Memory Monday - Granger Court East

This morning, I got a nice little Facebook memory on my friends and family account. This photo, which I estimate to have been taken when I was about 14 or 15, shows me (back corner right) with just a few of my neighborhood buddies (and a couple of young'uns), standing in front of the McBride home, on Micott Drive in Hampton, Virginia. Our neighborhood, "Granger Court East," was built in the early 60's as an extension of the historic Aberdeen Gardens neighborhood. Granger Court was marketed to attract black military families - retired or active duty - to its middle class arrangement of a variety of 3 and 4 bedroom single family homes.

Part of the "GCG" sometime in the early 70s. 
(Rest in peace, Shirelle and Karen.)

To say that Granger Court was filled with kids would be an understatement! Every household had children; and we spanned all the age groups. We were an all-black neighborhood, with working parents (always dad - and probably about 75% mom, too) and plenty of room to run, play, and explore. We didn't have any type of recreation services - not even a playground. We made our own fun playing kickball/baseball/football/dodgeball in the cul-de-sacs, hanging out and playing in the woods and at the "Big Hills,"* climbing/scooting/balancing over fallen trees and sewer pipes in the woods - to get to an adjacent neighborhood, riding bikes, playing hide-and-seek, swinging on clotheslines - and just doing whatever else we could do (or get into) that would keep us outside with our friends -- but only until the streetlights came on! (Of course, that rule loosened when we became teenagers. We hung on the neighborhood corners well into the night, then!)

New Journal and Guide (1916-2003); Nov 2, 1963

Somewhere along the way, a group of us started referring to ourselves as the GCG, or "Granger Court Gang," for short. I know that I was the one who came up with this, and it only caught on with a small group of my friends, but I remember thinking it would be cool to refer to ourselves in this way, especially when we ventured as a group into other neighborhoods, such as "L.A." (Lower Aberdeen) or "P.C." (Pine Chapel). And, every time I see this "tough" looking photo of some of us, I feel as though it personifies that moniker quite perfectly - quite probably being one of the only times a group of kids from Granger Court ever looked the part of a "gang."

Somewhere, I have a photo that shows our whole house; but, for now, here are my siblings and me standing in front of the house, sometime in the 60s.

Did you grow up in a neighborhood like Granger Court? Please share your memories in the comment section, below! :)

Thanks for reading!                                                                                                                              Renate

* The "Big Hills" were two HUGE mountains of dirt that we could climb, ride our bikes down, or slide down on pieces of cardboard. They were located behind the Darby's and the McBride's homes, off of Micott Drive, right next to one of our entryways to the The Woods and The Creek. :) We didn't know it, then, but I now realize that those "mountains" were the mounds of dirt that had created when the land was cleared to make our beloved neighborhood. Later, the Big Hills were removed, and more houses were built on the land on which they used to stand.

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Lies! Lies! Lies!

This is a quick one, but I just let out the loudest laugh and I want SOMEONE to know why!

I just returned to the recently publicized New York City Historical Vital Records Project, to look for the marriage record of one of my said-to-be-passing, relatives, Ruby Green. I knew that she'd married a man by the surname of SEABROOK, and that he was a doctor, but I hadn't known anything else about him or their marriage.

I easily retrieved the digital record by searching for it by the certificate number, which I already had from an index. I searched first for the marriage in Manhattan, but another couple came up. I changed the search to Kings County, which is Brooklyn, and there there were!

There were a few pieces of information provided on this document that were unknown to me. Some are "a-ha's" and others are just interesting. To maintain the quality of the document, I've cropped the first page (of four) to just show the relevant parts.

Partial clipping of Marriage Record of Ruby Green and Dr. William Seabrook

The A-Ha's

Ruby Green was one of the three people in my Green family who had moved to New York, and were said to be there "passing as white." (The three were Ruby, her sister, Bettie, and their uncle, William A. Green.) I'd been told by relatives who knew her that she was a seamstress on Broadway, who worked for all the "rich and famous movie stars." When I saw on this document that her occupation was "Dressmaking" and that she lived on Broadway, I felt that there may have likely been some truth in the oral history that had been shared with me. (However - and it's a long story - it's said that after William's wife found out that he was black, she outted them all and both Betsie (who was supposedly Doris Duke's hairdresser), and Ruby lost their jobs.

Helpful tidbits to update my tree and help in my research:

1. Ruby's husband's name was William Henry Seabrook. He was a doctor, but I don't think anyone realized he was a veterinarian. The additional information about him and his origins is great.

2. Ruby's middle name was Gordon (if this is real). I hadn't known her to have any middle name, and hadn't seen it on previous records. I thought maybe it was indicative of a previous marriage, but the document states that this is her first. I don't know of any family connection to the name Gordon. Perhaps it has something to do with her (white) father's family. I'll have to check into his family tree. 

3. October 14, 1944 - Learning that Ruby didn't marry until 4 years after the death of her uncle, William Adam Green, was helpful to certain aspects of my research. Ruby was the informant on William's death certificate, and I'd wondered why her surname was still Green(e), at that time, because I'd thought by the age Ruby was at that time, she'd have already married. As it is, Ruby was 40 years old when she married William Seabrook.

4. Race - Both Ruby and her husband are noted with "C" for race, indicating that they were colored, or black. According to my now deceased relatives who knew the couple, Dr. Seabrook was dark - or at least brown skinned. He was unmistakably black. New York didn't have any anti-miscegenation laws in place, so if Ruby were passing as white, it wouldn't have been illegal for her to marry a black man; but, being that William Seabrook was from Brooklyn, and likely had family there and was also likely a member of the black elite in the community, it would have been more favorable for Ruby to embrace and enjoy the perks of her blackness in that situation. (It's also likely that the rumors weren't even true. Ruby looked white; she didn't have to try to pass. More likely, she had to work hard to convince people that she was black!)

So, you're probably thinking... "So what was it that had you laughing out loud?"

Well, it was this part of the application. 

This part of the document revealed to me that Ruby had, obviously, learned some of the tricky tricks of the passing trade from her Uncle William, before he died. William had a habit of making up names and places, always using a bit of the truth and mixing it with a little flavor to distract anyone from finding out who he really was. That's exactly what Ruby has done here. 

Ruby names her father as "John Geene." (That should be Greene.) Well, first of all, the family name was spelled "GREEN," however, Ruby seems to have added the e to the end, as her  very accomplished cousin, William Lawrence Greene, had done. That's fine and good. However, John Green, was my great-grandfather, Ruby's uncle - her mother's (and her Uncle William's) oldest sibling. He was not Ruby's father. She is just using his name. From what I've been told, all of Annie Green's (Ruby's mother) children were fathered by Samuel Cannady VANN, a wealthy mill owner, from Franklinton, Franklin County, North Carolina.

Samuel Cannady Vann

(1852-1924)

Next, Ruby takes the liberty of giving her mother, Annie, the surname HAWKINS. This was the last name of Annie's father, Nathaniel, however, he and Annie's mother, Anna, who were my second-great-grandparents, never married. They couldn't have, in North Carolina, even if they'd wanted to. Anna was a mulatto woman and Nathaniel was a white man, from a prominent family in the area. All six of the children they had together carried the surname, GREEN.

So, just to set the record straight for those who are reading this: Ruby's parents were Annie Green and (according to family lore) Samuel C. Vann.

Annie Green (far left) with family members. The two young ladies closest to her are
her daughters. One is Ruby, but I don't know which one.

Okay, that wasn't as quick as I thought it would be; but, thanks for reading and allowing me to share this lil chuckle with you. 

Renate

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New York City Historical Vital Records ONLINE! I'm so excited!

Yep, you read that right! The New York City Department of Records and Information Services has finally done the right thing! Not only have they digitized their birth, marriage, and death records from all five boroughs, but they have put them online with FREE access to all! Woo-hoo!

Although I'm not a big-time NYC researcher, I do have reason to be very excited about this, as I had several ancestral relatives from my GREEN line, who left North Carolina to live in New York - and, while they were there, they were (at least part of the time) passing as WHITE. Though I've had some limited information about them, being able to see these vital records in their entirety will fill in some blanks for me and help to move my research on this particular family line forward. 

With that goal in mind, I dug right in and, voila! - I've already struck little nuggets of gold.

One of the most mysterious characters in my NYC-passing Green line is William Adam Green, son of my 2x-great-grandparents, Nathaniel Hawkins and Anna Green and younger brother of my great-grandfather, John Wesley Green - all of Louisburg, NC. I've written a bit about William, here. Though his mother, Anna, is the real mystery person, it's largely been the inconsistencies in the records I've found about William that have impeded my progress in successfully uncovering more details about the life of his mother - my direct ancestor. (You can read a bit about Anna in this 2009 post. Just keep in mind it was written 13 years ago!)

Though I'll need more time to work with this morning's loot, I'll share just a couple of the documents I've already encountered, and tell a little about why they are so helpful to my research.

1904 Marriage Record of William Adam Green and Sally Lou Johnson

First of all, though I've had this this marriage recorded on my tree, for a long time, no one in my family - even relatives who actually knew William Green - knew anything about it. And, although these relatives all lived in the tiny town of Louisburg, none of them had ever heard of a "Sally Lou Johnson" or her family. This documents reveals the names of Sally Lou's parents - Harry Johnson and Judy Eton (Eaton). I have already found Sally's (whose name is actually Sarah) immediate family, and will be able to find out more about her, them, and what happened to this first marriage (stated on document) of my ancestor, William Green. 

This 1904 document also shows that William gave his race as Black, and that he was marrying a black woman, who was from his hometown of Louisburg. That's important because I've hypothesized that he didn't purposefully go to New York to pass as white, but that it's something that happened as his time there went on. (More on that, later.) Additionally, I've always wondered if any children were produced by this first marriage. Perhaps having the additional information about Sally's name and family will lead me to a definitive answer about that.

                 

The biggest deal on this document is the very clearly written name William gave for his mother - Anna PERKINS. It's only been through William's records that I've ever seen this last name for my very elusive second-great-grandmother, who used the surname GREEN, but was rumored to have originally been a Perkins. There are other iterations of P-names on the other documents, but I trust this one more because I know this information would have been given by William, himself. However, I can't/won't allow myself to take it as definitive proof of her original surname because of the fact that, on this very same document, William gives the wrong surname for his father. On the document, the name is written as Nathaniel Green, but his father's name was Nathaniel HAWKINS. Is it possible that William didn't know that; or did the clerk make this error by either making an assumption or at the direction of William? I'll likely never know that answer to that. I am glad, though, that William knew who his father was, enough to get his first name correct. Since Nathaniel died when William was between 4 and 6 years old, it's not likely that he had many (if any) personal memories of him.

The last two "big deal" items from this document are that I can add this address, 48 6th Avenue, to William's timeline and, finally, that I'm able to see William's actual, very confidently written signature, for the very first time. (Of course, I'll be looking into the witnesses and the "Elder" Wm M. Johnston, too.)

                                     

Well, that was a bit longer than I'd planned this post to be. I need to get back to the research and to the things I was supposed to have been doing before this bright, shiny...errr-uh, I mean this wonderful resource was shared this morning. Therefore, I will just share one of the other documents I downloaded from the search site - William Green's death certificate. 

As you can see, William's niece, Ruby Green(e), served as informant for his death certificate. She was also living in New York and passing as white, according to what my older cousins have told me. She gives "Pecker" as the maiden name of William's mother and, curiously enough, she also gives Nathaniel's surname as Green. Since she would have never known Nathaniel, who died in 1879, I wonder even more now if that really is what William thought his father's surname was - and if he'd passed that on to his niece. Significantly, William's race is given on his death certificate as "White" providing supporting evidence that he was living as such at the time of his death. He'd had a second wife, an Irish immigrant, who'd lived with William at the same address shown on his death certificate; but she died in 1929. My thinking is that, perhaps because of that relationship, he had (or chose) to live out his later years on the other side of the color line.

Of course, there is more valuable information on this document, but I'd already had most of it, including William's home address, which I visited (from the outside) several years ago on one of my trips to visit my daughter in New York. Somewhere, I have pictures, but I don't know where they are, so here's a peek at the home from Google Maps. 

There's so much more to come...

Thanks for reading!

Renate

PS... Wanna explore the records at the New York Historical Vital Records Project for yourself? Just click this link and have yourself some fun!

PSS... If you'd like to learn more about the launch of the New York City Historical Vital Records Project, please visit this excellent blog post by "The Legal Genealogist," Judy Russell, by clicking here. 

Permalink to this post: https://justthinking130.blogspot.com/2022/03/new-york-city-historical-vital-records.html

Renate on the Web: Black History Month 2022

Updated 2/21/22

Black History Month is every month, for me! However, we've just entered the nationally appointed month of recognition and celebration - the "formal" Black History Month, if you will, which actually began with Carter G. Woodson's "Black History Week," back in 1926, but was designated in the United States as "Black History Month" in 1976 - and has continued to be designated as such by every American President, since then. 

Black History Month is also a very busy time for genealogists (and historians) who speak on topics related to African American research. Many of us are bombarded with requests to appear during the month of February, which we happily accept, but certainly would love for this level of interest in our specialization(s) would be present throughout the year. :)

I have been posting some of my upcoming events on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets but, that can get exhausting and also confusing if I don't do a good job of keeping up with what I've already posted and where! But, while doing some reviewing and editing on my blog this morning, I ran across a post I'd done almost a year ago called, "Renate on the Web" and I realize I must have been feeling much the same way, when I decided to go on and post my upcoming appearances for that particular period. "Ah-ha" (I said to myself): "THIS is what I need to do now!" So, here we go! 

Renate on the Web: February 2022                                                                                      (Please click on links for times and additional info. ALL events are virtual!)

Please join me for some (or all) of these exciting events!

1. Friday, 2/4/22 - Clayton Library (Houston, Texas) - "In Their Own Words: Voices from the Slave Narratives" https://houstonlibrary.libcal.com/event/8494212 (Scroll to bottom of page.)

2. Saturday, 2/5/22 - North Carolina Chapters of AAHGS - Black History Month Conference - "Freedom Bound: Escaping Bondage for Life in the North" and "We Were Supposed To Be Neals: Reconstructing an Enslaved Family Using DNA" https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nc-aahgs-black-history-genealogy-virtual-conference-2022-tickets-222988814547

3. Sunday, 2/6/22 - Let's Talk North Carolina Genealogy - Monthly Research Chat (Theme: "Love is in the Air." Join me and my cohost, Taneya Y. Koonce, as we gather with other North Carolina researchers to share findings, conundrums, celebrations, and stories from our family history journeys. All are welcome! Registration required. https://bit.ly/2022-ltncg-research-chats

4. Saturday, 2/12/22 - Hampton Roads Chapter of AAHGS - "Putting Your Fingers to Work: Transcribing and Indexing Historical Documents" (This is a joint presentation with Selma Stewart. The focus will be on African American projects.) Email aahgshr@gmail.com to request meeting link.

5. Thursday, 2/17/22 - Bay Shore Brightwaters Library (Brightwaters, NY) - "Genealogy 101: Researching Ancestors of Color" https://www.bsbwlibrary.org/black-history-month/  Scroll down to "Zoom Programs." To register and receive Zoom information, email rs@bsbwlibrary.org.

6. Saturday, 2/19/22 - International African American Museum (Charleston, SC) - "African American Genealogy Research in the North Carolina Gullah-Geechee Corridor" Registration required. Click here for link.

7. Wednesday, 2/23/22 - AARP and Richmond Chapter of ASALH - "Wind Down Wednesdays: The Dismal Swamp and African American Freedom Seekers" with filmmaker, Brian Bullock. (I've just been added to this program as a panelist, with Mr. Bullock after he presents one of his short films, so you may not see my name on the advertisement. The discussion will center around taking road trips to ancestral locations!) Registration is required. https://aarp.cventevents.com/event/ea2d90c2-7c1e-4a06-9ef3-1d8794323643/summary

8. Friday, February 25 (NEW!) - Shenandoah Valley Black Heritage Project - "Finding Calvin: Following My Enslaved Ancestor Through Multiple Owners: A Case Study" Set a reminder to join the Zoom meeting on February 25 at 1:00 EST. Here's the link!  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85372515448

National Geographic Podcast - I'm also pleased to be a contributing member of an exciting podcast, "Into the Depths," featuring National Geographic Explorer Tara Roberts, who sets off on the journey of a lifetime to meet the divers, marine archaeologists, descendants of those brought over on slave ships, as well as historians investigating the lost stories of the slave trade. This is a six-episode podcast, airing on Thursday evenings, which actually began on January 27, and runs through March 3. I was hired as Ms. Roberts' genealogist and will be included in the March 3 episode, as well as in the March issue of National Geographic Magazine (cover story!), which will be released on February 8th.

Click here for more information and to access all available episodes of the podcast and here for the National Geographic Magazine web site.  Though I don't yet know what parts or how much of my research actually "made the cut" for publication, I am ever grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Tara Roberts and to have been included as one of the "featured voices" in this amazing project!

Currently, these are the presentations I have for February 2022, but requests are still coming in, so stay tuned for updates! (I'm saying a prayer that I haven't forgotten anything!) I will also add a few of my commitments for March and April, below.

MARCH

March 3-5/2022 - RootsTech Connect! "Who Ya Gonna Call? Myth Busters" and "What To Do When There's Nothing To Do" (These are both short versions of larger presentations, due to the RootsTech format.) To register, for the world's biggest genealogy conference, visit   https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/next/

 Thursday, 3/10/22 - The Genealogy Center at Allen County Public Library - "Researching Formerly Enslaved Ancestors: It Takes a Village!" - Registration link not yet available, but check this link for updates: https://acpl.lib.in.us/genealogy

Saturday, 3/19/22 - Tidewater Genealogical Society (Virginia) - "Researching Free People of Color in Virginia and North Carolina: 1800-1865" Registration information will be forthcoming. Email VATGS@verizon.net with questions.

Thursday, 3/24/22 - College of Coastal Georgia - "Using Funeral Programs to Inform Genealogy Research" https://upto.com/e/F12WO

APRIL

Friday, April 1, 2022 (NEW!) - Legacy Family Tree Webinars - "We Were Supposed to be Neals: Reconstructing An Enslaved Family Using DNA" Come along on this journey as I share how, using a combination of DNA and traditional research, I was able to find the family of my once enslaved great-grandfather, Calvin! This live presentation is free and will be available for one week for non-members of Legacy. After that, a subscription (well worth it) will be required to view it. Register here! https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/we-were-supposed-to-be-neals-reconstructing-an-enslaved-family-using-dna/

And since I'm on a roll, a few blasts from the past!

January 2022 - North Carolina Genealogical Society and PBS - Virtual Sneak Preview of Season 8 of Finding Your Roots with follow-up discussion panel - Panel discussion available on YouTube at this link: tinyurl.com/NCGSPBS

December 2020 - Another View (Radio Show) - Finding Your Roots, WHRO Style! This is part 1 of a two-part event with Barbara Hamm Lee (host) and Lisa Godley (producer) of this popular PBS local radio weekly radio program. Click here to listen:                                                https://mediaplayer.whro.org/program/anotherview/e/anotherview-thursday-december-10th-2020

The second part of this wonderful event was a LIVE Genealogy Reveal, presented on Zoom, during which I present Ms. Hamm Lee and Ms. Godley with the results of my research on their extensive family histories. Grab some popcorn and join the fun and excitement as I reveal their roots, "WHRO Style!" (Click to watch!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ABGudqXJhbc)

I hope to see you (virtually) soon! :)

Thanks for reading!

Renate

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