So here we are in December,
not too far from the official debut of winter, but you’d never guess it! Leaves have turned bright colors
and fallen into great piles on the ground, but the cold air is infrequent. I found
myself this morning staring out at a deep, brown, soggy carpet covering the
yard, framed by empty tree branches and foggy sky…but even with that typical autumn
landscape, the balmy, humid air makes a lie of the word “fall.”
About this time last year, I
forced myself to start sorting through my cousin Alton’s papers which were left
to me after he died in 2002. If any of you younger relatives (or
those of you my age!) don’t know, let me tell you: Alton was a lawyer. He
had a wry, catch-you-off-guard sense of humor, but he was also detail-driven,
even obsessive. He kept meticulous notes.
I mean, volumes of meticulous
notes, boxes of meticulous notes.
It made me sad beyond words
to find reams of paper with the same things printed (by hand!) on them. Over
and over. I think that as time passed he just lost track of having done some of
the work, maybe couldn’t remember which storage box or cabinet drawer it was in—so
he did it again. Sorting those papers was depressing work, frankly. It brought me face-to-face
with my own mortality as little else had. And I am still not through sifting through the documents.
In my last post I alluded to
a “mystery,” but that’s not really what it was.
Sometime before his eyes gave
out, on one of the last times Alton came to the family reunion, he brought copies
of research he’d been working on and distributed them among the other Alawines
that day. You may still even have a copy of it somewhere yourself; I do. In
those pages he described how the family name (Alawine/Alewine/Alewyne and other variations)
had apparently been changed to that from a different one
entirely: “Generoeyer.” (Variations there, too.)
I remember being absolutely
astounded by that. Most researchers know that, upon arriving in the U.S., emigrants frequently had different surnames
foisted upon them by clerks who were unfamiliar with the language the emigrant
spoke. So “Schmidt” might turn into “Smith,” for instance—a more easily-written
word, one an English-speaking scribe would know handily.
But how would you ever get
from “Generoeyer” to “Alawine”? No matter how you twist your mouth, no matter
what acrobatics you make your tongue perform, those two words just aren’t
alike. He and I talked about it, and he had no explanation either—but, clearly,
it had happened, because everything else in the census records matched. It was
hard for me to accept.
Still, this was Alton, and he
was obsessive about documenting things, so I didn’t really spend much time, for
a while, thinking about it. Then he died, and for me genealogy stopped being so much fun.
By around 2005 my daughters
started taking an interest in family history. So we explored the records I had.
I showed them where my census copies were, my family trees. I had them look at
the old photographs I’d accumulated and told them who the people were. I
explained about Alton’s letters to me and the documents he’d assembled.
When she came to the research
I mentioned above, Erin—a child of the Internet, a computer engineer herself by
then—reminded me that there was an easy way to find out where the name had come
from. Alton had used the web some, but by the time everybody else was on it,
macular degeneration had pretty much ruined his eyesight. He tried enlarging
the print, and that didn’t help; it was like zooming in on a twig without even
knowing what tree you were looking at. There was no context.
So for Alton information on
the Internet was always like one of those objects you see in dreams that are
almost in focus but not quite, something you want to see but just can’t, somehow.
Erin, however, did a search
and in less than 10 seconds discovered an astounding thing: There was no record
of a “Generoeyer” (Genereoyer) surname. Period.
She and I sat back and
considered the next move. Where had he found that word? How had he—meticulous and
exacting—been convinced of its existence? We talked it over for a few
minutes.
The next search—based on
information Alton had included about census results in South Carolina—produced a
devastating result, semi-hidden in comments from other researchers who had combed through the records of a particular place and a particular year:
“This clerk’s
handwriting was notoriously, horribly bad. You need to go to photocopies or
microfilm of the original records, if you can, and see for yourself what the names were by
comparing his notes throughout the document and deciphering his letters.” (This is a paraphrased remark.)
Erin and I knew immediately
what that meant, and we were stunned.
We sat and looked at
each other with the computer screen open to those comments by genealogists. I'd learned calligraphy years
ago as a teenager. Those curly, curvy styles added what I thought was a touch
of elegance to my invitations, letters to friends, family trees. I spent hours
perfecting my scripts.
We reached for a pen and paper. It didn’t take long at all to get from “Alawine” to “Generoeyer.”
We reached for a pen and paper. It didn’t take long at all to get from “Alawine” to “Generoeyer.”
Imagine yourself with a
fountain-type pen, two hundred or so years ago. You write in cursive, like
everyone else does. You're a scribe, a clerk, so you’re not an unlettered person. You’re going to write in the elegant
style of the time. —Up to a point: if you’re in a hurry, or if you’re just a
sloppy or careless sort of guy, your script may not be up to par.
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In one of the fancy calligraphy scripts,
this is a capital “G”:
Now consider the capital letter
“A,” next to it. It’s pretty straightforward when it's typed. When you write it in careless script,
though, it’s going to look an awful lot like that “G."
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And if you’re a researcher poring through pages
of one clerk’s
handwriting, you’re going to be looking for patterns when you decipher his
notes. After a while you’re familiar with his style. But if you're just transcribing...maybe not so much.
So this scribe used the typically fancy script of the time, but he had famously terrible handwriting.
One other piece of information you need to know is that the name has appeared as “Alewyne.”
Now, the reason why I simply
could not pick up the research again—not even to look at it, except in passing—after
that discovery: Alton spent at least two years that I know of
trying to chase down the nonexistent Generoeyer (“Genereoyer”) ancestor. If there were an emoji I could put right here to show how sad that makes me, I'd do it. There's not.
[This important edit is from 2023, so follow this link to see another twist on how the name changed. Documents Alton owned, and which I now have, and, further, which are available to others, including Bill Alewine, show that "Gene-"beginning name was written clearly. How it got to that permutation, I still have no clue...nor do others. Go to this later blog post to see what I mean.]
So on to another mystery…
At least three cousins (all
directly descended from the Skinners) have independently now had DNA tests run,
and each test has shown no Native American DNA. I was disappointed at first—I’d
heard the stories myself, actually from Daddy (Bob Alawine), about how his
great-grandmother was supposedly Cherokee. (Two of the DNA tests report European and Scottish genes, by the way, and one noted the French-German region of
Alsace Lorraine as an origin, which fits what I’ve always read and have found
to be the source of the name. There were Alavoines, for example, in France.)
Maggie Petty
But does anyone actually know
how these stories began about Maggie Petty Mayo Sweeney Skinner (my
great-great-grandmother)? Daddy told me how his mother (Maggie Evalina Skinner,
the granddaughter of Maggie P.M. Skinner) was able to locate and use plants in
the woods for medicines and dyes. I thought that extraordinary when I was
younger, but I know now that most of our backwoods ancestors had to be able to
do that. There wasn’t any RIT dye, and medicines had to be near at hand because
doctors surely weren’t! Having dark hair or brown eyes doesn’t automatically indicate you've got Native American DNA. And, unfortunately, “high cheekbones” in women a
century or two ago frequently meant they'd had tooth loss, caused by
calcium depletion. (You see “high cheekbones” in lots of people who’ve lost
teeth; what's happening is that their cheeks appear sunken.)
Madora Ann Mayo Skiunner, Maggie Petty's daughter, my great-grandmother
So please e-mail me or put into
the comment section any story you know about our ancestor Maggie Petty. She
died in 1904, so nobody today could've got information directly from her. Her daughter
Madora died in 1934, which makes it highly unlikely anybody today heard
anything out of her mouth, either. But I’m sure others like me would enjoy
trying to figure out where and how the legends began, so let's start the conversation!
--Ælfwine
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