Doing your genealogical laundry

Laundry isn't fun - it involves a lot of sorting and organizing and gathering and folding, which is the WORST - luckily, genealogical laundry doesn't involve the folding part, but sometimes, researching your family tree isn't about making new, exciting discoveries. Sometimes it's about just the nitty-gritty, the mundane task of figuring out what it is that you have and finding out what it is that you need. And not even in the sense of "Who was Great grandpa's parents?" In the sense of "I know everything there is to know about Great grandpa, now what documentation do I need to back that up?"

Lately I've been floundering, family history-wise. I have a lot of loose threads, a lot of incomplete information, a lot of new, exciting paths to continue down, but a lot a lot A LOT of rounding out the picture of people I've researched for years and know all the facts about but none of the story in between. It's been overwhelming and honestly, boring, all at the same time, and so I've just ignored it. Ignored it, ignored it, ignored it, and during Family History Month, too! ::shakes head::

So today I'm making a list, a laundry list if you will. I decided to check out the Italian Genealogy Group's website and it turns out they've added some new records to their index, and so I decided to look back at my own records and see what was missing. Some people I have death dates for because I found an obituary, but I have no death certificate. Some people I have a birth date for because of a census record but I have no birth certificate. I'm  concentrating on my Queens-Brooklyn-Manhattan crew because city records are easier for me to get my hands on than Long Island records, but there are a lot of important corroborating records missing from my collection. And now that I have my list and can see the gaps, I can go about filling them in.

It's not the exciting work, but it's the necessary work...

Wordless Wednesday - John Ricklefs, 1936

Not great quality, but a photo of John Ricklefs - looks like he might even be wearing glasses - from the Feb. 7, 1936 issue of The Hartford Courant, now aged 50 years, upon his return to Connecticut after serving about 13 years, 7 of those in solitary confinement, in prison in Massachusetts aaaand...no more words! :)

Wordless Wednesday - Grandpa with Barbara Eden and Joe Garagiola

I Dream of Jeannie :)

My grandfather, Elmer Gorry, used to work on the Orange Bowl Parade for NBC. In this pic he's with Barbara Eden (Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie for those too young to know) and Joe Garagiola, center - I don't know who he is but apparently he used to be a Major League catcher and was a panelist on The Today Show. Barbara and Joe were both the hosts of the parade that year, which I believe was 1985.

Info found on John Ricklefs in The Hartford Courant

So, as I mentioned in my last post, thanks to a tip from fellow blogger TCasteel over at Tangled Trees, I was able to find more information on the criminal hijinks of Great Uncle Jack Ricklefs in the newspaper archives of The Hartford Courant. I found several stories from 1919, when he escaped the prison in Wethersfield, and several from 1936, when he was returned to Connecticut by the state of Massachusetts (where he served time in prison during the years in between) to be tried for that escape and finish serving the remaining original sentence.

The more I read about John, the more I shake my head at either his stupidity or his stubbornness, in that he seems to be stuck in an endless loop (and I'm not sure if it's by choice) of going to jail, either being released or escaping from said jail, then being arrested within a year or so for the very thing that he was previously in jail for, only to be sent back to jail and the cycle continues. But these last few stories made me very sad for him. But also very angry. I kinda wanted to reach back in time and smack him upside the head and just shout, "Stop it already!" at him.

::Sigh::

Okay, so as we already know, he was one of four prisoners to escape from Wethersfield prison in December of 1919, and I found some fun articles talking about the many escapes from that prison in that time period, whether due to negligience or complicity on the part of prison staff. I also found a fun editorial calling this particular group of escaped convicts kinda stupid for choosing to break free in the middle of winter. I think I concur. Anyway, within a day they were all captured except for John, who we already know ended up in prison in Massachusetts just two years later. But I knew very little about his time there, especially since I've reached a brick wall in obtaining his prison records from the state archives there since I don't know when John died. But the articles from 1936 fill in some of the very sad and somewhat horrible details of his years there. I will summarize:

• He was arrested in Massachusetts for his specialty (although you'd think he'd be better at it by that point, it being his specialty and all) of breaking and entering and sentenced to 12 to 15 years. He was given an additional 3 years for, big surprise, a failed escape attempt.
• We have more aliases to add to the list following True Name John Ricklefs. The list now reads aliases John Anderson, Harry Young, Robert Johnson, James Hamilton, James Ricklefs, and Henry Johnson. It's definitely a method of keeping the cops from finding you quite as easily but I would be super confused as to what name I was using when. 
• He ended up serving 15 years in several Massachusetts prisons, including Deer Island, New Bedford, and Charlestown.  
• Seven of those years he spent in solitary confinement. In a Feb. 22, 1936 article, it reads: "Ricklefs told the court that during his confinement in Massachusetts ... he was kept for seven years in a "blind door cell," from which he was removed only 15 minutes at a time, five times a week for exercise." A parole officer corroborated his story.
• From same story: "'This man has been severely punished,' Judge Jennings said to State's Attorney Hugh M. Alcorn. 'I don't see how he's kept his sanity.' ... Ricklefs, whose home was on Patchogue, L.I., is now gray-haired and stoop-shouldered, with a mild, bespectacled face. His pictures at the time he was an inmate showed him to be sturdy with strong, hard features."

As far as I know, this was the end of John's criminal journey. Well, after serving his time in Connecticut he was returned to New Jersey to finish serving his time there, and THAT was the end of his journey. But by then he was in his 50s or 60s. With the exception of just a few years, he spent his entire adult life in prison. I'm hoping that now, FINALLY, he had learned his lesson. Or that he was just too tired and cranky to continue the criminal lifestyle. But you never know. After all, his brother, though ten years younger, was still at it out on the East End of Long Island. Which is part of the reason my search for John continues...

Another "A-ha!" moment, brought to you by SHARING

They teach you to do it in kindergarten, and now as a genealogist more than 25 years later, I am reaping the benefits.

As my regular readers know, I love newspaper archives. They are by far my favorite hidden treasure for family history research. It's through newspaper archives, mostly found on http://www.fultonhistory.com/, that I've been finding clues and tracing the criminal exploits of the notorious Ricklefs brothers, my family's (so far) most colorful characters.

Because they lived in the New York metro area, http://www.fultonhistory.com/ and http://www.chroniclingamerica.com/ have both been instrumental in my research on these two troublemakers. But John in particular spent a large part of his criminal career in prisons in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, which newspapers are sparsely archived, if at all, on those sites. A Google search of newspaper archives for each of those particular states turned up pretty much nothing.

Now today, several weeks after my Ricklefs searches stalled out, along comes a post by TCasteel over at her genealogy blog, Tangled Trees, about Wikipedia having a listing of both free and pay newspaper archive sites for various countries and pretty much every state in the U.S.

I feel the genealogy itch coming back to my fingertips...oh, how I have missed you!!

At first, I was most excited to check out the New Jersey archives for possible information on John's arrest there, but searching every spelling of his name (damn those Germans!!) proved fruitless. So? Off to Connecticut.

Pay dirt.

The Hartford Courant, a paper I'd never even heard of, has it's archives online courtesy of ProQuest (which Cousin April has told me about many times before and which I had filed away in my already over-filed brain and never used; apparently if you go to your local library, you should be able to use their version for free, though printing fees may apply) ... anyway, I had to pay to view and print copies of the stories I found, but it wasn't that expensive and the truth is you're almost always going to have to shell out something, even if it's a "donation" in order to get the good stuff in genealogy. But I found eight articles about John, from his escape from Wethersfield prison in 1919 to his return in 1936, with quite a few details about his stint in several Massachusetts prisons (including an escape attempt, of course, and solitary confinement) in between.

So I will be going through those articles this weekend. That's what a genealogist considers good, clean weekend fun.

But the point is, even when your search stalls, it doesn't mean it's over. Sometimes you need to step away for awhile just to get a new perspective or, you know, retain your sanity. And sometimes someone else will share a tip or skill they discovered or learned which will prove helpful to your own search. So make sure you pay it forward, ok?

:)

Just a friendly reminder: Raynor Round-up XX coming up Oct. 1

Ah, it feels like it was only yesterday that the Raynor Round-up XIX was rolling around!

It's that time of year again! The Raynor Family Association annual reunion, Round-Up XX, will be held Sat., Oct. 1, at the Lake Ronkonkoma community building, 505 Hawkins Rd., Lake Ronkonkoma, NY.

The reunion will begin at 9:30 a.m. with registration, coffee, exhibits and a social hour, followed by a brief annual meeting and program. Dale Spencer, curator of the Lake Ronkonkoma Historical Society will speak about Lake Ronkonkoma history and the Raynor connection. A luncheon is included.

For more information and costs, call Jeanne Raynor 516-623-5967 or E-mail: raynortown@optonline.net. This genealogist will be unable to attend this year as I will be at a wedding, but for more information on the Raynor Family Association (to which I do belong, although I can't recall the last time I actually paid dues...oh well!) or to join the RFA, you can go to their website at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~karima/raynor/RaynorFamilyAssociation.html.

Cousin April, if you're reading this - how about we make it our goal to find SOMETHING on Jacob (our common Raynor brick wall) to share with the larger family by the time Round-up XXI rolls around??

Blast from the past - Raynor Round-up comes to Freeport, 1997

More stories from the Oct. 2, 1997 issue of The Leader on the occasion of the Raynor Round-up, the annual family reunion, being held there that year. I'll give The Leader this - they give us Raynors in particular and the history of Freeport in general a lot of love....

Surprisingly, this article about Edward Raynor is fairly accurate...



My uncle, Tom Raynor, is second from the right.