Hey Universe, Stop Talking to Me so Early in the Morning

Weird things happen in research. Sometimes I notch it up to the Universe trying to speak to me; which is actually a phrase I detest. If the Universe is speaking to me, it's much too unclear for this early in the morning. It's 8 a.m. on a Friday morning before I have even finished my coffee.

In any case, sometimes when you do research, weird things happen. This morning I was looking to see if there were any news articles out there about the first female sports team at the College where I work. I tried poking around the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Even though my college is clearly on Long Island, situated right on the boarder of Nassau and Suffolk County, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle picked up news from all over the Island, City, state, nation, and world. If you had anyone living in the City of New York you should check the Brooklyn Daily for a mention of them. It's free: https://bklyn.newspapers.com/paper/the-brooklyn-daily-eagle/1890/

So I did a "hail Mary" kind of search. I just put in some keywords; Farmingdale, agriculture, and basketball; and limited to the year 1925.

The first page that came up was page 24 of the November 27, 1925 edition. On that page there was nothing about our College's women's basketball team but there was the picture below of Miss Kathrine Boller.

The word basketball appears in the article about Kathrine and the other words appear scattered on the page in other articles but the weird thing is that, I know Kathrine Boller (September 17, 1908 - March 15, 1995). Well, I never met her in-person but I researched the hell out of her and her family. She is the daughter of Claude Villette Boller (March 1869 - August 2, 1951) of Freeport, New York. Katherine's second husband was Norman Holland Foote (December 12, 1909 - March 2, 1999). 

Now why did I research her?

Good question. Glad you asked.

Because here at Farmingdale State College we own the scrapbook of Katherine's father. I research that scrapbook for over a year and developed an online exhibit about its creator and its contents: https://bollerscrapbook.omeka.net/exhibits

Our only known connection to Mr. Boller would be through his son-in-law, Mr. Foote. Mr. Foote was a professor and the Head of the Agricultural Engineering Department at what is now Farmingdale State College from 1948 until his retirement in 1967. His career at Farmingdale began in 1933 when our institution was known as the State Institute Of Applied Agriculture. We assume that the College Archives must have acquired Mr. Boller's Scrapbook from Mr. Foote before he retired in 1967.  

It is a fascinating resource about the life of a noteworthy tailor from about 1883 - 1907. Mr. Boller established the men's wear department of the noteworthy Montgomery Ward & Co. in Chicago, Illinois. He began working for the famous catalog mail order company, Montgomery Ward, on September 29, 1896 and left on January 1, 1906 amidst the turbulent Chicago Teamsters' Strike. The Chicago Teamsters' Strike of 1905, which is noted as one of the bloodiest labor strikes in U.S. history, actually began in the Montgomery Ward & Co. cutting room where Mr. Boller was the manager

In any case, serendipity happens. Just thought I'd share. I guess the Universe is telling me to get back to work.

Remembering Ben and Reflecting on Cremation

On Saturday, August 5, 2017, I received an Earth shattering call from Cousin Peter that his cousin Ben had passed away. Since that day I have burst into tears at least once per day.

Ben was like a cousin to me. I didn't see him often but then again, I did see him more frequently then some of my own first cousins. I think of him as family. He was. And there was a time when we were close; a brief period when we called one another just to chat.

Ben was my age...or just about. I was born in June of 1974, Ben in November. However, I will always be 28. And well, now I suppose Ben will always be 42.

He and I seemed to have very similar emotional responses to the circumstances and situations around us. Ben, however, like so many I have loved, struggled with addiction. Recently, it had seemed he had gotten a handle on his demons; that he was sober and finally in a good place. Sadly, though, it was  indeed an overdose that took him from us.

His funeral was like no other that I have experienced. I thought my grandfather's wake had a huge turn out; the procession from the mass to the cemetery comprised about 75 cars of family and friends. Ben's wake, though, was so crowded that you couldn't move. People were packed into the double room shoulder to shoulder, out the door, filled the foyer, out the building, and down the block. And I had never been to a service where I had seen more people visibly shaken and unable to compose themselves; including me.

That is because Ben was awesome; funny beyond measure, generous beyond belief. He taunted everyone equally and no one was spared.

When I read his obituary I learned that his remains would be cremated and it made me a little sad. I shouldn't have been surprised and I really wasn't. Cousin Peter's family had chosen cremation for both of his grandparents on his mother's side. Of course Ben would be cremated. However, it made me flash back to when I was working on Mr. Boller's scrapbook.

I was about a semester into working on Mr. Boller's scrapbook, my capstone project for my Masters in Public History, when I finally obtained Mr. Boller's obituary which stated that he too had been cremated. It made me sad then that I had no place to go to pay my respects to Mr. Boller whom I had never met. Ben I at least knew and can sense around me since his passing.

However, Cousin Peter has assured me that Ben's cremains will be interred in a columbarium or outdoor memorial wall of some sort so I will indeed have a place to visit Ben. For researchers, however, who read such obituaries, one does not know if those person's ashes are interred somewhere or simply scattered about the deceased's favorite park or body of water or ballfield, what-have-you.  I hate obituaries like that. However, Ben's obituary is really quite beautiful, informative about familial connections (like all genealogist want to see), and very fitting.

If you have someone close to your heart who has struggled with and succumbed to the pain of addiction, or even if they are presently struggling, I encourage you to consider making a donation to Hope House Ministries of Port Jefferson, NY (http://www.hhm.org/). They are an organization that ministers to individuals and families in crisis and a place that has provided much love and support to Ben's family. Once you click on the "Submit Information" button on this page (http://www.hhm.org/MHDonation.html), whether you fill in any information or not, you will be brought to a paypal site through which you can make an online contribution.

Mental Illness in the Census

Laying around in the air conditioning on this hot and sticky Memorial Day weekend, I began to participate in my favorite sport; channel surfing. I landed on a show called Ghost Asylum. It is one of the many television reality shows in which teams of people investigate paranormal activity. I don't know if I believe flashing lights and beeping tones on electromagnetic meters mean there really is a presence of a human spirit, genealogy research stirs up the dead in a different way then ghost hunting does, but what drew me to the show was their investigation of the Peoria State Hospital. 

It took me a minute to remember where I had come across this hospital in my research. Yes, I came across this particular hospital while conducting some genealogy research during this past year of my graduate studies. My capstone project was on a scrapbook created by a man named Claude Villette Boller. In my effort to determine how my library might have acquired his scrapbook I created a family tree on Ancestry.com for Mr. Boller. I hoped it would help me to connect with some descendant of Mr. Boller or descendants of his siblings who might be able to provide some provenance for the scrapbook. Provenance is a fancy academic term for the origin or earliest known history of ownership on an object. 

Most family history researchers are interested in extending their own trees back as far as they can but when you are chasing family lore you really should spread out and trace more than just your direct line. You should trace the lines of siblings. Think about it. If you have siblings you know some of them may be interested in family history and heirlooms but some of them aren't. When family stories are passed down, some siblings retain them better than others. Right? 

So I went looking for records about Mr. Boller's siblings. He was the youngest of 10. Some of his siblings died young but most of them lived out their lives in locations far from their hometown of Lexington, IL. Mr. Boller wound up in Freeport, Long Island, NY. His brother Jacob lived in California. There was even a niece who died in El Salvador. There was one sister though who showed up in the 1910 U.S. Census listed as a patient at Peoria State Hospital. 

I didn't think much of it really but in a recent reference interview with a client at my part-time gig as a genealogy librarian, the patron mentioned that she had a great aunt who lived in a "mental hospital." The patron then said, "so there won't be any record of her in the census." "Oh no," I said, "Everyone is recorded in the census." 

Well, in theory, EVERYONE, is recorded in the census. I have some ancestors I can't find in census records. I'm sure there are people who were on vacation when the census taker came. There were others who probably just didn't answer the door but if they were a patient in a hospital, an orphan in a state home, or prisoner in the clink you can be sure they were recorded in the census. 

So there she was Elizabeth Boller, age 61, living in the Peoria State Hospital in 1910. Moving back in time, in 1900 she was living in The Illinois Central Hospital for the "blank." Blank? Yes. The name of the hospital is cut off. If you do not scroll to the next page of the record you wouldn't know the full name of the location is The Illinois Central Hospital for the Insane. In the 1880 census, at the age of 30, Elizabeth was living with her parents in Lexington, IL. If one reads that very faded census record carefully, though, in a far left columns there is a mark in Elizabeth's row; an aggressively stroked "1" under the heading "insane." 

Life inside Peoria State Hospital did not seem pretty according to this television show and despite the lovely architecture and gatherings of employees I can find in photos online. It opened in 1902 it closed in 1973. I don't know when Elizabeth Boller arrived there or if she lived out the remainder of days in that particular institution; medical records are often restricted and off-limits to genealogists. What I do know, though, is that thousands of patients went in and out of their doors and more than a few died there. In 1903 a patient was beaten to death by two attendants. Those two employees were charged with murder but never tried. 

Nowadays we fight to remove the stigma of mental illness but back then many of the mentally ill were locked away, abused, neglected, and forgotten. Elizabeth, though, is not buried in the infamous Peoria State Hospital cemetery known for its full-bodied apparitions. When Elizabeth died in 1919, she was brought home and buried in the Boller family grave. Now really, I don't know what her life was like, but I pray that her burial location is an indication that she was close to her family and that they cared for her as best they could.

It's been too long...so long...scrapbook.

It has been a while since I have written. I have not had much spare time this semester but that all comes to an end tomorrow. That's right, I'm never going to study another thing again. Well, maybe that is taking it a bit too far but I'm definitely not studying anything on Thursday, that's for sure. For tomorrow, Wednesday April 27, 2016, I submit my final report on my capstone project; Mr. Boller's Scrapbook (http://bollerscrapbook.omeka.net/exhibits/show/c--v--boller-s-scrapbook/biography)

That's right, I am graduating - finally - with my second master of arts degree in public history from St. John's University.

What is public history? I get that question a lot. It's kind of like the history side of museum studies; it's about making history accessible to the public.

For the past academic year I have been working on researching and analyzing the materials bound together in one man's scrapbook dating from 1883 in his home town of Lexington, Illinois to 1907 in the garment district of New York City with a majority of it's contents focused on his life in Chicago. Mr. Claude Villette Boller was a tailor by trade who rose through the ranks of the noteworthy mail order distributor, Montgomery Ward & Co. In 1905, Chicago was the scene of one of the bloodiest labor strikes in U.S. history. That strike began in the Montgomery Ward fabric cutting room where Mr. Boller was the manager. But today I don't want to talk about the strike or the trial that followed, or the website I built about it. I want to write about how genealogy research and the networking power of Ancestry.com answered the more important, and perhaps the harder questions about Mr. Boller's life.

As soon as my colleague, Librarian Karen :) , showed me the scrapbook my first month on the job back in July 2013, I instantly wanted to know how we got this resources. All Karen knew was that it had been in our library longer than she has been. I wasn't sure if I would ever get the answer to that fundamental question but I knew how I was going to try.

I got on Ancestry.com and started looking for documentation on Mr. Boller. I used the many census records I found to build a family tree for him and I contacted every Ancestry user who had Mr. Boller or his immediate family members in their trees.

Six months after writing scores of emails I finally got the reply I needed. Oh, I got many replies prior to this one but those users didn't know much about the Mr. Boller or his life in NY. But over the recess between the Fall 2015 semester and this Spring 2016 semester, I got a reply from a gentleman named Mike.

Mike wrote that his grandmother had a brother named Claude Villette Boller. Based on an obituary I had seen for Mr. Boller, I deduced that Mike had to be the grandson of Mr. Boller's daughter, Geraldine. I wrote Mike back and said, "If your grandmother was Geraldine Boller than your great uncle was Claude Villette Boller, Junior and this scrapbook belonged to your great grandfather, Claude Villete Senior." Thus began an exchange of genealogical information that only a historian and a descendant could exchange.

I wrote Mike about the details of Great Grandpa Boller's life as revealed to me through his scrapbook and he wrote me about the facts his father, Mr. Boller's grandson, could recall. In short time it was made clear that the obituary I was working with had wrong information in it. The obituary said Mr. Boller's daughter, Kathryn, was married to a man who's last name was Flood. Mike assured me though that her married name was Kathryn Foote, not Flood.

That detail changed everything. Mr. Norman Foote was a long time administrator in the School of Agriculture at what is now called Farmingdale State College where Mr. Boller's scrapbook resides. Whether Mr. Foote bequeathed the scrapbook to us or unloaded it on us is unknown. Did he generously give it to us? Did he move away and dump all his books in the library? We will never know and nor does it matter. We have it and it is wonderful.

The moral of the story though is that stories are important and usually it takes time and patience to create a great story. Sometimes a whole lifetime. Be patient and persistent in your mission to get the whole story. But know that those answers you seek do not always come from well trusted documentation. They come from people, people with family stories. Yes families tell "stories" and Yes, people make mistakes. But people also make mistakes in writing articles and drawing up documents.

Happy New Year

It has been a long time since I have blogged. My only excuse is that I have been fully engrossed in my last year of studies toward completion on my masters degree in public history.

Oh I have been doing genealogy research. Fear not. I just have not done much on my own ancestry. This is what I have been doing.

Mr. Boller's Scrapbook

My project this past semester has been on a scrapbook that mysteriously resides in the archives of the college at which I work. The book belonged to Mr. Claude Villette Boller (1869-1951). You can check the wonderful resource out at my online exhibit at this link: http://bollerscrapbook.omeka.net/exhibits/show/c--v--boller-s-scrapbook/biography.

In an effort to discover how the library acquired his scrapbook I have used Ancestry.com to search for living descendants of Mr. Boller and just this morning I believe I may have made contact with a great grandson. Back in August I sent an email to an Ancestry user who linked to the same document about the Boller family that I found on Ancestry.com. I received a message from him today. I hope our communication continues.

Genealogy Librarian



Back in March 2015, I picked up a part-time job at a library way out east in Suffolk County, Long Island at a public library. Once a month I meet with up to 5 patrons for one-on-one hour long sessions during which time I show them the online resources available to them.

 

Sometimes I am teaching them how to research on their own but in many instances the patrons are not computer-savvy and thus, I promise to continue research for them. I give them each an additional hour of my time researching their family history. So that has cut into my blogging time, for sure. But it has given me the opportunity to explore records I have not used before in regions where my ancestors did not reside - Slovakia, Puerto Rico, the Southern U.S.

 

It has been incredible fun for me. I have learned so much. And many of the patrons have been truly grateful for the service which is the real reward for me.

 

Maybe in the future I will share some of their stories, pending their permission.

 

Family News

This year was filled with a great deal of happy news. I had several cousins give birth to beautiful, healthy children.

• 9/6/2015: Cousin Jacquie gave birth to fraternal twins: Silas and Sora
• 11/11/2015: Cousin Therese gave birth to her daughter, MaKenna
• 12/1/2015: Cousin Lisa gave birth to a boy, also named Silas but from the other side of the family, so different last names.
• 12/5/2015: Cousin Mary, of Threading Needles in a Haystack fame, gave birth to her son, Julian.

 

Mary's new website is Heritage & Vino where she not only blogs but also offers her genealogical research service for a very affordable price. Check her out.

 

Following the line of vital record creation this year, we had births AND marriages. My sister Rachel got married on 9/27/2015. And she has announced that they are expecting my niece Breanna in late February.

 

And I thought perhaps this would be a year our large family would escape the pain of collecting death certificates but unfortunately I just recently learned of the very unexpected passing of my Uncle Ronnie. Just typing his name brings me to tears. He passed due to complications during surgery this passed Monday, 12/28/2015. My thoughts and prayers go out to those who knew and loved him, especially Cousin Lisa, his only child.

 

Resolution

In May I will finally be done with my second masters degree which will hopefully permit me more time to research my family history, and perhaps yours ;-)  ...and to blog about it all.

 

In any case, I resolve to do more posting on here in the year to come.

 

Happy 2016, everyone!