Armistice Day

“Well, finis la guerre!” my great grandfather wrote to his wife from the front lines, a day after Armistice. He was an officer serving with the American Red Cross, a 48-year-old physician from Montana. He described the sudden shift from war to peace, danger to jubilation on the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918.





Dearest Mabel:

Well, finis la guerre! Yesterday morning early the wireless told us that the Boche was going to sign but we fired till the last minute and, funny to relate, I had the closest call of the war just 6 minutes before they ceased firing. C battery commander, L——, went out with a 2nd Lt. named Luke Sunday afternoon looking for advance —— positions and never came back so yesterday morning —— and I went up in the car to the advance ambulance stations to see if we could weed out anything about there. We pulled out of Thiaucourt* at 10:46 and just as we got to Xammes* we went into a bunch of 77 bursts and how we got out I don’t know as they fell all round us. We got behind a house at 10:56. It seemed every —— on both sides of the front was firing as fast as it could and stones were flying in all directions when suddenly – 11 o’clock! Silence! And we drove home through the villages and the bands were getting out and the roads were —— with cheery troops. We found out today that they had been taken prisoners. Hard luck, last day of the war.

Last night had a big dinner at Ades, the colonel & some other ——. Lots of champagne and toasts for the best battalion of the best Artillery Regiment on the front. (Suppose every other Regiment doing the same thing.) The sky was full of German fireworks. They say the Boche is tickled to death that peace has come. Rumor has it that we are going to Metz for garrison duty, but I think I have done my bit and will apply to be put on the inactive list and come home as soon as the chance offers. See stocks going up. Did you get out of —. P. Ry? Have not heard from Lawrence [his eldest son] for several days but have an impression that he was not sent back. You asked a question about whether we are division troops. No. We are what is called Army Artillery. JKB can explain. We go in to support division movements or hold difficult sectors that the ordinary divisional artillery cannot alone and unsupported take care of.

Lawrence’s duties were mostly administrative and the action of carrying orders from the front line to the battalion echelon. Well, Georgie boy, Daddy will be home soon.

Best love, dear ——

Charlie

Public domain at a premium price

I recently shared some important documents with my distant cousins who happen to be among the few relatives I know who actually have an interest in our family history. The files were scans of our ancestors' burial records, which I found during last research trip to England. Since these cousins have provided me with phenomenal ancestral artifacts, I had no qualms about sharing my findings with them. It also inspired me to scan more of my precious discoveries, instead of letting them remain dormant in a folder and allowing my poor predecessors to be forgotten by their own flesh and blood.

Only after sending out the emails, did I realize my foolishness. I committed what is considered to be a sin in the world of intellectual property: giving away my work for free. It's a common mistake for us genealogy folk, and I don't really think any of us consider the results of our actions.

While genealogical records are essentially free or inexpensive for anyone access, I had made a considerable effort to unearth them, an effort that required both time and money. While anyone can walk into the Berkshire Record Office in Reading, getting there takes a bit of investment. I gave up a valuable week of vacation time to cross the ocean, and beg my British friends to drive me around the English countryside. Every purchase I made was in pounds sterling, which at the time was double the cost of an American dollar. It was like being on one trip for the price of two!

With this in mind, my thoughts turn to putting some proprietary control on my findings. Not on the records themselves, but on my research. My concern isn't with sharing an important find with a fellow researcher, it's what that fellow researcher does with the document. Digital files are like rabbits - in the right situation, they can multiple rapidly and prolifically. My generous exchange with a distant cousin suddenly allows future generations to freely benefit from my thousand-dollar research trip.

The best solution seems to be putting a watermark on any digital files that I share, and to make the files as low resolution as possible. If someone wants a high-resolution file without the watermark, then they will have to pay me for it. If they don't want to pay, then they can go get the document from the source themselves, "for free".

This attitude sounds a little greedy, doesn't it? Here I am, taking exclusive control of public records. The truth of it is, these records aren't free. And if my relatives, no matter how close or how distant, are willing to share the financial burden, then we all will benefit (this is starting to sound a lot like the American public healthcare debate). After all, Ancestry.com charges a hefty fee to use their services, so why shouldn't a small time genealogist? Or even a hobbyist for that matter?

Now, there is an added benefit to putting a watermark on these files. Because copies can be made and shared so easily, the added text will actually help keep track of who found the document to begin with. So often I see fellow family researchers emailing or posting documents and photos with no mention of the source. And if you ask, they frequently have no idea of where it came from. There is an original copy out there somewhere, but nobody knows where it is. This is Genealogy 101, people! Cite your sources! This is going to be crucial as we move into the digital future, where paper becomes a thing of the past (I do believe that paper records will go the way of another type of record - vinyl - and live on as a precious premium item).

Of course, I'll only do this on documents that I know no one else has. Common things like census records and certain photographs won't matter as they've already been widely distributed. And if I do charge a relative for the cost of doing our shared family research, then that will add value, in their eyes, to the document and make them think twice before giving away their purchase for free. It's simple economics.

The same goes for my professional genealogy research. Since one person is actually paying me to research their family, the watermark will help them keep tabs on their investment, should some ignorant or unscrupulous relative of theirs decide to freely distribute a valuable document.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Corporate Diaspora

As the cooling economy has slowed down human migration this past year, it’s worth reflecting how intense relocation has been during the past few decades. Historically, humans have always migrated for job opportunities, but usually for just one move per generation. Today we see families relocate multiple times as a result of the Corporate Diaspora, where distant job opportunities liken white-collar executives with nomadic migrant workers.

The end result will be a genealogist’s nightmare. How do you track a family that jumps from Cincinnati to Silicon Valley to suburban Connecticut, all within a decade? Without wars, famines, religious persecutions or gold rushes to help a historian pinpoint the movements of a twentieth century family, the trail becomes muddled. When the census records finally get released, families might have moved several times between surveys. They might even end back in the town where they began, burying a significant story in the cracks of decentennial paperwork.

With any luck, our descendants will have better access to information about our lives than the generations before us. But should the data of today get lost in the digital dust, it will be no easier to map the life of a twenty-first century office worker than that of a seventeenth century peasant.

The new Dark Ages

With the quickly-mounting death toll of newspapers, I wonder how the daily news is going to be archived. Surely, we can't rely solely on digital files.

One of the joys in reading an old newspaper is to see how an entire page paints a portrait of an era, from the articles to the ads and everything in between. The same can't be said of internet news. A single web article from CNN.com will lose its context once the "related links" go dead and ad space draws a blank.

As much as we're witnessing a technological revolution, I fear that we may be entering another Dark Age in the eyes of future historians. The Dark Ages as we know them (AKA medieval times) are called that due to few surviving records from that time. Is that because the majority of people didn't read or write back then? Or did they, but the means to archiving their daily affairs failed miserably?

As saturated as we are these days with digital media (including this blog), I have little faith that any of it will endure for future generations to peruse. Nor will its validity. How do you carbon date an HTML file?

Farewell, newspapers!

Presents from the past

I'm in the process of updating the blog with my past journal entries. Keep checking back, as they will be added according to their original date.

Putting the gene in genealogy

With DNA tests becoming more affordable, I decided to take advantage of a deal Ancestry.com is having with their new genetic testing feature. There are plenty of services out there, with various packages at various prices. However, as a longtime subscriber to Ancestry, I decided to go with loyalty (prompted by a well-promoted discount).

The test results depend on your gender. Men, with X and Y chromosomes, are able to do both paternal (X) and maternal (Y) tests. Women can only test the maternal line, as they do not have Y chromosomes. My rudimentary scientific understanding tells me that the paternal chromosome represents the genetic lineage of a man’s father’s father’s father’s father’s… and so on. The same goes with the maternal line (a mother’s mother’s mother’s…). Once your DNA has been analyzed, it can be compared with other people in the database to help find common lineages. The test is only as good as the database.

I decided to order the paternal test first, seeing as it was the clearest line I could match up with my own paper research. My string of forefathers were Western European (French/Spanish, most likely Basque), but if any surprises lay beyond that, the DNA test would bring them up.

Within a week, I received my neatly-packaged kit, which contained a handsome brochure and three cotton swabs. The whole process took a few minutes, not including time to read and re-read the instructions. Gently scraping the inside of my cheeks with each swab, I tried not to drool all over my desk nor accidentally contaminate the swabs with whatever foreign genetic material that might be lurking on my desktop. As my mouth hummed with numbness, I sealed the swabs in a series of carefully-labeled envelopes and mailed them back to the lab.

After about four weeks, the results privately appeared on the Ancestry DNA website. They were exactly what I expected. A handsome write-up described me as a member of the R1b Haplogroup, a population that came from west Asia and settled in Europe around 35 to 45 thousand years ago. They are better known for their cave paintings in France and on the Iberian Peninsula, among other interesting factoids and hypotheses. Of particular note was an entire paragraph dedicated to the Basque connection.

The results were nice and academic, however my biggest interest was in my distant cousins. By finding relatives 8 or 10 generations away, I could continue my research where the paper trail stops.

Among a long list of names, two people were listed as my closest connections – separated by 12 generations, which was not enough to generate much significance. One lives in England, the other in Australia. Beyond them, the list ranged from a 22 to a 43 generation separation. The majority live in the United States, a handful in England, and a few in France and Germany.

Hopeful, but not helpful. I presume that with time, the database will grow and offer more information. For now, it didn’t tell me much.

In the meantime, I took the maternal test. Due to the lack of respect for maiden names in my patriarchal society, I can only trace my maternal line back a few generations. Beyond that, it gets very murky. As before, I swabbed the deck of my mouth and sent the cheeky samples back to the lab.

A month later, it was unveiled that I was a member of Haplogroup H: The Colonists – another major European group with origins in western Asia. Interesting facts, but no groundbreaking revelations. On top of that, the collection of my genetic cousins lacks the generational distinction of the paternal test. It’s merely a long list of names – no places, and no indication how closely related we might be. I’d have to contact each one of them just to find out their ancestry. And that’s only if they reply.

Considering the reasonable costs, the DNA tests were worthwhile. Such databases need enough people to contribute to make it worthwhile. I only hope that more people give it a shot and that one company’s results can be compared with another's. Until then, the most reliable way to find your distant cousins is the old-fashioned way: by following the paper trail.

The fragility of stone (part two)

Morning arrived and the previous night’s panic had gone the way of dreams. No doubt it really happened, but with the bright sun came the familiar feeling of safety – quite a change from nighttime stillness and my shadowy pursuer. The hotel now buzzed with inhabitants; I strolled down the hall to find the breakfast room a-chatter with Francophones – undoubtedly visitors to the university.

Having a proper English breakfast, I hit the revitalized sidewalks for my long-awaited day at the Bristol Record Office. The only way to know a city is to walk it streets, and in less than half a day of footwork, I had come to know a good portion of Bristol.

With a fresh start, I decided to give St Andrews another chance. It was on the way to the BRO and I would be crazy not to spend another hour giving each and every grave another go. This time, I entered from the opposite side – a narrow pathway arched over by leafless trees. Thin iron fences barricaded the cemetery from the public walkway, with carefree gates left open for a dog out walking its master, or the occasional curious wanderer.




I had to believe that the Admiral’s stature had influenced his final resting spot. There were numerous graves dated after 1863, therefore the people who laid my great-grandfather to rest had their options.

On a whim, I first revisited the east side of the cemetery. There was a dense matrix of graves whose orderly arrangement stood out from the rest of the haphazardly placed tombstones. I remembered searching it the day before, with stones ranging from tall and ostentatious to modest and flat. There was no real reason why I started there. Just a hunch.

I approached the outermost row of graves, eyes scanning every stone in search of legible words and dates. And there it was -- modest and flat, the stone tinted green but otherwise in pristine condition. It was as if it had been patiently waiting for me all morning:

Serenity passed over me as I knelt to get a closer look. I found him! A man who lived an extraordinary life, hidden forever amongst the growing trees and fading stones of some forgotten corner of the world, far from family, far from home. In my imagination, it was akin to meeting a revered celebrity. My heart raced. I laughed out loud, impervious to the pedestrians who passed along the public pathway. A couple of drunken vagrants loitered nearby; no doubt I seemed madder than they.

While not a monumental challenge, it was a golden ancestral discovery. Here was the final resting spot of a man who went to sea at the age of ten; who mapped the Great Lakes while their neighbors were at war; who circled the African continent, meticulously charting its coasts and capes – a fragment of which still bears his name - as malarian death ravaged his colleagues; who advised a young naturalist before he set off on the Beagle for the Galapagos; who raised two sons as a widower and brought them, along with their British traditions, to the frontiers of Ontario and endured the bucolic days of a half-pay vice admiral, building a border town with his older brother. At the age of sixty-nine, ATEV had long outlived his siblings, his wife, and his eldest son, and collapsed in the care of strangers whose names were hidden from family lore.

This was perhaps a find for the history books, although they were already saturated by accomplished people, long forgotten. Memories are the first casualty of death, followed by flesh, then possessions. By the time those who knew the deceased are deceased themselves, the stonework begins to fade and all that is old and insignificant is washed away with the dust. A spirit is kept alive by those who make efforts to keep it alive.

I could only linger there so long. There was still much more work to do before I caught an evening train back to London. Besides, I was kneeling in a cemetery, muttering to a stone. So I set off for the BRO, determined to find out who was with ATEV during his final days. In less than twenty-four hours, I came to know that world – I now needed to know the people.