Coombs Day

Don’t know how these people would fit into my family tree, but I found this interesting nevertheless: a gloomy Newfoundland expression:

“On February 3, 1868, a vicious blizzard lashed the Avalon Peninsula killing more than 30 people. In Upper Island Cove a man named John Coombs and his two teenaged children, Mary and Richard, were frozen to death. John Coombs had gone into the woods to cut wood when he was overcome. In separate incidents the younger Coombs and two other residents of the town perished in the storm. Thereafter throughout the Avalon Peninsula the accepted expression for a bad storm was a “Coombs’ Day.” “Looks like we’re going to have a Coombs’ Day tomorrow” or “That was a real Coombs’ Day,” were commonly heard for generations after. The idiom lasted until the early 1920s.”

From Les Harding’s Exploring the Avalon. (Exploring Newfoundland Series. St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 1998. page 90.)

Oops

Misread a census and had to fix an error on the Clare page.

social networking genealogy peeve

Someone on Ancestry.com who has some relatives in common with me keeps uploading little images of national flags and attaching them to ancient relatives from before the time of photography. Like, we have no photo of this person, so here is a flag of his country. Too nationalistic for my tastes (oh, Happy 4th! and no, these are not American ancestors, so not really a 4th of July activity).

But because we have these relatives in common, every time one of these flags is uploaded I get a notice that there is NEW INFORMATION! But there’s not new information; there’s a national flag .gif. *eyeroll*

Maybe this is the ancestry.com equivalent of the person who tweets too much?

Continuing the slaughter theme

Squire’s sausage ad

An old ad from Squire’s slaughterhouse/meatpacking plant in Cambridge, site of ancestral employment. This place employed a lot of Cambridge and Somerville people. John P. Squire didn’t live near it though; he lived on Beacon Hill.

One time my great-grandfather Walter Murphy rescued a piglet from the back of the truck and brought it home as a pet. You would think that story would have the terrible “I love bacon” ending, but in the version I heard it did not — the pig lived happily for years and was taken for walks.

The plant burned down in the 1970s in a massive fire fueled by decades of offal and fat and grease soaked into the wooden floors of the brick warehouse. The Somerville Fire Department has a whole webpage about the fire.

Make the seal hunt history

Over the past few days I’ve read an antique book online via Google Books: Philip Tocque’s Newfoundland: as it was and as it is in 1877. I started out skimming descriptions of particular settlements, hoping for contemporary details, but I got caught up in Tocque’s opinions about the social structure of 19th-century Newfoundland, which he calls a “fishocracy.” Despite his obvious patriotism, the portrait he paints of Newfoundland is grim: all corruption, abuse, ignorance, partisanship, and violence. The frame of his critique is that Newfoundland was always administered by the Crown only as a profitable fishery, with no concern for the well-being or human rights of the island’s residents and workers. Tocque was himself a merchant’s son from Carbonear, and had a comfortable upbringing, but seems to have been spiritually moved towards progressivism.

Perhaps most striking about Tocque’s work is his nascent environmentalism. He finds the seal fishery disgusting and exploitative of both animals and humans. As a young man, in 1831, he stowed away on a sealer and became convinced by what he saw that the seal hunt was immoral. Years later, he still writes powerfully about the sickening violence:

On the first of March, all is bustle and animation, preparing for the seal fishery. Persons are seen coming in from all parts of the country, some by land, with their bats, sealing-gun, and bundles of clothes over their shoulders; others come in skiffs, loaded with clothes, boxes, bags, guns, and gaffs. From the 1st to about the 10th of March, the streets of Harbour Grace, Carbonear, Bay Roberts, and Brigus, are crowded with groups of hardy seal-hunters. Some are employed bending sails and fixing the rigging of the vessel; some making oars and preparing the sealing-punts or skiffs; others collecting stones for ballast, filling the water casks and cleaving wood; while others are employed putting on board the provisions necessary for the voyage. The shouting, whistling, and clatter of tongues, presents almost a scene of Babel. In severe winters the harbors are frozen, when a channel through the ice has to be cut for the egress of vessels. Many men and vessels are lost in the prosecution of this voyage. Sometimes vessels are crushed between large masses of ice called ‘rollers,’ at other times they get in contact with islands of ice. The seal-fishery is a constant scene of bloodshed and slaughter. Here you behold a heap of seals which have only received a slight dart from the gaff, writhing, and crimsoning the ice with their blood, rolling from side to side in dying agony. There you see another lot, while the last spark of life is not yet extinguished, being stripped of their skins and fat, their startlings and heavings making the unpracticed hand shrink with horror to touch them. In the prosecution of the seal fishery the Sabbath is violated to a great extent. In pursuing this branch of commercial enterprise, some have been suddenly raised from comparative poverty to wealth and affluence. On the other hand, persons of means have embarked in the voyage, and have been as suddenly reduced to poverty. Several steamers are now sent to the seal fisheries from Harbour Grace. Fortune at best is but a fickle goddess, but she will always have devotees worshipping at her altars. (pp. 123-124)

He expands on that idea later and says that the seal fishery is nothing but a lottery in which the merchants risk capital for the chance at vast riches, while the fishermen risk their lives for short pay.

That was in 1877. My Newfoundland grandparents were born in the 1890s and had no trouble with the seal fishery. My grandmother had fond memories of eating seal meat. Since her day, the world economy has changed. It’s impossible to justify the brutal seal hunt in the 21st century. This year’s hunt has just ended, with kills far under quota for the second year. This drop reflects lower demand for the furs (now banned in the EU), and also fewer hunters. Seal hunting requires one to go out on foot on the spring ice, and with global warming the spring ice is more dangerous than ever, adding even more risk to a bloody job. Some activists are calling for a boycott of all Canadian seafood until the seal hunt stops. (Beware graphic images of dead seals at that last link!) The seals even have a celebrity spokesman in Bill Maher. We can hope that two centuries after Tocque’s troubled witnessing, the seal hunt will also be history.

This post would not be complete without a baby seal picture.

quick updates

I put the photos back on the Costigan page, and I added the Deasy page. I’ve also learned that I’m terrible at figuring out military records. The more I work on this, the more gaps in knowledge are revealed.

Coombs page updated

I updated the Coombs page.

I’ve been cross-referencing between my Reunion database and my Ancestry.com account. (After that I will go back through my old papers and scan old photos. Such is the joy of a new computer!)  Anyway, I found a birth date for my great-uncle Henry Francis Coombs — it was right there in the Social Security Death Index. He was born in 1898.

For years I had believed, and had been told, that my grandmother was the eldest child in her family, and that there was a ten year gap between her birth and that of her nearest sibling. There was a lot of speculation about this. One aunt told me that my great-grandfather had run away to England where he had a whole second family. (But not so, as he turns up in a directory of Harbour Grace, Newfoundland residents.) There was other speculation about how my grandmother had been so much older that she was really a second mother to her siblings and helped to raise them, and perhaps that’s why she was eager to emigrate on her own as a young woman. But finding Frank’s birth date ruins all that speculation, because he was born just three years after his sister, and there is no long gap of a missing husband and a decade-older sister.

The other story about the Coombs family is that it is somehow closely related to England. I can’t find anyone in it who was born in England. The family probably originated in England, but they emigrated to Newfoundland in the 18th century. I wonder now if the emphasis on being English wasn’t really just local politics about distinguishing themselves from the Irish, whether the Irish of Newfoundland or the Irish immigrants of Boston? My grandmother wasn’t always embracing of other immigrant groups. She used to tell me the story of how when she was a young immigrant she worked in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, commuting on the train every day from her home in East Boston. She said she hated the commute because the trains were full of Italian immigrant men who groped her and stank of garlic — it made her hate garlic, she said. (I don’t know where the Italian men were headed, maybe to work in the quarries of Essex County?) On a more positive note, my grandmother told me how she learned everything from the woman who worked beside her on the sewing assembly line: the woman told her how to do the job, and where to shop, and how to make cake. She said she brought all her questions to her coworker and was so grateful for her help. But then that raises the question of why she didn’t just ask her aunt with whom she was boarding? Or brainstorm with the best friend with whom she’d emigrated? I think sometimes there was a happy spin put on memories of what were really pretty tough times.

I found some photos of the shoe factories in Lynn, although they may be a bit earlier than when my grandmother was there in the 1920s. The photos are by early woman photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston and are now in the Library of Congress.

Woman distributing work in a shoe factory, Lynn, MA by Frances Benjamin Johnston

2 women at work in a shoe factory, Lynn, MA by Frances Benjamin Johnston