Thursday, June 6, 2013

An Encounter with a Living Ancestor

    I often wonder how people develop an interest in genealogical research. What switch gets tripped in someone's mind to make them interested in discovering the people in their past. In my case I can't think of any single transformative moment. I had no lightning bolt or flash of light like that which blinded St. Paul on his journey to Damascus. Rather, I think it was a combination of my own receptivity to historical stories (something perhaps in my own genetic make-up), as well as hearing the tales about people in ouer past as told by my grandparents.  I was also very fortunate to come face-to-face with a living ancestor, and as unremarkable as the encounter was at the time, it did have a major impact on what would prove to be a life-long interest and career path.
     When I was born in 1960, two of my great-grandparents were still living: a great-grandmother, Anna (Pagel) Stob, on my father's side, and John Meyer, a great-grandfather on my mother's side. Anna died just before I turned three, and I have only vague memories of her, but John (for whom I was named), lived until I was nine, and I have clear memories of him. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, while he lived in what seemed the far-away place of Louisville, Kentucky. My mother had not been very close to her grandfather (whom we called "Papa"), but my grandmother, his daughter, would always pay him a yearly visit in the summer and made regular phone calls. I remember always sending him a card for his birthday, but I only got to meet him once on the occasion of his hundredth birthday. The event seemed important enough that my mother and father decided to gather my brother and me in the car and make the drive south to celebrate.

      Up until that time, I had never met a centenarian. My grandparents, all four of them, were in their sixties and seventies when I was growing up, and they had always been vibrant, engaging, and indulging of a small boy. Papa, however, was of an earlier generation: old, frail, taciturn, and formal.
       John Meyer's life had been recounted countless times by his daughter, my grandmother. Born in Bavaria in 1869, he was a peace-loving man who hated the Army and the German unification efforts of Otto von Bismarck. Boys were told that they had to serve in the new Prussian Army, and if they refused, they would be shot. Escape was impossible, the officials had added. John was undeterred. An older brother had deserted the Army and made it safely to America, and John, at his mother's urging, decided to join him there.  He left a detailed account of how he purchased a ticket, took rivers to reach Antwerp, and there boarded the S. S. Waesland for a two-week voyage on rough April seas for Castle Garden in New York City in 1887. He still had the silk scarf that had kept him warm in steerage and remembered later having to clean up from the sea-sickness of the man in the upper bunk. Once reaching Louisville, he found work as a gardener for $5 a month before eventually finding better-paying employment in the meat-packing plants of the city's Butchertown neighborhood. Though raised a Catholic, he had married a Swiss woman and together they were converted to the Baptist Church in a 1901 revival meeting. Still scared that the authorities would track him down, he had changed his name from Johann Knoll to John Meyer, just to be safe. My grandmother was always proud of the fact that her father was very mild-tempered, never punished his daughters with spanking, would shine their shoes and tell a joke, and was most happy when either working in his garden late at night by lamp-light or attending a Louisville Symphony concert.
     So, in 1969, I got to come face-to-face with the legend. Papa had been ill that year, was nearly deaf and could barely speak. He was a little frightening to a small boy more accustomed to indulgent grandparents. But he smiled, I shook his hand, and I remember him clapping when his large cake arrived. I wanted a more meaningful encounter, but at least I got to meet him. He would pass peacefully away three months later.
      I suppose it was the combination of the stories, the old photographs from the 1890s, and the chance to actually meet the ancestor in the flesh that made genealogy something very tangible to me at an early age. I enjoyed hearing the stories and collecting ephemera. Just this year I have finally completed tracing all of his known ancestry in Bavaria, with most lines going back to the seventeenth century - a task, I suspect, that would have been incomprehensible to a man who spent his career in a meet packing plant. "Why do it?" he would surely have asked. Why indeed.

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Jonathan and Elizabeth Ross: Patriots, Part 2


    Jonathan Ross was among the soldiers who fell that day at Crooked Billet. Was he among those burned alive or hacked to death with cutlasses? The record does not show.
     On 23 August 1780, his widow Elizabeth joined John Ross (probably Jonathan’s brother), and John Buchanan as joint administrators of Jonathan’s estate, and together they reported a valued of £793.14.12.[i] Elizabeth received a dower of £264.11.5, while the children, John, Elizabeth, Jane/Jean, Nancy, and Mary, received smaller sums .[ii] On 23 August 1780, John Ross, Jonathan’s brother, was appointed guardian.[iii]

    In a few years Elizabeth, who did not remarry, found herself in reduced circumstances. Court records document her struggle to obtain a pension from the state.[iv] On 21 February 1787, she petitioned: “the said Jonathan Ross was killed in the engagement at Crooked Billet on the first day of May 1778 doing his duty as a private of the Militia, leaving your petitioner and seven children in a distressed situation; that several of said children were very young and totally incapable of supporting themselves and that your petitioner, since her husband’s death, hath labored under great difficulties and distress to procure a bare sustenance for herself and the children…”[v]

    The court considered the condition of her premises from reports supplied by the Overseers of the Poor and two freeholders. It then awarded her Jonathan’s half pay of 12 shillings and six pence per month retroactive to 1 May 1778, totaling £67.[vii]

      The situation worsened. Her only son John died unmarried in 1793, leaving a will that named his mother and his sisters Jane Ross, Nancy Ross, and Margaret (Mary?).[viii]  Some of the other daughters had married – Ann to William Ferguson (my fourth-great grandparents), and Jane with Thomas Ross, apparently a cousin.[ix] On 7 November 1796, the county sheriff appraised Elizabeth’s property at £848.8.10 and then sold it.[x] As late as 20 April 1801, Elizabeth continued to struggle to have her pension continued.[xi] On 11 April 1807, she wrote a will, naming only daughters Mary and Elizabeth, with Robert Robb a “trusty friend” as executor.[xii]     

       Historian Judith Ridner uses Elizabeth’s plight to illustrate the challenges brought about by the war for many backcountry women. “Widows, in particular, often found their economic independence contested or curtailed by wartime circumstances. Yet, because economic freedom was of such basic importance to women, when they found their autonomy … challenged, they moved readily into the courts to obtain relief.”[xiii]

      Jonathan and Elizabeth were both patriots – Jonathan, for giving his life to the Revolutionary cause, and Elizabeth, for struggling valiantly to maintain her family and her pride in the shadow of a devastating loss. I honor them both for their sacrifice.



[i] Orphan’s Court Records of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 23 August 1780, volume 2, page 273.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Judith A. Ridner, "'To Have Sufficient Maintenance': Women and the Economies of Freedom in Frontier Pennsylvania, 1750-1800," in Larry Eldridge, ed., Women and Freedom in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 170-171.
[v] Orphan’s Court Records of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 21 February 1787, volume 3, page 18.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] John Ross will (1793), Cumberland County, PA Will Book E: 311; transcript in Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Abstracts of Wills, 1750-1800 (Philadelphia: Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, 1905), 91: 408.
[ix] Orphan’s Court Records of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 9 February 1796, volume 3, page 173.
[x] Ibid, November 1796, pages 188-191.
[xi] Ibid, page 319.
[xii] Elizabeth Ross will (1807), Cumberland County, PA Will Book G: 352-353; abstracted in F. Edward Wright, Abstracts of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Wills, 1785-1825 (Westminster, MD: Family Line Publications, 1998), 155.
[xiii] Ridner, “’To Have a Sufficient Maintenance’: Women and the Economies of Freedom in Frontier Pennsylvania, 1750-1800,” 170.

Jonathan and Elizabeth Ross: Patriots, Part 1


   With Memorial Day having come and gone and Independence Day here before we know it, I am mulling the subject of “patriotism.” We often call our rebel ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War “patriots,” but what exactly is imbedded in that word?  In past generations we tended to consider patriots primarily as male soldiers (perhaps with a few women of letters, Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren), and we placed them on pedestals. They became examples of public morality – exalted subjects for our children and grandchildren to admire and draw inspiration. The reality is sometimes more grey, but also much more richly textured. Patriotism also extended well beyond the soldiers to their wives and extended families.

    The story of my fifth-great grandparents, Jonathan Ross and his wife Elizabeth (___) of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, serve as examples of this idea. Jonathan was born about 1728, possibly in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but there is no first-hand evidence of his parentage.[i] He later lived on a farm in Tyrone Township, Cumberland County, in a part that later became Perry County. Land records show that on 3 February 1762, he purchased 150 acres and was taxed on that parcel in 1763 and again in 1767.[ii]

        The historical record offers few glimpses of his personality. In April 1767, he was arrested and prosecuted, along with David Beard, for assault and battery in the Cumberland County Court of Quarter Sessions.[iii] Thomas Ross, perhaps his brother, posted bail on 7 April,[iv] but the matter does not seem to have been continued, perhaps because the parties agreed to settle.[v] Later, Jonathan held several minor offices and positions in Tyrone Township, including fence viewer,[vi] superintendent of roads,[vii] and grand juror.[viii]

    At the outbreak of the Revolution, Jonathan enlisted as a Private in the Cumberland County Militia.[ix] Little is known about the activities of his unit, but in the spring of 1778, it, along with that of Bucks County, came under the command of the American General John Lacey, who had orders from General Washington to interfere with the flow of supplies into British-held Philadelphia. Through attrition from expired terms of enlistment, the Cumberland force was reduced to just sixty men, when they gathered on the morning of 1 May 1778, at Crooked Billet Tavern, about fifteen miles northeast of Philadelphia.[x] Lacey’s forces were surrounded by a much larger detachment of 400 British Light Artillery commanded by the British Lt. Col. Robert Abernathy, supported by 300 Queen’s Rangers commanded by Major John Graves Simcoe. A brief exchange ensued as Lacey withdrew into a nearby woods. The American forces managed to kill nine British soldiers but sustained 26 losses of their own. The British then committed several atrocities on the captured and wounded men.

    An anonymous diarist wrote in an account for the New York Journal newspaper:

The alarm was so sudden [that] we had scarcely time to mount our horses before the enemy was within musket shot of our quarters. We observed a party in our rear had got into houses and behind fences; their numbers appearing nearly equal to ours, we did not think it advisable to attack them in that situation…Our people behaved well; our loss is upwards of thirty killed and wounded. Some were butchered in a manner the most brutal savages could not equal; even while living, some were thrown into buckwheat straw, and the straw set on fire; the clothes were burnt on others, and scarcely one without a dozen wounds with bayonets and cutlasses.[xi]



[i] Jonathan was aged “about 50” at the time of his death in 1778, according to a petition made by his widow, Elizabeth, to the Orphan’s Court of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, on 21 February 1787. See Orphan’s Court Records of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 21 February 1787, volume 3, page 18. Some researchers have speculated that he was a son of John Ross of Donegal Township, Lancaster County, but more research is needed to prove this assertion.
[ii] History of that Part of the Susquehanna and Juniata Valleys Embraced in the Counties of Mifflin, Juniata, Perry, Union, and Snyder (Philadelphia: Everts, Peck, & Richards, 1886), 2: 963, 968. See also Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann, Tax Lists – Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, 1750, 1751, 1752, 1753, 1762, 1763, 1764, 1765, 1766, 1767 (Dover, PA: Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann, 1988), 51, 135.
[iii] Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann, Indictments 1750-1800, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania (Dover, PA: Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann, 1989), 28, citing original Court Record page 297.
[iv] Ibid., 29, citing original Court Record page 315.
[v] Diane E. Greene, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Quarter Session Dockets, 1750-1785 (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2000), 100, citing original page 133.
[vi] Ibid, 25 March 1789, 122, citing original pages 41-42.
[vii] Ibid., 20 March 1770, 136, citing original pages 81-82.
[viii] Ibid., 18 January 1774, 235, citing original page 106.
[ix] Thomas Lynch Montgomery, comp, Pennsylvania Archives (Harrisburg, PA: Harrisburg Publishing, 1906), 5th series, 6: 342, 361.
[x] Mark Mayo Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (New York: David McKay Co., 1966), 309.
[xi] Anonymous diarist quoted in Frank Moore, comp., Diary of the American Revolution, 1775-1781 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), 293-294.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

My initial post

  I have decided to start a personal blog, a common thing that many people do in the twenty-first century. I consider it as a place where I can share musings, mostly about genealogical topics I am researching (allowing me to tag subjects online). But I also hope it can be a place where, from time to time, I can ruminate on other topics of interest.
   
   Those who know me know that I suffer occasional bouts of insomnia.  In colonial times, when lives followed hours of sunlight, many people went to bed very early at night. They would awake in the middle of the night for an hour or two, write in their journals, eat, have intimate time, etc., and then go back to sleep. I read once that this was Thomas Jefferson's regular practice. Unfortunately, our modern schedules are less forgiving.

     Anyway, here I go. I'm not sure where it will lead, but life is an adventure, even within the confines of genealogy and history.