Cooking History: Celebrating the Food of Our Family

Today was a day off for me, so I spent some time getting some things done that I had been intending to do for a while now.

I roasted a pie pumpkin in the oven, with the intent of mashing it down and freezing it for our Thanksgiving pumpkin pies.

I also made some veggie scrap broth, which is currently simmering on my stove.

I also cut some older bread that had been made two days ago by my husband into cubes to make some dressing for a meal in the coming weeks.  The crumbs were also saved and will go into our breadcrumb container for meatloaf and other breadcrumb needs.

I do some of these things out of necessity - the bread is homemade, made with whole wheat flour, and has no salt due to my husband's dietary restrictions, as well as the veggie scrap stock since it also is better than the salt-laden broths from the store.  But I also do these things to keep a connection with my past.

My mother's grandparents and some of their descendants eating outdoors, c. 1930s

My mother's mother was a caterer.  She taught my mother how to cook from a very young age.  My mom did the same for me and my siblings.  All of us were helping her from the time we could lift spoons, and by high school I was able to help her in the kitchen by cooking meals while she worked nights.  Because of her mother's catering, my mom knew what could be substituted in cooking should someone run out, and she taught me how to make things from scratch the way she learned, which is why I prefer to roast my own pie pumpkins and mash them versus using canned pumpkin, although my shortcuts in the kitchen involve using my food processor to do the actual mashing versus doing it by hand as it was done in past generations. 

After my parents got married nearly forty years ago, my father's mother gifted my mom handwritten recipes of the foods my dad liked so Mom could make them for him.  Some were deemed "not the way Mom made them,"  but others still live on to this day... and I make them now as well for my husband and I.  When she was alive, my gram loved it when I messaged her via email to tell her I made her No-Peek Chicken (or Pork chops) and that my own dear husband loved the recipe.

My Gram and I at Thanksgiving dinner, 2005

Food is very much a part of history in any family...... When I ask for memories of family and get no response, I ask people to tell me what kind of food they had at family gatherings.  Memories seem to flow when people think about food.  My maternal great-grandmother was known for boiled chicken, which some of her grandchildren remembered fondly while others remembered with horror.  My great-great-grandmother had raised a hog every spring and butchered it in the fall.... so that the Alsatian tradition of having pork and sauerkraut on New Year's Day to bring luck to the new year could be celebrated.  My paternal great-great-grandaunt loved carrots, so much so that she put them in EVERYTHING, or so I have been told.... in soups and roasts, in mashed potatoes, even in lime jello.

My dad's grandparents and family gathered for a meal, c. early 1960s

It is these stories that make my family history come alive.  Since so much of family gatherings, indeed human culture, is spent around the table, it is natural that I have this connection to past generations each time I make a traditional meal for a celebration or make my grandmother's cucumber salad or even bake a loaf of bread.  I remember the stories that have passed down from my ancestors at the holidays as I celebrate their cultures in the foods that I choose to eat, from the Sauerbraten at Christmas to the turkey with homemade dressing at Thanksgiving to even the corned beef (rinsed really well and soaked to leech out the salt) at Saint Patrick's.  And yes, it is still traditional in this house to eat Pork roast and sauerkraut at New Year's to bring good luck

It's Like This, Cat: 1964 Newbery Award Winner

The beginning of March 2014 I started a new undertaking: reading every single Newbery Medal Winner book. A number of them I have read in the past, but I am reading them with fresh eyes,and reviewing them for others. I am not reading them in order, as some will require some effort on my part to find them all.  Want to keep track of which books I read?  Check them out at Confessions of a Wannabe Reader!

Cover of the book - Used for Identification purposes only under the fair use clause

Dave Mitchell: Seeing Through New Eyes

" My father is always talking about how a dog can be very educational for a boy.  This is one reason I got a cat."

Dave Mitchell is a normal teen growing up in New York City.  He is fourteen and doesn't see eye to eye with his father, which cases many shouting matches.  When they yell at each other, Dave's mom has another asthma attack.  It is after one such fight that Dave storms out, headed to the crazy cat lady Kate's home.  He meets a striped stray tomcat and decides to bring the cat home.  Naming the cat Cat, Dave starts to notice that Cat brings about a strange series of events.  First, Dave meets the strange young man Tom Ransom while trying to rescue Cat from a locked cage.  Then, while on the beach at Coney Island with Cat, he meets a sweet teenager named Mary and begins to date her.  Lastly, he begins to realize that maybe life with his dad isn't as hard as he thought, and starts to see that his family isn't as overbearing as he imagined, all because of an old tom named Cat.

Written by Emily Newville, It's Like This, Cat is a coming of age story.  Set in the late 1950s or early part of the 1960s, the has a whimsical feel of the era that happened right before the turbulence of the hippie generation.  The book is a story about a boy, his love for a cat, and the relationship he has with his father.

It is a story about learning how to perceive people, and how perceptions can change over time.  Dave sees his dad as overbearing and always yelling, but doesn't see that he is much like his dad.  He sees his mother as quiet and shy and sickly, not understanding that he and his father both have been stressing her out.  His friendships change as he grows older, and while he doesn't understand it, he vents to his cat.  Cat takes everything in and becomes Dave's confidant.  Cat also helps him to make new friends like Tom Ransom and Mary whom allow him to grow, and those friends grow with him as a result.  Dave is starting to shed his childlike perceptions and see the world through adult eyes.

This wasn't the first time I have read this book, but it was the first time I read it with the intent to study it.  It is a good read.

Jacob Have I Loved: 1981 Newbery Award Winner

In March of 2014, I started a new undertaking: reading every single Newbery Medal Winner book. A number of them I have read in the past, but I am reading them with fresh eyes,and reviewing them for others. I am not reading them in order, as some will require some effort on my part to find them all. Want to keep track of which books I read? Check them out at Confessions of a Wannabe Reader!

I apologize for my long absence from blogging.  Summers are usually filled with other endeavors for me, and this summer was no different.  I barely read during summer since I lost my library card and my Kindle bit the dust, and I regret doing so, but now that the school year is upon us, I am trying to make up for lost time.  I have found my library card, but must wait to replace my Kindle.  Therefore, I will be reading only print books.  

Cover of the book - used for identification purposes only under the fair use clause

Sara Louise Bradshaw: Behind Her Sister's Shadow

"I kept wondering ever since you came.  Why would a woman like you, who could have anything she wanted, come to a place like this?  Now I understand."

Elder by just a few minutes, Sara Louise Bradshaw, nicknamed Wheeze, lives in the shadow of her more delicate sister Caroline.  Growing up with her family on small fictional Rass Island in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay during the turbulence of the Great Depression and World War Two, Louise feels robbed by her younger twin, who is gifted in music and is considered more feminine and beautiful.  Caroline steals Louise's name, her friends, her belongings, her family's affection, even her very hopes.  Louise longs to be a waterman like her father and prays to become a boy so she can escape her sister's personality.  What surprises her, however, is that her dreams and prayers do not sustain the woman she is becoming and that leaving the island of her birth may be the only way to finding herself.

I first read Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson as a seventh grader in my English class.  It was one of the books that shaped my childhood.  I could identify with Louise's struggle to find herself, as well as with the feeling over being overshadowed by others.  As the eldest child in my family, the idea that a younger sibling's personality could overshadow an elder one's was something I could relate to, as I often felt the same way with my younger siblings growing up.  Sibling rivalry was a big deal to me, as it was to Louise, and I could feel her frustrations.

As I read this book as an adult, I find that it still resonates with me.  Since this was written from an adult looking back on her childhood, it reads well enough for adults to enjoy it.  Like Louise, I have been able to look back at the journey to adulthood so far as one that was filled with trials, but also with tribulations.  She is confident as she looks back over the story that had she not have had her twin sister and her overshadowing personality, she may not have come into her own as an adult.

There is a religious aspect to this book.  The story gets its title from a verse in the Bible where God says "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated."  Like the elder twin of Isaac, Louise feels unloved and unwanted as she compares herself to the favored, younger twin.  The story weaves itself around this tale of old, as Louise and Caroline's devout grandmother taunts the older girl with the verse.  It takes Louise years to feel wanted and loved again, and it is only when she releases herself that she feels this.

This book is a very well written story, and anyone who can remember what it felt like to be an outsider even in one's own home will probably enjoy this book.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH : 1972 Newbery Award Winner

In March of 2014, I started a new undertaking: reading every single Newbery Medal Winner book.  A number of them I have read in the past, but I am reading them with fresh eyes,and reviewing them for others. I am not reading them in order, as some will require some effort on my part to find them all.  Want to keep track of which books I read?  Check them out at Confessions of a Wannabe Reader!

Cover of the book - used for identification purposes only under the fair use clause.

Mrs. Jonathan Frisby: A Mouse on a Mission

With her son, Timothy, desperately ill with pneumonia and to frail to be moved, Mrs. Jonathan Frisby, a young widow of a mouse, is frantic.  Spring is creeping in and the farmer will be plowing his garden soon, the garden that was her family's winter home.  Mrs. Frisby must seek the help of the rats who live nearby.  They escaped from a laboratory at NIMH, but can they help save her son?

This was the first of the Newbery Award books that I had ever come in contact with, but it wasn't through a book.  I saw the Don Bluth movie, The Secret of NIMH as a very young child.  I remember it scared me. Let me say this.  If you have ever seen the movie, the book is different.  The book is titled Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and was written by Robert C. O'Brien.  I like the book much better than the film adaptation, which leaves out a good number of plot development and changes the characters of Nicodemus, Jenner, and Jeremy.

That being said, the book is a good read.  The idea that rats have the intelligence of humans through laboratory testing is plausible, and the story, while whimsical and pastoral, does say much about the idea of animal testing.  

Family and loyalty are big themes of this story as well.  Mrs. Frisby is a widow with four small children, her husband having died the previous year.  She loves her children, who have inherited their intellect from their father, and will do anything to protect them.  The rats also love their families and will protect them, but also honor the loyalty that Jonathan and the mouse Mr. Ages have given to them throughout the years.  They also mourn the loss of part of their colony through schism.  

If you have a chance to read the book, I would highly recommend doing so.  

A Year Down Yonder: 2001 Newbery Award Winner

The beginning of March 2014 I started a new undertaking: reading every single Newbery Medal Winner book. A number of them I have read in the past, but I am reading them with fresh eyes,and reviewing them for others. I am not reading them in order, as some will require some effort on my part to find them all.  Want to keep track of which books I read?  Check them out at Confessions of a Wannabe Reader!

Cover of the book - Used for illustration purposes only under the fair use clause

Sometimes I binge read and then remember to write up reviews on several books at once, or I write up reviews on sheets of paper and then have to find time to type them into the computer, so forgive the multiple posts today.

Mary Alice Dowdel: The City Gal

Mary Alice Dowdel used to spend just her summers at her grandmother's house in southern Illinois, but the year is 1937 and the Great Depression has hit her family hard.  Her parents are boarding in a single room, her brother is working out West, and the fifteen-year-old is sent to live with her grandmother for the entire year.  She is not happy with the prospect, as her grandmother lives in a very rural area that is very hick to the Chicago girl.  Her grandmother is tough as nails and very no nonsense, and Mary Alice dreads the prospect of living with her.  But that changes as Mary Alice gets to know her grandmother and warms up to some of the townsfolk.   She learns that maybe the year spent "down yonder" wasn't so bad.

I had read this story before and thoroughly enjoyed it when I read it.  A Year Down Yonder is the middle book of a trilogy by Richard Peck, who also wrote the book Strays Like Us (another book I really enjoyed reading).  It is the heartwarming tale of a teen who learns that her seemingly backwards grandmother isn't as backwards as she seems.  It is also a tale about coming home.  This book, which seems to be written for teenagers instead of children, is an awesome story of remembering a stage in childhood for a young woman.  Some of it reminded me of elements of the book Belle Prater's Boy, particularly the revealing of some of the townsfolk's secrets and the way that some of the hoity-toity elite of the town try to stay away from the country bumpkins.  It is a very good read.

Sometimes a little variety is needed

Don't get me wrong, I like Ancestry.com and their hundreds of databases.  I really do.

What I don't like is how easy it is to get the wrong information.  With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can have a full family tree.  And half of it can be wrong.

So what?

Having a name wrong in your tree could be a brick wall.  For years I was convinced my great-great-great grandfather's name was Franz, so when I found a François as the brother of another person, I overlooked it.  It wasn't until a common descendant confirmed that my Franz was indeed François and showed me her research that I then went back and not only found him, but his father, grandfather and maternal family as well.  A brick wall that was literally 10 years old was finally overcome because I thought to think out of the box.

Another more recent example is the mother of my Abinah Wood, Reumah (or Ruehama, if you follow the spelling on her will - Personally I think she went by both).  Her surname, as far as we can tell, is unknown.  Every document I have seen with her name lists her as Reumah Wood, as every document was issued after her marriage to Jonathan Wood.  The family book from 1903 speculated that Reumah was probably a wealthy French woman from New Orleans, Louisiana, and that is taken as near fact in my research circle.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered on Ancestry.com that someone in the Public Member Trees had given her the last name of Wealth.  Even more to my chagrin were the number of other people who copied that information onto their own tree.   A wrong name got copied and taken as fact several times over.

For a perfectionist such as myself, having incorrect names is bothersome.  That's why I truly enjoy it when someone corrects my data, and then shows me why they are correcting it.

It's a copy and paste job

Public member trees from Ancestry.com, Pedigree Resource File and Ancestral File from FamilySearch, and the WorldConnect Project on Rootsweb.com, among others, are all prone to grave mistakes from this kind of wrong data.

Don't misunderstand me, these sources are awesome resources, but they should be researched with a grain of caution, for they are not always going to be correct.  Anyone can find names and stick them together in research.  A genealogist who wants to be correct will actually back up said names with sources and research.  It is easy to plug names into a tree, what's hard is making sure the info you have is correct.

Too many times someone who is new to genealogy will take a tree and ecstatically plug it into their own without looking over the research.  I have been guilty of that myself.  However, when one then goes back over sources, it is harder to find the info one needs because the tree could be changed or deleted.  It is frustrating to be asked by another researcher about info and have no idea where it came from.

Okay, so what do I do?

So how does one make sure info is correct?  By checking sources.  I will rarely consult a tree in one of the aforementioned databases if it doesn't have sources.  I will also check the sources that are listed if it is possible to get a better look at what and where and when.   If I have to add the name of someone that is not documented by other sources (because sometimes, it can and does happen), I will document the source as coming from one of those databases AND I will try my best to make sure I also have the name of the submitter who submitted the data in the first place.  That way, if I find new information that either corrects or supports the data in my tree, I know who I can contact to ask if they have the info as well.  Also, I try to record what date I found info whenever possible, so that if the data does disappear, I still have some way of knowing who gave it to me and when.

Of course, even my own tree is not perfect.  Too many times in my early days I was one who just copied stuff willy-nilly, and now I am regretting making that mistake.  It may seem like a daunting task to sift over the info, but it is well worth it in the end.

Variety

One of my favorite  things to do is search more then one database, on more then one site.  I find that if I stick to one site, such as Ancestry.com, I miss the great databases some of the other sites have to offer.  I also miss getting a complete picture of who my ancestors and family members were and what they did.  While Ancestry has a vast amount of holdings, some other sites have great stuff as well.  A good jumping off point for searching some of these other databases is Cyndi's List, which has an extensive array of links designed to help everyone from the beginning genealogist to the most professional.

With odd names, such as my favorite of Waldspurger, I sometimes will just Google the name, or search the Google News Archive Search, which has old newspapers from around the world (This link is great for finding death notices too, particularly in the Pittsburgh area and for just having fun reading old time newspapers.)  I have found everything from old wedding announcements to my uncle's breaststroke record from the 70s by searching through Google.

There's also the old fashioned look-ups.  Yes, the world is becoming more and more digitized, but not always are the digital records correct.  Keep in mind some of those records on Ancestry and the like are transcribed by someone, and those transcriptions have a margin for human error.   Not to mention there are literally MILLIONS of records that aren't in digital format as of yet.  Sometimes it takes ordering them directly from the source in the form of old-fashioned photocopies or visiting the site and taking digital photographs to get information that is correct and pure.  If you are looking for information from Allegheny, Montgomery or Philadelphia Counties in Pennsylvania, I can get you contact information for places that can help!  Keep in mind, these look-ups can range from free (if you can find a person willing to do it for you) to 50 dollars an hour or even more.  But the amount of info you can glean from the original records can be worth the money spent.

A little variety is great for researching!  Don't limit your sources!

Take the time to ask the questions

Yeah, that's a question!

The last known World War One veteran has died.  She was 110.

From a genealogist and history buff's standpoint, that statement brings sort of a sadness to my heart.  What stories she must have had!  Yes, the last veteran was a woman, who served with the Woman's Royal Air Force in England.  She didn't see combat, but she still worked alongside men who did. 

I hope her stories were written down, for they had to have been awesome!  From the article I read, most of them were told to family members, but how many were preserved, not only for her future generations, but for millions of history buffs?
(for her story - see Last Known WWI Veteran Florence Green dies at 110)

Take time to ask the questions.

We're losing what is known as "The Greatest Generation" quickly.  Out of ten children born to my mother's paternal grandparents, only one survives. All of her mother's siblings are gone, as are my paternal grandfather and his brothers and sisters.

My grandmother, who is about to turn ninety years old, still lives, and is a wealth of knowledge for me to uncover.  I enjoy asking her questions, from the mundane to the personal.  Her responses are fascinating, and prompt me to ask even more questions.  Yes, some have to pertain to family history, but more often then not the questions I ask are offering me a window into a world of the past.  It is a world that she makes come alive far greater then any history book.

Hey look, the study of memory

The best resource a genealogist has is the memory of an older generation.  Learn to ask questions.  If they don't want to answer personal natured questions, start with something as simple as "What street did you grow up on?" or "What was your favorite toy?"  Sometimes the answers will unlock a memory or a world that you can explore. 

And your older relatives don't have to be "the Greatest Generation" - they could be the remnants of the WWI generation or Baby Boomers.   They could be your own parents, or cousins, aunts, uncles, even friends can have stories to tell.

So get out there and ask!

Lost photos are gems to find

Jesse Meyer and Jennie Hager Cox with sons c. 1942

Recently I found some old photos I thought I had lost. Most of them were in digital form made of scans I had done of photos various older family members had.  I lost them when my computer crashed over two years ago and was lamenting the fact that I might not be able to get them back, for I had foolishly not made hard copies of said photos NOR had I saved that particular set to a disk.  So it was nice to discover that I still had them.

These were photographs from my maternal grandmother's side, a side in which I do not have many contacts willing to share information, because many who had said information have passed on.

Where were the missing photographs?  They were still saved to my old email account's mail.

Dorothy and Jean Cox 1947

You see, I rarely delete emails if they have any family tree connection.  I will keep them for posterity in the account, and just happened to be looking through that account for something else when I discovered that the photos were still there. For those who were wondering - an initial search through the account after my computer crashed did not yield these photos, which makes me wonder if I was using the correct search terms the first time.

The pictures in question were among some that my mother's first cousin's ex-wife had sent me back in 2005 to add to my collection.  This is a family member that I sadly lost track of, so I couldn't ask for them back, nor could I find any of my family members that had these photos, so I was stuck with the fact that I'd never see them again.

It just goes to show you that you'll never know where you'll find photographs!