Mapping a Migration: Settling - and Clustering - in DC

Last week I introduced Operation DC with a map plotting the basics of my family's (great-grandparents, grandparents, their in-laws) migration to DC - who came, from where, and when. In that post, I also mentioned that I'd been compiling a list of family residences in DC, the goal being to get a better understanding of the neighborhoods in which they live and the institutions they might have interacted with (aside from the ones I already knew about), and hopefully opening the door to more resources.

So, my fun with maps continues, with a map of DC homes (1908-1964) for the Cooper, Shepherd, Petite, Watkins, Reid, Reeves and Ferguson families:

Some notes on the creation of this map:

• Addresses were pulled from City Directories, Deeds, Draft Registration Cards, Newspaper Articles (including obituaries and marriage license application announcements), and Social Security Number applications.
• The map was created using Google's My Maps function
• Each individual, family or married couple (depending on what they were at the time) has their points plotted in a different color, on a different layer of the map
• You can't actually see all the points on the map, because some are stacked on top of each other, as multiple couples lived in the same buildings, sometimes at the same time, sometimes over time

This last note above actually points to the coolest thing about all of this for me: seeing how families clustered together and supported each other through shared housing. Notice the clusters on this map, circled below:

The cluster to the left is a group of homes the Petites lived in, including my great-grandmother Katherine Shepherd's aunt Eleanor (Allen/Ellis) Petite and her son Fred Petite, as well as Katherine herself and her son, my grandfather Louis Shepherd. This is in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood.

The cluster in the center represents homes of the Coopers (my grandmother Elnora's family) as well as the homes their children and spouses (Fergusons, Reeveses, and Shepherds) would move into. This is in the Capitol Hill and Eastern Market neighborhoods.

On the right is a cluster of homes the Reid and Watkins families lived in. My grandfather Louis' second wife Doris was born a Reid; Doris' mother Cornelia was born a Watkins. These homes are roughly in the Capitol Heights, Grant Park, and Capitol View neighborhoods.

(Other markers generally represent either residences when a person or family first arrived in DC, or later homes of children after they married spouses and established themselves in the later half of the roughly 60-year period I'm researching.)

But actually, you need to drill down further to really see the clusters, and because of the stacked data points, a map isn't the best way to see it. So, I created a series of visuals:

Homes Owned by Noah and Nancy (Thomas) Cooper

(I don't have all dates of residence for all families, so you can see that a few of the years are approximate, and my research focus ends in 1964, so even if I have records of residence after that year, they aren't included here.)

This shows the two homes purchased by my great-grandparents in Washington, DC. According to Nancy's obituary, the family migrated up from Georgia in 1934, and city directories show Noah's early DC jobs were as a janitor, so it's notable that they were able to purchase two houses in about 10 years. My guess is that Noah sold his portion of the land inherited from his mother, but I haven't yet researched this.

Eleanor and Katherine, Sticking Together

When my great-grandmother moved to DC, she was just a teenager, maybe 16 years old, and she moved into the household of her maternal aunt Eleanor Petite, Eleanor's husband, Oswald, and their son Frederick. In 1922, Katherine gave birth to my grandfather Louis, while still living with the Petites, and in 1923, Oswald Petite passed away. It was now a household of two women and their sons. Katherine was briefly married in 1927, but within 2 years, she and Louis were back to living with Eleanor and Fred. In all, they shared at least 4 homes together between 1918 and 1933, when Eleanor passed away.

Watkins Neighbors or Housemates?

Meanwhile, my step-great-grandmother Cornelia (Watkins) Reid and her siblings, plus spouses, were living as either neighbors, or perhaps housemates (depending on whether the Blaine Street addresses are actually a case of an information collector getting their info wrong).

This doesn't cover all of the examples of family clustering or house sharing, but I'll end with two of my favorites before your eyes glaze over, if they haven't already:

The Girl and Boy Next Door

On the left is my grandfather Louis Shepherd. On the right, in the household of Noah and Nancy Cooper, is his future wife, Elnora. I've written more about them here.

And, new to me:

Share a House, Share a Life?

Yes, future husband and wife Fred Petite and Annice Gray lived in the same house at different times! Fred's mom Eleanor purchased 813 22nd Street NW from Annice's father and family in 1924. Censuses show the Grays (including Annice) living there at least from 1910-1920.  City Directories show that the Petites didn't move in immediately, but they're living there in 1930, according to that year's Census. By 1936, Fred and Annice are married. I want to know the story there!

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My next steps will involve researching the neighborhoods in which my family lived to see what adds to my understanding of their stories. I'll also be researching the institutions - churches, schools, businesses, etc - with which they were affiliated. This'll take a while, but there will be posts along the way.

And now that I've written this up, I've got a family reunion to head to!

Mapping a Migration: Coopers, Shepherds and Other Relations

In just over a week, I'm headed down to Georgia with my mom for her maternal family's biennial reunion. This year is extra special, because the Cooper-Cummings are gathering in Augusta, GA, and will have the opportunity to see our ancestral land - including land the family used to farm, land the family still owns, and even an old family cemetery. I am very excited!

I love going to these reunions anyway because not only are they a chance for me to meet distant relatives and learn more about family history, they're also a chance for all of my mom's siblings - the Shepherds - to get together and talk about their father's history. All of which means I need to be prepared 1) to ask the right questions to push my research along, and 2) to share what I've found since the last reunion.

All of this has prompted me to start a focused research project that I'm calling Operation DC. Washington, DC is where my grandparents Elnora Cooper and Louis Shepherd met, it's where my grandfather married the only maternal grandmother I was able to know (Doris Reid), where the Coopers migrated from Georgia, where my great-grandmother Katherine Shepherd moved from New Jersey to live with her aunt, and where my mom and her siblings were raised. There's quite a lot of my family history in that city!

For Step 1, I thought I'd focus on the who, what, when, and where of their lives in DC, with an eye towards the "where" especially. I've spent the past week or so recording and organizing every known address I've found from the time the first relative moved to the city until the year the last of my mom's siblings was born (1964). We're talking census records, city directories, deeds, and more!

The first result of that is this map, which is a simple visual of when people arrived in Washington, DC, and from where. It's not necessarily new information, but it's helpful - at least for me - to see it mapped out.



Clicking on a red marker will tell you the family or individual, their starting point, and a little about life at home. Clicking on the green line will tell you when (sometimes approximately) they arrived in DC and what they were up to after they arrived.

A few things:

• The Coopers, Shepherds, and Allens/Ellises are my starting families - I am biologically descended from them, the Coopers through my mother's mother, the Shepherds and Allens/Ellises through my mother's father.
• The Ferguson, Petite, Reeves, and Reid/Watkins families married into the above families.
• With the possible exception of Oswald Petite, everyone came from a farming family and had done some work on a farm or in a farming household.
• Members of each family had arrived in DC by the 1930s, putting them firmly in the Great Migration, which saw millions of African Americans move from the rural South to the urban North (and West and Midwest) during roughly the first half of the 20th Century.

As I continue with Operation DC, I'm looking forward to learning more about their schools, communities, jobs, and all of the other things that made up the context of their daily lives, especially given how different DC must have been from the farming communities where so many of them were raised! This is gonna take a while, but stay tuned as I use maps, timelines, photos and more to dig into these stories.

 And, as always, please share if you know something I don't!

Photo Friday: Bowling Highliners, 1957-1958

This Photo Friday, it's another photoset taken from my Grandma Doris' albums, which I am slowly (s-l-o-w-l-y) in the process of digitizing. These were taken about 6 years before this set of bowling photos, and look to be from an end-of-season banquet and awards ceremony, probably in Washington, DC or Maryland.

That's my Grandma second from left, pictured with (L-R) Roland Stribling, J. Gray, Cecilia Petty, and Joe Franklin.

In addition to the original photo above, Grandma Doris also had an article from a bowling newsletter (from whichever association this event was held for), that described the bowling season a bit:

It reads, in part:

After thirty-three weeks of excitement and close competition another most successful season of bowling has been concluded, To add to the interest in the league of twelve teams only three games in the won column separated the first and seventh place teams when the final results were determined.

Trophies were presented to each member of the teams that finished in the first three positions. The champion Highliners (shown above left to right) Roland Stribling, Doris Mathis, John Gray, Cecilia Petty, Capt. and Joseph Franklin, League President.

The climax of the season was a banquet paid for with league funds. Each member and his or her guest had an abundance and variety of foods and beverages to choose from and dancing to the accompaniment of a 5-piece band.

To round out this set, here's a glamour shot of my grandmother, with all her trophies from the evening:

I love the glamour of these photos - the floor-length gown, the gloves - and it's a feature of many of the photos I've come across in her albums. She was never rich - she made many of her own dresses - and she wasn't part of Washington, DC's African American elite, but the circle she was a part of and the era in which she did all of this socializing provided her with opportunities to doll up, opportunities she certainly made the best of!

(Doris Shepherd was a fixture of DC's bowling world for decades. Click "bowling" in the word cloud to the right to see related posts.)

Photo Friday: Bowling Tournament, Minneapolis 1964

In between my active research, my major genealogy project is to digitize my late Grandma Doris (Reid / Mathis / Shepherd)'s photo albums. We brought 29 of them home after cleaning out her apartment in April 2015 and I have  S-L-O-W-L-Y been going through and scanning images. They are such an interesting look into her life, her family, some of my biological grandmother's family (the Coopers), the world of bowling, Washington, DC, and several decades that I didn't get to experience (namely, the 50s - early 80s). As I go through this process, I'll be using the Photo Friday heading to post some of my favorite photos, starting today!

This is my Grandma Doris (far right) posing with members of her Washington, DC bowling team at a Women's International Bowling Congress competition in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1964. Two things: 1) I love the jaunty set of her hat, 2) She is one pretty lady!

And here is another team from Washington, DC - they probably all bowled together frequently back at home. Check out the lady in the shades - she is too cool for school!

If you didn't already know, bowling was one of Grandma Doris' passions, so there are A LOT of bowling photos in these albums. Be warned :) And click "bowling" in the word cloud to the right if you'd like to see related posts.

Grandma Doris - More Bowling Pins!

I posted a few weeks ago about the stash of bowling pins - the kind you wear, not the kind you knock down - my mom and I came across as we went through some of my Grandma Doris' things while prepping for a flea market. Grandma passed away at the beginning of April and a LOT of her things ended up with us.

(Side Note: If her spirit was watching from somewhere, seeing us getting ready for a flea market probably made Grandma smile a little bit - I'm pretty sure half her adult life was spent at flea markets, selling Mary Kay and an assortment of thingimbobs.)

Anyway, Grandma didn't just bowl, she lived bowling - and was pretty good - and her jewelry boxed attested to that. Our first go round revealed 26 pins, from the Washington, DC Women's Bowling Association, Virgina State Women's Bowling Association, Women's International Bowling Conference, and more. Welp, we found two more!

The one at the top of the page may be my new favorite out of all of them, b/c... Tasmanian Devil. I mean, really, y'all. This sends me back to my Looney Toons youth - Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs. But anyway...Both pins have been added to the collection, and I actually hope we find more. Plus we have tons of pictures of Grandma posing with her teammates at tournaments, so maybe we can match a few pictures to pins?

Speaking of which, one of the other things that came back up with us from DC were Grandma Doris' photo albums. If she had been born a little later, she would have been a scrapbooker, with all the fancy doodads, special papers, stickers and scissors that cut decorative edges. As it was, she filled album after album with labeled pictures, some with commentary, some with dialogue bubbles (yep!). There are 19 of them.

So one of my next genealogy tasks is going through these babies, scanning and cataloging the photos, and then making the hard (or digital) copies available to folks in the family who want them. Did I mention there are 19 albums? I need to get cracking!

Bowled Over by Bowling Pins

As some of you already know, my Grandma Doris passed away earlier this year. Technically, Doris Elizabeth (Reid) Shepherd was my step-grandmother – my mom’s stepmother – but she’s the only grandmother I’ve ever known on that side of my family. My biological grandma, Elnora Mae (Cooper) Shepherd, passed away when my mom was 5 years old. (In a strange twist of metaphysical fate, both grandmothers passed away on April 1^st, forty-eight years apart.)

One of the things Grandma Doris’ passing has meant is that a ton of her stuff is now at my parents’ house. Now that it’s yard sale season, we’re going through boxes and bags to see what can be let go, and what we want to keep (which, it turns out, is basically anything with sentimental value). Look what came out of one envelope of costume jewelry:

 

Grandma Doris was a bowler. Actually, that fails as a descriptive statement. Grandma Doris had a deep, abiding and passionate love of bowling and she gave a lot of her time and energy to both playing the sport and supporting it. Among her many bowling commitments, she was a member (and sometimes officer) of the Washington, DC Area Women’s Bowling Association for many years.

A love of bowling was something that my grandma had in common with her husband, my Granddad Louis, and my mom and aunt remember family trips to places like Lebanon, PA and Aliquippa, PA so their parents could compete in bowling tournaments. I didn’t find any Lebanon pins, but I did find a few from the Virginia State Women’s Bowling Association and the Ocean County, New Jersey Women’s Bowling Association:

She also had more than a few from the Women’s International Bowling Congress, plus one from the National Duckpin Bowling Congress:

 

(I’m not gonna lie – I had to look up what “duckpin bowling” was. According to duckpins.com, it is “a variation of 10-pin bowling where the balls and pins are significantly smaller making the game much harder.”)

In total, I counted 26 pins in that one envelope. I wonder if there are more hiding somewhere else? Either way, maybe we’ll come up with a good way of displaying these – my dad has already suggested mounting them in a nice frame for a conversation piece.

This is just a sliver of my Grandma Doris’ bowling story – I’ll be coming back to this topic more than a few times, so stay tuned! In the meantime, do you have a story or memory about Doris Shepherd the Bowler?