanda, at the corner of Main Street and Kohler Avenue.  It is the parish cemetery for St. Francis Roman Catholic Church, located on Tonawanda's Adams Street.  My mother told me that my great-grandmother, Josephine Siedlecki, was buried there.  My first stop in Buffalo (after a couple of hot dogs at Ted's Red Hots) was St. Francis Cemetery.


It is not a particularly big place, a large triangle bordered by Main, Kohler, and a line of railroad tracks.  Many of the headstones are badly worn, some have toppled over, others poke out of the ground at cockeyed angles, a crooked grin of marble and granite.  The snow was crusted, but pristine: it looked like no visitors had come to this lonely corner for many, many days.


There was no way of knowing where to start looking.  One of the first rules of family history research is that "oral history" is mostly a multi-generational game of Telephone: stories are told and retold, each teller adding some details and deleting others until you're left with something that's mostly myth.  My mother's recollection that her grandmother was buried "in that little cemetery" in Tonawanda might be completely off the mark.  There are at least four other cemeteries within a mile of St. Francis, and our people attended Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish, not St. Francis.  Saturday was cold, and wet, and snowing.  A good number of the headstones appeared to be buried under drifts.  This seemed like a fool's errand.


I said a prayer, asking for help, and entered the graveyard.  This is where the little miracle comes in.

I entered the cemetery at its back entrance, closest to the train tracks, walking in a nearly straight line, slogging through knee-deep snow drifts, for about 200 feet, where I found this:

 

The inscription reads, "Our Mom, Josephine Siedlecki, 1883 - 1920".  "Siedlecka" is the feminine version of "Siedlecki": when a woman marries, she takes the feminine version of her husband's name.


I took some other photos, just to give you a feel for the needle in a haystack aspect of this search:

Back home, I discovered that OLC had been founded on 3 May 1903.  The first parish hall was a white clapboard structure, rented from a local Protestant congregation:

The original OLC Church, Oliver Street, North Tonawanda.  Prior to 1922, Oliver was an unpaved road.

In 1919, a fire destroyed the church school.  The iconic red brick building, the building that still stands as the heart of North Tonawanda's Third Ward, was not completed until 9 December 1928. At the time of Josephine's death, OLC was a foundling parish in a very poor section of town.  Neither it nor the other, more established Catholic parish in North Tonawanda, Ascension, had its own cemetery.  St. Francis Cemetery would have been the nearest hallowed ground for area Catholics.  In the area where Josephine is buried, nearly every readable headstone bore a Polish surname.

Josephine was thirty-seven when she died.  She has laid in this lonely place for ninety years.  And I was led to her.  

They yearn for this, our kindred dead.  They yearn to be remembered, to be acknowledged, to be loved.  They want their stories told.

Jeffrey R. Holland teaches that we know very little of the afterlife.  The one thing we know, says Elder Holland, is that there will be families there.  The living must seek out the dead.  We have to remember.  We have to forge those welding links.  Last Saturday afternoon, I walked with my great-grandmother.

I look forward to meeting her. 

Buffalo

I have just returned from a two day trip to western New York, where I conducted about ten hours of family history research.

Just a few observations:

 -- Buffalonians are old.  The median age is 38.6, well above the national average, and close to sixty percent of the population is 35 or older.  In Houston, my home, about 42 percent of the population is 35 or older, and the median age is closer to 32.  The difference is noticeable: there aren't many kids in Buffalo.  There are, however, lots and lots and lots of old people.  They drive Buicks and use coupons at fast food restaurants.

--Buffalo is stuck in a time warp.  Driving from the airport to my hotel, I set the radio to scan the FM dial.  Within a half minute, I'd heard snippets of Billy Joel's "You May Be Right", Queen's "Killer Queen", and Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back In Town": every station is a classic rock station.  And there may not be a place in North America where there are more middle aged men sporting earrings and pony tails.  It's unnerving, standing next to a guy on the far side of fifty and noticing that long and wispy thing curled in the hood of his jacket is not an unusually large piece of lint; it's the trailing end of his 'do.  And nothing will disabuse you of the notion that you'd look jaunty in a little gold earring, than seeing someone roughly your age with such a hoop protruding from his creased, middle-aged lobe.  Not a sight for the weak.  I ate breakfast one morning in a place called Amy's Cafe, a friendly little joint that appears to be run by a collective of gentle souled, Whole Earth lesbians.  I saw an advertisement for a Hertel Avenue establishment called Terrapin Station, "Proudly Serving Your Grateful Dead Needs Since 1988."  Jerry Garcia died in 1995.  Apparently word hasn't reached Hertel Avenue.  I don't know of another place, aside from a few isolated enclaves in Greater Boston and possibly in the San Francisco Bay area, where people even have Grateful Dead Needs.

-- The North Tonawanda police LOVE their sirens.  I was in North Tonawanda for a total of twelve hours this weekend.  In that time, I heard sirens six times.  "Must be a crime wave," I thought.  A quick check of the "Police Blotter" section of the online edition of the Tonawanda News turned up the following offenses from the weekend: a citation for fishing without a license; a citation for driving an uninspected vehicle and for having an inadequate muffler; two DWIs; a charge of second degree harassment; and a charge of third degree assault (which I think is something like giving a guy a wedgie).  Based on the insistent drone of the sirens, I thought the Capone gang was back in business.

-- Buffalonians smoke.  Smoking happens in Houston, but it's an activity that's touched by a deep sense of shame.  You see the smokers, milling like pigeons outside of office buildings, sad little clusters of three and four, slump shouldered and eyes downcast, avoiding the glances of the clean-lunged passersby.  In Buffalo, everybody smokes.  And
they are unapologetic about it, dragging deep and blowing great plumes into the air, tossing their butts with a flick of thumb and forefinger, every man Humphrey Bogart, every woman Marlene Dietrich.  (This is not entirely fair.  First, not everyone smokes.  I noticed no small children smoking.  And there is an interesting subgroup in Buffalo -- call them The New Urbanites -- who mostly work white collar jobs in banking or education and who live in Buffalo because of its fortuitous combination of inexpensive, quality housing, close proximity to Toronto and Manhattan, and ample opportunities for hiking, camping, canoeing and cross-country skiing.  These folks, robust and ruddy as kids in a Komsomol recruiting poster, all drive Subaru Foresters.  They are Unitarians.  I fear them.  Second, there is a grand difference between feeling like Bogart or Dietrich, and being them.  These Buffalo smokers -- from the beer bellied goodtime gals dressed in full Buffalo Sabres regalia to the wizened, leathery little guys perpetually dressed in work clothes, even though they haven't held a job since Chevy shut down the Vega line back in '77 -- they aren't a pretty sight.)

A Komsomol poster.  This one says, "Thank You Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!"

Bogey. If he were in Buffalo, he'd be wearing a Carhart coat over a flannel shirt and a Buffalo Sabres knit cap. 

And he'd have a ponytail.

 -- Buffalo is beautiful.  There are the obvious glories -- the majestic Falls and the amazing Niagara Gorge, the ample turn-of-the-last century architecture, the blessed lack of traffic (Buffalo's population density is 727 people per square mile.  Houston's is 3,330 per square mile.  There are more than a million people in western New York, but that's less than a quarter the population of metro Houston, and they are so spread out, you never feel crowded), the char-broiled Nirvana that is Ted's Red Hots -- but the beauty is deeper than that.  There is a resilience here, a commitment to community.  At 2:00 on a Monday afternoon, the North Tonawanda library was filled with people, people reading books, people using the free Internet service, people doing their taxes.  They were out in force, talking to one another, complaining to one another, commiserating with one another.  I saw the same thing in restaurants and grocery stores, this fellowship of survivors.  You don't see that in Houston, where people tend to go from home to car to work to car to drive-thru and home again with a minimum of human interaction.


I have enough material for about a month's worth of entries.  More tomorrow.

I Owe Dan Brown A Big Apology

This morning, I mentioned to my wife that I thought I'd compiled at least 500 family names.  She looked up from ironing a pair of pants, the faintest trace of a smirk ever so slightly curling her lip.  "Really?  Five hundred? You really think so?"  

I have found a lot of ancestors.  I've managed to trace names on my mother's side of the family far beyond my expectations, back six generations on one line.  I've linked my father's side of the family to 17th century Ireland.  I've discovered that McMurray men fought for the British crown all over the world, and that McMurray women bore children in British India and on a military ship bound for Canada.  There have been lots of surprises, lots of discoveries.  


None of it has been orderly.  It's barely been coherent.  I've flitted around like a sparrow who's flown into a plate glass window, confused and concussed, or like that creepy guy who used to bicycle all over North Tonawanda, the guy who had a one-eyed baby doll's head wired to the basket of his fat-tired bike and who had an attention span measured in nanoseconds: the sound of a fire engine or a flash of something shiny, and I'm madly off, pedaling in a new direction.


My wife understands this.  In the last year, I have decided to learn conversational French, run a half-marathon, and read the complete works of Shakespeare.  These goals remain incomplete, abandoned like American military equipment in southeast Asia, slowly consumed by the jungle of my arrested attentions.  There is no reason for her to expect that this particular endeavor will fare any better.  It's a hard truth, a wounding truth, but a truth nonetheless.  A loved one's diminished expectations cut deep.

I sat here this morning, in full Black Knight, "it's only a flesh wound" mode, thinking, "I am going to count all the names I've found, and I will print the number in 100 point type on the ol' blog, and I will feel Vindicated!  and Victorious!  So I began my census.

Most of the work I've done has been among family members who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries.  I feel very confident in the accuracy of this work (but even there, I've already found errors; more on this in another post).  And I have, indeed, numbered dozens and dozens of family members from that era.  The first three generations, including what I've compiled of siblings, sibling's children and spouses, and other extended family members, is close to 120 people.  Go two generations more, and the number swells to over 200 people.  

Once in a while, your research opens up in dramatic, Indiana-Jones-falling-into-the-Egyptian-map-room-and-finding-the-key-to-the-lost-ark ways.  Of course, there are snakes.  There are always snakes.

My research uncovered the work of some Intrepid Genealogist, who had done extensive work on the Pearce family line.  I knew of this pedigree; working on the Anguishes and McMurrays and the Polish lines has been so interesting that I've never really looked at the information it contained.


Today, I looked.  At first, it was exciting, even thrilling: name upon name scrolled across the computer screen.  One hundred names.  Two hundred names.  Three hundred names, and I wasn't even tracing down all of the ancillary lines that curled like tendrils from the main vine.  My heart raced.  "Three Thousand Project?"  I thought.  "How could I have thought so small?"


It was then that the first snake slithered across the screen.  After a long list of nice, normal, workaday names -- Daniel Pearce and Richard Pearce and John Tucker and Henry Stevens -- there was Lord John Ryves, scion of Damory Castle, Dorsetshire.  The Ryves family were supporters of King Henry VIII, and were instrumental in establishing the Church of England.  


I must confess a prejudice.  I am very suspicious of family history that reveals either a connection to royalty, or a connection to infamy.  My research has uncovered my relation to Jacob and Henry Anguish, both of whom, much to my chagrin, were allied with the infamous Butler's Rangers.  There are some who would receive this information with glee, using it as an excuse to show up at Church activities dressed in buckskin and brandishing an Iroquois tomahawk.  I know a man who is thrilled that his great-grandfather was hanged for horse theft.  I think he's nuts.  Shame is shame, no matter how old it is.


The royalty thing is worse.  Despite my family's embarrassing past associations with imperialism, I'm an American, through and through.  I don't need to be validated by knowing that some distant relation owned a castle back in the olden days.  Frankly, I think a lot of this stuff is completely made up: it's a lot more fun to say great-great-great-great-great-great-great Granddad was King of Prussia, than a blacksmith or a farmer.


"You're overreacting," I told myself.  "Royals kept records.  It would make sense that a line this ancient would have some royal traces in it."  I continued scrolling.


It got worse, snakier and less believable.  King Louis IV.  King Louis I.  Charlemagne.  Charlemagne. King of the Franks.  Founder of the Holy Roman Empire.  You know, Pepin the Short's kid.  There is a family resemblance:

 

Maybe not.

Worse and worse, snakier and snakier.  After scrolling through nine hundred years of pre-Charlemagne kings and their wives and consorts, I arrived at this entry:

First Name:  Jesus

Last Name: Christ

Born: 8 March 0007, Bethlehem, Judea, Israel

Burial: 14 April 0033, Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, Golgotha, Judah, Roman Empire

Wife?  Sure! Marianne migdal-eder, born about 0005 BC in Bethany, Israel; died "after AD 33, in France."  This is, you may have guessed, the woman better known as Mary Magdalene.  Children?  Of course! Mrs. Antenor IV, King of the West Franks, was Jesus and Mary's little girl.  (Can you imagine those family get-togethers?  The holiday season is challenging for all of us, but when Christmas dinner is your father-in-law's birthday party, well, that's some tough sledding.  You'd think being King of the West Franks would be good enough, but when you've married the King of King's only daughter...I feel for the guy.)

This whole thing has left me feeling depressed and queasy.  I can see the Intrepid Genealogist, feverishly making connections, filling in the gaps with imagination and pluck until he or she has drawn an unbroken line leading straight to the manger at Bethlehem, shutting an enormous Book of Remembrance and saying, "There.  That's done," and feeling very proud, indeed.

I am reminded of Paul's warning to Timothy: "Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do" (I Timothy 1:2).  

This kind of nonsense is not why I am doing family history.  I don't care about kings, and I am far more worried about whether I am behaving like Jesus than whether I am one of his distant grandchildren.

For now, there will be no more counting.  It just makes my head hurt.

On the other hand, that pen cup on my desk does look remarkably like...a grail!

 

Photos

It's cold and rainy and altogether miserable today, and I am in Day Three of a migraine, the kind of headache that feels as if someone has driven a knitting needle into my right eye, and is now trying to push it through the back of my skull.  Not much writing today.  Instead, photos, courtesy of the amazing Steve Litwin (who is the most dedicated protector of our family heritage that I know -- if you haven't thanked the Lord for Steve, you need to, today):

Lolly Litwin, Flower Girl at Frances Litwin's wedding (date unknown)

Lolly Litwin at her wedding, OLC Church, May 1956 (I'm pretty sure that's Butch Socha in the background)

Mr. and Mrs. Bill Failing, May 1956

Rose Rusin-Litwin (l.), and her neighbor and in-law, Helen Moskal, NT, 1950's

Rose Litwin at Lolly's wedding, May 1956

 

Judy and Jerry McMurray's Wedding Photo.

Pictured (l - r):  Kathy Siedlecki, Al McMurray, Donna Socha Gable; Judy Siedlecki, Jerry McMurray, David McMurray

 

Donna Socha's First Holy Communion

Pictured (l-r): Steve Litwin, Bob Litwin, Donna Socha, Judy Siedlecki, Sandra Socha

Judy Siedlecki's First Holy Communion

Pictured with her parents, Anthony and Mary Siedlecki.

Litwin's Bar and Grill is in the background.

Peter Siedlecki, 1944.   

The inscription on the back reads, My First Photograph."

A wedding party from the 1920's (I've used this image before, 

but this one has slightly better resolution).

Peter Litwin is front row, left, holding a baseball.

Wedding photo of Veronica Rusin and John Vrabec.

Back row (l-r): Piotr Litwin; Rose Rusin Litwin; unknown; unknown; Mary Rusin (Piotr's mother); Jan Rusin (Piotr's father); Anna Rusin Litwin; unknown.

Front row (l-r): Charles Stobnicki; Bronislawa (aka Bernice and Bertha) Rusin Stobnicki; John Vrabec; unknown child; Veronica Rusin Vrabec; Peter Litwin; unknown; unknown.

Alice and Emil Ziolek and six of their eight children

Helen Litwin Socha, Alice Litwin Ziolek

Sophie Litwin Kalata, Lolly Litwin Failing

Horn Section

Just a short entry today, while I ponder why someone from China keeps leaving cryptic messages ("Circumstances are the rulers of the weak, instrument of the wise") and links to what appear to be Asian dating services in the comments section of the blog.

Speaking of disappointing messages from Asia, have you noticed that fortune cookies don't contain fortunes anymore?  It's hugely disappointing, after enjoying a fine repast of Mongolian beef or Sweet and Sour pork, to crack open that little cookie and find not a tiny scrap of intrigue ("You will soon take a long trip"; "Avoid men in black caps"; "Beware the Ides of March"), but what amounts to outtakes from one of Paster Joel Osteen's sermons: "If you want the rainbow, you must put up with the rain." "You are talented in many ways." "A good thing to remember is that someone's got it a lot worse than you do!" (That last one is an actual quote from Pastor Joel, so you see what I'm saying.  The man is a walking, talking fortune cookie.)  I say, less inspirational message and more weird predictions!

But I digress.

Today we have an amazing photo, from the amazing Steve Litwin.  This is the Polish Marching Band of North Tonawanda, New York, circa 1912.  The short guy, second from left in the second row, is my great-grandfather, Piotr Litwin.  (There is another P. Litwin in the photo.  That's Peter Litwin.  Piotr married Rosalia Rusin, in 1915.  Peter Litwin married Roaslia's sister, Anna.  So the two horn playing Peter Litwins were brothers-in-law.)

Just a really cool photo for this first day of February...