Book: Raking The Ashes

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Effects of the earthquake and fire

Last week’s post on “The records of death” — about the heartbreaking stories told of the 1906 Great Earthquake and fire in the records of what was then called the Coroner’s Office in San Francisco1 — raises a wonderful genealogical question.

If those records, from before and after that disaster, survived for us to use today, what else did?

And there’s a wonderful resource out there with the answers for anybody who’s interested in San Francisco research.

It’s a book called Raking The Ashes: Genealogical Strategies For Pre-1906 San Francisco Research,2 newly published in its second edition, and it’s an absolute necessity for your bookshelf if you’re looking at that place and time.

Written by Nancy Simons Peterson, CG, the research director of the California Genealogical Society, this 242-page paperback takes the researcher through the issues of what did and didn’t survive, what workarounds exist for things that didn’t survive, what additional resources are available, and even what research techniques are particularly applicable to solving difficult problems of pre-1906 San Francisco.

An appendix catalogs the availability of pre-earthquake newspapers.

For $25 ($20 for members of the California Genealogical Society ordering through the CGS website), it’d be a steal just for the research techniques discussion by itself.

You can get your copy through the California Genealogical Society website (the information page is here and the order page is here), through the website for the book (here) or even through Amazon (here).

And, by the way, at the book’s website, you will find not only more information about the book, but the author has painstakingly added updates even since the 2012 publication of the second edition.

To whet your appetite more, if you need it, the table of contents:

Introduction

Disaster!
Extent of the Record Loss
How to Use This Guide
Background and Acknowledgements

Part I: Original records: What Did and Did Not Survive, with Work-Arounds for Lost Records

Vital (Civil) Records: Birth, Marriage and Death
Mortuary, Crematory and Coroners’ Records
Cemetery and Columbarium Records
Religious Records
Newspapers: Films, Indexes, Abstracts and Online Digitizations
Census Enumerations and Indexes
San Francisco City Directories
Municipal Records: Annual Reports, Tax Records
Land Records
Original and Appellate Court Records: Naturalization, Probate, Land, Divorce and Adoption
Voting Records
Immigration: Overland Arrivals, Passenger Lists and Passports
Military Records
Records of Fraternal Organizations and Benevolent Societies
Institutional, Business and Occupational Records
Pre-Statehood Spanish and Mexican Records
Diaries and First-Hand Accounts
Ethnic Records and Resources

Part II: Continuing the Search: Additional Resources

Biographical and Historical Publications
The California Information File
Records of Pioneer and Other Lineage Societies
Help from Internet Resources
Family History Library Resources
Local Repositories
Professional Research Assistance

Part III: Research Techniques for Solving Genealogical Problems

Assembling and Assessing Evidence
The Basics: the Census and City Directories
A Quick Survey of the Most-Used Sources
A Less-Used Source: Religious Records
Location, Location, Location
Expanding Your Search: Wider and Later
Naming Complications
Thinking Beyond San Francisco
Source Summaries: Where to Find What
Putting It All Together

Appendix: Pre-earthquake Newspaper Collections: Titles, Local Sources and Dates of Coverage

Raking The Ashes: Genealogical Strategies For Pre-1906 San Francisco Research.

Highly recommended.

SOURCES

  1. Judy G. Russell, “The records of death,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 24 Apr 2013 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 28 Apr 2013). ↩
  2. Nancy Simons Peterson, Raking The Ashes: Genealogical Strategies For Pre-1906 San Francisco Research, 2nd ed. (Oakland, California : California Genealogical Society, 2012). ↩
Posted in General | 4 Comments

DNA webinar Tuesday!

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Free APG webinar: Autosomal DNA

Still wondering about autosomal DNA? Not sure if you’re ready to take that plunge and get tested, or whether it’s worth it to start nagging that cousin for a DNA sample?

Join The Legal Genealogist for an introduction to this newest type of DNA testing and the answers to your autosomal DNA questions in a free webinar sponsored by the Association of Professional Genealogists this Tuesday, April 30, at 9 p.m. EDT (8 p.m. CDT, 7 p.m. MDT and 6 p.m. PDT).

Autosomal DNA, remember, is is the kind of test that works across genders and helps you find cousins in recent generations.1 Unlike YDNA, you don’t have to locate sons of sons of sons to test and only get results in the male line,2 and unlike mitochondrial DNA, you don’t have to locate daughters of daughters of daughters and only get results in the female line.3 With autosomal DNA, you can test the son of a daughter of a son against the daughter of a son of a daughter and get good results even across genders.4 It’s the test offered by Family Tree DNA (the Family Finder test), by 23andMe, and by AncestryDNA.

Here’s the official info from APG on Tuesday’s webinar:

An Autosomal DNA Primer: “Sex Doesn’t Matter Any More”

A plain English introduction to autosomal DNA for non-tech types. Learn how this newest type of DNA testing works across gender lines to tell you more about your deep genetic past and help you find cousins to share your genealogy with today.

Again, this webinar is free and open to all genealogists, courtesy of the Association of Professional Genealogists, so reserve your webinar seat now at:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/328306193

After April 30th, the recording of this webinar — like all recordings of the APG webinars — will be available to APG members only. So be sure to reserve your seat now for Tuesday’s webinar. Better yet, join APG and get access to this and all the recorded webinars in the APG series — plus a whole lot more in member benefits!

 
SOURCES

  1. See generally Judy G. Russell, “Autosomal DNA testing,” National Genealogical Society Magazine, October-December 2011, 38-43. ↩
  2. See ISOGG Wiki (http://www.isogg.org/wiki), “Y chromosome DNA test,” rev. 21 Jan 2013. ↩
  3. See ISOGG Wiki (http://www.isogg.org/wiki), “Mitochondrial DNA test,” rev. 29 Jan 2013. ↩
  4. See generally Russell, “Autosomal DNA testing.” ↩
Posted in DNA | 1 Comment

Standing alone

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

The plight of the youngest

This photo, the one below, breaks my heart.

The people depicted are so very dear to me. From left to right, they are my Aunt Marianne, my Aunt Trisha, my grandmother Opal (Robertson) Cottrell, my Aunt Carol, my mother Hazel (called “Totsy”), and my Aunt Cladyne.

The Girls, they were called, always with the capital “G.”

My grandparents had six boys and six girls. They lost their firstborn baby girl, my Aunt Ruth, when she was only a few months old.1 They lost their seventh child and fourth son, my Uncle Donald, called Dooter, when he was only two.2

But they raised five boys and five girls to adulthood. And here you see the five girls and their mother.

It’s hard to look at that photo today. Yesterday, you see, was the 14th anniversary of the day we laid my mother to rest in the cemetery at Byrd Methodist Memorial Chapel in Kents Store, Virginia, in a grave next to her parents. And even all these years later the anniversaries are hard.

But what makes it all the harder is the knowledge that, of all of those beautiful women in that photo, only one is alive today.

     • We lost my grandmother in March of 1995; she was almost 97 years old, and didn’t make it quite long enough for there to be five living generations.3

     • My mother was the next loss, in April 1999. She was 73 years old, her life cut short by a lifetime of smoking.4

     • The next one we lost was Aunt Marianne, in September 2007. She too was a casualty to a lifetime of smoking; she was only 71 when she died.5

     • The oldest daughter, my Aunt Cladyne, was 88 when we lost her in November of 2009.6

     • And then last October we lost my Aunt Carol. She was two months short of her 81st birthday.7

And that… that left my Aunt Trisha. Of all those girls, she is now by herself. Standing alone.

And that just breaks my heart.

Trisha is the youngest of all my grandparents’ children. She never knew the two oldest siblings who died — both were gone before she was born — but in her lifetime she has lost both her parents, two of her brothers and all four of her sisters. And, as the youngest, it may yet be her lot to lose them all.

And I find that unimaginable.

I’m third of my father’s eight children, second of the seven born to my mother. My baby brother teases me whenever I give him grief on one of his birthdays by saying he’ll always be younger than I am. And I’m so glad that’s true.

As one of the older ones, I expect to be taking my revenge on my younger siblings by making them the executors of my estate. I’m supposed to go before the younger ones. I can’t even contemplate losing the two who are older. They are, all of them, part of my heart. Part of my soul.

Which is why that photo just breaks my heart. I have sisters, one older and one younger. Trisha today has no sisters left. I have all five of my brothers. Trisha is down to three.

I am one of the older ones. And I hope never to find myself looking at a photo like this one… and find myself standing alone.

 
SOURCES

  1. Dutton Funeral Home (Iowa Park, Texas), Record of Funeral, Baby Cottrell, 22 February 1918; digital copy privately held by Judy G. Russell. ↩
  2. Texas Department of Health, death certificate no. 35631, Donald Harris Cottrell (1930); Bureau of Vital Statistics, Austin ↩
  3. Virginia Department of Health, Certificate of Death, state file no. 95-011808, Opal Robertson Cottrell (1995); Division of Vital Records, Richmond. ↩
  4. See Judy G. Russell, “Remembering Totsy,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 28 Apr 2012 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 26 Apr 2013). ↩
  5. See ibid., “Marianne,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 28 Apr 2012. ↩
  6. “Cladyne Cottrell Barrett,” obituary, Charlottesville (Va.) Daily Progress, 13 November 2009. ↩
  7. See Judy G. Russell, “The pain of another goodbye,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 19 Oct 2012 (http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 26 Apr 2013). ↩
Posted in My family | 17 Comments

Reprise: Rules of my road

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Not legal advice!

Bunches of reader questions have come in over the past week or 10 days that are beyond what The Legal Genealogist can answer in this blog, mostly because they’re asking for legal advice. Um… that’s not what this blog is all about. Not what this blog can do.

Let me take this opportunity then to repeat these…

The rules of my road.

… It occurs to me that I’ve been remiss in explaining some of the limits on what I’m up to here at The Legal Genealogist. You know, the little things, like making sure I don’t get sued and the furniture isn’t trashed in a brawl.

So here are the rules of my road.

I’m not your lawyer.

I have a law degree. But I’m not your lawyer. I’m not even in active practice as a lawyer any more. I’m not licensed in your state, and I’m not giving legal advice online. We don’t have an attorney-client relationship, so anything I say can be held against you. If you get sued because of something I say here, I won’t represent you. I won’t even testify for you. I will, however, be enormously amused.

Seriously, this blog is general commentary on lots of things, including general commentary on the law. If you’re looking for more than general commentary on the law, you need to consult a lawyer in your home state. If you think this is more than general commentary on the law, you need to consult a mental health professional.

I could be wrong.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m (gasp) human. Which means, at any given time, on any given matter, I could be wrong. If I’m wrong about a fact, I’d like to know it. (I was delighted when Donn Devine told me about early Delaware statutes I hadn’t been aware of.) So tell me when you know more than I do or I’ve just plain goofed. As to everything else, don’t buy what I say uncritically; check the sources I cite and make your own decisions. You may well come to a different conclusion.

No advertising.

It appears that people selling (probably counterfeit) Coach bags and (undoubtedly overpriced) sports jerseys think that the comments area on genealogy blogs should be their personal playgrounds. Uh uh. Not here. And especially not the dolt who thought this lifelong New York Giants fan would be happy with a comment touting Tom Brady jerseys. Well, maybe… depending on whether I could dictate what was on the jersey…

No politics.

It appears that the extreme fringes of the political spectrum have people sitting out there, trolling every single nook and cranny of the Internet, looking for places where they can pop up and spew their conspiracy theories. “Obama wants to close the SSDI because he wants to hide his birth certificate!” “Romney is a Mormon and Mormons do genealogy so genealogy is a Republican plot!”

Bleah. A pox on all your houses. If you haven’t got anything substantive to say about genealogy, it ain’t going live here. And if it sneaks by me at first, it’ll get deleted when I spot it.

No flaming.

Play nice. We’re not all ever going to agree with each other on everything. But disagreeing doesn’t have to be disagreeable. So no personal attacks, ever.

How the World Sees Genealogists (Image used with permission of Jim Owston)

Posted in General | 30 Comments

Upon the country

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

In the April 1895 term of the Nolan County, Texas, District Court, C.A. Culberson, Governor of Texas, filed suit against J.W. Collins.

Collins, the suit alleged, was the owner of 160 acres in Nolan County originally sold to J. Asberry Jr. on 17 September 1881 for $1 an acre, with a note for $152 at eight percent interest.

As of 1893, the complaint continued, the interest owed was $85.12, and it asked the court to eject the defendant from the land for the benefit of the school fund and for the $85.12 in interest, together with costs of suit.1

In the November term, J.F. Eidson, the attorney for the defendant, filed Collins’s answer. It’s a two-paragraph pre-printed form:

Now comes defendant by attorney and excepts to plaintiff’s petition and says that the same is insufficient in law, and shows no cause of action against defendant–wherefore he prays judgment whether this court will take further cognizance of this suit.

And now comes the defendant by attorney and denies all and singular the allegations in plaintiff’s petition; and of this he puts himself upon the country–wherefore he prays judgment of the court.2

Okay. Just what the heck does all that mean?

The first paragraph actually is easy. The defendant is basically saying, in plain English, “so what if everything the plaintiff says is true? The law won’t let the court take my land away or make me pay that interest.” In today’s legal language, it’s a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim3 — a statement that, even taking the facts as true, the law favors the defendant and leaves the plaintiff without a legal basis for the lawsuit.

But that second paragraph! Sure, the “denies all and singular the allegations in plaintiff’s petition” is clear, but what in the world does it mean that the defendant here “puts himself upon the country”?

Going to the country, in the language of the law, happened “when a party, under the common-law system of pleading, finished his pleading by the words ‘and of this he puts himself upon the country’… (T)his was called ‘going to the country.’ It was the essential termination to a pleading which took issue upon a material fact in the preceding pleading.”4

To put, in the law, in a pleading like an answer, was “to confide to; to rely upon; to submit to. As in the phrase, ‘the said defendant puts himself upon the country;’ that is, he trusts his case to the arbitrament of a jury.”5

This was also called a tender of issue: “A form of words in a pleading, by which a party offers to refer the question raised upon it to the appropriate mode of decision. The common tender of an issue of fact by a defendant is expressed by the words, ‘and of this he puts himself upon the country.’”6

In other words, in plain English, the defendant was telling the plaintiff to put up or shut up — to prove the case to the jury.7

The same term was used when a criminal defendant pleaded not guilty, though the Latin phrase ponit se super patriam or abbreviation po. se. might be used then.8

Where exactly the phrase came from isn’t clear, though it does sound as though it was an appeal to the broader community to judge the case.

But wherever it comes from, that’s what it means whenever you see it in a legal document: okay, other side, prove it to the jury.

 
SOURCES

  1. Nolan County, Texas, District Court case file 455, Culberson v. Collins, complaint, April term 1895; District Court Clerk Archives, Sweetwater; digital images, “Texas, Nolan County, Civil Court Minutes and Case Files, 1881-1938,” FamilySearch.org (https://familysearch.org/ : accessed 24 Apr 2013). ↩
  2. Ibid., answer, November term 1895. ↩
  3. See for example Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), providing for a defense for “failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.” ↩
  4. Henry Campbell Black, A Dictionary of Law (St. Paul, Minn. : West, 1891), 542, “going to the country.” ↩
  5. Ibid., 969, “put.” ↩
  6. Ibid., 1160, “tender of issue.” ↩
  7. See also The Free Dictionary (http://www.thefreedictionary.com : accessed 24 Month 2013), “To put one’s self upon the country” (“to appeal to one’s constituents; to stand trial before a jury”). ↩
  8. Black, A Dictionary of Law, 910, “ponit se super patriam.” ↩
Posted in Legal definitions | 6 Comments

The records of death

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Coroner’s reports

There are 110 pages for January 1906. One hundred and seven pages for February. One hundred and one pages for March. And each of those books has at least one blank page at the end.

And then comes the book that slaps you upside the head — that makes you sit up and take notice. Something changed, you can’t help but think. Something big changed.

And then it hits you — just what it was that changed in April 1906.

April 1906… in San Francisco.

Yep, The Legal Genealogist was poking around the records again, and came across the San Francisco County death reports, made and kept by the Coroner’s Office.

Each sheet bears a header: Death Report, Coroner’s Office. Plus the date and a page number. The date received. Time received. Name of the person and address of the person reporting the case. The name, address and personal information of the deceased. Time of death or when found dead. Place of death. Presumable cause. When the body was received at the morgue. Whether there was an inquest and the verdict if so. An autopsy certificate. A place for a list of witnesses.

And on one side of the two-sided reports, a section for a history of the case:

“Deceased was shot a few days ago,” reads the history section for the report of the death of Soichi Namaya on the first of April 1906.1

“Deceased … went to step from the scow Shasta and made a misstep … and fell into the water where she was Drowned,” reads the history for the death report of Mary Ayscough on the second of April.2

“Deceased has been sick about 10 days they had no doctor to attend to the Child,” reads the history for the death report of two-year-old Ah Fook on April 12th.3

The stories told by the pages are many. The mother, despondent over the loss of a child, who took her own life. The worker who fell from a windmill in Golden Gate Park. The heavy drinker who took one drink too many. The infant suffocated in his parents’ bed. The old man run down by a baker’s cart in the street. The young mother lost in childbirth. The sudden heart attacks. The deaths that must have been the reliefs from long and painful illnesses.

Each death carefully documented. One by one, recorded in detail, day in and day out, one or two — at most a handful — in any given day.

And then came the 18th of April.

The earliest tremor hit at 5:12 a.m., and what has been called the Great Earthquake — centering in San Francisco — hit 20-25 seconds later. According to the U.S. Geological Survey:

The earthquake was felt from southern Oregon to south of Los Angeles and inland as far as central Nevada. … The frequently quoted value of 700 deaths caused by the earthquake and fire is now believed to underestimate the total loss of life by a factor of 3 or 4. Most of the fatalities occurred in San Francisco, and 189 were reported elsewhere.4

And the death records abruptly changed.

“No. A, male,” reads the report at page 42 of the first of three books required to record the dead of April 1906.5 “No. D, male,” reads the report at page 46, for a body found in the Valencia Hotel.6 “Jno. Doe McKenzie,” reads the report at page 50 of a body found at 115 Haight Street, the cause of death a fractured skull.7 “John Doe F” died on Dillon Place of asphyxiation.8 John Doe P, a male around age 40, also died of a fractured skull; the location wasn’t even recorded.9 “John Doe Louis (works for Paladinio Fish Market)” bled to death.10

Almost nothing was recorded about some of the dead. Only “John Doe, male” is recorded for one man.11 Another “John Doe” died at 3rd and Brannan Streets.12 Another on 6th Street between Mission and Howard.13 A “Jane Doe” at 3rd and Brannan.14

Not all the dead were nameless. William Carr died of asphyxiation at 1547 Ellis Street.15 Max Fenner, a 38-year-old German-born married police officer, died of a fractured skull.16 That was also the cause of death for Lena Crowder, a 41-year-old widow from Sweden, who died at 14 Seventh Street.17

Most have nothing written in the history section. Where there is a note, it is often heartbreakingly sad. “Found with husband & Baby,” reads the note for the death of “Jane Doe Johnson,” who died of a fractured skull at the Valencia Hotel.18 “Found with parents,” says the note for “Baby Johnson,” who died of asphyxiation.19 “Jane Doe Girl” died at 5th and Howard Streets, and the note reads: “Probably of Desmond family.”20 The same was recorded for another “Jane Doe Girl” on the following page,21 and yet another “Jane Doe Girl” on the page after that.22

By the third April book, the records are chilling. “Bones, Part of one person,” reads one record, found at the northwest corner of Howard and Seventh Streets.23 The dates stretch into May for the date received, but the date of death remains the same. “Human bones,” received May 8th, from April 18, 1906.24 Bones, found on 5th Street between Tehama and Clementina Streets,25

It isn’t until the very end of Book C that the death date moves beyond April 18th, and even then the record couldn’t be completed until much later. Henry Manders, a native of Holland, married, age 82, died of shock on the 22nd of April. His death was recorded on the 15th of May.26

But still the deaths of April 18th rolled in. “Human Bones supposed to be Fred H. Stanley.”27 “Chinese Bones Found on Dupont St. 135 ft. north of Washington rear of lot.”28 “Human Bones supposed to be Louis Stambler… 34… Celia Stambler… 30… Rosie Stambler… 10…”29

And page after page of handwritten notes in the back of the last book. “Louise Manks, 12 years. Elizabeth Marks, 8. Found in the ruins of 179 7th St. by their father.”30 “Denis T. Sullivan – Chief of S.F. Fire Department. April 22nd. Extensive burns sustained during the earthquake and fire April 18th.”31 “Annie M. Petrig – 9 days died April 20th of exposure in camp at Presidio foll. earthquake and fire.”32 “Margaret Miles 7 months April 20th Cause of death unknown. Probably due to exposure foll. earthquake and fire.”33

One set of records.

April 1906.

In San Francisco.

SOURCES

Image: H. D. Chadwick, “San Francisco Earthquake of 1906: Ruins in vicinity of Post and Grant Avenue. Looking northeast” (1906), National Archives.

  1. San Francisco County, California, Coroner’s Death Record Book A (April 1906): 3, Soichi Namaya, 1 April 1906; digital images, “California, San Francisco County Records, 1824-1997,” FamilySearch.org (https://familysearch.org/ : accessed 23 Apr 2013); citing California, San Francisco County Records, 1824-1997, San Francisco Public Library. ↩
  2. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 4, Mary Ayscough, 2 April 1906. ↩
  3. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 24, Ah Fook, 12 April 1906. ↩
  4. “The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake,” USGS, Earthquake Hazards Program, USGS.gov (http://earthquake.usgs.gov : accessed 23 Apr 2013). ↩
  5. San Francisco Co., Cal., Coroner’s Death Record Book A (April 1906): 42, 18 April 1906. ↩
  6. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 46. ↩
  7. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 50. ↩
  8. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 51. ↩
  9. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 74. ↩
  10. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 84. ↩
  11. Ibid., Book B (April 1906): 8. ↩
  12. Ibid., Book B (April 1906): 39. ↩
  13. Ibid., Book B (April 1906): 58. ↩
  14. Ibid., Book B (April 1906): 78. ↩
  15. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 52. ↩
  16. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 54 ↩
  17. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 60. ↩
  18. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 63. ↩
  19. Ibid., Book A (April 1906): 64. ↩
  20. Ibid., Book B (April 1906): 32. ↩
  21. Ibid., Book B (April 1906): 33. ↩
  22. Ibid., Book B (April 1906): 34. ↩
  23. Ibid., Book C (April 1906): 40. ↩
  24. Ibid., Book C (April 1906): 58. ↩
  25. Ibid., Book C (April 1906): 64. ↩
  26. Ibid., Book C (April 1906): 94. ↩
  27. Ibid., Book C (April 1906): 130. ↩
  28. Ibid., Book C (April 1906): 135. ↩
  29. Ibid., Book C (April 1906): 138. ↩
  30. Ibid., Book C (April 1906): 145. ↩
  31. Ibid., Book C (April 1906): 147. ↩
  32. Ibid. ↩
  33. Ibid. ↩
Posted in General | 8 Comments

Thank you, Bergen County!

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Great group!

A great crowd, great facility and great questions — the perfect recipe for a wonderful evening with genealogical friends.

I was warmly welcomed last night by the Genealogical Society of Bergen County, New Jersey, in a gorgeous room at the Ridgewood Public Library and we all had a great time poking around in the nooks and crannies of courthouses from around the country to see what goodies can be found if only we’ll go and look.

The best part of any speaking engagement is getting to chat with the audience, and last night’s was really special. I particularly enjoyed hearing one listener explain why it’s so important to include a flashlight in your on-site research kit: she was allowed down into a courthouse basement to poke through old records there, but the clerks forgot she was there — and at the end of their workday turned out the lights and locked the door!

I’ll be looking forward to my next opportunity to share an evening with this group.

Thank you, Bergen County!!

Posted in General | 8 Comments

The true gentleman

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
       — George Orwell, Animal Farm (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954).

So The Legal Genealogist was poking around in old records again and came across one line in a set of legal principles that couldn’t help but evoke the signature “rule” of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

The year was 1641. The place, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And the General Court of the colony adopted as law a remarkable set of principles. For its time, the document — known as the Massachusetts Body of Liberties — was quite forward-looking: it generally stated the rules in terms of the rights of the colonists, as opposed to the powers of the government.

As described by The Winthrop Society, a lineage society “open to all men and women of good character and proven descent from one or more passengers of the Winthrop fleet, or of others who settled in the Bay Colony and down east before 1636”1:

Perhaps no other writing from the Puritan Era had so far-reaching an effect as this document, which laid the foundations of Massachusetts liberties, for which New Englishmen fought against the Empire in the 1680′s and during the American Revolution, and which became a pattern of the United States Constitution. It is remarkable as a code of law, in that it lays out a structure of jurisprudence in terms of liberties rather than restrictions. In this it echoes the Magna Charta, and foreshadows our Bill of Rights.2

And it begins with this guarantee:

No man’s life shall be taken away, no man’s honor or good name shall be stained, no man’s person shall be arrested, restrained, banished, dismembered, nor any ways punished, no man shall be deprived of his wife or children, no man’s goods or estate shall be taken away from him, nor in any way damaged under color of law, or countenance of authority, unless it be by virtue or equity of some express law of the Country warranting the same established by a General Court and sufficiently published, or in case of the defect of a law in any particular case by the word of God (the laws of the Bible).3

Fair enough.

So why the Animal Farm reference? Because deep within the liberties comes this provision, jarring to The Legal Genealogist‘s 21st century soul:

No man shall be beaten with above 40 stripes, nor shall any true gentleman, nor any man equal to a gentleman, be punished with a whipping, unless his crime be very shameful, and his course of life vicious and profligate.4

Okay. So every man committing an offense could be whipped… except the true gentleman or a man equal to a gentleman.

Which, of course, raises the question: just who exactly was a “true gentleman” in the world of 1641?

According to John Bouvier in his 1856 legal dictionary, a gentleman “in the English law, … is one who bears a coat of armor. In the United States, this word is unknown to the law, but in many places it is applied, by courtesy, to all men.”5 In the first edition of his dictionary, published in 1891, Henry Campbell Black defined the term this way:

In English law. A person of superior birth. Under the denomination of “gentlemen” are comprised all above yeoman; whereby noblemen are truly called “gentlemen” …

A gentleman is defined to be one who, without any title, bears a coat of arms, or whose ancestors have been freemen; and, by the coat that a gentleman giveth, he is known to be, or not to be, descended from those of his name that lived many hundred years since.6

Which, of course, means we need to know what a yeoman was, since a gentleman was above a yeoman. And, under English law, a yeoman was “a commoner; a freeholder under the rank of gentleman…. A man who has free land of forty shillings by the year; who was anciently thereby qualified to serve on juries, vote for knights of the shire, and do any other act, where the law requires one that is probus et legalis homo.”7

The key distinction here is one of rank and the right to a coat of arms: in the 17th century, “for the complete gentleman the possession of a coat of arms was … considered necessary.”8 Any man with a coat of arms had the rank of gentleman; anyone with a noble rank was considered a true gentleman.

So if you had enough rank, you couldn’t be punished with a whipping, unless of course the crime was “very shameful” and the course of your life was “vicious and profligate.”

In other words, all men were equal in 1641 Massachusetts, but the gentlemen were more equal than others.

 
SOURCES

Image: Richard Brathwait, The Complete English Gentleman (1630), via Wikimedia Commons.

  1. Home page, The Winthrop Society (http://www.winthropsociety.com/ : accessed 21 Apr 2013). ↩
  2. “The Massachusetts Body of Liberties adopted as law by the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay December, 1641,” The Winthrop Society (http://www.winthropsociety.com/ : accessed 21 Apr 2013). ↩
  3. Ibid., paragraph 1. ↩
  4. Ibid., paragraph 43. ↩
  5. John Bouvier, A Law Dictionary Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States of America and of the Several States of the American Union, rev. 6th ed. (1856); HTML reprint, The Constitution Society (http://www.constitution.org/bouv/bouvier.htm : accessed 21 Apr 2013), “gentleman.” ↩
  6. Henry Campbell Black, A Dictionary of Law (St. Paul, Minn. : West, 1891), 538, “gentleman.” ↩
  7. Ibid., 1251, “yeoman.” The term “probus et legalis homo” means a good and lawful man, one whose character was unexceptional and who was qualified to serve on a jury or as a witness. Ibid., 946, “probus et legalis homo.” ↩
  8. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. (New York : Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911), vol. 11, entry for “Gentleman,” 604; digital images, Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org : accessed 21 Apr 2013). ↩
Posted in Legal definitions | 5 Comments

Protection for genetic privacy

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

Expansion of genetic privacy

Tucked away in the hundred-plus pages of a new federal privacy rule that took effect last month is expanded federal protection of our right to privacy in our genetic information that may help ease the minds of our cousins when we ask them to take a DNA test to help our genealogical research.

The rule was adopted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on 25 January 2013, and took effect 26 March 2013.1 It’s part of its responsibilities under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and it has the effect of broadening the reach of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA).

GINA, you may recall, provides that our genetic information can’t be used to discriminate against us in employment or in health insurance. We can’t be denied a job or treated differently from co-workers just because a genetic test shows we may have a higher than average risk of developing heart disease,2 and a health insurance company can’t charge us more money because a DNA test shows that we carry a gene that increases our risk of, say, breast or colon cancer.3

Under GINA, however, not all types of health plans were covered. And HIPAA does reach these additional types of plans:

(1) Long-term care policies (excluding nursing home fixed indemnity policies); (2) employee welfare benefit plans or other arrangements that are established or maintained for the purpose of offering or providing health benefits to the employees of two or more employers (to the extent that they are not group health plans or health insurance issuers); (3) high risk pools that are mechanisms established under State law to provide health insurance coverage or comparable coverage to eligible individuals; (4) certain public benefit programs, such as Medicare Part A and B, Medicaid, the military and veterans’ health care programs, the Indian Health Service program, and others; as well as (5) any other individual or group plan, or combination of individual or group plans that provides or pays for the cost of medical care… This last category includes, for example, certain “excepted benefits” plans …, such as limited scope dental or vision benefits plans.4

Under the new rule, all of those plans — except for long-term care policies5 — are now included: none of them will be allowed to make decisions about whether we can enroll or how much we will pay based on any genetic test we’ve taken or any other genetic information.

And the very definition of “genetic information” has been broadened and clarified as well. Clearly, genetic information includes any genetic testing we’ve done. But it also includes any genetic tests taken by any of our family members and information about “diseases or disorders manifested in an individual’s family members (i.e., family health history).”6

For purposes of the rule, family members include:

(2) Any … person who is a first degree, second-degree, third-degree, or fourth-degree relative of the individual or of a dependent of the individual. Relatives by affinity (such as by marriage or adoption) are treated the same as relatives by consanguinity (that is, relatives who share a common biological ancestor). In determining the degree of the relationship, relatives by less than full consanguinity (such as half-siblings, who share only one parent) are treated the same as relatives by full consanguinity (such as siblings who share both parents).
(i) First-degree relatives include parents, spouses, siblings, and children.
(ii) Second-degree relatives include grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces.
(iii) Third-degree relatives include great-grandparents, great-grandchildren, great aunts, great uncles, and first cousins.
(iv) Fourth-degree relatives include great-great grandparents, great-great grandchildren, and children of first cousins.7

Bottom line here: when that cousin balks at DNA testing for genealogy because of fear that it may be used against him or a family member, the new rule provides some help. An employer or a health plan can’t ask about any testing we may have done, can’t make us provide access to any results we may have, can’t make us take a genetic test, can’t refuse us a job or coverage because of a genetic test, and can’t even ask us if somebody in our family has ever taken a genetic test.

So… cousin of mine… about that test I want you to take now that Family Tree DNA has that National DNA Day sale going on…

 
SOURCES

  1. “Modifications to the HIPAA Privacy, Security, Enforcement, and Breach Notification Rules Under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act; Other Modifications to the HIPAA Rules,” 78 Fed. Reg. 5565 (25 Jan 2013), PDF version, U.S. Government Printing Office (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/ : accessed 20 Apr 2013). ↩
  2. See “Genetic Information Discrimination,” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (http://www.eeoc.gov : accessed 20 Apr 2013). ↩
  3. See “The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA),” National Institues of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (http://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/ : accessed 20 Apr 2013). ↩
  4. “Modifications to the HIPAA Privacy, Security, Enforcement, and Breach Notification Rules…,” 78 Fed. Reg. at 5659. ↩
  5. The rule puts long-term insurers on notice that they may be included in the future and are excluded now only because there’s not enough information available to say whether the policies can be financially viable if they can’t collect genetic information. See ibid., 78 Fed. Reg. at 5661. ↩
  6. Ibid., 78 Fed. Reg. at 5661-5662. ↩
  7. Ibid., 78 Fed. Reg. at 5688. ↩
Posted in DNA | 1 Comment

Five entries in a database

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Judy G. Russell

A cousin lost

She entered this world 98 years ago tomorrow — on the 21st of April 1915 — in Texas. And she left it 76 years ago today, on the 20th of April 1937 — one day shy of her 22nd birthday.

And there may be no-one alive today who knew her well.

Her name was Bonnie Mae Cottrell. She was my grandfather’s first cousin.

And it pains me to have to admit that, so far, I have only five entries in my Master Genealogist database on this cousin.

Her birth, on 21 April 1915, most likely Iowa Park, Wichita County, Texas, daughter of George Washington Cottrell (Jr.) and Birdie Jane Moss.1 She was their last born child; the couple only had one other surviving child, Luda Pearl, born some five years earlier.2

I’ve never found this family on the 1920 census, so the next entry I have is her residence, in Kiowa County, Oklahoma, with her family, in 1930. Bonnie was shown as age 16, born in Texas. She hadn’t attended school within the prior year and the word “none” was written in the column for her occupation. By 1930, her father was 63 years old, shown as a farm laborer. Her mother was age 50. Living with them was her sister Pearl, age 20, Pearl’s husband Ellis Jackson, a 24-year-old farm laborer, and the Jacksons’ three-month-old daughter Eva Mae.3

Then I have the one I treasure. It’s the link to the image you see here:

This is the only photograph I have of this cousin. It was kept by the Jackson family, perhaps in the keeping of one of the children in the front. Taken sometime in the 1930s, showing Bonnie at her father’s side.4

And then there are the last two entries.

Her death, on 20 April 1937, of pneumonia, in Levelland, Hockley County, Texas.5 And her burial at the Levelland City Cemetery, in an unmarked grave, next to the unmarked graves of her parents. Buried on her 22nd birthday.6

She never married. Never had children. Never saw the world beyond a small part of Texas and Oklahoma. Never really had a chance to live before she was taken.

And can be remembered only through five entries in a database … and — thank heavens for the Jackson family — one beautiful photograph.

 
SOURCES

  1. Texas State Department of Health, death certificate no. 21650, Bonnie Mae Cottrell, 21 April 1937; Bureau of Vital Statistics, Austin. ↩
  2. See generally Social Security Death Index, Luda P Jackson, 4 Feb 1991. ↩
  3. 1930 U.S. census, Kiowa County, Oklahoma, Dill Township, population schedule, enumeration district (ED) 38-4, page 240(A) (stamped), sheet 9A, dwelling 179, family 181, G.W. Cottrell household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 19 April 2013); citing National Archive microfilm publication T626, roll 1909. ↩
  4. Photograph, Bonnie Mae Cottrell and G.W. Cottrell with other family members, inscribed “Mid 1930′s, Aunt Bonnie, Grandpa Cottrell;” held by Jackson family members in Texas; digital copy provided to the author, June 2006. ↩
  5. Texas Dept. of Health, death certif. no. 21650, Bonnie Mae Cottrell, 21 April 1937. ↩
  6. See Levelland City Cemetery, Hockley County, Texas, Cottrell family markers; memorials, Find A Grave (http://findagrave.com : accessed 19 April 2013). ↩
Posted in My family | 15 Comments