Bidding Another Season Goodbye

If October caught up with you as unexpectedly as it did me, you can see why we so often use the phrase, “Time flies.” We’re now out of summer and into fall. While I am not inundated with autumn-colored leaves on my front lawn yet, thanks to the mild weather in my part of the country (and certainly not running the risk of frosts or first snows like one blogging friend of mine mentions), I am nonetheless sensing the passing of another season.

This season I’m mentioning is a time in which I’ve been privileged to linger over the papers of one relative long gone from our family. It’s been over a year now since I began sorting through those items. Letters, cards, news clippings and mementos: all cherished by Agnes Tully Stevens during her lifetime—and, as we all must do someday, all left behind for others to dispose of.

There are a few more items still left to post. Most of these are cards of one type or another. Many are holiday mementos, which I’ll save to share at the appropriate time. Why she kept these for so many years is something I cannot discern. I know some of the material actually belonged to Agnes’ own mother, and we’ve seen some of these items dating back to the 1870s. Perhaps Agnes kept these for a remembrance of family members of generations preceding her. Perhaps some inspired a nostalgia for special seasons in her own life—like the mysterious mention in a letter that seemed to refer to a disappointment in a relationship during her young adult years.

While it is easy to guess at the motivation behind saving some of the keepsakes we’ve seen over this past year, there are some items for which I have no clue. Take this picture at the top of today’s post. The card is captioned, “Lover’s Leap—Rock City Gardens, Lookout Mt.”

Why Lover’s Leap?

Could it be that Lookout Mountain was a stop on the way home to Chicago from the Wrightsville Beach area of North Carolina where the Tully family evidently enjoyed some vacations?

Or could this be a reminder of a disappointment in her own life?

The card itself, while similar to some postcards that can be found online, is of a smaller format. Slightly larger than a modern-day business card, the picture measures 2½ by 3¾ inches. There is nothing printed on the reverse other than a small marking in the corner, which—once I retrieved my magnifying glass to decipher the print—merely indicates a code: “2491.”

What I thought was a reproduction of a painting turns out to actually be a photograph overlaid on a linen finish. Embedded in the shrubbery detail of the lower left corner of the card is the barely legible stamp, “Photo by Ohne.” (At least it looks like it says Ohne. Maybe someone else would know better. I can’t read it.)

Regardless of the detail, the question remains: Why would Agnes keep this little card for so long? There is no endearing note enclosed. It is not wrapped within a letter that would reveal more details. It’s just there: a solitary keepsake, as singular as the striking subject of the card itself.

Whatever it is, it has become like the changing colors of fall to me: a melancholy reminder that a season in which I’ve enjoyed lingering is about to pass. I’ll miss sharing these daily treasures from the cherished possessions of a woman I’ve never met. Discovering her cultured late-Victorian-era childhood in the rough-and-tumble immigrant milieu of a rugged Midwest city was a piquant mix that upset my preconceived notions of nineteenth century Chicago and growing up American in an Irish household.

Unidentified Faces—Still Looking At Us

To think it was just last night: the webinar that would have so handily suited my purposes for today’s post. The Online Photo Editing Workshop, one of DearMyrtle’s webinars, would surely have provided me just the tools needed to spruce up yet another murky, aging photograph.

But, alas, I missed it. I was too occupied, sorting through the remnant’s of Agnes Tully Stevens’ papers to see what was left of the collection to write about today.

Some of the photos left behind are so degenerated that they are not even discernable anymore. Regardless, I’ve yielded to temptation to post some of them. But after today, no more!

Unfortunately, these faded likenesses in today’s picture come with no identification. Of course.

However, I have guesses.

On a postcard format, this picture features a man, a woman, and a young child. They appear to be inside a shop of some sort. Using the autofix feature on my Adobe Photoshop, the blurry cabinet that the subjects are standing behind seems to either contain sets of polished rocks, or—more likely—various candies and other sweet treats.

I am not so sure about the man, but the woman looks vaguely familiar. She seems to resemble one of the women in the Wrightsville Beach pictures I posted mid-summer.

Just to see if my eyes weren’t deceiving me, I decided to crop the beach photos and zero in on my suspected subject. It helps to check similarities that way, rather than flipping back and forth between pages.

Could it be that these two women are actually one and the same?

The man in the shop may have been in the beach pictures, too. At first, I had thought he was the gentleman belonging to the smiling woman with the baby, but that mother doesn’t as closely resemble this mother as does the woman I first mentioned. Perhaps another man in the beach set is the same as this shop picture’s gentleman.

And then I wonder…let my mind cause all sorts of unsubstantiated trouble. Could it be that the man in the shop is Agnes’ older brother William? After all, before 1912, he did work as a clerk in a cigar shop. Comparing this picture with a later one of William—at Agnes’ wedding in 1912, only three years before his death—there seems to be a similarity.

If this shop picture is of William Tully, then the woman at his side would be his wife, Mary Balfe Tully—a woman born and raised in Leeds County, Ontario, who married William in Chicago in 1901.

The child, then, would be their daughter, Agnes Margaret Tully, born in Chicago in 1904. We’ve already met her in another hopelessly blurry photograph as a young girl, but I have nothing else to help confirm that this is the right identity for the child in the shop photo.

At any rate, half a guess is probably better than none, and I can cling to the possibility that I now have a photograph of another branch of our Chicago-based extended Tully family. Or have originated a grave error that will be replicated for generations to come.

Beautiful Genealogies

When it comes right down to it, some people see genealogies as bare bones lists of names, dates, and connections demonstrating relationships in a family tree. Who those people were—other than the basic facts cited—becomes no clearer for having been listed within the charts or reports provided. Using the lingo of journalism, genealogy gives us the Who, Where, and When. It is truly, “Just the facts, ma’am.”

On the other hand, when people speak of family history, I see a different matter: an explanation of the What and the Why. While the newspaper reporter might focus on the facts alone, the family historian wants to move beyond cold data. The family historian wants to uncover the full chest of hidden treasure in ancestry’s story, not just settle for the pennies of a string of “factoids.”

In the genealogy blogging world, arising from the nearly three thousand of us, we see some writers intent on moving beyond merely reciting data. I’ve seen this type of movement in other disciplines throughout history, and I’m hoping this is a glimpse at a trend that will take hold and call others to join the effort.

In our modern times, when we think of the discipline of art—or, to put it more broadly, “The Arts”—we may, if we are honest with ourselves and not afraid to admit our “ignorance,” see creative efforts that may seem downright ugly, untoward, or distasteful. A trend toward beauty seems counter-intuitive to those currently immersed in these fields. And yet, music history, for one, has shown developments that have reached out toward beauty, toward an uplifted ideal.

Take the designation, in the world of opera, once known as Bel Canto: “Beautiful singing.” Whether you are an aficionado of the niche of Italian opera or not, you can appreciate the sentiment: a style of singing that upholds beauty as an ideal.

I grew up in a metropolitan area that once considered itself the center of the universe: New York City. I didn’t exactly live in any of the five boroughs, but I lived near enough to benefit from the magnificent arts and culture the region afforded. In addition, I lived in proximity to many other, lesser-known historic cultural resources, thanks to my residence on Long Island.

Many people may not be aware of just where—or what—Long Island is. For those map-challenged among us, Long Island is the fish-shaped appendage docked to the east of that better known, more celebrated port called Manhattan. People hearing the island’s name may think of a few things—mostly the Long Island Parking Lot (otherwise known as the Long Island Expressway), the Mets, Jones Beach, or even Teddy Roosevelt’s home—but not many will recall the rich historical heritage whose tokens are scattered throughout the island’s landscape.

Several years ago, I was pursuing a personal study of significant residences on Long Island dating from the 1800s. Mostly, I was focusing on the opposite end of the island—the Hamptons, in particular. Somewhere in my studies, I stumbled upon the fact that there was a name given to the style of residential architecture in vogue during the latter part of that century. Rather than taken from the Italian, as the “beautiful” designation for opera, the term for this architectural school of thought came from the French: Beaux Arts.

Beaux: beautiful. Once again, someone slipped away from the drudgery of the world into the ideal—a realm where there is no place for ugly.

I don’t know what your feelings might be about the historical context surrounding the times in which these beautiful residences were designed and built. Admittedly, there were some very ugly things happening during those times. But for those who could—through finances, ability, will power, or whatever—a cadre of leaders chose to focus not on the base or the distorted, but on the uplifting, both for the individual residences of the privileged, and for public displays of urban architecture, too.

There have been other times in history when things weren’t going so swell—and yet, someone chose to shift attention from the painful and the discouraging to the uplifting and beautiful. If you have ever studied the state of life in medieval Ireland, for instance, you know the times were fraught with risks, political collapse and chaos. Narratives like Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization—whether you agree with its premise or not—give a pretty good idea of the times. And yet, despite the many opportunities to focus on the bad, that time period, too, yielded a token of choosing instead to look toward the beautiful in its exquisitely illuminated Book of Kells.

Not that all tragedies of life should be designated as ugly and shunted out of sight. It is in the handling of the story that we either benefit from the good or get dragged down with the ugly.

Why mention all that in relation to genealogy? I say this because I see a movement taking shape: people who cherish their families’ stories so much that they are not content to simply build a genealogy—no matter how well documented. These people sense the need to tell something more about their families, to pass down a history of the relatives before them who made them who they are. To know these family members they’ve never met. And to pass that knowing along to others.

In the writing of it, they discover not only their ancestors, but they discover something more about themselves. As the story becomes more compelling to them, they become part of it, too. Intertwined.

Crafted with compassion, what they write becomes beautiful. The subjects might not be beautiful in and of themselves—an alcoholic in my family’s story, for instance, or an escaped prisoner in another’s story. But in the telling of the story—and here is where we become intertwined—in our perceptions of the gifts we’ve received from that heritage, our eyes are opened to the beauty of the chain reactions of life. How the choices one person may have meant for harm bestowed unexpected benefit upon another generation. How one generation’s weakness or mistakes strengthened the next generation. How one generation’s poverty or suffering resulted in another generation’s determination and resilience. How another’s journeys became our arrivals.

To tell the beautiful story means to speak with these ancestors’ words, to mouth the sentiments they might have felt. It means ferreting out the compelling in the life lessons of a previous generation so another generation won’t have to go without.

I love what I’m seeing as these people start unfolding their families’ stories, blog post by blog post and book by book. So many new publications show me that these researchers have found their voice—actually, their ancestors’ voices—and are stepping up to tell their stories.

I’m grateful for these stories. I don’t know what genre they would be classified under, but in the tradition of Bel Canto and Beaux Arts, I consider them Beautiful Genealogies.


Above left: Incipit "Liber Generationis" of the Gospel of Matthew, from the 700 A.D. illuminated manuscript, the Lindisfarne Gospels. Below right: the "Four Evangelists" from the Book of Kells, circa 800 A.D. Both courtesy Wikipedia; both in the public domain.

The Legacy of a Church

Can a church be a church without a church building?

That is a question posed in many theological circles, and among laymen as well. Whether getting technical with discussions of the “ekklesia” of ancient Greek, or examining traditions of various denominations, though we often refer to the building when using that term, “church,” it is really the people congregating in that building who make the difference.

It was especially that way when it comes to considering the church of Agnes Tully Stevens, my husband’s grandmother—Saint Anne Catholic Church of the “Southtown” of Chicago. Claiming a heritage that sprang up among the cottages that dotted the plain beyond the lake where Chicago eventually stood, Saint Anne’s church had a humble beginning in home meetings. There was no church building in those early days in which parishioners could gather. The residence of a local merchant became the church home of this early Chicago mission.

Eventually, the corner of South Wentworth and West Fifty-fifth Streets became the home for the new congregation, with a suitable building dedicated in 1880. During those formative mission years, Agnes’ own parents—Irish immigrants John and Catherine Malloy Tully—met, were married, and saw each of their children baptized.

Though Agnes, born in 1888 and the baby of the Tully family, wouldn’t remember that baptismal event, she grew to find Saint Anne’s Church to be her second home in many ways. Her early years were spent attending the school at Saint Anne’s, and on her twenty-fourth birthday, June 12, 1912, she married the love of her life, William Stevens, in that very building. When the newlyweds were blessed with children of their own, each of them began life with the sacrament of baptism at this same church.

The church must have inspired a lifetime of service. It became Agnes’ habit, following the same dedication she had observed in her own mother and the many mentors she was blessed with at Saint Anne’s church, to reach out and help others in need. Our family still possesses the many letters written by Saint Anne’s priests and nuns—often from desert locations where, stricken with the dread tuberculosis, they hoped for recovery—sent in reply to Agnes’ letters of encouragement. Others were correspondence with Saint Anne’s teachers, with whom Agnes kept in touch and looked to for guidance.

The church that began as a mission outpost and grew with the city became the center that influenced the strong faith of women such as Agnes. The tokens Agnes saved and passed on to family are witnesses of that influence. A prayer book, published in 1908, displays her name as “Agnes Stevens” and, judging by the energetic scribbles encircling her signature, was her companion along with the young children who also demanded her attention. Numerous readers, magazines, and other material from the church she held on to, with the letters, for the rest of her life.

Beautiful little mementos like the one above right, its gilded filigree worn with the passing of time, are reminders of the life that meant so much to Agnes—a life centered around faith, family and her church.

That church itself, though, no longer remains. The building known as Saint Anne Catholic Church saw its congregation expand to its highest numbers in the 1950s, then wane as Chicago’s population migrated to the suburbs. Combined for a while with another parish, Saint Anne’s church eventually gave way to a secular force: the paving of what is now known as the Dan Ryan Expressway.

As a church building, Saint Anne’s Church is no longer standing. There is no picture to remind our family of the church which so greatly shaped several generations of our family through the influence of one member. We have no remembrance of stalwart church doors, meditative inner sanctuary, upward-reaching church spires.

The only reminder our family has of this church building is what was built inside the character of one faith-filled, determined mother—who, in turn, learned this respect for faith and desire to serve from her own mother. It was the people of this church, in turn, who instilled these values into the lives of the Tully, and later Stevens, families.

It all started at a church without a church building.

And it continues to have a witness, passed down through the lives of subsequent generations, despite again being a church without a church building.

The above post was written for The Catholic Gene and their "Doors of Faith" online celebration. 

Commemorating this "Year of Faith 2012-2013,"  The Catholic Gene will publish links to posts from each participating blog with their edition on October 11, 2012. 

Participation is open through Friday, October 5 for bloggers following guidelines posted by the host publication here.

Waiting For the Harvest

In the beautiful Mediterranean climate I get to call home, September is the month to celebrate a bountiful harvest. This month, I had the privilege (and oh, the aches and the pains, too!) to help some friends a couple times with the harvest in their vineyard.

While this may not sound like the kind of topic that would relate to genealogy, there actually is a connection. You see, in this same week between the two harvests, I’ve been reaping another harvest of sorts, too: a harvest of cousins.

The vineyard where my friends and I wrapped up the year’s work just yesterday is home to vines that are upwards of sixty years of age. I am not an expert in such matters, but I’ve heard it reported that whatever it is that goes into nurturing a vine to that age somehow impacts the product—once it is ultimately obtained.

Not that you have to wait that full sixty years to receive any harvest. I’m sure someone—probably at first the people who planted the vines and were the original owners of the property—reaped a harvest every year since that first planting became productive. It’s just that the mellow richness that boosts the vineyard’s reputation today didn’t blossom with that first planting.

Some things just take time.

It’s the same way with family history research. We have to plant. We need to remember to water. To do the weeding. And pruning, and plucking, and shaping and staking. To work through some pretty hot, sunny times. And then…wait.

I posted my first electronic genealogy query to GenForum in 1999. It contained a question about a Sarah Rinehart who supposedly married a James Gordon from Pennsylvania, sometime before 1820.

I got a few answers to my question. But not many.

I didn’t let that stop me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve posted questions, comments, or notes of help on GenForum since then. And I can say the same for Rootsweb—maybe even more, since I discovered Rootsweb online a bit earlier than GenForum. Admittedly, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been at this genealogy thing ever since I could read and understand “grown-up” books. And that’s been a lot of planting seasons.

I can’t say the harvests were all that exceptional, especially at first. But you know, there have been some useful hints gleaned over the years. And a few happy moments along the way when minor connections have been made, especially those you’ve read on this blog, concerning research on my husband’s family lines.

This week, however—this week—I got to make a connection with someone in my own family. Granted, it is a relative of an in-law (my family always called them “outlaws”), but nonetheless, it is someone who knows cousins in my own family. The person who contacted me is someone who knows the people who, for me, only resided in my grandmother’s little address book. And she is willing to help me connect with cousins who are now morphing into real people from those static names written on a page by someone long gone from my life.

Of course, I’m ecstatic about the possibilities. This is a branch of my mother’s family that she, for whatever reason, never kept in touch with, either in childhood or as an adult.

What reminds me of the harvest today is this: the reason this total stranger was able to find me was due to a post I wrote on GenForum. I wrote it over seven years ago. Because of how genealogy forums like GenForum work, this woman was able to contact me, even after all those years. In whatever cycle of planting and harvest this genealogy season has taken us, this week we were ripe for the harvest. A connection was made.

It will probably be some time before I’ll be able to write much on what I’m sure to uncover of the stories from this branch of the family tree. And that is fine. Sometimes, the most mellow results come from the more mature vines.

That type of experience—waiting—reminds me that genealogy, like the harvest, has seasons. A time to plant. A time to reap. And a time when the older vines become recognized as the better producers.

Above right: Amalie Kärcher, Insekten auf Weinrebe (Insects on Grapevine); oil on canvas; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Not the Assignment I Was Hoping For

I’ve heard many people tell stories about how they first became involved in genealogical research. Often, the story begins, “When I was in school, the teacher assigned a project to interview my grandparents and draw a family tree.”

That’s the case with my cousin’s daughter, who came home from high school one day with that announcement. By the time she turned in her report, our supposed Irish roots were suddenly Polish. She had uncovered the family secret. (And I’m still trying to sort out the mess.)

I’ve spent an entire adulthood awaiting the parental chance to have my own daughter come home with an announcement like that. Admittedly, I’m a homeschooling mom, so I have no one to blame but myself for such a long wait. Now that my daughter is in college, my chances may actually have increased. Considering that she has declared her major to be archaeology, my daughter seems to have registered for every anthropology course ever known to mankind. This semester, she enrolled in a Cultural Anthropology course, and my long wait is now over: she has received the coveted assignment.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. As she explained the other night as prelude to sitting down with me in front of the computer to examine my genealogy database, what she needed for class was a “kinship chart.”

It took me a long while to get my head around that concept.

“You don’t want names?”

“No.”

“What about dates? Birth? Death?”

“No.”

“But surely you need information about marriages? How else can you produce kinship?!”

What evolved from that conversation was a chart which—she assured me—did include all the relationships contained in my genealogical records for the past three generations.

That’s not what it looked like to me. It looked for all the world to be a series of triangles, circles and random lines.

“Like those charts about Queen Victoria and the spread of hemophilia throughout European royalty,” my daughter explained. “Remember those?”

Well, actually, no. I guess I wasn’t such a good student in my homeschooling-high-school years. After all, I was the one who was supposed to be the teacher.

She promised to produce a link to an online source where I could generate such a chart. But as luck would have it, she then managed to join a friend for an outing downtown for the last night of the local farmer’s market and street faire, leaving me link-less.

Secretly, I snuck a look at the Internet, trying in vain to recapture my advanced educated persona and find the blasted chart.

Not successful in my search, I did uncover some nice resources for relationship charts—not those beyond-bare-bones genealogy-counterfeit things anthropologists like to use, but the kind of thing real people like genealogists could put to use.

In the end, though I still can’t dismiss the squishy sense that somehow I’ve been cheated, I did run across the material my daughter tried to explain to me. Plus, she did get me that link.

And she even let me scan a copy of her class assignment. Well, at least part of it. It’s too long to fit across just one page. Some of us had pretty big families.

“It’s to demonstrate patterns in relationships, mom,” she tried to explain.

Somehow, I still think something is missing…

Top chart, "Cousin Kinship Chart," courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Ireland’s Still Reaching Out

The Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.

                 (1998 amendment to Article 2, Constitution of Ireland)

Think of it: an island, stricken by famine, loses nearly one fourth of its population to either death or emigration. Such was the impetus causing a million Irish—many of them single young men and women—to leave their beloved home between 1845 and 1852.

From those million—well, at least those who survived journeying in the “coffin ships” headed for the New World—North America now claims multiplied millions of their descendants. In 2006, Irish descendants represented Canada’s fourth largest ethnic group—fourteen percent of the overall population—and a 2008 survey in the United States reveals thirty six million Americans claim Irish heritage.

These numbers of multiplied descendants are seen as part of the Irish Diaspora. While the government of Ireland technically classifies this dispersion as all persons of Irish nationality who habitually reside outside the island of Ireland—including their children—the traditional concept has been stretched to include the estimated eighty million people today who still cherish their Irish ancestry. This interpretation has been referenced by the Irish government in the quote mentioned above.

I’ve spent a lot of time considering the trails of one family falling into that second category. My husband’s Tully family—of which I’ve written extensively in posts here on this blog—left their native land in the 1840s, immigrated to Canada, settled in Ontario for a generation, and then eventually found their way to Chicago, the Dakota Territory, or even further west in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

After years of research, I feel like I know these pathways well—at least those in the New World. As far as those Irish origins, however, I was clueless until I stumbled upon some corroborating evidence. Yet, even then, I wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a resource across the Atlantic that I had just discovered: Ireland Reaching Out. The organization had established a web presence after a successful pilot year, and an online forum promised to help descendants from around the world find their connections in their ancient homeland.

I took them up on their offer. I posted the information from those corroborating baptismal records on the Ireland Reaching Out forum for County Tipperary.

And waited.

Just this month, someone sent me an answer. In fact, it was someone quite familiar with researching in that area—Ballina in County Tipperary. We began a correspondence discussing the possible records that could match up with my family’s Tully data. While I have a long way to go on verifying data through documentation, I almost feel breathless to think I may finally have found the origin of at least one of our Irish families. In addition, further baptismal records seem to link the mystery Michael Tully I stumbled upon in the Canadian village of our Tully family’s residence with the rest of our family. A missing link I’m looking forward to verifying—along with the new-found distant cousins I’ve met while posting about that Tully line.

So much attention seems to be focusing on the Irish lately. Several U. S. cities host Irish festivals every summer attracting growing crowds of attendees. In the past months alone, there have been announcements of the opening of facilities dedicated to pursuit of specific aspects of Irish immigration or influence on American life—a museum in Connecticut; a library in Arizona. A Canadian film company recently released a documentary, Death or Canada, focusing on the Irish Famine and emigrants’ escape route to Canada. This past August marked the publication of Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, an extensive volume examining all aspects of what may have been the defining event in Irish history.

I’ve followed the announcements of all these opportunities for further immersion in Irish culture and history with great interest. But there is nothing to catch the eye of a family history researcher quite like the opportunity to pinpoint his or her own roots in the beloved emerald isle.

Above right: 1868 engraving by Henry Doyle, Emigrants Leave Ireland; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.