The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Time lines a window to your ancestors' lives
This column was published April 14, 1996
Did your pioneer ancestors eat pancakes as they made their way laboriously along the Oregon Trail? Or as they panned for gold in California?
They did not.
At least not pancakes as we know them.
Food has been grilled in something called pancakes for thousands of years, and a recipe for a kind of pancake called Indian slapjack was included in Amelia Simmons' American Cookery published in 1796.
But the modern pancake, that flipable flapjack of airy batter, made something of a sensation when it was introduced in a New York City department store window on March 25, 1882.
The pancake mix was soon created. By 1910, pancake flour was being sold throughout the United States.
This culinary tidbit helps me envision the lives of my ancestors. Grandma Ada Rene Barnes was a 20-month-old girl in Cove, Ore., when Aunt Jemima cooked her first stacks of pancakes in that New York City storefront.
Chronologies are built from such obscure facts. Some folks call them time lines. They help us understand our ancestors' lives. Conversely, our ancestors' lives can help us understand their times.
The most common chronologies are based on economic and political events, such as the reigns of kings and queens, wars, pestilence - the kind of stuff that bored most of us to tears in history class.
But chronologies can be developed around any subject. I favor time lines that use events that affected the daily lives of my ancestors, including culinary events. Consider these:
The first commercial shipment of bananas to the United States happened in 1870, when 608 bunches of bananas arrived in Jersey City, N.J. The first shipload arrived in Boston a year later, but few U.S. citizens had tasted bananas when they were sold, wrapped in foil, at the Philadelphia World's Fair in 1876. (My grandpa, Charles C. Day, was a 3-year-old boy when those first bunches arrived, and a 9-year-old when they were introduced at the World's Fair. How I wish I'd had the foresight to ask him if he remembered the first time he saw or tasted bananas.
On May 8, 1886, John Pemberton put Coca-Cola on sale at Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta. It was a headache and hangover remedy advertised as an "esteemed Brain Tonic and Intellectual Beverage." Ingredients include dried leaves from the South American coca shrub and extract of kola nuts.
The ubiquitous hamburger has a mini chronology of its own. Hamburgers caught on slowly in the U.S.. The Hamburg steak appeared as an expensive entre'e on America's first printed menu (Delmonico's Restaurant, 1836). The hamburger as we know it appeared in New Haven, Conn., in 1900, only a year before my grandparents, Ada Rene Barnes and C.C. Day, married each other. The burger gained a big boost at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904, and later became a staple in the fast-food industry dominated by McDonald's, which opened its first hamburger stand in Pasadena, Calif., in 1940.
In 1858, a 26-year-old New York metalworker named John Mason invented the first reusable jar for preserving food. This made home "canning" practical for the first time and millions of farm and urban families soon were putting up fruits and vegetables to tide them over the winter.
At least one genealogical software company has incorporated a chronology feature in its program to help genealogists relate the times of their ancestors to major historical events. The Master Genealogist, by Wholly Genes Inc., has a feature called Timelines. It displays historical events in conjunction with individuals placed in the database.
I haven't tested The Master Genealogist, so don't have any idea how good this feature is, but the concept is interesting.
Regardless of the computer software we use, or whether we even use a computer in our genealogy, we can develop our own chronologies. With a little research we probably can develop more meaningful chronologies than those "off the shelf" because we can localize our chronologies and tailor them to our ancestors' lives.
For descendants of Utah pioneers, a time line would include such important dates as the arrival of the first Mormon pioneers in the Great Salt Lake Valley (1847), completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point (1869), the Manifesto banning polygamy (1890), dedication of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake (1893) and so on.
Events used as chronological benchmarks take on special importance when we know an ancestor was involved in them. For instance, my interest in the Civil War runs very high until my great-grandfather, Theodore Barber Day, was shot in the knee during the battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg, if you're following the Confederacy), then it drops dramatically.
It's easy to create time lines as a window on your ancestors' lives. Most can be created from an almanac, available at any library and most bookstands.
Many inventions had a profound influence on our ancestors' lives, including many that seem obscure today. I'm sure the invention of barbed wire dramatically altered my Grandpa Day's life. He was a boy in Kansas when barbed wire made its appearance in 1874, spelling doom for the open range.
None of my ancestors zipped trousers or dresses until after 1891, and neither did yours. That was the year the zipper was invented. Before that time, it was all buttons, hooks and laces.
Whether you create your own or borrow one from a book, a chronology can help you understand your ancestors.
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