For the complete article, courtesy of the APG Quarterly

Writing
Adding Muscle and Sinew
Spicing Up a Family Narrative
by Peter Haring Judd, ph.d.
Y
ou might put it this way: vital and property records and
court, estate, and other official documents provide the
skeleton of a family history; the more complete they are the
stronger the structure. Often that is enough, and solving or
at least explaining the lacunae in the records in some cases is
sufficient challenge. However, curiosity can prompt further
investigation of the social and economic context that will create
a richer, more character-filled narrative.
Curiosity prompted me to expand my investigation into the
lives of forebears in New York and New England from colonial
times to the present. As I proceeded, I found myself progressively wanting more detail to answer basic questions: What
was involved in being an attorney in an eighteenth-century
Connecticut town? Why and how had places been settled? What
did the people look like? How different or alike were the families
from others at the time? These and any number of other ques-
March 2008
Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly 23
tions popped up each step of the way.
I’ll use this article to explain my approach and to give
examples of what I call “adding muscle and sinew.” Notice
that I didn’t use the more familiar “flesh” as a quality to be
added to the narrative; flesh can be fat, padding in a narrative,
fictionalizing, sugarcoating. I’d like to have the “muscle and
sinew” of context brought into family history to be every bit
as focused and disciplined as the building of the genealogical
skeletal structure itself, that is, fact- and document-based.
Believe me, however, it is a challenging task, and when I
started out on the research that led to The Hatch and Brood
of Time,1 I had not a glimmer of what the book would be
like or even that there would be a book. The material about
these members of the Phelps family of Windsor and Hebron,
Connecticut, stimulated questions; research to answer them
led to other questions and month-by-month the project grew.
Curiosity is the mother of investigation.
From this effort to develop a coherent and well-documented narrative I can list broad categories of interest for the
family historian:
• Social—how individuals and their families fit into the social
structure of the era in which they lived, and the changes
over the generations.
• Economic—how people made a living, their relative wealth,
education, how their economic activities relate to those of the
local area, region, nation.
• Historical—wars, depressions, immigration patterns, political
events, culture (ethnic, place of origin, locality), emphasis on
what closely affected the families. That is, not events far off,
that however much they changed the world—an example is
the Hiroshima bomb—had no direct relevance to, say, a child
born in 1945 in Connecticut unless it meant the dad was
soon to return from the Pacific. Other topics could be: the
construction of the dwelling, furnishings, lighting, media. I
would often begin with the scholarly literature and follow the
trails pointed out in bibliographies and footnotes.
• Geographic—the places where people lived, what brought
about their settlement, principal activities, transportation,
appearance, changes over the generations.
• Kinship of the experience with published biographies, memoirs—that is, accounts by others of a similar occupation to
that of the subject. An account of life as a mill worker, for
example, or of a Civil War soldier, could mirror the experience
of a subject; social histories, such as studies of immigrants,
Levittown, robber barons, can illuminate.
• Artifacts—personal portraits, miniatures, silhouettes, photos,
letters, ornaments, clothing, tools, cutlery, dishes, coins, souPeter Haring Judd, The Hatch and Brood of Time: Five Phelps Families
in the Atlantic World, 1720–1880 (Boston: Newbury Street Press,
1999).
1
24 Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly
March 2008
Figure 1
While no miniatures or portraits of Samuel Haring (1776-1830) and his
wife Sarah Clark (1780-1841) have come down in the family or been found,
these spoons have passed through the generations. The mark shows
they were made by silversmith Robert Wilson, at 23 Dey Street, on the
west side of the island, not far from Samuel Haring, grocer at 5, Cortlandt.
The monogram “SH” in an expansive scroll, the S for Sarah (and Samuel),
the H for Haring. They remind one of the modest affluence and gentility
the family had achieved in the city.
venirs. Each one can tell a tale, perhaps of the person, likely
of the time and place.
• Writings—letters, memoirs, genealogies, Bible records, alumni
records, obituaries in newspapers or published by organizations with which the individual was affiliated.
The challenge is to weave the material into a narrative that
has a fundament of genealogy. There is an art to this, and it
develops in the process of drafting and redrafting. It is demanding but satisfying, and the result adds facets to the perspectives
on forebears and their times.
Curiosity Is the Mother of Investigation
The talisman that initiated my pursuit was a black notebook
with scrawly handwriting—that of Julia Phelps (Haring) White,
my great-grandmother. It contained the American ancestral lines
down to her parents and was a present to her granddaughter,
my mother’s first cousin, on her thirteenth birthday in 1919
and from that cousin to me on my fifty-first. I was a late starter,
however, and since I was then fully occupied, it stayed in a
garden house along with shoeboxes of family letters. This reprehensible custodianship of the documents came to an end with
my retirement, and I read through it. Questions tumbled out.
Some of the names I knew a little about: John Davenport of the
New Haven Colony; Eleazar Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth;
Peter Haring of New Amsterdam and Tappan, New York, after
whom I was named. A cousin proudly showed me a photo of
the house in Fairfield, Connecticut, of George Alexander Phelps,
his second great-grandfather, my third, in
the style of the Greek Revival with magnificent columns and several figures
visible, including a woman in black,
said to be Julia in mourning for
her parents from whom she was
orphaned in 1868 when she was
eighteen. As I am sure others
have experienced, I promptly
felt it urgent to find out more
about these and the others in
the numbered columns that Julia
had so carefully laid out. And that
began the first foray into the literature. The 1899 Phelps genealogy
where there was a chronology from
the immigrant ancestor, William Phelps
of the Mary & John and Windsor, was a
giant step forward and provoked
an array of new questions about
the places where people lived and
what they did.2 (I later discovered
that great-grandmother had letters
from A. T. Servin, the genealogist
who put together that volume and
assume that Julia was his source for
some of the information about her
contemporary Phelps relatives.)
Experienced researchers will
smile at my excitement at finding just about the easiest bit of
resource available, the pages in a
post-Centennial compiled genealogy about a reasonably well-documented family. But it did what
any solid nugget of research will
do, stimulate curiosity. What was
Hebron, Connecticut, like in the
early 1700s where Nathaniel Phelps
and his son lived and died? What
brought about the move of Col.
Alexander Phelps to New Hampshire, and where was Lime
where he died in 1773? Was there more to the Wheelock story,
a connection with the founding of Dartmouth? Alexander’s son,
Eleazar Wheelock Phelps, was an attorney and judge in Stafford,
Oliver Seymour Phelps and Andrew T. Servin, comps., The Phelps
Family of America and Their English Ancestors with Copies of Wills,
Deeds, Letters and Other Interesting Papers, Coats of Arms and Valuable
Records, 2 vols. (Pittsfield, Mass.: Eagle Publishing, 1899).
2
Figure 2
These silhouettes were located in the
Tamworth, N.H. Historical Society after the
publication of both books. The man was
identified as Eleazar Wheelock Phelps
(1766-1818), the boy as his son, George
Alexander (1803-1880). A family note,
included in the 1899 Phelps genealogy, referred to E.W.P.’s sojourn
in Europe during the War of 1812
years. No documentary evidence
of this was found, but Brenton
Simons, upon examining the silhouette, concluded that it was of the
type that was practiced in England,
thus a confirmation of the sojourn.
From his profile, note E.W.’s dress and
grooming.
Connecticut, in the early nineteenth century and
unaccountably was stated to have
died in Havana, Cuba, in 1818.
How could this be? He married the
daughter of a half uncle, Benajah
Phelps, who was termed a “Rev.” in
the genealogy, said to have lived in
Cornwallis, Nova Scotia—not on
present day maps—and to have been
an “unrepentant Whig” during the
American Revolution. It didn’t take
long to find that the Rev. Benajah
Phelps was a figure in Nova Scotian
history, that he served the “planters”
who moved to its west coast in the
1750s and 60s from southern New
England. There was surely a story,
and indeed there was, including
Benajah’s flight in the midst of the
war, capture by a British man-ofwar, and being put out in an open
boat to make Passamaquoddy and
thence through the “wilderness” of
Maine back to Connecticut.
A look in the New York City directories for George Alexander
Phelps, the owner of the great Fairfield house, revealed addresses
that over the years moved up from near lower Broadway to West
Fourteenth Street, and his occupation was listed early as “fruiter,” later as “merchant.” What did those occupations mean at the
time? What was the city like then? Did he have views about slavery, the Civil War, and the debates that preceded it? There was
a 1926 letter to my mother from Julia, his granddaughter, who
March 2008
Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly 25
Figure 3
Eliza Ayers (1808-1880) married George
Alexander Phelps (son of Eleazar Wheelock
Phelps), Connecticut-born, who became a fruit
importer in antebellum New York City. Their
daughter, Caroline Eliza (1828-1868), married
James Demarest Haring (1819-1868), Samuel’s
son. This is a portrait of Eliza to commemorate her 1825 marriage to George in New York
City; her wedding band is noticeable on her
left hand. In addition to revealing a beautiful
young woman, her dress, earrings, and coiffure
denote that her family was well-to-do and that
her young husband must have been deemed to
have prospects.
Figure 4
James Demarest Haring, husband of Caroline
Eliza Phelps, in his prime.
26 Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly
March 2008
recalled being in Palermo in December 1868 where she visited
his son. What were each of them doing there? (George Jr. ran the
family’s office importing citrus fruit to New York and Liverpool,
and Julia was in Palermo at the beginning of a nine-month tour
of Europe that was intended to help her recover from the sudden
loss of her parents—knowledge of this took time to discover.)
The Phelps’s were a Puritan-Yankee family. George Alexander’s
daughter Caroline Eliza married James Demarest Haring in
Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1846. That was how the New York
Haring family came in, and Julia’s notes traced James (her father)
back to Jan Pietersen of New Amsterdam, and to Peter, Alexander,
and John Haring. The last was a member of the Continental
Congress and had a short nineteenth-century biography written about him. I knew I could find out more about him from a
number of sources. The Revolution in New York looked to be a
fascinating subject, and I had only faint notions about the details.
Surely there was (and indeed there is) an abundance of useful
material on the politics and military engagements in the city and
region in those years. But what about John Haring’s son, Captain
Samuel? What service, when? Early nineteenth-century addresses
in New York City show him as a “grocer.” What did that mean?
And an easy check showed that there was a pension record from
service in the War of 1812. The outline of that war did not come
readily to mind. Where was he in it? He was a quartermaster. By
tracing the movements of his regiment and the accounts in his
pension application, I found he was in the Northern campaign
in 1812 and was at Fort Niagara and at the taking of Fort George
and Newark in Upper Canada (present-day Niagara-on-the-Lake)
and fell ill; he was a figure in the all-but-forgotten, thoroughly
botched attempt to invade Canada in 1813—a look at Henry
Adams’s History of the Madison administration showed me there
would be an abundance of sources.
What Happened to the Past?
There was another impetus to the family history in my books:
even to my four score and ten. The worlds of childhood and
youth seem as remote as if three or four generations had passed.
My overall questions were (and are): What happened to this
past? Why and how had its conditions vanished?
The Waterbury, Connecticut, where I grew up in the 1930s
and 1940s seemed to a child a place within an understandable
frame. There was Mrs. Wade who wore a black choker and nodded her head as Grandmother and I passed her window on the
way downtown on a Saturday morning. I didn’t know her, but
I knew she fitted into the constellation of family, as I was told
she was my godmother’s grandmother. We regularly met Captain
Kellogg whom I was told had been in the Spanish-American
War. Dancing school was at The Elton, the best hotel in town,
and my father often took one or both of my grandmothers there
for a family Sunday dinner in its Copper Room. The public
library was a permanent-looking building that had an aura of
age. (Richardsonian, it was, now long gone.) The City Hall
was beautiful, with a bell tower, and fine brass fittings within.
(Designed by Cass Gilbert and still there.) The railroad station
had a tall tower made of brick and within was a sign reading
“The Brass Center of the World” with displays of shiny metal
objects. (The building was saved by the local newspaper and is its
office; the sign is long gone.) When we passed by the factories,
the sound of their machine and belt drives seemed to flood the
street. Cousins lived in nearby houses; I could walk to and from
school and play guerillas with pals on vacant lots and on the
grounds of Grandmother’s house. On rainy days its third floor
was the place to present plays and magic shows. Nothing of that
frame is left but some of the buildings.
How did this apparently stable, prosperous place and society come to be? What were the paths from William Phelps of
Windsor and Jan Pietersen Haring of New Amsterdam to the
Hillside section of Waterbury, the houses and people who were
there in the 1930s and 40s?
Since all of the presses, screw machines, fourslides, and plating tanks are gone, and most of the buildings that held them too;
since no family members live in that city, no one anywhere in the
family is involved with the manufacturing that sustained their
forebears for 150 years, the task was to recapture and understand
people—Grandmother, her mother and father, the eminentlooking man with a full beard who was a great-great-grandparent, and, closer to me, my mother who died young and who was
often away with “nervous breakdowns.” My father lost his battle
to keep his factory viable in the changing economy of the 1960s.
How had that enterprise developed and what happened to it?
So, I had curiosity and a desire to understand to spur my
research, and I knew that to be satisfied I would have to find
out more than the bare bones. The second of my two books,
More Lasting than Brass, begins with the Haring family in preRevolutionary New York and comes to the family and Waterbury
in the late twentieth century.3 Here are a few examples of how I
expanded my research for that book and its predecessor to give
strength—muscle and sinew—to the narrative. I should add
that I had no idea at the outset of the richness of materials that
was available in public repositories to supplement what I had of
inherited letters, images, and objects.
Military
A pension application is not only interesting in itself, but it is a
mine from which other details about the individual’s service can
be developed. James Clark (1756–1814) was twenty years old in
3
Peter Haring Judd, More Lasting Than Brass: A Thread of Family from
Revolutionary New York to Industrial Connecticut (Boston: Northeastern
University Press and the Newbury Street Press, 2004).
Figure 5
The Manhattan East River docks in the 1850s shown in a Panorama of
the time. (Library of Congress) The Haring offices were close by.
Figure 6
Julia Phelps Haring (later White, 1850-1928), only surviving child of
Caroline Eliza and James Demarest Haring, in 1859. The image was
created by applying color to the back of a photograph, and affixing
the image to glass. The short-lived technique (by some practitioners
termed Ivorytype) was meant to compete with oil portraits. The dress
and pose reveal a cherished child. Both parents died in 1868, leaving
her an orphan.
March 2008
Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly 27
1776, a resident of New Windsor, north of the Highlands on the
west bank of the Hudson River. He and his militia unit answered
the call to defend New York City. From the account in his widow’s pension application, we learn that the unit was dispatched
by Washington as a rear guard during the evacuation of the
Americans across the East River on the foggy night of August 29.
We also learn that James was in the party sent to bury British and
American dead after the Battle of Harlem Heights, that he was at
White Plains at the time of that battle, and that he then returned
home and was occupied occasionally at building cheveaux de frise
in the river. The bare facts are exciting enough, but each led to
far more detail. There are good histories of the engagements
around New York in 1776 for the larger picture, and the recently
published edition of the Washington papers includes accounts of
engagements by participants, including a lad of the same age as
James, who also was in the rear guard. His account can testify
to the fusillade from the British sentries as they realized in the
dawn that the Americans had tricked them and made a getaway.
General George Clinton’s papers provide more on the burial
party at Harlem Heights, and accounts of the Battle of White
Plains—including the position of the units—add to the bones of
the pension application.
The War of 1812 is far less familiar to most people. Samuel
Haring (1776–1830) served as a Captain in a U.S. unit activated
in the months prior to the war. The pension application tells
us that it was the 13th U.S. Regiment, that it was activated in
Greenbush across the river from Albany, and that it and Captain
Samuel participated in the campaign that took the regiment to
the Niagara frontier (where it—but not Samuel who was at Fort
Niagara—participated in the Battle of Queenston Heights in
1812). Samuel took part in the amphibious action against Fort
George at the western end of Lake Ontario the next summer,
and the pension application notes that he was taken ill with
“lake fever” and invalided to quarters at Henderson Harbor
at the eastern end of the lake. There are excellent Canadian
histories of the battles of this campaign to enrich the narrative.
The 1813 campaign to take Montreal by moving the Americans
across Lake Ontario was a fiasco. The commander was General
James Wilkenson, one of the rogues of American history, who
conspired against Washington after Saratoga, conspired with the
Spanish in Louisiana, and was court-martialed. His 1816 three
volume memoir—which includes the transcript of the court
martial—was a mine of information about the campaign; it was
meant to self-justify, but it included documents such as medical
reports from the Henderson Harbor field hospital where Samuel
was. From resources such as these—and memoirs of others, such
as Winfield Scott who planned the attack on Fort George—an
account of the actions in which Samuel’s unit took part can be
reconstructed, as can a broader picture of the northern campaign
in that war.
28 Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly
March 2008
Figure 7
George Alexander Phelps gave his grieving grand-daughter, Julia,
a nine month grand tour of Europe with his son, Howard, (and her
uncle) as a companion. (Above.) The first stop in December 1868 was
Palermo where another son had opened an office for the fruit importing business. We know of the trip from the letters that Julia saved
from her paternal aunt, Catharine Teller (Haring) Kip (1808-1872). Aunt
Kate was the last of Samuel’s children to be alive and was a link to the
family past, with references to other members of the family and warm
support for her young niece.
Commercial New York
American wars are richly documented with material to be culled
for context and detail, the same is true of commercial life in New
York City, though the resources are not so neat. Samuel Haring
was shown as a grocer at various addresses in Manhattan in the
early 1800s. A grocer meant a wholesaler in what were called dry
goods (to distinguish them from produce and meats). A grocer
purveyed a variety: grains, wines, fabrics. One approach I used
was to examine the advertisements in a newspaper of the day.
In the Shipping News section were columns listing what vessels
in the port had for sale (and their origin), and the stock of the
local grocers. The survey of ads in that one day showed that the
port of New York was receiving shipments from ports in Europe
and Latin America, and that the goods ranged widely, altogether
giving a “feel” for the commerce at that time. A court case found
later revealed the range of Samuel’s goods. The New York City
directories gave an address, and, with a little work, it was pos-
sible to specify the occupations of the
was visiting a world that was soon to
neighbors from which could be drawn
vanish as the German states she visited
some approximation of social status.
thereafter were shortly to be incorpoThere are economic histories of the
rated into the second Reich.
United States that can be consulted
James Demarest Haring and his
to give the broader picture of the
brother in the 1850s were involved
economy in a historical period. The
in flour, the term used for their firm’s
most illuminating single book I found
activity in the New York City direcfor the economy of New York City in
tory. What did this mean? One useful
the first half of the nineteenth century
reference was to a contemporary study
was Robert Albion Greenhalgh’s Rise of
of the grain trade, which described
4
New York Port. This book described
what was in effect the beginning
how the city, in the latter eighteenth
of a commodity market—brokers in
century a co-equal with others on the
the city committed funds to upstate
eastern seaboard, after 1814 recreated
farmers in advance of the season. A
itself as an entrepot of trade; set up
reference in a general history located
an auction system for goods, instia contemporary book that described
tuted scheduled service to Liverpool.
just how the process worked in that
The New York City merchants manday.
aged to tie the cotton trade from the
While New York City life is richsouth into the system, providing credit Figure 8
ly documented in a wide variety of
for the southern buyers to purchase The house on Henry Street, Brooklyn Heights, where forms, there is less on smaller places.
goods in New York and importing Aunt Kate lived with her second husband, Henry Kip In order to find out what economists
manufactured goods from Lancashire (1807-aft. 1872). In the front parlor there remains have thought about the constellation
in the same bottoms that had taken the mantle on which Henry placed Julia’s picture of metal-working industries in the
between those of his two political heroes, Daniel
the cotton east. By 1830 New York
Naugatuck Valley in Connecticut, of
Webster and Henry Clay as Julia described in a
port was preeminent on the eastern letter. Kate called the house a “shack,” not how it which Waterbury was the largest, I
made a successful search for dissertaseaboard. George Alexander Phelps would be referred to today.
tions. One in particular pointed out
(1803–1880) began as “fruiter” in the
how it was the mix of numerous
1820s and 30, ascended to the status
factories not just the most visible copper and brass works that
of a merchant, and by the 1850s one of his sons had opened an
created a symbiosis that encouraged newcomers in the metaloffice in Palermo to ship citrus from Sicily and the Levant. By
working and plating industries to cluster together. Business-orithe 1860s, Phelps Brothers had an office in Liverpool. A look
ented sources with personal details are the credit reports of the
through the Customs reports in the Liverpool library showed the
R. G. Dun and Co., which from the 1850s included reports on
shipments of citrus. Its directory showed where the Phelps men
family members’ activities in Waterbury and in New York. One
lived, and a walk up the hill led me to the houses they occupied.
of them included an observation that surely had to do with a
Palermo had importance to the story because it was the first
family secret, an elopement in the 1870s of the daughter in a
stop of Julia Phelps Haring’s nine-month tour of Europe in
highly proper household whose later husband was said to be the
1868 following the death of both her parents. Palermo was then
lawyer who assisted her out of the first marriage. This attorney
a fashionable wintering spot for the well-to-do, and during her
successfully covered the tracks of the elopement and first martime there, the young couple who later became king and queen
riage. However, a Dun reported the daughter of Luther Chapin
of Italy visited the city—referred to by Julia in a letter fifty-six
White as having made “bad investments,” which had led to some
years later.
financial strain. It is unlikely that the seventeen year old would
On that tour, Julia visited Rome. It was early in 1870, an
have speculated, and this probably referred to cost of undoing
important date, as it was still the Rome governed by the Pope, a
the elopement.
colorful rundown place, described in a memoir. This color was
added to the narrative, but there was a greater significance: Julia
Travelers’ Accounts, Guidebooks
From the eighteenth century there are numerous accounts of
4
Robert Albion Greenhalgh, Rise of New York Port (New York: Charles
travel in the lands across the Atlantic where a new society was
Scribners and Sons, 1939).
March 2008
Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly 29
Figure 9
Julia in mourning
black is likely to the
right in this photo
of the house that
George Alexander
Phelps bought for
his retirement in
Fairfield, Conn. (It
remains, but shorn
of the pillars.) The
bodies of both of
Julia’s
parents
were brought to
Fairfield by train
accompanied by
mourners
who
had been informed
of the funeral
arrangements by
a notice in the
newspaper.
developing so different from Europe. By the 1820s and 30s there
came a flood, a series of “Strangers’ Guides” to New York and
other U.S. places began to appear, describing for English-speaking travelers, full of information about Broadway and its teeming
life, theaters, and modes of travel. In the 1830s de Tocqueville
and Dickens both visited the city, resulting in the former case in
letters back home that were a rich resource for understanding the
city where Samuel’s son, James Demarest Haring, lived. Boston
abolitionist L. Maria Child published letters from New York in
the 1840s with vivid observations of its ever-changing character,
teeming street life, and social classes.
Guide books are a useful resource for places and transportation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In
the latter half of the nineteenth century, Appleton’s published
guidebooks that covered smaller places such as Waterbury. One
of the series was particularly useful to help describe the 1874
and 1875 transcontinental railroad journeys that George White
and Julia Phelps Haring took in the first year of their marriage.
Baedeker began publishing European guides in the 1860s; by
using the edition that matched the year of travel, I could specify
the cost of the hotel stay of a letter writer, and include the often
entertainingly solemn warnings that Baedeker gave of beggars,
over charging, and uncooperative custodians.
30 Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly
March 2008
Figure 10
Julia met George Luther White (1851-1914) in Minneapolis where she
had gone to visit a relative’s family. It was then a rapidly growing,
but still small city. It was touted in guide books as having salubrious
air and a place of opportunity for easterners whose lungs had been
damaged by the polluted air of the industrial cities. George was there
with a touch of TB on a lung. They were married at the Fairfield house
in 1874 and took the transcontinental railroad (opened in 1869) to San
Francisco and to San Raphael north of there where their first child
was born, Caroline Haring White (later Griggs) (1875-1969), the Carrie
of More Lasting than Brass. Here they are in their sixties in a photographer’s studio in Atlantic City, prosperous citizens of Waterbury, to
which George had returned to participate in his father’s businesses
(button backs and cardboard boxes).
at the New York Public Library, that the
Family Letters
archive of the abolitionist Gerrit Smith at
In a window seat on the top floor of
Syracuse University contained more than
Grandmother’s house in Waterbury there
one hundred letters from the Herring
were letters she and her mother had saved.
(anglicized from Haring) family to Peter
Caroline Haring (White) Griggs (Carrie,
Smith from the 1790s to 1820s. This
1875–1969) is a central figure in the latopened up knowledge of their business
ter section of More Lasting than Brass. As
and whereabouts, and gave an insight into
a boy I had picked through the envelopes
the connection between city merchants
for stamps, and in her old age I read some
and upstate traders. There were personal
of the letters to her. I inherited the boxes,
details too, the most striking of which
but it was twenty and more years later that
was a divorce, most unusual in the early
I examined them systematically. The com1800s. Transcription into Word made
puter and word processing had arrived in
excerpts of these letters readily available
the 1980s, and it was obvious that to have
for the narrative.
a fully accessible set of letters they should
be transcribed and entered in a form in
Images
which they could be searched and excerpts
For the period beginning in the 1850s, I
copied. I did some myself, recruited help,
had family photograph albums, saved by a
and soon the archive was visible on the Figure 11
monitor. The next step was to annotate Caroline Haring White (Carrie) at about the cousin’s husband. Most of the early ones
the letters, identify the persons men- time she accompanied her grandparents on were from photographers’ studios; by the
1900s came informal photos, some taken
tioned, research the hotels and ocean lin- a visit to Florida.
by Julia herself. To these I added images of
ers from which they were written, and tie
houses and of the buildings and streets of
in events in family history. There were sevWaterbury from the collection of the local historical society.
eral sets of letters: a series from her Aunt Kate (Catharine Teller
Panoramic images of American cities were sold from the
(Haring) Kip, 1806–1872) to Julia on her European tour of
1850s and may be found on the Library of Congress website.
1869–70; there were adoring letters from a young man who fell
These show as from a bird’s eye the places, with individual
in love with Julia before her marriage and who in 1872 and 1873
buildings shown in the near view. One of New York City in
interspersed sentiments with accounts of concerts and lectures in
1851 gave an evocative image of the East River docks near where
Boston and New York; letters from Carrie to her parents from
the Haring brothers had their offices in the 1850s. There was a
her chaperoned trip to Europe in 1896; letters from Carrie’s
Waterbury panorama from 1899 that I used to show the layout
daughter, Carol (Carolyn White (Griggs) Judd, 1906–1940, my
of the town around its Green and the houses on Hillside. There
mother) on her chaperoned 1926 European tour; letters from
were maps of the time that could have been used, but the panCarrie’s brother from the Yukon in 1899–1900; and dozens of
oramic images were more vivid.
letters from family members on trips south in the winter and
To illustrate places, there is usually a collection in the local
north or across the Atlantic in summer. It was from the familiarhistorical society, as I found in Waterbury and in Minneapolis.
ity with these letters that came from annotating them that the
Finding illustrations in the pre-photograph era requires more
shape of the second half of More Lasting emerged. Carrie and
research, with images now increasingly available online. The
Julia, her mother, became characters, almost novelistic, but from
hotel letterheads at the turn of the last century typically included
their own words. (I subsequently have published an edition of
5
cuts showing the building in its setting, often with enhancing
these letters in two volumes, entitled Affection. )
touches. These too give a sense of place and how its owners
There were more letters in archives than I could have
wanted it to appear.
dreamed when I started out. The Dartmouth archives had
The research that I did required the proximity of a major
extensive correspondence between Alexander Phelps and Eleazar
research library, in this case the Research Division of the New
Wheelock, and some involving other members of the family. I
York Public Library, supplemented for me by the New York
discovered, through a random keyword search at the end of a day
Genealogical and Biographical Society’s library and that of the
New-York Historical Society. All of the research for The Hatch
5
Peter Haring Judd, ed., Affection: Ninety Years of Family Letters,
and most of it for More Lasting was done before resources on
1850s–1930s: Haring, White, Griggs, Judd Families of New York and
the Internet changed the nature of genealogical and historiWaterbury, Connecticut, 2 vols. (New York: By the editor, 2006).
March 2008
Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly 31
cal research. The catalogs of New York Public Library and the
Library of Congress were accessible from a home computer and
were invaluable in locating material.
unimpeded by description. Thus in The Hatch “Genealogical and
Biographical Notes” are included in the volume, laying out, in
modified Register format, the American ancestries of the principal
families in the book. The equivalent for More Lasting was too
long for inclusion in an already substantial volume. I published
it separately; it is also available to members on the New England
Form
The shape of the two books—even the concept of developing a book-length manuscript—came from the
research. The Hatch began with the thought that
it would be interesting to see how family members
managed through one of the great transitions in
American history, from colony to independence.
It soon became apparent that there was such an
abundance of material, and the individuals and
their times were so interesting, that each of five
Phelps men and their immediate families required
a chapter in a narrative that covered more than
one hundred years. With the wealth of the family
letters available, it was obvious that its successor,
More Lasting, would involve a book-length narrative.
The genealogical bones can, I hope, be sensed
in the flow of the narrative, but a good suggestion Figure 12
from my editors provided that they be included A letterhead from Carrie’s 1896 tour of Europe.
Figure 13
George and Carrie in St Mark’s Square in 1899, photo taken by Julia. The trip celebrated the 25th anniversary
of the couple.
32 Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly
March 2008
Figure 14
A page from the wedding book of Caroline Haring (White) Griggs from 1904. From this it was possible using the Waterbury directory to specify
the address and occupation of the guests and to identify the origins of the items that came down in the family.
March 2008
Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly 33
Ancestors website <http://www.
newenglandancestors.org/>. In
the books, I followed the genealogical practice of placing the
footnotes on the same page as
the text, the sadly no-longerfollowed practice for works of
scholarship.
If it is daunting to contemplate a multi-generational narrative with the detail I have described, and there are many—if
not most—family histories that cannot be based, as mine were,
on an abundant personal archive, what I have developed could
also serve as an example for smaller scale projects. For example,
the abundant historical and sociological material available on the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrations could enrich
what could otherwise be a bare record. Or if a forebear was
Figure 15
Carrie and her family about 1912. Robert Foote Griggs (1868-1927)
was a stockbroker with a firm that bore his name in Waterbury. The
children: Haring White Griggs was named for his New Amsterdam
ancestor; Carolyn White Griggs (Carol, 1906-1940, mother of the
author), and Robert Foote Griggs, Jr. (1908-1996). The family appears
in this Bachrach photo to be fortune’s favorites, Robert in the flush of
a prosperous business career, handsome children. There was much
sadness to come for Carrie in her husband’s debilitating illness in the
mi-1920s, her hopes of her eldest son never fulfilled, and the onset of
manic-depressive psychosis in Carol when she was eighteen.
34 Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly
March 2008
Figure 16
Carrie lived in this house on Hillside in Waterbury from
1912 when she and Robert had it altered to accommodate the children, as shown by the third floor dormer
windows. (In one of them was the seat where the family
letters were stored.) She stayed on through her long
widowhood. It had been staffed with two maids, a cook,
a chauffeur and part time laundress and gardener, all but
one of whom and the Pierce-Arrow were gone by 1937.
involved in an industry, there will be excellent resources available
to describe its conditions. The towns and cities where people
lived all have their stories into which forebears can be fitted.
Maintain curiosity, read widely, and follow trails should be the
approach. That will awake a reader’s interest and create a legacy
for a future that will be as radically different as is the past to us. It
is a challenge that goes beyond traditional genealogy and encourages the development of a biographer’s skills. It is not for everyone, but my experience revealed how enjoyable and informative
the process can be. I look at American history now with far more
knowledge and understanding, and I would know how to start
right in with these ancestors with questions if they should suddenly materialize when I look up from the keyboard.
Peter Haring Judd is a graduate of Harvard
College and has a Ph.D. from Columbia
University. In his professional life he was with
the Corporate and Environmental Planning
Department of Northeast Utilities in
Connecticut for twenty years and served from
1984 to 1991 as an Assistant Commissioner
in New York City government. His book The
Hatch and Brood of Time: Five Phelps Families in the North
Atlantic World, 1730–1880, published by the Newbury Street Press
in 1999, received the Year 2000 award for family history from the
Connecticut Society of Genealogists. In 2001 it was given the Donald
Lines Jacobus Award by the American Society of Genealogists. His
More Lasting than Brass: A Thread of Family from Revolutionary
New York to Industrial Connecticut was published by Northeastern
University Press jointly with Newbury in 2004, and it received the
grand prize in genealogy from the Connecticut Society in 2005. Two
related publications are Genealogical and Biographical Notes:
Haring-Herring, Clark, Denton, White, Griggs, Judd, and related families, 298 pp. (2005), and Affection: Ninety Years of Family
Letters, 1850s–1930s: Haring, White, Griggs, Judd Families of
New York and Waterbury, Connecticut, 2 vols. (2006), both published by the compiler. He was a trustee of the New York Genealogical
& Biographical Society and a member of the Council of the New
England Historic Genealogical Society. The surnames that are his
principal research interest are Judd, Cowles, Griggs, White, Phelps,
Haring, and their associated families.