The missing “J”
For most of my life I never had any interest in genealogy, although I did have an interest in family stories. And it was the family story of a long-lost great-uncle, a mystery I wanted to solve, that propelled me into genealogy research on my own family.
I solved it, and more. I found present-day relatives I became friendly with. I found out the story of the uncle (and his son, who is still alive at almost 100 years of age and about whose existence I’d previously known nothing). I found out about some long-ago philandering ancestors and love children. I found scandalous stories of certain rich ancestors, tales of gossip published in the NY Times that would do nicely in today’s tabloid papers. I found that my mother and grandmother’s family stories were all true, at least the ones I could document. I found that family members on both sides were heavily involved in raising, trading, and training horses, for hundreds of years. That was almost the oddest of all; my interest in horses has been close to zero.
And so I’ve found it a lot more rewarding than expected. But I still wonder why we should care. The stories we learn are so few and so incomplete compared to the vast amount we don’t know. It always perturbs me to find a relative about whom all I can glean are birthdate, marriage date, names of children, and death date – an entire life neatly encapsulated and researched in just a few minutes. The joys and sorrows all lost or imagined, the names unfamiliar, the places unknown.
On one side of my family I’m in possession of many artifacts, including two embroidered samplers. They are fragile and in small frames. They’re not museum quality or anything close to it, but they were made by my maternal great-grandmother and they carry her name and the date of 1861, which meant she was approximately eight years old.
Something that always mystified me, from the time I first saw them when I was a child, was the fact that both samplers omitted the letter “J” from the alphabet. No one could tell me why. It made no sense to me that my great-grandmother had just forgotten the letter; the samplers were carefully stitched. But then it occurred to me to do a search online, and I came up with this:
Many samplers, dated well into the nineteenth century, seem to be missing the letter “J”. Actually, the “J” is a relatively young letter, coming into common usage sometime after 1820. Young needleworkers, such at Katy Bemis, were stitching the alphabet as they knew and used it . . . without considering the “J” as an individual letter.
We also have this:
One explanation is that some of the very early samplers reflected the Elizabethan time (1558-1603) when the alphabet was comprised of 24 letters. Another shortened alphabet, about that same time, included just 21 letters, dropping the W, X, and Y as well. What’s more, U and V were sometimes shaped alike and thus not duplicated on samplers. Additionally, Dutch and German samplers sometimes reflect an early Latin alphabet that did not include J, V or W.
My great-grandmother was born in Germany.
Another mystery solved, which to me is a great satisfaction.
Washington, DC has letters for east-west street names — for example, the (in)famous K Street — but there is nowhere in DC a J street: it goes from H Street to I Streeet to K Street to L Street and so on.
I Street is sometimes deliberately (but inaccurately) spelled out as Eye Street, just be sure no one confuses it with a 1 Street or a 1st Street*. It seems to me it would make sense to have no I Street but a J Street, removing any confusion, instead of the other way around (as it is now). But what do I know? . . .
* There does exist in DC, not only First Street but even Half Street — in fact, not only First Street SW and Half Street SW (I once lived very close to both), but also First Street SE and Half Street SE (which weren’t far off). But I digress . . .
” … an entire life neatly encapsulated and researched in just a few minutes. The joys and sorrows all lost or imagined, the names unfamiliar, the places unknown.”
This nicely sums up my present-day angst … the knowledge of mortality maturing into understanding … we sprout and blossom in the morning; by evening we wither and fade.
My father was the family genealogy master and going through his notebooks brings me to this point. He reconstructed through historical research many stories about our relatives and extended family tree. Every one of those people had a real life, most grew up in a farm family, most had multiple children and raised them on a farm or in a small town, all of this is familiar to most of us and yet also alien because the times have changed so much … if I could send a message to my 3rd-great grandmother, whose gravestone has a beautiful poem inscribed on it (her children must have really loved her to afford that), what would I say? Sadness for what is lost and can never be recovered, at least not in this life.
It is interesting to see how family histories can be passed down. Sometimes quite accurately and sometimes not. I encountered an example of the latter back in the ’90s when I was discussing our family with my maternal grandmother. She mentioned one of her grandfathers (thus one of my great-great-grandfathers). She told me he had been an emigrant from Prussia who had served in the Union Army during the Civil War. After the war he had become a prominent member of the Grand Army of the Republic (the GAR was the leading Union veterans organization).
What really caught my attention was her telling me that before my GGGF had enlisted in the US Army “…he had been a soldier in Mexico.” This intrigued me. What would a Prussian be doing as a soldier in Mexico in the 1860s? Then a bright idea struck me: he must have been a soldier in the French Foreign Legion! Troops from the Legion (with plenty of Germans among them) were part of the forces that Napoleon II sent to Mexico (while America was distracted by the Civil War) in order to install his brother-in-law Maximillian as “Emperor” of Mexico. My ancestor must have been part of this legendary mercenary force. Had he heard the call of freedom, deserted the Legion and traveled north to fight for America and liberty? It would be a great story (if I could document it).
Sadly, when I actually got my hands on some family records I found that my grandmother had remember it wrong. My GGGF had not been “a soldier in Mexico”, he had, in fact, enlisted in the US Army in the small town of Mexico, Missouri. I am still proud of my ancestor but I still regret that my great story was shot down by dull facts.
This incident does give a good illustration of the hazards of the oral tradition for a historian.
On one side of my family I’m in possession of many artifacts, including two embroidered samplers. They are fragile and in small frames.
My wife has two samplers made by her great grandmother. One is dated 1836.
As for family history, my grandfather was born in 1849. I have daguerreotypes of him and his sister at about 6 years old. He could theoretically have fought in the Civil War. He was 16 when it ended. He died in 1899, when my mother was 18 months old. I was born when she was 40 so we compressed a generation. She lived to 103.
I’m old enough that I consider leaving a legacy. I wrote a “work autobiography” for my colleagues that covers 40 years of life in the software business from the rise of PCs to the rise of AI, including what it was like to live through the advent of the Web from inside the business.
For my recently deceased wife, I posted a eulogy on the web consisting of a concise biography of the things others didn’t know about her.
We have no children, so no oral tradition, but maybe some great nephew or niece will find my reminiscences some day. The grandfather I was closest to died when I was 7, so I never got to ask him about the railroad business.
A few years ago, when I went to my 92-year old landlord’s funeral, I was impressed by the military honoring his WWII service even though I never knew about it despite our 30-year relationship. I did know some about his wife’s work as a Rosie-the-Riveter though.
It can be very interesting to find out either that family stories are true or untrue. One of my several times great-uncles supposedly fought in the Civil War, was captured, and died at the end of the war on the way home from the infamous prison at Andersonville. Well . . . as it turns out, he had moved to Missouri from Illinois where the family lived, joined the CONFEDERATE army, was apparently (I haven’t quite got it all together yet) one of the prisoners paroled at Vicksburg, and died on the way home. The surviving family, being strong supporters of the Union, like most Illinoisans, apparently altered some embarrassing details.
That said, I have plenty of ancestors who did fight for the Union, so it’s kind of cool to have a Confederate ancestor too.
Funny. I have been on the web doing just that too, today. Head swimming with cross referenced details and needed a break. Came here.
Ok, why should you care? Because it gives you a place to stand in figurative terms; somewhat as owning property and having weapons does literally.
You cannot be pushed, conned and browbeaten as a pseudo adult adrift-on-a-sea of others’ deeper claims to the world; because you know you do not live, and did not come to be by, their leave.
The Romans knew this. Those who knew who their ancestors were, were quite literally, a different class of people than those who were products of a social tempest or a catch as catch can mating.
There is much to be said in the abstract for arguing your right in universalist natural law terms. Applies equally to waifs and bastards as well as so-called “aristocrats”
But nothing – perhaps except strong religious conviction – quite matches the ability to deliver an historically grounded and accurate, “F**k you, this is who I am; this is mine; and you don’t have a damn thing to say about it.” LOL
There is an amusingly famous scene in an old Charlton Heston Sci Fi film that established itself as a kind of video snip meme, years ago, that parallels the sentiment if not the circumstances.
Go for it Neo. Horse Women have style and class …
You will need to get a bigger yard though.
On my Father side, his Grandfather, my Great Grandfather, and his 3 Brothers from South Carolina fought for the Confederacy. Two of them died, one in the Union Prison in Chicago, every bit as bad as Andersonville. The other died of wounds in Tenn. My Great Great Grandfather was in the Army during the War of 1812. The interesting thing is the spelling. The first part of my name is “Har”, Two of the 4 boys had an “i” and the other two, my side dropped it. GGGF had the “i”.
On my wife’s side she had a land transaction dated to late 1700’s, written on vellum. She found it on Ebay, of course. She also has Plane dated to about 1850 and signed by her ancestor. She got this on Ebay too. We believe that it was from a collection sold off when the owner, Sen Ted Stevens, died.
My wife did all the research and found other things. My Dad’s Mom’s family once owed the land that is now The Naval Acadamy. We believe that my Dad’s Mom’s family might have come across to England with William the Conqueror.
A friend of mine just heard yesterday from a woman who says she is a half-sister, who found this information via 23 and Me. The half-sister is from my friend’s father. Fortunately, this is not a traumatic thing, since my friend isn’t on close terms with her dad, but really, sometimes this can turn out badly.
M J R:
The story I heard about the lack of a “J” Street is that whoever laid out the city (l’Enfant? I’m not sure) despised John Jay. Hence the lack of a street name that could have been construed to honor him.
My story of family history starts with my father, who knew his family’s history from remembering conversations with relatives. It was spotty, and did not contain anything about my mother’s family, but it was a good start for my own research.
I had several days free from work in Washington D.C., so I went to the National Archives to see what I could find. Tremendous success when I discovered the census archives! I found out where relatives lived in 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910, and 1920. That stimulated memories from my father, who filled in a lot more detail.
I also searched my mother’s side of the family, discovering many facts in the census archives. I got street addresses for several of her relatives, and later was able to find those houses (those that still stood) and photograph them to share with my mother.
Oral tradition on my father’s side was that my great-great grandfather came to New England from Canada to fight for the Union Army. The family had a framed naturalization certificate hanging on the wall attesting to his naturalization on the basis of military service. I was able to find Army pay stubs he had signed during his service, and that really tickled my father.
I was also able to find that he (who worked as a horse shoer in the Army) had been hospitalized in Philadelphia after having been injured by a horse. (Take note, Neo!) My father speculated that the woman he married was a nurse in the hospital he spent several months in. No way to confirm that, except my father remembered she had been a nurse and the 1880 census reflected this, IIRC.
One fun story from my research: the great great grandfather who emigrated from Canada was said to have come from Napierville, in Quebec Province. I drove to Napierville, which is not far from the border with New York, and visited the provincial archives. That was a dead end, so I decided to visit the two cemeteries. No luck there either, which was disappointing. Our name is rare enough that I thought I could at least get a lead there. So I drove around the rural area looking at names on mail boxes and interviewing people.
One of those people was a woman working in her front yard. I approached her and introduced myself, explaining that I was looking for relatives with my name. She acted frightened, and without saying anything ran inside to get her husband. He came out and after a short conversation I realized the problem was that she did not speak French and didn’t want me to find her out. We continued the conversation in English and all went well, except they did not recognize the name.
From my experience in France, I realized that if I could find out where my GGF’s parents were born, I could extend the family history back several generations. Alas, I never found any records of his parents. Perhaps they spelled the name differently. There is oral tradition in our family that my GGF changed the spelling of his name when he came to the USA.
As for my own history, I had a career in the U.S. Foreign Service, and self-published my recollections of those 28 years. It was fun for me to do, but I have had very little feedback from my daughters, for whom I wrote it. One son-in-law did comment on the book, but that was it. A pity, really, as we lose so much when we are ignorant of what our parents did and knew. Perhaps they will read it after I am gone. But by then they will not be able to ask me for clarification of things they remembered differently. Alas.
Speaking of “ J” . On the 400 th anniversary of the printing of the 1611 King James Bible, Zondervan issued a reprint with the original style type. My late dad purchased a copy for himself and some of the family. If you look at verses about “ Jesus”, He is spelled “ Jefus”. Note there is an “ f “ instead of an “s”. But there is a strange , to my eyes, version of “J”. But then when you look at the name “ John”, it is spelled with an “I”.
A “J” is used sometimes in the Roman Numeral chapter banner for a number near the top of the page, but not where it is printed immediately before the the chapters, in the text.
My dad, a man who believed the Bible should be translated into the language of the day, having long had some , shall we say, angst, with some of the “ King James Only” crowd in the family, seemed to think it was a good teaching point to show them that their “1611 King James Bibles” , were not exactly using the same print script as the actual 1611 King James.
Oh, and “ Christ”, was spelled “Chrift”, with an “ ft”, at least in the page banners.
I thought you mistakenly meant to refer to Rock Island at first.
I guess you meant this.
http://www.ncgenweb.us/transylvania/Camp-Douglas-Civil-War-Prison,-Chicago.html
If they had known what was in store for them they would probably never have surrendered.
It’s what happens when you lose to people on a mission from the future. Does anyone imagine that our American leftists would not be just as enthusiastic?
Hell, they will kill your kids if they get half a chance.
Kate:
Many people have written articles and even books about shocks they’ve gotten from DNA-testing, which is somewhat different from genealogical research. The former is what tends to uncover sexual dalliances resulting in pregnancy and birth.
Most people are probably aware that some adoptees will be looking for biological relatives, but what most people don’t think about is that some other cases involve children conceived within a marriage in which the legal father is not the biological father and yet the family and descendants are unaware of that (sometimes even the woman having the baby is unaware that it’s her lover rather than her husband who is the father, if she’s been having sexual relations with both). Somewhere I’ve read a statistic – don’t remember it exactly though – but I think it was that they’ve found that something like 5% of births in the past used to have that pattern of the non-husband being the biological father.
In my own family, there were several variations on that theme, all involving one person or perhaps two brothers. This was two generations back, though, not one, so nobody’s parent (or actually any living person) was involved in the affair. That made it easier, I think, for people to accept. I found several situations in which perfect strangers were somewhat closely related to me, second cousin level, and neither they nor I had any idea why. In one case, the person was very friendly and very interested. In another, the person was not interested. So people’s reactions to a situation like that really vary.
I’ve heard that, especially when a parent has been involved in infidelity, this can cause enormous rifts in families.
I inherited a desk made by one of my fore fathers, whose dad had died in one of the Union Prisoner of War Camps….
F (8:31 pm) begins, “The story I heard about the lack of a “J” Street . . .”.
Thanks; that account does ring a very distant, very musty, very old bell.
Mike K:
I seem to recall you saying that you mother lived in 3 centuries. Pretty amazing.
I had a great-aunt who lived to be around 100 and was born in 1849. My grandfather’s sister. Long generations, many children.
There was no J in latin which was the basis for most European languags. The Romans also pronounced letters differently, take for example the following:
Vini Vidi, Vici, Caesar’s famous line. Based on how things are pronounce in Sardina( closest tp vulgar Latin) the V was actually pronounced like a W, as in Wini, Widi, Wici. The is an interesting video on You Tube about this.
I seem to recall you saying that you mother lived in 3 centuries. Pretty amazing.
Yes, she was born in 1898 and died in 2001. Her father was 50 soon after she was born and she was 40 when I was born. We compressed a generation.
Vague information that the family was part of what may as well have been a township–as these things were thought of–about the end of the Fifth Century in England’s west country. Up sticks due to Saxons coming on, went to Brittany as so many did.
Stayed there for about a thousand years plus. Took the True Faith and were with Protestant Henry at Coutras. After which our Henry decided Paris was worth a Mass and converted. To hell with kings, went back to the West Country.
There is a Lieutenant Colonel Richard Aubrey, commander of the Glamorganshire Militia.
Turns out there’s a Bad Guy with the same name and rank and command in the novel “In The Vale”. Like to get to the bottom of that.
Name came to North America with Wolfe, mustered out after the Plains of Abraham, and moved to upstate NY in late nineteenth century.
Mom’s side isn’t known that far back. Welsh, sent a twelve year old kid to make a start. Got a job as a sutler’s assistant with the Union Army, settled in downstate Ohio where the rest of the family joined him and took up farming.
One descendant went into the kind of carriages that don’t have horses and ended up doing well.
I figure, based on pretty much any story I’ve ever heard about any family that those who came here were from the top third, maybe mostly top quarter of the risk tolerance scale.
Wonder if that’s heritable, or a culturally transmissible trait.
DNW, I don’t image that he gave up voluntarily. I have somewhere a letter written by I think a tenant farmer of the family that went into the Army with him. They were on a train North when it broke down and they were forced marched in the Snow and cold with little food and medical attention. I gather he was a very large man, well over 6 ft and a lay preacher. He died the day he got to the prison. The Civil War was cruel and vicious for all concerned.
Do you remember the TV show that the actor “jumped” from different time to time. One time he became a Confederate solider. My Dad walked in and said “My Great Uncle died in a Yankee Prison”. Dad was born in Atlanta and moved to Texas a teen. He was a US Navy Vet and his comment was only time he ever said anything about the South.
Jon Baker:
Regarding the “s” being written as “f”, I have seen that in a lot of old English texts, and even in some Revolutionary-era texts. I think if you look closely, though, you will see that the “f” replacing “s” does not have the crossbar on it. In point of fact, it is an “s” with the bottom straightened out.
Mrs. JJ inherited some interesting artifacts from her paternal grandmother. An 1800s marble topped table, an 1824 handwritten bill of sale for a slave, an 1883 reproduction of the Vicksburg, Mississippi commemorative newspaper edition printed on the day that Grant entered the city after the Confederate troops surrendered, and four copper etching plates of scenes of antebellum New Orleans. Her grandmother lived on a plantation in Mississippi that survived the Civil War and Reconstruction, though barely. My wife was her favorite grandchild, so she left these precious southern mementoes to her.
We’re now divesting what few things we have of value to our daughter or to nieces and nephews. Our daughter is not interested in these items, and we have found none of the other family are interested in them either. So, they will be sold on e-Bay. Kind of sad, but the Civil War and the South are not held in high regard these days.
Other than her grandmother’s story, we know little about her family tree. My side is much better known. One of my aunts (My father’s sister) did ancestry work all the way back to our descendants being with William the Conqueror on the Norman invasion of England. Also, in our ancestry was Dr. Benjamin Rush of Revolutionary times. Myu paternal grandmother was descended from the Rush lineage. Her father married one of Rush’s great, great, granddaughters.
On my mother’s side we traced our lineage only to our great grandparents, who were married in Missouri in 1876. He was a carpenter with a full set of tools. They spent their lives moving by wagon to towns in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota where he would build anything that was made out of wood – mostly stables, saloons, and houses. He tired farming, but it wasn’t his cuppa. Working with saws, hammers, chisels, planes, axes, etc. was what he was good at. They had six children and four made it to adulthood. It was a pioneer life on what was then a young but growing farm belt where he could find work wherever they roamed.
I met him once when I was about four. He was a big man, with broad shoulders, a weathered face, and calloused hands. He died shortly after. His wife then lived with my grandparents after he died. She was a tiny woman with dark eyes and a proud manner. She dressed well and did her best to help out, but she was failing fast and died a couple of years later when I was about six.
So if the letter J is a relatively new letter, how did they originally spell James and John from the Bible as that is centuries old?
TroyCity:
Here’s the answer.
The use of a letter like the “f” for some variants of the letter “s” is apparently a carry over from the German.
E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-24563,00.html
Between my spelling and keyboard work, it hardly matters.
“Jefus.”
My calligraphy learnin’ would call that a ‘medial s.’ Wikipedia labels it a long S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
As to genealogy, my parents told me to stay away from one half of the family, which was easy as they lived several states away. And they wouldn’t show me my birth certificate until forced to by bureaucratic circumstances. The places, dates, and names on it were preposterous. So of course my parents lied, concocting a ridiculous story to make sense of it all.
Only by DNA testing decades after their deaths I discovered… my DNA mother was a bit wild, marrying three times over four years, the first and third time to the same man who didn’t want the intermediary’s child. She died at 98, a few months after Iearned who she was. My half-brothers (from marriages one & three), who refused to speak to me, refused to let me know where she was.
How this baby—me—came to be given my parents is and always will be a mystery. And everyone was wrong. My adoptive mom thought I’d run away if I found out. Nope. My DNA family thought I’d be angry. (I wanted to thank her.)
The most surprising thing: my father was adopted, too. Never told me.
@TroyCity
It may be interesting for you to know that in modern Italian all this biblical names are now beginning with the letter “G” (the soft “G”, like in “George”): Giacomo (James), Giovanni (John) and also Gesù (Jesus).
However all these name in more arcaic Italian begin with “I” (which we always pronounce like in the English word “timber” ) or “J” – but we Italian use almost exactly the same sound both for “i” and “j”. In other words, we are lazy.
Here’s an nice video about “J”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfB9mX5UUNU
Curiously, the “gl” in Italian (for instance in my family name) is pronounced like “J” in the German “Ja”, or “LL” in the Spanish “paella”.
Sports Illustrated ran a piece decades ago, “How To Fwim
Hilarious.
I’m so glad they invented J.
Tired of being Ewish.
@ TroyCity, Paolo Pagliaro: Arabic-speaking Christians, having the ancestral memories of the related language, Aramaic, which was spoken in New Testament times, call him “Yeshua.”
Neo, if you read this, I have a favor to ask.
Please use your editing rights to remove either the last sentence or the entire posting here …https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/02/19/open-thread-2-19-22/#comment-2608533
Telling Om to go hang and kill himself, was, despite his constant trolling provocations, possibly a little, verging on, maybe, uncharitable.
Anyway, if you see this please do what you can.
Thanks,
DNW
DNW:
Spreading sweetness and light again, it seems.
I’be heard the interweb is forever. Find a dictionary, look up constant, cheritable.
Philosophy is a heavy burden for some.
Curiously, the “gl” in Italian (for instance in my family name) is pronounced like “J” in the German “Ja”, or “LL” in the Spanish “paella”.
Paolo Pagliaro:
Reminds me of my favorite Cyrillic letter, “ee kratkoye,” as I learned it. Looks lke a backwards N with a curvy bit over the top. In English, “short i.”
_______________________
Short I represents the palatal approximant /j/ like the pronunciation of ?y? in yesterday. … Depending on the romanization system in use and the Slavic language that is under examination, it can be romanized as ?y?, ?j?, ?i? or ???.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_I
____________________
So if you happen to see “j” appearing, often mysteriously at the end, of a romanized Russian word, that’s our friend, ee kratkoye.
“F”,
Regarding the “ f “.
In the larger part printed part of the book I was looking at, you are right in that there is no crossbar.
There is however the beginning of what seems to be a start of a cross bar. As if someone put a period on the left side of the “ f “ and then stopped.
Here is another link about the “long s” which I coincidentally ran across the other day:
https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/DP_Official_Documentation:Proofreading/Proofing_old_texts
BTW this is a site associated with Project Gutenberg. They are volunteers who proofread and prepare free ebooks online from public domain texts. It can be relaxing and enjoyable if one has an obsessive mentality. I’ve come across a number of interesting reads this way. It’s also neat to me to help proofread a book, and when it’s finished to download it and read it.
My ancestor was from Brunswick and was a professioanl soldier. He because one the hirelings rented by the British during the American Revolution. In 1776 he and his brigade were sent to Montreal to join Burgoyne’s army and ended up a prisoner after the surrender. By 1782 he was in a prisoner of war camp in Reading, PA where he reached an agreement with a local German man and was freed with an indenture. His name was Christopher Scherzeberg and the name transformed into my present spelling by a english speaking clerk.
” It always perturbs me to find a relative about whom all I can glean are birthdate, marriage date, names of children, and death date – an entire life neatly encapsulated and researched in just a few minutes. ”
Among what is known as “old money” it was an axiom that a proper woman only got her name in the newspapers three times: At birth, at marriage, and at death. Anything more was looked upon as quite louche. And the rituals of the upper classes in America always (until recently) tended to drift down.
Gerald, thanks for sharing your insight. Any other cheery thoughts old boy?
DNW was angry, your excuse?
Have a good day.