65th Anniversary Update: Well THAT Was a Mistake

19 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by Generations of Nomads in Genealogy, People

Tags

Family history, Genealogy, genealogy mistake, Johns Hopkins, wedding, Wedding anniversary

Celia and Bill at their second wedding on June 16, 1954 and gathered at Bill’s graduation from Johns Hopkins University on June 14, 1955 with (l-r) Aunt Marjorie (Miller) Willbern, Bill’s mother, Jane (Miller) (Stephenson) Hare, Bill, Bill’s step-father, Bob Hare, Celia, and in front is cousin David Willbern.

Today I got a reminder of how easy it is to unwittingly make stuff up in genealogy. Earlier this week I wrote an affectionate little post about my parents’ 65th wedding anniversary. This morning I got a call from my mother, who said, “You’re not going to like this.” And she straightened me right out.

First of all, I had the year wrong. Celia Oliver and Bill Hare (born Stephenson) were married in Wellesley, Massachusetts on June 16, 1954 (not 1955), which was four days after Mum’s college graduation and a year before my Dad’s. Secondly, my aunt and uncle were in fact married in 1955, a year, not a few weeks, after my parents. Thirdly, I left out the part where Mum and Daddy were secretly married in Baltimore a year before their official wedding in Massachusetts.

So what, you say? Well, facts matter. And this story is actually different when it’s correct. And, since I’ve never located a marriage certificate for either the Maryland or Massachusetts marriages, I should have double checked with Mum instead of going on my memory of what I thought she’d told me long ago. And yes, this is the downfall of many a sloppy genealogist!

It was the 1950s. My parents were still in school and they quietly got married in 1953 in Baltimore. They were 19 and 20 years old and they never told their parents. Not ever. According to Mum, “Bill was afraid that because I was a year older I’d take off, and if we got married I wouldn’t.” So they got a marriage license, and one afternoon they rounded up two friends–Vince, a fraternity brother of my Dad’s, and Callie, a classmate of Mum’s–and went to the home of a Justice of the Peace. When it was over, Vince and Callie drove off in one car and Celia and Bill drove off in the other.

Because Mum was a year older than my Dad, they decided to get married when she graduated. They could get an apartment together (it was the ’50s) while she worked through his senior year at Johns Hopkins.

This morning Mum explained that my aunt and uncle traveled from Boston to Baltimore to visit them, the newlyweds, during the year before their own wedding in June 1955, again confirming that my dates were mixed up. So it’s actually my aunt and uncle whose 65th anniversary is this month…

And this solves my burning question as to why Mum would wear a suit to my Dad’s graduation a few days before marrying him in the same suit. What bride would do that?! The answer is that she’d worn the suit at her wedding first, the year before. I’m relieved.

So happy 66th (and 67th) anniversary and double check your facts! xxoo

A 65th Anniversary

16 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by Generations of Nomads in People, Uncategorized

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Tags

Family dogs, Goucher College, Hare, Johns Hopkins, Miller, Mills, Oliver, Stephenson, wedding, Wedding anniversary, Wellesley

*Celia and Bill on June 16, 1955 in Wellesley, Massachusetts*

A big, fancy-numbered anniversary. Today is the 65th anniversary of my parents’ wedding.

Celia Oliver and Bill Hare (born Stephenson) met in college in Baltimore in the early 1950s. She was a student at Goucher College and he was at Johns Hopkins University. My Mum was a year older than my Dad, graduating from college in 1954. Their wedding took place soon after his 1955 graduation from Hopkins when he was 21 and she was 22.

It was a small, simple wedding at the house my grandparents were renting on the campus of Dana Hall School on Grove Street in Wellesley, Massachusetts. My mother wore a dark suit with white piping around the collar. It’s the same suit she was wearing in photos of my Dad’s graduation from Hopkins earlier that month.

Present were their parents–Ken and Elsie (Mills) Oliver and Bob and Esther Jane (Miller) Hare from Maryland, with Bob’s mother, Fern, (Bob was actually my Dad’s step-father); Mum’s brother Peter Oliver and soon-to-be sister-in-law, Connie Gibbs; my grandfather’s brother, A. Douglas Oliver from Philadelphia with his wife, Dessa, and two young daughters, Anne and Susan; and finally, my great-uncle, Clark Stephenson, (brother of my dad’s father, Bill Stephenson) with his wife Louise. And must not forget my grandparents’ boxer, Judy, who was an important part of my childhood a few years later!

Top left my grandfather with his old blunderbuss pistol threatens my dad to “make an honest woman” out of his daughter! Top center, Mum’s cousins Anne and Susan Oliver, Dad’s grandmother, Fern Burnham, and my aunt, Connie. Top right, Susan Oliver, unknown minister, Uncle Doug and Aunt Dessa Oliver. And I’ve never asked my mother, but I wonder if my granny–an amazing baker–made the cake.

I love the intimacy of the gathering, the silliness of my Dad hamming it up for the camera while Mum beams, the image of my dignified grandfather being silly. The house isn’t one I ever knew, but everything they’re surrounded by–furniture, hangings, rugs–is embedded in my childhood memories. It was a day filled with joy and promise.

My parents had adventures together during their six short years of marriage before my father’s early death. They drove cross-country to spend a year living in Alaska. They spent a year working in Germany. They had four years as parents together in Baltimore. And a dog. For all that, I celebrate them and look back on that day 65 years ago with gratitude.

UPDATE: Oh, my, did I get this wrong! My next post sorts it all out…

Off to Baltimore–A Geographical Genealogy Adventure

07 Saturday Apr 2018

Posted by Generations of Nomads in Genealogy, Geographic Genealogy, People, Places

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Tags

Architectural history, Architecture, Baltimore, Baltimore history, Genealogy, geographical genealogy, Hill, Johns Hopkins, Maryland, Maryland history, Mills, Oliver

After an eighteen-month hiatus from blogging due to the chaos of work and family life, I retired last week. So…I’m taking a deep breath and jumping back into blog life and family exploration.

Post-retirement getaway number one will include a quick family history stop in Baltimore next week. No research, but a 24-hour pilgrimage to visit five generations of houses, work, school, and worship places, and a cemetery. I lived in Baltimore until I was five, and with no family there after we left, have never really explored the family sites.

Nicholas Snowden Hill about 1909 with his daughter, Mary (Hill) Mills, and grandchildren. L to R: Elsie (my grandmother), Audrey, Mary Carroll, and Jimmy.

A big part of my love of genealogy (and of history in general) is about putting people in the context of their places–geographical genealogy. I want to be able to visualize where they lived and what they did there. Placing Granny in her childhood home–an urban row house on Park Avenue, Baltimore, full of children; picturing the 1912 funeral of her beloved grandfather, conducted by his lifelong friend, Cardinal Gibbons, at the Baltimore Basilica; walking the Johns Hopkins University campus where my dad studied and my parents strolled with me as a toddler, all keeps their memories alive and vibrant in a way that mere names and dates never can.

And then there’s my inner architectural historian at work. To see these buildings that are so evocative of their time and place–the Italianate row houses in the Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill neighborhoods, the 1920s apartment building near Hopkins, the spectacular, high Victorian Johns Hopkins University Hospital. These places would speak to me even if they weren’t tied to my family, but those connections make them especially dear.

Step one in my geographical genealogy research is to figure out where my people lived, most often through census records and city directories. According to these records and the deeds for the property, my great grandparents, James and Mary (Hill) Mills moved to their home on Park Avenue in 1900 with my grandmother, Elsie, age 1. They had been married two years, and rented the house for five years before Mary bought it in 1905. They remained on Park Avenue for the rest of their married life. James, a physician and medical professor at Hopkins, ran his practice from home, and he and Mary raised their four children here. By the time James died in 1925, the children were grown, and Mary sold the house and moved in 1927.

James Mills 1900 census

After identifying the locations of family places, then comes the fun part–seeing what they looked like. Through the wonders of Google maps street view I’ve figured out which of these homes and related places are still standing (happily, most of them), and found current images of the ones that survive.

James and Mary (Hill) Mills’ home on Park Avenue in Baltimore (left of the white building).

My pilgrimage will include a few sites from my own early childhood, including a peek at one of my earliest homes.

The Bradford Apartments on St Paul Street, where I lived with my parents in the late ’50s.

And for extra thrills, real estate websites have even provided interior views of the Park Avenue house (now apartments, but a few original details survive), and some beautiful 19th century interior features of the Eutaw Place house where my grandfather was a tenant while he attended medical school at Johns Hopkins. Seeing the very rooms where my family lived a century ago takes my breath away.

A 2nd floor bedroom (Granny’s?) in the Park Avenue Mills House, courtesy of an online rental listing.

Perhaps my grandfather, Ken Oliver, had a chair in this first floor window, or in a similar upper story window when he rented here on Eutaw Place in 1926.

Of course, public buildings are easy to find, and I’m headed to see a few of those as well. James Mills, my great grandfather, taught at the Hopkins medical school, where my grandfather, Kenneth Oliver was his student in the 1920s. One thing led to another, and Ken married Dr. Mills’ daughter Elsie in 1925.