Meuse-Argonne Travelogue, Part Two of Two

Traveling around this part of France, the terrain often felt like my native Fayette County in southwest Pennsylvania. This part of France would have felt familiar as well for George Marshall, a native of Fayette County's Uniontown, who was a key planner of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. There are no deep river gorges, and the hilltops even in the Argonne Forest are nowhere near as high as the ridges east of Uniontown. Nevertheless driving in the Argonne Forest felt like being on a shady lane up the mountains east of Uniontown. East of the Argonne Forest there are two rivers, the Aire in the west and the larger Meuse in the east. Both rivers flow generally from south-southeast toward north-northwest. The high ground between the two rivers is chopped thoroughly into ridges and hilltops separated by valleys that drain mostly east or west. As a result, the American troop advance was repeatedly up and down, over hill and dale.

Maarten guided me to Hill 304. On top of that hill (cote, in French military parlance) is a memorial to the French who fought there in 1916 and 1917. By the time the Meuse-Argonne offensive began on the morning of September 26, this hill was barely inside allied territory. According to the ABMC maps (see previous post for reference), the starting front lines for the American 79th and 4th Divisions were about one kilometer to the northwest and to the north. Maarten and I walked north slightly downhill to where there was a good view of the panorama of ridge and dale. I didn't think to take a picture until we started back up. I asked Maarten to have my thumb pointing to Montfaucon, which is about six kilometers (about 4 miles) northwest from here. It took American troops two days to get there.

Although most of the area is farm fields, interspersed are large tracts of woodland. A few kilometers southwest of Hill 304 (not sure exactly where, but somewhere near Avocourt) Maarten had me park the car along the side of a dirt road, and we walked into the woods. There trenches, bunkers and shell craters have been left as they were, to be covered with 108 years of forest growth. Apparently the craters can be located from airborne lidar imagery. It had been a dry year, so the various bottoms were not wet. Much of the metal has been scavenged for recycling. But here we're in a trench and Maarten is indicating barbed wire that was left behind.

The rest of my pictures don't really do justice to walking through the old trenches and craters. You have to be there. (In the backroom of his museum in Montfaucon, Maarten has recreated the experience of living in the trenches.) Back to the advance toward Montfaucon.

Instead of being in a forest, this bunker has been preserved in the middle of a farm field. It is close to the top of one of the ridges, not quite to Montfaucon. Besides the wide opening for their guns aimed south at the American advance, there is a small opening on the back aligned with Mountfaucon, so that the soldiers inside could signal American locations to their command post. After 1916 the Germans had had two years to prepare their defense lines.

Since Mountfaucon was an enemy command post it was a key objective. After the war, America built a memorial column on top of that hill. It is known locally as the American monument. If you follow that link you can read that there are 234 steps to the observation platform near the top. It is a spiral staircase inside, and I was slightly splayed out, holding on for dear life to the handrail at the center, while my big feet found the wider part of each step toward the outside. I would not have tried it by myself, but Maarten was keeping an eye on me. Their are about 11 landings, and some of them have benches if I had needed a rest. Below is a view from the observation platform looking west.

The original village of Mountfaucon was centered around the top of the hill. After the war the village was rebuilt at the foot of the hill. On the horizon is the eastern edge of the Argonne Forest. Just below the horizon from center and slightly to the right, reverse-silhouetted and barely visible in this image are three wind turbines. Apremont is near those windmills. Next is a view to the northwest.

Down below are the ruins of an abbey that had been part of the old village. As the deck label indicates, it is 7 kilometers to the American Cemetery. So that brings us back to the beginning of the previous post.

There are many other memorials in the area. Maarten guided me to the memorial for the 316th Infantry Regiment of the 79th Division. Their hilltop memorial, where the 316th was when the war ended on November 11, is on the east side of the Meuse River. It took awhile to get there from Montfaucon, but it was worth it. The hill provides another panoramic view of the Meuse-Argonne battlefield, seen from the east extending south to north. Fortunately French locals and some Americans take care of the monument.

The Pennsylvania Monument/Memorial was erected by the State of Pennsylvania in 1927. It is located in the town of Varennes, slightly uphill from the town center, a block west of the road south to Clermont. Varennes is in territory assigned to the 28th Division (Pennsylvania National Guard), but the memorial honors all of Pennsylvania's troops in the Great War. So that includes my grandfather's service in the All American 82nd Division. This memorial has been criticized as too grandiose, and I agree. But the best part is that the memorial is open on the back side. You can step forward, putting the grandiose columns to your right and left rear, and contemplate the Aire River valley. (The river makes a few 180 degree loops as it passes through the town.) In the background are the hills at the eastern edge of the Argonne Forest (especially difficult to advance past in 1918).

Since Varennes is only about 15 kilometers north of Clermont (exit 27 on the A4 autoroute), the Pennsylvania Memorial is a relatively accessible place to pause and remember the sacrifices made 108 years ago.

Meuse-Argonne Travelogue, Part One of Two

Some previous posts at this genealogy blog have been travelogues. In each case the main excuse for the trip was to visit where one of my ancestors had been born or had later resided. Recently I've had a slightly different excuse for traveling. Two years ago I visited the Puglia region of Italy, because that is where my father, John Toth, was stationed with the Army Air Corps during World War II. This October I traveled to France, because that is where my maternal grandfather, Felix Murtha, served during World War I.

The Meuse-Argonne region of France was the location of the final and largest campaign of the American Expeditionary Force. The Meuse-Argonne offensive began on September 26, 1918, and ended 46 days later with the November 11 armistice. According to his discharge papers, my grandfather's specific unit was Company D of the 307th Engineers of the 82nd Division. The 82nd had arrived in France in late spring of 1918, and so had already seen combat before September. For the first several days of the Meuse-Argonne offensive the 82nd was held in reserve. (Similarly the 1st Division, which had been in France since 1917, was held in reserve for the first few days.) At the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne offensive my grandfather's 307th Engineers unit was temporarily detached from the 82nd and tasked with repairing supply line roads. As previously summarized in source note number 6 of my grandfather's WikiTree profile, on 29 September my grandfather's D company traveled north to report to the 28th Division near the front at Apremont. In the Official History of the 82nd Division, one section describes D company as having been shanghaied by the 28th Division. Another section is more diplomatic, describing reporting to the 28th as being in compliance with orders from the 1st Corps [higher headquarters for the 77th, 28th and 35th Divisions, and soon to be also for the 82nd and the 1st].

Later in this post there is more about Apremont. The point for now is that learning (from the 82nd Official History) exactly where my grandfather's D Company was located from 29 September to 1 October made me want to get a feel for the area. So I traveled to France. Sandwiched between several nights in Paris, I stayed three nights at the bed and breakfast 14-18 Meuse-Argonne in Montfaucon. My hosts were Maarten and Didi. On the first full day Maarten was my guide. But I'll start with a moving experience on my own on the second day.

I spent some time in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. It is the largest American cemetery in Europe, the resting place for over 14,000 military dead. (For the American cemetery at Normandy the number is about 9,400.) This cemetery is organized into eight sections, all eight on a gently sloping hill. Below is a view of part of just one of the eight sections. This is section F.

At home before leaving for France I had searched the Find A Grave page for this cemetery. I searched for memorials where the word Fayette appears in the biography section. I grew up in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and I discovered several people from my part of Fayette County who are buried in this cemetery. None of them are related to me. But one stood out. I found him in the first row of section E.

Private Fortunato Fiorentino was a member of the 111th Infantry of the 28th Division. He died on October 1, 1918, at Apremont, during the defensive fighting there that my grandfather's D Company had been invited to join. Fiorentino was born in Sicily, but he had joined the 28th from Republic in Fayette County. I attended junior high school at Republic. This soldier could easily be related to one of my classmates.

There is a chapel at the top of the cemetery's gently sloping hill. Wall panels adjacent to, outside the chapel have inscribed on them the names of over 900 missing in action. One of the outside wall panels is a map showing where the various divisions fought in the Meuse-Argonne.

On the south, along the completely American portion of the September 26 front line, from the west side of the 77th to the east side of the 33rd, the straight line distance is about 30 kilometers or about 20 miles. Toward the southwest are the divisions previously mentioned (77th, 28th, 35th, 82nd, 1st), all part of the 1st Corps. Also notice near the middle of the area assigned to the 79th Division, the black dot with the smudged label. This is the location of Montfaucon, where I stayed three nights.

If you want to see Apremont located on a modern map, the easiest way is to search google maps for Sergeant York Historic Trail. There is not much to the trail itself, but it happens to be a map feature included by google. Selecting that feature will quickly take you to a zoomed in part of France. Zooming out slightly will reveal Apremont, located about two miles southeast of the trail feature. A view containing those two features will approximately correspond to the map below. First I need to explain where the map below came from.

The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) was created by Congress in 1923. The ABMC administers cemeteries and a few other memorials. Years ago the ABMC created booklets, one for each division that served in France during World War I, containing both text and map depictions of the division history. These booklets, both text and maps, are digitally archived through links at the University of Texas. The original publication year was 1944. The maps were created by the ABMC by adding information in red to a base map in French. I've extracted a part of the ABMC map for the 28th Division in the Meuse-Argonne.

Red lines labeled with double Xs are division boundaries. Other red lines and labels are front lines and dates, bold lines for the 28th, thin lines for adjacent divisions. In particular the right side of this extract includes lines for the adjacent 35th Division. By September 28 the 35th had reached a hill northeast of Apremont. The hill is labeled Montrebeau. A fierce counterattack drove the 35th back to a line through Baulny, and it was along that line that the 35th was relieved by the 1st Division on October 1. Meanwhile the 28th's left side had not advanced as far as the right. The situation is described in the 28th History (from the ABMC booklet archive) as follows. During the night of September 29-30 the line of the 28th Division was considerably in advance of the front lines of the divisions to its flanks. ... Apremont was organized during the day with four strongpoints, echeloned in depth. Strongpoint No. 1 was located in the cemetery on the ridge north of Apremont; No. 2 was situated about 400 meters to the left, in the large gravel pit; ... These strongpoints were garrisoned with the following troops: ... No. 2, Company E, 110th Infantry, and a platoon of the 307th Engineers, 82d Division; ...

So what is described as an old quarry in the 82nd history is a large gravel pit in the 28th history. And it is clear to me now that not all of D Company was at the quarry/gravel pit. From the 82nd Official History, At daylight [Sep 30], 50 men, under Lieutenant Sam H. Andrews, Jr., were sent to an old quarry ... The other elements of D Company were on the firing line immediately in front of Apremont. So my grandfather could have been at either of these two locations. I'm guessing in front of would also be on the north side of Apremont.

This was near the end of my day with Maarten as my guide. We had just come from Chatel-Chéhéry traveling highway D42 approaching Apremont from the north. In 1918 I would have been wearing a gas mask, and crouched down in the ditch.

The 28th History says only that Apremont was successfully defended. You have to go to the Official 82nd History, discussing their Company D of the 307th Engineers, to get part of the rest of the story. There were American casualties, but the October 1 engagement appears to have been a disaster for hundreds of attacking enemy troops. The 82nd history concludes its discussion of D Company with, On October 3, this unit returned to road work. October 1 may have been the only time my grandfather's Engineer Company D was engaged in fighting at the front.

When the 1st Corps reorganized in early October, the 1st Division was instructed to continue advancing north-northwest through the territory originally assigned to the 35th. The 28th was instructed to concentrate on the high ground to the west. On October 6 the 82nd Division as a whole entered the offensive when it was slotted in between the 28th and the 1st. The 82nd was also instructed to initially focus on the high ground to the west. On the map above, the division boundary line extending horizontally west from Chatel-Chéhéry, labeled Oct. 7, in theory separated the activities of the 82nd, to the north, from those of the 28th, to the south. That line traverses a ridge that would be close to the 82nd's Sergeant York's heroic deeds on October 8. In Chatel-Chéhéry there is a plaque erected by Tennessee in 1987 honoring Sergeant York.

A 1941 movie Sergeant York stars Gary Cooper in the title role. I don't know what my grandfather may have thought of that movie. The subject of Sergeant York never came up in family conversations.

In Part Two, to be posted at a later date, I will discuss the other sites Maarten guided me to.

Deakins Survey (Locating Military Lots in Western Maryland)--Lessons Learned

The next paragraph is a long introduction.

Most of the branches of my family tree can be traced back within about four generations to specific locations in Europe. Details can be viewed most easily by following the links from my profile at the single-tree WikiTree. My maternal grandmother's branch, however, is much more complicated. My grandmother was born in Frostburg, Maryland, as was her mother. Their maternal root, Ellen (Powers) Brooks, is firmly planted at a specific location in Ireland. But several years after Ellen's childhood family moved to Frostburg she married George Brooks. George, my great-great-grandfather, has deep roots in the western panhandle of Maryland, going back well into the 1700s. My family knew almost nothing about the George Brooks branch before I started researching about 25 years ago. It turns out that there are multiple great-somebody connections scattered on both sides of the Old National Pike from Frostburg west. In recent years during my trips back East, genealogy has been an excuse to spend time exploring and enjoying the scenery and history of the mountains, particularly the mountains of Western Maryland. So this long introduction has been an explanation for my interest in locating military lots on modern topographic maps.

The Western Maryland Historical Library has a web page devoted to the Deakins Survey. Hereinafter that page and its links will be the Library website. I won't repeat the information and explanation provided at the Library website. Their main page has a map of the military lots for Garrett County. Multiple horizontal and vertical lines divide that map into small rectangular sections. Clicking anywhere on that map will zoom in on only the small rectangle clicked on. Regarding the Garrett map, the Library website provides a link to the "Full Military Land Map (without lines)". That full image can be downloaded and viewed at full resolution in its entirety offline. But that won't be necessary for following this post. I have cropped the full downloaded image and kept only a northwest corner of the map. Here is that portion.

Deakins Map Redrawn, Cropped, northwest corner of Garrett County

You may want to download this northwest corner map and look at it offline while continuing to read this post. The Library website explains that the map for Garrett County was redrawn from an earlier map (the Veatch map) that covers both today's Garrett County and today's Allegany County east to Cumberland. The Library website includes a link to the Veatch map, which is a color image. I would suggest instead viewing a black and white version of the Veatch map. A link to the B&W version is provided at a web page discussing use of the Deakins Survey in researching the Corn (Korn) family. The B&W version is described there more correctly as a grayscale version. The Corn website also provides additional information and discussion about the Deakins Survey. For the purpose of this blog, I have cropped the B&W version of the Veatch map and kept only the same northwest corner (also cropping some notations on the northern and western margins). Here it is.

Deakins Map, Original Veatch version converted to grayscale, Cropped

The reason the original Veatch map is in color is because some military lots were surveyed with settlers already present. Those lots were then offered for sale to the original settlers, and so they were not available for distribution to soldiers. A red shading was applied to the original settler lots on the Veatch map, often making the lot numbers difficult to read. In the gray scale version the numbers are still somewhat smeared and faded, but a bit easier to read. My g-g-grandfather George's g-grandfather, Thomas Humbertson, was one of the original-settler purchasers in the Frostburg area.

On the two maps above there are large swaths covered by fairly uniform grids of rectangular, not quite square, lots. Similar rectangular lots appear in many areas of the rest of the survey. A starting point for locating specific lots is to understand that the rectangular shape of the lots is related to their areal size, 50 acres. One square mile is 640 acres, and 50 does not divide evenly into 640. However an old measurement unit is a perch, or rod, which is equal to 16.5 feet. A rectangular lot that is 80 perches (1320 feet) by 100 perches (1650 feet) is exactly 50 acres.

Ultimately the goal is to approximately locate these lots on a modern topographic map. Most of the area in the two maps above is covered by the USGS Friendsville topographic map. (An electronic version of the Friendsville map can be downloaded for free from the USGS Store, when the government is not shut down. The latest version of the traditional form of the Friendsville topo is the 1993 version.) I have a paper copy of the Friendsville topo that I bought from the USGS about 25 years ago. Since I know that the paper copy is printed at a scale of 1:24,000, I have drawn on a separate little sheet of paper a grid of rectangular military lots at 1:24,000, like this.

I overlay my little grid on the topo map and see how it fits (a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle). Even when lots have irregular shapes, I know that the area enclosed needs to be the same area as my hand-drawn rectangles. You can confirm the shape and size of the rectangular lots by looking at the B&W Veatch map above. The circles along the north and west boundaries are one mile apart. Four lots added along their short sides is exactly one mile. Four lots added along their long sides equals the length of five lots added along their short sides, etc. It's easy to measure mileage south from the Mason-Dixon line. Just count the number of short sides and divide by four. The complication is the first row of lots, along the M-D line. Those lots appear wider in the long direction, and so must be narrower in the short direction. I estimate the inflation factor in the long direction as 7/6, and so the reduction in the short direction 6/7, so the north-south distance of the top row is approximately 0.21 mile instead of 0.25 mile.

Let's see how this works for an example. My 4th-great uncle (i.e, George Brooks' uncle) Noah Humberson acquired several parcels of land in the Blooming Rose area beginning about 1860. His 1860 purchase is described in part as including military lots 2842, 2843 and 2844. The lot numbers are easier to read on the first (Deakins Redrawn) map above. The irregular shape of lot 2844 is better depicted on the Veatch B&W map. On either map you can see that the three lots partially wrap around the north end of the Blooming Rose tract. Consider the corner where the three lots meet. How far south of the state line (the Mason-Dixon line) is this corner? Count north 10 lots along their short side. Ten divided by four is 2.5 miles. Add the top row estimate, 0.21 mile, to get a total of 2.71 miles as the approximate answer. When I measure this distance south, and consider the approximate location of the Blooming Rose tract, I find a point on the southwest edge of a short ridge labeled on the topo map as Emberson Hill. I have not been able to locate a description of the Blooming Rose tract, but I suspect that the north end of the tract follows the Emberson Hill ridge line for a short distance, cutting into what would have been a perfectly rectangular lot 2844. To compensate, lot 2844 then extends south of the ridge line.

Regarding the east-west positioning of military lots on a modern topo, I repeatedly fall for the notion when looking across the top of the Veatch map that the numbers labeling the circles indicate mileage along the Mason-Dixon (hereinafter M-D) line. But that is false, it does not fit. The circles are one mile apart, but they are not the exact M-D mileage.

In 1859 a brother of Noah, Azariah Humberston, purchased military lots 2936 and 2939, and a western part of military lot 3330. These lots are located just south and southeast of the circle labeled 196 on the Veatch map. Comparing with the Deakins redrawn map, you can see that this is an example where the digit six has been miscopied as a zero. (Miscopying is mentioned at the Library website.) So lot 2936 appears incorrectly as a second lot 2930 on the Deakins redrawn map. The excerpt below from the Friendsville topo includes the area of Azariah's purchase.

The total north-south distance on this excerpt is about 1.5 miles. Maryland state route 42, near the left edge, continues north to Markleysburg. The other north-south road crossing the state line, a secondary road a little right of center, is identified by google maps as Guard Road. I'm reluctant to draw Azariah's lots on this map because I can't be sure of the precise location. I know that the north boundary of lots 2936 and 2939 is only about 1/5 mile south of the state line. I play with my hand drawn grid of lots overlaid on the paper version of the map. Notice that some features are colored purple. Those features are photo revisions. Notice the photorevised road that veers to the south off of Guard Road, curves west, descends a steep hill via a switchback, and arrives at a photorevised lake. I believe that Azariah's lots 2936 and 2939 encompass most of these photorevisions, with room to spare on the west. How did I arrive at this east-west position? For one thing, it fits with the earlier positioning on Emberson Hill. It also fits with the position of the Youghiogheny River near Friendsville. (The drainage pattern sketched on the Deakins Map Redrawn provides a broad perspective on the area location, but details of the stream courses are in many places very wrong. At Friendsville, which developed in part from the land patent labeled "Look Sharp", the approximate location of the river is determined by the lot boundaries.)

It is possible to locate the M-D mileage on this and other topo maps for western Maryland, but it's complicated. Looking at the topo excerpt above along the M-D line we see the number 220 (a bit east of highway 42) and the number 218 (near the top of a hill that lies north of my estimated location of Azariah's lots). These are monument numbers, not distances. The numbers are from a list of monuments installed or repaired or merely noted during a resurvey of the M-D line conducted in the years 1901-1903. The report of the resurvey is available as a 23 MB pdf download from the Mason and Dixon Line Preservation Partnership website. The list of monuments appears on pages 83 through 101 of the report. For the first (eastern) 132 miles of the M-D line the list of monuments is almost entirely the milestones. Monument number 136 is milestone number 132, indicating only 3 extra resurvey monuments in that distance (resurvey monument no. 1 being M-D's initial monument). Partially quoting from the resurvey's description of number 136, Near the eastern base of Sideling Hill ... the most western of the [milestone] monuments planted by Mason and Dixon... West of this point M-D installed makeshift monuments of rock cairns or mounds of earth.

Moving ahead in the list of monuments, arriving at monuments in the area of the topo map above: 217. Small mound of stones, with a good sized tree growing in it, on the east side of [Guard Road] ... This marks the 196th mile of Mason and Dixon's measurement, 193 miles from the initial monument ... 218. Stone monument in fence line on the high bare ridge one-fifth of a mile west of the preceding mound ... The distance on the topo map from the east side of Guard Road to the number 218 is slightly more than, but about, one-fifth of a mile. As a consequence of my east-west fitting described previously, I estimate that the point labeled 196 on the Veatch map is actually the 196.35 mile of Mason and Dixon's measurement. The 0.35 mile adjustment is a bit more than the width of one of the rectangular 50 acre lots. This adjustment should work anywhere along the northern border of the Veatch map.

(This paragraph and the final paragraph discuss the eastern, beyond Garrett, part of the Deakins Survey. The small portion of the Veatch map displayed above will no longer be of use. You may want to download the relevant maps from elsewhere, or you can just imagine.) Moving 27 miles to the east, and quoting again from the resurvey report, 179. Stone monument in mound of earth on the western edge of the summit of Big Savage Mountain. This mound marked the 169th mile of Mason and Dixon's measurement ... This is the most eastern of these 'mile mounds.' (Note that I've calculated the distance from Guard Road as 27 miles by subtracting the 169th mile from the 196th mile. The difference in monument numbers is 38.) This monument and the next 11 resurvey monuments to the east (numbers 178-168, extending over about 8 miles) are all labeled with their numbers on either the Frostburg or the Cumberland topo maps. None of the monuments 178-168 are at locations that could have been mile mounds. In other words, the resurvey would have determined that they had arrived at locations where there could have been mile mounds. But finding no evidence that M-D had marked the spots, the resurvey also did not mark or remark upon those spots. Instead the resurvey installed stone monuments at more prominent locations, such as beside a north-south road or on a mountain ridgetop. Most of those resurvey monument locations had remnant evidence of having been marked by M-D.

In the resurvey's listing of monuments, after number 136 (the most western of the milestone monuments planted by M-D) all the way to number 179 (the most eastern of the M-D mile mounds), the monument descriptions for 137 through 178 say nothing about the M-D mileage. So even though the monuments covering the easternmost seven miles of the Deakins survey, numbers 162-178, can be located precisely on a modern topo map, there are no associated mileages in the monument descriptions. There is nothing for the estimated adjustment to be applied to. But it should be possible to extrapolate east from monument 179. For example, applying the estimated adjustment to the point at monument 179, the 169th M-D mile, yields 168.65 mile for the Veatch map (i.e., Veatch 169 is estimated 0.35 miles west of monument 179). On the Frostburg topo I measure 1.65 miles east from resurvey monument 179 and so arrive at a point estimated as the point 167 found on the northern edge of the Veatch map. This point is close to the eastern edge of the Frostburg topo, and is two miles north of Mount Savage. If the locations of the military lots surveyed in the vicinity of Mount Savage were not already known, steps analogous to those outlined above could be used to approximately locate those lots.

The Brown Family, The Monongahela, and The Two Alicias

The family homestead of William Hughey Brown, 1815-1875 (his Find A Grave Memorial), was situated along the Monongahela River, about five miles east of downtown Pittsburgh. William Hughey and his sons were coal operators. In particular, they pioneered shipping of coal by barge along the Pittsburgh rivers, and soon expanded their business down along the Ohio and the Mississippi. An 1889 posthumous biographical sketch of William tries to counter the impression that the Brown family wealth was acquired through government contracts during the Civil War, arguing that William was already prosperous before the war. Still it seems that business during the Civil War must have been as profitable as it was exciting and dangerous.

Several years ago someone compiled a comprehensively illustrated ebook genealogical history of the W. H. Brown family. That ebook at times could be accessed publicly online, but I don't know where it may be found now. You can follow the descendants of William Hughey Brown through the links from his Find A Grave Memorial to memorials for family members. You can do the same from his WikiTree Profile (currently only a few generations there) or from his profile at Family Search. (The latter link requires a free account registration and login. Also note that at FamilySearch William Hughey has been recorded as William Henry.) The links to individuals below are to their Find A Grave memorials.

This post is the first of what eventually will be a series of posts here, with the common thread being that there is some connection, even if tenuous, between the story of the Browns and the story of my family tree. Several of the threads deserve their own posts. This page is an introduction, with many details to be filled in later.

When William Hughey Brown died in 1875, there were four surviving sons. The oldest was Samuel Smith Brown, 1842-1905, (Samuel S.) and the youngest was William Harry Brown, 1856-1921, (W. Harry). One of the middle sons died in 1882, and then Samuel and Harry bought out the other middle son, leaving Samuel S. and W. Harry in charge of the family enterprises.

Brownsville, where I grew up, is also situated on the Monongahela, about 30 miles in a straight line south of downtown Pittsburgh, but about 55 miles upstream following the curving river. There is no evidence that the William Hughey Brown family was related in any way to the Browns who founded Brownsville in 1785. But it might be imagined that as attention turned to coal resources along the upstream Monongahela, the Pittsburgh Browns would be intrigued by a community named Brownsville. Sometime before Samuel died, he and Harry acquired coal property just southwest of Brownsville. Somewhat unusually for coal operators, the Browns' acquisition included much of the surface property several hundred feet above the coal beds. Today a big chunk of that surface property is the 467 acre Patsy Hillman Park.

Shortly after Samuel died, W. Harry Brown developed the coal part of their property near Brownsville, naming the mine Alicia, presumably after his daughter Mary Alice. About 10 years later Harry developed a second Alicia mine, about 12 miles farther south. The ebook genealogical history describes how Harry at his office in Pittsburgh closely supervised the architectural and engineering details of the two Alicias. A few years before Harry died, he sold his business interests to Pittsburgh Steel Company, which at its Monessen mill was already Harry's main customer. By 1936 the original Alicia was mined out. The surface properties there passed to the Hillman family. Probably not coincidentally, beginning in 1936 John Hartwell Hillman Jr. is listed among the members of Pittsburgh Steel's board of directors. In 1954 the Hillman Family Foundation presented to Brownsville much of the Brown->Hillman surface property, to be used as a community park. For several decades it was known as the Brownsville-Luzerne Community Park, but it is now Patsy Hillman Park. Below is a telephoto view taken almost 50 years ago looking northeast from the flagpole hill near the center of the park.

On the right side of this view is a water reservoir for Brownsville. Toward the left, on the far side of the Monongahela, is Krepps Knob, at 1350 feet one of the highest hilltops in the vicinity. Looking back toward the reservoir, heading on a straight line past the left side of the reservoir then down a steep hill on the other side would bring you to 770 feet at the river's edge. There you would be among the Bridgeport Patch houses, where my Hungarian grandparents raised their family. Back up at 1100 feet, visible on the left is a relatively flat area that is today's park soccer fields. Beyond the right side of this view there were other ameneties (e.g, golf driving range, kiddieland carnival rides) that came and went in the first decade or so of the park.

Let's go back to Samuel S. Brown. If you look at his Wikipedia page, you'll see there are only two sentences about the family coal business. Samuel was much better known nationally as an owner of racehorses, and a promoter of interest in that sport. His New York Times obituary (link is on the wikipedia page) reports that, His stables and stock farms were at Brownsville, Penn., and Lexington, Ky. In 1904 J. Percy Hart published Hart's History and Directory of the Three Towns (Brownsville, Bridgeport, West Brownsville). Hart's History has a biographical sketch for Samuel, as well as a separate portrait of Samuel with a caption. Much of Hart's sketch is taken from a sketch that had appeared in a Pitsburgh paper earlier in 1904, and both sketches dwell mostly on Samuel's racing interests. Hart's 1904 caption for the portrait reads, Capt. Samuel S. Brown, Who Owns A Stock Farm Just Above Bridgeport--the Home of "Troubadour." The Area of this Farm is 999 1/2 Acres, Underlaid with Coal. It took me awhile to connect the dots--obviously Just Above Bridgeport is today's community park. So as a child, when approaching The Park what I was feeling must have been the spirit of old Troubadour grazing in the grass-covered hills.

More 1930 Slovakia Census, An Index for Two Hungarian Villages

As mentioned at the beginning of the previous post, I've been reviewing the 1930 census sheets from my grandfather's home village of Nagy Szelmenc and the adjacent village Kis Szelmenc (Czech/Slovak Veľké and Malé Slemence). I've now completed an index of selected information from those census sheets. More about that farther down in this post. But first, in the next few paragraphs, I'd like to restate a few main points from that previous post, maybe more clearly this time.

In that previous post the main main point is the embedded image, which is a map from a 1921 history of Czechoslovakia. The map displays the eastern half of the Czechoslovakia that existed before World War II. The image title states, in Czech/Slovak, that the map is of Slovakia (Slovensko) and of Subcarpathian Rus' (Podkarpatská Rus). A solid bold line encompasses the two areas; together they were the eastern part of pre-WWII Czechoslovakia. A dashed bold line divides the two areas. (The breaks are very short; takes awhile to recognize it as a dashed line.) The figure, from wikimedia commons, is repeated below.

On the map the county of Užhorod is labeled in all caps. A much smaller label, in upper and lower case, marks the city of Užhorod. The dashed line follows a tight nearly three-quarter circle around the city. The western border of today's Transcarpathia lies a few to several miles west of this 1921 wavy dashed line. Transcarpathia extends slightly farther west than the interwar Podkarpatská Rus; they are not the same thing. Equivalently, the Slovakia part of pre-WWII Czechoslovakia extended several miles farther east than today's Slovakia. About this interwar dividing line—when was it first established as the western boundary of an intended semi-autonomous Ruthenian region, which country did that, and what were they thinking, why the waviness? That is a story for another time.

The final main point is that before WWII Czechoslovakia conducted two censuses of the country, one in 1921 and the second in 1930. For each of the two areas on this map, the process of restoring, digitizing and making the census images available online has so far been conducted for only one of the census years. For Podkarpatská Rus it is the 1921 census that is available online; the 1930 census is not available. Conversely for pre-WWII Slovakia it is the 1930 census that is available online; 1921 is not available.

Now back to my index of the two Szelemenc/Slemence villages in 1930. I've placed the index on google drive in three formats: (1) the Numbers file from my Mac laptop; (2) an xlsx file exported from Numbers; and (3) a CSV file exported from Numbers. Although the columns of the index are mostly self-explanatory, some additional explanation may help. Along with the explanations will be hints and lessons learned from working with this 1930 Slovakia census.

In the first column, Sheet, the leading number 317 was assigned by the archives to the box in which those sheets had been stored. The number after the slash was assigned to that sheet when the restoration process began. A small, white, scanable and human-readable label was attached near the top right corner of each sheet, and is visible in the online images. These box/sheet numbers are a modern creation, unknown in 1930. The box/sheet number can be used in the search field at the Slovakiana site. To aid the search results, occasionally it may be necessary to add a comma, a space and the first letter of the village's Slovak name (in this case M or V) in the search field. For example "317/92, V", without the quotes. The front of a sheet holds information for up to nine persons; if all nine rows are filled, click the right arrow to check if there are more persons on the back of the sheet. The House Number is as recorded by the enumerator. I don't know if these numbers were pre-assigned on a map, or if the enumerator simply entered a number in order of visitation. Kis Szelmenc (Malé Slemence) had its own set of house numbers, 1-59, which appear in reverse numerical order when viewed by Sheet order 317/1-59. Nagy Szelmenc (Veľké Slemence) was a bigger village, spanning sheets 317/60-248. Nagy Sz. has two sets of house numbers 1 through 28. The second set 1-28 was recorded for the Roma (gypsy, Hungarian cigány) neighborhood(s). What I call Head is the person on the first line of the census sheet, even though sometimes the situation was more complicated. The religion columns will be discussed in later paragraphs. Online the Slovakiana site also has summary sheets from 1930. The numbers in the last column of my index indicate that the summary sheets for this area had been stored in box 1201. (Subtotal summaries for other villages in the area include: Palad' 1201/28-29, Ptruska 1201/32-33, Ruská 1201/34-36, Vajany 1201/41-42, etc.) The information on these summary sheets is roughly the second, third, fourth, sixth and seventh columns of my index. The summary sheets also contain hand calculations of subtotals and grand totals. It appears that these summary sheets must have been folded into four-page booklets. When unfolded, the first and last pages appear on the first scanned page; click the right arrow to view the inside pages. The population total in 1930 for Malé Slemence was 303 and for Veľké Slemence it was 892. My great-grandfather is on sheet 317/61.

The 1930 Czechoslovakia census forms included columns for nationality and for religious affiliation. The vast majority of individuals in the Szelmenc'es were recorded as Hungarian. I've noted the rare instances when someone was recorded as Slovak or Czechoslovak. I've also noted when the nationality was recorded as cigány. There are two clusters of these, sheets 317/151-165 and then sheets 317/184-196. Everyone in these clusters was recorded as cigány. Conversely, no one outside of these clusters was recorded as cigány. For all those with Jewish religious affiliation, recorded either with the older Hungarian term izraelita by enumerator II or with the term zsidó by enumerator I, their nationality was recorded as zsidó (thus that entry in the notes column would be redundant). I suspect that many of the Roma and Jews would have thought of their nationality foremost as Hungarian, having ancestors who lived for centuries in the Hungarian part of Austria/Austria-Hungary, but had no choice how they were recorded.

Long before the 1930 census became available, I perused the information in the 1877 Dvorszák Gazetter, images available online from the University of Pécs. See this 2012 blog post, Boundaries of some Greek-Catholic Parishes in Old Hungary as well as my grandfather's wikitree page. For each village the 1877 Gazeteer provides population totals broken down by religious affiliation. Here are the 1877 numbers for Nagy Szelmenc (p. 738): Greek Catholic 314; Roman Catholic 175; Reformed 200; Jewish 69. Adding, the total population in 1877 was 758, slightly less than 1930's 892. The breakdown in 1930, from my index: Greek Catholic 385; Roman Catholic 268; Reformed 208; Jewish 30; Unstated 1. It's interesting to notice that in 1930 nearly 100 households subscribed to multiple Christian denominations. (For example, if the 1920 US census had recorded religious affiliation by baptism, my Dad's childhood family would have been 4 GC, 1 RC.)

I often explain to people that Toth is a very common Hungarian surname (and that Hungarian o, with or without an accent mark, is always pronounced like the o in both). The commonness holds true within the two 1930 Szelmenc villages, where 24 households were headed by a Toth.

Subcarpathian Rus'--Loose Mentions and Misunderstandings

This post is a follow-on to my reviewing of the 1930 census sheets from my grandfather's home village of Nagy Szelmenc and the adjacent village Kis Szelmenc (Czech/Slovak Veľké and Malé Slemence). About two years ago the 1930 census became available online, following a 90-year privacy period.¹ I was slow to realize that the information was available, but have now updated several WikiTree pages, including those for my grandfather's brothers and their father, and for my grandmother's sister in Csap. I'll have more to say about that 1930 census itself, including lessons learned, in a later post.

Intending to summarize some of the information, but also wanting to avoid reinventing the wheel, I searched for what other people have been doing with this 1930 census. In the process, which has included following links to descriptions of the history of the area, I've found that many play fast and loose with terms they use to label broad and narrow regions, glossing over context and time, substituting alternatives as if they were equivalent synonyms from a thesaurus. There is a lot of history, with many labels. But my concern for this post is about the early censuses from Czechoslovakia, and thus is limited to two time periods. The first period is 1921-1930, when the censuses were conducted. The second period is now and recent decades, when the information has been made available.

I found this map at wikimedia commons.

The map is from a 1921 history of Czechoslovakia. The broken line boundary through the county of Užhorod separates two parts of Czechoslovakia. On the west is the Slovakia (Slovensko) part. On the east is the Subcarpathian Rus' (Podkarpatská Rus) part. Notable on the map around the city of Užhorod is how the boundary forms a tight nearly three-quarter circle around the city. The term Subcarpathian Rus' has been reasonably applied by many people to a broader area based on their analyses of earlier reported ethnicities. But for the purpose of discussing the census records, it is the area as shown on this map, which was defined in the establishing treaties and founding documents for Czechoslovakia. As I understand, within Podkarpatská Rus there were numerous internal rearrangements of county and district boundaries between 1921 and 1930, but the western boundary of Podkarpatská Rus remained the same in 1930 as it had been in 1921.

Then there is the border today, which has not changed since 1945. When Stalin annexed Transcarpathia to the Ukrainian part of the Soviet Union, the border line was straightened and moved comfortably west of the city of Užhorod. Transcarpathia is slightly larger than Podkarpatská Rus; they are not the same area. Podkarpatská Rus is not Czech for Transcarpathia. According to Google Translate: Czech for Transcarpathia is Zakarpatí; Slovak for Transcarpathis is Zakarpatsko.

It is the position of the Slovak National Archives that census sheets from 1930 stored by them are only from present-day Slovakia.¹ Yet it is clear that the 1930 census sheets made available online by the Slovak National Education Center at their Slovakiana site include all of Slovensko as it was in 1930, which includes the far western part of today's Transcarpathia. The Slovakiana site does not include Podkarpatská Rus.¹

I don't know if the census sheets for Podkarpatská Rus were at some point transferred from Czechoslovakia to Transcarpathia, or if the Podkarpatská Rus sheets were always stored there and remained there as part of Transcarpathia. At any rate, in 2017 the Budapest Capital Archives went to the Beregszász (Berehove) section of the Transcarpathian State Archives and digitized the 1921 census sheets for Podkarpastká Rus. The digitized sheets are available online. That online collection is not a 1921 census for Transcarpathia. It is the 1921 census for Podkarpatská Rus.

Reference 1. Email responses from the Slovak National Archives archiv.sna@minv.sk and the Slovak National Education Center slovakiana@nocka.sk to questions from Jim Toth, October 2022.

Browsing a GEDCOM File

A GEDCOM file is the standard for sharing genealogical information. The version 5.5.1 specification is old, but still widely used. A GEDCOM file is generally understood to be intended for output from one computer program, then input to another computer program. But the GEDCOM file is plain text. The file's contents can be browsed that way, and that may be the only way to see all the details that were output by the generating program.

At GitHub I have a little macOS app that I use to browse GEDCOM files. Some of my GEDCOM files are very old, sent by cousins when I first got into genealogy over 20 years ago. Some of the files were created only recently, when I downloaded information from WikiTree and from Ancestry. (It is the standard, so a GEDCOM file is what you get when you download your tree from somewhere.)

Why not just use a plain-text editor for browsing? Discussion follows this screenshot of the app.

In this example the opened file is my tree downloaded from Ancestry. That tree was created by me to aid Ancestry-DNA matches in determining common ancestors. Because of that sole purpose this file contains records for only 37 individuals (35 of them my known ancestors) in 18 families. (My private GEDCOM file on my personal computer has about 1500 individuals.) A single record in a GEDCOM file generally contains multiple lines. The beginning of a new record is indicated by, among other things, a zero as the first character on a line. Though not obvious from the screenshot, the entire opened file can be scrolled from beginning to end in the view on the left. I've scrolled to the point where the beginning of the record for Ann Cavanaugh, one of my great-great-grandmothers, is displayed. Having clicked on the "Process" button, the file has been separated into records which are sorted and selectable in the four views on the right. I can easily jump from one record to another. In the list of individual records I've selected Ann Cavanaugh--much easier selecting that one record than searching for and scrolling to Ann in the original file. But what if Ann had been in a file with thousands of individuals? I would have switched temporarily to sort the list of individuals by surname.

Each record in a GEDCOM file starts with a unique cross-reference label. Ancestry has generated very long cross-references for the individual records. Ann's individual record indicates that she is a spouse in family F17. Having selected F17 in the list of families, we can see that that family record is linked back to Ann's individual record--a two-way link between individual and family record, as required by GEDCOM. My little app is oblivious to most of GEDCOM's requirements and recommendations. Basically all it does is display whatever the content happens to be for each record.

While preparing this post and reviewing the earliest version of this screenshot, I noticed that there were too many families and individuals--duplicates and even triplicates, with the extras differing in having mangled links. Here is how I think that happened. Before last December I had already enjoyed connecting with DNA-test-match cousins at other sites. Worried that I might be missing something at Ancestry, last December I took advantage of their DNA test sale. Preparing for anticipated new connections I created for the first time at Ancestry my tree, adding only my ancestors, one at a time. After that I succumbed to the allure of confirming Ancestry's hints. I think that is how the extra, mangled relationships were generated. After several iterations of deletions and repairs, my tree is back to what I originally intended. So the point is, downloading and browsing of a GEDCOM file can help find problems that are not obvious using the vendor's interface.

I prefer WikiTree. These days my genealogical research results get transferred directly to WikiTree, either by updating existing WikiTree profiles, collaboratively if possible, or sometimes by adding new profiles there. The GitHub link for my GEDCOM Browser app has a README file on its main page which contains a screenshot similar to the one on this page. In the GitHub screenshot the file is a GEDCOM that I downloaded from WikiTree. In that file I've also selected Ann Cavanaugh for illustration, so the two screenshots can be compared and contrasted. The contrasts between a WikiTree GEDCOM and an Ancestry GEDCOM illustrate that there is a great deal of flexibility in how information can be organized in a GEDCOM file. That flexibility can be a hindrance when importing a GEDCOM from somewhere else.

There is a problem with GEDCOM files generated by WikiTree that transcends whether WikiTree follows the spirit of the GEDCOM law. The problem is well explained in this Tamura Jones web page from over five years ago. WikiTree exports the entire biographical section of a profile as one long note in the individual's GEDCOM record. A large number of continuation lines are needed. WikiTree breaks a line and continues on the next line when the line length is well short of the limit specified by GEDCOM. All of that is within the letter of the GEDCOM law. The problem comes when a two-byte UTF-8 character (for example, an accented letter in a Hungarian name, or an educated quotation mark) happens to straddle the arbitrary number of bytes where WikiTree breaks the line. A malformed UTF-8 file is generated. Fortunately my Mac text editor of choice follows orders when I tell it to open the file as UTF-8, but it complains and warns me, highlighting the problem spots. So it was relatively easy to manually repair the file. I only recently experimented with downloading GEDCOM from WikiTree, and it was surprising to eventually discover that the malformed UTF-8 problem had been identified five years ago and never fixed.