NOTE: This article was originally the lesson plan for the TellOurLifeStories.com and NewspaperARCHIVE.com co-sponsored teleconference on using archival newspapers to enhance and inform your historical writing
For this article we are going to talk about a bygone time.
In researching this topic, I turned to my favorite life-story writing teacher, Lois Daniel, who wrote How To Write Your Own Life Story. In it Lois talks about writing about our ancestors.
I believe it is true what she says in the book about Americans in general not knowing too much about their grandparents and great-grandparents. We are a here-and-now society and our immediate families and companions compel our attention.
But there may be a time, when, for whatever reason, our thoughts or those of our families turn to questions about our heritage. At that time, we may want to know and explore more about the world in which our ancestors lived.
Lois advises that one way to begin this is to ask older family members to write one story and then perhaps more, so that we can begin to build a picture.
During this series of classes, I have spoken of my grandmother. But I know very little about her mother, whom we called Busia (pronounced busha), which means grandmother in Polish.
There was a picture of Busia in the Milwaukee Journal, standing in a celery field in the late 1800's. The field was probably where city streets are today. No one in the family knows where that picture went.
I wondered about how Busia came to America, what kind of ship she came on, and where they went when they first got here. A couple of years ago, I visited Ellis Island and got the tour with the headset. It was an experience I will never forget. They included the voices and sounds of crowds of people so that when I was listening, I really got a taste of what it might have sounded like and felt like, to the degree that I could imagine it at all. There were all these people crowded into a large hall, the city of New York they could see out the window. That was their goal. Yet they were in this room standing in vast lines after their long journey by sea, waiting to be told, "yes," or "no" that they could proceed to meet their sponsor, or that they could not proceed because of illness or for some other reason and that they would have to make the long journey back to where they came from. In some cases a parent would have to leave young children with the sponsor and return back across the sea.
I looked into newspaperarchive.com to find stories of immigrants that came through Ellis Island.
I found a story from March of 1895 in the Middletown Daily Argus of New York about some diamond cutters from Antwerp who were told by their employer who sent them to America, to tell the immigration authorities that they were tourists. One of their number, however, told the truth, that they had been sent as contract laborers to work in a firm in Cincinnati. Upon that testimony, all 125 of the men were excluded from entrance to the country.
There was an even better story from the New York Times in June of 1902.
The headline was "Queer Hiding Place of a Boy Stowaway; Took Passage in a Boiler of a Donkey Engine on the Umbria; His pluck Enlisted Sympathy of Passengers and Immigration Officials and He Found Here a Friend He Sought"
This was about a boy, described as a "well built, bright looking young fellow" by the name of Bozo Gicano from Serbo Croatia who was given 100 florins by his father and told to make his way in the world. His first time out the money was stolen from him and he had to go back home. His next time out, he had no money, but lots of pluck and he set out to find his friend Felix in America. He stowed away on three different ships before he finally headed out from Liverpool and made it to New York. The ship's crew and passengers helped him clean up and found him a suit. One of the crew members recognized his language and went with him to the Serbo Croatian neighborhood in New York where, when they entered a back room there were a dozen brawny men hanging about. One of them jumped over a chair, and cried "Bozo!" And it was his long-lost friend Felix for whom he had been searching.
Imagine stowing away in the boiler room of a ship.
Imagine coming to America at all in the late 1800's and going through Ellis Island.
We may not know much about our ancestors, but by reading some of these newspapers, we can get a feeling for the times in which they lived and it helps to round out somewhat of a picture.
Here we can share some thoughts and stories about what people are working on and tell about websites and what they can do.
Continuing on the immigration theme, and it is probably something that we can all relate to because America, after all is a land of immigrants. I looked further to my own background and searched to find stories of immigrants in Milwaukee or Wisconsin.
I found an article in the Janesville Daily Gazette from February of 1888. As I read over some newspapers of the time, it became clear that the front page was often used in an editorial way. In today's newspapers we wouldn't find that to be the case, but 100 years ago, editorial-type commentary was commonly found amongst the news articles.
This was the case for the story on this day. There was an article on the front page of the paper with the headline, The Evils of Immigration. It talked about how over 15 million immigrants had arrived in the United States between the years of 1819 and 1887. Of those, over 8 million arrived after the Civil War ended in 1865. It said that their cash value was over $15 million. And the main focus of the article was to point out that America should encourage industrious immigrants, but that the "worthless and dangerous classes should be kept out."
Another story was very interesting.
The Stevens Point Journal, in Stevens Point Wisconsin, today a college town had a story on April 28 of 1888. It appeared on page 17. It was about a grandmother and a grandfather. They were nearly 50 years old, but strong and hearty and they sold their farm in Ohio and located in Western Kansas. Their children were all married off. They had a stout and comfortable log cabin and a good farm. Grandmother said at the breakfast table that they would see an Indian raid that day because she had dreamed it in the night. Grandfather said, "Well I hope we do, at least 100 of them." She told him he would regret his words and when he went out to the fields with the plow, she got the shotgun down from the wall, loaded it and waited. Sure enough there was an Indian raid and they captured the Grandfather. It was a hair-raising story and during part of it Grandmother was hoping that someone would come from town or some immigrants would come and help.
The Indians chased Grandfather across the field and they captured him and Grandmother holed up in the house and barred the door and they tried to get her to come out, but she wouldn't budge, even when they started horse-whipping Grandfather. Hard as it was she stayed put and managed to kill one of them with the shotgun and injure another.
Finally, they took Grandfather off with them and when she thought the coast was clear, she high-tailed it to town to get help and she led a party after those Indians, or Redskins, as the story called them, and they found them raiding another farm. They were able to save Grandfather.
I would advise anyone to read it.
The conclusion was that in the future, whenever Grandmother talked about having a dream, Grandfather never again charged her with being whimsical or expressed a desire to see her midnight visions fulfilled, so that he learned a lesson from her intuition. And then they moved back to Ohio.
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