After an exceptionally quiet and safe semester, we will be putting together a non-feast very socially distanced #TCC4Vets holiday delivery on 12/10.
Asking for multiples of just a few things: new large white bathtowels, men's bedroom slippers and laundry pods/dryer sheets.
Please sign up if you feel called to shine some light and show some love with us.
https://www.signupgenius.com/go/508094ba5a72e5-donations
OK. So it seems nice, right? It can't be.
Any document that honors the right to own humans is fundamentally flawed.
This one is especially strange because of the offer of time off to female slaves for bearing children "while in my service."
Does "in my service" mean "having sex with me?" or "while I am forcibly enslaving them instead of someone else enslaving them when the child was born?"
It had to be well known that Mr. Williams gave women who bore children -- and whose kids survived -- more time off than everyone else, but I makes me wonder what kind of system that fueled.
The clause about the children being alive in order for this clause to kick in is menacing.
Why add that? Would you really take time off BACK from a grieving mother? I bet he would.
Did women (and the men they loved?) encourage each other to face nonconsensual sex in order to buy 100s of hours of freedom of the next years?
Were the enslaved women jealous of each other? or protective?
What did older women tell their little sisters? Their daughters?
We may never hear their side of the story.
Mr. Williams benefits from laws and traditions that were obstacles to literacy for people of color because I think they left none of their stories in writing, but in all truth .
I have hours and hours to fill during this slippery time of questioning everything, so I just might search the Library of Congress' Slave Narratives or Louisiana archives for answers that will lead to more questions and stories.
Just as it should be.
I have hours and hours each day to fill during this slippery time, and I can’t keep rearranging books or finding obscure Swedish shows on Netflix.
So I keep researching. Sometimes I have a goal in mind, like with the Pandora’s Safe project. Most of the time I don’t, and instead open digital databases and read file after file of raw data.
There is something so uncomposed about data that relaxes my mind. When you read a book it’s been edited and architected to take you somewhere in a fixed number of words and images.
It is a constructed ride and sometimes I need to have the feeling of taking a long walk in archives staring at documents like birdwatchers squint at trees.
On Monday night I read the death certificates of each and every person who died in one Alexander county of North Carolina between 1945 and 1950. I didn’t take notes but I did bookmark interesting names and shout out things like “this poor guy --- the saw mill” to my kids who are experts at both ignoring me and appearing to be encouragingly supportive.
What I found didn’t surprise me. Most deaths were disease related, and the only gunshot deaths were suicides by men in their 60s and a toddler shot by her 6 year old brother.
I was not pleased with seeing a 24 year old woman die of natural causes and bookmarked the page to research it later.
There is something quietly soothing in reading every record then moving to the next file.
Because I am not looking for anything in particular, I notice more.
Middle names excite me.
Missouri Arkansas. Now that's a name.
I always want to know who was the informant at the death, and where the body went after the funeral. Every now and then I pull up an obituary or look for a newspaper article but most of the time I just keep reading the primary sources as they were written and filed.
One of my favorite things to do is read Wills (and yes, my brother told me to get a new hobby but also have you tried reading Wills?), especially those written and/or probated before the 13th Amendment’s abolition of slavery.
When Wills are filed for Probate they are usually copied into the counties book of wills, which means that all the wills of everyone who died in a certain year can literally be read like a book from cover to cover if you are good at reading cursive and also open to French and Spanish, because about 30% of the Wills I read that were written before 1860 were not written in English. We can discuss this later.
What matters is that many states made those books of wills available to ancestry to digitalize and code and that’s how I access them.
The other day I was reading Wills filed in Orleans Parrish in the 1860s, shocked by how wealthy some people were, throwing around legacies of thousands of dollars and leaving lists of addresses of all their properties to be disposed of. I make a point to look for mention of “slave” or “negro” (they were used interchangeably in Wills, let’s unpack that later) and also if there is some context to the discussion.
For example, I have read Wills where the person mentions that their kids will divide equally all their property including real estate, cattle and slaves.
I have read Wills where the enslaved people are doled out by name (beloved Betsy goes to XXXX) and others where the decedent allows their children to each pick 2 and then sell the rest and split the profit.
Nothing I’d seen before prepared me for what I found in Alfred A. Williams’ will, which I found in Orleans Parrish Will Book #13, page 99.
The will before Mr. Williams’ was in French, so I just passed on it and want everyone to remember I didn’t read all the wills, just the English ones, and even though Louisiana became a state (I often read the event described as “Louisiana was granted statehood” which is a whole other way of seeing the relationship, right?) in 1812, about 1 in 5 wills I’ve come across filed in the 1840s-1860s were in French or Spanish.
I feel that you’ve heard me on this point of how connected and multilingual the cities of the Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean Basin were in the 19th century and I can move on.
In his 1858 pre-Civil War testament, Alfred A. Williams leaves cash to his brother and brother-in-law, and wants a trust created for his minor children and administered so that when each of them reaches 21 they get all the funds accruing since his death. He then inserts something I’ve seen before and because I didn’t go to law school I get to name things and I call it the jerk clause.
He says that if his kids oppose the will then their shares will go to his brothers and sisters.
Like how does someone get into a future fight with their kids that happens after their death?
What’s it like to be that controlling?
Does it work? Because as I see it he’s going to die in 1863 and most of the wealth his family had when will was signed in 1858 will be on it’s way to be gone with the wind.
The next several paragraphs are assigning who he wants to administer his property until the kids all turn 21, and how that person should be compensated. Yawn. I see this being written in a smoky room over rum, fat bellies and promises. Once you tell someone you’re leaving them stuff, things have to be different between you guys.
I try to be neutral but it’s hard to like this guy, swinging his wealth around.
Then I found the portion of his will where he mentioned slaves, and I feel like I have uncovered the devil, and puppeteer who implied choice and freedom in a situation when the opposite was true.
(Continued in next post)*****
I have been working on a project for about two years that started when I stumbled up a case involving $7 and an iron safe in the early hours of the Civil War in Jackson County, Missouri.
I have meant to finish this project and turn it into a snappy manuscript over the past year but instead I have rolled with the changes 2020 has brought and instead mastered the art of Zooming while feeding my dog quiet treats to keep her docile.
I have turned my attention to hanging plants, training for a 10K and learning to paint my own nails (I hate it). I have mastered the art of keeping my kitchen clean, lined up all my clothes by color and season, and binged more series than I care to admit. Nothing I do gives me space from this project, instead it seems like every quiet moment I have my mind wanders back to “what if?” and “did you think about” and “oh hey what if this person is the same as …”
By working, I mean putting names and census data on the wall and connecting them with strings and pins to probate documents and naturalization oaths.
Since I am teaching from home during this strange and slippery time when it’s hard to know what to hold on to, I don’t have as many student papers on my desk and instead have neatly labelled vertical files of things I’ve printed out from digital archives even though it is much more awesome it is to be able to pinch and zoom a document than to hold a blurred copy.
The physical files are something to hold, to highlight and to read over and over until new things reveal themselves.
Even after I find new things I still go back and look for more data points to help me connect these dates and misspelled names and silences into stories of people
I have spent many restless nights tossing and turning ruminating on little bits that fit together like a puzzle, wanting to be done with this and share it already and yet in no hurry to move forward with it all.
The names have worked their ways under my skin – Gian-Jean-John, Johann, Achilles, and Sylvester who believed he was an Osage Indian and became a powerful leader in turn of the century Oklahoma. It doesn’t matter at all to me if I am related to any or all of these people whose name I more or less share; their stories as immigrants and orphans are interesting and important on their own.
Today I put names in digital archives again, just like I do every time I don’t want to grade.
Jean Soldani. John Soldani. Jean Goldani. John Soldan. Gian Soldan.
I change one letters and dates like a scientist adding drops of this or that into a test tube and holding the results up to the light.
I print the documents and keep going.
And no you don’t get them now, because then this wouldn’t be a good story, it would be a data dump and that’s no fun at all.
Ground zero of the big story I am taking you to and through for Pandora’s Safe is the 1860 census, but today we are not visiting ground zero. It is too boring to start there, and I don’t have time to waste your time by telling this story wrong. Today we will visit the probate file of someone who may or may not be related to everyone else in this story.
JOHANNES SOLDANE
From what I can piece together, Johannes Soldane left Switzerland for the US in 1848. I find several documents of people with names similar to his arriving in the US in the 1840s, and there is no reason to believe he was the kind of man who came to the US several times before bringing his family.
I can’t find his marriage papers, and I can’t find his children’s birth certificates.
A lot of history involves using the stuff you DO find and not losing your mind over what you wish you could find, so I don’t waste too much energy here. I might never know if he was an explorer, but I get the feeling he was the kind of guy who thought crossing the Atlantic was more fun than being in central Europe as the wars of the 1840s pulsed through changing the political and economic landscape forever.
There are no pictures of Johannes Soldane or his wife Maria Anna or their kids, but their actions speak volumes. Johannes Soland moved his family from Europe to the US right as the US and Mexico concluded the war that would lead to the US acquiring California and finding gold there. Maybe that’s where he was headed?
From what I can tell he didn’t buy land or intend to stay in St. Louis very long – or maybe bad luck struck as soon as they settled in. Again, I only know what the data points tell me, and the data is pretty raw here.
When a person dies very often they have a will that is brought to a probate court and then dispassionate bureaucrats make sure the everything unfolds legally and fairly – for example, that the deceased’s goods are appraised at fair value, and that proper notice is posted in newspapers etc. It doesn’t seem as though Johannes Soldane had anything to be probated other than a single bank account, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Page one of his file says that he died in April 1849, but he has no heirs because his wife and two children - -whose names were unknown to the lawyers probating the documents – and died in September and October of that same year.
They didn’t make it to the 1850 census or the 1850 mortality census, which would have given us clues on where they lived and who they lived near. We can’t tell how many children they had in 1847 – six? Four? Two? – and whether they had older children waiting for them who would never know what happened to them specifically but we can guess.
I guess cholera. In 1849 a cholera epidemic swept the young city of St. Louis, killing hundreds a day. Perhaps that’s how they died – one at a time, but all together in the blurr of history – leaving no one to tell their story or claim their bank account. Maybe that’s why Johannes estate is not put into probate until 5 years after his death.
By the standards of many probate files, this one is thin and lacks excitement. No one contests the itemization, no one demands changes. Its freakishly quiet.
The only asset Johannes Soldane has is about $175 he put in an account with three guys whose last name is Rippenstein. By 1855 the Rippensteins are insolvent and don’t give the money to the executor of the will.
The data points can be flexed and bent to imply that there are people in Missouri waiting for Johannes Soldane – perhaps his brothers, cousins, children – but no one document I have found in the hundreds I’ve poured through answers that question with certainty.
The lesson from this tiny piece of one person’s life shows us what we all know. Nothing is certain, no tomorrow is guaranteed. Today is everything, do something.
And now that I’ve written that I feel like he will rest more peacefully tonight now that his family’s tragic 1849 is no longer forgotten.
(continued)
