Author: Sean Vanderfluit

52W Mark II – Week 7: Outcast

While my mother is not Mormon, her paternal line is, having been connected with the Latter Day Saints almost since its inception. By some accounts, my great x4 grandfather, William Burgess, joined the church in 1832. However, there are church records stating that he joined the church and was ordained a deacon on April 6 1830 – the date the church was formally established. Despite this, I suspect that William’s ordination date may have been “backdated” and the accounts that he joined in 1832 are correct.

William Burgess (1794 – 1880)

The church was founded by Joseph Smith. his successor was Brigham Young. However, the transition in leadership was not seamless. Joseph had actually designated his brother Hyrum as his successor; however, Hyrum was killed by a mob along with his brother in 1844. This resulted in a leadership crisis within the church.

While Brigham Young quickly took control and the majority of the church came to support him in short order, several other church leaders continued to maintain their claims to leadership. Among other things, this resulted in the establishment of other, albeit smaller, denominations within the Latter Day Saint movement. Many church members, including my ancestors, were caught up in the chaos created by the power struggle and church schisms.

Susan Turple 1818 – 1906

On another branch of my mother’s paternal line is Susan Turple, my great x3 grandmother, who was born in Halifax in 1818. Susan, her mother, and several of her siblings joined the church in the late 1840s. Susan was baptised into the church in 1849.

However, in August 1851, Susan found herself excommunicated from the church, because she had aligned herself with one of the factions who were not backing Young. Her mother and her siblings shared in that experience. After confessing her “error”, Susan was rebaptized and rejoined the church in October 1851. However, her mother and siblings ultimately left the church. This led to estrangement from her family.

The next year Susan struck out on her own and emigrated to the United States, with the goal of joining the Mormon migration to Utah. By September 1852, Susan was in Salt Lake City, where she was an outcast no more. Within weeks of her arrival, she married Henry Lyman Cook, who was fifteen years her senior. Together they had four children, including Sarah Florilla Cook, my great great grandmother.

52W Mark II – Week 6: Social Media

Needless to say, most of our ancestors were never on what we now consider to be social media. There were forms of communication and systems of social connection that we can consider to be the “social media” of their time. Minstrels, troubadours, and jongleurs were the social media influencers of medieval times. Ham radios and party lines are more recent pre-internet examples of what could be analogous to modern social media.

This is not an ad. Welcome to the olden days of the internet.

Of course, nowadays when people think of more modern forms of social media, things like Facebook and Twitter readily come to mind. I’ve made great use of both of those for genealogical purposes.

However, if you think about it, social media as we know it is getting somewhat long in the tooth, and the internet has been around so long that we no longer capitalize the word. The World Wide Web – another term that’s not used so much any more – made its debut to the general public in 1991. Thousands of genealogy websites were in existence more than 25 years ago. When Cyndi’s list made its debut in 1996, it had thousands of links by the end of that year.

The late 90s was also the heyday of Geocities, which I used for genealogy, among other things.

Here’s a part of the genealogy section of my Geocities site as it was in February 1999. Unfortunately, the background design and images have been lost.

I am amazed to see how many of the links on my old Geocities page still work. Of course, I made several mentions of Cyndi’s List. In fact, my genealogy page ended with this:

I also would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Yvette’s Dutch Genealogy Homepage, which you’ll see is one of the hyperlinks on my old Geocities page. It is now Dutch Genealogy and I still make use of it all the time. Given that 15 years ago Yvette marked its 15th anniversary, this site has now been around in one form or another for thirty years!

Yes, I acknowledge that websites aren’t necessarily social media. However, while the term “social media” was many years in the future, I would argue that message boards, bulletin boards, IRC (internet relay chat), and Usenet were all early forms of social media. Looking through my digitized documents, I am surprised by how many items I saved through those sources as far back as 1995, along with scores of emails I exchanged with other genealogists using good old Pine. Other websites from back in the day that were forms of social media included Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com.

Even blogging easily pre-dates the turn of the century. THIS century, not 1900 as might come to mind to many older people when they hear the term. Blogging networking platforms such as Open Diary and LiveJournal originated in the late 90s.

I still have connections with some of the people I met through those venues, especially Nol, a fellow genealogist from Haarlem. I can’t even remember which bulletin board or Usenet group I met him on, but I have every email we exchanged since 1995. His help over the years has been invaluable. My only regret is that after all this time, I have yet to meet him in real life. The last time I was in Haarlem, Nol was in the United States! I promise we’re not deliberately trying to avoid each other.

My first email from Nol after we moved off the message boards. Not long after we started our correspondence, I learned that the family line of Nol’s wife intersected with mine.

The internet and social media isn’t as new as it’s sometimes made out to be, and it has always been a great tool for genealogists!

52W Mark II – Week 5: Oops

This week’s theme for the 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Oops”. A true “oops” does not readily come to mind, although I know I’ve had a few over the last many years. This is about more of a mistaken conclusion based upon incomplete information than it was an actual “oops”, but it was a misleading error nonetheless.

Helen Lerner, about 1945.
Not English.

When I was about four or five, my maternal grandmother, Helen Lerner, went to England. At the time, my mother told me that grandma was going over to visit relatives. To me, it seemed reasonable to conclude that grandma must have been English. On top of that, at that young age I had no idea what my grandmother’s surname at birth had been, I just knew her as “Grandma Burgess”, and Burgess sounded like it could be English (spoiler alert: it wasn’t).

Meanwhile, I only knew Helen’s mother, my great grandmother, as “Grandma Wright”. Again, I had no idea what her surname at birth might have been or that she had previously been married. Wright also seemed pretty English to me, which only reinforced my belief that Grandma Burgess was English.

By eight or nine I developed my interest in genealogy. I even bought a book to help me along, Digging for My Roots, by Michael Scheier and Julie Frankel, which I still have to this day. When I started, I unknowingly did what one is supposed to do as a beginner in genealogy: ask your parents or other close family members. In addition to asking my mom some questions, I also copied what she had written in the family bible. In doing so, I learned my grandmother and great grandmother’s surnames at birth; however, I didn’t realize that “Lerner” and “Anton” were German. It seemed to me that those surnames could also be English. Moreover, my mother had not entered the place of birth for either of her maternal grandparents. When filling out the pedigree in my book, I can’t recall asking my mom where her grandparents were born. However, what little space there was to write place of birth remains blank. (Needless to say, it is recorded in my desktop database!)

My copy of Digging for My Roots, which I still have. On the right, you can see that I don’t have a place of birth for my great grandmother Ameilia Anton.

When I was in grade seven, I started taking French in school. However, when I started high school in grade eight, there were many other language options. I decided to drop French and take German. By that time, I had already begun trying to teach myself Dutch, so I figured studying German would help me with that goal. I also knew that, for some reason, my Grandma Burgess knew German. How or why she did, I had no clue. It clearly didn’t cross my mind to ask. It seems pretty daft in hindsight, but there you go.

Emelia Anton, around 1920. Also not English.

During Christmas break in grade eight, we visited Grandma Wright. During the visit, my mom said, “Grandma, guess what? Sean is studying German in school!” My first thought was to wonder why great grandma would find that particularly interesting, but my train of thought was quickly interrupted by my great grandmother immediately starting to speak to me in fluent German. I’m sure you could have knocked me over with a feather, I was so surprised. (I was also pleased with myself that I understood some of what she was saying.)

After we left, I asked my mom how it was that great grandma spoke German. My mother responded, “Because she’s German.” She was?!?

Later on, my mother told that my great grandmother was born in Russia. Of course, that confused me further. My mother then explained that her grandmother’s family was actually from Ukraine, but weren’t Ukrainian. That is when I learned about the Germans from Russia, who were colonists who settled in territory held by the Russian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Fortunately, none of these misunderstandings resulted in me wandering aimlessly down the garden path. Rather, learning the correct facts sparked my interest and put me on the correct path.

52W Mark II – Week 4: Education

My maternal grandmother, Helen Lerner, originally wanted to be a teacher. After finishing high school, she moved to Regina, Saskatchewan to work and earn money to pay to go to Normal School (teacher’s college). Helen applied to the school in Regina run by the Sisters of St. Martha, who were based out of Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

Waiting for her interview, Helen fell into a conversation with an older nun. After chatting for a while, my grandmother was called in for her interview. Following the interview, Helen was told she would not be admitted to the program. However, she was offered the opportunity to train as a lab technician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Lethbridge, Alberta, which was operated by the Sisters of St. Martha. Helen accepted.

Helen in the uniform she wore as a lab technician.

One day at the hospital after my grandmother had begun working in her new occupation, there was a great commotion in preparing for a visit by the Mother Superior. When the Mother Superior arrived, Helen recognized her as the nun she had been chatting with before her Normal School interview. It turned out that based upon what Mother Superior learned of Helen during their conversation at the school, she advised the interviewers that she believed Helen was an ideal candidate for the hospital and told them to deny her admission to the Normal School.

St. Michael’s Hospital in Lethbridge, Alberta, which opened in 1931.

The Mother Superior’s directive was significant for me, because St. Michael’s Hospital is where Helen met my grandfather, Leo Burgess. Leo worked as an orderly at St. Michael’s at the time my grandmother was a lab technician. Many years later, I was born at St. Michael’s.

My grandparents, likely sometime in the mid to late 1940s.