Usefulness of Community History Books

A few years ago I was looking for information concerning the father of a client, by the name of August Becker. Eileen (the client) knew he had been married before he met her mother but apparently neither one would ever talk about that marriage while Eileen and her siblings were growing up, or what happened to the union in the end. The parents had been deceased for many years before we started the research – Eileen herself was in her eighties – so we had no one to ask about the situation. She did know that her father had apparently lived in Eastern Alberta at one time so that was a start.

I will have more to say about some of the very interesting stories uncovered about the family in a later post but what I wanted to highlight today was the usefulness of local area history books. I have a couple in my collection for my own family. They were produced in the 1970s and contain the recollections of original settlers and/or their children about the areas where my parents were raised. Many local communities took advantage of government grants back then to assemble the stories and information about the areas and the families. The books provide, in many cases, first-hand accounts of people, places and historical events not available elsewhere. There are many such historical summaries spanning the country, highlighting villages and farming regions in most provinces.

I also have some pages from a similar book titled Portrait and Biographical Album of Washington, Clay and Riley Counties, Kansas, published by Chapman Publishing Co. of Chicago, in 1890. It is part of a large series of similar books put out by Chapman, Biographical Publishing Co., Lake City Publishing Co., Record Publishing Co. and others in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Dozens are available to read and download for free at Archive.org (just search for “portrait and biographical”). Most have the description “. . . Portraits & Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative Citizens” but also offer historical information about the communities. I found a few similar books that can be read on Open Library and Google Books. I am sure there are many other websites as well where genealogists may access books of interest.

The book with information about Riley County, Kansas contains very interesting information about one of my 2^nd great-granduncles, who was a prominent doctor in Randolph, Riley County, and his parents, my 3^rd great-grandparents. The biography opened up another line of inquiry for information about my ancestors which I had not seen anywhere else.

Anyway, I did a search for a similar book for the Provost region of Alberta and found one available for purchase on Amazon, called Early Furrows: A story of our early pioneers in Provost, Hayter, Bodo, Alberta and surrounding districts, published in 1977 by the local Senior Citizens Club of Provost. Not only did it contain a write up of the first August Becker family, it had a photograph of them as well.

 

Photo of the family of August and Nellie (Needham) Becker, taken on their homestead near Provost, Alberta about 1915 (copied from Early Furrows; photo was provided by Emily (Becker) Henry, second from the left)

Seeing the family for the first time delighted Eileen and set us off on more searches for August’s first family and Eileen’s half-brothers and sisters, whom she never knew or knew about.

The Early Furrows book, along with many others, including my own KIK Country, about the communities of Keoma, Irricana and Kathryn, near Calgary, has since been scanned and can be accessed on the our roots nos racines website which has a wide collection of material on Canadian local histories.

Local area historical publications are always worth looking at. Sometimes recollections of those submitting information are not entirely accurate but they they do provide a great resource written by members of those families who lived in the areas. The information in the books can easily be compared to that found in other data sources.

Grants are available in Canada from many provincial departments and other organizations to support the activities of local communities, including the assembly and publication of history books. In Western Canada, these websites might be investigated:

Alberta      http://culture.alberta.ca/

British Columbia http://aabc.ca/resources/grants-and-funding/

Manitoba http://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/grants/heritage_grants.html

Saskatchewan http://heritagesask.ca/resources/grant-db

Government of Canada http://www.pch.gc.ca/eng/1267799042836

Next up: more about those elusive Becker family members Eileen learned about and some of the surprises she had when stories she was told turned out to be not exactly truthful.

Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is a past Editor of Chinook, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Family Histories Society. Wayne also provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated.

Passenger List Confusion

I have posted before about passenger lists and the difficulty in finding people. Recently I was looking for information for a friend whose grandfather had come to Canada from Romania in the early part of the 20^th century. From other family information, including a personal biography written by this individual, we had a birth date and the year he immigrated. As with many cases, especially for non-English speaking people, the record of his name was inconsistent.

Trifu Samoila was born on November 10, 1887, in a little town named Uzdin, a few miles north of Belgrade. The town is presently located in Serbia, formerly part of Yugoslavia. That corner of the country is also a place where many families are of Romanian descent. That was the case for the Samoila family. So, on many documents, there is a mixture of nationality and origin.

 

Part of the outgoing passenger record for the ship, Lake Simcoe, which sailed from Liverpool, England to St. John, New Brunswick on March 4, 1903, showing the Samaila family (copyright-holder The National Archives; image downloaded October 27, 2014 from Ancestry)

Part of the incoming passenger record for the ship, Lake Simcoe, which arrived at St. John, New Brunswick on March 14, 1903, showing the Samaila family (copyright-holder Library and Archives Canada; image downloaded September 18, 2014 from Ancestry)

The ship passenger list shows the family of Roumanian (Romanian) origin. They were en route to Regina, Saskatchewan, which seemed to confirm this was the right family. Later documents, including Trifu’s marriage record and the 1916 Canada census, show his birthplace as Hungary. His Canadian naturalization certificate says his birthplace was “Serb-Croat-Slovakia” and his nationality as Hungarian. Uzdin was, in fact, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918. Just to add to the confusion, the family’s surname has been spelled and/or transcribed differently on many records on both continents.

Anyway, both passenger lists show adults Jan/Yan, age 46, and Iconio/Iconia (age 40) Samaila and children, Trifu (11), Adam (10), Totia (4-5) and George (3). On the face of it, this is a nice, neat family. The problem is that it is actually members of two families. Jan, later called John, and Iconia had two sons, Adam and Totia (Joseph). Trifu and George were their nephews, sons of John’s brother, Peter, who had immigrated earlier in 1903. The age of 11 shown for Trifu was not accurate as he would have been closer to 16 years of age. No other immigration documents have been found so we cannot determine why he was recorded much younger than he actually was.

Given all of the other information we have about the family and most of the facts shown on the passenger lists, we have no doubt that they represent the right families. Without the additional data, however, perhaps especially Trifu’s own biography, these passenger lists might only have served to confuse or misdirect a family history researcher.

There are genealogical lessons to be learned, or at least reminded of with this example:

1.      Assemble and compare every kind of information you can about an individual.

2.      All types of records can and often do contain errors or mistakes, whether accidental, intentional or through carelessness.

3.      Question everything. An individual’s own recollections may be faulty especially in what they think they know about other family members and their ancestors.

4.      Be aware of different spellings of names and especially of transcriptions on public websites.

Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is a past Editor of Chinook, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Family Histories Society. Wayne also provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated.

Driving on the Left Side of the Road

At a dinner party the other night, a story was told by one of the guests, John Farnham, about his father, who lived in News Brunswick when the laws were changed to make driving on the right side of the road the rule. John told the story his father used to relate about some of the interesting side-effects of the new regulations.

I did not know, or at least did not remember that, in many parts of Canada, vehicles use to travel on the left side of the road, the same as in almost all of the British Commonwealth countries. On December 1, 1922, New Brunswick changed the rules regarding which side of the road one should drive on, presumably to conform to what was the case in the United States right next door. In Nova Scotia, the law came into effect on April 15, 1923. British Columbia had made the switch on January 1, 1922. Prince Edward Island changed on May 1, 1924 and Newfoundland on January 2, 1947. Ontario and Quebec drivers were already following the practice, having apparently been doing so since before the takeover of the country from the French. The central provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba had also been driving down the right side for many decades.

 

Page one of Amherst Daily News for Saturday, April 14, 1923 – reporting on the changes to road rules about driving on the right side (copied October 20, 2014 from the website, History of Automobiles)

Some newspapers had a field day with the new idea and the potential problems that could come along with the change as described on the website, History of Automobiles, part of Nova Scotia’s Electric Gleaner website.

It seems there was a lot of cross-border activity between New Brunswick and Maine. Many local businesspeople, like milkmen, used to travel back and forth selling their wares and services. To do so meant a trip across a bridge spanning the Saint Croix River. This was, of course, in the days when there were still a great many horse-drawn wagons in use in both countries. Before the changes, vehicle and wagon operators were required to change over to the left lanes in the middle of the bridge to conform to New Brunswick law. After the change, they could continue on their way in the right-hand lanes. John’s father told him that the horses were well-trained and very habitual in their trips into Canada. On reaching the middle of the bridge after the changeover, they automatically moved to the left as they had always done, causing some mayhem with motorists and others travelling south. It was some time before all of the teams had been re-trained to stay to the right for the entire trip.

The same problem apparently occurred between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in the four and a half months they had different driving laws. There were other considerations as well resulting from the changes. The History of Automobiles website reports that “Nova Scotia Tramways & Power Company Limited, which owned and operated the electric streetcar system in Halifax, sued the provincial government to recover the cost of changing the doors on all streetcars to the other side, and the cost of changes in track layout.  In Lunenburg County, 1923 is still known as The Year of Free Beef; the price of beef dropped precipitously because oxen which had been trained to keep to the left could not be retrained — oxen are notoriously slow-witted — and many teamsters had to replace their oxen with new ones trained to keep to the right; the displaced oxen were sent to slaughter.”

Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is a past Editor of Chinook, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Family Histories Society. Wayne also provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated.