Happy birthday to me...John Ricklefs admission register to New Jersey State Prison

My birthday present finally arrived, and only a day late! Ha ha.

The New Jersey State Archives sent me the inmate register to the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton for one of my favorite uncles, John Ricklefs. Alias Harry Young. Alias James Hamilton. It's nice to know an obsession with names runs in the family.

I would like to especially thank Bette M. Epstein at the Archives for her help with this, as some of the handwriting is next to impossible to read and she gave me her best translation of what it says - I'm not sure I would've been able to decipher it without her help!

But let's get to the good stuff, shall we?

After beating the rap for not one but two burglaries in the early part of 1916, John Ricklefs was arrested by the Elizabeth, N.J. police for either breaking and entering or burglary, but definitely stealing, and was sentenced Nov. 17, 1916 to 4 to 7 years at the state prison in Trenton and a $1000 fine. He would have been out by November 1923 at the latest, 1920 at the earliest. With only a year and change to go, he escaped from the New Jersey prison on June 22, 1919. Three months later he was arrested in Connecticut and sentenced to 5 to 10 years at the state prison in Wethersfield. From which he escaped only two months later, in December.

John Ricklefs, escape artist...our family's Harry Houdini.

Now there's a whole chunk of time where I'm missing info, from the deets of his incarceration in Connecticut, his escape from there, and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment in Massachusetts. I still haven't heard back from the Massachusetts State Archives about that. I do know that after serving his time in MA, he was sent back to Connecticut in 1936 to serve his time there, and then sent back to New Jersey to finish serving his time there. The register I received reads "returned from Conn Nov. 16, 1940," and apparently he was paroled on April 22, 1942. The info from NJ clarifies and corroborates info on both Jack's WWI and WWII draft registration cards - when he registered for World War I in 1917, it lists his residence as "NJ State Prison," and in 1942, he's living in an apartment complex in New Jersey, because it was after he was paroled after his second New Jersey prison stint.

Now, some of these prison records have been very helpful, but some have been very bare bones, but using the info from them, I've been able to find newspaper articles that round out the stories surrounding Jack's arrests, imprisonments, and escapes. Fultonhistory.com and ChroniclingAmerica.com have been especially helpful with that. The problem now is I need to find old New Jersey newspaper archives and neither of those sites have it, so I am opening the floor to my readers for suggestions!

Also, if the Massachusetts State Archives would be so kind as to get back to me, I'd really appreciate it...thanks!!

Happy weekend everyone! Anyone in the path of Hurricane Irene, please stay safe!

Wordless Wednesday - John Ricklefs mugshots

Filling in the blanks - the New Jersey State Archives

Going down one path will always lead to another

A difficult research decision made... so long, but not goodbye, to my Ancestry account

I recently let my Ancestry.com subscription run out. This is the first time in easily four years that I don't have access to any of their records. Considering everything that Ancestry makes available to you, their prices (either a yearly, quarterly, or monthly subscription - I was paying monthly) are actually pretty reasonable. But at the moment I'm saving up to pay off some of my credit card debt and to be able to afford to move out, so every penny I can put toward that counts.

I'm not used to not being able to check their records collections whenever the impulse comes, although I have to admit that at the moment, I've sort of exhausted all their available records. My tree is still there, which I'm glad about - that would have been frustrating to recreate, even with the same exact tree saved to my family tree program on my laptop. So right now, I feel like I can afford to take a break from the website. But all of these family history research websites, whether it be Ancestry or FamilyLink or Archives or whatever, are constantly updating and adding to their databases. So even if their databases aren't helpful to my research at the moment, I might discover in the future a new family member or line to look up in their existing records, or I can wait to see what new collections become available - probably of most important note, the 1940 U.S. Census next April. I believe family historians shouldn't rely entirely on these genealogy research websites, but I really believe most if not all of these websites are invaluable genealogy tools in our research arsenals. :)

So it's not goodbye to my Ancestry account - just "until we meet again!"

On this date (my birthday!) in history...

Today I thought we'd take a look at this auspicious date, ha ha, in history since we can't have full, rounded family trees without it. What's the second word in "family history" after all?

So, Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 - that was the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire.

Aa lot of groups of people were massacred, particularly the Jews (1349, 1391) and the French Huguenots (1572)...

The British invaded Washington D.C. in 1814 during the War of 1812 and burned down the White House. This is where the famous story of Dolly Madison, wife of President James Madison, saving the portrait of George Washington comes from.

Ooh, the waffle iron is invented in 1869!! (Which I guess is why today is National Waffle Day!)

Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly across the U.S. non-stop in 1932, which is pretty cool, because Amelia was totally one of my heroes growing up.

In 1944, Nazi troops begin attacking Paris (wow, this wasn't a really great date for important cities under the threat of being taken over during wartime, huh? First Rome, then D.C., now Paris!)...


...and my personal favorite, Mount Vesuvius erupts and buries Pompeii. In actuality, this event is extremely sad because of the loss of life, although the way the every day life of the every day person was preserved by the ash is beyond amazing - as genealogists, we all know that the further and further back you go in time, the harder it is to find any record of the common man, which is who most of us are and are from. But I like this event because of the symmetry not just with the date (August 24) but also with the year (79), exactly 1900 years before I was born.



Wordless Wednesday - Mary Ellen Gorry born August 24, 1979

As I celebrate the the 3rd anniversary of my 29th birthday, let's all just take a moment to look at how frickin' cute I used to be! Lol... When my great great grandchildren are looking at photos of me when I'm old, wrinkled, and grey, I want this one to be in the pile somewhere, too! (That was a little more wordy than wordless...sorry!) :)

Holy earthquake, Batman!

5.9 on the Richter scale, epicenter in mid Virginia. It's no disaster movie scenario, I know this is a somewhat common thing for all you Left Coasters and that we've had earthquakes here in New York before, but this was my first one and let me tell you, it's completely disconcerting when you're not sure why the whole building is shaking, and continuing to shake, and when you get vertigo so badly when you stand up that you have to hold on to the wall to evacuate the building. It's been more than half an hour and I'm still dizzy!

Whenever some kind of natural phenomenon like that occurs though - earthquake, eclipse, or whatnot - it makes me wonder what our ancestors, maybe not a hundred or two hundred years ago, but maybe 300 or 400 or 1,000 years ago, what they thought was happening. If an earthquake is scary when you can explain it's cause as the shifting of tectonic plates against each other, how scary is it when you're not sure if it's witchcraft or the gods being angry or who knows what!

Anyway, hope everyone who felt it is safe and secure now!

Tombstone Tuesday - Old Brookville Cemetery, New York

From my trip to Old Brookville and Oyster Bay with my father in June 2010. This cemetery is tiny and overgrown, sitting on a hill overlooking the Upper Brookville police department, with a few new headstones but mostly old, weathered ones. Many of the residents of this cemetery are Tappens, a common family name in the area dating back to at least the 1700s. The cemetery also sits across the road from the site of a double murder that occurred in the 1883 - two of the original suspects were brothers, Ed and John Tappen.





RestingSpot.com

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!

I got an e-mail last week about a new website and project called RestingSpot.com. I haven't gotten a chance to use it yet but I've taken a look at the website and this project, while extremely ambitious, could prove extremely useful to any family historian who has ever spent hours or days or weeks trying to find what cemetery an ancestor is buried in, only to get to the cemetery and not be able to find the grave. This website seems to take FindAGrave.com one step further, in that they hope to not only make available not only what cemetery a person is buried in but, using cellphones and GPS coordinates, identifying and recording the exact spot in the cemetery where the grave can be found. So, check it out, see if it's helpful, if it works, if you want to volunteer to help, if it's worth recommending and passing along. It seems to still be somewhat in it's infancy, but I think it's a great idea. You can find them at http://www.restingspot.com/, or follow them on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/RestingSpot/217684168263834) or on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/restingspot).



Filling in the blanks - the New Jersey State Archives and (true name) John Ricklefs

I've worked with the New Jersey State Archives before, when tracking down vital records on my Reinhardt relatives, and I've always been very pleased by how quickly they respond, how helpful they are, and how many of the records I need they actually have.Well, it turns out inquiring about criminal records is no exception.

I wrote an email yesterday to the NJ State Archives asking what records they might have on John Ricklefs and how I might go about getting them - the first time I wrote to the New York State Archives, I didn't include any of the information I was actually looking for, which might have saved me a day and an email, so now I just give them as much information as I have, straightaway - the more specific you can be about who and what you're looking for, the less work they have to do and the more quickly they can get back to you. This goes for any record you might be looking for, from any agency or institution.

 So, I wrote yesterday telling them John Ricklefs, sometimes spelled Rickless, served time at the state prison in Trenton - I knew what date he had been arrested and what date he had been incarcerated, and I had an idea of the year he escaped. I had also done some research on their website ahead of time (which never hurts to do - really, the more research you can do yourself and the less you have to rely on others, the better - although don't rely on yourself so much that you don't ask for help when you need it!) and thought it was possible, judging on the dates, that they might have an inmate register for him.

I heard back from them this afternoon and it turns out, they do. They will mail it to me as soon as I send them a check for the copying fees but they were nice enough to give me a bit of information contained in the file - John was received at the prison Nov. 23, 1916 and escaped on June 22, 1919 (which I did not have an exact date for previously); he spent two years at Blackwell's Island (which I think might have been his time in the House of Refuge but which I will have to look into), he spent 6 1/2 years at Sing Sing as Harry Young, and he was returned to the prison from Connecticut on April 16, 1940, which is just everything coming full circle - he escaped from jail in New Jersey in June of 1919, he was jailed in Connecticut three months later, he escaped from THAT prison in December 1919, he ended up in prison in Massachusetts about two years later, and after serving that term, was returned to Connecticut in 1936 for his jailbreak there, and after serving that term, was returned to NJ in 1940 for his jailbreak there.

I have no words. The more I learn about these brothers, the more fascinated I become, and the more my heart breaks. But for now, I have a check to write and mail, and I'll let you know what I find out!

Going down one path will always lead to another...

So I've been very happy with the New York State Archives in my research on the Ricklefs brothers, although this last time I associated with them there was such a long lull between my request for information and them getting back to me that I thought my email got lost! But even though this isn't really genealogy work per se, I feel like the research skills I'm using - whether it's thinking of any and all possible agency or institution to contact who might have the info I'm looking for, or not being afraid to ask questions or ask for help, or reading the documents I receive as closely as possible to catch any tiny clue that I might be able to use on the next leg of my research journey - are all skills we should all be using in our genealogy research, and this is good practice for me and a chance to hone them!

Anyway, I got a ton more information on John Ricklefs' early criminal career, just fascinating stuff, but also info and clues to help point me in another direction for finding out even more info to fill in the blanks and round out the picture. I knew, in addition to spending time in the New York House of Refuge, Elmira Reformatory, and Sing Sing, he had also spent time in Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate Dannemora; in New Jersey State Prison, from which he escaped; a Connecticut prison, from which he escaped; and prison in Massachusetts. These new documents the NY State Archives sent me included various case histories on John, which told me WHY he was sent to prison in NJ and CT (burglary, of course), the dates of his arrests and incarcerations; the prison names; his prisoner number; all useful information I can now use to take this path onto the next one. Now that the New York State Archives have been so helpful and proven so fruitful, it's time to see where these other states keep their historical prison records, and find out how I can get my hands on them.

It's all about connecting the dots...the journey doesn't end. When one path ends, another usually begins. Don't be afraid to take it!

In the midst of a busy summer, although not genealogy-wise...

Hopefully y'all have been too busy with your summer vacations to notice that I've been too busy with my summer vacation to write! There hasn't been a lot going on on the genealogy front for me lately and on top of that, I was away in Mexico for a wedding and there have been a lot of little day trips and busy weekends and now I have birthday planning to do! I think I'm going to need a vacation from my summer! :)

I really don't have much to add right now either but wanted to drop everyone a line just to say hi and to hope your genealogy research has been more productive lately than mine! I have much more to look at regarding the Ricklefs-Tiedemann Germany lines, which hopefully I'll get to once September rolls around. I've also, as I always do, jumped around back to my Raynor line - since reading Russell Shorto's "The Island at the Center of the World," I'm determined to look more closely at both my English and Dutch colonial ancestry to see how they connect to the events Shorto talks about in his book (or, if they don't connect, just finding the contemporaries of those New Amsterdam settlers and seeing what was going on in their lives). I also have an extra day off on Monday coming up and if it rains, I'm contemplating a trip into Manhattan to visit the Municipal Archives. It's been too long since I've been there and I have a couple of records I think I'll have better luck finding if I do my own search instead of relying on archive staff (if it's your tree and your research, you know what spelling variations or name variations to look for much better than an employee or volunteer with no vested interest in your personal tree would). If I get there, I'll let you know how it goes!

New Netherlands becomes New York - finally finished with "The Island at the Center of the World"!

I just finished Russell Shorto's "The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America" and maybe it's just hormones, but I started crying as I read the last page. This is my new favorite book. It took me forever to get through it because life kept getting in the way, but the story Shorto tells and the way he tells it made me fall in love all over again with colonial New York history and my colonial New York ancestry. The world and the people in this book just come alive and jump off the pages and make my fingers itch to do for my colonial family tree branches what I've been trying to do for my more recent family history - really delve into the world they were living in. The book is about Dutch New Amsterdam and New Netherland, which ties into some of my ancestry, but it gives an interesting perspective of my English Long Island heritage, what those people looked like from the other side. If anyone has any kind of early colonial New York ancestry, Dutch or English (or any of the many other nationalities who settled in New Amsterdam), or has any kind of interest in early New York or even early American history, read this book!!

The importance of tenacity and our regularly scheduled reminder to SHARE!! :) :)

As genealogists and family historians, I think I can safely say we are all very good friends with Frustration - a missing maiden name, the incorrect recording of dates or their total omission whatsoever, trying to read someone's chicken-scratch handwriting, the proverbial brick wall.

Sometimes, it's something obviously important, and so we're more tenacious in our pursuit of tracking it down. But the truth is, when it comes to family history research, it's all important. You never know what fact, however small or middle-sized it might be, will lead you to something potential brick wall-breaking.

Take my 3rd-great-grandmother, Meta Tiedemann Ricklefs. She is positively dying for her family to be known and she keeps reaching out to me in unexpected ways. She's the one who had the illegible town of birth on her marriage certificate, which I figured out was "Mittelstenahe" while I was at the family history conference in Charleston. Before that, I struggled for years to read that one tiny word on one of several records I had on her - but I had a somewhat narrow place in Germany, Hanover, and I had the names of her parents, John Henry Tiedemann and Meta Buckmann. With that info, I had actually found records that I believed led to THEIR parents using FamilySearch, and so I figured, why drive myself nuts trying to figure out this town name? I had other clues to follow. But the trail went cold. And even once I deciphered that chicken-scratch handwriting on her marriage certificate, the trail went nowhere. All I could determine was that there were a whole lot o' Tiedemanns who came from Mittelstenahe and who still live there.

But when an ancestor wants to be found, they will find ways to make it happen, if you help them...I wrote about my Mittelstenahe Tiedemanns in this blog. And a few weeks ago I got an email from a man living in Ohio whose family also came from the Mittelstenahe and Lamstedt area of Hanover and who had access to primary and secondary church records and state records and compiled genealogies on many of the families from that area. Including mine. And though we are only very distantly related, he sent me info on this line that for years has confounded me. In an instant, he had taken me back at least two more generations. And today he wrote me again - he had been kind enough to take the time to compile information on my Tiedemann line for me and email me a report that traced them back to the 1600s, completely annihilating that brick wall. There is still work for me to do, but he not only showed me where to look and pointed me in the right direction, but he gave me an outline to work from, and I am so grateful. That's part of our job - if we have the primary or secondary sources, we need to share them with those who don't have them. We want all our trees to be as accurate as possible, right? In an age when there is just so much bad information or even completely unsourced information circulating, it's our job to make sure the right information sees the light of day. It doesn't do anyone any good if its simply locked up on our personal hard drives.

So I have two points - SHARE! And don't give up or think that good is good information is enough if you have better information at your fingertips that requires a little work.

Now, Meta, if you could just help me find some more information on your sons John and Charles, I'd be a very grateful 3rd great granddaughter! :)

If you're in its path, stay cool during this heat wave everyone!!

Some light genealogical and historical summer reading

No chick lit for me, thank you. This summer my poolside and beach reading has been Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America. Published about six years ago, the title is pretty much self-explanatory. I'm only about a third of the way through it, but as a lover of history and a person with both Dutch and English colonial New York roots, this book is fascinating. It's so well-written and its based on actual Dutch documents that were, at the time, being translated and transcribed by Charles Gehring at the New York State Library as part of the New Netherlands Project.

Everybody knows about the Pilgrims and the Puritans and Jamestown, all the English roots of America, and I think people know about the Dutch in New York, but unless you're really into New York history or have colonial New York ancestry, the Dutch really are just a footnote in American history. I don't really know a lot about my Dutch roots - it mostly comes from women who married into my Raynor family and who I have so far been unable to trace back - so I focus a lot on my English colonial roots. But I remind everyone who will listen that the settlers of Hempstead on Long Island started their town in Dutch territory. And that many of the place names in the greater New York metro area are actually Dutch in origin - including the name of the county I live in, Nassau. Anyone who reads any Washington Irving reads about the colonial Dutch. Many of the old, established New York families, such as the Vanderbilts or, say, the Roosevelts, are of Dutch origin. People know it, but just might not realize how intertwined New York history is with the Dutch.

Anyway, it's been interesting to read about, among other things, how similar the beginnings of the Netherlands are to the United States, how different the raucous New Amsterdam and New Netherlands colonies were to their English contemporary counterparts. I even learned something new - I had no idea there were Swedish immigrants in America (down around Wilmington, Delaware) in the 1600s. It's a fun, easy read and I get excited and passionate about, obviously, history in general, but the fact that this book ties in to my own personal family history is making it all the more interesting.

You can find out more about this book at http://www.randomhouse.com/features/island/.

Chasing Charlie: criminal worlds collide

The events that occurred in 1915 and 1916 are what originally drew me to John and Charles - they were the first stories I found that substantiated my grandfather's claim that my grandmother's family was a bunch of criminals. I think he probably said it half jokingly - but oh, if he only knew!

John was released from Sing Sing in July 1915, after serving 6 1/2 years of a 10 year sentence. He was 28. Charles was 18. Only three months later, on Oct. 24, "someone" robbed the home of John Linz. Only two days later, Leib Lurie caught three burglars in the act of robbing his home, and in the ensuing confusion, one of them fired a weapon at Lurie, and accidentally hit one of his comrades instead. A call for an ambulance at 456 Glenmore Avenue led police to John, who had been shot in the chin and was pretty badly wounded - he had to be taken to the hospital for surgery. He later claimed the reason he got shot was quite innocent - really John? Not the sharpest tack in the drawer - but the police believed he was the burglar who was shot while robbing Lurie's house, and he was arrested. He was also arrested for the John Linz robbery.

Now, nowhere in the newspaper is there any compelling evidence linking John to the Linz robbery. They don't say why John was arrested. So with what happens next, maybe Charles was telling the truth. Maybe it was him, and not his older brother, who was guilty. But I find it hard to believe at that point in time. John had already shown a pattern of behavior of immediately going back to his criminal ways upon being released from prison. He had a track record of burglary sprees. Maybe Charles *was* there - maybe John brought him along, now that his brother was old enough to bring along to such a thing.

Whatever the case, John went to trial in County Court in front of Judge Mitchell May on Jan. 8, 1916 for the John Linz robbery. Charles was called as a witness toward the end of the day, and as the newspapers reported, his testimony "caused a sensation" when he confessed that it was he, and friend Henry Heinz, who were the real culprits, not John. The judge had no choice but to acquit John and arrest Charles. On Jan. 31, Charles was sentenced to 2 1/2 to 5 years at Sing Sing. He was sent up the river that same day.

That was Charles' first time in jail. A 1921 newspaper article noted that "John was on trial as a fourth offender and to save him from a life term, Charles took the entire blame for the job." Five years is considerably less time than a life sentence, but going to prison, and a maximum security prison at that, has to change a man, and I think that first stint at Sing Sing did change Charles, and not at all for the better.

Anyway, Charles was in prison, and John's troubles were still not over, because now he was facing a life sentence if found guilty of the Lurie robbery. That trial happened in early April of 1916. One newspaper reported that he was still carrying the bullet in his chin. For that alone, having been shot in the face, John would seem to have had the worst luck in the world. But at that point in time, between his brother taking the fall and what happened next, John was the luckiest SOB on the planet.

Because on April 5, he was acquitted of the Lurie burglary. The doctor who attended to his bullet wound testified that he treated John at 2:15 in the morning, when the robbery didn't even occur until closer to 3. He had been at the Ricklefs house at 3:15, but got the time mixed up, and for his "stupidity," as Judge Aspinall called it, John got off.

Crazy frickin' justice system.

You'd think, having tempted fate twice and beaten it both times, that maybe, quite possibly John might have learned his lesson. And until recently, I thought maybe he had. But he did not. And neither did Charles, both of them back in prison within a few years, because as we all know now, those Ricklefs boys, they never learn...

Chasing Charlie: the criminal adventures of the brothers Ricklefs part II

My search for Jack led me to discover more about Charlie which has now led me back to Jack, so just to keep things moving in this circular fashion, we're going back to Charlie. At first, it was kind of exciting and scandalous when I found out about these two. But the more I learn the sadder I become for them and what they did, or failed to do, with their lives.

So, Charles Ricklefs was born to German immigrants John Ricklefs and Meta Tiedemann Ricklefs on January 5, 1897 in Brooklyn. He had a brother 10 years older than him, John, and four sisters. Charlie was the baby of the family.

His father bought the house on Glenmore Avenue in East New York in 1904 - Charles was only 7 but by then his older brother had already started his brushes with the law. In my head, I imagine that John Sr. was trying to get the family into a better neighborhood and I picture little Charlie, young and impressionable, with a bit of hero worship of his older brother. It was just the two of them in a house full of sisters. I have brothers. The little ones follow the older ones around - they want to be with them and be like them. Nice and heart-warming in theory - not so much when you consider the choice of role model.

Ok, so in the 1910 census, Charles is 13 and in school. His brother John is not living at home because he's in the middle of serving a 10-year sentence for burglary, grand larceny, and receiving stolen goods. I can only imagine how that affected Charlie's adolescence - oh wait, no, I have evidence. In 1912, at the age of 15, he was charged with burglary in children's court - the sentence was suspended. In 1914, at the age of 17, he was convicted of third degree assault - sentence suspended. I have no details on these cases as I only found out about them through Charles' Sing Sing Prison receiving blotter, but I have a feeling that in order to really get details about these charges and cases, I'm going to have to go to the actual court records, whatever I can find and wherever I can find them. This brings us to 1916, the year John and Charles' criminal lives finally intersect, where you can actually feel Charlie's totally misplaced love for and loyalty to his older brother, the moment when Charles' criminal activities went from childhood mischief to the real deal. This was a story that was in multiple newspapers not just in Brooklyn but across all of New York State, which years later another newspaper account described as an act that made Charles Ricklefs famous...how many little brothers would take the fall for a crime their older brother committed, especially if it meant doing time in a maximum security prison?

Back to our regularly scheduled program: oh Johnny, you're breaking my heart!

Right now, I am devastated.

Maybe that's a bit melodramatic, but the fact of the matter is, whereas I was tracing Charles Ricklefs' maddening spiral downward, his older brother John had seemed to, after 1916, drop off the criminal radar for the most part. He has a 1942 World War II draft registration card that has him living in Englewood, New Jersey, he's listed in the 1920 census in his parents' household on Elton Street in Brooklyn, and he's in a  June 1917 World War I draft registration as living with his mother. I conveniently ignored that it said he was working as a bricklayer in a New Jersey state prison. I had hope in my heart that somehow John had gotten himself onto the straight and narrow. But when it comes to people we are emotionally invested in (and I am becoming extremely emotionally invested in these two lost souls), we see what we want to see.

I had, in the course of my research, come across a couple of newspaper accounts of a John Ricklefs or John Rickless who escaped from a prison in Connecticut. In one story, his age was wrong. And my John was from New York. It had to be someone else.

But Ricklefs is not a common name out in the real world, must less within the smaller criminal population. This other John was also, like mine, from Patchogue, and served time in a New Jersey state prison. Just like Nancy Drew, I don't believe in coincidences. And like my boyfriend Sam says, I have an instinct for this stuff. Today my genealogist intuition is screaming at me to WAKE UP!!!! Because it now appears that not only did John serve in at least two maximum security prisons up the river but he was possibly in prison in New Jersey, Connecticut *and* Massachusetts between 1916 and 1936. Oh, and made several semi-successful escape attempts as well. ::Sigh::

And so while I had intended to tell the story of the brothers Ricklefs one brother at a time, in my next entry I think I will jump back in time to start Charles' story, while I try to sort out what exactly John was up to in what I had thought were quiet years. I'm going to have to look up more newspaper articles and try to navigate my way through the archives/criminal records of other states. I'm still waiting on more info from the New York state archives, and am now looking into getting my hands on any criminal court records I can find on Jack and Charlie - that looks like it might bring me back to a New York City municipal archive field trip.

Genealogy - the work, it never ends! :)

A brief holiday interlude...

Wishing all my fellow Americans a very happy Independence Day - it's a good day to think about our history and our ancestors, particularly if we have colonial American family history. Of course, somewhere in the universe the spirits of MY colonial American British-loving ancestors are crying...it's ok, Raynors. I still love you! :)

Enjoy your holiday everyone - have fun and be safe!