Grandma Ethel's Diary

 

The year was 1909. Mary Ethel Leverich lived in Danville, Illinois, and was 22 years old, when she and her maiden aunt took a trip "out west" and to Yellowstone National Park.  We are blessed to have her diary of that trip:

As you read this, imagine the amount of clothes Ethel was wearing and the likely dressy shoes. Riding in an open coach, no doubt. 

26 Jul 1909  --  Left at 8AM in stage for Norris (Geyser Basin). Rode 20 miles in the rain before lunch. Saw many beautiful things. Passed from God’s Country into the other fellow’s land. After lunch, guide took us to see the geysers and Devil’s Washbowl. The formations were beautiful. This PM rode 20 miles to Fountain Hotel. Failed to see bears. Here is the Firehole Geyser. Whole trip 195 miles.

27 Jul 1909  --  Still raining. Rode to O.F. (Old Faithful) Inn. Very rustic. Passed Morning Glory Pool, Crystal Lake, Three Sisters, Emerald Pool, Paint Pots, Devil’s Punch Bowl. After lunch will go with the guide. Gov. of New York is here. Walked about 6 miles after lunch. Stumbled and was caught by a doctor from Wis(consin). Saw the Castle Play. Morning Glory Pool was beautiful. Dr. was not in favor of my going out tonight. Saw the geysers by search light.

28 Jul 1909  --  Clear day, ready to start for Lake Yellowstone! 9325 feet altitude, 7 miles from the hotel. Saw Lake, Natural Bridge, Knotted Forest, Sleeping Giant, Kepplar Cascades, Continental Divide, Blue Ribbon Spring……place where 18 coaches were held up last year and got $1800 and jewels. Shoshone (?) Lake. 

30 Jul 1909 --  After lunch drove 21 miles to the M.H.S. (Mammoth Hot Springs) Hotel. Left for Seattle at 6:30 from the hotel. Mike bade us goodbye. Mr. Gehender, Miss Galley and Mrs. Newmeyer left for the east.

31 Jul 1909  --  Day is hot and dusty (**trains had open windows, no AC). Had hard time to get into the diner. Reached Spokane about 5 o’clock. Many people went there to register for homestead lands. Will receive a card from Mr.Oswald.

Now the wonderful family story is that Mary Ethel married John Peter Oswald in 1911! Aren't we lucky to have this diary? 

More Railroad Trivia

 

What were railroad land grants? Did your ancestor receive one?

The land grants were business transactions between the federal government and 61 pioneer railroads, all of them in the West and South. The grants, made from 1850 to 1871, were meant to encourage railroad construction through underdeveloped territory in order to attract settlers, increase the sale of government-owned lands and unify the westward-expanding nation. These objectives were accomplished.

Map showing the land grant of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company in Montana, Idaho, and in part of North Dakota, and in part of eastern Washington, reaching from Dickinson, North Dakota, to Ritzville, eastern Washington.

It is a bit hard to see, the the areas shaded in green were the railroad land grants in the west, including Eastern Washington.  Below is the bit I snipped to share from FamilySearch:

Ukrainian Archives Future?

 

Dave Obee's "Back Page" column in the June-July 2022 issue of Internet Genealogy hit a real bell with all genealogists. Dave's mother was born in Ukraine, he has visited several times and of course he is passionate about preserving and accessing Ukrainian family history in the form of archival records. 

According to Dave, "FamilySearch has several crews at work in Ukraine. After the invasion started, most of those crews stayed on the job, despite the dangers, gathering everything they could." Isn't that totally awesome?

Our state is helping. The above image is from the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, campus of U.of W., Seattle. Somehow these good folks are helping to save the contents of over 700 archives in Ukraine...... and to be fair, they are not alone. 

On a website, The Conversation, a journalistic forum, dated 10 April 2022, this was the headline:  "Libraries around the world are helping safeguard Ukrainian books and culture."

Dave Obee ended his column with these words:  "Ukraine will live on in the hearts of everyone with roots there. And family history will live on as well, a family history that has been given much more meaning by the Russian invasion."

Websites for Learning Social History

 

Big thanks to the July/August 2022 issue of Family Tree Magazine for this information.

Why do we want to learn about social history? What has it to do with genealogy? It has everything to do with our family history! Genealogy is the facts. Social history gives the why-when-how of those facts. When I learned that my great-grandmother took her 8-year-old daughter (my grandmother, Clara) upstream on the Mississippi River to visit family in St. Louis, I wanted to know more about the circumstances of that story. THAT'S social history. 

We've probably all used Google to find images of what life was like for our ancestors in any past time period or place. That's well and good, but there are other website you might consider:

** Encyclopedia Britannica - yes! No more a groaning load of huge volumes on our living room shelves, but all online AND up to date!  (www.britannica.com)

** Food Timeline  (www.foodtimeline.org). What your ancestors ate, and how they fixed their food, tells you much about their daily lives.

**History Net (www.historynet.com). Search for U.S. history topics at this website from the California Gold Rush to D-Day.

**Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930... really long website address:

library.harvard.edu/collections/immigration-united-states-1789-1930

This Harvard Library resource allows you to search among thousands of digitized books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts and photos to learn more about voluntary immigration to America.

**Library of Congress Digital Collections (www.loc/gov/collections). This site includes Chronicling America (the only US newspaper resource) and more. 

At the bottom of the article was this banner bit:  "Read Shelley K. Bishop's list of free social history website, categorized by subject at 

www.familytreemagazine.com/history/top-social-history-websites

There is ALWAYS more to learn about the lives and times of our ancestors. 

American History True Story

 

Quote from Cities of Gold, by Douglas Preston, 1992, a wonderful historical fiction narrative.  “A journey on horseback across the American Southwest in Coronado’s footsteps.”  Story from pages 123-124:

“The valley, we learned was first settled by a man named Colonel Henry Clay Hooker. Hooker, one of the great pioneer stockmen in Arizona history, was born on a farm in New Hampshire in 1828. He ran away to the California goldfields in ’49, opened a hardware store in Hangtown, California, and became a prosperous merchant. In 1866, a disastrous fire swept away his uninsured house, business and goods, leaving him nearly penniless with a wife and three children to support.

“But Hooker had an idea. Scraping together all his remaining money, he bought 500 turkeys from local ranchers and announced his intention to drive them from Hangtown over the mountains to Carson City, Nevada. Everyone thought it a ridiculous idea and when it came time for him to leave, much of the town turned out.

“With the aid of one helper and several trained dogs,” an account went,” he headed his strange procession across the mountain tops….. as he was coming down the mountains not far from his destination he was suddenly confronted by a precipice too steep to descend and all but impossible to skirt. The dogs so pressed and worried the birds, trying to force them to make the descent, that the birds finally became desperate and took to the air. Said Colonel Hooker: ‘As I saw them take wing and race away through the air I had the most indescribably feeling in my life. I thought, here is good-bye turkeys! My finances were at the last ebb; these turkeys were my whole earthly possession and they seemed lost.’

“But the case was not so bad as it seemed. In the valley below, Hooker, and his helper, and his dogs, succeeded in rounding up the aerial squadron and steering it once more toward Carson City and VICTORY!

“He sold his turkeys at a spectacular 350% profit and with this money laid the foundations for one of the great cattle fortunes in Arizona Territory.”

Covered Bridges

 

Loved it or hated it, the 1995 movie, Bridges of Madison County, certainly drew America's attention to our wonderful old historic bridges. 

At one time in our country's history, there were as many as 12,000 covered bridges (according to the book Covered Bridges Today). Today there are way less than 1000.

The states with the majority of existing covered bridges are: Pennsylvania,  Ohio,  Vermont,  Indiana,  New Hamshire............. and OREGON!   One website says Vermont has the most; more than 100 with the oldest dating back to 1820.  Another website gives the honor to Pennsylvania with over 200. Our neighbor, Oregon, boasts over 50 historic covered bridges remaining in the state. (Who would have guessed?)

Ask Google for an Oregon map showing the location of those 50-some bridges for your next vacation road trip. Oh, there is a Covered Bridge Society of Oregon too. 

Serendipity & Humor

 

What better image to begin a post on humor and serendipity??? A Doxie Cake!

** A Copenhagen, Denmark, neighborhood is named after what once lay under the ground: potatoes. Called Kartoffelraekkeerne, which means "Potato Row," this area was named for the crop grown on the land in the 1800s. Homes on Potato Row nowadays command high prices.

** Did you know China owns, OWNS, al but two of the pandas in the world (Mexico owns the other two) and loans them to zoos, sanctuaries, and breeding centers in other countries. Remember that when you visit those darling bears next time.

** What is a merswine?  (A dolphin or porpoise)

** What U.S. state is known as the Sunflower State?  (Kansas)

**What does the acronym "yuppie" stand for? (young urban professional0

** What mountain range is also the name of a breed of dog?  (Pyrenees)

** According to the International Playing Card Society and other researchers, the kings in a deck of cards are thought to be David, King of Israel (spades), Alexander the Great (clubs), Charlemagne, King of France (hearts) and Caesar Augustus (diamonds).  (Remember that when you audition for Jeopardy.)

** Do you have mageirocophobia???   Sometimes I do!  This is a fear of cooking. (Gosh, there is a word for everything.)

** What did Barbie do when she directed the hens in a play? Barbie cued them.

**Art Conger,  retired policeman who now lives in Spokane, in his younger days lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He took a "room for rent" in a house with two 90-year-old sisters, who had lived there for 70 years. Soon, the building owner told Art that the sisters were being moved and he was going to offer the state $250 for all the stuff the women left behind. Art promptly went downtown and paid $50 for all the house contents, thereby usurping the owner. Art rented a dumpster and got busy.  To shorten the longer story (which appeared in our Spokesman Review, 30 June 2022), Art ended up with a 16-inch bronze vase, circled by a five-clawed dragon,  dated authoritatively back to the Ming dynasty in the 1400s. No price was stated for the vase, but one can imagine that it is priceless.  (Moral: you never know what you'll find once you start looking.)

**Our near neighbor, Montana, became a state on 8 Nov 1889, two days before Washington became a state. Montana is the 4th largest start; nickname is Treasure State; state animal is the Grizzly Bear; state bird is the Western Meadowlark...... and there is a state butterfly, fish, flower, grass, tree, fossil and gemstone. Can you name them???

** Villains twirl their moustaches and are easy to spot. Villains who are camouflaged are harder to see and more often fool us."  (Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, TV's Star Trek)

** If a tomato is a fruit, is ketchup a smoothie?????

The Scandal of a Fork

Did your ancestor eat with his/her fingers or use a fork? The answer might surprise you.

"The fork is a latecomer to the table." Knives and even spoons were used "forever," but forks? (Google: The Rise of the Fork)

An article in the July-August issue of LDS Living, tells the tale:

"Have you used a fork today? If so, some early clergy men might have said you should fear for your soul. In the year AD 1004, a woman caused a stir when she used a fork at her wedding feast in Venice. Most Europeans still ate with their fingers and knives at the time, and the local clergyman firmly believed it should stay that way. According to Smithsonian Magazine, a religious leader said, "God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks---his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating." 

"The for continued to be a topic of scandalous discussion for hundreds of years. In fact, forks weren't well established in the U.S. until the 1850s. And for that bride in Venice? She died of the plague a few years after her wedding and local religious leaders claimed that her demise was a punishment from God. Makes us wonder what ancient clergymen would say about a spork." 

Really want more fun reading parallel to this topic? Click to www.theguardian.com and then "The history of table manners," by Jonathan Jones posted 9 Nov 2011. 

 

Sunflowers!

 

    

Sunflowers are summertime! When we think of a sunflower, we picture a tall yellow head eventually full of black seeds, right? But did you know there are yellow sunflowers and dark purple sunflowers? Did you know there are 70-some varieties of sunflowers? Google taught me that the sunflower originated in North American and spread to Europe in the 1500s. Sunflowers can be divided into three types: tall, dwarf and colored. They were (and are) mostly cultivated for food, oil or birdseed. Mostly we like them in our garden because they scream summer.

Native Americans, about 3000 BC, first domesticated the plant into a single headed plant with a variety of seed colors. Commercialization of sunflowers took place in Russia. By 1880, U.S. seed companies were advertising the ‘Mammoth Russian’ sunflower in catalogues. Google will teach you way more about the history of this flower than you’d ever imagine.

Do sunflowers figure into your family history???