Women's History Month Day 1: Fearless Females: Favorite Female Ancestor & Genealogy Guru!

+Lisa Alzo from The Accidental Genealogist has invited the online genealogy community to join her in celebrating Women's History Month by writing about our female ancestors. She has kindly provided us with 31 inspirational writing prompts for the month of March. I just finished the Family History Writing Challenge with +Lynn Palermo, The Armchair Genealogist, and I thought, what the heck! I have time on my hands!

This challenge is different than last month's. Last month, my writing was private and I chose not to share it on my blog. This time, it's public! Currently, I write three posts a weeks. Writing daily, along with my personal writing will be a interesting, but I feel ready. I decided to take this challenge, because  I noticed that my blog has been very male ancestor focused. I will continue my regular posts (only they will be about the ladies!). I will be writing everyday, so do check in more often!

If you're a fellow blogger, do consider joining us in this celebration of women! It's not too late and you don't have to write everyday.

 If you're family, I'd love to hear from you about your favorite female ancestors. Please share your stories in the comment section of my blog or send me a note and I'll include it in the blog! I'd be happy to feature guest bloggers this month from family members!

Here we go!

Prompt #1: Favorite Female Ancestor

Minnie Crane with three of her siblings, (left to right)
Bernard, Harry and William Crane, (printed June 1949).
This is a photo I found after I published the book. It was
most likely taken on the Atlantic City Boardwalk during
one of Minnie's many visits. They look like they are dressed
for a special occasion, a wedding perhaps.

Do I have a favorite female ancestor? Of course I do. This one is easy! My great-grandmother Minnie Crane. Most of you knew I was going to say that. Minnie, my mother's maternal grandmother and I co-wrote a book together, Stored Treasures. I don't write a lot about Minnie in the blog, because almost all I know about Minnie is in the book, her memoir. When I say we co-wrote it, I mean she wrote a journal. Thirty years after she died, I found her writings. I wrote additional sections, collected more stories, photos and documents and put the whole thing together into a book! I couldn't possibly tell you, all about Minnie in a single blog post. If you really want to know about this amazing woman, you'll have to read the book (believe me, it's worth it). What I want to share today is why she is my favorite ancestor.

Minnie was the only great-grandparent I met. The fact that we shared thirteen years on this earth, means that she is the most distant ancestor I've had the pleasure to get to know. She is the farthest link to my past. Best of all, Minnie had the foresight to document her story. She understood that her history was a family legacy. From her journal, I learned about many more ancestors. If she had not taken the time to tell her story, not only her story would have been lost, but the stories of countless other relatives and friends. It took me thirty years to appreciate the gift she left our family. Today, her story lives on and enriches the lives her descendants and her extended family. The book is an inspiration not only to those who are connected to Minnie, but also to all who are engaged in writing family history or interested in learning about history form a personal perspective. I use her writing as a guideline for my research. Usually I can find documents to corroborate her story. When I can't, I know it's because I haven't found the right document yet, not because she was wrong.  Minnie was a genealogy Guru, she just didn't know it! 

Thanks Minnie!

More posts about Minnie Crane:
The True Stored Treasure Surfaces!
The Gift that Keeps on Giving for Mother's Day
LOVE 1920s Style

Friday's Faces From the Past: Bloomfield Brothers

The Bloomfield family has been very engaged in genealogy research. As much as I would like to take credit in generating excitement about family history, I feel only partially responsible. I must give credit where credit is due. I think the family itself, as well as, +Geni.com (our virtual meeting place), deserve most of the praise! If you have been following my blog, you will recall there have been several major Bloomfield discoveries lately. One was Barney Bloomfield's naturalization petition (Hot Off the Press!), which introduced the name Kaplan into the mix. A second wave of excitement came when I discovered the University of New Hampshire Yearbook photos (Fun Yearbook Finds and The Hidden Gems of Yearbooks).

These posts created quite a buzz, stirred old memories and led to sharing of stories and photos amongst the cousins. A few weeks ago, I posted a wonderful picture of Joseph with his University of New Hampshire football team, from the 1925 yearbook, in honor of the Super Bowl. Access to the family albums yielded an even better photograph which Joseph's daughter, found amongst her uncle Barney's things—a close up of Joseph in full football gear! 

Analyzing the yearbook, led Joseph's son, to an interesting observation. For the first time, he realized, that his father who was four years older than Ben, graduated a year after his younger brother from UNH. The discussion is ongoing and we are trying to get to the bottom of the story. My sense was that since they both arrived from Russia at a young age (8 and 4-5 respectively), they probably started school together. Neither spoke English and it's doubtful the eight-year-old Joseph had much schooling back in Russia. They entered the Claremont public school system (as indicated in the 1910 US census) and very likely advanced at a parallel rate, as they were acquiring language skills. The question remains whether they graduated high school together or did the older Joseph graduate early and take time off to work and perhaps save money for college. To answer this question definitively, I will need to get more records, perhaps from the Laconia High School which they both attended. In the meantime, I did a bit of photo detective work.

Ben and Joseph Bloomfield 

Here is another great photo also submitted last week by Joseph's children. How old do you think they look in this portrait? Could it be a High School graduation photo? A formal portrait like this signals a special occasion. Graduating from High School certainly would have been a very special occasion for the Bloomfields. Ben and Joseph were the first Bloomfields to attend High School, let alone graduate. Based on having three teenage sons, I venture to guess they were about fourteen and seventeen years old in this photo, dating the photo to about 1917. I recalled another photo, where I've seen the two of them—standing side by side—looking very young, a family photo taken with the matriarch of the family, their mother Frieda Toby Bloomfield. 

Left to Right- top row: Ben, Joseph, Barney and Harry Bloomfield, Archie Gozonsky
Bottom row: Fanny Leah Pomerantz, Miriam Harris, Freida Toby Bloomfield, Ida and Abe Gozonsky.
Baby: Mary Gozonsky. c1919.

Dating the group photo was a family effort, and was based on Abe Gozonsky's date of birth (December 21, 1917) amongst other clues. In 1919 Joseph would have been about 18 years old and Ben would have been 14. A close inspection of this picture, shows that Ben was not quite as tall as Joseph yet, so this picture most likely predates the formal portrait of the two of them by a couple of months (taking into account the fast growth rate of a fourteen-year-old boy). Ben, must have been growing quickly. He eventually surpassed his brother Joseph by a few inches as seen in a later photo (see below). Based on these three photos, I adjusted my initial assessment and propose to date the formal portrait c1919-1920. Joe would have been 18 or 19 years old in 1920 and Ben would have been about 14 or 15. Ben, a member of the class of 1925 at University of New Hampshire, was only twenty-one years old when he graduated. He must entered college around 1921 when he was barely seventeen-years-old. I know he began his college career at Rice University. His Texas stint didn't last long. He transferred to UNH by his Junior year. This means that that the formal portrait with Joseph was most likely taken no later than 1921 when Ben would have left for Houston. 

One of the Bloomfield cousins pointed out another interesting observation. She recalls her grandfather Harry as a very stern man compared to his next younger brother, Joseph. Here is what she shared with me.

"Uncle Joe was an amazing, happy, wonderful man. I was always amazed that he and Harry were brothers. My grandfather Harry was serious, stern and quiet. Joe loved music, always celebrated holidays with parties at his house."

Joseph and Ben Bloomfield, 1943

I didn't know any of the Bloomfield brothers, but my sense from my research is that the younger Bloomfields had a very different life than the older group. Aaron, Max, William, the three eldest, arrived in their teens and went straight to work. They were very intelligent, but mostly self taught. They worked odd jobs, sending money home, so that their parents could eventually join them with the younger siblings. When my great-grandfather William immigrated around 1904, Joseph was only a toddler and Ben hadn't been born yet. Age-wise, Harry was right in the middle. He arrived with his parents in 1909, but unlike his younger brothers, he didn't have the luxury of attending school. Instead, at seventeen, he joined his older brothers at the Shoe factory. The older Bloomfields had a much tougher life with far less opportunities. Joseph and Ben, on the other hand reaped the benefits of their brother's hard work. I'm not saying this explains their different nature, but it is an excellent example of how studying family history, helps sheds light on the formation of our ancestors as people.

For the sake of completion, I would like to add a note about Barney Bloomfield. I don't know much about him and the only photo I've ever seen of him is the family photo above, where he is standing between Joseph and Harry. The story is that Barney was "different". He was "slow" they say, which explains why he didn't follow his brothers' footsteps to college. There is rumors of an accident around birth, something about excessive bleeding, which makes me think of hemophilia, but so far I can't document any of this. Hopefully, I'll get back to him in another post.