Looking closer at our families
It’s something The Legal Genealogist is so so so guilty of doing.
I look at people who are closest in my family, people like — say — my mother’s siblings.
And I say to myself, “Oh, I know all about those folks…”
Except when I don’t.
And occasionally I get slapped upside the head by the fact that I don’t.
In my email this morning was one of those lovely reminders from MyHeritage that it has a ton of neat city directories online,1 among them some of the very first California directories in which my mother’s brother Monte would have appeared after his marriage to my aunt Zena.
And indeed there they were in an apartment in San Diego in 1957.2
And by the very next year in the house where they lived all the rest of Monte’s life there in El Cajon.3
And, in both of them, next to his name, the fact that he was an assistant foreman at Convair.
And I realized… I had had no idea of what he’d done for a living all those years he lived and worked in California.
Birth, check.
Military service, check.
Marriage, check.
Three children, check.
Death, check.
Burial, check.
And how he lived all those years?
Just the memories of the times when we visited with him and his family, or when he and his family visited with us.
I had nothing, not even a clue, as to what he did each and every day of his working life.
It turns out that Convair was “an American aircraft manufacturing company that later expanded into rockets and spacecraft” that was “best known for its military aircraft; it produced aircraft such as the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, the Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, the Convair F-106 Delta Dart interceptors, and the Convair B-58 Hustler strategic bombers. It also manufactured the first Atlas rockets, including the rockets that were used for the manned orbital flights of Project Mercury.”4
Color me gobsmacked.
And chagrined.
I’d love to know exactly what his job entailed.
I’d love to know whether he worked on any of those early rockets.
I was able to verify that he was still with Convair’s parent company of General Dynamics in 1971,5 but I’d love to know even if he stayed at Convair and/or its parent company of General Dynamics until he retired, or if he ended up somewhere else for a time.
And I’d love to be able to say that I ever asked him about what he did.
Lesson learned.
We need to document our own.
And never ever ever allow ourselves to say “Oh, I know all about those folks…”
Because, all too often, we don’t.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Documenting our own,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 27 June 2020).
SOURCES
- See “U.S. City Directories,” MyHeritage.com (https://www.myheritage.com/ : accessed 27 June 2020). ↩
- Ibid.; Polk’s San Diego City Directory 1957 (Los Angeles: R.L. Polk Co., 1957), 187, entry for Monte B. Cottrell. ↩
- Ibid.; Polk’s San Diego Suburban Directory 1958 (Los Angeles: R.L. Polk Co., 1959), 165, entry for Monte B. Cottrell. ↩
- Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.com), “Convair,” rev. 9 May 2020. ↩
- Polk’s San Diego Suburban Directory 1071 (Monterey Park, CA: R.L. Polk Co., 1959), 165, entry for Monte B. Cottrell; digital images, “U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995,” Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 27 June 2020). ↩
I would bet that like most of us who have worked for defense contractors he could not tell you what he worked on, that was pretty much a no-no. I started working for a defense contractor called E-systems in 1992 after my newspaper shutdown. What a shock in job change. I went from a company who wanted to publish all the information to a company who wanted all the information and wanted nobody to know it. E-systems was so secret, we got contracts other defense contractors never knew about. At family reunions cousins, aunts, uncles would say what kind of work are you doing now? I would always say we manufacture washing machines. The truth was the contracts were with …. well, you know who those contracts were with!
You’re probably right, cousin Stan — but I still wish I had asked. 🙁
Those non-disclosure agreements that the bad boys have you sign are full of threats from life in prison to “you won’t ever see us coming” …lol.
Hi Judy,
May I add that even when you think a person’s life has been “done,” there’s room to add? I was asked to do an article on my great-grandfather, who was a fairly well-researched personality. My work involved doing a literature review first, then checking for gaps in the documentation. I was able to uncover brand new stories, correct some previous thinking, and strengthen other suppositions. Truth is, there’s no end to the possibilities in genealogy, whether your ancestor was a dirt farmer or a titan. I’ll share my article here, because I learned so much about him by writing this piece and solidifying my thinking about his impact – a Chinese man who couldn’t’ vote – on Canada’s history. (And I learned I need to buy ES Mills’ book on Evidence Explained to properly cite evidence genealogy-style!) https://blogs.ancestry.ca/ancestry/
That’s a terrific bit of work you did on Yip Sang!! Thanks for sharing the link.
Judy, I don’t want to go all Sally Field on you. I’m such a fan of yours. Thank you – that means a lot to me.
Judy, I love it when you give me a “smack-in-the-head” reminder!
Sigh… we all need ’em…
And have you documented yourself? I have lately been panicking about my own history! It has been so long ago that I was a child that the memories have faded. I am now going to try and find my school records and so on. I moved around a great deal until high school, only one interruption there. And the cousins I met, who were they? Turns out aunt Peggy was really Gladys and a cousin. And so on.
Or my uncle Ray whose real name was Miller… yup… working on it…
Convair also manufactured commercial aircraft. Many years ago, I was lucky enough to fly one of the last remaining Convair 880s on a Republic Airlines flight from Memphis to Detroit. The interior of the plane was pretty shabby, but what was there reminded me of the golden days of airlines. My seat was like an easy chair, separated by a tiny bit of space from the one beside it. The legroom was huge by today’s standards. The windows had curtains on them!
This is a good reminder. We need to ask the questions before they can’t remember the answers. I wish I would have asked family members when I was younger and recorded the answers. I should have also been better at writing my life history as it was happening instead of trying to remember it now.