Review:Matteson’s Tugboats of New York

Review: Tugboats of New York: An Illustrated History by George Matteson. New York: NYU Press, 2005.

George Matteson spent decades on the waterfront of New York and knows the towing business from hawser to spreadsheet—and he’s researched the development of the harbor’s workboats with the eye of experience. His book guides you effortlessly into the world of tugboating, showing you the ropes (pun intended) with the ease of a master. You can’t help but respect him for both his undoubtedly hard-won insider’s view of a gritty profession and his spare, pointed, informative prose. You might say he guides the reader through a century-and-a-half of maritime history like the seasoned seaman he is.

According to Matteson, tugboating is an especially non-routine business, in that “each tow is different, each requires special attention to rigging and maneuver” (2). Working in New York Harbor presents additional complexities; the Hudson River is officially designated as a fjord, having been cut by glaciers rather than by flowing melt from upstate, and in it salt water and fresh mix throughout. “The rise and fall in the harbor is about five and one-half feet,” Matteson reports, unlike other east coast harbors with rises of three or less ( 6). While the harbor is protected by islands and hooks of land spread down through Brooklyn and New Jersey, it can also be a cauldron of whipping cross-currents.

In the early days, two streams of maritime business filled New York harbor: ocean-going ships from other US ports and abroad and the river traffic of passengers and goods to-ing and fro-ing from all the river towns up the Hudson River to Albany. Especially after the opening of the canal system to transport goods back and forth across NY State to the Great Lakes and down into the coal country of Pennsylvania, NY harbor became a locus of shipping and passenger activity.

At first, steam ferries, diverted from their primary assignments, handled the job of towing sailing vessels into berth. Towboats began to be specialized as passengers and freight customers demanded reliable service. Gradually, river and harbor freight movement shifted to barges when it became obvious that tugboats could move unpowered loads more efficiently through more diverse conditions than they could tow loaded sailing sloops. Throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century, hundreds of tugboats swarmed though the harbor in New York endlessly performing the daily work of commerce.

Tugboats of New York is in “coffee-table” format with dozens of photographs of working tugs and harbor scenes drawn from the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and other archives. Boats make great subjects, of course, being sculptural and statuesque, and NY provides a dramatic textured background. The author’s photo choices portray both the scenic and the work-a-day shipping world, and beneath each photo, Matteson’s lengthy captions explain details only a mariner would notice.

Towing involves great seamanship and acumen on the part of boat captains and crew. Matteson’s crystal descriptions of such strategies as towing “on the hawser,” “shifting,” and “gate towing” make you comprehend the craft involved; in fact, you feel you could do it on the basis of his instructions (and you almost wish you could). But you also realize the depth of practice involved in success in this trade.

In describing “shifting,” for example, Matteson writes that “moving one or a number of barges within a tightly congested ship or work site requires a level of delicacy and precision far greater than that required for other towing assignments. . . . Each barge may be destined for a different customer, so the order of eventual delivery must be reflected in the order that each is added to the tow, the first to be dropped off needs to be the last added to the tow. . . . To open up a raft of barges, extract one or several, and close the raft back up in the fewest possible moves is a distinct skill at which some tug captains excel and others do not” (74-75).

A reader comes to realize that the tasks on board are performed in a state of almost mystic cooperation: “Key to success in shifting work is a skilled captain and crew who have worked together long enough for each to anticipate the actions of the other. In the days when engine room orders were conveyed by the use of bells, the deckhands working out on the barges could usually keep track of the tug’s intentions by careful listening. . . . A highly polished crew can perform the most complicated maneuvers in near complete silence, each knowing exactly what to do and often using only hand signals.”

He continues, “Railroad shifting tugs averaged 566 bell commands from pilothouse to engine room in an eight-hour shift. During a close-in shifting operation the rate of bell signals transmitted from pilothouse to engine room might read six per minute, and a period of such intense activity might last an hour or more. The likelihood of a miscue at some point in this process, sending tug and barge off at the wrong speed or direction, is inevitable, and many costly accidents and time-consuming snarls have been the result.” When engine technology so that the pilothouse directly controlled the engine, towing and the job of shifting became immensely easier. Matteson concludes, “The development of twin-screw propulsion adapted for pilothouse control of the engines further simplified the work of shifting such that the old captains of single-screw bell boats would say that, nowadays, anybody can do it.”

My interest in Matteson’s book, of course, is that it captures what the job was like for my tug captain ancestors, Capt. Quimby and the two Capt. Burgers, who all worked, not New York Harbor, but Brooklyn Harbor. To a great extent, of course, these are the same places and share the same history. But Matteson’s book focuses on Manhattan’s shipping industry, and so there is almost no mention of onshore conditions or companies in Brooklyn (except those that grew and became Manhattan companies). My captains were operating during a period of intense growth in harbor activity. Matteson provides the astonishing statistics: “The dollar value of manufactured goods produced in Manhattan and Brooklyn went from 105 million in 1850 to 194 million in 1870 and just over a billion in 1890. . . . The [city’s] population skyrocketed from 650,000 in 1850 to 1, 360,000 in 1870 and 2, 350,000 in 1890.”

Describing the intensity of the need for tugboats in what may have been towing golden’s hour, he continues: “In 1896, there were 4,460 arrivals of vessels from overseas and 10,229 from U.S. coastal ports. There were 4,736 steamers, and the rest were sailing vessels, including 8,353 coasting schooners.”

Beyond assisting ships, tugs also moved huge amounts of goods. “Vast quantities of stone, block ice, and brick came down the Hudson, so much sand was barged into the city from the north shore of Long Island that local observers wondered if the island would disappear entirely into the maw of New York City.” And what went out is even more astonishing: “Cellar dirt, the debris from the excavation of building foundations; dredge spoil, the mud and silt produced by the maintenance and steady enlargement of harbor facilities; garbage; ashes; horse manure (about four hundred tons per day), and dead horses (about two hundred per day) all left the city by barge for disposal offshore or at the rendering plants . . .” (84).

The return of boats from the civil war and the magnetism of NY caused an eventual glut of tugboats in the harbor, according to Matteson, by the late 1880s (just when my family captains would have been operating). “The majority of boats [at that time] were owned by partnerships, often comprising captain, engineer, family members, and associates. Because the captain and engineer owners of a small tug could not simultaneously run the boat and run the business, the securing and scheduling of individual jobs and the subsequent payment for these jobs was ordinarily handled by a towing agent, usually with offices along the Manhattan waterfront“ (91-92).

The end of the nineteenth century saw what Matteson calls a “sea change’” in the business of towing, with many of the older operators selling out. Many original boat operators were, of course, approaching retirement age after a long career as tugboat pioneers. The overabundance of tugs drove prices down. Also, the press to upgrade to propeller power drove some of the traditionalists away, to retirement or the slower life of tugboating on one of the canals or lakes. Finally, the era of corporatization had arrived, and tugboating was becoming a professionalized business field. “Tugboating at the end of the nineteenth century was leaving behind its entrepreneurial beginnings and settling into the character of a mature service industry where success is more dependent on office discipline than on wheelhouse daring” (94).

Matteson recounts the story of the Luckenbach towing company, prominent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and interesting to me because the immigrant Lewis Luckenbach was reared in Rondout, NY, and started his first business there. His first tug was, in fact, called the Blue Stone. He proceeded by retrofitting schooners as barges, with marginal sailing capacity to be used only in extremis. Luckenbach saw early the profitability of venturing out on the high seas to transport goods and get away from the intense rivalry for business in the harbor itself.

In addition to compiling the history of shipping in New York, Tugboats of New York uncovers the details of seamanship and celebrates the practical art involved in commonplace work. Every detail of the book is pristine: the photographs, the design, the clarity of explication, the easy but professional tone, all, in fact, modeling the attention to detail and the fanatical competence that is required to work at sea–qualities often obscured by the supposed ordinariness of the labor that weaves the complex materiality of our civilization.

Margaret, August 19, 1912-December 7, 1961

Years after the death of her beloved husband, journalist Lynn Sheer interviewed psychiatrist and grief-expert Jimmie Holland for the television show 20/20. Holland disputed the existence of the now-classic “five stages of grief”—the concept that people “progress” through a series of ever-healthier emotions and finally heal from a loved-one’s death. To this expert, boxing people into a rigid concept of how they are supposed to feel after a loved one dies—and when they are supposed to feel it—is punishing, not curative. Sheer quotes her: “Your pattern of grief is as unique as your pattern of love.”

For Sheer, this one sentence was liberation: she had not progressed to “acceptance” of her husband’s death, and she realized she didn’t have to, she could stay sad if she was sad. To her, embracing sorrow was a means of reconnecting with her loved one; grief was a manner of relationship.

But my deaths came well before the stages of grief were invented.

There were no expectations about mourning then. There were no constructions around experiencing a death, other than the formalities of funeral.

This doesn’t mean I grew up in some halcyon time of natural grieving. Not at all. Around death there was silence. There was the scaffold of ritual and a busy-ness of preparations that occupied adults. And there was euphemism.

“She’s in a better place.”

“The good die young, that’s the way it is.”

“God took her so early because he loved her so.”

This was meant to comfort me? God didn’t much love a thirteen-year-old girl if he took her mother. Away. Forever.

* * * * *

The culture of platitudes was, of course, a culture of suppression, a way of rushing past the pain, of boarding an express to next week, when it would be all over. Probably it was meant to cushion the bereaved in public and permit private mourning. But shallow funeral-talk—Your mother is with the angels—was just another abandonment.

The “five stages” put a slower train on the tracks through the territory of grief, with, of course, the same destination: complete recovery for the living, oblivion for the dead.

Grief became work, a job to be done and done well.

I was twenty-something when I heard of the stages of grief. It was deeply weird: at my first job after college I was assigned to write a press release about a book on thanatology, the “science” of grief. Sitting at a desk, looking out at St. John’s Cathedral where pigeons swarmed in the eye-blue sky, I read without revelation. This step-by-step pilgrimage couldn’t be retrofitted to what I’d been through. It didn’t fit my case, for, after all, nothing did. Two parents dead, dropping like dimes out of God’s pocket of a sudden, falling forever through a hole in His pants, tumbling through infinity, a bit of silver lost, written off His accounts.

Five stages of grief would be a luxury when you’re a kid on your own. You move on. You move from the dorm to an apartment so you can have your stuff all twelve months. You give up the portion of your scholarship that pays the residence hall, but start to collect the veteran and Social Security survivor benefits for minor children attending college. You wait tables and you pay the mortgage on the family house until the sale goes through. You pay the undertaker, you pay the doctor who closed your dad’s eyes, you share out the few thou that’s left with your sibs, and you put what’s left of your dad’s life in a savings account for some rainy day.

I shed platitudes then.

I swore never to say, “passed on.” I was at war with pillowed sorrow. I would say “dead.” This speaking formed a tribute to them, though I didn’t realize it then. I honored them by showing that I knew what had really happened. They had died from life. Their children were tossed to the center. I would bite grief and chew it.

* * * * * *

So my mother is my first ancestor.

And, my father is my second.

In genealogy I complete myself. I get them back—and the others too, that went before. I have them, not the way I did, but a different way. Not such a great way—I know—but it is the only way.

Seeing their names on a page of the census, opening an envelope with a vital record inside, is like glimpsing a familiar face in the window of a passing train. The moment goes by too fast to wave, too fast to attempt any signal at all. But the trace lingers, an image in the mind, ink on a page, bits of data in storage, indexed now for retrieval through all time.

Decades have passed, but I still have grief. I look out over my scraggly fall garden and think of my Mom’s zinnias, carnival colors outside our front door, then drying stiff in the turn of the season. More, I think of her similar moments, hand on a mug of coffee, quiet in the house, children at school, the meaning of it all drifting in the air outside a window, leaves circling in a fall wind.

My sorrow transmutes to empathy as I learn details of their struggle. Instead of stunned, mugged, plundered, by loss, I can feel about them. I feel for them the way you feel for a person you know and love, whose life entangles with yours.

Genealogy is my relationship with my family. It is my grief still alive.

The Big-Big Parents

What’s so grand about grandparents? I wondered about this as a child, you know. Typical of me: snagged by words that didn’t quite fit, words that sprouted questions.

Now I realize, of course, it must be from the French. Les grand parents: crunch that r in the back of your throat, drop the plosive d, squeeze your nose tight. And this, translated, means, big parents, big as in Grand Canyon.

Now the word makes me picture an extended family, with a tiny, tiny baby held between the regular-size Momma and Poppa, and all of them loomed over by the swollen giant shadows of les Grand Parents.

Today people rue the loss of the extended family, but les grandparents looming is not what every momma and poppa want.

My first home was a cottage next to my Irish grandmother’s house. It was wood frame with minimal amenities (as one would say today)—a water closet (one toilet in, yes, a closet), a kitchen sink, a gas stove, an ice box. (I saw the ice man cometh throughout my youth). The house was heated by a coal furnace in the parlor (not a cute wood stove, mind you, a furnace, possibly installed by my plumber-dad). I was bathed in a washtub; my parents must have borrowed a shower somewhere from time to time. Before us, my mother’s sisters and their husbands and babies bunked there until they got their feet under them and moved on.

Until I was five, I saw Grandma Jennie regularly. She was too old to come across the yard and visit us. Heck, she’d been born, to my best estimates, in 1874.

Mostly I remember being in her house—a dark room, people crowded in, chatter of voices, milky tea in big cups for the children, wooden chairs and a table of some kind. I’m not even sure if the room I remember was the parlor or the kitchen, but it was a room for laughing in.

One time she did visit us, at some small family gathering in the cottage. She and I went for a walk hand-in-hand on the road across from the house. I strained to pull a flower, a blue cornflower, my favorite, and I pulled her right over. She couldn’t get back up, but she held on tight to me, afraid I’d get hurt in the road. I yelled, and she yelled, and everyone poured out of the house to rescue her. When they learned it was all because of a flower, they yelled at me for knocking her down. She wasn’t, of course, exactly steady on her feet, being not only old but partial to whiskey. Nevertheless: I’m sorry, Grandma.

You don’t want to be the cause of somebody falling in the road, especially your ancestor. I think we’re reaching for flowers here. We’re hoping to make that chart of les big-big and les big-big-big parents. The chart where they’re up above us, looming. The part about where they fall down, well, it’s part of the narrative, small print on the next page.

* * * * * *

Les Big-Big, Cont.

We got our own house and became our own solo nuclear family. Eventually my dad built an apartment on the second floor for my other grandma, his mother. Here is where some actual looming came in.

Grandma Josie was rather opinionated about how children should be raised. In particular, she thought they should be raised Methodist. She raised my older half-brother so, even though I believe he’d been baptized in a Catholic Church—his deceased mother was a Kildare. And here my Dad had gone and married another Catholic.

When I went upstairs to pay my grandmother a visit, she tried to evangelize me. She reminisced about a blind preacher she had heard speak in her youth at a “revival” (whatever that was). She showed me her Bible and read to me from it and seemed faintly shocked that I was completely unfamiliar with the book. Never mind its contents—its tissue pages and red titles were nothing I’d ever seen before. I was seven or so at the time, and I was getting an A in catechism, but her lesson introduced an alien world. She spoke gently against statues and Virgin Marys and told me to watch a particular preacher on the TV who didn’t need fancy robes and ringing bells to spread the word of Jesus.

I didn’t exactly rat on my Grannie—but with bursting mixed emotions at hearing so much new in the realm of God—I told my mom. I wanted to hear her view.

It was not positive: Grandma is a different religion and she doesn’t believe the same as us. Ignore it.

But it didn’t end there for the grown-ups. There was some sort of late-night discussion, heated enough I could hear it from my bed, about this bad behavior on my grandma’s part. I never visited her by myself again. There were from then on quite separate worlds in our divided house.

The Ladies Aid from the Methodist Church that Grandma had attended in her previous town picked her up for church. She didn’t much visit us downstairs, and we didn’t visit her up there. She watched us children come and go through her windows. She grew African violets in a planter.

Once I expressed to my mother some sorrow about not knowing my grandmas very well. In late elementary school I had become aware of children whose grandmothers were close family. My mother told me her philosophy that it wasn’t good for children to be too close to their grandparents, because they would be too hurt when the old folks passed away. I’m sorry, Grandma.

Day of the Dead

On the car radio, Chef Jim’s show came on; his guest was discussing memorializing of the dead in Chinese culture. In particular, the Dragon Boat festival celebrates the attempted rescue of an ancient nobleman who threw himself into the river in despair over a dynastic shift. Sticky rice is wrapped in bamboo packages and thrown in the water to feed his spirit, while the boats race futilely to abort his suicide.

I was driving to the craft shop to scare up some preservation aids: acid-free paper, polypropylene photo sleeves, archival quality this and that. The world is yellow and saffron and tangerine as clouds of leaves diffuse from high above us into the middle air where we live and on down to the ground. My part of the county seemingly has millions of trees—-my yard alone has fifty—and therefore some billions of leaves are dancing through our peripheral vision.

I slid into the right lane to leave the bypass for a smaller road, but had to pull in as a cortege of cars, purple stickers on the rear windows, lights blinking, processed in the local lane. Slowed to a majesty, seeming hooded and private, the cars moved as one unit: a ritual as old as the Ford, as old as the horse and wagon, as old as feet, really, I suppose, as old as grief.

Another radio guest, a restauranteur, discussed her months of preparations for the Mexican feast of the Day of the Dead—or days, first one for the angelita, the little angels who have passed on, and the next for adults. Originally an Aztec celebration going back to antiquity, it became linked to All Souls Day by missionaries in the fifteenth century and now is celebrated in the fall. In Mexico, people decorate the cemeteries; candles and marigolds are spread to help light the way so the dead can find their families; picnics of special foods are spread, including “Day of the Dead” bread and sugared treats, even skulls made of candy, and a hot corn-chocolate drink similar to cocoa. Home altars are also stocked with food and flowers as people beckon the spirits and honor their significance. It is a circle of life celebration, not one of mourning.

I turned on to another secondary road and drove past the Catholic cemetery—it’s so big you can hardly see any graves beyond the expanses of lawn at its margins—and the cortege had U-turned and was coming back down to turn into the cemetery gate. Someone’s bones were going in the ground. Chef Jim’s last guest gave instructions on how to make a chocolate spider out of melted chocolate, chow main noodles and rice crispy cakes.

And at Michael’s, I lucked out: there was a 40%-off sale on archival memory books.

Rachels

I have Josephines, but I also have Rachels. The first Rachel that I know of for sure is Jannette’s daughter, born about two years before my great-great grandmother Josephine. I have a suspicion, however, that Jannette may have had a sister named Rachel, on the basis of some bits and pieces I have seen on the web. Since Rachel is carried on in Josephine’s family going down at least two more generations, I believe my great-grandmother Josie and her sister Rae were close. But I haven’t been able to find out much about Rachel.

She appears in the 1860 census with her parents, age 11, “attends school,” and in the 1865 NY census (“Rachel A 15”). But in 1870, she is not living at home with Jannette: only Josephine 18 (“app. dressmaker”) and William 14 (“cook on boat”) are still at home. Josephine’s apprenticeship is significant: the next reference I can find to Rachel is an entry in the Brooklyn Lain’s Directory for 1878: Burger, R. A. dressmkr h 301 Degraw.

By this time, many of the Burger siblings are in Brooklyn. Josephine is married and living with Walter. Rachel herself marries William, Walter’s brother, in 1878, and in 1880 the couple is living on Court Street. Rachel is still a dressmaker. But she fades from view after this.

Josephine names her first daughter for her sister Rachel in 1884. Her second daughter is my grandmother Josephine, who grows up and has two daughters, also Rachel (“baby Rae”) and Josephine. Baby Rae dies in childhood, but her aunt Rachel marries and has a son and a daughter, whom she names Josephine. Rachel is listed as “Rae” in the 1920 census, so that seems to be the usual nickname for the Rachels. But then, as my information moves toward the middle of the twentieth century and the databases close up, I can’t tell if there were any more Josephines or Rachels.

Mary’s Middle Son

One of the mysteries is where my grandpop was in 1910. I have his marriage certificate in March of that year, with a Bay Ridge Avenue address on it. In April, in the census, his new bride is living with her mother (the two Josephines), under her new name, on Seventeenth Street, but grandpop isn’t in the household. They will continue to live in the Seventeenth Street house, so I wonder whether whoever gave the census information was just confused and omitted him.

He doesn’t appear in the census for that year at all—or rather I haven’t been able to scare him up. I decided to search Bay Ridge Avenue for him; even though he doesn’t pop out when I search directly for his name (and variants), I thought perhaps he was recorded at his old address in some indecipherable way but that I would recognize him if I saw the census page.

I figured out from a 1910 Brooklyn ward map on the web that his address would have been in the 30th Ward. Then I massaged Ancestry until it gave me a listing and description of the E.D.s in Wd. 30. I photocopied a map I have of contemporary Brooklyn and sketched in some E.D. boundaries until I figured out his was 1097. Then I called up and read the pages, searching the street names on the left margin until I came to Bay Ridge Avenue. I first found the odd numbers, but I read through the names anyway. Then, a few pages on, I found the even side of the block. Grandpop is not recorded at the address he was married from. I kept on reading, and about thirty numbers on there was a family with his/ our name—a variant, actually more common spelling of—but our name nevertheless. The head, James, is 35; he’s married, with three children. He is reportedly born in NY of a Pennsylvanian father and Irish mother.

So—is James a relative? Did my grandfather live with his family in Bay Ridge before marrying? Or live nearby to them because he was related? James might be a half-brother, the child of his father from a first marriage in PA. Or James might be a cousin, descended from the brother of grandpop’s father. Or is this just a coincidence?

I have been able to follow this other McM family through two more censuses. James’s origin varies: in the other two censuses he is said to be born in PA of a PA father and Irish mother. I would in the past have discounted him as a relative on the assumption that my McM line was rooted in NY. But Mary did live in PA, western PA, and it is possible that she knew McM there and not in Brooklyn. All reports are that my grandpop was born in Brooklyn, but that doesn’t mean his parents were ever there together.

James and his wife were apparently married about 1898. She is a NYer, so I would expect the marriage to be in Brooklyn. But 1898 falls within a gap of the marriage records indexed on-line at IGG; without knowing Emma’s last name, I can’t get the certificate number. I might just have a several-years’ search done to see if I can’t scare up the marriage license: perhaps it will give me a sense of who his parents are. I have not had any luck regressing James and Emma back from 1910. They seemingly were together in 1900—in the 1930 census he indicates he was married at age 22—but I can’t find them before 1910.

And there’s still the matter of Grandpop in 1910: where was he hiding?

Less Than I Knew

Yesterday I received quite the anticlimax: the death certificate of Jeannette. All along, it was exactly where it should have been, in the archives of the City of Brooklyn, now within the NYC archives on Chambers Street. It’s just that I didn’t know where that “should be” place was.

The anticlimax: how minimally informative a death certificate from 1884 can be:

Department of Health of the City of Brooklyn
[Brooklyn was a separate city until 1898]

1. Full name, Jeannette Burger
2. Age, 68 years, –– months, –– days.
3. Sex, Female 4. White
5. Widow
6. Birthplace, New York State 7. Occupation, ______________
8. If of foreign birth, how long in the U.S. —————-
9. How long resident in City, One years. [sic]
10. Father’s birthplace, NY 11. Mother’s birthplace, NY
12. Place of Death, 451 Sackett Street Brooklyn Ward, 10th
13. Number of Families in House, two 14. On what floor, 2nd
14. I HEREBY CERTIFY that I attended the deceased from Nov. 5, 1884,
that I last saw her alive on the 15 day of Nov. 1884; that she died on the
15th day of November 1884 about 3:45 o’clock P.M., and that the following
was the
16. Cause of Death I. Hemiplegia II. Asthema
Time from attack till death About 10 days
Signed by C. Eugene Gunther, M.D. No. 157 Clinton Street
17. Place of Burial, Kingston N.Y. State Cemetery
18. Date of Burial Nov. 17
19. Undertaker A. Lennart Place of Business 277 Columbia

The one detail I care most about––the names of her parents––is absent.

There’s also no indication of who the informant was for this document.

It seems filled with generalizations: her age is rounded off to 68. There is no option to indicate Divorced, so she is listed incorrectly as a Widow. (Sex, race, and marital status are indicated by crossing off what does not apply,i.e., Single, Married, Widower, not by filling in a blank.) The place of birth for everyone is just the state. The place of burial is a city, rather than the name of a cemetery. I already know more than this document tells!

So I can’t really trust that she has been in the city for a year. Obviously, it’s rounded off, or even just a place-filler. She might have been there for a year and a half, or perhaps just a few weeks.

The address is something to check on: 297 Sackett Street was the 1897 residence of Alva, Jeannette’s grandson by James, according to the Lain Directory. And, in 1876, Walter Davis gives 460 Sackett as his address on his marriage license. So, some family members were living at 451 (or 7) in 1884, but who? I’ll make this certificate yield some new information yet!

Mary, Mary, What Were You Thinking?

It’s one thing, I suppose, if you find a horse rustler in your genealogy; that’s kind of funny. A thief, a chisler, a dance-hall gal . . . we assume that they at least had some fun, and they did do what suited them. Perhaps dramatic improper behavior signals some gusto, some pride, some chutzpah we can at least appreciate.

But suppose what you find is sly compromise, shifty adjustment of the facts, slipperiness and evasion? How can you get comfortable with that? If you could know the details, you might feel compassion—or you might not. Without details, though, with only an outline sketch of behavior, you wind up a with a kind of caricature.

I recently acquired a marriage certificate that confirms my analysis of the 1870-1900 federal census data for my grandfather McM’s mother. She married young (c.f., 1880 census), had four children with her first husband between 1880 and 1890. In 1890, my grandfather was born. By 1900, Mary was married to George Payn. and had his one-year-old child. Both my grandfather, age 9, and her children by her first husband are in the household.

There are many missing pieces. The first husband died, I presume, but I don’t know it for sure. Also, I don’t know whether Mary actually married my great-grandfather McM—I have some reasons to suspect not. I don’t know what happened to this great-grandfather—whether he died, or was already married to someone else, or drifted off—he’s quite elusive. I have not found him for certain in any census.

Furthermore, in the information that I do have, there are details that are wrong, or that seem unlikely, and these details don’t read as mistakes.

For example: In the 1900 census, Mary is married to George, who is 24. She is 39, born Aug. 1861. According to this census, Mary has had only one child; that would point to their baby Howard H, age one. But the household includes four step-children, surnamed Reed, the same as her first husband and clearly also hers. The nine-year-old “boarder” in the house is my grandfather, another of her children, yet he isn’t even identified as a relative. His parents supposedly are both from Ireland—but I know through family papers that his mother was Mary Strick., born in NY. My grandfather’s last name is also misspelled in a way that seems snide. But, who knows? One can’t ascribe intention to such small mistakes. But unless the information was relayed by someone who didn’t know John was Mary’s son, it appears as if this relationship is being disguised or disowned.

But now I have acquired the marriage certificate for Mary and this George, and it is revealing, for the details can only have come directly from her. She gives her age as 28, although she is 37. She says this is her second marriage. This would be true if my grandfather were born out-of-wedlock, not at all an impossibility. But, conflicting with that, Mary is using, not the surname of her first husband or even her maiden surname, but McM. If she is legitimately McM, then she was married to the elusive Daniel, and she’s going into her third wedding.

It appears to me that my grandpop was a source of embarrassment—humiliatingly renamed, distanced as a “boarder.” His mother seemingly took his last name to cover her lack of marriage to his father. But pressed for information for the wedding license, she admits to only one prior marriage. She lowers her age, to the point that her first four children, ages 13 to 19, wouldn’t fit into her shortened life. Yet I know I am not dealing with two Marys, because all the while her mother, Sarah Strick., is in the household.

Another oddity on the marriage license is that Mary’s father is called “George” when according to the census of 1870 (where the family is indexed on Ancestry with the first letter “W” instead of an “S,” Mary’s father has the first name of “Charles.”

The final conundrum: George Payn. seems to be a relative himself. I haven’t figured it all out yet: he may be a cousin once or twice removed. Mary’s mother Sarah’s maiden name was Payn., and I have followed her family back a bit. I think Sarah’s daughter’s husband George is the son or grandson of her brother, also George.

And, then, there’s this: Mary marries George in April, 1898. According to the 1900 census, their son, Harold, is born September 1898. Mary is pushing forty at that point. You think she would be able to think things through a bit by that time. There I go . . . twenty-first century moralism back-loaded on to the past.

Contemporary views of bluestone industry

In discussing the Kingston Courthouse in his book Picturesque Ulster, Richard L. De Lisser indulges in a bit of a digression and-or diatribe about the bluestone industry in the area. The court house setting is peaceful, he says, except when “the rumbling and lurching of the heavily loaded stone wagons . . . go jolting by, on their way from the quarries in the mountains to the blue stone yards along the Rondout Creek.”

He continues, “In no place but Kingston would such abuse of a city’s principal thoroughfare be tolerated. The roadbed of the streets through which these teams pass is so deeply rutted and broken up as to be almost impassable at times. These wagons carry an enormous weight, often exceeding eighteen tons. ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ The great flat bluestones comprising the load, sometimes measure over 200 square feet, and project four or five feet from either side of a four horse wagon, to the annoyance of others and a menace to all vehicles. ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ The right to use the street in this manner is claimed by a company that obtained its charter about the year 1850, and which has been renewed since, by an Act of Legislature. The city by virtue of recent legislation has commenced condemnation proceedings against the private ownership of its main street, as that we may soon hope to see this nuisance abated” (11).

Review: Picturesque Ulster

Review: Picturesque Ulster Richard Lionel De Lisser, 1896-1905. © 1968 C.E. Dornbusch. Republished, Saugerties: Hope Farm Press, 1998.

This is both a wonderful and supremely odd book by our current standards. Its history explains its character: the facsimile available today brings together eight smaller books written for the tourists who began flocking to Ulster County in the latter nineteenth century. Part guidebook, part photo-documentary, the compendium covers its subject in great detail, more detail than today’s tourists would appreciate unless the subject was Renaissance Italy or some such. But for a reader willing to work for the privilege of being transported back 110 years, the book is a treasure trove.

Yet, it presents obstacles. The author, or “artist,” is Richard Lionel De Lisser, whose crisp photographs of Ulster County scenes form the heart of the book and the premise for his essayistic “rambles” through the area.

His pictures document Kingston and other towns in great detail. Yet, they are always from a certain distance and most are clinical: passersby are absent, for the most part, and stillness reigns. Yet the coverage of buildings and neighborhoods is priceless; there are places where De Lisser literally goes up one side of a street and down the next, discussing what is known of each property. Every single photo is captioned. Another photographer supplied some photos of buildings no longer extant at De Lisser’s time.

It is the layout that frustrates the most. The pictures are arranged stylishly on the pages but they are not numbered, referenced or coordinated with the text. The picture of a building under discussion might be found numerous but untold pages prior.

Even more head-slapping for a twenty-first century reader is the interweaving of the main text by De Lisser with topical essays he commissioned by contemporary experts. You are reading along about the First Dutch Church of Kingston and turn the page to find a separate in-depth essay on the subject but no indication of where you might pick up the next word of the sentence you have been reading. The Table of Contents does indicate the leaps and bounds of De Lisser’s text through the book, but it is never comfortable navigating your way. And, the text blocks are crowded: sans paragraphs, the text indicates topic changes by strings of dingbats.

At the turn of the century, Ulster County’s tourist region was to the north: Woodstock, Saugerties . . . the mountains and untouched backwoods. This volume covers only northern Ulster County, the parts most appealing to the audience of tourists that De Lisser hoped would buy the eight booklets. As the editor of the first reissued facsimile (1968), Alf Evers, points out, the author ignored “those sides of life in Ulster which might offend the audience he had in mind—that was why he touched lightly on the lives of Ulster’s urban poor who lacked the picturesqueness readers of the 1890s found in backwoods poverty . . . “ Hence, the book skims over the harder part of life and the more common people and occupations are little rendered.

Evers also indicates that a second companion volume was intended for the southern part of the county but it was never done.

This is most unfortunate, of course, for my needs. De Lisser covers Kingston and Rondout in great detail, but he put off the work-a-day towns and hamlets across the river for another, never-to-be-realized, time. Port Ewen, Fly Mountain, Sleightsburg, Rifton, St. Remy . . . so close yet quite forgotten in “Picturesque Ulster.”

When De Lisser recounts the history of churches in Kingston and Rondout, he supplies details I have been craving. As a genealogical researcher, I want a sense of when the various denominations started holding services in Kingston and Esopus. Only with that knowledge can one determine whether any church records are missing or incomplete. Since I have reviewed quite a few microfilms of Esopus area church records, I even recognized some of the information recounted in the narrative part of the text.

Having a go at antique volumes like this is part of being a responsible researcher . . . although not the easiest reading, it helps fill in the background of a crucial family homeland. It also conveys the sense of self and locality held by the people of Kingston in the 1890s. So I’ll be plowing on through the rest of the essays pertinent to Kingston and Rondout.