I’m doin’ it rong.

A critic has arrived on the Hegarty page comments.

I think if anyone in my family had died on the Titanic, I would have been told about it ad nauseum.

Butte, Montana

NASA satellite image of Butte, Montana minepit

In the first few decades of the 1900s, several of my ancestors traveled from Newfoundland to Butte, Montana to work in the mines there. According to Wikipedia, Butte was one of the most unionized towns in America at the time, due to labor activism among the miners. I wonder how that experience shaped the Newfoundlanders’ responses when they came back East and worked as longshoremen, another industry with serious labor organizations. My grandfather worked at different times as a fisherman (where he lost a finger), a miner, an ironworker (where he lost an eye), and finally as a longshoreman. His longshoremen’s union pension was a big part of my grandparents’ retirement security. I remember how angry my grandparents were during the Reagan years when they heard anti-union arguments. Their Newfoundland brogues would get thicker and they would try to explain how the bosses always wanted to get rid of the unions and the workers always suffered without unions.

I’ve been thinking about them a lot during the recent weeks of attacks on teachers’ unions.

Coombs scans

I’m still scanning old family photos. Here is my first cousin twice removed, Elijah Coombs (1891-1984) of Harbour Grace. He must have given this photo to my great-grandmother because the back reads: “To Aunt Bridge with best regards to all, Elijah”

Elijah Coombs

And here he is again as an elderly man. My great-uncle Sandy had gone up to Newfoundland for a visit and brought back this snapshot.

L to R: Elijah Coombs (much older than the picture above), his cousin Alexander (son of Eli), and his wife Edith

I’m not sure who the woman inside the shed is – maybe their daughter?

Coombs changes

I had to make a small change to the Coombs page and remove the wife of Richard Coombs, Jr. I had read on a private family tree website that her name was Lavinia Smith. This seemed plausible to me because my grandmother had mentioned the name Lavinia but she wasn’t completely sure of how it fit in. So given my years of fruitless searching for Richard Jr’s wife, I went with it.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, depending on your outlook, people on Ancestry.com have been showing the same Lavinia Smith married to a Henry Badcock in Spaniards Bay. I no longer have access to the private website where I got her name, so I can’t check back there. I searched a ton of parish records on NF Gen Web and found supporting evidence for the Badcock marriage, so I am deleting her from my tree. (Yes, I considered whether they could have been the same woman with two husbands but the dates don’t work.)

And wouldn’t it have been great if the people on Ancestry.com had included a mention of those parish records? But of course not.

The Coombs page is the most popular page on this site, so if anyone was relying on it, take note of the change.

That’ll teach me to believe undocumented trees on the internet!

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History: #4 Home

I missed a few weeks of these due to the start of the new semester.

The house I grew up in was a third-floor apartment in a typical Boston style triple-decker. It was a long hallway with the parlor at one end and the kitchen and dining room at the other, with bedrooms off both sides of the long hallway. It was very noisy because you could hear what everyone else was doing, and it was near the airport so jets roared overhead all day long. I got pretty good at tuning things out.

It was too crowded. When I was small we had a parlor and a dining room and a playroom for all our toys, but as we got older and there were more of us, all the rooms were turned into bedrooms and we just had a kitchen and a dining room/living room as shared space. There was only one bathroom, so it was a challenge for everyone to get ready and get out to work in the morning. Things were always interfering or in the way: someone’s music was drowning out your TV, or someone’s project on the dining room table was interfering with dinner. At one point I was sharing a bedroom with both of my sisters. We each had a single bed and a couple of bureau drawers and a tall industrial-type metal shelf (spraypainted bright colors). All our stuff had to fit in that space if we wanted to keep it.

It was an old building with a neglectful landlord and things were always leaking or breaking. But it was affordable so we stayed and stayed and stayed. I even moved back in there for awhile when I ran out of money during grad school. I love living alone now because it feels so luxurious to have all my space to myself without interference. That probably sounds more antisocial than I really am — I do enjoy having houseguests and visiting other people! But I really love living alone.

tiny update

Made a small change to the early Coombs generations based on what I feel is right given the information that I currently have. Also added a tiny shred of immigration information to the Murphy page.

I joined Footnote.com and so far have found it useful for nailing down elusive military details for my Murphy branch, as well as for having some (but not all!) of the naturalization petitions I need. I find the search process a little cumbersome.

the Pavonia

My great-grandfather Walter Murphy arrived in Boston in 1891 aboard this ship, the Pavonia. He was 27 years old and had one piece of luggage.