Frames of Reference

 

We may bemoan the fact that, despite our best efforts at research, we still don't really know that much about our ancestors—even our closer ancestors. In the case of the only grandmother my father-in-law ever knew, despite the personal connection, there still wasn't much to pass to the next generation about her family's story.

I gave that realization some thought today. Not that I'm the only one to face that difficulty—in the resources we've found this month, it appears I am in good company in my complaints about lack of detailed information. In a 2019 presentation to the Besancon Historical Society, the speaker discussed the "problem"—a sparse supply of "sketchy" stories. Over the generations, that bare-bones story of immigration was "either forgotten or more often simplified."

I am wondering whether that case of the vanishing immigration story might rather be due to the effect of frames of reference. In the speaker's case at the Historical Society, the example was given of simply saying one's ancestors were "from Paris," or even more generally, "from France." I am wondering whether that might be more of a factor of a speaker declining to explain details which would have been beyond the listener's frame of reference. Why go into detail when the detail would be meaningless to the listener?

An example from my own experience resonates. When I first moved to California from the New York City suburbs where I spent my high school years, I never answered the question, "Where are you from?" with a specific answer. I'd generally say New York and leave it at that. Only if I knew the person I was talking to was also from that area would I go into further detail. Otherwise, it would be extraneous information, easily discarded.

How were those ancestors to know that one day, we would have powerful computers with search engines able to ferret out the slightest details, not only of current events and locations, but also of now-nonexistent villages halfway around the world? How could they have even known that generations after them, people would have the time and inclination to dig up those details of the life they had left behind—and good riddance, as far as they were concerned in many cases.

People share information with their audience based on their perception of the listener's frame of reference. Imagine what you'd say to an inquisitive grandchild, after a long day of work in the field, in answer to the question, "Where did you come from?" The answer to Besancon's grandchildren in Indiana might likely be, "Oh, from far, far away, but in a little village much like this one here."

This puts a different spin on the usual complaint about not listening to our elders' stories until it was too late to ask them; if we did ask when we were younger, the answer might be framed for what was seen as appropriate for younger ears.

True, in many cases, we didn't stop and stay to hear any stories when we were younger, but we also might not have had the framework to build upon the references made in the telling of that tale. If all we know about France is that it is across the Atlantic Ocean and has a city named Paris, the clarity of details like "Besancon" might be lost on us. But then, how many of us have taken care to tell our own stories in the detail we wish we had received from our ancestors? Perhaps it is human nature to gloss over the details we think our listener would see as "TMI"—too much information.

In all the letters my father-in-law's family preserved from Theresa Blaising, their grandmother, it is evident that she was writing about happenings very much in the present. Perhaps, by that point as an elderly woman, she was the last one surviving of all her siblings. That immigration story was likely far from her mind—certainly much farther removed than a widow's concerns about living life alone, far from family, during a World War.

Perhaps we need to go more lightly on our ancestors when we complain about their lack of information about where they once lived or any of the other details we crave about our family's history. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to piece together the story—and sometimes we can be quite successful in such endeavors. It's just that, in Theresa Blaising's case, there wasn't much story to gather.

With the coming week, we'll be into a new month, pursuing a new ancestor. We'll set Theresa's story aside, noting what was gained from this month's search and drawing up a list of what is still needed to reach back to another generation in a future attempt. On Monday, we'll move to another ancestral puzzle from my father-in-law's Irish family.

Recapping Reports

 

To zero in on arrival dates for the immigrant Blaising family—all the brothers and the mother of my father-in-law's step-grandmother Theresa Blaising Stevens—I went back to the reports contained in the U.S. Census records. There, line items in the 1900 census, as well as the 1910 and 1920 enumerations, revealed at least what was reported by each resident in the United States.

Reports, of course, can be misleading. First, we need to rely on the enumerator hearing answers correctly, then writing them legibly enough for us to read. We also must hope that the enumerator gleaned his or her information from the source, not the neighbor down the street who was filling in while the hoped-for interviewees were away on an extended trip. Above all, we need to hope that the individuals themselves remembered and reported the correct answer. Otherwise, we are depending on answers as true which might be otherwise.

With those constraints in mind, here is what I discovered in all three enumerations, for Theresa's mother (before her 1907 death), her siblings, and her own report. 

According to Mary, the widowed mother, in the 1900 census she—or someone in her stead—claimed that she had arrived in the United States in 1868. This, of course, is not what was claimed in her obituary only a few years afterwards, but we will see how that report played out among her children's own census entries. Since she died in 1907, she was not found in any subsequent enumerations.

Henry, apparently the oldest son, also reported a 1868 arrival in the 1900 census, and noted that he was naturalized. However, ten years later, the 1910 census saw him change that immigration date to the 1866 date maintained by the family in his mother's obituary back in 1907. Once again, he claimed that he had been naturalized. Hoping to drill down to more detail in the 1920 census, I was disappointed to see some scribbled entries, overwritten by a clear "unknown" for both the date of arrival and the date of naturalization. Thus, Henry's entry doesn't provide us much help.

Next son Lawrence, who moved from Indiana to Albany, New York, appeared in the 1900 census with no arrival date and no information on naturalization status. By 1910, though, he reported arrival in 1866, and that he had been naturalized. Unfortunately, he died in 1918, so there was no way to follow him further in census records.

For next son Phillip, we run into conflicting data, which I suspect was partially owing to his own reports. Phillip, it appears, was married once in Allen County, Indiana, where his family had settled, but divorced and moved to Ohio, where he subsequently married and raised a second family. However, in later census reports, his age given and statement that he was married only once would have made me doubt I had found the right person, except that his residence in Ohio was reported in his mother's obituary. Nevertheless, in 1910, he reported arriving in the U.S. in 1876, and in the 1920 census, he claimed arrival in 1870 and naturalization in 1880, despite also stating that he was born in 1869 (while the 1870 census showed his age then as eight).

Son Louis was another Blaising child whom I couldn't find in the 1900 census. However, in 1910, he claimed arrival in 1866, though no word about whether he had been naturalized. In the 1920 census, he again mentioned arrival in 1866, and naturalization in 1876. Considering that the 1870 census had shown him to have been born about 1861, I tend to doubt that date of naturalization.

Son August was found in all three census reports, though in the 1900 census, all immigration information was left entirely blank. In the 1910 census, he referred to that same arrival date as many of his brothers: 1866. He also reported having been naturalized. But in the 1920 census, he switched the arrival date to 1868, and claimed naturalization in 1886.

Theresa herself included some variations from those dates given by her brothers, but that could possibly be due to reports actually being provided to the enumerator by her husband. In the 1900 census, she gave her arrival date as 1867, though in the 1910 census, she revised that date to 1866; there was no report of naturalization, but depending on the timeline of naturalization requirements for women, her marriage to an American citizen may have obviated such a need. Yet in the 1920 census, while keeping the 1866 arrival date, there was an entry on naturalization given as 1876 which was overwritten, making it unclear.

With the exception of the one brother, Phillip, dates given for arrival vacillated from 1866 to 1868. We can see from the siblings' mother's original entry that perhaps everyone followed suit—or perhaps by the time of Mary's death, the family gathered together to rebuild the family history in agreement. Variance in naturalization dates would be due to each person's own date for going through the legal process. Some may have started as soon as possible; others might have waited to begin the multi-year process.

At any rate, those dates will form a "ballpark" range for the next steps in the process. While I will want to seek out naturalization records for each of the Blaising brothers to glean details to guide me to their home town in Europe, I will need to also find passenger records or some sign of how they arrived in the New World. For that, we'll need to revisit our work from earlier this week just one more time.  

People who Preserved the Past

 

It's a snap that I wouldn't have known how to answer my own question about the Blaising family's emigration from France to, of all places, Indiana if it hadn't been for people who made it their mission to preserve their ancestral story—in essence, to preserve their own family's past. In this case, it is mostly thanks to a small band of volunteers who formed the Besancon Historical Society and, in particular, one writer by the name of Ralph Violette, who edited the organization's collective findings in their quarterly newsletter and spearheaded the assembling of a database of genealogical information from Society members' collective stories.

It is one article written by this Ralph Violette which simultaneously provided me with so many answers yet made me wish I could barrage him with so many other questions. His article appeared in the December, 1996, edition of the Besancon Indiana Chronicles, beginning on page four, exploring "From France to Indiana." Exactly what I was questioning.

In pursuing that question, I found so many other online search results which referred to a writer with the same surname—Aurele Violette—and I wondered about the connection. Perhaps Ralph was son of Aurele? Though the older Violette might not still be alive, perhaps the son could explain more of this other researcher's discoveries.

I set out to find an answer to my question about the Violettes, not withstanding the possibility that this might simply be a case of surname coincidence. But searching for a name like Aurele Violette—or "Aurelle" as I had first found it online—yielded very little online. Digging deeper into the Internet—that marvel of modern research possibilities—I discovered scattered signs of his existence. A notice on college letterhead of an upcoming faculty election and subsequent confirmation of selected representatives clearly linked Aurele Violette to the history department of the branch of Purdue University at Indiana University in Fort Wayne. Online articles had mentioned his forthcoming publication, and a search led me to a 1996 book, Peopling Indiana—thankfully reprinted in 2010 by the Indiana Historical Society Press—which contained an article on French immigration there by the same history professor.

Moving forward with my search, my disappointing discovery was to find that one document which all genealogists seek for our ancestors: the Violette obituary. Sadly, Aurele Joseph Violette passed away only a couple years ago. In that discovery, I received my answer to my second search: that Aurele and Ralph Violette are one and the same person. Aurele often went by the nickname Ralph.

Small wonder. I can see why a given name like Aurele might cause a man some difficulties in current American culture, despite the fact that, as an Acadian descendant born in Maine, he was named after his own father, who likely carried that name from generations before him. I have a brother-in-law with a similar name—another ethnic variant of a name which surely was inspired by the Roman Emperor and philosopher, Marcus Aurelius—who, when golfing with visiting Asian businessmen, says, "Just call me Jack."

This Historical Society, in existence for over twenty years, was peopled by descendants of the original settlers to the Besancon farming community outside New Haven, Indiana, who worked hard to preserve their settlement's history. In the end, though, they too needed to make those final plans upon the realization that there was no one left to whom they could pass the baton. In their Winter 2019 issue of The Chronicles, one speaker at their meeting made the plea for a practical way to preserve all the hard work the organization had done to preserve those family stories.

In that plea (on page five), the author made one point clear which may be one faced by a multitude of other local historical or genealogical societies:

Here is a problem we have. Stories of Besancon might be told, but they were sketchy. The old immigrants were not story tellers, they were survivors. Their children were survivors doubly: they had to survive not only the fast-changing pace of American society, but also the hard-bitten life patterns of their immigrant parents, which often offered at best half-solutions for their own lives. Assimilation affected not only those branches of Besancon families who left the land. Those who stayed, within a generation or two, also became similar in almost all respects to any other small town farm settlement in America. French names were Anglicized in pronunciation, if not spelling. French language disappeared from households, as did devotion to French saints. The basic immigration story was either forgotten or more often simplified: one's grandparents simply came from "France" or even "Paris." Too little of the story has been preserved. Nevertheless, a clear shadow of the old immigrant community yet remains in this little area around Saint Louis Besancon Church today.

Generic responses: "They came from Paris." Reticence to share stories of their past in detail: "They were sketchy." They "were not story tellers" because of "the hard-bitten life patterns" of their forebears, who likely had been through much. These are likely the type of situational disappointments some of us face whether trying to coax out stories from the distant past, or merely of the World Wars from our own parents or grandparents; the trauma of the experience left them wanting to say little.

The work the Society did to try to piece together the story from what fragments of memory they could glean from members' family histories was further put at risk when the Society itself had to close its doors. Fortunately, the Society formed a constructive partnership with a nearby friend of such pursuits: the Allen County Public Library in nearby Fort Wayne, Indiana.

That institution—thankfully—has a reputation as the largest public repository of genealogical information in North America, and has made the assembled publications of the Besancon Historical Society freely available online. If it were not for that generosity, I likely would never have gotten close to any answer about my own connection to the Blaising family, the roots of my father-in-law's step-grandmother Theresa Blaising, who arrived in Allen County as a small child, moving there with her family.

Still, the Besancon story is not necessarily the story of the Blaising family. What that discovery does do, however, is show me that it was possible for a French immigrant family to find their way directly to a small town in Indiana. The next task, however, is to see if I can find any records showing me just how they got here.

Reminiscing and Reconstructing

 

"Come with me, it will only take a few minutes of your time," beguiled a brief family history on the front page of the Spring 2001 issue of the Besancon Indiana Chronicles, the newsletter of the Besancon Historical Society. That promise led to reminiscing about "a woman like many women you know" from the descendants of the original French settlers of the Besancon community in Allen County, Indiana. 

The writer guides you down a country road, with the church steeple of Saint Louis Catholic Church pointing the way through farmland outside New Haven to a community called Besancon. There, reminiscences about family life center around Gladys Nail Lomont, born in 1903. These tales provide a snapshot of what life was like for children and grandchildren of the immigrant settlers in Indiana from faraway France, the story culminating in Mrs. Lomont's efforts with a committee to register the Besancon community on the National Register of Historic places and reconstruct the identity of a settlement her ancestors once called home through establishment of the Besancon Historical Society.

Reading the historic district application, completed in 1994 and certified in 1995, provides some background on the likely origin of the immigrants peopling the Besancon settlement. Though by 1880, the population of Jefferson Township, where Besancon was located, was seventy percent French (National Register of Historic Places, section 8 page 9), its parish—and now historic district—was later identified as the only remaining one among several French settlements in Indiana still retaining the ambience of a place  "predominantly an agricultural parish whose ancestors came from France." (See section 8, page 9.)

According to researcher Aurele Violette, history professor at Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne, the settlers at Besancon parish originated in eastern France. The professor fingered the specific area of the Franche-Comté, or "free county" of eastern France. An embattled location, this place was occupied throughout history successively by the Gauls, then Germanic tribes, and eventually became the unwilling subject of a tussle between France and Spain. In addition, some of the immigrants to Besancon traveled from French-speaking cantons of Switzerland. But primarily, Dr. Violette noted, "most settlers" had originally belonged to the diocese of Besancon.

That diocese, if you've lost track, would be located at Besançon in France, for which the wandering immigrants made their Indiana settlement the homeland's namesake.

Whether our Theresa Blaising, the only grandmother my father-in-law ever knew, came to Indiana with her mother and nine other siblings from that specific region—another author in that same Besancon Indiana Chronicles mentioned immigrants from the neighboring provinces of Alsace and Lorraine—this information helps us understand why anyone migrating from France would decide to choose Indiana. Whether following Catholic priests ousted after the French Revolution due to political pressures, or coming to America during times of our relative economic upturns, the French did heed the news in letters from friends and family who went before them to America, to seek their own betterment in the same path as their fellow countrymen now resident in places like Allen County, Indiana.

It's Been One of Those Days

 

Here I was, intending to harvest links today for researching Theresa Blaising Stevens' parents records back in France. That was the plan, at least. But things turned out differently. Let's just say it's been one of those days...

My go-to place for learning more about how to research a new area in my family history is the FamilySearch wiki. However, I don't just go straight to the wiki; I first google the terms I'm seeking and designate the specific website where I want to search. To test the information I found the other day on Laurent Blaising, Theresa's supposed father, I looked for the wiki which would include a guide to researching Romelfing in Moselle.

While wandering through the choices served up in my Google search for wiki resources, I found a French Genealogical Word List—helpful indeed for someone whose memory of college French is quite faded.

Somewhere in all my searching—and selecting to open each discovery in a new tab—I ran across the same wiki page in English and French. Hmmm, I thought to myself, maybe I should cross-check these two and see if there is more information in the French version.

It was a great idea—and rather daring of me, considering my rusty French—but somehow there must have concurrently been a glitch in the ether as I made my fateful selection. Suddenly, every time I tried to look for something on the FamilySearch website, it offered up the page to me in French.

Quoi?

Did you know there is a way to switch languages while using FamilySearch? Of course, in retrospect, I can see how that would be useful for an organization which freely offers views of digitized records to people from around the world. But at the moment, I was panicking at the thought of being doomed to never view that website in English again. 

I realized there had been some other online glitches throughout the day—Ancestry.com, for instance, seemed to have its "hints" system unavailable for a few hours yesterday—but how was I suddenly assigned a language I couldn't speak?

Cool heads prevail when using computers, so I tried to contain my dismay and look for a reasonable answer. Well, forget the answer; I have no idea what happened. But for someone who learns how to use a program by clicking until I find the answer—I'm a hunt-and-peck student—I soon discovered the use of the "world" icon at the top of the page.

Despite that unexpected detour, I did find a wiki page on Moselle, the department in which Romelfing is located. And by using the catalog, I now have another item added to my to-do list for the next trip to Salt Lake City: the yet-to-be digitized microfilms of the civil registrations during the time period in which Laurent Blaising and his wife would have lived there.

No matter how crazy a day might turn out to be, at least if we take it step by step, we eventually can get something accomplished.

The Third Emperor

 

To understand the life of our ancestors, sometimes we cannot do so without understanding the history of the times in which they lived. Reading the obituary of Theresa Blaising Stevens' mother, it is plain to see a compelling story motivated her choice to move with her children to a new world. What actually happened—and when—in that bigger historical picture will help us form a timeline that either juxtaposes with our ancestor's lifespan, or doesn't.

Take that mention of "the third emperor" in the tale of what became of Mary Blaising's husband back in France. Who might that "third emperor" actually be? Since we already read that Mary brought her children to New Haven, Indiana, about 1866, one could presume that the emperor the obituary referred to was Napoleon. But a little fact checking reveals that the Napoleon in power at that time in France, while called Napoleon III, was technically France's second emperor, reigning as such from 1852 to 1870.

A key turning point in Napoleon III's reign did turn out to be that same year the Blaising family was said to have emigrated: 1866. At that point, tensions between neighboring Prussia and Austria caused the French emperor, through his foreign minister, to expect a long war ahead, precipitating Napoleon III's proposal the next year for a form of universal military service. 

Perhaps that period of uncertainty, at least for those already involved in the French military as Mary Blaising's husband supposedly was, could have been the impetus to send loved ones far from harm's way. It would make sense for someone in the military to use inside knowledge as a springboard for such decisions. But looking ahead in the timeline of France's history, we can see the emperor's military proposal failing—in fact, his overall political success waning. Napoleon III's reign came to an end not much afterwards; he was deposed in 1870.

Checking this timeline of France's history seems to correspond handily with the story the Blaising family offered for their mother's obituary in 1907. But if the Laurent Blaising whose 1882 death record we found in Paris was Mary's long-lost husband, why didn't he join his family after the war came to a close? Or did Mary only presume her husband, so far away after her arrival in Indiana, had died in battle?

Finding military records, or death records for any other French men by that same name will help sort out some of these questions. Whether I can access them online is a question still needing an answer. The story in the obituary seems plausible enough—but the fact that details in Laurent Blaising's death record don't align with the other end of the story is troubling.

  

Those French Records: They're all Greek to Me

 

I'd love to say it's all Greek to me, but unfortunately I can't; it's French, and the last time I studied that language...well, let's just say it's beyond my memory currently. But to gain any helpful details on a family member's roots, I'll try anything.

In this case, the possible family connection is to Theresa Blaising Stevens, technically my father-in-law's step-grandmother, but in reality, the only grandmother he ever knew. Theresa came to the United States as a young child—possibly a toddler or even an infant—sometime before she and her family showed up in Indiana for the 1870 census.

Her family, by the time of that 1870 census, was missing one person: Theresa's father, whoever he was. We've seen Theresa's mother Mary's obituary, which mentioned his name as Lawrence Blaising, but we've found two of her brothers' death certificates state their father's name as Henry. This past weekend, it was time for me to see what could be found on the man who supposedly died during wartime, back in France in the 1860s, no matter which given name he claimed.

Ancestry.com made the search rather easy, if the death record featured through their hints system is the right one. Logically—at least for someone whose death was in France—Theresa's father was listed as Laurent, rather than the Americanized Lawrence. That was a discrepancy easily accepted. But for the next detail translated from that block of French handwriting, I had my doubts. Either my French was far more rusty than I thought it was, or we have a problem with this death record.

I tried my hand at transcribing the words into Google Translate, just in case. Of course, what appears to me to be illegible text might, to a native speaker, be easily deciphered. Here is my best rendition of the basic details:

In the year 1882, January 4th at [?] hours in the morning, the death certificate of Laurent Blaising, aged 61, bus driver, born at Romelfing (Meurthe). Died yesterday at 1:00, [at his home at? or] Lived at 47 Chapelle Street. Son of Jean Blaising and Anne Marie Meiller, spouses [or couple?] deceased; married to Marie Hirschbeck aged 52, day laborer....

Whether I've managed to mangle the body of the text or not, there is one thing clear about this portion of the record's information: Mary Blaising did not leave France after this man died; she left long before his 1882 death.

Now, this Laurent Blaising may not be the right husband, notwithstanding the name of that man's wife matching up with what our Mary's name might have been in France ("Marie"). And of course there might be more than one Laurent Blaising with a wife named Marie in the whole of France—or even in their native region of Lorraine.

One thing, however, is certain: this puzzle will require further inspection.

At the Corner of Sunrise and Sunset

 

Back roads can provide us with some unique scenery—and confounding concepts. The other day, an errand to a city two hour's drive north of my home put me on track to retrace my steps just as rush hour was beginning. Traveling with my daughter, who doesn't mind exploring options, we decided to avoid the traffic by returning home via some back roads. Curious to look around as we drove from one town to another on our impromptu route, while stopped at one traffic light, I spotted the street signs marking the intersection: the red light had us paused at the corner of Sunrise and Sunset.

Give that one a thought. Could that even be possible? Yet, here we were, accomplishing the impossible.

Later that evening, I reconsidered that little discovery: a spot in the universe where it was, indeed, possible to be at the nexus of absolute opposites. Here I was, opening my laptop that night, preparing to chase after Theresa Blaising Stevens' roots. And what did I find? Two brothers claiming their father was named Henry, while the rest of the brothers—if they acknowledged anyone at all—told their families their father's name was Lawrence.

Wait. Either he was, or he wasn't...unless we are at the corner of Sunrise and Sunset.

Such a tidy tale was presented in Theresa's mother's obituary. Perhaps in 1907, that was the way the world was: organized and orderly. The family lore said Mary Blaising's husband was Lawrence, so that was who he was. And that he died in Paris, in service to his native France, prompting his widowed wife's exodus in 1866—along with ten children—to America.

Perhaps that is more a romantic notion than a report of reality. One disrupting detail: there was a "Laurent" Blaising who died in Paris—but his death came sixteen years after the supposed precipitating event that propelled a desperate widow and her ten orphaned children to seek asylum in the United States.

But remember: we are at the corner of Sunrise and Sunset, where little oxymoronic details—dead? or alive? Schrödinger?—matter little. It is that romantic notion that plays well in those 1907 obituaries and in stories families repeat to themselves.

In the here and now of 1907, perhaps the stories the children repeated to themselves provided comfort. But for us in their future, at that corner of Sunrise and Sunset, we can look back through time—and several assembled digitized documents—and sort through the details. We can reconstruct historic timelines as well as personal and family timelines and see whether the plot lines can even intersect.

While my French may be a bit rusty, we'll take a look next week at what can be found about Mary Blaising's husband, whoever he might have been.

Theresa's Six Surviving Siblings

 

One way to confirm those doubtful listings of parents' names in a death certificate might be to compare what was given in a sibling's own record. Thankfully in our case, while seeking confirmation of Theresa Blaising Stevens' parents' names, we have at least six opportunities to do so: her six siblings still remaining after their mother's 1907 passing.

According to the Fort Wayne, Indiana, obituary for Mary Blaising, she originally came to the United States from France with ten of her children. By the time of her passing, seven of those descendants remained, including Theresa herself. They were Theresa's brothers Henry, August, Lawrence, John, Philip, and Louis. Granted, those were their Americanized names, but that list provides us a starting point for launching our search for other confirmations of the Blaising children's parents' names.

Unfortunately, while this sounds like a straightforward proposition, in reality these research quests are not so easily accomplished. For one thing, if you know anything about French given names, you may realize that there may be more coming into play here than a mere Americanization of their names. The possibility of two given names for one son—such as Jean Phillipe instead of simply Philip, for instance—might make one son appear as if there were actually two, depending on how inconsistently those two names were used.

Looking back to the 1870 census, where we first found Theresa and her family in New Haven, Indiana, we can see there were seven children listed. Whether the names were not totally identical to those in Mary's obituary may be a case of editorial error on the part of the newspaper where Mary's obituary had been published—or perhaps a case of census enumerator error in the 1870 census. Whatever the case might be, that 1870 census provides a sister for Theresa rather than all brothers. And there was no sign of a son named Lawrence, despite that child most likely being a namesake for his father, who was by then presumed dead back in France, or at least not likely to have fathered another son after 1870.

No matter; now that we have at least a partially confirmed list of Theresa's siblings, our next task will be to trace the location of each sibling to find records of each sibling's family across the decades, and particularly to locate their own death certificates. Let's see whether the names of Mary Blaising's parents still turn out to be Henry "Herochbeck" and Mary Ann Becker.

So, Just How DO You Spell That Name?

 

Some surnames have got it made. There isn't much wiggle room when it comes to spelling a name like Baker, bestowing a certain sense of research confidence. But Manouiloff? Oh, let me count the ways a name like that can be messed up.

When I first stumbled upon the possibility that my godmother Genia, only child of war refugees Michael and Lydia Melnitchenko, might have had an aunt who also immigrated from their interim residence in France, I thought I was on to the beginning of a productive search for at least one branch of her roots.

Not so. Just as unexpectedly as Alexandra Manouiloff appeared in records linked to the wandering Melnitchenkos, she vanished from the scene. First I found her in Marseilles. Then I spotted her in a passenger list, arriving in New York City. And not long after she filed her petition for naturalization, she died.

Oh, I checked all the usual places for further signs of her name in records, but without any success. That's when I took my search straight to the search engines and out from the confines of genealogical websites. There are, as you've realized from past searches here, many ways to find further information on surnames in general.

What could I find about the surname Manouiloff? Sadly, not much—but of what I did discover, it will take more than one post and, I promise you, a long slide down a rabbit hole as well.

Where would a surname like Manouiloff show up, you ask? I tried directing that question to the surname distribution site, Forebears.io, but was rewarded for my effort by a null set—plus a list of alternate spellings to try, many (but not all) of which led back to Russia.

Reconsidering my query, I thought maybe a suffix like "-off" didn't look very Russian. Perhaps it was more likely that Russians might end such a sound with "-ov." Furthermore, since the name, as we saw it, came from a refugee who had settled in France, for whom the middle syllable, spelled "oui," might actually sound like the French word for yes, "oui," we might need to reconsider that section of the surname as well. Once again trying to think like a Russian, perhaps the spelling might originally have been more like "uy"—thus, I settled on the Forebears alternate choice, "Manuylov."

That didn't tell me much.

Face it: Alexandra Manouiloff's surname could have been spelled in any of a kazillion ways, especially considering it had passed through an intermediary stop before arriving on American shores to be mangled by English-speaking bureaucrats.

In fact, as far as the French went, during the time period spanning the war-torn twentieth century, when Alexandra would have settled in Marseilles, one French genealogy site indicated that only one person was born with that surname at all. And whoever that was, it was someone who was born in Paris.

Now, keep in mind, all we have for Lydia's and Alexandra's addresses in France were for Marseilles, but if you recall Lydia's daughter's profession—a ballet dancer—we need to remember that Genia spent quite a bit of time in Paris receiving her training and then beginning her career. It is not beyond possibility that having an aunt in Paris to chaperone her activities when Lydia was not available would have made that arrangement more realistic.

Who might that one Manouiloff born in Paris have been? To Google I went for more information, and found references to one "J. Manouiloff" referenced as a contributor to a few research articles published in French science journals in the 1970s. Whether that J. Manouiloff was one and the same as a Joseph Manouiloff listed in a French genealogy site who has since died in Paris, I can't tell.

There were, of course, other Manouiloffs listed at both Ancestry and MyHeritage, but I can't at this point tell whether there was any connection. As Alexandra was listed as Lydia's sister, and I already have discovered Lydia's maiden name, we need to remember that Manouiloff was Alexandra's married name—a name useful for tracing her details in later life, but not helpful for the years before her arrival in France.

Before chasing after any conjecture about alternate spellings, though, there is one fascinating detail I stumbled across that we may as well stop to examine. I warn you: it will be a rabbit hole, and likely not of a type to equip us to find answers to our questions about Lydia's family, but if you are interested in Russian history, you may find it a fascinating detour. You see, embedded deep within the Russian history which was likely at the root of what caused the young Melnitchenkos to flee their homeland was another player's vignette in the Russian saga, someone who also happened to claim that very same name, spelled exactly the same way: Manouiloff.

"Vel" is to Polish as "Dit" is to French?

Attempting to research the family history of my mystery grandfather—the man known by his grandchildren as John McCann who turned out arriving in New York with a name far more Polish than Irish—has been a challenge. A hopeful sign that I might soon break through that brick wall is the recent arrival of a handful of DNA matches which can only connect with the line of the erstwhile Theodore Puchalski.

All of those DNA matches to my paternal grandfather's line happen to contain the surname Michalski. As I mentioned yesterday, knowing that fact—even the documentation showing they all landed in Wisconsin—is not entirely comforting. After all, once I tried my hand at the Polish search engine called Herby, I realized that the Poles really seem to like the surname Michalski. As of 1990, there were over fifty thousand people all over Poland sporting that surname.

Herby, however, left me a parting tidbit. In addition to the entry showing me the forty nine provinces containing residents with that Michalski surname, there was a second entry. This second line showed me that there were a mere twenty two additional people in one solitary province who all had a special form of the surname Michalski: it was called Michalski vel Michalak.

Perhaps that name may sound like gibberish to you, but I perked up when I spotted that second line. I had seen something like that before, in a Michalski tree of one of my DNA matches. When I had first seen it, I thought maybe it was a mistake, or a researcher's way of saying, "I'm not sure which one is the right surname." The entry had two names: Michalski and Michalek.

Similar names, admittedly, and one could have been the result of a documentation error, or the effect of reading sloppy handwriting. That, at least, would be the type of assumption an American like me might make. But here it was now—at least a similar version in the entry for "Michalski vel Michalak"—and I couldn't just walk away from it. Perhaps if only because of the virtue of capturing that family location in one specific province—Łódź—I had to pursue the reason why it was showing up.

Just in case there might be something to this, I ran the thing through Google translate. Perhaps "vel" was a specific word in Polish. And there was a result for my efforts, but all the screen told me was "aka." Written just like that.

Of course, by this time, you may be screaming "A. K. A." for my lack of insight, but you know me: I have to make sure of things. So I kept plodding along, looking for answers.

I wondered whether "vel" in Polish might be a way to handle names the same way the French in Canada would use the convention, "dit." In French, "dit" means "called," and "dit names" could signify two different surnames, both of which might be used by a family (or sometimes, alternately used).

I put my little hypothesis to the test, and searched for information on how the Polish use "vel" names. Along the way, I found a wealth of details on how very differently the Polish handle the use of surnames—much more than the little factoid I already knew about the masculine and feminine form of Polish surnames. Eventually, that led to the answer to my question about "vel." Yes, as it turns out, you can think of "vel" names much the same as a French Canadian of the 1800s might have used "dit names." "Vel" apparently comes from the Latin, and signifies an alias—for instance, if a soldier having participated in an uprising wanted to evade authorities, yet otherwise retain both identities.

Of course, you know finding a detail like that will not help my research progress. Now I'll have to figure out just why those Michalski vel Michalak scoundrels had to assume a double identity.