I am working up a research proposal to identify all the tenants who lived in Minneapolis’s oldest house between 1853, when the first family moved out, and 1905, when the Hennepin County Territorial Pioneer’s Association bought it with the intention of turning it into a museum. Today I stopped in the special collections room at the Minneapolis Central Library to read through a 1983 research report, newspaper clippings, and other materials about the history of the house.
To my surprise, an article published in the February 13, 1927, issue of the Minneapolis Journal carried the headline, “DO YOU REMEMBER SPHIKENSHPOKENBLUNGGERFUNGGER? He Was Listed in First Minneapolis Directory of 1859, Preserved at Godfrey House.” I will be relying heavily on the Minneapolis city directories for my research, so I already know my way around them. When I checked the city directory from 1859-60, sure enough, there was Hans Von Shpikenshpokenblanggerfungger. According to the directory, he resided, on Main Street near the sidewalk.
Snipped from Commercial Advertiser Directory, for St. Anthony and Minneapolis; To Which Is Added a Business Directory, 1859-60 (St. Anthony and Minneapolis: H. E. Chamberlain, 1859), pg. 118.
Who was Hans Von Sphikenshpokenblunggerfungger? He can’t be found in any census records. Was this a case of atrocious spelling of a long German surname? Was it the whimsical alias of a local comedian? The 1927 newspaper article provides the answer. “Hans was really a joke of the publishers. He never existed save in their fancy, but his name was a byword in the pioneer homes of the time.” Perhaps it was a derisive nickname used by Yankee residents for German and Scandinavian immigrants in the city (though there wen’t that many yet in 1859; most residents were from New England or upstate New York).
The moral of the story is, you never know what real or fictitious people you will run across when doing genealogy research!
Our ancestors were just as political as we are today. The issues may have changed—do you care more about currency backed by silver or about immigration and terrorism?—but voting is as important as ever. Since today is another monumental presidential election in the U.S., I thought I should write a short post about how genealogists can learn about the politics of our ancestors, using a few of my own relatives as examples.
The power of democracy
As the America nation expanded geographically during the 19th and 20th centuries, so too did the number of people who could vote. Through grassroots activism and the hard work of many individuals, earlier limits based on property, race, and gender gradually fell by the wayside. This ever-expanding democracy was one of the “pull”-factors that enticed millions of immigrants to the United States in the past two centuries. The immigration process can sometimes offer us our first tantalizing clues about our ancestors’ politics.
First of all, the date our ancestors left their homelands might suggest that they had a certain political affiliation in their native country. For example, 17th century migration from England to America happened in waves that were directly tied to changing political conditions in England: most notably the Separatist and Puritan migrations to New England between 1620 and 1640 and the Royalist “Cavaliers” who settled in Virginia during the English Civil War of 1642-51. Likewise, several German and Bohemian families in my ancestry left central Europe during the late 1840s and early 1850s, a time when political retribution was common after the failed revolutions of 1848. For people seeking a more liberal, democratic form of government, America was an obvious choice. If your ancestors were among these particular groups, you’ve got a good starting point for understanding how their political (and religious) beliefs fit into the context of their times.
I think it can also be suggestive to consider how long it took our immigrant ancestors to become U.S. citizens once they arrived. Some of them declared their intent to become a citizen within months after first setting foot on American soil. Others waited years, and some never even tried. Their haste (or not) in becoming a citizen gives us a clue to how engaged they were politically. Becoming a citizen meant earning the right to vote (if they were white and male, depending on the era). But just like today, some people were apathetic about participating.
My 4x-great-grandfather Abraham Pattison immigrated in May 1861, settling near Madison, Wisconsin. Not long after, in October 1862, he declared his intention to become a U.S. citizen. He was eager to participate in American politics at a critical moment in American history. According to his son Henry, Abraham wanted to join the Union army but his wife implored him to stay home. In the end, they compromised. Abraham stayed in Madison, but he helped train and organize official recruits at Camp Randall before they left for the battlefronts.
Parties and issues
It is often quite difficult to know who our ancestors voted for or why. (Indeed, the secrecy of the ballot is one of its key features.) But sometimes you’ll stumble across a document that provides clear answers about their political opinions. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to have ancestors in some of the few places for which voter rolls have been digitized. But even if you can’t find your ancestors in those records, you’ll probably still be able to learn something about their politics.
Abel Dunham (1819-1899) and his first wife Rachel Harding (1816-1886). Photo shared on Ancestry.com by user RDunham35.
Some of our ancestors were outspoken about particular issues, and their views were recorded in newspapers or county histories. For example, one of my ancestors, Abel Dunham (1819-1899), was an outspoken abolitionist. His staunch Republicanism is noted in every county history sketch about Abel or one of his children. One sketch (of two) in Past and Present of Pike County, Illinois, reads in part:
Mr. Dunham was a prominent abolitionist, doing everything in his power to suppress slavery, and when the Republican Party was organized to prevent its further extension he became one of its stalwart advocates. Later he was again connected with a party of reform—the prohibitionist, for he was an earnest advocate of the cause of temperance and in fact his influence was ever given on the side of progress and improvement and for the amelioration of the hard conditions of human life.
Similarly, searching through newspapers I came across an article that helped me and my wife understand the political sentiments of her great-great-grandfather Erhardt Lenhardt (1844-1929). Lenhardt was a well-to-do immigrant brewer in Litchfield, Minnesota. Amidst the heated debates about currency leading up to the presidential election of 1896, Lenhardt was noted in the St. Paul Globe as one of the “influential Democrats” who had thrown their support behind Republican nominee William McKinley and the policy of “sound money.” It was an unusual position; most Democrats supported “free silver” that year. Indeed, “free silver” was the primary campaign issue for Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan.
Why did Erhardt Lenhardt cross party lines with his support? As it turns out, Lenhardt had invested $15,000 in a municipal bond from the state treasury department in 1895. He had a lot to lose if the value of the state’s fixed interest payments were reduced by inflation. Thus, the picture comes into focus. As a businessman and investor—more specifically as a lender—Lenhardt risked losing money on his investment if a flood of new (silver-backed) currency entered the economy and depreciated the value of each dollar he was supposed to be repaid by the state. That was enough for him to overlook other Democratic policies he might have supported and Republican policies he may not have liked.
Political affiliations often pass from one generation to the next (although I’m sure we all know of counterexamples). One line on my Irish side voted Democratic for several generations, even as the party itself gradually moved from the right to the left on many issues. Abraham Pattison’s son Henry ran as a Democrat for Wisconsin state assembly from Pepin and Buffalo Counties in 1914. (He lost badly, receiving less than 15% of the vote.) As something of a consolation, two years later a Democratic senator named him postmaster for the city of Durand.
Some of Henry’s children and grandchildren were even more involved in the Democratic party. Henry’s grandson Basil Jordan (1902-1983), my great-grandfather, worked in St. Paul Union Stockyards in South St. Paul, Minnesota. He helped organize a labor union there. My grandmother remembers him hosting clandestine meetings at their house in St. Paul when she was a little girl. (The Twin Cities were a hot spot of labor activity during the 1930s, and the stakes were high.) Basil wasn’t a socialist or a Communist, just an everyday working-class Democrat who supported organized labor.
Photo courtesy Mary Ann Pattison.
Basil’s brother Tom Jordan was raised by his grandparents Henry and Kate Pattison. As an adult, Tom was an active Democrat. He owned and operated the Prindle Inn in Durand, Wisconsin, and he sometimes invited Democratic politicians, including President Kennedy, to stay there. Finally, here is a picture of Henry Pattison’s youngest son Francis “Fal” Pattison with sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey. I don’t know the story behind the photo, but the political affinity fits with what we know about the Pattison family.
Most of our relatives weren’t influential enough to be photographed with national political figures. Others, like journalists and judges, were ostensibly obligated to be keep their political views private. To give a final example using yet another Pattison, Henry and Kate’s son George Leo “Judge Lee” Pattison, spent 32 years as an elected judge in Buffalo County, Wisconsin. His job demanded impartiality, and George was proud of his track record. Though from a staunchly Democratic family, he was first appointed by a Republican governor. Perhaps most suggestive of his impartiality, he never had a decision overturned by the state supreme court.
To sum up this post, celebrate the fact that we live in a democracy and that you have the right to vote. Then get out and find the compelling political stories in your family’s past. What issues mattered to your ancestors? Did any of them run for or hold elected offices? Can you figure out for whom they voted and why? It’s a fascinating search, and it’s less trivial than it first appears. I think it helps inform the present. Most of us have ancestors with a wide range of political beliefs. (On my dad’s side are relatives who have been Republicans for as long as the Pattisons have been Democrats.) Just like today, it is more useful to try to understand why these people valued what they valued than to dismiss them out of hand for belonging to a particular political party.
Welcome to the GeneaLOGIC blog. Here you’ll find posts about genetic genealogy, stories from my own family and some of my clients (with their permission, of course), insights about lesser-known archives and documents, ideas for your own research, and more.
Having three branches on your family tree can feel a little crowded. How does that third branch fit with the other two?
For my first post, I thought I would write about what it’s been like to be a genealogist with three branches on my family tree. If you’ve read the About page on this site, you know that two years ago my parents told me they had used a sperm donor to conceive me. In this post, I’m not going to write about my personal response to the news so much as my “genealogical” reaction. They’re related but distinct in my mind. Had I lost an entire branch of my family tree? Had I gained a branch? After years of researching both my mom’s and dad’s families, where did my family tree stand now that my true biological origins had been revealed?
One of the reasons my parents hadn’t told me they earlier that they had used a donor was precisely because I had become such a genealogy hound. “How were we to know we would get the genealogy kid?” my dad asked with exasperation during that first, most difficult conversation about the subject. And I get it. My obsessive hobby put them in a tough spot. Not only did I love my dad and my grandparents, but I was also quite attached to many of his — our — distant ancestors. Telling me they had used a sperm donor would, in a way, sever me from all of those people. My parents feared that my reaction would be much worse than it was.
To be sure, I have had to face that I am not biologically related to my dad’s family. I still mourn the loss a little bit, and not just for my dad himself. I lost biological relationships to early settlers in the New Sweden colony and to a rogue-ish New England heretic named Jonathan Singletary who upon his exile reinvented himself as the New Jersey miller Jonathan Dunham. I lost ties to Methodist preachers like Reverend Burgess Nelson, Revolutionary War veteran and Appalachian circuit rider Rezin Simpson, and abolitionist Illinois minister Abel Dunham. I no longer share genes with Palatine refugees who were part of the very first large-scale German immigration to America in 1709-10 or with Czech villagers who fled political retribution after the failed 1848 uprisings in Europe.
And yet, these families are in many ways my cultural legacy. Though I grew up in liberal Yankee-German-Scandinavian Minnesota, my closest family relationships besides my parents were with my grandparents in Nebraska. They were inheritors of a rural, more conservative midlands culture with roots farther east in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. My grandma said “warsh” and “garsh.” She had no rhythm but still taught me how to polka. I attended a family reunion or two on my great-uncle’s big Nebraska farm (which he still operates). My grandfather was 100% Czech in ancestry. He took me to Czech Days in Wilber, Nebraska — self-proclaimed Czech capital of the U.S.A. He also took me flying over Nebraska’s endless cornfields in his Piper Colt. Together as a family, we drove a short distance to the Platte River in the early spring to watch the magical sandhill crane migration.
For all of these reasons, I still consider my dad’s family to be a full branch of my family tree. Even if I’m not biologically his son, I wouldn’t be here if he and my mom hadn’t decided to use a donor. My birth depended entirely on his (and my mom’s) desire to have me. There’s no sense in abandoning him or the impact his more distant family had on me as both a person and a genealogist.
All of that said, genealogist John was also excited by the news. Everybody has two main branches on their family tree. How many people get to have three?! I got to research an entirely new branch. (The hard part was figuring out where it fits in relation to the other two — but that’s the personal side of the story which I’ll leave for another time.)
At first glance, the donor’s ancestry wasn’t as exciting or diverse as my dad’s family. It’s almost entirely German Catholics who settled in central Minnesota during the late 19th century. I haven’t come across as many unexpected stories as I had found my dad’s side (suicides, accidents, stark moral decisions about slavery, etc.). One non-German line found its way into the tree, and it’s pretty neat. It goes back to New York Loyalists who chose to remain in the United States after the Revolution when some of their relatives moved to Canada. Further up that line are several families who arrived in the Massachusetts Bay colony during the 1640s to work in John Winthrop, Jr.’s iron works. They were among the earliest dedicated industrial workers in America (though calling it “industrial” a bit misleading, since their work looked nothing like the later factory system we’re used to). Even further back, my biological father descends from Alice Boleyn, aunt of the beheaded English Queen Anne Boleyn and one-time caretaker of both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.
In summary, I have three full branches of my family tree, and I am fond of each of them in a different way. Each leaf on each branch represents a fascinating individual story. Together, they tell a fairly comprehensive history of America north of the 39th parallel. Perhaps most importantly, without any single person on any of the three branches, I would not be here today. Every family tree is quirky. In my case, I needed a third branch.
