This post is part of the Fearless Females: 31 Blogging Prompts to Celebrate Women’s History Month.

Today’s prompt is: “Working girl: Did your mother or grandmother work outside the home? What did she do? Describe her occupation.”

As far as I know, my father’s mother did not work after she married, but like most everyone else in her neighborhood she worked in the hosiery factories before then. My mother was a Registered Nurse and worked in a hospital before I was born and in a nursing home when I was in high school, and later in home health care.

It was my mother’s mother who I always thought of as a working woman. She did stay home with my mother for about a decade, but the rest of her pre-retirement adult life was spent working.

She worked at a book bindery and at least part of her time was spent packing boxes for shipping and she became an expert at that. If you needed items packed in a box wasting the least amount of space, she was the woman to ask. She could eyeball it and get it all in there on the first try.

I recently rediscovered this interesting piece of ephemera in my family documents:

It details all the pays scales and benefits negotiated for by her union. It even has raises built in with separate tables of pay for 1965, 1966 & 1967. This being the 1960’s there are different pay scales for men and women, even if they had the same job title, e.g. Male Helpers, Female Helpers, Journeymen, Journeywomen. Someday I plan to scan the whole booklet. It’s a fascinating look at the time period and industry.

I am not one for the whole bucket list idea, but as we pass from one year to the next I recognize there are some genealogical mysteries I would like to solve in my lifetime.  Here is an incomplete list in no particular order. Some are things that are likely never to be answered. Some are only a matter of time.

1. The disinheriting of Charles H. Ware.  In his will, Uriah Ware very explicitly excluded his son Charles. For the longest time, I was unable to prove the whereabouts of Charles after he left home. I have since discovered him in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania which seems a long way from Camden County, New Jersey. How did he end up there and why did his father disown him? I may never know.

2. What happened to Frances Funston? Joseph Funston was married twice according to his Civil War pension file. His first marriage to Frances ended in divorce. She was the mother of his children and according to what was found in the pension file, did not appear to contest the divorce. Joseph remarried right away. I have never found Frances in any record after the divorce in 1872, not alone or with any of her children who were by then grown. She likely remarried, but to whom I have no idea. (Update 7/17/14: I found her!)

3.  May Whitaker? When talking about her family, my grandmother always said there was a Whitaker in there somewhere. On death and marriage records for her uncles and mother, it was their mother who was listed as May (or Mary) Whitaker. I have her on the 1880 census with her husband Joseph and children, and with a Mary Partington who is identified as Joseph’s Mother-In-Law. Then she died in 1886. Did her mother remarry a man named Partington? Was the family wrong and May’s last name was really Partington? I have found no other records of her or her mother, under Whitaker or Partington. May was born in England around 1852. I have no immigration date so I do not know if she came over as a child or adult. Based on the ages of their children, she and Joseph married around 1871. There is still a lot more searching to be done on this one.

4. What ethnicity and religion were the Carmans? There are several Carman lines in the eastern United States. There was an Englishman who settled in Long Island and his ancestors stretched south into New Jersey and east into Pennsylvania. There was a German who landed in Philadelphia whose name became anglicized as Carman. My Carmans have been in the Philadelphia area a long time. My latest research suggests they were in Montgomery County in the late eighteenth century and likely well before that. Are they connected to the Germans, the English or some other Carman line? My 3rd great-grandparents were Catholic and their church was set on fire during the Riots of 1844. From what I read, it was the two Irish churches which were targeted while the nearby German church was left untouched. Were they Irish? My 2nd great-grandfather married a German Protestant. Was this when the Carmans became Protestant? The more I learn about this family, the more questions I have.

5. French! My grandmother had no idea where her Carmans came from and she knew there was a Whitaker but not who it was. Another thing she always used to say was that she had French in her, but she did not know from which line. My family ethnicity is fairly boring: lots of German, English, Irish, Scottish and way back on my father’s side a bit of Scandinavian  But mostly just lots and lots of Germany and British Isles. What I am trying to say is that French would be exotic. Ironically, the closest I have come to finding it has been through the only ancestors I have traced back to Germany: the Hornefs.  The area of Germany they lived in was near the border which by the little I have read moved around a bit. There was also the movement of people as Protestants sought safe havens. I have found church record indexes with their names in German and French. (Georg Peter/George Pierre) Is this the French my grandmother heard about? Since most of my grandmother’s ancestry has brick walls in the United States I may never know for sure.

6. The princess in the hogshead. I’ll end on this one, because it’s a bit silly. In the seventeenth century a young Swedish princess had to flee her home due to political troubles. She stowed away on a ship by hiding in a hogshead. The ship wrecked off the New Jersey coast and she washed up alive but destitute. A trapper, John Garrison, found her and eventually married her. And thus, all Garrisons in Southern New Jersey are descended from Swedish royalty. Or, so we claim. Who is ever going to prove otherwise? 🙂

On September 20, 1907, my grandfather Orville Wilson Garrison was born in the city of Camden in New Jersey. He grew up in Bridgeton, and his parents were residing there in 1900 and in 1910, but his mother was from Camden. She was likely back in Camden to be with family after her mother passed away there on August 5.

I found two birth certificates for my grandfather in the files I inherited from my grandmother. The first is from the city of Camden and was issued in 1942. The second was from the state of New Jersey and was issued in 1963.

I never met my grandfather. He passed away about four months before I was born, just as his grandmother passed away a little over a month before he was born. He would have been 105 if he were alive today.

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People are listed as living if they were born 100 years ago or less and I have found no evidence of death.

 

Relationship Evidence
	Strong evidence	Birth record, SS-5 application, multiple other evidence
	Some evidence	Death record, vital record indexes, Census records (post-1880)
	Weak or no evidence	Family stories, Census records (pre-1880)

Genealogy is intimately tied to death. Most genealogy jokes revolve around the fact that we spend so much time with dead people, or with the records they left behind anyway. I even subtitled my blog “News about dead people.”

Sometimes these dead people are a lot closer to us however, and we cannot joke about their absence. Each record of theirs we hold in our hands brings back memories, a reminder that all of our ancestors were once living, breathing people, as dear to someone as our recently lost are to us.

I have always been careful not to include the living in research I have posted to the internet. I have often extended this to people who have recently passed away. In my mind they are still living, I suppose.  But, I have also had the desire to memorialize the dead, to extend their lives a bit by sharing what I knew of them with other people.

My parents passed away 13 years ago this summer. I have assiduously kept their information off of the internet. Partly out of privacy, partly out of grief, partly because they are just too young to be “dead ancestors.” But, the 1940 census was released this year and they are in it. And, I decided to begin work on the electronic family tree book I always had in mind, and I want to start with them, so I am finally adding their names to my public database.

Charles “Charlie” Conrad was born in 1937 in Philadelphia to Edward C. Conrad and Susan L. Todd. You can see him in the 1940 census in my Todds on Tioga and Conrads around the Corner post. Carol Garrison was born in 1938 in Philadelphia to Orville W. Garrison and Naomi E. Carman. Charlie and Carol were married in 1959 in Pitman, New Jersey. Charlie served in the Air Force in the 1950’s and later worked as an accountant and comptroller. Carol was a registered nurse. They had their own business in the 1980’s. In the 1990’s they moved to Florida where they both passed away in 1999.

They loved each other deeply and saw each other through sickness and health, good times and bad. This site and my research have always been secretly dedicated to them. Now you know.