Wherefore art thou Thomas - 1

The beauty of a wide readership of a blog is that sometimes someone can come up with a suggestion that may solve a mystery. This post (and the one that follows it) postulates a mystery and attempts to solve it. A new, and in hindsight, very obvious potential solution has been suggested. So please look at the end of the second article for this suggestion.

These two articles are about the problems of doing research, and how sometimes it is necessary to make a judgment on conflicting information from historical sources. The subject is the birth date of Thomas Russell, the older brother of CTR, who is pictured with him in that memorable picture in the original issue of the January 1, 1912 Watch Tower.

The picture dates from 1855 and shows Thomas (aged about 5) on the left and Charles Taze (aged about 3) on the right. This was published during CTR’s lifetime. When the magazine was reprinted after CTR had died, the picture was cropped and only Charles was shown.

As to why this matters, it can help us narrow down when Joseph Lytle Russell and Ann Eliza Birney were married. Marriage licences were not required by law in Pennsylvania until 1885, so it is unlikely that any documentation will ever surface now, assuming it ever existed. We know that Ann Eliza was still single in March 1849, or at least there is a reference to a Miss A E Birney in the Pittsburgh Daily Post for Wednesday, April 4, 1849. So, to be pedantic, someone thought she was still single in March 1849.

Knowing when Thomas was born, we can make assumptions about when he was conceived, which would narrow down the date of the marriage.

So when was Thomas born? We have three conflicting dates, January, March and May in 1850. Let’s look at the “evidence” for each.

If you examine information on the Ancestry website, you will find Thomas’ birth date given as March 1850. But as often happens with such sites, there is no reference given for the information.  Everyone seems to be copying everyone else on a circular journey with no original source material provided. I suspect that the March date comes from the 1850 census return for Pittsburgh. The entry for the Russell family, father, mother and one son, is reproduced below.

The rules for the 1850 census were that entries should reflect information as it existed on June 1^st that year. So we have Joseph L Russell, aged 32, merchant from Ireland, Ann E Russell, aged 26, from Ireland, and then T Russell (Thomas) from Pennsylvania, who might appear on first sight to be 3/12. Reading that as three months old would have him born around March of that year.

The problem arises with the crabby handwriting of the era, using scratchy pen and ink. Numerous enumerators’ hands are found in these census returns, with varying degree of legibility. So let’s zoom in on that entry for Thomas.

Unless my eyes are deceiving me, that entry for Thomas is not 3/12 at all, but rather 5/12. There is no reason why the Russells should give false information, and assuming the enumerator did not make a mistake, then we now have Thomas’ birth pushed back to January, or even the very end of December.

But then we have another source of information, which could be viewed as a potential primary source that gives us yet another month, this time May 1850. This is the burial details for the Russell family plot on file at the Allegheny Cemetery.

This has been reproduced before on this blog in articles about the cemetery and the Russell interments, but it is shown here again.

You will notice on the right that it states very clearly that Thomas Russell died on 11 August 1855, aged 5 years and 3 months – which would give a birth date of May 1850.

The problem is that this is not actually a primary source at all! The document was put together to show how many people were buried in this family plot and where the graves were. This was useful since not all had grave markers and some of those that existed had been worn by time. The plot was sold for ten graves, but in the event there were only nine burials.

The plan shows that the plot was purchased by James Russell, older brother of Joseph Lytle. A little over a year after James made the purchase, his wife Sarah was buried there, and James followed not that long after. The record has the burial of Sarah in one style of handwriting. But then a later hand has added another seven names, not in order of interment, but rather in order of the rows of graves. This handwriting includes Joseph Lytle who was buried at the end of 1897. This is approaching fifty years after Thomas was born. But whoever wrote out these seven names, omitted Thomas whose grave started the bottom row from the right.  So yet another later hand wrote in the number 9, but then instead of adding to the existing list, wrote elsewhere on the document that Thomas died 11 August 1855, aged 5 years and 3 months.

When was this done? Obviously it was after 1897. How much longer after 1897? We don’t know, but decades after Thomas lived and died.

So where did the information about 5 years and 3 months come from? The writer on this grave plan copied the information out from somewhere. But why the discrepancy with the census returns from all those years before? Joseph and Eliza would know when Thomas was born and how old he was when he died.

I have a theory, and it goes back to the confusion with the census returns. As the numbers three and five could look similar on cursory examination, so could a three and an eight be confused, considering the handwriting of the day and the fact that scratchy entries made in ink may fade in places over time. On that basis maybe the final hand on the grave plan document just made a mistake. Maybe Thomas died aged 5 years and 8 months (rather than 3 months). If he did, then he ­would have been born in the January, which now would tally perfectly with the 1850 census return.

There is more on this in the following article.

Wherefore art thou Thomas - 2

 The previous article attempted to unravel three possible dates for the birth of CTR’s older brother, Thomas. One date was provided by the Allegheny burial site map, which had an entry to the effect that Thomas died on August 12, 1855, aged 5 years and 3 months. However, this entry on the document dates from decades after the event, and was therefore suspect.

I am extremely grateful to J who went back to the Allegheny cemetery and photographed the complete burial record for Thomas from 1855. So now we have a contemporary document to consider, although it doesn’t solve the discrepancy at all.

So let’s have a look at the original entry from 1855.

 

Going in close for the entry for Thomas we read that he died of whooping cough, aged 5 years and 3 months, and was buried on August 17, 1855.

This means that whoever compiled the plan of the graves in the Russell plot copied out the entry accurately from the register when they added Thomas’ details.

So where does this leave us?

First, we must remember that none of the information actually comes in Joseph or Ann’s handwriting. It is at the very least second hand – they provided information for others, and it is others who have recorded it.

We can certainly do away with the incorrect March 1850 birth that turns up in various places. This is simply a misreading of the family’s 1850 census return which may look like 3/12 but turns out to be 5/12 when magnified, as shown in the previous article.

So let us for the sake of argument assume that the burial register is correct. Thomas died in the middle of August aged 5 years and 3 months. On that basis he was born in the middle of May. But if that were true, we have a census enumerator recording events as they were on June 1, 1850, who describes a two week old baby as a child of five months.

If a mistake is going to be made somewhere – as is obviously the case from the discrepancy – personally I would expect it to be made at the other end of Thomas’ short life, at the time he died. In the register page reproduced above, the same hand made all the entries – names, where from, cause of death and age at death. So the appointed scribe received the different pieces of information from different sources, perhaps verbally or more likely written down and passed on. At some point after events he wrote it all up in the official registers. Would Joseph and Ann provide incorrect information? Here my theory in the original article about the numbers 3 and 8 being misread could still hold true – pushing Thomas’ age back to the January, which would tally with the 1850 census return.

Does it matter? Well, I concede there are far more important things in life to consider. But the date of Thomas’ birth will provide the approximate date of his conception, which will help us in establishing when Joseph Lytle Russell and Ann Eliza Birney were married. We know Ann Eliza was sent a letter under her maiden name in March 1849. Maybe she had recently married and perhaps the correspondent did not know that.  But however you analyse or theorise, the marriage would seem to have taken place in the earlier part of 1849.

Maybe one day extra documents will come to light. One thing is clear, Joseph and Ann didn’t arrive from Ireland to America as a married couple in 1845 as suggested in a history video commentary. (The video was obvious based on a newspaper obituary for Joseph which said he came to America “about 1845.” However, the problem with obituaries is that the one person who can verify the information is not there to do so. Joseph had to arrive before that, if his statement about five years’ residency in his naturalization declaration of 1848 is truthful, and Ann Eliza was single at that time. It would seem that both Joseph and Ann came from Ireland at different times, but then they met and married in America, probably through their association in Pittsburgh Presbyterian Churches.

Of course, I could be wrong…

A suggestion has been made by a correspondent that may solve the above mystery. The expression 5/12 would normally in census returns refer to the 5th month out of 12 in a given year. However, it can also refer to an actual date. In the UK we put the day first and the month second - which is why the suggestion that follows never occurred to me - but in America the month goes first and then the day is second. So what if this enumerator put down Thomas as born on 5/12 - in other words on the 12th day of May? That would fit the burial register. It would also allow a longer period for the marriage of Joseph and Ann to take place in 1849. On reflection, this would answer all the queries about Thomas' birth. 

As said earlier, of course I could be wrong...

A New Book?

Well, it isn’t really, but a print version of something produced some years ago has now been published.

To explain:  I am hoping to use Lulu self-publishing for a book in progress.

But to test out how to use this platform and whether it will be suitable for my needs I decided to publish a print version of something produced back in 2012. This is the Houston-Davidson debate of 1896. It has been available as a free download from Lulu for some time. Having tried it out a “proof copy” it seems to fill my needs, but as it has now been “published” in this form, it is also available to others if they want it.

I am not asking anyone to buy a book. If you want just the background story, see this old post on this blog:

https://jeromehistory.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-houston-davidson-debate-1896-part-1.html

There are parts 2 and 3 that follow it.

If you want to download the complete text this can be done freely from Lulu books. Go to their website, go to Bookshop and type in the search terms Houston-Davidson debate.

 Punch it in, and you will see a Yellow cover and the name “Jerome” attached. The same search facility will also now show a print edition.

The printed version has only one real change, the addition of two graphics from newspapers of the day, which you will also find in the articles on this blog. These are not necessary for the story at all, but gave me the opportunity to see how graphics would come out in a Lulu printed edition.

ZWT and the YMCA

Zion’s Watch Tower soon found a readership outside the obvious Age to Come and Adventist connections. In 1881 it found a regular home in a YMCA library. The cutting below (from the Buffalo Morning Express of April 9, 1881) listed what readers would find in their free reading room. It was an eclectic mix. Any library that included the British satirical publication Punch (or the London Charivari) – one of the few joys I remember from dry history lessons at school – had to accommodate wide tastes of the day. One such taste was Zion’s Watch Tower. Look down the graphic and see it listed in the Monthlies available to all, not just YMCA members.

The dalliance with Zion’s Watch Tower was probably short lived.  Later that year concerns were expressed about the paper, although the reasons given were interesting. It wasn’t doctrine or the herald of Christ’s presence that concerned the YMCA, but rather the paper’s (quote) “opposition to church organization.” From the Buffalo Evening News for October 11, 1882.