Yet Another Harry and Alice

In trying to determine the identity of the woman who sent a family photo album from Ireland in 1936, all we have to go on is the fact that the frontispiece included a Christmas greeting signed "Harry and Alice." That, plus several notes in the album's pages, identifying a young mother only as "Self."

It's my guess that "Self" and "Alice" are one and the same person. The only trouble is, this family—now that we've uncovered just who they were—seemed to have a love affair with the given name Alice. Indeed, there was even another woman identified as Alice in the album, itself.

My problem is, unless I can figure out who this Harry and Alice were, I will likely have a hard time determining just who it might have been who received the album from them—and thus, lack any means to speculate on just how that album made its way from County Cork, Ireland, to an antique shop located nearly halfway around the world.

While I want to use due diligence in my speculations—reasonably exhaustive search and all—I'm not beyond engaging in some quick and dirty thumbnail sketching along the way. (Not to worry, though—I'll always steer back to the tried and true path before finalizing any assertions.)

So, in one of my fever-crazed deliriums this weekend, I poked around what can be found on Ancestry for any trees containing our Hawkes family. Believe me, there are several to be had. Sadly, in the end, I couldn't work up enough confidence to buy their conclusions—but I want to use this detour to bring up a few observations.

First of all, if we are looking for Alices in the Hawkes family, there are several to be had. And not all of them are blood line descendants. If we take the given name Harry to actually be a nickname for the more proper Henry, lo and behold, the possibilities for cousins expand, as we find the Hawkes family was in love with this name for their progeny, as well.

Thus, not unsurprisingly, I ran across one member of the Hawkes family called Harry—to differentiate from his dad, who was also named Henry—who ended up marrying a woman named Alice. Et voilà, right? There we have it: Harry and Alice.

I ran across that tidbit while perusing those other Hawkes family trees on Ancestry. And as we all know, while Ancestry.com is a wonderful tool for building one's family tree, that does not mean everyone who uses it does so with the utmost of care for meticulously documenting all assertions.

But let's set that concern aside for the moment and consider the possibilities. If this assertion were correct, how would this Harry and Alice Hawkes relate to our anchor character for this pursuit? Let's go back to the line of descent we rehearsed a while ago about Penrose Hawkes. He was son of John Pim Penrose Hawkes of County Cork, Ireland, who in turn was son of Quayle Welsted (or Welstead) Hawkes.

From this same Quayle Welsted Hawkes, we've already observed the connection to the Alice we were studying last week. Her father, Thomas Gibbons Hawkes, was another son of this same man.

As it turns out, the Harry and Alice we are looking at today also tie in with another son of Quayle Welsted Hawkes. This time, though, the line of descent goes from the patriarch to his son Henry, and then—supposedly, according to this other tree's records—to Henry's son, nicknamed Harry. Harry, as it turned out, did not have a sister Alice. So he found an Alice to marry.

Once again depending on someone else's family tree, I found that this Harry was born in New York, about five years before Penrose was born in County Cork. And yes, Harry and Penrose would have been cousins. It's tempting to assume this would be the answer to our puzzle.

Except for two things. First, I can't really use something I haven't yet proved for myself. And second, this Harry and Alice had three sons. Not two daughters, as we've come to presume, based on all the cute photographs of Harry and "Self" in poses labeled "family group," along with two charming daughters. This other Harry and Alice had no sign of anyone in their immediate family named Ruby or Iris.

I bring this up for two points. First, as tempting as it is to use other family trees—yet as frowned upon as it is in proper research protocol—I'm not against using it as a tool to quickly steer me away from other possibilities which might, in the end, provide a fruitless chase. More importantly, as a second point, I try to view other researchers as trail blazers for their own family's pedigree, taking their information as suggestion (possibly with insight which I would otherwise be lacking). Taking this quick tour of the lay of the land in the Hawkes generations has shown me that it is rife with occurrences of Harrys and Alices. Oh, my.

While online resources in the United States have provided so many digitized documents to supercharge our genealogical research, we have to remember that we are inquiring into a family who, while partially immigrating to this country, still had many branches back in their homeland—and some which had left the island for England, apparently, during Ireland's war-torn era between the Easter Rising of 1916 and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.

While we were able to gain some research headway using these American-based resources, our lack of further progress may be a small hint urging us to broaden our search horizons just a bit more. For that, tomorrow, we'll move our search across the pond to other, more productive venues.

Rethinking Research Journey Strategy

It's been over a week since I returned from the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, a fantastic learning opportunity set in a prime research destination. It's been no surprise to hear that some fellow SLIG attendees opted to stay on in Salt Lake City for a few days to avail themselves of further research opportunities at the Family History Library. Some even announced their intention to make the trip a double-header, staying on long enough to take in RootsTech, as well.

I wonder how many now regret what seemed like a good idea at the time. Just the other day, on the private Facebook group set up for SLIG attendees, someone mentioned coming down with the flu right after the closing banquet. Those five days reserved for further research? She spent those flat on her back in her hotel room.

Believe me, I'm not much better off than she. While I caught the first flight home after the Friday closing, here I am, smitten by the flu, too. At least I have the luxury of being miserable in my own bed.

All that to say, perhaps I need to rethink preparation for research journeys. Treat them more like training for a triathlon, and less like indulging in the pampered treat we've come to expect from SLIG. After all, the one drawback to attending genealogical institutes in the winter is, well, it's right in the middle of flu season. And I don't know if you are like me, but I'm particularly susceptible to catching everyone's germs when I fly places.

My target list of activities to nix is pretty obvious. Do the homework—if the class expects homework—but quit early enough to get a decent night's sleep. Don't cut out on breakfast because you're running late. And don't think that one of those yummy hazelnut chocolate croissants and a sugary Starbucks coffee are all you need to get you through the morning. In fact, if I could have found a restaurant to provide me a spartan plate of steamed vegetables for dinner, I'd be doing much better now.

It is tempting to allow yourself to be pampered during conferences and institutes, but heeding an athlete's long-term mindset might be a much better approach to maximizing the return on a research journey.

Now Indexing: Something Sure to be a Safe Choice

In the genealogy world's time-honored tradition of giving back, I try to regularly spend some time contributing to efforts to make more records available for online researchers. Thus, my routine posts on what I'm indexing at FamilySearch.org. Because this is not an entirely altruistic endeavor, I try to find a project to help which also shares one of my research focuses. Anything from New York or Chicago, for instance, fills the bill.

For today's project, unfortunately, I couldn't find anything to augment those goals. My default option, then, had to be something which could be done without undue angst over handwriting, blurry source documents or other transcribers' woes. I opted for the collection labeled "California Birth Records 1824-1974," a set of records from my home state. What could possibly go wrong?

For one fleeting moment after clicking on my choice, the date 1824 flashed, once again, before my eyes. I panicked, entertaining images of old priests in musty offices of remote missions and the obsolete hand they might have used nearly two hundred years ago. Not to worry, though, for all the documents served up to me in this session involved births in the city of Los Angeles for the year 1900.

What I didn't count on, though, was the fact that Los Angeles, in addition to being home to many immigrants from south of the border, also played host to multitudes from China. Knowing what little facts as I know about Chinese culture, I spent the next few minutes agonizing over whether I should fill in the first name—as in, the first name written on the form—as the individual's given name or surname. After all, don't the Chinese offer this information in the opposite format from western cultures?

So...would the entry listed as Fong Lee really be the entry for the child of proud father, Mr. Lee? Or Mr. Fong?

I think things out too much. In the end, I decided to index the forms just as they were given to me. Hopefully, the bureaucrats in 1900s Los Angeles were sensitized to those cultural differences and provided the information, just as it needed to be.

Or not.

While I tell myself I am indexing because I'm grateful for all those many people who, when I was a beginner, were so generous with their help, I find that indexing has become an eye-opening exercise. It helps me gain empathy for those who struggled to make those impossibly scrawly hand-entered documents accessible through the streamlined processes of computer-assisted search programs. It helps me recall the gratitude I felt, the first time I didn't have to spend nauseating hours poring over microfilmed records. And it certainly provides a boost to all of our research efforts, speeding up the process and guiding us to facts which would have been near-impossible to find, otherwise—like those wandering ancestors who seemed to turn up in a different state, each time the tally came up for the U.S. Census.

In the end, no matter how frustrated I feel while I'm in the process of doing some volunteer indexing, after my brief stint is completed, I remind myself that it is all of us, doing our small part on a regular basis, which will chip away at the mountains of documentation that hold the family secrets we are striving to uncover. In the end, the effort is worth it. And really, with such a small contribution—but multiplied on the part of all of us—we can achieve so much in the end.

Above: Portrait of manuscript illuminator and scribe Jean Miélot, in the service of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, attributed to Jean Le Tavernier circa 1456; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Seeking Another Alice

In genealogical research, we sometimes end up testing hypotheses which turn out to be wrong. If we want to find the answer after such a false lead, obviously we need to get back on the research trail.

While we can congratulate ourselves that we have likely identified the right key people in the mystery photo album I found abandoned in a local antique store, there is still more work to be done. Among other things—and keep in mind, I have yet to share a few more photographs from the album with you—we need to identify who the woman called Alice in the pictures might have been.

But there's another pursuit, as well: to determine just who the writer was who left those white-inked comments on each page of the album. While she only used the identifier, "Self," I have my guesses. One of those guesses is that she also carried the name Alice.

Let's look at the first identification puzzle today, and I'll continue with the other one when we pick up the tale again on Monday.

Rather than the one who sent the photo album as a Christmas gift in 1936, signing it from "Harry and Alice," I wonder if the Alice we're currently eyeing might have been the visiting Alice. Keep in mind, if this guess is correct, not only are we talking about a cousin of Penrose as well as a fellow New Yorker, but a daughter of the man who started the company which Penrose had been invited to join—the T. G. Hawkes cut glass manufacturers in Corning, New York. Of all the Hawkes cousins, it is most likely that Penrose's closest relatives would be those with whom he shared an adopted hometown, over in the States.

True, this Alice, daughter of Thomas Gibbons and Charlotte Isadore Bissell Hawkes, was born quite a bit before Penrose—the age difference was about fifteen years—but taking a look at the few photographs we see labeled as Alice, she does seem to be a bit older than both Penrose and his supposed sister, "Self."

Since we learned, from Alice Hawkes Robinson's own story, that she returned regularly to Ireland after the death of her parents to attend to the family's property there in County Cork, we can presume this might have been one of her routine journeys across the Atlantic.

But the question remains: why didn't Alice's older brother Samuel take on those responsibilities? Or, for that matter, her older sister Charlotte? This is clearly an area that needs to be inspected further. Not to mention, as strong-willed and capable as this Alice might have been, by 1936, she was the mother of a nineteen year old son—Thomas Gibbons Hawkes Robinson—and her fourteen year old daughter Alice Dewart Robinson, whom we've already met. If the photos in the album were of this Alice Hawkes Robinson, why didn't her family join her during this visit in 1936?

Still, as far as I can tell so far, this is the only Alice who presents herself as a possibility in the Hawkes family constellation.

We can't conclusively say we've done an exhaustive search yet, by any stretch of the imagination—even though we can convince our discerning minds to decide that the Alice in the photo album looks, oh, about fifteen years older than Penrose and his sister.

While it might be nice to identify the Alice mentioned in the album, rather than continue in a tight loop, let's move on and ponder the possibilities for the other mystery person: the young mother who calls herself simply, "Self."

Above: Photograph of the family's picnic visit to Crosshaven, County Cork, during the summer of 1936. From left to right: "Self," Harry and Alice.

At the Gates of Her Home

Step by step, we're picking up clues that help build a composite sketch of just who were the family members related to the people we found in a discarded photo album, here in northern California. Because our task seems to be such a merry divertissement, it takes on the aspect of a treasure hunt. Because these are people we don't really know—certainly not anyone we are related to—it becomes a trivial pursuit. Entertaining, and not much more than that.

Even in the context of a story of strangers, though, there are some occurrences entering the narrative that are so dreadful, it is hard to continue the pursuit without being drawn further into the realm of personal concern. What happened to Alice Hawkes Robinson only a few years after the death of her husband was one of those points.

We learned, after the March, 1948, passing of Edward H. Robinson, that it was not in Canada that Alice's husband had died, but in Florida. While news reports indicated that he "had been vacationing," those articles also revealed that Alice's brother—Samuel Hawkes, by then owner of the successful cut glass manufacturer in Corning, New York, which bore their father's name—maintained a residence in Daytona Beach, a four hour drive to the north of the Florida city where Dr. Robinson had succumbed to a heart problem.

Perhaps this small detail provides a hint as to why Alice was in Florida during the month of March once again, five years later. Having spent much of the winter of 1953 down in Florida, Alice—by then just turned sixty eight—had that day completed the long drive northward to return to the family home near Newmarket, just outside Toronto, Canada.

As a reunion celebration, along with her son and his bride of only two years, she had gone out to dinner. Returning to Inniscara—named after the old Hawkes family estate in County Cork, Ireland—they had paused on the highway to await a safe moment to turn into their long driveway when a car approaching from behind them struck their vehicle, puncturing the gas tank in the rear. The force of the collision overturned the Robinson vehicle, trapping the three passengers inside.

The incident occurred at "the height of the Friday night traffic." Though "dozens...raced to the rescue," yanking on door handles to no avail—the handles were actually pulled off by their efforts, yet with no success—no one was able to extract any of the passengers in the Robinson vehicle. The two men in the other vehicle were dragged from their car just moments before it exploded, showering the area with flaming gasoline. In a horrific finale no one would ever want to observe, witnesses said they "heard the trapped victims moaning and screaming inside," but there was nothing that could be done.

News of the tragedy was reported back in Corning, Alice's hometown, as well as in the Syracuse, New York, Post-Standard, the Robinsons' former residence and current home of Alice's brother-in-law. A week later, a front page article in The Newmarket Era and Express declared,

The community has still not recovered from the shock of a tragic accident which took the lives of three well-known residents of the Newmarket district last Friday night...at the gates of her home.

Having not only completed the long journey from Miami to Toronto, but a life's journey taking her through service in two World Wars, Alice met an unexpected end which literally took the breath away from all who heard of it. The only one left to her family, besides her brother Samuel and his wife and children, was the Robinsons' daughter—also named Alice.

The one gleam in this tragic episode—at least for us as genealogical interlopers in this family's difficult moments—was that the many news reports provided one additional family clue: the younger Alice, now long past her wartime Canadian Air Force duties, had married and was now the mother of at least two of the grandchildren of Alice Hawkes Robinson.

While I still have reservations as to whether this unfortunate Alice Hawkes Robinson was part of the couple who signed their names as "Harry and Alice" in the photo album I found, this small detail provides a clue to help examine whether this was the route bringing the photo album west to California. Yet, whether that route proves correct or not, the episode reminds us to tread circumspectly as we unfold the stories of unknown others in our research. We can barely imagine the anguish which such stories brought to those for whom these subjects were so much more than mere players in an entertaining puzzle.  

"Anything From a Jeep to a Lorry"

Miss Alice Hawkes sailed for Ireland to spend some time at Inniscara House, the Hawkes family estate.

Sometimes, despite all the hard work invested in a genealogical search, the conclusion reached turns out to be disappointing. In our case with this puzzle of the photo album found in an antique shop, we are struggling to determine the identity of the couple—Harry and Alice—who sent the album to an undisclosed recipient for a Christmas gift in 1936.

While we did find an Alice in the Hawkes family who seemed to fit the parameters for our mystery couple, it turns out she didn't marry anyone named Harry, thus ruling her out in our search.

However, in the process of doing so, I discovered so many interesting details of this woman's life that I can't simply set her aside and continue, laser-focused, to cut through every other possibility. We can at least take some time to recognize the unique contributions this Alice made during her moment in history.

Alice Hawkes—later to become Mrs. Edward H. Robinson, the woman we saw mentioned in two family obituaries, traveling back home to Corning, New York, from her current residence in Ontario—lived an active life from an early age until her premature death. Though faced with a seeming set-back during her return to the Hawkes family estate in Ireland in 1915, as soon as she could, she found a way to volunteer to serve during the first World War, a path leading her through posts in both Britain and France before her marriage to a British Army physician, with whom she eventually settled in Canada to raise her family.

Several newspapers, including this June 15, 1944 reprint in the Corning Leader from the Syracuse, New York, Post-Standard, have preserved her story.

     Pvt. Robinson was born in Corning. After the death of her parents, she went to Ireland to take charge of her properties there. When the first war broke out, she was en route to New York, but the ship turned back.
     She was all alone in Ireland, her friends in the Army were being wiped out swiftly in the early phase of the war. The first thing she did was to offer her large home in Inniscara for use as a hospital. Then she moved to London to volunteer for canteen work. The official opening of the canteen at the Liverpool station was attended by King George V—and despite the royal presence the coffee pot just wouldn't work.
     From the canteen she proceeded to France to work in the wounded and missing office in Boulogne under the British forces. Then when the United States entered the war, she became a nurses' auxiliary—similar to a nurses' aid now—in an American hospital near Paris.
     After the war she was married to a Canadian subject.

That "Canadian subject," as we've learned, was Edward Robinson. Together, Alice and Edward raised a son—Hawkes Robinson—and a daughter. It will be no surprise to learn that the daughter's name was also Alice.

The newspaper account, however, provided the explanation for the senior Alice's involvement in the first World War. This, as you've likely noticed, was a report published in 1944, in the midst of the second World War.

There is a reason for this. As much as one would expect the wife of a respected physician to enjoy her station in life, by the time of Canada's involvement in World War II, Alice Hawkes Robinson was ready to jump back into the action. She became a member of the transport division of the Canadian Women's Army Corps., where she was likely to be found driving "anything from a Jeep to a lorry."

By then, both her children were grown and concurrently serving in the war effort—notably her daughter Alice, who had enlisted in the women's division of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Not long after the close of the war, an entry back home in the Corning newspaper pinpointed the next event in the family's timeline. Alice's husband passed away on March 8, 1948, while vacationing in Coral Gables, Florida. While a sad yet inevitable episode in any family's history, it certainly didn't come close to matching the next occurrence in the story of this Alice and her branch of the extended Hawkes family.  

Finding the Right Alice

While it has been gratifying to figure out who the unidentified people were in a photo album I found at a local antique store, I'm not satisfied to stop there. You know I have to find out more about this family.

My quest right now is to figure out just who the Harry and Alice were who sent the album as a Christmas gift, back in 1936. Perhaps knowing exactly who that couple was will reveal more clues about who the recipient of their creative family photo-documentary might have been.

Since the most obvious name to follow from the album was that of Penrose Hawkes, Irish immigrant to Corning, New York, I tried my hand at doing a search on his name in all available digitized newspaper archives. Let me tell you: there were a lot of results found at the Old Fulton NY Post Cards site.

One hit I remember in particular was a 1933 wedding announcement I found in the Elmira, New York, Star-Gazette. In that two-column spread, Penrose's name showed up as merely an "also ran"—a mere blip of a mention, stating he had served as usher at his cousin's wedding. I had to go back and double check that entry...out of over two hundred matches.

As it turned out, the article was covering the wedding of a different cousin, not Alice Hawkes. But there was an Alice mentioned—an Alice Dewart Robinson, "cousin of the bride."

This, as it turned out, was yet another Alice in the extended Hawkes family—bringing us farther and farther away from our goal of zeroing in on the Alice of the Irish photo album. Yet the exercise did provide some clues about the Alice we were introduced to yesterday, the one who married a Canadian man named Robinson. That Alice came with an interesting story of her own, as the newspaper entries revealed. We'll begin with some links to help trace who she was and continue tomorrow with the rest of the story on what became of her.

The first clue came from a retrospective column in the Corning Evening Leader from January 25, 1940. Labeled "Looking Backward Through Files of The Leader," the column focused on that same date in 1915. There, a brief mention told us, "Miss Alice Hawkes sailed for Ireland to spend some time at Inniscara House, the Hawkes family estate."

Remember our story about the Hawkes family member who, realizing his place in the family constellation as second son would never net him the family estate, left his homeland to seek his fortune in America? Perhaps, since Thomas G. Hawkes' older brother did predecease him, he may have inherited his father's property back in County Cork, after all.

Why do I mention that? Because, according to this June 8, 1902, article in the Buffalo Courier, Alice was indeed identified as Thomas G. Hawkes' daughter:

Miss Alice Hawkes, youngest daughter of Thomas G. Hawkes, returned from the National Cathedral School at Washington, D. C., bringing with her two very handsome cup trophies, one won at athletics and the second as tennis champion.

A front page insertion in the Bath, New York, Steuben Farmers' Advocate provided the next link in the proof. The January 5, 1916, edition informed us,

Announcement has been made of the engagement of Miss Alice Hawkes, younger daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Thomas G. Hawkes, of Corning, to Edward Hartley Robinson of Toronto.

Thus, with that one announcement, we receive not only confirmation of who this Alice Hawkes actually was, but have our feeble hopes further dashed upon discovery that the "H" in her fiance's name did not, in fact, stand for the hoped-for Harry.

I leave it up to you to decide whether we can stretch that detail far enough to fudge it and make this Hartley party to our sought-after couple, the Harry and Alice signing the greeting on that mystery photo album presented to an unnamed someone in December, 1936.

In the meantime, though I've given up this segment of the chase, there are a few other details that this Alice deserves having mentioned in her memory. Let's not leave her trail—nor that of the other Alice mentioned here today—without following up on a few other details.

Harry offering Alice some more lunch! Crosshaven, Aug. 1936.