Doing your genealogical laundry

Laundry isn't fun - it involves a lot of sorting and organizing and gathering and folding, which is the WORST - luckily, genealogical laundry doesn't involve the folding part, but sometimes, researching your family tree isn't about making new, exciting discoveries. Sometimes it's about just the nitty-gritty, the mundane task of figuring out what it is that you have and finding out what it is that you need. And not even in the sense of "Who was Great grandpa's parents?" In the sense of "I know everything there is to know about Great grandpa, now what documentation do I need to back that up?"

Lately I've been floundering, family history-wise. I have a lot of loose threads, a lot of incomplete information, a lot of new, exciting paths to continue down, but a lot a lot A LOT of rounding out the picture of people I've researched for years and know all the facts about but none of the story in between. It's been overwhelming and honestly, boring, all at the same time, and so I've just ignored it. Ignored it, ignored it, ignored it, and during Family History Month, too! ::shakes head::

So today I'm making a list, a laundry list if you will. I decided to check out the Italian Genealogy Group's website and it turns out they've added some new records to their index, and so I decided to look back at my own records and see what was missing. Some people I have death dates for because I found an obituary, but I have no death certificate. Some people I have a birth date for because of a census record but I have no birth certificate. I'm  concentrating on my Queens-Brooklyn-Manhattan crew because city records are easier for me to get my hands on than Long Island records, but there are a lot of important corroborating records missing from my collection. And now that I have my list and can see the gaps, I can go about filling them in.

It's not the exciting work, but it's the necessary work...

Wordless Wednesday - John Ricklefs, 1936

Not great quality, but a photo of John Ricklefs - looks like he might even be wearing glasses - from the Feb. 7, 1936 issue of The Hartford Courant, now aged 50 years, upon his return to Connecticut after serving about 13 years, 7 of those in solitary confinement, in prison in Massachusetts aaaand...no more words! :)

Wordless Wednesday - Grandpa with Barbara Eden and Joe Garagiola

I Dream of Jeannie :)

My grandfather, Elmer Gorry, used to work on the Orange Bowl Parade for NBC. In this pic he's with Barbara Eden (Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie for those too young to know) and Joe Garagiola, center - I don't know who he is but apparently he used to be a Major League catcher and was a panelist on The Today Show. Barbara and Joe were both the hosts of the parade that year, which I believe was 1985.

Info found on John Ricklefs in The Hartford Courant

So, as I mentioned in my last post, thanks to a tip from fellow blogger TCasteel over at Tangled Trees, I was able to find more information on the criminal hijinks of Great Uncle Jack Ricklefs in the newspaper archives of The Hartford Courant. I found several stories from 1919, when he escaped the prison in Wethersfield, and several from 1936, when he was returned to Connecticut by the state of Massachusetts (where he served time in prison during the years in between) to be tried for that escape and finish serving the remaining original sentence.

The more I read about John, the more I shake my head at either his stupidity or his stubbornness, in that he seems to be stuck in an endless loop (and I'm not sure if it's by choice) of going to jail, either being released or escaping from said jail, then being arrested within a year or so for the very thing that he was previously in jail for, only to be sent back to jail and the cycle continues. But these last few stories made me very sad for him. But also very angry. I kinda wanted to reach back in time and smack him upside the head and just shout, "Stop it already!" at him.

::Sigh::

Okay, so as we already know, he was one of four prisoners to escape from Wethersfield prison in December of 1919, and I found some fun articles talking about the many escapes from that prison in that time period, whether due to negligience or complicity on the part of prison staff. I also found a fun editorial calling this particular group of escaped convicts kinda stupid for choosing to break free in the middle of winter. I think I concur. Anyway, within a day they were all captured except for John, who we already know ended up in prison in Massachusetts just two years later. But I knew very little about his time there, especially since I've reached a brick wall in obtaining his prison records from the state archives there since I don't know when John died. But the articles from 1936 fill in some of the very sad and somewhat horrible details of his years there. I will summarize:

  • He was arrested in Massachusetts for his specialty (although you'd think he'd be better at it by that point, it being his specialty and all) of breaking and entering and sentenced to 12 to 15 years. He was given an additional 3 years for, big surprise, a failed escape attempt.
  • We have more aliases to add to the list following True Name John Ricklefs. The list now reads aliases John Anderson, Harry Young, Robert Johnson, James Hamilton, James Ricklefs, and Henry Johnson. It's definitely a method of keeping the cops from finding you quite as easily but I would be super confused as to what name I was using when. 
  • He ended up serving 15 years in several Massachusetts prisons, including Deer Island, New Bedford, and Charlestown.  
  • Seven of those years he spent in solitary confinement. In a Feb. 22, 1936 article, it reads: "Ricklefs told the court that during his confinement in Massachusetts ... he was kept for seven years in a "blind door cell," from which he was removed only 15 minutes at a time, five times a week for exercise." A parole officer corroborated his story.
  • From same story: "'This man has been severely punished,' Judge Jennings said to State's Attorney Hugh M. Alcorn. 'I don't see how he's kept his sanity.' ... Ricklefs, whose home was on Patchogue, L.I., is now gray-haired and stoop-shouldered, with a mild, bespectacled face. His pictures at the time he was an inmate showed him to be sturdy with strong, hard features."
As far as I know, this was the end of John's criminal journey. Well, after serving his time in Connecticut he was returned to New Jersey to finish serving his time there, and THAT was the end of his journey. But by then he was in his 50s or 60s. With the exception of just a few years, he spent his entire adult life in prison. I'm hoping that now, FINALLY, he had learned his lesson. Or that he was just too tired and cranky to continue the criminal lifestyle. But you never know. After all, his brother, though ten years younger, was still at it out on the East End of Long Island. Which is part of the reason my search for John continues...

Another "A-ha!" moment, brought to you by SHARING

They teach you to do it in kindergarten, and now as a genealogist more than 25 years later, I am reaping the benefits.

As my regular readers know, I love newspaper archives. They are by far my favorite hidden treasure for family history research. It's through newspaper archives, mostly found on http://www.fultonhistory.com/, that I've been finding clues and tracing the criminal exploits of the notorious Ricklefs brothers, my family's (so far) most colorful characters.

Because they lived in the New York metro area, http://www.fultonhistory.com/ and http://www.chroniclingamerica.com/ have both been instrumental in my research on these two troublemakers. But John in particular spent a large part of his criminal career in prisons in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, which newspapers are sparsely archived, if at all, on those sites. A Google search of newspaper archives for each of those particular states turned up pretty much nothing.

Now today, several weeks after my Ricklefs searches stalled out, along comes a post by TCasteel over at her genealogy blog, Tangled Trees, about Wikipedia having a listing of both free and pay newspaper archive sites for various countries and pretty much every state in the U.S.

I feel the genealogy itch coming back to my fingertips...oh, how I have missed you!!

At first, I was most excited to check out the New Jersey archives for possible information on John's arrest there, but searching every spelling of his name (damn those Germans!!) proved fruitless. So? Off to Connecticut.

Pay dirt.

The Hartford Courant, a paper I'd never even heard of, has it's archives online courtesy of ProQuest (which Cousin April has told me about many times before and which I had filed away in my already over-filed brain and never used; apparently if you go to your local library, you should be able to use their version for free, though printing fees may apply) ... anyway, I had to pay to view and print copies of the stories I found, but it wasn't that expensive and the truth is you're almost always going to have to shell out something, even if it's a "donation" in order to get the good stuff in genealogy. But I found eight articles about John, from his escape from Wethersfield prison in 1919 to his return in 1936, with quite a few details about his stint in several Massachusetts prisons (including an escape attempt, of course, and solitary confinement) in between.

So I will be going through those articles this weekend. That's what a genealogist considers good, clean weekend fun.

But the point is, even when your search stalls, it doesn't mean it's over. Sometimes you need to step away for awhile just to get a new perspective or, you know, retain your sanity. And sometimes someone else will share a tip or skill they discovered or learned which will prove helpful to your own search. So make sure you pay it forward, ok?

:)

Just a friendly reminder: Raynor Round-up XX coming up Oct. 1

Ah, it feels like it was only yesterday that the Raynor Round-up XIX was rolling around!

It's that time of year again! The Raynor Family Association annual reunion, Round-Up XX, will be held Sat., Oct. 1, at the Lake Ronkonkoma community building, 505 Hawkins Rd., Lake Ronkonkoma, NY.

The reunion will begin at 9:30 a.m. with registration, coffee, exhibits and a social hour, followed by a brief annual meeting and program. Dale Spencer, curator of the Lake Ronkonkoma Historical Society will speak about Lake Ronkonkoma history and the Raynor connection. A luncheon is included.

For more information and costs, call Jeanne Raynor 516-623-5967 or E-mail: raynortown@optonline.net. This genealogist will be unable to attend this year as I will be at a wedding, but for more information on the Raynor Family Association (to which I do belong, although I can't recall the last time I actually paid dues...oh well!) or to join the RFA, you can go to their website at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~karima/raynor/RaynorFamilyAssociation.html.

Cousin April, if you're reading this - how about we make it our goal to find SOMETHING on Jacob (our common Raynor brick wall) to share with the larger family by the time Round-up XXI rolls around??

Blast from the past - Raynor Round-up comes to Freeport, 1997

More stories from the Oct. 2, 1997 issue of The Leader on the occasion of the Raynor Round-up, the annual family reunion, being held there that year. I'll give The Leader this - they give us Raynors in particular and the history of Freeport in general a lot of love....

Surprisingly, this article about Edward Raynor is fairly accurate...


My uncle, Tom Raynor, is second from the right.



(Not quite) Wordless Wednesday - Blast from the past: Freeport becomes Raynortown for a day

In an effort to get her hoarding under control, this genealogist started throwing away old newspapers she had been collecting for, oh I don't know, a bazillion years, and I came across this story from the Oct. 2, 1997 issue of The Leader, the newspaper from Freeport:



Direct descendant Thomas Timothy Raynor, toward the end of the story, is my mom's twin brother, so that would be my Raynor line, too.

RestingSpot.com update: App now available for Android phones

Ah, genealogy in the 21st century!

For those of you who may have checked out the website RestingSpot.com, which is taking the goal of Find-A-Grave to the next level by asking volunteers to mark the exact spot of people's graves in a cemetery using GPS technology, the app to do this is now available for Android phones as well. As I said in my last post about this new website, I think it's an ambitious but exciting project - I would love to one day go to a cemetery I've never been to before and not spend all afternoon, sometimes unsuccessfully, looking for an ancestor's grave site. I haven't been to any cemeteries lately, but now that the app is available for Android phones, I will be downloading it so that next time I head out one of those ways (Greenfield is right by my job and I'd like to say hi to my Raynor, Berg, and Dauch peeps again before the weather stops being so beautiful) I can contribute to the project.

You can find more information at http://www.restingspot.com/ or by following the project on Facebook or Twitter!

Check out the Carnival of Genealogy, 109th edition at The Catholic Gene

In case you missed it, Sept. 4th was the 109th edition of the Carnival Genealogy, hosted by The Catholic Gene. The topic was "Where did your ancestors worship?" Yours truly was one of this month's featured bloggers, where I took a look back at a blog post I did on St. George's Episcopal Church in Hempstead, where many of my Raynor branch ancestors worshipped.

Check out my entry and many others here:

Carnival of Genealogy, 109th edition at The Catholic Gene

Nancy Drew and the case of the missing death date

That's the question of the day - when did John Ricklefs die?

So, I finally heard back from the Massachusetts State Archives - they seem to keep a tighter lid on their records, as they reminded me about the 75 year period that has to pass and all the records they do NOT make available, ever. Which seems to be most of them.

But they do release prison records. And as we all know, one of the many states in which Great Uncle Jack was incarcerated was Massachusetts. So Mass. will give me those records.

But first I have to send them a copy of John's death certificate.

As genealogists, that's one of our favorite questions - when did someone die? Fortunately, there are many ways to find that out. If someone had a social security number, you can look them up in the Social Security Death Index. You can look in newspapers to see if you can find an obituary - that's how I found out when John's father, also John Ricklefs, died. Some places, like New York City and the state of New Jersey, will have online indexes of death records for certain years. Sometimes you go to visit someone's grave and discover the death dates of other family members, either by a tombstone inscription or a cemetery plot listing. Sometimes you can narrow down the window enough to just ask for a search to be done for multiple years.

Unfortunately, I have no idea when John died. He had no social security number as far as I can tell. I can't find an obituary. I don't know where his parents are buried, so I don't know whether or not he might be buried with them.

This is what I do know - according to his World War II Draft Registration card, he was living in New Jersey in 1942. He was born in 1887, so if we assume he lived no more than 100 years, that still gives us a 42-year window in which he could have died. And on top of that, I also can't assume that he died in New Jersey. So in theory, if I can't discover any more information about the end of his life, I would have to send away to at least two states - New Jersey where he lived and New York, where his family lived - and possibly a third - Florida, since he had a sister who moved there, and ask them each to do a 40-plus year search for his death record. Oh, and also take into consideration the very, very, VERY many spellings of his last name.

I definitely cannot afford to pay how much that kind of search would cost.

And so my search for more information continues, as it always does for us. I've delved into his death date before and backed away because of how daunting that search is, but I am so, so curious about his time spent in prison in Massachusetts - I know almost nothing about those years - and so in order to get those records, I need to really buckle down and start thinking outside the box, start thinking like Nancy Drew, about how I can solve this latest mystery in John Ricklefs' life...

Ancestry's Free Access Week to travel and immigration records Aug. 29-Sept. 5

Just an FYI for anyone who doesn't have an Ancestry.com account  - they are making their immigration and travel records available for free this week until Sept. 5, so if you think that might be useful to you (and from my own experience, if you can find travel or immigration records, especially recent ones, like from after 1900, they can be EXTREMELY useful in your family history research), go check it out while it lasts!




Immigration Collection

A quick thought about hurricanes. But not the fun kind from New Orleans...

As we've been preparing for the impending "extreme and extraordinary threat" of Hurricane Irene here on Long Island, it made me start to think about my family living here 50, 100, 200 years ago. We've known about Irene for about a week now, how big it it, how dangerous it is, how this could be our first serious hit up here since Gloria in 1986 (which I remember was both frightening because of the flooding and toppling trees and fun because my cousins who lived on the water came to stay with us) or even worse than that. All the coastal areas are being evacuated. Even where I live, with my house on a canal and the bay right down the street, we're on standby to evacuate to higher ground.

But I wonder about what it must have been like before satellites and Doppler, before up-to-the-minute radio news and up-to-the-second social media updates. When nobody knew a storm, a dangerous possibly lethal storm, was brewing, not until the clouds rolled in and the rain and wind picked up, probably not until it was too late. My family has lived here for 350 years, right on the water, fishing and oystering and making their living from the water. Granted, nor'easters are more common than hurricanes, which don't hit us here as much as the mid-Atlantic states, but even our nor'easters get pretty scary. As lifelong baymen, could they read the signs in the water and wind and air and wildlife and know something bad was on its way? I hope so, but even if they knew, I'm pretty sure they didn't have hurricane shelters back then, either!

But we're all here to wonder about it, so they must have toughed it out somehow.

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.