Keeping an Eye on the Goal

As much as I love delivering hundred-year-old family photos back to their rightful place—and we will return to that with a new episode tomorrow—behind the scenes, I am still chipping away at my own family mysteries. Still keeping my focus on my mother's southern lines, now that I'm home from my travels, I'm back at this project in earnest. After all, that SLIG class on southern research is drawing closer, and I want to be in the thick of things when it's time to pepper the instructor with questions.

Considering my return to work on this goal, it is likely no surprise to discover that, in the past two weeks, I've been able to add 236 names to my mother's family tree. Her tree now stands at 14,741 ancestors and related lines. I'm still working on the descendants from her McClellan ancestors, but after the Civil War, one branch had moved from their home in Florida to Texas, so I'm in a whole different kind of southern, now.

Despite my decision to focus my research on my mother's southern roots through next January, there are times in which I make a slight detour. In the past two weeks, that was again the case, only unlike the previous biweekly span, this time was owing to the discovery of the passing of a very distant relative on my mother-in-law's line. Thus, courtesy of a newly-discovered obituary, her tree expanded by thirty six people to total 15,703.

Wrapping up this two week period, it's no surprise to see that my dad's line is still stuck at 514—a number that likely won't change for a very long time—and my father-in-law's Irish-Chicago clan is still holding at 1,513.

I'm glad that the summer DNA sales at a number of the DNA companies will soon trickle down in the guise of an increased count in my DNA matches. Things have been progressing so slowly since the Father's Day sale wrapped up. It makes me wonder whether these companies have been conditioning their prospective customers to only buy when there is a sale. My match counts, as well as those for my husband, have increased by only a handful at each company in the past two weeks. And among those new names, most are distant cousins, at best.

Still, that's not to overlook the fact that AncestryDNA has quietly exceeded another ceiling, now having over ten million among those who have completed their DNA tests at Ancestry. And that's not to discount the thousands of DNA matches for which both I and my husband have already received notification. Furthermore, it's an encouraging sign for those I'm working with who are hoping to learn more about their family's past which has been obliterated by choices placing them in an uninformed position—unnamed parents whom they have never met are taking shape as real people, thanks to DNA, instead of the murky mysteries they previously had been. The more people who test, the greater the chance that these forsaken stories will be brought to light in the therapeutic way so desperately needed by those most impacted.

Meanwhile, besides these fun projects, I'm sticking to my goal: between now and my class in Salt Lake City in January, I'm working the southern angles on my mother's ancestry.

Off the Shelf: The Art of Gathering

No sooner have I returned home on the high of a scintillating conference experience than I am contemplating launching myself into another such event. Conferences always introduce a high note into the lonely researcher's life—well, at least for people who thrive on connecting with like-minded others—but they come with a down side, as well.

I always like learning about trends, new techniques, promising possibilities—and all that can come at you from a well-planned conference. The flip side is the wearisome travel to and from, the discomfort of hotel rooms and the constant diet of restaurant food.

Worse—and this is from a veteran of conference-going in several different disciplines—is the creeping sense that the next conference is just a rehash of the same old material despite the new faces in a new venue.

I sometimes wonder if conferences are best suited for the beginner's niche: a wonderful smorgasbord for the hungry learner. I've thought about this long and hard for the past twenty years—well, for as long as I've been a repeat-attendee at any given subject's annual gatherings.

The conclusion I've come to—other than the suspicion that conferences are best suited to those who've never attended previously—is that such a conclusion might not be the result of subject fatigue, but rather owing to methodology fatigue. So many events repeat the same format: an audience of eager recipients, all seated facing in one direction, listening in silence to the one expert on the stage ahead. There is no other learning modality.

I've yearned for another way to achieve fuller mastery in the areas I'm studying.

As much as I have, over the years, bashed the book, Bowling Alone, for its doom-saying diagnosis of the decline of "social capital" and civic involvement, I've always wanted to cheer for the other side—the side of increased involvement, more effective coming-together for can-do collaboration. Bowling Alone was one expert's way of taunting me in that dream.

But now, I've found a new champion of my hopes: an improbable facilitator of conflict resolution turned meeting midwife, Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.

She's got the drill down. You know: all those meetings we hate to attend, all the wasted time getting together which detracts from work done alone. True, people should come together not only to exchange information but to inspire each other through some sort of synergistic alchemy that can't happen when we're stuffed in our solitary cubicles.

Offering ways to escape what she calls "uninspiring, underwhelming moments that fail to capture us, change us in any way, or connect us to one another," Priya Parker emphasizes drilling down to the bedrock of the reason why we wish to gather. What is the purpose we hope to achieve by meeting together?

As the author put it,

When you skip asking yourself what the purpose of your [event] is in this specific year, for where you are at this present moment in your life, for example, you forsake an opportunity for your gathering to be a source of growth, support, guidance, and inspiration tailored to the time in which you and others find yourselves. You squander a chance for your gathering to help, and not just amuse.

When I attend conferences, for instance, I often come away from the week wondering why we can't break the mold—instead of everyone facing the same direction, hearing from one expert at a time, for instance, why not also offer experiences such as round table sessions, or small collaborative meetings focused on the same challenge? I know these have been tried as experimental attempts, but why not fine-tune the results and try, try again? Why not include other learning models to allow people of all ranges of experience to provide input as well as to gain handy take-home ideas?

These thoughts on meetings don't just apply to the super-sized. Not only in conferences but in the smallest bane of business life—the office meeting—do we need fresh inspiration. No matter how much we may believe in the power of crowdsourcing, we seem to lack the finesse to bring such magic to life between those four mundane walls back home at the office.

I see the need for ideas like those in The Art of Gathering in the very civic associations Robert Putnam once bemoaned in his seminal Bowling Alone. Particularly for myself—and you and others like us, concerned about reviving the pertinence of genealogical societies—I hope to apply some of the inspiration from Parker's book in strengthening our local genealogical organization. Groups like ours have so much potential, but we need to understand the craft of drawing out that potential and converting it into the kinetic energy needed to actually get things done.

With Family to the Four Winds

One of the questions always in my mind when I rescue abandoned family photographs from antique stores is: how did that picture end up here? With the picture of Rachel Lewis Webb obviously taken in Chicago—and Rachel and her husband Francis spending their last days there in that city—the question naturally arises: what was that photograph doing in a town of less than five thousand people in northern California?

Tracing what became of Rachel's descendants doesn't give us a clear picture, though I'll rehearse the matter so you can judge for yourself. Francis and Rachel had five daughters, as we discussed yesterday. The oldest, Clara, was blind from childhood and stayed with her parents when they moved from Indiana to eventually reside in Chicago. The story for the other daughters, however, brings us in several different directions.

Second oldest daughter Edith married Charles Fink in her hometown in Marshall County, Indiana, long before her parents removed to Chicago. Not surprisingly, they raised their daughter in Indiana. Though that daughter, in turn, married someone in Michigan, she eventually ended up in Florida. Her daughter married a military man with all the moves one would expect with a military lifestyle.

After Edith came Susan Rosina, whom we first saw in the 1880 census, listed as Rosa. To tell this Webb daughter's story, we need to take a brief detour, back to the year after her parents, Francis and Rachel, were married in 1856. Apparently, Francis and another Webb relative—perhaps a brother—decided to move to what was then called Minnesota Territory. By 1857, they were settled next door to each other, along with their wives and firstborn children, in Goodhue County.

As we can tell from the 1860 census, that arrangement did not last long for Francis and Rachel, as they had returned to Indiana. But sometime between that 1860 federal census and the time after the 1880 census, the Webb family returned to Goodhue, where their daughter Susan eventually married a man from New York who had also settled in the same county. Though Susan's firstborn son died as a teenager, her daughter remained in Goodhue County until her death in her eighties.

Moving to the next daughter, though, brings a greater geographic distance. Fourth Webb daughter Eva, like Susan, had moved with her parents to Minnesota upon their return there in the 1880s. But by the time of the 1900 census, she was back in Chicago, like her parents. By that time, she had also married and given birth to a son, all while in Chicago. Not long after that, however, Eva and her family moved far away, to Los Angeles, California.

Perhaps you will suspect that would be the connection that brought Rachel's photograph eventually into my hands. But that would be too premature an assumption. After all, Los Angeles is a distance of over three hundred miles from where I found Rachel's photograph. And besides, though Eva died in Los Angeles—as did her only child—Eva's grandson ended up in Columbus, Ohio.

There was, however, one other California connection: the line of the youngest Webb daughter, Lula. Married and raising her family in Chicago, Lula's one surviving child had moved to Palm Desert in southern California. In her older years, this grandchild of Rachel and Francis moved to Ventura County to be near her only child.

Still miles from the northern California town where I found Rachel's photograph, Lula's descendant may be the key to how Rachel's picture ended up in California. That, at least, is the guess of Rachel's second great granddaughter, the one to whom I've mailed Rachel's now-found photograph.

Perhaps it was Lula's family who was the original recipient. Perhaps, alternately, it could have been someone from Lula's sister Eva's family, even though they moved out of the area in subsequent generations. Or perhaps it was thanks to another relative—or even a good family friend—to whom the photograph had been sent. It's likely we'll never know for sure. But one thing we do know: Rachel has found her way back home—ironically to southern California—and with that ending to her story's journey, we're satisfied.

Above: In what seems to be an earlier century's equivalent of Photoshop artistry, Rachel and Francis Webb appear side by side in what seems to be a mash-up of two family portraits. Photo scan courtesy of Cathleen, Rachel's great-great granddaughter; used by permission.

About Rachel's Beau

Now that the photograph of the older Rachel Lewis Webb is making its way back home to join the one of her younger self, I have the opportunity to share with you, by permission of Rachel's second great granddaughter, a photo of the man Rachel married.

It was in July of 1856 in the county seat of her home in Marshall County, Indiana, that Rachel married an Ohio man by the name of Francis Darius Webb. Son of Oliver and Louisa (Ellis) Webb, Francis had evidently moved as a child with his family from Ohio to LaPorte in the Indiana county by the same name just to the northwest of Marshall County. The move, according to a report by the Webb family, likely occurred sometime between 1847 and the time of the 1850 census.

Though all five of the daughters of Francis and Rachel Webb were born in Marshall County, there was a distinct division between the arrival of the first three daughters and that of the last two: the era of the Civil War.

Though the father of three children at the time, on August 5, 1862, Francis enlisted in Company D of the 73rd Regiment of the Indiana Infantry. Almost three years later in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 1, 1865, Francis Webb was discharged as the Company's Chief Musician.

Following the war, Francis had many health problems due to his time in the service. According to a note from his great-great granddaughter, from that time forward, Francis "suffered from ill health due to mercury treatment given to treat illness during the war."

Returning home to Indiana after the war, Francis and his family remained in Marshall County until after the 1880 census. By the time of the 1900 census, however, we find Francis, his wife Rachel, and their oldest daughter Clara in Chicago, just as we found them when first searching for Rachel's identity. All the other daughters were, by that time, already married. Clara, according to Cathleen (Rachel's second great granddaughter), had been stricken with both measles and spinal meningitis, on account of which she was blind from the age of eight—something I noticed from an entry in the 1880 census—thus, remaining with her parents for the rest of their lives.

Though Rachel, Clara's mom, lived to be ninety two years of age, her father Francis did not live so long. Perhaps owing to the disabilities from his years in the Union army, Francis suffered from "muscular rheumatism" and "cardiac hypertrophy," dying in 1913 at the age of seventy seven.

A tall man (according to his military history, five foot nine inches), before his marriage to Rachel, Francis was, according to Cathleen, formerly Rachel's teacher. When I saw his photograph, which Cathleen had also provided to the volunteer at Find A Grave, I couldn't help but notice his eyes. Just as his wife Rachel's eyes had captivated me when I first found her photograph in that antique shop in northern California, her husband's eyes were quite expressive, as well.

Above: Undated Civil War photograph of Francis D. Webb, Chief Musician of Company D of the 73rd Indiana Infantry; photograph in the possession of his great-great granddaughter Cathleen, who granted permission for its use on this post.

Got Something From a Go-To Place

When researching our ancestors, what do most people do but pursue their family history via the many online resources now available to us. So, to find out what I could about Rachel Webb, the woman in the abandoned photograph from the antique shop in northern California, of course I checked what documents I could find, thanks to Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.

There is, however, one other go-to spot I keep on my must-see genealogy list: Find A Grave.

Fortunately, I found a memorial for Rachel Webb almost immediately. While it was great to find her listing, that also presented another twist. Rachel's memorial at Find A Grave includes a photo—a photograph different from the one I rescued in Sonora.

The catch was: the details were so tiny, I couldn't determine whether it was a picture of the same woman as the one I was looking for.

Again, there was a way through this dilemma. The volunteer who created the memorial happened to mention that the picture was "graciously provided by Cathleen."

I fervently hoped that either the Find A Grave volunteer was a Webb family member, or that this person could at least put me in touch with the source of the photo. I just had to see the face on this photo up close.

Rachel, as it turned out, was not buried far from her Chicago home. If you remember the map I posted the other day, showing her address in the Chicago area known as Evergreen Park, you'll realize the green area on the map, just north of her home, is actually a cemetery: Evergreen Cemetery. And that, shortly after September 4, 1930—now eighty eight years ago—is where the Webb family buried her.

Seeing that too-small picture, I decided to send a message to the Find A Grave volunteer, in hopes of seeing a bigger version of the photo.

I wrote. And waited.

Meanwhile, I was back to researching everything I could find on Rachel Webb and her family. After all, I'm quite curious to learn how a hundred-year-old photograph of a Chicago woman ended up in a small town in the northern California foothills.

About the time I followed the trail of each of Rachel's daughters and their descendants—finding nothing besides a couple weak leads to southern California—I stumbled upon several family trees at Ancestry containing Rachel and Francis Webb. Then, not on the links provided by the search engine at Ancestry, but by following links of links, I ran across the very photo I had seen on Find A Grave.

There is something important about provenance to a genealogist. Thankfully, Ancestry provides a way—though not a foolproof one—to ascertain just which subscriber was the first one to post the picture. For that first listing, a fair guess would be to assume the source of the photo has been determined.

In finding that earliest post, I noticed something special about the name of the provider. The subscriber's first name just happened to be spelled the same way as that of the person who graciously allowed the same image to be shared on Find A Grave.

It wasn't long after I sent a message, via Ancestry, to this subscriber when I received my request: an enlarged copy of the photo I had found on Find A Grave. Take a look for yourself and see if it isn't one and the same as our Rachel.

Better yet, the source for this photograph—not to mention the well-researched tree, itself—is actually a great-great granddaughter of Rachel and Francis Webb.

Above: Photo of an eighteen year old Rachel Lewis, not long before her 1856 marriage to Francis Webb in Marshall County, Indiana. Permission to include this photo here kindly granted by Cathleen, Rachel's great-great granddaughter.

When all the Details Fall Into Place

When working on old photographs I've rescued from antique shops, it's always gratifying to quickly come to the conclusion about the subject's identity. In finding the Chicago photograph of Rachel Webb—handily labeled with not only her full name, but also her address—we get a head start on learning more about this woman with the captivating gaze.

After quickly finding her in the 1900 and 1910 census records, we're already able to glean some details. First of all, we learned that her husband's name was Francis, and that the elderly couple lived in Chicago with their unmarried daughter Clara. Furthermore, it was easy to determine that Francis Webb was born in Ohio, and that his wife, Rachel, was born in Indiana. Though we've found them in Chicago, since their daughter, like her mother, was also born in Indiana, my guess is that Francis met Rachel in Indiana, and that they lived there until at least the year of Clara's birth in 1857.

That date gives us an extended range of census records which, once located, may paint a clearer picture of this Webb family we've found on Turner Avenue in Chicago.

And so, the search is on. With not much difficulty at all, we locate Rachel and her husband Francis in Indiana by the time of the 1880 census. At that point, Francis Webb worked as an engineer in a sawmill and the family lived in the town of Argos in Marshall County, Indiana, a small community now counting less than two thousand in population. Back then, when Francis and Rachel lived there, Argos was a tiny place of barely over six hundred people.

By 1880, the Webb family consisted of Francis and Rachel plus their four daughters. Besides Clara, there were her three younger sisters: Rosa, Eva, and Lula. When we locate the 1870 census, we realize there had been another daughter, Edith, who had been born in 1860.

Reaching back to that 1860 census, we are fortunate to find the Webbs listed in the household of the man we can presume is actually Rachel's father, Joseph Lewis. There, Edith, having just been born a few months previously, is listed only as "Baby."

Since the family was still in Marshall County at the time of the 1860 census, it is likely no surprise to find the marriage record for Francis and Rachel in that same county. There, on July 3, 1856, Rachel Lewis appeared with her intended before a Justice of the Peace to exchange vows.

It wasn't just in governmental documentation that records of Francis and Rachel Webb and their family could be found. As it turns out, almost at the start of my search for Rachel, I stumbled upon another of her photographs—this one, as it turns out, of a Rachel much younger than the woman whose likeness I rescued from an antique store in northern California.

Someone, as it turns out, has cared greatly for her family's history.


Images above from the 1870 census and the Marshall County, Indiana, marriage records courtesy Ancestry.com.  

Icons of our Occupations

Today, for those of us living in the United States, is the holiday known as Labor Day. Many of us likely see the holiday as a welcome day off from work. Others see it as the last gasp of summer before the long, hardworking winter months tie us down.

The genesis of the holiday started with the recognition that a day should be set aside to honor labor. The first Labor Day in the United States was designated by the state of Oregon in 1887. Between that year and 1894, when the day was officially recognized as a federal holiday, thirty states had added that designation to their list of holidays.

Buried in between the lines of that often-violent battle for recognition of laborers and the unions which represented them was the shift from a nation which was mostly agrarian—nearly everyone worked as a farmer—to a nation served by people skilled in many different occupations.

For those of us involved in exploring our family's history, though we may be riveted by the quest to learn the names, dates and locations of our ancestors, we can find fascinating details by attending to those other details such as occupation. Because of my use of genetic genealogy, I tend to record not only my direct lines, but also those in collateral lines. Blending that pursuit with my natural nosiness to ferret out the details on distant cousins' lives, I've recently run into some fascinating facts.

Just this weekend, I was doing further work on that never-ending southern connection on my maternal grandmother's line. Since I had finally pushed further back in time on her McClellan line to find connections with some southern Tisons, Charleses, and McLerans, I decided to bring those lines forward to our current times.

Working down one McClellan line—a brother of my third great-grandfather, George Edmund McClellan—I ran across a family which moved from Georgia to west Texas, then Arizona, then, ultimately, to southern California. By that point in the generations, I was looking at a McClellan descendant who would have been my third cousin twice removed. This man, son of George's brother's granddaughter Berta Margaret Davis and her husband John Jones, was the baby of their family.

When he was young, this boy had two interests: learning how to ride horses, and playing his guitar. Those two skills eventually paid off for him when his mother moved the family to Los Angeles. Working as a forest ranger at Death Valley, he was assigned to work as a technical advisor for a film crew shooting a western there on location. Hanging out with the cast and crew during breaks, he played some of the songs he had written on his guitar.

Following up on the crew's encouragement for him to submit his songs to music publishers was what got Stan Jones his start. Though never becoming a household name in the music or entertainment industry, even today we can recognize one of his 1940s hits: Ghost Riders in the Sky. That was enough to get Jones started in a career in both songwriting and acting.

Though he was only distantly related to me—remember, he and I are third cousins, twice removed, something maybe only a genealogist would care about—I thought it was an interesting quirk to learn about my McClellan roots.

Delving into another line of my southern family, a while back I found someone with a very different occupational story. I found this story while working on the line of my George Edmund McClellan's wife, the former Sidney Tison, daughter of Job Tison and Sidnah Sheffield of Georgia.

Sidney Tison McClellan's brother William had a second great-granddaughter who, after all those generations, still remained in the state of Georgia, home of her family's roots. Born in 1918 in Savannah, this Tison descendant—Elizabeth Mercer, my fourth cousin once removed—married a man named Christopher Cashel Fitzsimmons Hammond. You will be relieved to learn he was called, simply, Chris.

Chris attended Georgia Tech, where he received his degree in mechanical engineering in 1934. Like many other young men of that era, he followed up by joining the navy. Eventually back in civilian life, he found work as a salesman with a Savannah company known as The Steel Products Company.

The Steel Products Company was mainly involved in what was called the structural steel business. The company had a side line for which they needed a sales rep; Chris took the job.

That product line of trailers, which the company dubbed Great Dane Trailers, got its start with the dealerships which Chris set up in Florida. With the advent of U.S. involvement in World War II, an army contract catapulted the company—and Chris—into a prime business position, and from there, Chris became an integral part of the company's development.

After Chris Hammond became president of the company in 1953, the company name eventually changed to reflect what had now become its main product line: Great Dane Trailers. From 1973 until the time of his retirement in 1984, he served as the company's chairman of the board. After his retirement, he remained active as a consultant in the trucking industry, as well as in community endeavors, passing away in 2011.

Though the company's current website—with its ten-minute film of the company's history—doesn't mention Chris Hammond's name specifically, every time I pass a Great Dane logo on a truck on the highway, I now can't help but think, hey! I'm a relative! Though a distant connection—and one by marriage, not blood—the link to Christopher Cashel Fitzsimmons Hammond somehow makes seeing that icon of an industry giant, Great Dane, remind me of my family's history.

As I wander through my family's story over the ages, I'm sure I'll encounter more such tokens of the varied occupations which developed as our country grew from its agrarian roots. Not just for Labor Day, but for a deeper appreciation of my ancestors' contributions to the growth of our nation, I've realized that learning about these forebears' occupations provides a richer appreciation of who they were as people, and how they connected with and served their local communities.