Wordless Wednesday

Don't Look a Genealogy Gift Horse in the Mouth?

Have you ever heard of Jean Léon La Forêt?  I hadn't either, until a couple of weeks ago.  That's when a fellow genealogist in the Bay Area tracked me down in the Oakland FamilySearch Library and walked over with a bulging bag in her hand.  "Do you have a minute?  I have something I want to show you."

The bag contained two boxes, two notebooks, and two scrapbooks full of photos, documents, and a mystery.  The cast of characters includes Mr. La Forêt and Emma Margaret (Schaefer) La Forêt, Earl Elden Cobb and Rosita (La Forêt) Cobb, John Schaefer and Elizaeth (Walz) Schaefer, and many more.  Locations include Algeria, France, Switzerland, the United States.  Accusations appear to include child neglect, theft, swindling, and possibly murder.

Sound good so far?

About 1865, John Schaefer married Elizabeth Walz.  They had at least one child, Emma Margaret Schaefer.  Mr. Schaefer died suddenly in 1867 without having written a will.

As was common at the time for widows with young children, Elizabeth remarried, this time to Mr. Curdt.  He seems to be the villain in this story.  Poor Emma Margaret is said to have been mistreated and frozen out of her inheritance, with the assistance (deliberate or unintentional?  as yet uncertain) of her mother.  She ran away into an early marriage, to Mr. Petit.  That apparently didn't work out.  Later she married Jean La Forêt, who might be the hero of the piece.  He was a former Marine (because there is no such thing as an ex-Marine) and a Vice-Consul in Algiers (at different times, of course).  They had one child, Rosita.  Elizabeth later died in a suspicious fire.

There are copies of wills and probate proceedings.  Originals of deeds and naturalization documents, State Department and U.S. Senate letterhead, newspapers and clippings, business and calling cards.  Lots and lots of notes.

This interesting package was donated several years ago to a local society, but no one there really knew what to do with it.  One person decided to take it home and try to piece everything together and make a narrative, but other things always took priority, and it sat in the back of a closet.  And then suddenly she came up with the idea of giving it to me.  (Remember the old Life cereal commercial?  "Let's get Mikey!")  She said she thought I could do the mystery justice.  So how could I turn it down?  It has certainly tickled my curiosity bone!

The first thing I'm going to have to do is look through all the items and figure out a logical way to sort them, so I know what I actually have.  Normally the order in which items are kept is important, but these have changed hands enough times that any original sequencing appears to have been lost.   Then I'll start analyzing everything.  I plan to post updates as I work through the documents.  I don't know if I'll find an answer to the questions the first collector posed, but it should be an interesting journey.

FamilySearch, Otto Frank, the British Library, and the Sartorial Splendor of Viennese Jewish Men

Did you participate in FamilySearch's 2014 Worldwide Indexing Project?  That was an organized effort to have as many people transcribe (because the volunteers aren't actually doing any "indexing") at least one batch of records from FamilySearch over a two-day period.  This year the effort is being called the Worldwide Indexing Event, it has been extended to one week (August 7–14), and the goal is to have 100,000 volunteers submit at least one batch each.

Remember, all of the free searchable databases on FamilySearch.org are there because volunteers donated their time and transcribed digitized microfilm.  This year there is a particular emphasis on transcribing records in languages other than English.

We're talking about having a group of staff members come in to the Oakland FamilySearch Library for another brunch and indexing party, as we did last year.  Why not get your friends together and do the same?  I hope we have chocolate again!

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Anne Frank

The Sydney Jewish Museum and the Netherlands' Anne Frank House are searching for letters from Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank.  The father of the famous diarist received a large amount of correspondence in the years following the English publication of The Diary of Anne Frank.  Most were written by girls the same age as Anne or older.  While the Anne Frank House has retained all the letters sent to Otto, his replies were not copied or archived.

If you or someone you know wrote to Otto Frank and still has his letter written in response, please contact Anne Slade in Australia at 0418 670 352 or by e-mail.

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Dr. Wilhelm Solf was the first governor of German Samoa and later was the German ambassador to Japan under the Weimar Republic.  After his death in 1936, his widow, Johanna Solf, presided over the Solf-Kreis, a circle of anti-Nazi intellectuals, in her salon in Berlin.  Solf and her daughter, the Countess So'oa'emalelagi "Lagi" von Ballestrem-Solf, hid many Jews and provided them with documents to emigrate to safety.

Most members of the circle were arrested and executed after attending a tea party in Berlin on 10 September 1943.  The guests had been betrayed by a Gestapo spy.  The Solfs were interned in Ravensbrück and narrowly avoided death because of delays in their trial and the subsequent approach of the Red Army, which led to their liberation.

Now, New Zealand author Michael Field is seeking survivors or descendants of survivors who escaped the Holocaust through the Solf Circle.  Michael wants to tell the story to a wider English-speaking audience and is seeking more information.  Anyone with information should e-mail him.

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Weinberg and Applebaum families in Macclesfield

The short-lived Macclesfield Hebrew Congregation flourished from 1941–1946 in Cheshire, England, following the arrival of evacuees, refugees, and firms which moved up from the London area. The firms included Belmont Textiles (the Belmont/Lazarus families), Osband Knitwear, Offenbach, BJ Friend, H&I Franklin, V&E Friedland, A. Goldstein, and possibly Halle.  The congregation was the most northerly outpost of the United Synagogue and had its own rabbi as well as its own branch of the Women's International Zionist Organization.

Basil Jeuda of Macclesfield is currently researching the congregation.  He hopes to mount an exhibition in 2016 for the 70th anniversary of its end, to celebrate Jewish life in the area during World War II. If you have any information, photos, memories, or other memorabilia, please contact Basil via e-mail or write to him:
Basil Jeuda
Sandringham Road,
Macclesfield SK10 1QB
United Kingdom

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Jonathan Kaplan, a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Technology in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia is focusing his research on the social, sartorial, and aesthetic roles of Jewish men in Vienna (and other towns in cities in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (roughly 1890–1930).

He is trying to create a digital database of photographs and ephemera from this era for his research.  If you have family photographs, advertising materials, or other relevant items that you are willing to share with Jonathan, please contact him.

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Would you like better access to knowing about the holdings of the British Library?  The library has launched LibCrowds, a platform for crowdsourcing library projects.  The first project, Convert-a-Card, is dedicated to the retro conversion of printed card catalogs into electronic records in order to make them available to a worldwide audience via the ExploreBL catalog, which already includes nearly 57 million records.  The initial focus of Convert-a-Card is the Asian and African collections.  (But I still like hard-copy card catalogs . . . .)

Wordless Wednesday

Newspapers, Newspapers, Newspapers . . . .

It's time for another round-up of the latest additions to the Wikipedia online newspaper archive page!  Advantage Preservation has been on a binge of digitization lately, so more newspapers seem to be coming online every day, which is great for us researchers.  And almost all the new links are free, which is even better.

Belgium:  The Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique (Royal Library of Belgium) has uploaded free digital images of newspapers dating from 1831–1918.  The site is in French, Dutch, and English, and some of the newspapers are in German.  Newspapers from 1919–1950 are indexed and appear in search results, but due to copyright issues, those images are not free.

Canada:  I found a trove of Mennonite links.  There are links to indices for death notices and obituaries in five Mennonite newspapers, and an author/subject index for one of the newspapers (which was published in in the United States for a time and so also shows up in the Multistate list).

China:  The Shanghai Echo, a periodical for Jewish refugees who had fled Europe, is online for 1946 to 1948.

England:  The Foxearth and District Local History Society has posted transcribed selections from newspapers in the East Anglia area.

England:  Spare Rib, a feminist publication, has been digitized and uploaded in its entirety.

England:  A book was published with a detailed index of The (London) Times of 1863, and that book is available online as a downloadable PDF.

Ireland:  Ancestry.com has created a new newspaper site, IrishNewspapers.com.  I wonder if this means it's trying to go back to the pricing model it used to have, where you could pay for different databases separately.

Poland:  There is an index to death notices published in Nasz Przegląd ("Our Review"), a Polish-language Zionist newspaper that was published daily in Warszawa from March 1923 until August 1939.

Russia:  This is another Mennonite resource.  Someone created an index of Mennonite-relevant stories in the German-language Odessaer Zeitung ("Odessa Newspaper").

California:  The Genealogical Society of Santa Cruz County has an index to early local newspapers, available as PDF files.  I don't see that the index tells you which paper an entry is from, but maybe I'm just overlooking it.

Georgia:  The Uncle Remus Regional Library System, which covers six counties (but not the ones I'm researching, of course), has several newspapers available online, courtesy of Advantage Preservation.

Indiana:  The New Albany–Floyd County Public Library has an index to local newspapers for 1847 to the present.

Indiana:  The obituary index for the Plymouth Pilot Daily is downloadable as several PDF files.

Iowa:  Ten newspapers from Dickinson County have been digitized by Advantage Preservation.

Massachusetts:  The first 30 years of the Boston Jewish Times are available courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society.

Michigan:  More than one million subject index cards from the Detroit News are available on the Seeking Michigan site.

Michigan:  The Milford Public Library not only hosts an obituary index for the Milford Times for 1929–1949, but they will provide you a free copy of the obituary when you find one you want.

Michigan:  This one's a little unusual.  A cemetery has the local newspaper, the Petoskey News Review for 1874–2001, on its site.

Montana:  The student newspaper for Bozeman High School for 1939–2015 is available online, courtesy of Advantage Preservation.

Montana:  Montana State University is in the process of placing digital copies of its student newspaper, the Exponent, online.  Not everything is there yet.

Nebraska:  Advantage Preservation worked with the North Bend Public Library to digitize three local newspapers there.

New Jersey:  Ten early Plainfield newspapers running from 1837–1918 are on the Plainfield Library's Web site.

New Jersey:  The Rockaway Township Free Public Library has the Iron Era and Rockaway Record available online.

New York:  Allegany Public Library and Advantage Preservation teamed up to put four Allegany newspapers online.

New York:  The Troy Irish Genealogy Society has added a marriage notices index to complement its Lansingburgh newspapers death notices index.

North Carolina:  The Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper for Duke University, is online but only for the 1960's and 1980's.

Ohio:  A collection of newspapers printed by the Wright Brothers has been digitized and is available on two sites, Dayton Metro Library and Wright State University.

Tennessee:  An obituary index for the Nashville Tennessean for 1964 to the present is on the Nashville Public Library's site.

Multistate:  The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia hosts an index for about 200,000 obituaries.  There is no indication on the site what years this covers.

Multistate:  MennObits has transcribed obituaries from Mennonite newspapers from 1864 to the present.

I hope you find some great information in at least one of these newspapers!

Wordless Wednesday

Were They Murdered?

Belvidere Apollo, March 27, 1885

I recently wrote about my discovery of the index to obituaries and other mentions of deaths in the Belvidere (New Jersey) Apollo/Intelligencer.  I now have all the copies, and while I am very excited to learn more about my ancestors, the most intriguing item was about a collateral line.

I was curious about this one when I found the names in the index.  The index entries for Joseph W. Sellers and Mrs. Joseph W. Sellers were on the same day.   I had wondered if maybe there had been a tragic accident and the two had died on the same day, or something similar.  But no, the story is even more interesting than that.

"Coroner Harry H. Davis, of Camden, said that the suspicious circumstances connected with the death of Joseph W. Sellers and his wife, and the fact that several other persons of his household have suffered with symptoms of poisoning, leaves but one course for the officials to pursue, and that is to make a thorough investigation.  The body of Mr. Sellers will be exhumed and possibly that of Mrs. Sellers also." (Belvidere Apollo, March 27, 1885, page 3, column 6, under "State Items"; image above)

When I checked my family tree for Joseph W. Sellers, I didn't find him.  I had to look for him in the 1880 census and work backward to determine that he was a great-grandson of Abraham Sellers, my 4th-great-grandfather; I had begun work on his father's line in the past but had not pursued it forward in time sufficiently to have learned about him and added him to my tree.  Joseph W. Sellers was the great-nephew of my 3rd-great-grandfather Franklin P. Sellers, and therefore the first cousin once removed of my 2nd-great-grandfather Cornelius G. Sellers, second cousin of my great-grandfather Elmer Sellers, and my second cousin three times removed.  (Not exactly a "close" relative.)

But he was a relative!  Now that I knew he was a relative, I couldn't leave that poisoning question alone, could I?  And down the curiosity rabbit hole I fell.  I jumped online and started searching for more information.  A couple of Google searches immediately found three more newspaper articles.  The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on March 20, 1885 that Joseph had died on February 15, supposedly from typhoid fever and fatigue contracted while taking care of his wife, who had died a short time before him.  The deaths were not considered to be suspicious until Mary Bowyer, a cook who had worked for the Sellers family, moved with the Sellers' son to another family, which apparently was going to adopt the boy.  Suddenly everyone in that family became ill, except the cook and the boy.  The doctor called in to take care of the family members stated that they were suffering from arsenic poisoning, which made people wonder about Joseph Sellers and his wife (Sallie, by the way, though she is identified by her own name in only one of the articles I found).

The next day, March 21, 1885, the Philadelphia Times carried more information on the developing story, on the front page!  The decision had been made to exhume Joseph.  More people, including a former housekeeper of the Sellers family, had come forward to say they had had bad reactions to food prepared by the cook, and a motive for the hypothetical poisonings was being bandied about.  Apparently Mary was very attached to the Sellers' son and wanted to have him for her own.

By March 22 the story had gained more traction and was being republished in other areas of the country.  The Indianapolis Sentinel ran a synopsis of the Times story and included commentary from the doctor who had attended Joseph, saying that he had observed no signs of poisoning and still believed Joseph had died of typhoid.

The next step was checking dedicated newspaper sites.  Searching for "joseph w sellers" and "joseph sellers" on Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank.com, and NewspaperArchive.com provided several more articles.  All told I found almost twenty articles, ranging from Philadelphia and New York City (including the New York Times!) to Boston and Indianapolis, covering the ongoing question of the possible poisoning of Joseph and Sallie Sellers.  The articles were published between March 20 and March 27, 1885.  One article, from the Philadelphia Times of March 24, 1885, even ended on the chilling note that "[i]t was semi-officially stated that they [the Coroner, County Physician and Dr. Snitcher] were satisfied that Mr. Sellers did not die of typhoid fever."  I noticed, however, that I hadn't found anything from New Jersey, where they had died, or about a resolution to the investigation.

Next I looked at New Jersey links on the Wikipedia newspaper archive page.  None of the pages had any hits for "joseph w sellers" or "joseph sellers."  I also checked the newspapers on Google News Archive and found a local paper, the Camden Democrat.  Unfortunately, the only issues online for the 1880's were for January 1880.  I was starting to wonder if perhaps the matter had been a tempest in a teapot and nothing had come of it—notwithstanding the opinions of the coroner, county physician, and Dr. Snitcher—for otherwise surely there would have been more local coverage.

Then I remembered that FindMyPast.com has been adding many U.S. records to its site, including newspapers.  So I signed in to my account on that site and searched for "joseph sellers" in 1885 in the newspaper collection.  (I wrote in 2013 about how much I dislike the disastrously awful interface that brightsolid created for the FindMyPast.com site and then had the stupidity to port over to the FindMyPast.co.uk site.  I originally planned to allow my subscription to expire, but when I learned that the Family History Library edition of the site allowed access to only the index for the newspapers and not the images, I decided I needed the newspaper access enough to keep up the subscription.  It pains me every time I have to use the site, though.)

The first thing I noticed is that I finally had some results for New Jersey papers!  I found articles from the New Brunswick Times and Trenton Times that pretty much rehashed the same information I had found before, during the same period.  But then I saw an article from April 9, 1885 in the New Brunswick Times:

"The jury in the Sellers poisoning case at Camden agreed that the deaths of both Joseph W. Sellers and his wife were due to natural causes."

New Brunswick Times, April 9, 1885

Well.  It's good to know they weren't poisoned, but I have to admit it was rather a bit of an anticlimax.  On the other hand, a few valuable lessons were illustrated by my search for the answer.

First, and it's something I say all the time (even in classes focused on online resources), not everything is online.  The Camden Democrat, being the local newspaper, probably would have had more detailed information about this case and been able to give me a direct answer more quickly, but the only site I could find with any issues didn't have them for the right period.

Second, never rely on only one source of information when you're doing your research.  I started with a short item from one newspaper and ended up looking for information from thirteen sources (and finding useful info in most of them) before getting a fuller picture of the situation and finding out what happened in the end.

Third, more than one finding aid (i.e., index) for the same records can be really helpful!  I mentioned that I had searched on NewspaperArchive.com early on.  I didn't have any New Jersey results from that search.  But when I used FindMyPast.com, all the significant results were noted as coming from NewspaperArchive.  So that search found items that NewspaperArchive's own search didn't.

The last lesson has to do with a fact that I haven't mentioned until now.  Most of the articles talking about the possible poisoning mentioned that Mary Bowyer was "colored."  Considering the time period, I have to wonder how much that affected people's opinions of the likelihood of a poisoning having occurred and of her being capable of doing it.  Depending on what kind of research you are doing, you might need to take into account perceptions of the time.

Spurred on by this little excursion, I have found a few more pieces of information about the Sellers family.  FamilySearch provided the death dates of Joseph and Sallie, and the number of the microfilm roll on which the records appear.  I also found their son, Robert, in an index entry for the 1885 New Jersey state census; he was living with the family that was said to have wanted to adopt him.  I have not been able to find Mary in 1885 in New Jersey, although she was with the family in the 1880 census.  I am curious what happened to her.  More than one article mentioned that she was still in Camden during the investigations, and even that her residence was being watched.  Taking into account that her name was spelled Bowyer (most common), Bower, and Bowers in the articles (and Boyer in the 1880 census), however, who knows how she might have been enumerated.  Or maybe she decided that leaving the state was her best move and didn't stay around long enough for the census.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Fourth of July Memories

This week for Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, he asked everyone to share their favorite memories about Independence Day:

1. Think of the best Fourth of July you remember from your childhood.

2. Think of the best Fourth of July you remember from your adulthood.

3. What will, or did, you do today?

4. Write about one, or all, of them on your blog or in Comments to this post, or on Facebook or Google+.

1.  I'm surprised that I really don't remember any Fourth of July celebrations from when I was a child.  I have some vague recollections of playing with sparklers, but that's it.  I'm pretty sure we used to have firecrackers, but I just don't remember anything beyond that.

2.  Since I can't remember any great Fourth of July stuff from my childhood, I'm going to claim two best days from my adult life.  Both were performances while I was in the USC Marching Band (The Greatest Marching Band in the History of the Universe!).  The best one was in 1986, when we played a concert at the Hollywood Bowl and the conductor was Bill Conti (while Dr. Bartner, the band's real conductor, was with the Liberty Band for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty).  I remember it was a great concert and working with Conti was fun.

The second best Fourth of July was the year the band played at the Rose Bowl.  I don't remember what year that was, but it pretty much had to be 1985, 1987, or 1988.  Gary Owens was the announcer, but the event is not listed in his IMDB profile (though I think it was televised).  Not only did we give a great performance, but the fireworks weren't the everyday shoot-up-in-the-sky-and-explode-in-a-shower-of-sparks type.  One side of the stadium was blocked off, and fireworks were used to create images.  Probably the best fireworks show I've seen ever.  And I learned that Gary Owens was an egotistical ass.

3.  I have spent most of today working on genealogy.  I helped a friend with the book she's putting together for a big family reunion, I did some research, and then I spent far too many hours on citiations (bleah).  It's overcast this evening in the Oakland area, so I won't be able to see the fireworks being shot off in San Francisco.  And one of my cats is hiding in the back of the house because of the noise of firecrackers outside.

The "Spirit of Troy logo" by Source is licensed under fair use via Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spirit_of_Troy_logo.jpg#/media/File:Spirit_of_Troy_logo.jpg.

Wordless Wednesday