I have been a volunteer at RAOGK for a few years now. It’s a fantastic group of volunteers, and there’s a strong sense of community that makes it feel like that old, worn pair of sneakers.
Earlier this week I received a lookup request for a family that had been killed in a car accident in the late 1920’s. Long story short, it turned out that many of the details the requester provided about the family weren’t entirely accurate. This is fairly normal; it just meant I had to spend more time digging.
I never did find much about the family itself, and the scarcest of facts remain: a mother, father and two children from Durham, North Carolina were killed when their car went over a bridge circa 1928. What I did manage to find was a birth certificate for one of the kids and a mention of the mother’s family in the 1910 census.
But that’s not why I’m blogging. What I found interesting is how quickly I’ll adopt someone else’s family as my own. And it happens in a very roundabout way.
The search started with a scan of Durham city newspapers from 1924 through 1931 (since the exact date of the accident wasn’t known, other than being “around” Christmas). These types of searches involve hours at the public library in the microfilm room. Or - more succinctly - hours in a dark room haunched over a 30 year old microfilm projector, with fuzzy images of old newspapers whirring by as fast as my eye can scan them.
It’s inevitable that you’ll stop to read the paper once in a while. The first ad that caught my eye was a motorcycle dealership on North Roxboro Road, and I jotted down the details for my perusal at some later date.
A few things started to become apparent. Any article that involved African-Americans had the word “negro” in the headline. Common lexicography in the 1920’s, I suppose, but it’s one of those cultural details that still rubs me the wrong way.
The next thing I noticed was how many car accidents seemed to happen at this time. The first few pages always seemed to have articles about a car rolling over and killing so-and-so. By the mid 1920’s the automobile was in common circulation (thanks largely to Henry Ford’s ever-present Model T), but the idea of automotive safety (seat belts, crumple zones, etc.) was still embryonic - if conceived at all.
And so it went. Four hours scanning newspapers, with at least an hour of that time reading through things not directly related to my genealogical lookup. But it certainly puts my mind back into a 1920’s way of thinking.
Then it was off to the Register of Deeds. “Vital Records” include birth certificates, marriage certificates and death certificates, and they all reside in a relatively tiny back office in the basement of a large government office building. I presented my ID, signed in on the visitors log and was left in this room with over a hundred years worth of peoples lives.
For many people, the idea of scanning through thousands of birth certificates would seem like Chinese water torture. Not for this deranged soul; I poured over the records with rapt interest, and was amazed at what I was finding. In the so-called “good old days”, people seemed to be giving birth out of wedlock more than they were within marriages. Interracial parents were having kids more often than you would think in the pre-Civil-Rights South, and they were doing it at remarkably young ages (the youngest mother I recall seeing in the birth certificates was 13).
And this isn’t to say that people are inherently bad; I’m just suggesting that the pundits who talk about the “good old days” haven’t spent much time with vital records. What became clear to me is that people were having sex in the early part of the 20th century just as much as they are now.
Marriage certificates are always interesting to read - and unlike birth and death certificates, have the direct involvement of the persons involved. That said, I found marriage certificates the most laborious to look through, since the outcome was inevitable: the couple got married.
Death certificates. If there was ever something that could entertain me for hours on end, it’s death certificates. What satisfies the inner-voyeur in each of us more than a snapshot into the final moments of peoples’ lives?
I admit to taking death certificate volumes (bound books containing death certificates for a particular year, sorted by surname) randomly off the shelf and leafing through them like a magazine. One certificate was for a police chief who was shot in the head twice; the cause of death was rather humorously put as “two bullets in the brain”. I imagined some poor sod looking up at his wife and declaring, “My god, Martha, I think I have two bullets in my brain. Would you bring me a few Aspirin?”
Another death certificate was for a 21 year old woman who hanged herself at home.
And let me be clear: there’s nothing amusing about a person hanging herself - especially at such a young age. The “cause” was listed simply as “depression”. The person who discovered the victim was her mother. It took my breath away to imagine a family having to cope with this tremendous tragedy. And the idea of this little piece of paper making it “official” seemed to add insult to injury. What mother should ever have to endure the pain of receiving her own daughter’s death certificate?
And so it went. Cerebral Hemorrhage. Pneumonia. Ruptured heart (cause: gunshot wound to the chest). Tuberculosis. Pulmonary edema. Broken neck (cause: overturned automobile).
Two things became clear: people are constantly having sex, and people are constantly dying - with the assistance of things like guns and cars, if not from “natural” causes.
And this family that became my own? Victories in genealogical research are fleeting things, and the excitement after the discovery of some detail - slight as it may be - is very real. The birth certificate that I found is nothing extraordinary, but it seemed to make this long-dead family real. One small flicker of life for corpses long forgotten.
