What I Did On My Summer Vacation: Pittsburgh and Steubenville, Part 2

 

The Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, seen from the Carnegie Library's Main Branch

 

After one last trip down The Strip – and a stop in the candy shop – my parents and sister headed back to Philadelphia and left me behind.Why? I’d planned an additional few days in the area to conduct some family history research, knowing that despite how close Pittsburgh and Philly are on a map, the logistics of getting and staying there meant research trips weren’t easy to just make happen. Getting to Steubenville, 45 minutes west of downtown Pittsburgh, nearer to Wheeling and Weirton, WV, would mean even more effort from Philly, but would be easy to do since I was already in the area. In fact, that was the purpose of my extended stay.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation: Pittsburgh and Steubenville, Part 1

 

View from the Monongahela Incline

It’s been quiet around here, I know, but I’ve actually managed to do a fair amount of research behind the scenes these past few months – what else are weekends for? Throw in a vacation or two and a girl can learn a lot! In fact, I just returned yesterday from a trip to western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio to learn more about my Whaley roots. And in the spirit of back-to-school season, here’s a “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” trip report.

I Curated An Exhibit!

https://easternstate.org/visit/events/pop-museum

Hi All, I'm interrupting my regularly scheduled programming - which, in this case, has been interminable silence as I've been very busy with work and other commitments - to let you know about something exciting in my world: 

I've curated an exhibit at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site!

Differentiating Rufus Littlejohns, aka Making Charts Makes Me Happy

Spreadsheets are awesome for solving, or at least better understanding, genealogical problems. Once your information is organized, you can literally see things more clearly, make better inferences, and see where opportunities, possibilities and solutions may be. 

So as I've been trying to untangle Rufus Littlejohns to see if indeed my 2x Great Grandfather from South Carolina is the same man who passes in Pennsylvania in 1934 - or, if that PA Rufus is actually a second Rufus Littlejohn from South Carolina - I made a spreadsheet. Here is a simplified version:

Piecing Together the Pennsylvania Littlejohns

In my quest to either prove or disprove that a Rufus Littlejohn who dies in Beaver County, Pennsylvania in 1934 is the same Rufus Littlejohn from whom I'm descended, I've been seeking out obituaries to scour them for information. The hope was that the PA Rufus would have an obituary stating his parents' names - I know "my" Rufus's parents, so making the connection would be easy. But alas, I've found no obituary yet - no smoking gun, as it were.

However, I did get my hands on two additional obituaries recently. The PA Rufus was living in the home of his daughter Alma in 1930. Tracking her through records, we can find that her mother was Jane "Jennie" Alexander. The first new obituary is hers - it was published in the Beaver Falls Review on 13 May 1937:

No Smoking Gun...Yet

On the heels of my recent success in finding obituaries related to a person who might be my 2x Great-Grandfather Rufus Littlejohn, I thought I'd see if my luck continued by seeking out the obituary of the potential candidate himself.

I learned two things:

1.  The good people at the Beaver County Genealogy and History Center respond very quickly to queries (based on my sample size of 3 requests in 1 message).


2.  Luck was not on my side.

Made in America, Born in the USA

My great-grandmother Katherine (Shepherd, then Banks) Sharpe spent the last two decades and change of her life living in the Bronx, in New York City. For some of that time, one of my mother’s brothers lived there with her, and one of his clear memories from that time is her telling him the story of where she came from. As the story goes, she was born in...Italy! She was supposed to come over on the Titanic, but her mother stopped her from going at the time, saying she was too young to travel so far by herself.

The RMS Titanic docked in Southampton, England before her 1912 maiden voyage.