Today’s exciting find: a historical 103-year-old world map, hidden in Grandma’s steamship travel journal!
This 1922 antique world map (made by the George F. Cram company, Chicago; for Kiggins and Tooker CO, New York) reveals how far the British Empire and other ruling empires extended. (You can see the color-coding chart, bottom R on the map.)
The map also includes dashes showing steamship travel paths through the seas.
This helps me trace where Grandma’s ship sailed and stopped in 1926. The color-coding shows me who ruled the countries she passed through at that time (unless that changed shortly after the map was published.)
As a bonus, note also the solid lines marked in the seas, indicating submarine cable lines from World War 1.
(Later in this post you’ll see how the map unfolds from the journal.)
Sometimes I think my own home is a historical wonderland!
I have so many boxes of antique handwritten photos, letters, and other memorabilia, it’s easy to lose track of what I have. I joke that I came from a family of hoarders. But I DO relish items hoarded now for over a century which are now in my possession.
It’s a historical writer’s dream, right?
For the past year, I’ve searched for such a map online. In the meantime, I had this all along!
[My excuse for missing this map: I was temporarily derailed for a few years, assembling and editing a 1950s-1960s collection of vintage scifi short stories, written by yet another family member. See Gremmie’s Reef, now in print.]
It helps that I’ve now switched my office research piles from vintage science fiction manuscripts back to the India artifacts. So I now have more at my fingertips, including this travel journal.
Here’s how this antique world map physically unfolds:
When Gladys wrote in this journal, she’d just begun her steamship journey. It would last 51 days.
She noted that she boarded the S.S. President Garfield in San Francisco, California in August of 1926. She then had various stops in other countries and ship changes before finally landing in Madras, India to marry Grandpa Ken.
A bit of their romantic history:
Ken graduated from high school in Walla Walla, WA with Gladys in 1915. They then both attended the University of Washington in Seattle.
After college graduation, Gladys went to San Diego to teach.
In 1923, 25-year-old Ken (J. Kenneth Pearce) was sent to South India, to work as a Forest Engineer for the British Indian government.
In the fall of 1925, Ken got a short home leave to visit Washington State. He then proposed to Gladys. It was about time! For ten whole years they’d been close friends. But during that visit, sparks flew.
Gladys and Ken would live in India until 1933: first in South India, and later in the Andaman Islands.
The Andaman Islands
The Andamans are tiny specks on this world map, in the Bay of Bengal. The islands are east of the Indian mainland, near Burma (now Myanmar) and Siam (now Thailand.)
This particular map has the Americas in the center (being published in the USA.) So the R edge of this map shows the mainland of India, while the L edge has the Andaman Islands.
If you zoom in close you can see where Gladys put an arrow pointing to them. Seeing it on a globe or other-centered map might make it easier to visualize this.
Still, what a great find this is! I now have this map as my computer screensaver.
I’m sure the cartographers who drew it 103 years ago could have never imagined THAT.
What’s in your own attic, basement, or closet? What surprise about your own ancestors awaits you…or have you already found?
Please share your own discoveries in a comment, or email me via my Contact page. I’d love to hear from you.
This post is in the series Stories from Family Memorabilia, on researching family history, via odd objects and papers.
Today’s historical mystery is a 1938 4th Grade report card. It’s a strange report, from an odd location.
And as usual, I can’t pick up any old family paper without it stimulating my curiosity. Like Paul Harvey, the old American radio broadcaster, I want “the rest of the story.”
Despite the missing first name on this paper, I realize quickly I’m looking at my dad’s report card, since in 1938 he was 10 years old. Still, Inoticed odd things about this report.
Harsh Teachers
For starters, one teacher’s comments were over-the-top insensitive. I’m not a fan of participation trophies, so mentioning he was sloppy or untidy was acceptable. But for his English teacher, H.D.H., to call him–any kid!–“lazy and unintelligent” raised my Mama hackles.
Dad as an adult was both industrious and bright, working as a creative landscape architect. So I put on my psych cap. (I formerly worked in both psychiatric and educational Occupational Therapy.) What the heck was going on with Dad at age 10?
Words from less harsh teachers described him in this report as “content with something much less than his best”, “aught to have done better”, “inclined to be erratic”, “rather mischievous”, disobedient, silly, slack, and forgetful. Ooooh, this is beginning to sound like a boy who had potential, but didn’t give a rip. But why?
Conversely, his French teacher wrote “He is keen and intelligent and well ahead for his age.” His Scripture teacher wrote “listens well and answers intelligently.” And while Dad was 10, the average age of the class was 11 years old. Hmm. I’ve worked with gifted children who misbehaved out of sheer boredom.
Children on the Move
Finally I notice the words at the top: Form: “Remove” and in the tiniest cursive imaginable at the bottom of the report, “Knowing he is leaving has unsettled him, I think.”
So Dad was leaving. To go where? And where, in the world (literally) was this school, teaching French and Latin to 4th graders?
The odds were high he had just come from another country, and soon leaving for another. You see, Dad was the son of an American foreign service officer. I have a list of dates of dates and places where Dad’s family lived.
This list below, created by one of Dad’s sisters, reveals that Dad moved four times in his first 10 years of life. Born in Winnipeg Canada, he then lived in Arlington Virginia, Trieste Italy, and Plymouth England, then later that same year to Lynchburg, VA.
Dad was born in 1928. He lived in four countries before age ten.
Where was Ravenswood School?
The location of Ravenswood School puzzled me. In 1938 Dad lived in two places. Historical sites for Lynchburg don’t show any school by that name, yet four hours from there is the town of Ravenswood, West Virginia. Three schools there had the name Ravenswood.
I found in my ancestry app that while Dad was at Ravenswood (in January) his grandmother had died in Lynchburg.
So the Lynchburg timing was right. But wait! But why would they dump him in a school four hours away at age 10, unless it was a boarding school? They didn’t have boarding schools in WV, right?
Also unusual to me was the inclusion of Latin and French in an American 4th Grade classroom, even in 1938. The wording was weird too: “Form 4” instead of “Grade 4” with the school term was labeled “Easter.”
I called my lifeline (my brother) who said dad had been in a boarding school at some point in his life. So thinking the town of Ravenswood, WV might be a red herring, I Googled Plymouth, England. Lo and behold, there was a Ravenswood School in England, too.
Then began a deep dive for me down a dark hole for two days.
British boarding schools for 8-year olds?!
That Ravenswood was indeed a boarding school. And from the dates on the report card, I realized Dad had been there at ages 9 and 10. Possibly at even a younger age. WHAT?
Although my grandparents were American, it was particularly common for children of diplomats and others in working government service in other countries to send their children to boarding schools. The justification for it was that it would supposedly give children more stability and an excellent education.
But for some reason, I always thought this involved the teen years, not children still clutching teddy bears and wanting mom to read bedtime stories to them.
I was shocked to finally understand one of the lines in tiny print at the bottom of Dad’s report card: “too many stripes for silly behavior and disobedience.” That meant beatings with a cane. I was also distressed reading about how much bullying and even more extreme abuse took place within early boarding schools, meted out by older children.
Dad, born in February, at the time of this report card was only 10 years and 1 month old, so the report was mostly about his behavior at age 9.
Boarding school documentaries reveal harsh truths
I then watched two documentaries on YouTube showing 8 year olds being sent off to boarding school in more recent years. I was disturbed by how it distressed those particularly young children. Leaving Home At Eight | Boarding School Children follows four little girls, and The Making of Them (1994) (also connected with Nick Duffell) several 8 and 9-year-old boys.
Listening to one little boy in the latter documentary broke my heart. He had quickly learned to shut down his emotions and be a brave little man. Boys who cried for their mothers were particularly targeted for bullying.
Strangely, those two modern documentaries revealed distress in some of the mothers who felt pressured to send their kids to boarding schools. They were truly persuaded it would be good for them. Some believed it would give their children more stability, what with the family moving often with Dad’s work. Many of these women had husbands who had been in boarding schools themselves, so for the fathers that was all they knew.
I urge you to watch those documentaries, but with a tissue handy.
Raising resilient kids at on the move
This deep dive has me appreciating the permission I always had, being an American, to educate my children in a variety of ways and even when moving to new locations. As a child, I moved every three years: Dad had apparently caught the moving bug.
I feel that caused growth in me as child and helped me to learn to adapt well. My husband and I while raising our three children lived in three different U.S. states and one other country (Norway.) Of course, it was not always easy for the kids changing schools. But they all grew into adults who love to travel.
Educationally, depending on each of my own child’s individual needs, we used a variety of methods. Our children experienced a mix of public school (including in Norway) and home school–depending on each one’s individual needs at the time–growing up to be brilliant and loving adults now teaching their own children to explore.
Fresh understanding
Now I know more than I wanted to know from a single piece of paper from my vintage paper pile. But it’s got me thinking about my dad and how it may have affected him.
It also has given me more insight into my Grandmother’s writings about living in British Raj, India. She had commented with some horror on young children being sent away from India to England to boarding schools, while both parents remained in India. Once they were shipped off, some children didn’t see their parents for years. Grandma had come from an extremely tight and loving family, so this shook her.
I want to weep for all the precious moments British moms missed (as did my Dad’s American mom) with their children in boarding school. Some of you know I wrote a book called Delight in Your Child’s Design (Second Edition, Kindle) so know my passion for that. I can only hope that those moms now know there are ways to educate children well, while keeping them close.
Little-known History ~ Abolitionist voters in Massachusetts, 17 years before the 13th amendment, proposed a bill: denounce slavery or secede from the Union.
When I found this document accidentally during a family ancestry search, I felt heartened. In these days of racial discord, it’s nice to see evidence of people who always thought slavery a horror and fought hard to destroy it. I’d never heard before of any bills proposing a state secede unless slavery was abolished, have you?
Sadly, the bill did not pass. Yet it inspires me to see seven names connected with my family tree (Nickerson, Doane, and Robbins). Grandpa’s middle name was Robbins; his mother’s parents were Robbins and Nickerson. Perhaps some of your own ancestors are in this list of signers.
I know we can just as easily find dark histories buried in our family trees, but we can at least be proud of these brave people who signed this in 1848. And surely to get to the point of creating a bill, they must have been fighting slavery long before.
Taking a closer look in the document itself, with eight parts, I-VIII, we see slavery declared:
“a covenant with the death, and an agreement with hell”.
The proposed bill decried that as long as the Commonwealth consented to slavery, the government would be “morally and politically responsible for all the cruelties and horrors of the slave system.” The bill also requested, in near-poetic and faith-filled words:
In writing history – family history or a historical biography— using a little math humanizes characters so we can see them as former living, breathing human beings.
An ancestry chart can provide nuts and bolts about people: birth dates, death dates, marriage dates. But how can those dates tell a story?
While researching one interesting true character in my own tree for a history magazine article, I learned the following about a guy named John. Read (but feel free to skim) this next paragraph. I guarantee it’s boring, but a fresher approach follows:
John Martin Gose (1825-1919) married Hannah Jane McQuown (1831-1925) in 1854. They moved from Missouri to the Washington Territory in 1864 with five children, Thomas Phelps (b. 1855), Dora (b. 1856), Mack (b.1859), John (b. 1861) and Christopher (b.1863). They arrived in Walla Walla in 1865. A sixth child, Oscar (b. 1865 or 1866) was born there.
With no additional information other than those dates and locations, can we discern more about what this family was like and make their story more interesting?
1 calculator + 1 family tree = more compelling stories.
Doing a little math with the dates provided, this picture emerges:
24-year-old John and his wife Hannah, 22, began their year-long journey on the Oregon Trail with five children all under ten years old. In their covered wagon were Phelps (9), Dora (8), Mack (5), John (3) and Christopher, a nursing baby. After arrival in Walla Walla, Hannah had another child, Oscar — she’d been expecting him either during the during the arduous journey or shortly after arriving in the new settlement. Years later, when the children were teens, tragedy struck. To the devastation of John, Hannah, and the siblings, Oscar died when he was only 12 years old.
Although I was able to confirm that yes, they traveled the Oregon Trail, dates and locations alone strongly suggested that initially. All other details in the previous paragraph came from my simply subtracting birth dates from death dates, then imagining what that must have been like for them. Who knew math could tell a story?
Does this give you an impulse to look at your own ancestral tree in a new way? Eager to find stories about your own family history? Whip out your calculator too! Let me know what stories you discover.
