Characters on the page

Given my heritage (Irish), my college majors (theatre & French) and my taste in literature (eclectic), it is safe to say that I have run into my share of characters in my life, both fictitious and real. In the genealogical sense, though, characters are often glyphs that we spend time trying to decipher. 

In the 1980s, calligraphy was all the rage, and I was sure I could parlay my nascent skills into cash, addressing wedding invitations and such. I was fascinated by the shape and form of letters, and the strokes that made them up, the feel of the nib on paper. In those days, when you wanted to use a specific font for a poster or program, the best you could do was to purchase rub-off letters in the font of your choice (your choice being predetermined by which fonts your office supply supplied), or to invest in overpriced pens and nibs and spend hours practicing. I did both, and even though I thought I could make a good living as a graphic artist, it turned out that before I could really get started, computers made it easy for anyone--regardless of their artistic sensibilities--to produce flyers and banners in cutting-edge dot-matrix fonts. The writing, as they say, was on the wall.

In graduate school, I indulged my love of farce and learned to read 15th century manuscripts--knowing myself how the pen strokes formed the letters and words meant that I could literally see and feel the actions of the scribe. The other part of the task, of course, was learning the old and middle French so I could make sense of the language made of these ciphers. Learning modern German was easy after that.

As a professional translator, I am sometimes called upon to decipher the odd handwriting in an official document, providing the holder with an official translation to pursue their chosen path in life. But what strikes me overall is the permanence of the written word. Poets before us have noted it, but the fact that I could spend hours hunched over a sheet of parchment that someone wrote on five centuries before I was even a twinkle in my father's eye is sobering. 

In general, if it was important enough for someone to write it, it was important enough to keep. In genealogy, we are fortunate that someone hung on to those traces of pen on paper; loopy handwriting, sloppy hen scratches, misspellings abound, but somehow they are nearly always recognizable (though there will always be the ink splotch or tear that will obfuscate just the number or letter we need for our research). 

I still write with a fountain pen--when I write by hand at all; the callous on my middle finger is all but gone. Decades ago, I spent many hours poring over microfilms of parish records in the national archives in Dublin, Ireland, armed with a steno pad, my trusty blue fountain pen, and paper; These records are now scanned--and indexed--and it is eerie to be able to revisit them. I am reminded that the lines not only trace the names of my ancestors in those characters, but these rural parish priests themselves were characters in the play called life--as they wrote notes, including IOUs in the margins to each other, they painted a more complete picture of these lives we strive to remember than any typewritten records digitized using the latest AI.

Edward Walsh's baptismal record

An official birthdate

For the vast majority of us, our birth certificate is our primary proof of identity and existence (on paper). As genealogists, we rejoice when we find one, especially when it lists things like the parents' names, bridging generations.

There is a certain irony that my Grandmother, Ruth Thompson, who spent years on her family's genealogy and who was a state regent of the California DAR for several years, had no birth certificate of her own. 

She was born July 25, 1884 in Steele City, Nebraska, which had a population of about 375 people at the time (and the population has been declining ever since). The town, hardly worth its moniker of "city," was founded in 1873 when the St. Joseph and Western Railroad was extended to that point. It is no accident that Ruth's father was a railway employee. Needless to say, the town did not have a city hall or other place to register her birth (or the births of her sisters). The family bible has single line notations for their births--and college graduations.

But since the government had determined that 65 was the official retirement age, and she qualified for social security payments in 1949, not having a birth certificate finally became an issue. So she started her journey to get a birth certificate. 

The first thing she learned was that she was not alone--in the 1940s, as many as 40 million Americans did not have an official birth certificate, likely mostly rural residents. And as it turns out, most vital statistics offices decided early on that family bibles were not acceptable proof of birth. So even though she had a photostat of the bible's family record, that didn't do the job. 

But something interesting happened in around this time: the Soundex system gained traction--and the US Census Bureau undertook transferring all the data from the 1920, 1900 and 1880 censuses to 100 million individual punch cards, all filed using Soundex. My mother clipped an article for Ruth out of the Sunday paper:

"The Soundex system, installed by the WPA in the less hurried depression years, makes use of phonetic filing. Thus, all names like Martin are filed, state by state, under the letter M and the code number 635. If your family name was wrongly recorded or even changed slightly, it still will be there under such variations as Mardan, Marden, Mardyn, Martan, Marten, Martyn, Merten, Merton, Morden, Morten, Mortin, Morton or Murten. And, for a nominal fee, the Census Bureau will send you an official transcript of its records concerning you, which may serve as a substitute 'birth certificate.'"

It was that last sentence that held the key. Correspondence shows that Roy V. Peel, Director of the Bureau of the Census, provided her with an official transcript of the census enumeration that included her 9-month-old self living with her parents (Geo. C. and Mary Fay Thompson) in Omaha Nebraska in 1900 (that census wasn't released until 1972). The 1900 census asked for the birth month for all residents, which established her birth month and year as July 1884. 

It cost $4 with the Douglas County clerk to file an affidavit from her cousin Robert Neely to prove her birthday was celebrated on the 25th of July, and that she had been born in Steele City. And so, on July 15, 1954, she received her Certificate of Delayed Birth Registration -- just 10 days shy of her 70th birthday.