All About Uncle Dale

I have a totally cool uncle, my Uncle Dale (and another cool uncle, my Uncle Rickey who is not the subject of this post).  Uncle Dale was brazen enough to toss me fully clothed into a swimming pool.  He understood when I was hungover and swore I would never drink again--and he didn't believe that for a minute.  When his son, my cousin Kevin, asked me to look into his father's family history, I was only too happy to help out.  Any excuse to look into family history!

As part of my research, I located my Uncle Dale, with his parents, in the 1940 census. 

Lewis Orth and Barbara Layne

Voter registration records and recollections from my mother and father gave me an address where I should find my Uncle Dale and his parents in the 1940 census. 

Just because I had an address, though, did not make the little Orth family easier to find.  They did not live within the city limits of Sacramento, and I did not know enough about the old names of county areas to readily identify the correct enumeration district.  I checked each County area, and under the name of the Brighton area, I found an ennumeration district that contained Parker Avenue.  And, sure enough, there I found Lewis Orth, his wife, Barbara, and the baby version of my Uncle Dale.

Lewis Orth is 30 years old at the time of the census, born in California.  From earlier research, I know that this parents were both immigrants from Germany who settled in the area around Murphy's California, up in the foothills of Calaveras County.  Lewis' father, Frederick, died when Lewis was just 11 or 12 years old and is buried in the cemetery in Murphy's.  Lewis' mother, Katherine, at one point worked as a laundress to support her seven children, of whom Lewis was fourth born.  That Lewis finished four years of high school, in spite of the fact that his mother was a widow with seven children, is an indicator to me of the importance that Katherine placed on the education of her children.


Uncle Dale's great-niece, Heidi,
visiting the grave of
Frederick Orth in Murphy's.

Barbara Layne Orth is 21 years old at the time of the census.  She was born in Washington, Tacoma to be exact.  Like her husband, Lewis, she finished four years of high school.  Her son, my uncle, listed by his "real" name of Lewis D. Orth, is just three months old at the time of the census, having been born in California.  Over the next several years, Uncle Dale and his parents would welcome additions to the family--Kathleen and Steven. 

Lewis and Barbara own their home on Parker Avenue, valued at $2000.  Their house was modest in comparison with those of their neighbors, whose homes had values between $1,700 and $7,000.  Lewis works as a utility man at something called an "auto agency."  From voter registration records, I know that Lewis is actually an auto mechanic.  As auto maintenance (and race cars!!) has been a huge facet in my Uncle Dale's life, it does not surprise me that his father was involved with cars.  In 1939, Lewis earned just about $100 per month, a respectable salary in 1940 although far from allowing the family to live in any kind of luxury.

From voter registration records, I also know that both Lewis and Barbara were Democrats.  They would likely have supported Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1940 would be running for his third term as president.  They would be supporters of Roosevelt's New Deal policies, and I am sure that they would be keeping an eye on news of the war raging in Europe in 1940.  The fact that both Lewis and Barbara were Democrats would have put both of them at odds with Lewis' mother, Katherine, who was a Republican for much of her life.  Political conversations around the Orth house must have been interesting.

Lewis and Barbara Orth with their children, Steven,
Kathleen, and the great Uncle Dale.

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I hope that my Uncle Dale, my Aunt Sandy, and my cousins will enjoy this little peek into their family history. 

Review of English Lessons by James L. Hevia

In English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China, area studies specialist James L. Hevia takes a look at imperialism through the lens of cultural pedagogy, striking a different tone than the traditional view of Western imperial action through military might.  In doing so, Hevia makes the case for what is really colonializing action taken by Western powers (specifically but not solely the British) against China as comprised of four key elements.  These include:  (1) the use of violence against the people, institutions, and culture of China, through military means but also through diplomatic and linguistic coercion; (2) the “universalization of pseudo-scientific racial categories;” (3) the anxiety of the Western powers over the contrast between civilization and barbarism and the actions taken in response to that anxiety; and (4) the “practices of military plunder, the public exhibition, and the art market.”

James Hevia

Hevia bookends his work between the Second Opium War and the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion.  Certainly, the military violence of the period is undeniable.  Hevia, however, points to other methods of violence, including the use of diplomacy and the treaty system by the Western powers as a tool to produce Western hegemonic power.  Hevia effectively demonstrates  the manner in which language is manipulated to Western advantage and used as a tool against the Chinese.  Matters such as the development of a standard translation of Chinese ideograms and the restriction of certain words from official Chinese communications demonstrate the lengths to which language was used not only to instruct the Chinese in their relations with the West but to control their actions.

Hevia focuses a great deal of attention in English Lessons on the standard compilation of knowledge of China and the Chinese people developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century.  Western scholars combined the new access to China that arose from the Opium Wars with the sociological, demographical, geographical, and anthropological advances of the time to designate a set of characteristics for the Chinese people, their government, their culture, and more.  The end result was a hierarchical categorization of the races encountered by the Western powers during the course of colonialism, knowledge which was then used to direct policy.



The sack of the Summer Palace



Certainly the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion led to the third element of Hevia’s focus noted above, that of the anxiety of the Western powers over the contrast between civilization and barbarism.  Here Hevia loses something of the strength of narrative that held the reader’s interest to this point.  He writes of the atrocities committed at the time by the Western forces with a sense of detachment, a style which serves as a strange echo of the response of Western leaders to the actions of their troops.  Perhaps this was intentional, perhaps not.  In any event, while Hevia notes the concerns raised in the imperial centers over the actions of their military (and missionary) men, this seems to have had little effect on the powers themselves.  Rather, they turned from the simple process of executing prisoners with bullets to the somehow less-barbaric (?) means of beheading.  To off-set the stain of barbarism that attached to Western soldiers during the Boxer Rebellion, Hevia details the cultural methods used to justify the atrocities, including the introduction of the victim-martyr amongst the Christian missionaries and the symbolic place given to such martyrs.

With both the Boxer Rebellion and the sack of the Summer Palace during the Second Opium War, Hevia focuses on the significance of looting.  He does an admirable job providing detail on the objects looted, their cultural significance, and the manner in which they were then displayed to the larger world.  He identifies looting with the Western pedagogical project, and he is convincing that this was a large part of the process.  Where he may be lacking, however, is in attributing other motives to the act of looting.  What happened to sheer human greed?  Certainly the average British private had more on his mind than teaching the Chinese a lesson?   In his zeal to find cultural significance, Hevia might have stepped just a little too far in this area.

Troops used during the
Boxer Rebellion

If there is one criticism to be made, it is not really a very important one.  From the very introduction to his work, Hevia makes it clear that this will not be another “China-centered approach” to the study of Western relations with the Chinese empire.  By focusing on the period of the Opium Wars through the Boxer Rebellion, Hevia sought to reexamine the role of the Western powers in an effort to rescue the actions of the West from its position as a “reified historical agent.”  He does this admirably, while also admitting that the Chinese were not totally without agency.  Sadly, that agency is not included in this work (can one not hear Andre Gunder Frank shouting in the background “Eurocentrism” with the appropriate exclamation points?).  In fact, while Hevia indicates at more than one point in English Lessons that the Chinese eventually adapt Western military techniques and instruments, he does not follow through on the promise to explore this topic.  The Chinese appear at best as passive-aggressive agitators and at worse as mere bystanders to their own history.



Monument at Oberlin College
originally built to honor
missionary victims of the
Boxer Rebellion



In a work dense with analysis, James Hevia gives his readers a lot to think about in terms of the processes of colonialism through culture.  His section on the pop culture outcomes of the Boxer Rebellion (boy adventure books, films, etc.) is fascinating in its level of detail and its excellent analysis.  Yet, while Hevia provides more than ample information on the role of the teacher in the Western pedagogical project in nineteenth-century China, a modern-day scholar will have to look elsewhere for the experience of the student.  With Hevia as a starting point, however, it will certainly be worth the effort.

More from the 1940 Census

My quest to find ancestors in the newly released 1940 census continues.  This time I took on my Gumz-Stratton family line, hunting for a few of them in the census records from Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Gus and Allie Gumz

I took a chance when I went out looking for Gus and Allie Gumz, my maternal great-grandparents.  I had an address from the 1960's, along with a pretty good idea that Allie and Gus had lived in that house for years.  I used the tools at http://www.1940census.archives.com/ to identify the enumeration district that would contain that address in Oshkosh, then looked at each image in the set from that district until Gus and Allie popped up, right where they would live for another 20+ years.

The home that Allie and Gus occupied in 1940 was located at 303 Prospect Avenue in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (since renumbered to 807).  The home was owned by Gus and he gave it a value of $2,800.  The homes around 303 ranged in value from $2,000 to $5,000, putting the home at 303 in just about the middle in terms of value.  The fact that most of the homes on the same census page were owned by their occupants tells me that it was a pretty stable neighborhood, a well-settled and established section of Oshkosh. 



Allie's father, John Arza Blake, with
his children.  Allie is seated at
the far left.

 At the time he spoke to the census taker, Gus was 62 years old, Allie 61, and both of them were born in Wisconsin.  Gus went through the 8th grade in school, while Allie finished through the 7th.  Allie was the second oldest of eleven children and the oldest girl in her family.  It is likely that she quit school to help her mother run the large and bustling household.  When her mother died shortly after the birth of her eleventh child, Allie was just 18 years old.  As her father did not remarry for several years, it fell to Allie to tend to her younger siblings, even as she had her first baby herself when she was just 21.

Gus, too, came from a large family, being the third born in a family of twelve children.  Like Allie, it would not be hard to surmise that Gus, too, left school to help out with the family.  However, even if neither one of them had to leave school to meet the needs of their families, it was not uncommon for children to quit school after the 8th grade to begin their work lives.


Living with Allie and Gus was their daughter, Norine, known to her friends and family as "Sis," and her husband, Arnold Zuelke.  Sis was 26 years old, Arnie 29, and both were born in Wisconsin.  While Arnie quit school after 8th grade, Sis went through all four years of high school. 

Gus and Allie Gumz along with their children
photo taken about 1920

Everyone at 303 Prospect Avenue except for Allie worked outside the home.  Gus was employed as a tent-maker at a tent and awning company, an occupation he had worked at for over ten years by the time of the 1940 census.  His daughter, Sis, worked as a clerk in a dry goods store, and his son-in-law Arnie worked as a "machine hand" in a woodworking concern.  The daughters in the Gumz family were no strangers to working outside the home.  Sis's older sisters, Fritzie, Fern, and Marian, had all worked as bookkeepers at one time or another.  It is to Gus' credit that he told the the census taker that his daughter, Sis, made $780 in 1939 while he himself made only $750.  Some men may have shied away from admitting to making less than their daughter, but I imagine that Gus was proud of all his daughters and the manner in which they made their way in the world.  Arnie was the big breadwinner in the home, bringing in $1,040 during 1939. 

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A friend once found a saying that really speaks to genealogists.  It says that a person dies three times.  The first is when they stop breathing.  The second is when their heart stops.  And the third is when their name is no longer spoken on earth.  I'm trying to make sure that my ancestors never reach that third stage.



The 1940 Census is a BIG DEAL!

 
If you are a genealogist exploring your American ancestors, you know that census records are your bread-and-butter.  The U.S. census, taken every ten years since 1790, anchors each family in a particular place and time, providing insight into who and what our ancestors were.  Census questions about a person's parents provide clues to the identities of more ancestors, and questions about employment and military service tell us how our ancestors lived their everyday lives.  Using census material as the skeleton, a skilled genealogist can employ cultural and social history to fill in the flesh, creating a real connection between the twentieth-first century genealogist and the times and people of the past.

Aggregate census data is usually released by the Census Bureau not long after the completion of each census.  To see individuals, however, genealogists must wait until 72 years after the census was taken to view the population schedules.  In 2002, I was just a beginner, and I was thrilled when the 1930 census records became available.  Quickly exhausting those records, it has been a long wait for the 1940 census to come along.  Happily, the big day arrived on April 2, 2012.  The National Archives released digital copies of the population schedules, and eager genealogists began pouring over them.  Unfortunately, there are no online indexes as yet, so you need an actual 1940 address and a lot of patience to find your family members.  I used address information from City Directories (the precursor of telephone books) and all of my patience (that being a very limited commodity) to find a few of my family. 

Bart and Lorraine

The 1940 census was the first to show me my paternal grandparents living together with my two-year-old father. 



Rickey E. Dias



The record tells me that Bart V. Dias, his wife, Lorraine M., and their son, Rickey E., were all living at 223 T Street in Sacramento.  They rented their home for the astonishing sum of $25 a month.  Bart is 30 years old, Lorraine only 22, and Rickey is probably a pretty rambunctious 2-year-old.  All three are noted as being born in California.  The record indicates that they were all living in the same house in 1935, but that is something I would question, as Bart and Lorraine were not married in 1935 and, of course, Rickey wasn't born until 1937. 

New to this particular year's census is a question regarding education.  Bart notes that he has finished two years of high school, with Lorraine finishing only one.  Bart is employed as a janitor at a rooming house, while Lorraine tends to the home.  In 1939, Bart's total income was $720, averaging out to $60 per month.  After rent, this would leave Bart and Lorraine with $35 a month to spend on food, clothes, entertainment, etc.  As gasoline was $0.18 per gallon, and a loaf of bread cost $0.11, I imagine Bart and Lorraine could get by but they were definitely not living in luxury.