Preserving the Stories of our Veterans

As we celebrate a more subdued Memorial Day this year, without parades and with fewer barbecues and swimming parties, perhaps we have more time to think about why we have this holiday in the first place. Originally called Decoration Day, it was intended as a quiet day of remembrance, one in which to decorate the graves of those who gave service to the country. It's a rare family, indeed, who doesn't have one or more member who served in the military. From drummer boys in the American Revolution to military generals in countries all over the world, our relatives, male and female, helped to preserve our democracy and way of life. If you are lucky, you may have a veteran from World War II, Korea, or Vietnam still alive in your family. Or, you may know a younger veteran from one of the more recent conflicts. Their experiences in the military undoubtedly affected their lives, and, with your help, could be preserved to add to our collective history.

Preserving Personal Military History

The easiest way to preserve the military history of your relatives is to encourage them to tell their stories, either orally or in writing. In this day of videos and computer chats, it is relatively easy to put someone in front of a camera to capture their memories. If you (or they) find that too daunting, they
can dictate to someone or create their own memoirs. Some of us are lucky enough to have relatives who have done just that. Although your blogger seldom injects herself into these posts, this week I will introduce you to Sgt. Sol Kanfer, my dad, who served in the Army Air Corps in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands as an armorer during WWII. Dad never saw combat, but he and his squadron were responsible for the weapons used by troops and on airplanes that flew over the Pacific. Luckily for my family, he loved to write and take photographs, so he returned to civilian life with a rich archive of memories, which, some fifty years later, he published as a series of anecdotes in book form. We always knew that those war experiences had a huge influence on Dad's life, but without his book of stories, we never would have understood exactly how and why. He explained the importance of the medals he kept in a frame, the odd pieces of memorabilia he brought back, and the need for preservation of the giant stack of love letters between my mother and him. His book is a priceless treasure!

If you want to share your family's military stories, one of the largest repositories for personal military history is the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. According to the website, the project "collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war." They are collecting information from all conflicts beginning with World War I through the Iraq War and are interested in personal narratives in any form, correspondence, and visual materials. You may want to begin with a look at their Frequently Asked Questions for details on what and how to submit.

If you have family military memorabilia that will not be passed down, consider donating it to any military museum in your city or region. Most will gladly accept donations. Dad's collection has gone to a small military museum in Daytona Beach, Florida, where he spent the last twenty-five years of his life. They were delighted to have everything we gave them.

Here in St. Louis, the Soldiers Memorial Military Museum at 1315 Chestnut Street (currently closed because of COVID-19) honors those who served from the St. Louis region. You can look at their online collection to get an idea of the wide variety of objects in their possession, and, once the museum reopens, contact them for details on submission of artifacts.

Honoring those who have and will continue to keep us free and safe is so very important. We, as family historians, have the ability to make sure they and what they did for us are not forgotten.

Summer Speaker Series Will Be Online in June!

With an ongoing commitment to the health and safety of our members and friends, and due to the great success of our virtual Family History Conference, the StLGS 2020 Summer Speaker Series will now be offered online. Believe us when we say we wish we could see your faces, share a coffee, and chat in person about family history, but that just can't happen right now. Thanks to the flexibility and willingness of our speakers, we are pleased to be able to continue to hold the Summer Speaker Series, now expanded to two days with two lectures presented live each day and access to all four presentations for ninety days online. Here's the scoop:

Hidden Gems at the Missouri State Archives

 

Featuring Missouri State Archivist, John Dougan, Kelsey Berryhill, and Christina Miller

Live Webinars: Saturday, 27 June at 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. 

AND

Sunday, 28 June at 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. 

(Digital recordings of all four talks will be posted online by Monday, 29 June and remain available until the end of September. All lecture times are Central Standard Time (CST).

Saturday, 27 June 2020
1:00 p.m. (CST): "Plundering the Bounty of the Missouri State Archives" (Christina Miller)
3:00 p.m. (CST): "All Hands on Deck: Using State Government Publications to Track Your Ancestor’s Career" (Kelsey Berryhill)

Sunday, 28 June 2020
1:00 p.m. (CST): "X Marks the Spot: Researching Land Records at the Missouri State Archives" (Christina Miller)
3:00 p.m. (CST): "Peg Legs, Rum, and Eye Patches: Reasons Your Ancestors Did Not Serve in the Civil War" (John Dougan)

We are again using Zoom, an internet platform, to host the live presentations and digital recordings. Zoom has a limit of 100 participants for each live talk and those spots will go to the first 100 registrants who sign in for each lecture. If you cannot attend the live session, all registrants will still be able to watch the lectures online afterwards. Recordings will remain active for ninety days, so you may watch them at your convenience.

Registration for the Summer Speaker Series

New lower price! All four lectures are now available for $35 for StLGS members and $45 for non-members. More information about the lectures (including descriptions of each), speakers, and the registration process is on our website.

Register via our secure online store or by downloading and mailing a registration form from our website.

After you have registered, you will receive an invitation to the Summer Speaker Series via the email address you provided. (Note: The email will come to you during the week before the live webinars.) The handouts will be available to you as downloadable PDFs and you will receive an email with instructions on how to access them.

We are delighted to be able to continue to provide educational opportunities for family historians and look forward to "seeing" you online soon!

Women's Work, Women's Lives

On this day after Mother’s Day 2020, let's take a brief look at how some of our female ancestors probably spent their lives. Many of us are used to leisure time, especially in the past months since we have been home, yet that would have been an unbelievable luxury to our working-class grandmothers, aunts, and cousins. The females in our past were often mothers, and without family planning options, the number of children in a household could go into double digits. During the Colonial period, women often worked alongside men, running a farm or plantation. They did most of the cooking and spent long hours spinning yarn, weaving, mending, sewing, and knitting. If the family had a vegetable garden or domestic animals, tending them was “women’s work,” and, of course, looking after children and seeing to their education was the job of women as well. Enslaved or indentured women often had to work in the fields alongside men. And during harvest or if a husband had to travel, all of the women, regardless of status, pitched in. Rarely did married women work outside the home. They were treated as property without personal or economic rights and men were the decision makers.

What happened to unmarried women? Certain jobs were “respectable,” and you may find a female ancestor working as a teacher or governess or, perhaps, owning a small business, such as a dress store or millinery shop. Women also worked as midwives or assisted in apothecaries, boarding houses, or taverns. If an unmarried woman had a father or brother, he often insisted on his right to “protect” her.

By the mid-1800s, industrialization created new jobs and women began to work outside the home.

 (Women at work in a textile factory; engraving, c. 1860, public domain)

Factory owners eagerly hired women and children because they could pay them less than men, and some jobs, especially related to textiles, had already been identified as women’s work. After the Civil War, educational opportunities slowly increased for women, thereby opening more doors for them. Eventually, women were allowed to study medicine, law, science and technology, areas from which women were previously banned. However, attitudes were slow to change. In fact, by the time of the 1910 census, more than three-fourths of working women held the following jobs:

• Servant
• Factory worker
• Laundress
• Teacher
• Dressmaker
• Saleswoman (in a store)
• Stenographer/typist
• Bookkeeper
• Housekeeper
• Boarding housekeeper

(Statistics from “Women’s Occupations in the Early Twentieth Century,” by Sharon S. Atkins, https://www.thesocialhistorian.com/womens-occupations/)

Our female ancestors had to combat gender stereotyping and inequality while assuming enormous responsibilities for themselves, their children, and their households. We can honor them by not losing their stories. Take a look at a few of the strong women who lived and worked in St. Louis honored in the St. Louis City/County Biographies project:

Dr. Kate Garner Walker Beall and her daughter, Dr. Mary Elliott Beall

Jane “Dearie” Hawkins Hay Cummings

Opal Gwendolyn Hudson

Margaretta (Simon) Soehngen Jantzen

Aida Lowena Mayham

Consider adding your ancestor to the project by writing her story (or his; of course, men are welcome!) for the St. Louis City/County Biographies section of our website, where you will find complete instructions for submission.

 Read more about women’s work in America:

“Women’s History in America,” Women’s International Center, http://www.wic.org/misc/history.htm

“Lives of Women,” Conner Prairie, https://www.connerprairie.org/educate/indiana-history/lives-of-women/

And don’t forget to watch Judy Russell’s lecture, “’Don’t Forget the Ladies’––A Genealogist’s Guide to Women and the Law,” part of the 2020 StLGS Virtual Family History Conference.

Making the Most of Quarantine Time: Connecting with New Cousins in Far Away Places

(Thanks to StLGS volunteer, Kathy Franke, for sharing this interesting story about the importance of having some of our genealogy online so others can find us and of not throwing away those mystery photographs. We know many of you are sifting through old family photos during this time of quarantine. Maybe you, too, will be lucky enough to identify and learn more about someone in your own family album.)

Kathy writes:

I have a box of photos that were handed down to my grandma, then to my dad, and then to me. In the middle of that sequence, they got transported to my aunt’s house about forty-five minutes away, in a rural area of Missouri. They were left there for years and finally I went to pick them up. My aunt said she was going to throw some away because she did not know who was in some of the pictures, so why keep them? I think she pitched some from her collection, but I have a large box. I have separated them into groups of people I know and by generation and people I do not have any idea about. During all of this, I’ve kept them together in one box (an archival quality one). That way, I’ll know the provenance of the group.

Flash forward to last week. I received a message through Ancestry's messaging service from a man named Paul Jadot. He found my 2nd great-grandmother, Agnes Sondag (pictured here on the left), in my online tree. His great-grandmother, Marguerite "Gretchen" Sondag, was Agnes’s first cousin. Agnes came to St. Louis after the Civil War but Gretchen stayed in Belgium. Paul was born and grew up in Belgium, speaks Dutch, French, German, and English and has done a lot of research on the Sondag family. He now lives in the U.S. We had a great phone call that lasted more than an hour this morning and we now have a ton of new things to add to our To-Do lists.

Tonight I went to that box of Grandma's photos to find one that I wanted to send to Paul of a man in a white uniform from the Belgian Congo in 1916. The name of the man in the photo is Paul Crélot and the card is signed in French, "your nephew." I have not done much research on this side of my family so was not familiar with the Crélot surname. It turns out that Paul Jadot has Crélot in his tree and Agnes Sondag’s sister married a Crélot who had several children!

Here is the note from my new cousin Paul:

"What a find! I admit that I'm not too proud of the colonial experience of Belgium in the Congo. The country is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, (DRC). The capital is Kinshasa. It's a country in constant turmoil. It is eighty times bigger than Belgium."

Paul also translated the caption on the lower left of the front of the photo: Leó le 1r Mars 1914 Congo Belge—he abbreviates the city of Leopoldville as Leó in the Belgian Congo where the picture was taken on 1 March 1914.  Leopoldville was the capital of the then-colony. Note: In August of 1914, Germany invaded Belgium and the Belgian colonial army fought against German colonial troops located at the eastern border of the Congo.

I'm so glad I kept these photos and could learn this new information!