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This semester I am spending countless hour doing research with students and I had no idea it would be so fun. It started out innocently with an offer to all the students in a particularly small class.
Students come to
my office to do research, clicking away on their laptop and pausing for
questions. This is much more fun than talking about grades and
points. This is actual professoring.
One particular student
started her own tree, and apparently is an amazing researcher because she came
to me with generation after generation filled in.
She apologized for her tree being boring because
everyone pretty much stayed around the same county where they all still live.
I jump in and start looking at her data and
we look for questions to ask. Do women
have less children over generations? If yes, does that start in the 1920s? or 1960s? Notice how all the families on the census page are white in 1870? How does it change by 1890? Her eyes light up and she digs back into her data and I dig back into mine while a giddy silence falls over us.
Another student
sent me names and dates that I plugged into Ancestry and by the next day I was
barely able to contain my excitement over finding out that his family was from
Poland, not Greece.
The student
looked at the tree and said nope, that’s not my grandfather and I was crushed.
Hours later I
realized it was his great uncle and all the work I’d done was correct. Yay
me.
I research another student until I find her
great-grandparent born in Pottawatomie in 1857, right after the famous massacre.
Treasure.
I click a few more times and find one of her ancestors whose first and middle name is “Thomas Jefferson” and then I go back to another student’s tree and count the president names in HIS family (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Pinckney). This will now be our game and it started here.
One particular student just didn’t get how easy and fun I make all
this “history research” out to be. How do you
know what to look up? I shrug, you just
start plugging things in and see what you find.
And how do you know what do to next? Other students who rarely speak leaned in a little for
the answer.
It feels like water rolling downhill, you go with the flow and just keep gathering information.
What if you get
stuck?
You research something else and either let it go or come back to it a different way. You can’t do research wrong, there is no one waiting for you to come back with one single story.
He liked that.
I click a few more times and find one of her ancestors whose first and middle name is “Thomas Jefferson” and then I go back to another student’s tree and count the president names in HIS family (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Pinckney). This will now be our game and it started here.
And how do you know what do to next?
It feels like water rolling downhill, you go with the flow and just keep gathering information.
You research something else and either let it go or come back to it a different way. You can’t do research wrong, there is no one waiting for you to come back with one single story.
I thought I would
spend this weekend doing other things but I accidently fell back into a research
hole of my own (again.)
A sticking point
in our larger family history has to do with Jean-John-Johan, the father of
Achilles Soldani, a New Orleans born child who was put on an orphan train and
ended up living in Avoyelles Parrish up the Mississippi River.
He would stay there for the rest of his life,
except for one trip. I know this
because I found it documented in an unsigned Xeroxed copy of a seven-page handwritten speech
apparently delivered at a gathering of Achille’s descendants. Clearly a valid source.
“Achilles Soldani was born on November 12, 1863 in Genoa, Italy….”
Stop. I can’t
find a single source putting Jean in Genoa, but I do have multiple sources
indicating Jean Soldan said he was from Switzerland.
OK, back to the letter.
“…It is not clear exactly how he ended up in the United States but his mother and father died in what we believe to be a boating accident. At the age of 5 he was placed in an orphanage in New Orleans.”
Boating
accident? Possibly, but not coming from Europe, probably on the Mississippi
River.
The corridor
from St. Louis to New Orleans was a lot different during the Civil War, so
possibly.
Or maybe not at
all. Hang on.
Back to the
letter.
“Achilles courted Ella Mae English and received her hand in marriage. Prior to his wedding Grandpa returned to the orphanage in New Orleans to attempt to find out something about his people. He located one brother and three sisters – he visited them and satisfied with having found his relatives he returned home to take his bride in marriage. How times have changed. Grandma Ella always said that Grandpa Achilles first kissed her on the second day after the wedding. I suspect many of you your brides and brides to be and young girls have not and will not wait until the second day.”
Seriously.
Seriously? People, just because your
grandparents tell you something doesn’t make it true, and I think the whole
kissing story holds as much water as the part about Achilles being born in
Italy.
First of all,
how would Achilles know anything about his parents other than what nuns would
tell him? Considering the number of orphans and foundlings being delivered to New
Orleans orphanages in in the aftermath of the Civil War, what would nuns know
about his story?
Second of all, I
am suddenly aware that I do NOT know who Achilles’ three sisters and brother
are, and now I have to know, so I start hunting. I already know about Isocline,
and think I find a brother, Joseph, and then I find something like a Giuseppina
who was born in 1869 and could be the child that survived the birth that killed
their mother.
These poor kids!
Dad died in 1868,
mom died the year after, and they had no aunts or uncles or cousins to help
them.
Or did they?
And that’s when
I used my history professor brain and shifted my research perspective. Jean-John-Johann
Soldani had to have some relatives in the US.
People migrate in small groups and join larger groups often in ethnic
enclaves where they can speak their languages while acculturating.
I looked up the
Mississippi River to the lovely state of Missouri and I found him right away.
1860 Census
shows John-Jean Soldani living with his brother Peter in living in Kansas City;
it indicates that he and his brother were born in Switzerland and are saloon
keepers.
I find multiple contracts and mortgages in
Missouri archives under John’s name between 1858-1863, borrowing money to buy
goods for the saloon, selling land as the prices went up.
John has two
children in Kansas City – Sylvester and Anthony -- and then he disappears.
I already knew
that when Civil War started, Missouri stayed on the Union side, and trade
traffic on the Mississippi became increasingly perilous and unreliable.
What I didn’t
know is that Jean-John-Johan was married in Missouri, and it wasn’t to Achilles’
mom.
Bless his heart.
I figured him out.
(continued)
