Samaritan Sunday (August 25, 2013) -- A World War II POW's Ring Comes Home 70 Years Later

[If you should choose to adopt this prompt to contribute your own stories of folks who have gone out of their way to lend genealogy-related assistance to others, I would greatly appreciate a mention to Filiopietism Prism whenever you do so.  Thank you!  And please do use the same photograph below to illustrate the prompt.  ;-) ]

In the early months of 1945, the Red Cross food deliveries had essentially ceased at Stalag VII-A, Germany's largest prisoner-of- war camp located outside Moosburg, Bavaria, Germany.  Lt. David C. Cox from North Carolina was a co-pilot in a B-17 Flying Fortress that was shot down over Germany on July 28, 1943.  After initially being imprisoned in Stalag Luft III (the camp of The Great Escape fame), Lt. Cox was transferred to Moosberg in a consolidation of prisoners-of-war during the gradual collapse of the Third Reich.  By the time of liberation on April 29, 1945, there were 80,000 prisoners at Moosberg.  Food was scarce and consisted mainly of bug-infested bread and soup!  

Lt. Cox found himself flying B-17s after leaving college and enlisting following the attack on Pearl Harbor.  He applied to the Army Air Corps and was accepted on his second attempt.  In celebration of his graduation from flight school on July 26, 1942, he married his high school girlfriend, Hilda Walker. And in celebration of his graduation and commission, his parents, Irvin and Connie Bell Cox, presented him with a gold signet ring featuring a raised propeller and wings.  Inside the ring an engraving read, "Mother & Father to David C. Cox Greensboro, NC 10-4-18-42" [David's birthdate followed by the year of the gift].

Near starving and exposed to winter's cruelties on top of everything else, David Cox finally reached the point where he removed the gold signet ring his parents had given him and passed it through a fence to an Italian POW in exchange for a couple of chocolate candy bars.  It was the last David Cox ever saw of his ring.  But it was not the last that the Cox family would see of David's ring, for it is now a much-cherish family heirloom!

David Cox, Jr. is the son of Lt. David Cox and he now has his father's ring some 70 years after it was exchanged through a prison fence for the nourishment of two chocolate bars.  The ring traveled a long and circuitous route and, thanks to some Good Samaritans, it found its way back to David Cox Jr. in North Carolina.  The story and the route home began with the exchange to an Italian POW, but it also involves a Russian soldier making his way home after the war through present-day Serbia, a Hungarian family that owned a pub, a grandmother who wanted to give her grandson a good luck token that could also provide funds in an emergency, a church painter's immigration to Germany, an American seeking an air traffic controller's job at a U.S. Army airbase in Germany, and a friendly, serendipitous dinner invitation by neighbors.  Read the details of this amazing story and decide for yourself who the Good Samaritans are by going here.  And then go here to read more and see a photo of the ring.

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Photograph of the The Good Samaritan sculpture by Francois-Leon Sicard (1862 - 1934).  The sculpture is located in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, France.  The photograph is by Marie-Lan Nguyen and has been placed in the public domain by her. See, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Good_Samaritan_Sicard_Tuileries.jpg

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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Saturday Serendipity (August 24, 2013)

Saturdays often allow a more leisurely approach to life than work days. I can more easily post links to some blog posts or other materials I have discovered during the week, or even to those discovered during a Saturday morning coffee and extended surfing of the blogosphere/internet.

Here are a few discoveries from this week that I recommend for inclusion on your reading list.

1.   Judy at The Legal Genealogist has the latest report in the very important legal dispute over Myriad Genetics' claim that they have a patent that prevents other companies from offering significantly lower prices for tests to determine the presence of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that seriously increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer in women.  Two companies (including the parent of Family Tree DNA) are fighting back and have filed answers in federal district court in Utah to challenge Myriad's claims.  Everyone should follow this litigation.  In my humble opinion breaking once and for all Myriad's monopoly on this gene testing is crucial to women's health.  

2.  Heather at Leaves for Trees posted a piece here  musing about the reasons for blogging and whether continuing is justified.  She posted a synopsis of the many comments she received here. Both posts and the comments are worth reading for the dialog about reasons for genealogy blogging. 

3.   Do you have any gods in your genealogy?  Apparently there have been more than a few family trees that have made such claims.  Check out Editor Lynn Betlock's Note titled "Divine Origins" in the NEHGS Weekly Genealogist newsletter for August 21.  Lynn provides some links so you can see if your tree connects to these gods too.  

  

4.  Speaking of gods, have you seen the recent print about the legality of using certain names for children in the U.S.?  There is of course the urban legend that Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane fame named her daughter "god" back in 1971.  And then there are the examples of naming a child Adolph Hitler, Lysterine, Dweezel or Moon Unit.  But in Tennessee one apparently cannot name a child "Messiah" -- or at least Judge Lu Ann Ballew has said so.  This is the case even though there hundreds and hundreds of "Messiahs" in the U.S. according to the Social Security Administration and enough of them to put this name it in the top 400 baby names for 2012.  Read about the naming of babies in the U.S. and some other countries here. 

5.   If you talked to many of your parents, grandparents or even great grandparents and asked them where they would shop to get tools, clothes and especially home appliances like washers and refrigerators, odds are they would have said something like, "Oh, we always go to Sears Roebuck for things like that."  Well, not so much anymore.  Read here about the continuing problems of what for many of our ancestors was the Walmart of yesteryear.           

6.   We are approaching 100 years since the beginning of World War I -- the war that was supposed to end all wars!  We will be reading a lot of WWI stories beginning in 2014, but you can read one now about a British man who went to France to see the spot where his great grandfather won the Victoria Cross.  Go here to read the story and see some photos including the arresting one of soldiers at Riqueval Bridge.      

7.  Do you have any idea where the oldest community of free African Americans in the U.S. (circa 1790) might have lived?  You can go here to find out and hear what is being done to research the community.  

8.   And here is an article I stumbled across from back in July 2011 that explores what could be an increasingly perplexing question about what exactly is a family tree and how do people fit into that tree these days.  For example, if a woman agrees to help her sister who cannot have children and bears a child that her sister and her sister's husband then adopt, where is the baby placed in the family tree?  In one place or two?
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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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Friday Fotos (August 23, 2013) -- The Parents of Elizabeth Ann Fennell

Robert Fennell (1833 -     )

Mary Jane Wood (1841 - 1891)

Robert Fennell and his wife, Mary Jane Wood Fennell, are my wife's 2nd great grandparents and therefore the 3rd great grandparents of our two sons.

Robert and Mary Jane had seven children born in Canada between 1861 and 1879.  Their fourth child and second daughter was Elizabeth Ann Fennell born December 12, 1866 in Bradford, Simcoe County, Ontario, Canada.  On September 16, 1891, Elizabeth married Herbert Beverly Jeffs who was born March 14, 1864 in West Gwilliambury, Canada.

Elizabeth Fennell and H.B. Jeffs had three children together -- all girls.  The eldest of the three girls, Eulalie Lillian Mary Jeffs (1893 - 1984) is my wife's maternal grandmother and the maternal great grandmother of our sons.

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Photographs in the collection of the author.

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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First Cars (August 22, 2013) -- My Paternal Grandfather's First Car

 Ford Model T 

My paternal grandfather's first car was the Ford Model T shown above with him behind the wheel. The photograph was taken at Roger Williams Park in Providence, Rhode Island in October 1920 while he was courting my grandmother, Huldah A. Hasselbaum.  You can just see the joy and pride of ownership on his face as he sits up there in his Model T.

The Model T was produced by Ford Motor Company from October 1908 until May 1927.  It was the car known as the "Tin Lizzie" and was seen as the first really affordable automobile (which was largely due to Ford's innovations in assembly line mass production).  The Model T was also the first car to have completely interchangeable parts.  When the last Model T was rolled out in May 1927, there had been 15 million of them produced over less than 20 years.  By 1918 half the cars on the road in the U.S. were Model Ts!

What did a Model T cost back in its day?  The standard 4-seater in 1909 cost $850, but by 1913 the price had dropped to $550 and then to $440 in 1915.  By the 1920s, the cost of a Model T had dropped to $260!  

My future grandmother sitting in the Model T of her boyfriend, Arnold G. Tew, Sr. 

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Photographs in the collection of the author.

For more information on the Model T and its history go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T.

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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Wedding Wednesday (August 21, 2013) -- A History Of Marriages

Since today is the 37th wedding anniversary for Molly and me -- and it is a Wednesday so that a Wedding Wednesday contribution is appropriate -- I thought I would recognize the occasion here by posting a history of the marriages in the Tew and Carpenter families over some eight generations. 

My parents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in 2011 and as part of the celebration I created a slide show and included a slide and a hard-copy handout that listed the marriages of seven prior generations in each of their respective ancestral lines.  Here it is. . . 

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY MOLLY!! 

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Marriage history created by the author (2011). 

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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When All The Paper Is Gone, What Will We Have Lost?

I am certainly not the first to muse about and then write -- as I am doing here -- concerning the demise of writing.  But I am not talking merely about the near ubiquitous shift to verbal communication represented by the omnipresent cell phone or the streaming of video content or even the writing with electrons via email, twitter and . . . yes . . . even blogs. [1]  

I am talking about the slow loss and perhaps eventual eradication of the so-called "hard copy" record formerly represented in paper-based handwritten, typed and printed letters, notes, diaries, cards, journals, magazines, books and photographs.  The things that our parents, grandparents and ancestors back as far as most of us have been able to trace, produced as everyday items and that we can still easily access if they were preserved for us somehow.  These are the things that took some time and effort to create, but also took more than a button push to destroy.  To destroy these hard-copy documents of the lives of our ancestors required fire, shredding, the slow long-term ravages of rodents, and insects, or the degradation caused by acid and light during improper storage over a very long time.  BUT, if the paper medium was protected and preserved the content can still be accessed even centuries after the documents were created simply by picking them up and examining them.  Will this be true, however, in a few short decades (or less) as the electronic information age matures?  I wonder.

I need only hold original letters, postcards, diaries and photographs in my family collection that are many decades or sometimes more than a century old (many images of which -- thanks to the age of the computer -- have been shared here on The Prism), to realize that I have virtually no problem accessing them, analyzing and extracting the information they contain and then sharing them.  It gives me pause, however, when I realize how difficult it is for me to even access the content of the LPs, cassette tapes, eight tracks, VHS tapes and other music/video formats I have enjoyed and collected in just the last 4 -5 decades.  Soon it could be all but impossible outside tech museums to access the content in these media formats.  Will the same thing soon happen to all the electronic data we collect and assemble into our digital genealogy records?  Even if we back up our data and take extremely good care of our computer and digital hardware, will our descendants be able to access our record data in the future like we have been able to access "paper-based" media for hundreds and hundreds of years?  For example, ask yourself if all the genealogy data you had on floppy disks or zip-drives got completely, accurately and faithfully transferred onto the latest new format or media?  How much has been and will be lost to our descendants by being left in the dust of advancing technology or by falling all too easy victim to the ability to delete data with the ease and quickness of the press of a button?

While vacationing in the Adirondacks, where I was already thinking about writing this post, the "All Tech Considered" feature on NPR presented a piece on July 30th by Heidi Glenn.  The title was "In The Digital Age, The Family Photo Album Fades Away."  The article muses on the sad but increasingly apparent demise of the family album and scrapbook in this digital age; but I worry too about the complete passing of a centuries-old format -- the hard-copy, paper-based media of generations of our ancestors -- in favor of the easy and convenient (but very ephemeral) electronic formats we have all embraced and rejoiced over in this golden digital age of genealogy.  Will our descendants have the same long-term ability to access the electronic record we are creating of our lives in the same way we have been able to access the paper-based record of our ancestors?  It bears serious contemplation.

On that note, I am going to go hold and look at some paper letters, hard bound diaries and paper photographs from my ancestors while I put my original vinyl album of Sgt. Peppers on my decades old turntable.  I want to hold the records created by my ancestors in exactly the same my they did . . . as I get older, losing my hair, not too many years from now . . . !  

 
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Digital photo collage by the author with the assistance of a scanner, computer and the internet.

[1]  Some bloggers (Heather Rojo of Nutfield Genealogy for one) have recognized the possible loss of electronic blog content and have pro-actively taken periodic steps to save their blog content in old-fashioned paper-based format via "blog books" from such sites as Blurb.  I am convinced this is an excellent idea and an important endeavor to try to preserve our blog content and the contributions they make to the genealogy community.  I am slowly following Heather's example and trying to do just this for my infant blog.  
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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew
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Immortality (August 19, 2013) -- Edna Lillian (Tew) Tarr

"Immortality Lies in Being Remembered by Family and Friends." -- John D. Tew 

My paternal grandfather's older sister, Edna Lillian Tew, was born 128 years ago today.  She was eleven years older than my grandfather and was the only girl among the five children of John Andrew Tew (1853 - 1903) and his wife Margaret (Conner) Tew (1860 - 1935).  In fact, my grandfather and my grand aunt Edna were the only two of the five children who survived beyond age two!

Arnold G. Tew, Sr. and his older sister, Edna L. (Tew) Tarr circa 1956-57
 [My grandfather died in 1958, so the  Dec. 61 date on the top margin of the photo
is probably when the photo was developed.]

I remember my Aunt Edna and always enjoyed seeing her and being around her.  One of my best memories of her was when we visited her at the cottage she and her late husband, Edward Clifford Tarr, had on Prudence Island in the Narragansett Bay.  [Her grandson, my cousin, still owns that cottage, which has been in the Tarr family for more than 100 years now!  And as this is written my cousin and his wife are being visited on Prudence by my father's sister, my Aunt Priscilla.]

Edna passed away three days after Christmas in 1969 when I was a senior in high school.  In fond and lasting recollection of my Aunt Edna, I present photos of her and will raise a glass in her memory this evening!

 

Edna Lillian Tew, approximately two years old 

Edna L. Tew, age 6

Edna in 1902, age 17

Edna in her twenties -- probably around the time of her wedding to Edward C. Tarr when she was 24 years old

My Aunt Edna on the porch of her cottage on Prudence Island

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All photos -- many of which were contributed as scanned copies by the grandson of Edna Lillian (Tew) Tarr -- are in the collection of the author.  Thank you Bruce!

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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Samaritan Sunday (August 18, 2013) -- Return Of A US Naval Academy Ceremonial Sword After 70 Years

[If you should choose to adopt this prompt to contribute your own stories of folks who have gone out of their way to lend genealogy-related assistance to others, I would greatly appreciate a mention to Filiopietism Prism whenever you do so.  Thank you!  And please do use the same photograph below to illustrate the prompt.  ;-) ]

In June 1942 the USS Erie (PG-50), was moved from its home base in Balboa, Panama to Cristobal, Panama and assigned to patrol against German Kriegsmarine U-boats in the waters between Panama and Cuba.  On November 12th she was leading a convoy between Trinidad and Guantanamo Bay when she was struck by three torpedoes from U-163.  Erie was badly damaged with seven killed and eleven wounded, so she was beached to prevent sinking.  The Erie burned for days, but later was raised and towed to the Willemstad, Curacao harbor, but during preparations for salvage, Erie capsized and had to be left in place until 1952 when she was partially raised and towed out to sea and allowed to sink in deep water. 

Enos Eldemire was a salvage diver in the Caymans and during salvage dives was able to recover a US Naval Academy ceremonial sword with the name Ned James Wentz engraved on it.  Understanding the meaning and importance of the sword, Mr. Eldemire set about trying to find the owner or his family.  He tried for years, and upon his death, his son, Kent Eldemire, a prominent businessman in the Caymans, came into possession of the sword . . . and of the quest to find its owner.  Kent Eldemire surfed the internet for years and years trying to find any lead that might help him locate the owner of the sword or his family, but without success.

Recently, Kent Eldemire got the clue he had been searching for.  A funeral notice in a Tallahassee, Florida newspaper publicized the death of a man by the surname Taber.  The notice stated that his widow was Frances Wentz Taber and Frances Wentz was the name of a daughter of Ned James Wentz, the owner of the sword.

Against all odds -- and thanks to the dauntless efforts of two generations of the Eldemire family -- Mrs. Frances Wentz Taber now has her father's long-lost US Naval Academy sword.  As it turns out, Mrs Taber was a genealogist and recognized the value of continued use of her maiden name for genealogy purposes.  It was this decision on her part that provided the clue necessary to find her and return the sword.  Internet search engines over the years had provided many false clues to Mr. Eldemire until he chanced on the name Frances Wentz Taber in the funeral notice.

To read the rest of this amazing story of two generations of Good Samaritans and their quest to return an especially meaningful part of the Wentz family history (and to see a photo of the sword), go here.    

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Photograph of the The Good Samaritan sculpture by Francois-Leon Sicard (1862 - 1934).  The sculpture is located in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, France.  The photograph is by Marie-Lan Nguyen and has been placed in the public domain by her. See, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Good_Samaritan_Sicard_Tuileries.jpg

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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