Starting over ...

Okay, I admit that I forgot I even had this anymore. But as I was pondering doing a blog about my latest passion, genealogy, I remembered that I had this old blog ... and so instead of looking for a new service, I thought I'd just reuse this old blog and start something completely new. 

And this is it. 

Yes, I still enjoy photography, though I don't get much chance to do it, and unfortunately, the convenience of having a cel phone with a good camera allows for taking a lot of good snapshots without lugging around a digital SLR. During the Pandemic (remember that??), we got into birdwatching, like most everyone else in North America, and while I still enjoy that to a degree (we don't go out much on birdwatching hikes too often ... a teenage child makes it difficult to get out of the house early when the birds are active), and enjoyed bird photography (though trying to capture the fast little buggers was a huge challenge), again it's not something we do a lot of anymore. 

But then there's this new passion, which is a nice one because it also takes advantage of skills I've honed over years and years of school and work ... family history. I've been a nut about history (particularly American history, to specify) since I was a student in school, and then in college, that's what I majored in. I continued into graduate school, earning my MA in Modern American History, and deciding I wanted to be a history professor. So I went on in grad school to work on a doctorate, and learned to really hate academic history. I think the professors at my school really tried hard to have us hate it, too. But I did find one series of classes that still allowed me to love history, and that was Public History. 

Basically, it's history OUTSIDE of an academic setting, so it's history work in an archive, a library, a museum or somewhere else that's not higher education. That made history fun again for me. And turned out to be a life-changing option, because I chose public history as my "minor" in grad school, and as part of the course of study, I had to do some public history internships. So I reached out to the history museum up in Cleveland, and got an internship with them, helping out on the team doing a series of exhibits on Cleveland history at the museum. When I did my internship, they were doing an exhibit on the foodways of Cleveland, focusing on the foods enjoyed by the various ethnic groups in Cleveland, local manufacturers and stores, family traditions, etc. So I got to do a lot of research for them in newspapers and archives, but then also swing a hammer and wield a paint roller when it came time to build the actual exhibit. It was amazing (the experience, though the exhibit itself was quite good). 

Then later I had to get another internship, so I sought out an interesting one with the Southwest Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission of the National Park Service. This was an attempt, pushed through by some local congresspeople, to try and replace some of the money in the local economy that had previously come from "old industries" like coal mining and steel mills in the area, that had closed up decades ago. They rationalized, and not without some logic, that a LOT of folks from the region moved on after the mines and mills closed, and were still interested in "home" back in Pennsylvania, so this was an attempt to create tourism out of those industrial sites and attract some tourist dollars for the region. To that end, the Commission was working with a lot of local historical organizations, and they were also seeking out interns to help with some of the grunt work. 

I was intrigued, because I was doing research on the steel industry for my academic history work, so I thought I could hopefully land an internship near Johnstown, PA and do some first-hand research there on my off hours. I was also a little interested because my Dad's mother had come from a coal-mining village in that region, and I had been there once as a kid, and it interested me to go back to where "my people" came from. Plus, it sounded like a pretty cool gig. 

So I applied. I got a call back, saying I was in consideration for this tiny little town on the PA-MD border, but then a few days later, I got another call saying that another intern had claimed it (and he later regretted it, because it was a REALLY SMALL village), and that I was up for this old canal town near Altoona ... only to get another call saying they had chosen another intern instead, one who had done research in canal history (though a canal in Ohio), so he was better suited for the position. I then got another call saying that they had a position that they were having trouble filling, because there weren't a lot of folks who met the qualifications, and also it was unusual, it was an internship with a local historical society that really had their act together and were an amazing group, but sort of needed help to go to the next level. Plus, the internship had been set up by someone very politically connected to the Commission, so they HAD to find an intern. The Commission's intern guy said it was in a small town called Portage. 

I instantly said I'd take it, and he was very relieved. I wasn't desperate, despite my instant acceptance. No, my heart literally skipped a beat when I heard where the internship was, because Portage was the town right next to the small coal-mining village where my paternal grandmother came from. 

I never knew her, as she died a year before I was born. But I suddenly realized that it would be really neat to spend a summer working in her old neighborhood, so to speak, and maybe I could learn more about where she came from and what kind of person she was. It was completely a surprise that I ended up in Portage. I never told anyone in the Commission that I had family there. They wouldn't have known whatsoever. It was just a twist of fate that I ended up where my late grandmother had grown up. 

Once I started my internship, I went to the museum where I was going to work all summer. It was a small train station in Portage, which was a small community on the old main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and surrounded by coal mining villages, so the museum essentially interpreted both the railroad and the mines, with a permanent exhibit about a mine catastrophe nearby that killed 63 miners that included personal effects carried by the miners the day they died, one of which was a notebook where a miner recorded his final thoughts as he asphyxiated to death. Pretty powerful stuff. As the historical society's director, a local history teacher who was to be my boss for the summer showed me around, one of the volunteers at the museum came in to work that day, and he introduced me. He told her that my family was from the area, and she asked, so I told her about my grandmother and her family in the nearby coal village. She smiled, and told me she had grown up right across the road from my family's house, knew my grandmother (who was a teenager when this lady was a young girl), and knew my great-grandmother, who had actually been the midwife to bring her into the world, and later pierced her ears.

This was a surprise ... because I really didn't expect to meet anyone who knew my family. The last resident of the family house had been my grandmother's brother, my great-uncle John, who died in 1977. The house had essentially sat abandoned and dilapidated since then, though apparently a local cousin had used it for a number of years to store stuff. I hadn't seen it since 1976 or 1977, when we came out to visit Uncle John, who was my dad's favorite uncle, as my dad used to spend a few weeks every summer out there visiting with his mother, who came to see her childhood friends and also to check up on her bachelor brother. So meeting this woman was a complete delight. I actually called my dad that night and told him what this woman had said, and he was surprised as well, because he had no idea his grandmother was a midwife. He even called some of his first cousins in the family, and none of them had known either. But from what the museum volunteer had said, my grandmother, who came to the US from the Austria-Hungarian Empire in the early 1900s, had been educated in the old country, and could actually speak several languages, which was very valuable in a coal mining village filled with Eastern Europeans.

It was a great internship. I did have to do a variety of things for the Commission on weekends, often going to local historic sites to help out with events, or go there and survey visitors and count how many people were coming, but I also had time to explore the region. I checked out the remains of the family's house, and even met the folks across the road, who had lived there for decades and also knew my family. Our house was clearly not long for the world, so I took a bunch of photos of it, as well as the family outhouse; my family's house never had flush toilets; it had a cold water tap and electricity, and that was it for utilities; the only heat came from a coal stove in the downstairs "parlor" (one of three rooms in the house, besides the upstairs bedroom and the kitchen behind the parlor ... a small house for a family that had 9 people when they first moved into the place). Because I knew the house wouldn't be standing too much farther in the future, I actually shoved open the door, and explored the empty place briefly, sticking to the perimeter of the rooms, because the floor could have collapsed under my weight. It was empty, and in pretty sad shape, but as I was leaving it, I grabbed the key to the front door, which was hanging on a nail next to the door. There was no reason to lock it, no one was ever going to be in the house again, but I wanted a souvenir for my father, who had the happiest of memories spending boyhood summers there, which coming from the urban streets of Cleveland, was an adventure in the country for him, complete with an "old swimmin' hole" nearby where he swam with the local children (which I did find that summer as well, though as it was in a spring-fed stream, it was ice-cold, so NO WAY in hell was I going to swim in it). 

I did do a little family history while I was there as well, going to the local county historical society and looking in census records for the family. I had learned to use the census on microfilm (which is a clear indicator how old I am) and most importantly, figured out how to use the Soundex system to actually figure out what microfilms to look out. It was a royal pain in the ass. Researchers today who have never looked at anything but the Census online have no idea how easy they have it! And I was able to find my family, though it wasn't easy, because their last name was spelled differently EVERY census, and then I found that there was at least one other family in the same freakin' village who had a similar-sounding name (not exact, but close), and since I was also using my grandmother and her siblings to figure out which family was the right one, I was distressed to see that their kids also had the same common first names ... Mary, Helen, Ann, John, etc. However, the one thing that helped me was that my grandmother's sister had a unique name ... Sabina. No one else in the village had that name, so as long as she was there, I could find everyone in the census, at least until she moved to Cleveland with all of her sisters, as they had no desire to stay in a coal mining town and become a miner's wife. So they all came to Cleveland for better opportunities and hopefully better husband possibilities. And all of them married and settled in Cleveland, and interestingly enough, they all married immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe (except for my grandfather, who immigrated from England). 

So all in all, I had a great summer, surrounded by my grandmother's history. I think I came to understand her by learning to understand the locals. I learned a great deal about coal mining history, and even found in the museum an old United Mine Workers minute book from a nearby town that had my great-grandfather listed as a member in the early 1900s, an era when it could be downright dangerous to be a union member. My experience working in the little museum there had re-ignited my passion for history, and as the internship was drawing to a close, I was delighted to get a phone call from someone at the historical museum in Cleveland that I previously interned at, asking me if I would be interested in coming to work for them, as they had some more projects and liked the work I did. I immediately accepted, and pretty much walked away from my Ph.D. program and previous dreams of becoming an academic history professor. Screw that, the museum world was really where I felt at home, sharing my love of history with anyone who came through the door instead of a bunch of undergrads who could care less, and barely paid attention in class. 

So that's what started my deep interest in family history, right? That's the key moment that begun my passion for researching my ancestors and the worlds they lived in, right? 

Nope.