Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Genealogy Detective, Part I: Catherine Who?

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For somebody with a passion for history and a taste for detective stories, genealogy is a very logical hobby. Piecing together a family tree is a puzzle that often takes real detective skills, and reading between the lines of the births, marriages, and deaths, with the occasional nugget of a newspaper item or a picture to shed a flash of light on the story, is one form of time travel for the imagination. Although I only just got my first Ancestry subscription, I’ve been pursuing this hobby for years now, using the limited free resources from Ancestry itself and places like Family Search, Find a Grave, online newspaper archives, et cetera. And you know, I’m actually glad it turned out that way. Working under limitations really sharpens your wits—you learn to dig and sift and work around obstacles instead of having information easily handed to you, and perhaps learn not to take things for granted and repeat other people’s assumptions or research mistakes.

This month, I spent a weekend working out perhaps the most challenging puzzle I’ve solved yet. It was on the German side of my family; not even in the direct line, but I like to flesh out the side branches as much as I can in the hopes that eventually I might come upon something in one of them that points backwards towards our overseas roots. Besides…once I’m launched on a really good puzzle, blood relative or no, I keep going for the sheer thrill of the chase. This time, it was so complicated that I started keeping notes along the way—it actually began as a query I was going to post to a genealogy message board, but I decided to hold back on it and see if I could find out more by myself before asking for help. I ended up solving the whole thing on my own and finished with three pages of slightly tongue-in-cheek notes. So I thought it might be rather fun to turn them into a blog post giving a behind-the-scenes look at the adventures of an amateur genealogist.

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The initial beginning of the quest is several years ago; I can’t remember exactly how many. (I am not the best person with dates in everyday life.) I wish to confirm the maiden name of a woman named Catherine, born about 1872, the wife of a German-born tailor named John Hoffmeister who lived first in Troy and later Albany, New York.

At first glance, it looks obvious: on the 1900 census, their household includes a girl named Clara Gregory who is listed as “sister-in-law.” By 1905 they’re joined by another sister-in-law, Jennie Gregory. (In-laws sharing a household are a boon to the amateur genealogist—they’re usually the best and easiest way to learn a woman’s maiden name.) But there is a tiny seed of doubt in my mind. Usually when you know a woman’s maiden name and date of birth it’s easy to locate her on an earlier census in her parents’ household. But I can’t find a Catherine Gregory anywhere. And my inquisitive, perfectionist mind wants to be sure I have the right name listed in the family tree. So I begin to dig.

On a lovely spring day last year, I make my first visit to the local-history research room at the library—a small room filled with bound copies of church and cemetery records, city directories, maps, books on local history, filing cabinets loaded with miscellaneous records…I could spend hours in a place like this, for research or just for fun. (I can’t remember how much time I spent on this occasion, but I know it was longer than I was supposed to.) I glean a number of useful family-tree leads from church records, including the baptism record for John and Catherine Hoffmeister’s first child. Oddly enough, it seems to confirm the obvious: Catherine’s maiden name is listed as Gregory, and one of the sponsors is Clara Gregory. But for some reason, the tiny doubt remains. (I can’t recall why, as I made no note at the time.)

The next clue: I find Jennie Gregory on the 1900 census. She was living with a married aunt, but the household also includes her grandfather, Caspar Geisler. A little further digging turns up a marriage record between Clara Gregory and Hugo Wagner, which lists Clara’s parents as Mary Geisler and William Gregory.

A quick check of an earlier census confirms that Caspar Geisler did indeed have a daughter named Mary, born about 1849. And searching an online newspaper archive that I’m just learning how to use, I find an item on Caspar Geisler’s will which lists among the legatees his granddaughter Catherine Hoffmaster [sic].

But here there comes a catch. On the 1880 census, Caspar Geisler’s household includes a granddaughter born in 1872, whose name is…Catherine Jack. Right age, right first name…wrong surname. Could it just be an odd mistake by the census-taker? Such things are not unheard-of. [Read more…]

Book Review – Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West

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First off, as I suspected even before I began reading the book, the subtitle “The Hidden History of the Cowboy West” is a bit hyperbolic. Perhaps a more accurate subtitle would have been “An Economic History of the Cowboy West,” but of course that wouldn’t have sounded nearly as sensational. The history here is not “hidden” in the sense that the author makes any startling new discoveries or revelations, but rather turns the spotlight on aspects of Old West history that few Americans have read or heard much about.

The book opens with a few chapters on how the open-range era began—the post-Civil War demand for beef, the development of the big Texas drives to move the cattle to market, and the subsequent growth of the boom towns and railroads in consequence. But the book’s main thrust is a fascinating look at the massive investments of capital (on the level of millions) in cattle ranches by wealthy stockholders from the East and across the Atlantic, with a particular focus on the investments made by English and Scottish aristocracy and nobility. And how a combination of too-rosy sales pitches, financial mismanagement, ignorance about ranching, and sheer overgrowth of the industry led to an ultimate collapse of the cattle boom, with the devastating winter of 1887 providing the death-blow. I found one theory of Knowlton’s particularly interesting: that one reason for the eventual collapse may have been the industrialization of a livelihood that was in essence agricultural. The emphasis on mass-production, faster delivery, higher profits and so forth went along with overlooking the variables of weather, disease, natural predators, and what would happen if the projected herd growth didn’t materialize—and in the end, the top-heavy cattle companies reaped the consequences.

It puts a thought-provoking new complexion on the concept of the range war that we’re familiar with from fiction and film when you realize that the “big ranchers” fighting the small rancher or homesteader were not necessarily just tough individual men trying to strong-arm their way to prosperity, but rather multi-million-dollar corporations with millionaire industrialists and foreign aristocracy for its investors, trying to keep their profits from being cut in on. [Read more…]

The Way of the Western: Finale

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In 1956, author Donald Hamilton (primarily known among Western fans for his “Ambush at Blanco Canyon,” which became the movie The Big Country) wrote in the introduction to an anthology of Western stories that he edited:

…The free-riding ranch girl and the saloon-busting free-for-all are part of our stock-in-trade; are we going to discard them in the interests of mere accuracy?…The Western reader expects to be entertained by a good yarn first of all. If it’s authentic, so much the better, but the average reader isn’t going to give a story much higher marks because something like it actually happened…

…Let’s not get too enamored of absolute historical accuracy, and for heaven’s sake let’s us not start thinking of ourselves self-consciously as great creative artists inheriting a grand literary tradition stemming direct from Owen Wister…Let’s remember that we also have an inheritance from Zane Grey and the Beadle and Adams dime novels which were lousy literature and stinking history, but which entertained millions—and who’s too proud to be an entertainer?

When I read that introduction (you can read it in full here), I think my reaction was the opposite of what Hamilton intended. My first thought was that the ensuing decades have proved his view to be a short-sighted one. As cheerfully well-intentioned as it was, I think that attitude espoused by writers has ended up helping to marginalize the very genre Hamilton set out to champion.

Reading his remarks a few weeks ago helped to crystallize a train of thought I’ve been following recently, which sort of brings me full circle back to the beginning of my blog series on the Western genre begun seven months ago. In my introductory post, I talked about how I used to think that the Western’s own popularity, leading to its eventual over-saturation with flimsy, historically-inaccurate, copycat “shoot-em-ups,” was one of the main things that resulted in its downfall. But my view on this altered: I came to believe that the decline of the Western was primarily an ideological infiltration, in which mid-20th-century values became more and more reflected in the new Western movies and books of those decades, until any sense of the culture and mores of the original West was gradually eaten away.

I took a look at some of the ways this happened in subsequent posts, mainly by comparing classic Western films to earlier Western literature. We looked at how the average American settler was frequently portrayed as a weak-willed coward compared to gunfighter “heroes”, and how superficial portrayals of historical “facts” leads to caricatures and skewed impressions. We saw how quasi-accurate film adaptations of books can twist or change their authors’ original themes or intentions, and how even choices of artistic style can affect viewers’ impressions of history.

Now, after reading the Hamilton piece—subsequent to having gotten a pretty comprehensive survey of the Western genre in the 20th century by reading the anthology A Century of Great Western Stories—I’m beginning to piece in the role that Western writers have played in all this. I believe the mass of inaccurate and clichéd Western stories did contribute to the genre’s problems, though by no means did they play the central part that I once thought. [Read more…]