Looking for Kate

Last week I was in New York City and spent time at the Municipal Archives searching for any information about my great-grandmother Kate Higgins or her brother Michael, both of whom came to Indiana on an Orphan train in 1860 or '61.

Their parents were Irish, and we believe from a letter written later in life by Michael that her father was Thomas Higgins and they lived on Elizabeth Street, which runs about a mile between what is now Chinatown and Nolita (northern Little Italy). Based in what I have been able to learn about Elizabeth Street in the 1850s, the southern end of it was part of Five Points, the worst slum in NYC at the time. So, despite family legends about a dastardly uncle who sent Kate and Michael away to take their money--I suspect they were destitute.

Early birth records in NYC, which begin in 1847/48, then stop, then restart at 1853, were simple kept in ledger books. The books are divided up alphabetically, with everyoneborn to a parent with last name H appearing in the same section, and the books run chronologically (for the most part) from there. More often than not, only the names of the parents, sex of the child, address of the [parents and name of physician or midwife are included.

I came up empty, but I suppose many people simply did not register births in those early years.

So today, I visited Kate's grave at South Park Cemetery in Martinsville, Indiana. I took a picture of her headstone, and uploaded it to Find-A-Grave. I feel like I have somehow finally registered her as someone who lived in this world.

The Quarterfinals--George Smith Wilhelm in the Maternal Bracket

I play tennis and I love nothing more than to spend a week watching every match of a great tennis tournament. Small wonder, then, that tennis tournaments are how I think of ancestry.  But it makes a curious kind of sense.

Winner: me (1)

Finalists: the parents (2)


Semifinalists:the grandparents (4)

Quarterfinalists: the great-grandparents (8)

Round of 16: the great-greats (16)

and so on--each generation back in time yielding twice as many players/ancestors as the one it gave rise to.

For me, things get really interesting in the Quarters and the Round of 16. The ancestor I know the most about, because he left a 240-page memoir, is my quarterfinalist grandpa, George Smith Wilhelm. Just to give you a snippet of his life, I include a story from a brief period when he lived in Woonsocket, South Dakota (hometown was Portsmouth, Ohio). The plains were a revelation to him. The picture was taken while he was living in Woonsocket, circa 1882.

"One day in Woonsocket there was a “twister,” tornado, or cyclone—the first one of my experience! And while the majority of the citizens were safe in their cyclone cellars, I witnessed from the shop window the fury and grandeur of that storm. I did not know whether the shop and a friendly dog who was there with me could survive the storm, but I thought I might as well look at it and see for myself what a cyclone was like.

The roaring of the wind, the crash of falling signs [and] flying roofs was appalling. But when it struck a lumberyard, hurtling planks and boards filled the sky like a thousand gyroscopes out of control and thicker than any snowstorm.

Then the dog crouched and whined and came closer to me for companionship. Suddenly the storm lulled and all was peaceful again, but it took days to return the wreckage to their proper places and to reduce to kindling anything too badly damaged for its original use.

One of our farmer friends, a Mr. Briggs, was plowing in his field when the twister formed. He unhitched his mules, mounted one of them, and tried to get out of its path. When he saw he could not, he slipped off, gave the mules a slap and they just made the raffle while he grabbed a death grip on the tuft grass and held on while the storm drummed his legs up and down on the ground like you’ve seen a piece of paper wrapped around a bush or other obstruction fluttering in the wind.

He was home for quite a few days following the storm, and on going home found his wife with a big foundation stone poised over her, but it did not fall. His house was blown away and he lost a dozen haystacks that day."