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Re: What do you say? esp for C&U archivists



I am working on a talk called "Oops! Bad Moments in Genealogy," which talks about dealing with this sort of discovery. In researching the talk, I have found that most genealogists are actually quite happy to discover that their ancestors were engaged in unpleasant events, as these usually generated more records than were generated for the average law-abiding ancestor. The problem they have is how to pass on this news to other family members who may not be so happy to hear about it. I think this sort of thing is also tolerated much more when it is an ancestor the person didn't know. I'm just working up the courage to try to get records for my grandmother's two divorces (I do know that the second husband divorced her, among other things, because she gambled away his money at the race track....) I didn't feel comfortable researching this while my father was still alive.



Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
Special Collections Librarian/Archivist

Culinary Institute of America
1946 Campus Drive
Hyde Park, NY  12538
(845) 451-1757
c_crawfo@culinary.edu

>>> "Wood, Thomas" <Wood.Thomas@UIS.EDU> 03/30/01 11:03AM >>>
A couple of years ago we helped a genealogist find some potentially
disturbing court records regarding her g-g-grandfather. We located an 1860s
divorce case file, in which Mrs. Ancestor sued Mr. Ancestor for divorce on
the grounds of adultery and abandonment. The documents in the case file
revealed that Mr. Ancestor was the son of a prostitute, and had in fact been
raised in a brothel. Thus, he leaned from an early age the (nuts and bolts?
Ins and outs?) of the business. Here in Springfield Mr. Ancestor met a
madam, who was so impressed by his peculiar business skills that she paid
him $500 to leave his wife and elope to Kansas to help her run a brothel
there. Mrs. Ancestor was granted a divorce by the court.

Luckily, rather than be insulted, the researcher seemed delighted that
gramps had been so, um, colorful.


Thomas J. Wood
Archivist
Archives/Special Collections LIB 144
University of Illinois at Springfield
P.O. Box 19243
Springfield IL 62794-9243
217-206-6520 | wood@uis.edu | http://www.uis.edu/library/lib-arch 

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