17 Apr Find my ancestors- Newsletter- April 17, 2021
Contents
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!!
Mother’s Day became an official holiday in 1907. However, it was being celebrated (at least by advertisers) as early as 1902, when this ad was run.
You thought the risk of catching COVID on a cruise ship was bad, look at what our ancestors went through…
During the 17th and 18th centuries, vessels transported emigrants between Europe and America. These vessels were small and crowded, the cabins close, and the voyage required six to ten weeks. “Betwixt decks,” writes a colonist, “there can hardly a man fetch his breath by reason there ariseth such a funk in the night that it causeth putrification of the blood and breedeth disease much like the plague.” After William Penn came to America and his vessel lost a third of its passengers to smallpox, he urged those who came to keep as much upon the deck as maybe, “and to carry a store of Rue and Wormwood, or often sprinkle Vinegar about the Cabin.” Actually, this was an old sailor’s yarn, considering the health hazards onboard vessels. Rats were a real issue, so they sprinkled arsenic around the barrels. Needless to say that arsenic caused sickness and death, as in the first colonists to Jamestown. In 1639 the wife of the governor of Virginia writes that the ship on which she had come out had been “so pestered with people and goods and so full of infection that after a while they saw little but throwing people overboard.” One vessel lost 130 out of 150 souls. One-sixth of the three thousand Germans sent over in 1710 perished in a voyage that lasted from January to June. In 1686, Huguenot refugees left Rotterdam with 150 Palatines, and when they landed 24 weeks later, only about fifty persons survived. Again, in 1738, a malignant fever and flux left only 150 survivors out of 400 Palatines. It was estimated that during the years of 1750 and 1755 that 200,000 corpses were thrown overboard from the ships plying out of Rotterdam. This voyage is described by Mittelberger a year later: “During the voyage, there is aboard these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, vomiting, many kinds of sickness, fever, dysentery, scurvy, mouth-rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from nasty and foul water, so that many die miserably. Many hundred people necessarily perish in such misery and must be cast into the sea. The sighing and crying and lamenting on board the ship continue night and day.” All vessels had such casualties even up until 1775 when a brig reached New York, having lost 100 Highlanders in the passage.
My city is bigger than your city! Yes, but my city grew faster than your city!
My city is bigger than your city! Yes, but my city grew faster than your city!The 1870 census was fraught with accusations of undercounting. This happens with every census. 1870 was the first time that America’s population decreased with the toll of the Civil War. Also, see how the 2020 census results will affect politics.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/04/25/census-1870-2020-civil-war/
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-congress-reapportionment/
Still don’t know what to get mom for Mother’s Day?
Still don’t know what to get mom for Mother’s Day?One of my kids gave me StoryWorth as a gift, and I have become a fan. Do not tell my mom, but it is what I got her for Mother’s Day., My clients are supportive of capturing their family legacy but struggle to gather their own story. Here is an inexpensive way to help them capture and preserve excerpts to their story. If you look, there is a Mother’s Day coupon out on the internet. If you sign up, please enter DancestorsGenealogy as who referred you!
