TERMINAL ISLAND : LOST COMMUNITIES ON AMERICA'S EDGE by NAOMI HIRAHARA and GERALDINE KNATZ ; ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK RECOMMENDATION (NAME DROPPING THOSE LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES)

This is a tremendous book about the history of residency on Terminal Island which is now part of the Los Angeles Harbor complex, one of the largest deep water ports in the world. The photographs and images and the story of how people made use of the resources takes us back to a pre-industrial time and then moves us forward to the development of the port. Surprises abound: the squatters shacks, burials of sailors, and an artist's colony, including a women's writing establishment. Then an important fishing village built by Japanese immigrants and the beginnings of the canned tuna enterprise developed, first fisherman, then their families. 

The book is especially strong in describing the history of the Japanese immigrants and what happened after Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States government moved the people to internment camps.

I attended the presentation by the authors at Los Angeles Public Library Central, and then read the book page by page, rich with artistic and photographic displays. 

For the purposes of this genealogy blog, I want to focus a bit on the authors research. In the acknowledgements it mentions that besides the individuals with a personal or familial history who were interviewed and contributed, including photographs from their own collections, a number of libraries and archives were consulted. Many of you forget to contact the local libraries, historical societies, and colleges so perhaps this will be an inspiration. 

Who would have thought that Los Angeles Harbor College would have an archive that according to the authors, "opened an archive into another world for us."  Additionally the San Pedro Historical Society helped with getting back issues of the local newspaper News-Pilot. Also mentioned was the Rosemead Library's Asian Pacific Resource Center for microfilmed issues of Rafu Shimpo dating back to 1919.  California State University - Dominguez Hills Archives and Special Collections, Taiji Historical Archives, California State Historical Society, Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles Times (newspaper), UCLA Special Collections, Japanese American National Museum, California History Room of the California State Library, Autry National Center - Braun Research Library, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Huntington Library.  Port of Los Angeles Archives was especially helpful. Have you heard of all of these?

One of the things I thought of as most helpful for Japanese-American genealogy was the 1912 map of the island, showing the layout of streets and houses - with the full names of the residents - that was probably prepared before the removal of the squatters.

I thought about was how these people, the squatters, created homes from lumber and driftwood on land they didn't have to buy or rent, which is what our homeless are doing too. From these squatters sprung some people who became important to the history of the city of Los Angeles

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WHAT ELSE YOU CAN DO TO LOCATE SOMEONE CIRCA 1960? PHONE BOOKS! GOT ANY? DONATE THEM TO A GENEALOGY LIBRARY

Phone books are fragile, the paper used isn't the best. I'm not sure exactly when phone books went extinct but there was a time where, if you had a phone. now called a LAND LINE, you got a phone book update once a year.  The last time I got a phone book was ????? and it was a yellow pages. As the years went by, you could usually choose to have your number UNLISTED!  

With the Internet there are many sites that help you locate a person, their address, possibly their phone number and their e-mail.  WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

There is misinformation on the Internet about me  So...

Check the library closest to where your ancestors lived to see if they have a phone book collection.  Los Angeles Public library has some phone books for places other than Los Angeles.

If you have old phone books consider donating them to a Genealogy Library!

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MY DIFFICULT RESEARCH INTO A PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN IMMIGRANT FAMILY: STEP FOURTEEN : POST #10

Step Fourteen :  Cemetery Records

As started, Find A Grave TM did not have postings for the immigrant nuclear family from Germany-Prussia who lived in Pennsylvania or died there. But something very important to remember is that such tombstone websites DO NOT HAVE ALL THE BURIALS IN A CEMETERY. No they do not. Back in the day the emphasis was not on expensive carved tombstones as there is today. In some cemeteries hundreds of burials never had tombstones or those tombstones were destroyed or removed.  

Additionally in modern times the death certificate and the burial paperwork lean on each other. Team that up with an obituary from the newspaper or website and it's all good. 

I researched German cemeteries in the city and and its vicinity and on the Internet up came a historical one.  Some good souls had listed all the burials in that cemetery.  And under yet another variation of the surname I found both the first female immigrant ancestor of my client and a man who is likely her husband, who lived into his 80's.

I've called that cemetery long distance three times and they NEVER get back to me.  Don't you just hate messages that claim they will call right back?  And there's no information on when someone is in the office - if ever.

I'll let you know.  I'm praying that there is something on the burial about where these people came from.  But the INDEX to the burial does not say!

Posts in this series will be brought up using the label PA-GERM research path

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MY DIFFICULT RESEARCH INTO A PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN IMMIGRANT FAMILY : STEP ELEVEN : POST #7

To recap: So far we've looked at actual books on shelves in an honored genealogy research library - the Los Angeles Public Library - for biographies and other information about the surname immigrant German-Prussian family in the city and county where they were found on the 1860 United States Census. The potential was there to be lead to important family members, perhaps participants in local history, to the ownership of land or businesses, as well as on those German - Prussians who came to America on sail ships. 

We've looked at the United States census focusing on the County and City that family lived in 1850 and expanded out to other nearby counties in Eastern Pennsylvania.

We've looked at maps and land and property records,and the history of the area when it comes to waves of German Immigration. We are pretty sure this family came with the Second Wave of Immigrants who brought crafts and skills and were not land owning farmers. 

We went back to Pre and Revolutionary War times and forward to the Civil War and there is some evidence that men with the same surname served but they cannot be linked to the immigrant nuclear family. If we do send money to the Pennsylvania Archive it may be speculative. We might find the name of a town in Prussia that is the origin of that soldier but that might now be a family member.

We went on a foray into Old German language newspapers on databases and got frustrated.

There is evidence of the surname in other counties in Eastern Pennsylvania but not connections to that immigrant nuclear family. There is no record of them being in the country earlier. What is next?

Step Eleven: Ship records for Sail Ships coming into Philadelphia or New York.

Sadly, these records are notoriously spotty. If this were an immigrant family who came through during the steamship era, this search would be a priority because of all the information collected on ship manifests. 

There were some index type cards that might again be of members of an extended family but not the names on that 1850 census, and with near no information.  A lot of people over many years have devoted themselves to these records, finding them and adding them to databases and so on. While there is always the possibility of more being found, nudda.

Back at Los Angeles Public Library I checked all their books (information that links to databases now) and found nothing new... but just in case there had been some indexing error...

Posts in this series will be brought up using the label PA-GERM research path

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FILBYS PASSENGER LISTS - STILL GOOD - STILL AVAILABLE ALWAYS ADDED TO! BUT NOT FINDABLE ON ANCESTRY TM DATABASES BY THAT NAME

Before there were databases that attached to original ship manifests... there was FILBY's.  Well Filby's still exists. Covering immigrants to the U.S. and Canada, the 1500's forwards to the 1970's, every calendar year it's supplemented with more information. Many big city libraries, colleges, and genealogy specialty archives, have the entire binder set, a vast number of volumes. 

Filby's best use is for finding those who came before the 1820's, before there was any lawful requirement that such records be kept. The immigrants on sail ships trickled in well before the steamship era, sometimes just a few at a time on a ship intended to transport cargo. Information in these books comes from a variety of first resources including family diaries, naturalization documents, even indentured servant lists.  An important source was also the passenger lists that were published in newspapers.

The places referenced do not always equate to a port or port city. The place might be a destination city or the first place the person appeared in a public record.

The information in Filby's can and should be cross referenced with other documents.  For instance, I would attempt to cross reference based on lists for Philadelphia or Boston of incoming passengers.

Primarily, it is a way for people with ancestors who arrived in the United States, the colonies, and territories, to move to finding the location they left and potentially records held in other countries.

However, I recently went looking for some German immigrants who came to Pennsylvania some time between 1795 and 1820, most likely closer to the 1820.

The person I sought did not come up on Ancestry TM, the popular database in a general search.  So I headed to Los Angeles, the Central Library in downtown LA, where there is a genealogy and history floor. The Filby's book set there was not entirely complete or undated and the wonderful and earnest genealogy librarian there said to me "Filbys is on Ancestry TM now." We went onto Ancestry TM from there, and using the card catalog (which is confusingly called New Collections on the main page of Ancestry TM) and tried again. No - Searching for Filbys did not bring it up.  But there are numerous other databases that bring up early America arrivals on sail ships.  I individually searched through these and up came a few names.

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THE LIBERATOR NEWSPAPER to BE DIGITALIZED - LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY

CALIFORNIA REVEALED - PRESERVATION FUNDS for THE LIBERATOR - AFRICAN AMERICAN NEWSPAPER

From the Los Angeles Public Library home page EXCERPT:

The Liberator is an early 20th-century Los Angeles African American newspaper, whose owner and editor, Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, was born enslaved and spent twenty years in bondage before Emancipation. Edmonds was educated in Mississippi Freedmen's Bureau schools and served two terms in the Mississippi State Assembly before moving to Los Angeles after the end of Reconstruction due to threats against his family.

****

I believe this is money well spent and will be of great benefit to African-American/ Black historians and genealogists!

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FORENSIC GENEALOGY?

Forensic Genealogy is the use of genealogy in order to locate missing people and solve crimes, a juicy subject.

I recently attended a lecture by a well regarded and experienced Forensic Genealogist. She told about doing numerous family charts in order to locate someone who might know where a woman who had gone missing might be.  This was not exactly a teenage runaway situation.  There had been a remarriage, a step-parent, and the person intentionally cut off from everyone.  That's difficult to do.  Maybe her reasons wouldn't seem rational to you or me, but the Forensic Genealogist sought to give her family "closure." And they got it.  She had lived for many years but had commit suicide.  She had done what many people do when they want to get lost.  She had assumed the identity of a person who had died who was about her age. Other than assume this identity, and gather together the paperwork she would need to prove who she was and keep her cover, she was never involved in any other "criminal" activity.  I looked at some web sites that tied to the Forensic Genealogist's and some of them started out using the word "Criminal" because of "Identity Theft" on this person who needed to get lost as she saw it, and I sort of cringed. 

While listening to the lecture I thought about Missing Persons.

Tell me, if YOU hated your family, maybe had a terrible childhood, and you wanted to get lost, if you never wanted to hear from them again, what would you do?  Expect the FBI or CIA to create a new ID for you?  Law enforcement does those things for people in Witness Protection Programs sometimes. Tombstone websites would certainly make locating someone your age who died more accessible to you, easier than prowling cemeteries in other towns by yourself!

It turned out that yes, there was ONE person, a distant family member, who had contact with her and kept her secret for many years. That he kept her secret makes me think that she had some good reasons to leave and be in hiding.  My guess, the stepfather molested her.


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THE VALUE OF USING OLD PHONE BOOKS FOR GENEALOGY

Recently a friend was telling me that her parents have had the same phone number and landline since 1950 when they moved to a new suburb and shared a party line!  These days some people change their cell phone number every year.  (And I know a lot of people who never answer their phone unless a friend first text messages them.)


So it may be difficult to understand the value of old telephone books with all the amazing technological changes in both phones and networks.  Concerns about long distance phone call charges have evaporated with Unlimited calling all around the country, but not so long ago it could cost a lot more to call a few miles away into another network. The cost of phone calling meant that people used the mail (as in snail mail) to write each other letters.


Recently I traveled to Los Angeles Public Library Central to look through a half dozen old phone books there in the stacks.  Oh they were really decaying so much so that I had to wonder if the particular city I pulled from the shelf to look at 1940, 1945, 1950, 1955, 1960, and 1965 for certain surnames would disintegrate beneath my fingers.

Why would I do this, seeking what may be trivial information, when years ago I looked through the City Directories for the same surnames?

Well, let's remember that City Directories were often PRE-TELEPHONE or sometimes CO-EXISTED WITH TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES because City Directories had more in common with Yellow Pages or Business Directories than Residential Phone Books.


It cost to list yourself in most City Directories and so people did so to advertise the kind of work they were available to do or their business.  Sometimes a young woman would list herself so young men who might want to court her or marry her could find her, particularly if she was self supporting and had left home.

And then the telephone came to cities, towns, villages, suburbs at different times and places and not everyone wanted one or could afford one.  I once met a woman who discovered a secret in her family. 
A father in the family was so angered that one of his daughters would want to WORK and be a TELEPHONE OPERATOR and had responded to signs posted up around town for workers that he beat her and she rolled down the stairs and died.  Everyone knew he was a violent abusive man and in that time and place he wasn't the only class conscious man who thought "No woman in my family is going to WORK!",but he wasn't tried.  That he'd killed his daughter because she wanted to be a liberated woman was the dark family secret.

This leads into the value of using the old phone books.

They can put people at an address between census.  They can let you know that the same people lived at the same address for a short or long time.  Sometimes if the address is the same but a different person is listed, say the son or daughter, it can indicate that the father or breadwinner has died or left the home and that a child is now paying the bills.

Sometimes you can cross reference the address with the City Directory. Sometimes you can cross reference it with a census.  Sometimes you can cross reference it with a Social Security Application.  Or a ship manifest.

Sometimes you know where the family was living from a census but they simply do not yet have a phone.  (The 1940 census would be most revealing because by 1940 most places - especially the larger cities and suburbs surrounding them, have phone service for those who wanted it.  1935 there are phones but not as many of them. The books get fatter and fatter as they years go by and then with the onset of cell phones begin to skinny down.)


By looking for the surnames in the old phone books that I did, I stumbled upon one bit of information that is of special interest to me. That the wife of a man who divorced her some time after he returned from World War II does have her own phone, is listing herself as Mrs. and so by 1950 he must be living separate.  Because in 1950 it was rare for a couple to list their phone under the woman's name unless she was widowed or divorced.


Which brings us to the use of the phone book to possibly narrow down the years we must look for divorce or marriage records or death records.



Some of the phone books have the month and year date on them which is helpful but unlike a census this is the date of publication not the date of a census taker's visit.
Depending on the city and the location of the old paper books, you may find the old names, addresses, and phone numbers, with their now quaint "exchange names" very interesting!


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TOWN BOOKS - A WEALTH OF INFORMATION WHEN THEY EXIST

A town book may or may not provide addresses and phone numbers.  It is not a city directory.  It's a bit closer to a yearbook, but historical.  One client I worked for came from a small town in the deep south.  I was surprised to find many volumes of Town Books at the Los Angeles Public Library which included black and white pictures of some of his ancestors who he best remembered as a small child!  The stories were very much about how these citizens contributed to their community so in them we found out who was the big deal at the Baptist Church as well as who was the temporary mail carrier!

Town Books are usually written and organized and published by people who are VERY PROUD, VERY PATRIOTIC about their town.

They are often put in special collections or archived so you may have to ask about them and order them to be brought out in advance.  Ask large out of town libraries as well because who knows how it is that Los Angeles Public got copies from this small town!

A TOWN BOOK can give you a snapshot of the town as it existed around the publication date!

CENSUS OF THE BLACKFEET MONTANA and ELECTRONIC DATABASES

Recently someone asked me for some advice on researching their BLACKFEET Native American roots. At the Los Angeles Public Library genealogy section - downtown- I checked to see if any books were available on this subject.

I found CENSUS OF THE BLACKFEET - MONTANA 1897-1898
The book was put out by Jeff Bower C 2004 and it leans on the original census taking by
George B. McLaughlin and Thomas P Fuller who were "Indian agents" and also on NATIONAL ARCHIVES FILM COLLECTION ROLL M595-4

I learned that there were four reservations and that this census is one of them. (One of the four reservations is in Canada.) Looking over the census, I saw that the names were translated into English. There was also a great number of family groups that included two wives, which makes knowing which wife is a child's mother a question. As usual, I greatly enjoyed the names such as Morning Plume (a husband), a family group headed by husband Shoots At Another and his wife Martha Shoots at Another and their children Martha and Josephine Weather Wax, Longtime Sleeping, and so on.

I learned that the Blackfeet name comes from the look of ashes on their moccasins. (But as I understand it, there were other not-related tribes called Blackfoot or Blackfeet so be sure you want this Algonquian speaking group found in Montana!)

I decided to see if I could bring up the 1900 census with some of these names using Heritage Quest and Ancestry Genealogy Databases. After all this census was just a couple years after these special counts.

THE PROBLEM WAS, if you have a name such as "Shoots At Another", is your given name "Shoots" or "Shoots At" or is" Another" a surname or is "At Another" a surname?

I was completely unsuccessful using my short list on Heritage Quest and almost completely unsuccessful using Ancestry. But I was able to bring up SOME OF THE NAMES IN THIS AREA OF MONTANA by using the word BLACKFEET!

So here is my advice should you wish to proceed electronically! Just get to THE Enumeration District (ED) THAT CONTAINS SOME OF THE NAMES that do come up through standard given and surname searches (non-native names) so that you are in the neighborhood and then read the census page by page - just as you would if you used GOOD OLD MICROFILM!

LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY : HAS 10,000 TITLES FROM RESOURCES ALL OVER THE COUNTRY

Did you know that the Central Library genealogy collection has over 10,000 titles and "this exhaustive database is not duplicated in any other California library, and contains documents not even available through the Library of Congress!"