Standing on the Shoulders of Our Ancestors

I was raised to do two things: Work hard and get a good education, with the expectation that doing so would result in success.

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Because my childhood neighborhood in the smallish (now bigger) suburb/town was populated mainly by factory and steel mill workers, the value of an honest day’s work was instilled in most families.

At the same time, many who put food on the table through manual labor did so hoping their children wouldn’t have to work quite so hard to make a living.

This wasn’t the case for everyone, however. There were students at my high school who expected to get a job at the mill or Ford or Chevy like their fathers and uncles (somehow the mothers rarely figured into this) and make a “good living.”  They believed this despite being warned by teachers that those jobs weren’t going to be around.

Some parents probably encouraged this belief, not wanting their children to “get above themselves,” perhaps fearing those children might one day look down on them (as if children don’t do this anyway <grin>).  I’ve heard this is referred to in Australia as “Tall Poppy Syndrome.”

And the same attitude exists in England, where my husband was raised, as my mother-in-law once shared in recounting the following anecdote.

My then future husband was one of two boys in his village school class who were given the opportunity to attend a more scholastically rigorous middle school that would prepare them to attend University.

Naturally, my MIL chose to send him. But the mother of the other boy did not, explaining she didn’t want her son to get any ideas about being better than he was.

The (future) Engineer did attend that school, which resulted in much greater and more opportunities than he would ever have had if his mother had chosen to have the same attitude as her neighbor.

For me, a higher education was imperative because I was hopeless at anything requiring hand/eye coordination (coordination in any form, in fact), and at age eighteen, I was a woefully impractical dreamer with my head in a book. A college degree would help me find my way.

It did, though that path proved more meandering than anyone expected, moving from job to job in several fields, mostly restaurants, and sometimes doubling back to work at a previous job once more. I made a living working two jobs (sometimes three) or working full-time and going to school (plus side gigs) until after I was married and had our daughter.

Eventually I found my place at the local library, and worked my way up the ladder, which entailed getting a second degree. (Later, I chose to work my way back down, but that’s another story. :-))

For my field, education meant two college degrees, backed up with many years of customer service jobs. For someone else, education might be an apprenticeship, on-the-job training, a vocational school certificate, or a combination of all these.

Thus, I’ve come to define education as the means to develop a knowledge base that makes one employable, preferably with the possiblity of improving one’s life.

It means being given the opportunity and the encouragement to make the best of the talent and brains we are born with.

Many people get neither.
I was privileged to have had both.

Why?
Part of the answer lies in the color of my skin and where, when and how I was raised.

But with a family tree populated mostly by farmers and manual laborers, how is it that my particular branch tried to reach higher? Who of my ancestors decided their children should be encouraged to do more?

How did it happen?

I am not casting aspersions on the industriousness of farmers or manual laborers. Without farmers, we wouldn’t eat, and despite the advance of technology, many of what we consider life’s necessities wouldn’t exist without manual labor.

However, farming and manual labor are, and always have been, jobs where the pay rarely reflects the toil expended. To this list,  I would add most jobs in the service industry, which frequently require more skill than people realize, yet are still inadaquately compensated.

Most people don’t choose to work poorly paid jobs, even if they enjoy the work. They do it because they have no choice.

Who in my family began the process that gave me that choice? Who looked at her or his life and said, “This is okay, but I’d like my children to have other options,” and then, somehow managed to provide those options?

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It wasn’t my father. Although his father was a laborer and farmer, Dad was pushed to go to college.

I don’t know if similar expectations were placed on his sister.

It was common knowledge that Dad skipped two grades, landing in high school at age twelve. Although this doesn’t jive with the year he graduated, his parents moved to Ohio around then, and he enlisted in the Navy at seventeen, so he probably lost a couple of years in the process.

Dad’s on the right.

After World War II, Dad went to Glenville State College in West Virginia on the GI bill, graduated in three years, and then returned to Ohio, where he eventually met and married my mother.

She was a high school graduate, but there was no expectation of any higher education for Mom, her two sisters or four brothers. In Mom’s family, the kids were encouraged to get out of the house as soon as possible. From the choices they made, the options on offer seemed to be finding a job, joining the service, and/or getting married.

Mom got a job, and then married my dad.

Back then, the working world was divided into “white collar” jobs and “blue collar” jobs, terms that I have only just now realized are incredibly sexist, as well as arbitrary.

Dad was neither, and both. He grew up poor, in the hills of West Virginia, yet had a college degree. As a warehouse foreman for Goodyear, he was considered management, and thus wore shirts and ties to work, but his work clothes reeked of Eau de Rubber.

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In fact, the clothes stunk so badly, he and Mom took out a loan to add on a second bathroom with a closet, so he could shower, change, and store his work clothes separately as soon as he got home.

Dad never called himself white or blue collar, but hillbilly or redneck instead. Repeat those words to Mom, and she’d laugh, saying he’d lived in Ohio longer than he’d ever lived in West Virginia and was a transplanted buckeye.

In truth, he was no longer a hillbilly or a redneck, but he also never went corporate, turning down promotions to avoid having to move, and occasionally siding with workers in labor disputes.

I find this dichotomy in myself, and I’m grateful for it because it reminds me not to take too much for granted.

My father thought deeply, and Mom thought quickly. At least that’s how I viewed them. And the encouragement to make the most of ourselves came from both.

Still, I think the expectation originated with my father’s family.

Specifically, it came through my grandmother, Leone Catherine Lang. The eldest of seven children of Thomas Jefferson Lang and Emma Virginia Weinrich, she finished high school and the one year of college needed to teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Alice, West Virginia.

Wikipedia’s entry for Alice says, “Alice is an unincorporated community in Gilmer
County, West Virginia, United States. Its post office ^[2] is closed.”

End of entry.

Evidently, it’s not a big place and probably never was.

 

Grandma’s teaching career was brief, ending when she married my grandpa, Everett Ernest Byrd, at nineteen. As I write this, I think about how young she was and wonder if she was one of those teachers who had students who were bigger than her. I also wonder if the experience of controlling a building full of children of all ages, coupled with having been the oldest child in her family, made her the strong-willed woman I knew.

When she told me married women weren’t allowed to teach, I was outraged! She calmly explained that a man might need the job to support his family, and I was surprised she accepted the limitation so easily.

Despite her having spent the time and effort to qualify as a teacher, the expectation was that grandpa, with his eighth-grade education, would find a way to support them and their children.

And, so he did.

Initially, I thought this disparity in education was an anomaly in our family, that my grandmother continued with school because she hadn’t yet married.

When I looked deeper, however, I discovered this wasn’t the case.

Though her father and mother, Thomas Jefferson Lang and Emma Virginia Weinrich only went through eighth grade, at least five of their seven children surpassed that level, including all the girls.

Leone completed 1 year of college.
Harold Clare (Heavy) stopped attending school after eighth grade. He married Alma Gay Bird, who despite the different spelling of their last names, was my grandfather Everett’s sister.
Fay Dorrette was a student nurse in 1930 before dying of TB in 1933 at the age of 24.
Lacelle finished high school, worked briefly as a maid, and then moved to Ohio, living in the same town as Leone. She married at age 66, returning to West Virginia with her husband, before coming back to Ohio on his death. I inherited her amethyst ring (eventually). If you’d like to read about that, click on her name.
Thomas Jefferson (Jr.)’s life is shrouded in mystery, at least so far. Though he was living with Thomas and Emma  in 1930, I have found no further trace of him until he washes up in Florida many years later. My mom and dad said he was a hobo during the Depression, riding the rails, which is interesting if true. Sadly, life as a vagabond doesn’t lend itself to record keeping, so I know very little about him, though I remember meeting him as a child.
George W. had completed two years of college by 1940 but hadn’t attended any school during that year. He went on to be a three-term president of his local autoworkers union.
Darlette Kay finished high school, but shot herself in her father’s barn at age 36. Although her brother George lived in Ohio by this time, he was the one to find her body.

The records I’ve found lead me to believe this is the generation when our family developed a culture of encouraging further education, though of course, I can’t prove it conclusively. Until 1940, the census didn’t ask about levels of education, only if each person could read and write, and sometimes not even that.

Assuming I’m correct (always a dangerous thing to do), what caused this sudden emphasis on further education and/or training?

Here are my two hypotheses:

• Sometime between 1900 and 1910, Thomas began working for the  Rural Free Delivery (RFD) mail service. The RFD began in several West Virginia towns in 1896, and quickly expanded to cover the state. Thomas delivered the mail at least through 1940, first as a contractor, and then as an employee of the USPS. In 1910, he and Emma were living in a rented house. By 1920, Thomas listed his occupation as farmer and RFD carrier, and he and Emma owned their home, though it was mortgaged. By 1930, they owned the home and farm, possibly able to afford it because of the extra income from his mail route. Did this income also make it possible for their children to pursue further training and/or education?
• Or was it Emma who was responsible for encouraging this advancement? She was born in 1876, a year after her sister Helena, to a father and mother who were unusually old for first-time parents. Emma’s mother, Elizabeth Daugherty, was thirty-five when she married Karl (Charles) Weinrich, a German immigrant and Civil War veteran sixteen years her senior. This means Emma’s father was fifty-five and her mother thirty-nine when Emma was born. Could having older parents and/or an immigrant father somehow have affected Emma’s attitudes toward educating her children?

Clearly, I can never answer these questions, just as I can’t be 100% sure it was Emma and Thomas whose influence has carried into my own generation.

In all likelihood, the true reason for this change was the result of several factors, some of which I  probably cannot begin to guess. In the end, I can only take away this lesson: When someone talks about how slavery was so long ago, I can see how long ago it wasn’t. The Civil War that legally ended the abhorrent institution was fought by ancestors whose lives had direct impact on family members I knew as a child.

Because my great grandparents had the ability to freely establish families, work for pay, buy land, and send their children to school, their children had advantages which ultimately affected me.

The last American slave ship came to this country in 1858, just twenty years before Thomas Jefferson Lang was born. The cargo — calling the enslaved people “passengers” would whitewash the experience of their journey — may have had children the same age as Thomas or Emma.

Do you think the descendents of that human cargo would have had the same advantages enjoyed by Thomas and Emma’s descendents, e.g., me and my siblings?

Viewing family history from the perspective of a genealogist has also enabled me to see how a change of attitude or circumstance can affect a family for generations. In the case of my 2x great grandfather, Montcalm Armstrong, his Civil War service had a great affect on his children, which almost certainly filtered down to his grandchildren, perhaps even his great grandchildren.

Being a slave during the same time period could only have worse consequences.

We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. And those whose ancestors were forced to kneel in subjugation begin their climb from a much lower place.

 

This is Thomas Jefferson Lang’s fiddle, which I ended up with. I didn’t even know I had a musical ancestor until my stepmother gave it to me, having somehow gotten it from one of our relatives, probably Thomas Jefferson Jr. Initially she said it was my grandfather’s, which I knew wasn’t correct. But then she added that Uncle Jeff (Thomas Jr.) said he remembered his father playing it, I understood. She was thinking he was my uncle, rather thanmy father’s. Ergo, the fiddle belonged to Dad’s grandfather, the older Thomas Jefferson Lang, who I knew when I was very young. He died in 1966, at age 88, followed by Emma a year later at age 90.

 

 

 

 

 

Our Ancestors: We Know We Can Make It Through Because We Know They Did

It’s been a weird few weeks, I think we all can agree. In all my born days, I never could have predicted something like coronavirus could scour the world as it has.

That’s not quite true. I’ve predicted a pandemic for years. I just never believed it would happen.

I find it hard to believe even now, even though I know it’s gone way beyond weird to tragic.

So many people are sick and dying, while so many more are unable to work.

Meanwhile, our so-called leaders can’t even manage to pass a bill to help those who need it most.

My answer: Do something now to help our country’s citizens. Argue about how to the big corporations later. And be sure to factor in more accountability than the last bailout.

But, this is not a political diatribe.

It’s a reminder.

We can get through this.

I know this because I study the genealogy of my family, and I know my ancestors made it through their own horrors.

There was Sarah Jane Daugherty Feathers Scott who married at nineteen, only to lose her husband in the Civil War shortly after the birth of their first child. Her three brothers fought in the same war, one for the Confederacy and two for the Union. All came home safely, but one died before the age of 20 from an accidental gun shot. Sarah later remarried and had seven more children, with four of them dying before she did. And yet, she and her second husband, Amos, took in and were raising three of his siblings the year before her death. Sarah was the sister of one of my 2x great grandmother, and her first husband was the brother of one of my other 2x great grandmothers.

Sarah’s brother Jacob was the one who fought for the Confederacy. He and his wife Julia lost two children within eighteen days of each other at a time when their home counties were in the process of seceding from the Confederacy to become what is now West Virginia.

On the other side of the family, there was John Garman and his many children. And you already know about Montcalm. 

And I can’t forget about my Great-grandfather Lang, who was an RFD mail carrier, carrying out his rounds on a mule in West Virginia. If you’ve ever been to the hollers of that state, you can imagine what that must have been like, especially in the winter.

There was my Grandpa Byrd, who dug ditches for one of the Federal works projects during the Great Depression so he could feed his family.

His father, Andrew Warren Bird (the spelling varies) and mother, Clara Olive Summers (one of my favorite names ever!) lost a child, Mary A Bird, in 1898. She was only twenty months old, and I came across her by accident when I was looking for the death record for another Byrd/Bird. It says “caught fire from open grate, never rallied.”

Every time I read that phrase, I get tears in my eyes.

Mary’s Death Registration

Still, Clara and Andrew soldiered on until Clara’s death at age 66 in 1938. Andrew lived to the age of 96, remarrying a woman 41 years his junior when he was 78, although — and I find this detail amusing — he claimed to be a sprightly 72 to Alice’s 37.

Alice’s life was a difficult one. She was first married at 15, to a fifty-two-year-old man, with whom she had nine children.

Writing that makes me cringe, though the nine children and the fact that Andrew bequeathed his land to her on his death makes me think theirs was a marriage of economical necessity.

She died at seventy-five, having married a third time, this time to someone closer to her age (only six years older).

Although she isn’t my direct ancestor, I find myself hoping her life with Andrew was a pleasant one, and that the acreage she inherited enabled her to achieve some independence after what sounds like a life of drudgery.

My parents also knew challenges, growing up in the Depression, and that experience was reflected in how my siblings and I were raised, with a big garden and two large cupboards in the basement, filled with home-canned food.

Grandma and Grandpa Byrd would come to stay for a few days in the late summer or fall to help, but we were all expected to contribute, by lugging water to the garden, stringing beans, pushing apples through a ricer to make applesauce, or washing dishes.

The first time I made and canned jelly, I was so proud of myself, feeling like I was maintaining a connection with my parents and grandparents.

Then I realized if Grandma could look down from heaven, she would be laughing at me — so smug about over a few jars of jelly.  She, along with Grandpa and my parents, would churn out seemingly endless jars of multiple varieties of jelly every year, along with applesauce, green beans, tomatoes, tomato juice, grape juice, peaches, pears, plums, and more.

So, here’s the thing: I come from a long line of resilient people. They suffered the deaths of spouses, siblings, and children, lived through wars and the Depression, and raised their children. Every generation has had its challenges, and yet, we persevere.

Your family’s story is probably similar, though you may not know its “narrative.” This might be a good time to learn some of it because research shows that such knowledge makes a person more resilient. (If you’d like to read more about this study, there’s a good artice in the New York Times. )

It makes sense. If a person knows their family’s stories, they know that there have always been difficult times, and that people — not all of them, obviously, but many — manage to find a way to survive. When we know that, it makes us more confident we will find a way through our own hardships.

We can do that best, I believe, by learning to depend more on ourselves and on each other, even though right now that interdependence with others must, of necessity, be from a distance.

Though we may not be able to deal with difficulties in the same way as our ancestors, we too will find our way through.

Also, I take heart from two of my favorite quotations.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Ghandi

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

We don’t have to do everything to fix things. We just have to do something, preferably something that takes us out of ourselves and helps others.

So, be kind. Check in with friends and neighbors.

And, for heaven’s sake, quit hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer!

 

The Brief and Difficult Life of Montcalm Armstrong

Montcalm was my 2x great grandfather, born in 1843 in Wayne County, Ohio on June 30 (calculated by the registration of his death, though Ohio, Soldier Grave Registrations, 1804-1958 says May 30 and findagrave.com says January 29.)

The sixth of ten children, he grew up in Napoleon, Henry County, Ohio. His father was a carpenter/joiner/cabinetmaker, and Montcalm followed in his footsteps, working as a carpenter.

Montcalm didn’t reach 40, dying less than a month before his birthday on June 14, 1883. Whoever indexed the death registration mistakenly wrote his name as “Montealm,” a type of error that’s common in genealogical records.

Also, the person who recorded his death couldn’t spell “diarrhea.”

Even misspelled, “chronic diarhea” gets the message across.

When I discovered what caused his death, long before I found this record, I was aghast. His pension records (kindly shared with me by a distant cousin) mention “complications of dysentery.” I looked it up and remember thinking, “That’s basically dying of diarrhea,” something almost beyond my comprehension.

Montcalm suffered from 1865, when he was discharged from the Army, until he died. His pension records reflect this, with the illness also affecting his back and one leg. From what I’ve read, amoebic dysentery can cause postinfectious arthritis, so perhaps that’s what the problem was.

He’d enlisted in July of 1862. A little over a year later on September 8, 1863, he was captured and confined as a POW at Belle Isle, Virginia, until March 15, 1864, when he was admitted to the hospital (possibly Annapolis — I can’t make out the writing — cause not given).

The National Park Service record of Montcalm says “Held at Andersonville and survived.”

Those five words describe a world of misery.

Although the information I have only mentions Belle Isle, the NPS also describes the Belle Isle prisoners at Andersonville, “By February 1864 prisoners on Belle Isle were moved to a newly established prison in Andersonville, Georgia. The men who left Belle Isle were dirty, poorly clothed, and almost all of them weighed less than 100 pounds.”

This was a month before Montcalm was released.

Meant for only 3,000 prisoners, with only 300 tents and no permanent shelters, Belle Isle eventually held between 10,000 and 30,000 men (estimates vary wildly).

To put it bluntly, it was a freezing kind of hell.

“In a semi-state of nudity…laboring under such diseases as chronic diarrhea, scurvy, frost bites, general debility, caused by starvation, neglect and exposure, many of them had partially lost their reason, forgetting even the date of their capture, and everything connected with their antecedent history. They resemble, in many respects, patients laboring under cretinism. They were filthy in the extreme, covered in vermin…nearly all were extremely emaciated; so much so that they had to be cared for even like infants.”
— Lucius Eugene Chittenden, U.S. Treasurer during the Lincoln Administration, quoted at https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-prison-camps.

Looking at the table below (from http://mdgorman.com), it’s clear provisions were in short supply.

O.R.–SERIES II–VOLUME VI [S# 119]
UNION AND CONFEDERATE CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, ETC., RELATING TO PRISONERS OF WAR AND STATE FROM JUNE 11, 1863, TO MARCH 31, 1864.–#35

Statement of clothing issued to Federal prisoners of war at Richmond, Va., by a committee of officers of the U. S. Army, from November 10, 1863, to January 18, 1864.

 

A.	No. of men.	F.	Blouses.
B.	Shoes.	G.	Shirts.
C.	Socks.	H.	Greatcoats.
D.	Drawers.	I.	Blankets.
E.	Pants.	J.	Caps.

 

	A.	B.	C.	D.	E.	F.	G.	H.	I.	J.
Belle Isle	7,568	3,173	4,189	3,446	2,597	2,629	3,336	3,730	4,946	2,479

If you want to read further, the same site has links to a variety of information on the camp. You might start with this report, written nine days before Montcalm was released.

I was going to include this photo from the Library of Congress of a prisoner on his release from the camp (initially identified incorrectly as Andersonville), but couldn’t bring myself to do so.

Belle Isle is now a state park, described as letting “visitors explore a wide variety of tidal wetlands interspersed with farmland and upland forests. It has a campground, three picnic shelters, hiking, biking and bridle trails, and motor boat and car-top launches. Belle Isle also offers overnight lodging at Bel Air and the Bel Air Guest House. Bicycle, canoe and kayak rentals are available.”

I’m not sure how I feel about that. I mean, it sounds lovely, I’m sure, ideal for kayaking and cycling, but don’t you think the description should mention the historical significance of the site? A lot of men died there, and I’m sure there were others like Montcalm, who died as a result of being imprisoned.

Shouldn’t that be worth a line or two?

For now, let’s focus on the fact Montcalm lived, or “survived” might be a better word.

He went back to Ohio, married Emma J. “Jennie” Price in 1866. She was twenty; he was just twenty-two, but after what he’d been through, he could hardly be considered young.

Look carefully above, and you’ll see there are two parts to marriage records, the license and the return beneath it. If the bottom part hadn’t been filled out, we’d have no proof the marriage ever took place. In this case, it did. Emma and Montcalm were married by Mr. A. H. Tyler, J.P. (Justice of the Peace).

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They had two children, Luella “Ella” (born 1867) and Jennie May “Maima” (born 1869).

Emma died in September, 1870, at age 24, leaving Montcalm a widower with a one-year-old and three-year-old to care for.

He remarried in 1874. From the record, you would think he married a woman named Anna Seitner, and when I first started doing genealogy, I believed that was her name. However, my mom kept talking about someone named “Lightner.”

I never connected the two until we took a road trip to Napoleon, and in the clipping files of their library, we found records connecting Anna Leitner and Montcalm.

My big contribution to the genealogist community was sharing this discovery. These days, “Anna Seitner” rarely makes an appearance in the Armstrong family trees I see. By 1880, he and his new wife were living in Napoleon with their three children, Harry/Harvey Coddington (born 1876), James Gideon (my great grandfather, born 1878), and Guy R (born 1880). In 1882, almost exactly a year before he died, they had a fourth child, Alba.

Luella and Jennie May were fostered out to other families.

In 1880, Ella was with Addison and Sarah Crew in Swanton, Fulton County, listed as “adopted. Six years later, when she married Arthur Sweeney, she again uses the name “Ella Crew.” However, we know she is Ella Armstrong because when she died in 1940 in Michigan (age 73), her death certificate, listing Arthur as her husband, gives Montcalm as her father, and “Price” as her mother.

I would like to claim I figured all that out by myself, but I followed the bread crumbs left by other genealogists, verifying and adding details as I went.

As for Jennie May, from my copy of Montcalm’s pension files, I know she was born in Napoleon on July 28, 1869.

In 1880, she was listed as “Jane Armstrong,” adopted daughter of Levi and Hannah Serrick, living in Clinton, Fulton County. Claiming to be 16, using the name “Jennie Serrick,” she married Wallace Wagner (age 21), a neighbor of the Crews. If my dates are correct, she was actually 15. According to the bread crumbs and family lore, she divorced Wallace in 1892 because he sold her horse without asking.

Later, she married Andrew Smith.

I have no records to prove these facts, but Wallace did remarry in 1893, and by 1900, Jennie was living as Jennie Smith with Andrew Smith in Lucas County, raising poultry. When she died in 1927, the death certificate listed Levi Serrick as her father, and gave her birthdate as July, 1869 and birthplace as Napoleon, Ohio.

As we know, Montcalm died in June 1883, leaving Anna with four children. He wasn’t approved for a pension until 1881, leaving me to wonder how the family survived. The same pension was later assigned to Addison Crew, after he became Alba’s guardian.

Anna married again in June 1884, this time to a man named Charles F. Harrison. They had five children together.

Unfortunately, the 1890 census was mostly destroyed by fire, so it’s difficult to trace what happened to the rest of Montcalm’s children following his death.

The same distant cousin who sent me the pension file told me that Guy ended up in the Ohio Soldiers and Sailors Orphans Home at the age of 10.  (His application was dated July 21, 1890.)

In the 1900 census, he was back in Napoleon with Anna, her second husband, and their children. In 1910, he was living with Anna’s brother, Samuel and his family in Michigan and working as a carpenter. He married Lettie Taylor in 1911, dying in Michigan in 1950.

One of Guy’s granddaughters contacted me via Ancestry.com for any information I had on him. When I told her he was a carpenter and had been in care, she said that made sense because one of the few things she remembered about him was he was good with his hands and liked to make things. She didn’t know he’d been institutionallized.

Montcalm’s youngest child, Alba, was also farmed out to Addison Crew, and in 1892, Addison was awarded her pension.   By 1900, Addison was dead, but “Alba Crew” remained with his widow Sarah as her adopted daughter. They lived next door to a branch of the Serrick family, who had also taken in an adopted child.

Alba married August Melching in1903 in Emmett, Michigan, with Guy as one of the witnesses. (As usual, the record is mis-indexed, listing Montcalm as Mort C.) Alba died at the age of 72 in Michigan.

This adopting/fostering out of children shows up in other family records. Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for children to live with other branches of the family or friends when their own parents couldn’t care for them.

Alba’s oldest brother Harvey’s bread crumbs are harder to follow. The next record I found for him was in 1899, when he married Sadie Reninger in Summit County. He  remained there, working as a machinist and rubber maker draftsman until he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1928. At that time, he was living on Buchtel Avenue, a street I walked daily when I was in college at The University of Akron.

Odd to think I walked in my great uncle’s footsteps for four years without ever knowing it.

My great grandfather, James Gideon, was five when his father died. The next record I found of him was the 1900 census, where he is working as a servant for Alvin R. McFarlin, in Bath, Summit County. Before you start getting a Downton Abbey type picture in your mind, I will clarify that in this case, “servant” means “farm laborer.”He married seventeen-year-old Sophia Viola Myers a year later. Below is their marriage record, with the one on the left showing the “permission slip” her father Rolandous had to sign for the marriage to take place.

With the permission slip lifted on the right record, you’ll see Summit County marriage records provide the details genealogists love — where each member of the pair lived and were born, their ages, and the Holy Grail of genealogy, their parents’ names including the mothers’ maiden names.

City directories show James and Sophia were still in Summit County in 1907 and 1908, but by 1910, they were back in Henry County in Freedom Township with their two children Harold (my grandfather) and Ethel. Sophia’s brother and James’s half sister Grace Harrison also lived with them.

When I first began researching her family, my mom kept talking about how she remembered her grandfather running a grocery store, and that there was a picture of him in front of it.

She was right. In 1910, James was a “merchant” of “groceries” employing others. He also rented a farm.

Eventually, we found this picture, which Mom says is the store with James in front of it. 

By 1920, he and Sophia had moved to Plain Township, Stark County, where James farmed. In 1930, much like my paternal grandfather, he was doing road work to support his family (mistakenly named as John G. Armstrong, but other documents confirm this is the right family).

James registered for the draft for both World Wars, but didn’t serve. The card on the right is from a collection called the “Old Man’s Draft Registration Cards.” If you look at his age, you’ll see why.

James died in 1956, before I was born, so I never knew him.

On re-reading his death notice as I wrote this post, I see James G. also worked for Goodyear Aircraft. I’m not sure why this surprised me since my mom, my dad, and all my maternal uncles worked for the rubber makers at one time or another. Of course, back then, everyone in Akron either worked for or was related to someone who worked for the rubber companies.

I sometimes wonder how and why Montcalm would marry — not once, but twice — and have six children. Did he initially recover enough from his imprisonment to think he was capable of being a proper partner and raising a family? Was he simply trying to live a normal life after what he’d been through? Or was he just trying to find happiness while he lived?

Since there’s no way of answering that question, here ends the stories of Montcalm Armstrong and his six children.

Blame It on Montcalm

If you ask about genealogy, and I talk until your eyes roll back in your head, it’s Montcalm’s fault, although my mom does bear some responsibility.

She’s the one who gave me Montcalm Armstrong’s Civil War discharge paper (below — much the worse for wear because someone scotch-taped it where it had been folded. Big mistake. Never scotch-tape an important document).
The document was found behind a reverse glass painting of a woman clinging to a cross. Big Brother got the painting, and I, the history buff of the family, got Montcalm, our 2x great grandfather.

My fascination with the man (and genealogy) began when I first beheld this piece of history, long before it became mine.

Genealogical databases had become available via the Internet, and the library I worked for subscribed to one — I can’t even remember which. But, one night when I was working in the computer room, I threw Montcalm’s name into it, and bingo!

There he was.

I played around a little, doing a general Internet search of his regiment, and found a history of the 100th Ohio Voluntary Infantry.

It was amazing. The information was easy to find, not even as difficult as some  questions I got at the reference desk.

I dropped into genealogy like a stone into a well.

Unlike a stone, I managed to resurface long enough to take a deep breath and realize this wasn’t an interest I could pursue at that time in my life.

Because I quickly learned most ancestors are not as easy to research as Montcalm.

Think about it. Have you ever heard of anyone else with that name? I hadn’t, and when I looked it up, I could only find Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, French commander of forces in North America in the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War).

Montcalm’s mother was named Eleanor Pinkerton and his father was James Armstrong. Neither one sounds, nor was, French, at least as far as I can tell.

Given when they lived, my best guess is James may have fought in the same war as Louis-Joseph.

Come to think of it, maybe Montcalm’s parents should be blamed for my immersion into genealogy.

Seriously, Eleanor and James? What were you thinking?

Montcalm?

The name is so uncommon I can almost guarantee anyone whose name includes Montcalm and Armstrong in any form is some kind of cousin.

As for having my first genealogical experience be based on the original Montcalm, well, it was false advertising, that’s what it was.

Especially when his father’s name is common as dirt.

Following Montcalm back through the censuses, I learn that James was born around 1804 in Pennsylvania. (The Federal Census often lists ages and birthplaces, though they are inaccurate almost as often.)

Eleanor was born around 1815 in Virginia.
Or Kentucky.
It depends on which census you believe.

Oh, and sometimes she’s called Nellie.
Or Ellen.
Or Elenore.
It varies by document.

And women are harder to trace anyway, partly because of the whole name change thing. Also, they rarely appeared on property records and didn’t usually join the military — just stayed at home, fed and clothed and raised the kids while their husband went off for years.

In short, they didn’t do anything important. 

Sorry. I digress.
The point is: Even with an approximate year and place of birth, finding a man named James Armstrong is a challenge.

Because of naming customs, there are many James Armstrongs, born in or near 1804 in Pennsylvania. Below is a list of those from 1850 censuses.

Ours is the third from the top. I know this because Montcalm was born in 1843, and he’s listed with the rest of his family. When I search for him, he comes at the top of the list for 1850, (although I did have to play around with it because it’s indexed as two separate names).

Still, you get the idea. After working downward from Montcalm and back up, I got to James and decided to put my genealogy interest on the back burner.

I had a full-time job and Darling Daughter to raise, and genealogy was clearly an addiction I didn’t have time for.

Things are different now, and you can look forward to (or maybe not) reading more about Montcalm soon.