Category: Aubry

Wedding Wednesday: Jean Nicholas Grillot and Marie Anne Aubry

2/18/2014

This is the Darke County, Ohio probate record of the marriage of Jean Nicholas Grilliot and Marie Anne Aubry, my husband's 3x great-grandparents through his paternal grandmother's line. Jean Nicholas and Marie Anne were both French immigrants whose families had immigrated to western Ohio in 1838 and 1840, respectively. Even though their birth villages were only a couple of kilometers apart in northeastern France, Jean Nicholas and Marie Anne probably did not know each other before settling in Darke County. At the time of the marriage, Jean Nicholas was 28 years old and Marie Anne was 18 years old.

Darke County, Ohio Probate Marriage Record for Jean Nicholas Grillot and Marie Anne Auby.

Jean Nicholas' surname is spelled 'Grillot,' which is indeed his birth name spelling. Somewhere along the way, an extra 'i' was added, making it 'Grilliot,' which is how it is spelled in his will. Marie Anne's surname at birth was spelled 'Aubry,' but 'Obry' is seen in many of her family's American records.

This marriage record, as well as a couple of other other Grillot marriage records from 1852 to early 1853, state that the marriage was solemnized by a Justice of the Peace, NOT a Catholic priest. In fact, simply paging through the probate marriage records for these couple of years, it seems that the mention of a solemnization by a Catholic priest is rare, even for couples who are definitely French (and definitely Catholic). I am guessing that the small French community in the area had to go through longer periods without the presence of an ordained priest - perhaps they shared a priest with another community that was quite some distance away? Perhaps if that one priest suddenly passed away, they would have to wait even longer for a replacement. Whatever the case, the next step for me is to try to track down (if they exist) Catholic church records from the small parishes in this area of Darke County, to see if there ever was a church marriage for these couples who were 'officially' married by a Justice of the Peace.

Darke County, Ohio Marriage Records can be at FamilySearch.org at this link.

©2014, copyright Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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Tombstone Tuesday: Jean François Aubry (Obry)

5/6/2013

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The tombstone of Jean François Aubry, my husband's 4x great-grandfather. He is buried in Holy Family Cemetery, which is located just northwest of Versailles, Ohio in Darke County. Jean François immigrated to America from France with his wife, Anne Martine Drouot and his three living children, Etienne, Marie Anne, and Auguste. They arrived in New Orleans on April 28, 1840, and made the arduous journey northwards to Darke County in western Ohio, where they would settle and set up a farm. (The daughter Marie Anne married Jean Nicolas Grilliot in 1853.)

Tombstone of Jean Francois Aubry, Holy Family Cemetery

In census and other record sources, the Aubry family is often found under the surname 'Overly' or 'Obry.' The 1850 Agriculture Census shows 'John Overly' owning a small farm of only 50 acres, with 20 acres listed as 'improved' and 30 acres as 'unimproved.' He has two horses, two 'working oxen,' a handful of other cattle, ten sheep, and twelve swine. For the year 1849, he reported producing four tons of hay, 200 bushels of indian corn, ten bushels of oats, and forty pounds of maple sugar.

Jean François passed away April 26, 1873. The tombstone reads, "Priez pour son âme," which means "Pray for his soul" in French.

Jean François' birth record is below. He was born in the town of Herbeuville in the Meuse department of northeastern France. His parents were Nicolas Aubry and Anne Catherine Colnard. The birth record indicates he was born in 1802, which is fairly consistent with the ages listed on his U.S. census schedules. (Even if you CAN read French, don't try to find '1802' in the record below; the date is listed using the French Republican Calendar, and needs to be 'translated' to the Gregorian calendar to figure out that it is indeed 1802.) The tombstone lists his age at death at 66 years, and I believe that the stone is wrong in this case. By the way, you can search Meuse department civil birth, marriage and death records online at the following website: archives.meuse.fr (click on 'Etat civil' to search.)

Jean Francois Aubry Civil Birth Record

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On the Practicality of Marriage

9/16/2012

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Earlier this past week, I read an article on NPR.org entitled "Can Marriage Save Single Mothers From Poverty." The big statistic (as gathered from recent census data) is that a "third of families headed by single mothers is in poverty and they are four times more likely than married-couple families to be poor." My initial reaction was "Well...duh." Of course there is a better chance for a family to earn more money and be above the poverty level if there are two able-bodied workers in the home. I read a few more articles from other news outlets and "traditional" family-oriented organizations that discussed the same statistic. Not surprisingly, the more conservative, traditional family organizations hailed the institution of marriage as the obvious answer to solving the woes of families in poverty. And, of course, that got the online comment and debate boards rolling.

In modern society, it's absolutely ridiculous to tell a single mom (or dad) to get married, or stay married in an unhealthy relationship, just to avoid poverty. (This is my opinion, but I think a lot of you would agree with me.) And many of the online comments reflected how extreme this option seems in the 21st century. How could you marry someone without being in love with them? Why would you take vows to stay with a person forever just because it will help you economically? And in today's world, it does sound absurd, BUT until relatively recently this WAS how single-parent families, especially those with young children, DID stay out of poverty.

Let's go back, say, 150 years. You live in a small rural farming community. How did you meet your first husband? At church? Or maybe you attended the local schoolhouse together? Perhaps your fathers farmed land adjacent to one another. Considering how slow and difficult traveling long distances was at that time, most people tended to stay near their towns and most definitely within their home counties for their entire lives.

The image below is a map of land owners in Wabash Twp, Darke County, Ohio in 1875. My husband's great-great-great-grandparents were John Nicolas (J.N.) Grilliot and Mary Anne Aubry. Just by looking at the map, you can see how (and why) the marriage came about. ("S. Aubry" is Mary Anne's brother, Stephen, who inherited the land from their father when he died in 1873. Stephen actually married one of John Nicolas's sisters.)

Portion of 1875 Wabash Twp, Darke Co, Ohio Land Ownership Map.

Marriages initiated by local neighborhood proximity were commonplace and even expected well into the 20th century, and not just in the rural areas. The addresses of my grandparents on their 1939 Cleveland, Ohio marriage license are literally right around the corner from each other. Of course, people still fall in love with and marry people they grew up with, but that phenomena is much less common than it used to be.

Ok, so you are, say, 34 years old, living with your husband on your farm (which you may own outright or on which you may be paying a mortgage) and you have 6-7 kids. What happens to your family should you or your husband suddenly die? In a time when good hygiene and antibiotics didn't exist, disease and infection were all-too-common parts of life. In the mid 19th century, women were 40 times more likely to die from childbirth-related complications than they are today. Work-related accidents, whether on the farm or in a factory, took many parents' lives as well. Life insurance did not exist and many families only scraped by as it was, so there was no savings to draw from. There were no government-sponsored welfare programs; any assistance to families in distress originated from local neighbors and churches.

Widows and widowers with small children usually found it necessary to remarry in order to keep their families intact and to keep food on the table. There were no such things as day care centers to watch the kids while mom or dad worked 12-14 hour days. Occasionally, neighbors or extended family members could help, but nearly everyone had their own families to support and sometimes they could not handle that extra burden. A struggling single parent would often be forced to send several of his/her children, some as young as nine years old, to live and work for other families as farmhands or house servants. Even if they were able to stay at home, other children would be forced to quit school in order to work on the homestead or find a job in the community.

The death of a parent forced my grandfather's family to split up temporarily. My great-grandmother, a Polish immigrant, died suddenly of appendicitis in 1919 at the age of 29, leaving my great-grandfather with four sons between the ages of ten and five. In the 1920 census, my great-grandfather and the two oldest boys are living with a cousin and the third boy is living with another family. I cannot find my grandfather, the youngest, in this census, so I don't know where or with whom he was living. My great-grandfather remarried in 1921, at which point I know the brothers were reunited.

Did all of these widows and widowers marry because they fell in love, or was it more because of the need to take care of their families? Old marriage certificates can't tell us that, so we'll never know for sure. It's unrealistic to expect single parents to do so today, but, if I ever did find out that one (or more) of my ancestors' marriages were for more practical reasons other than for love, I would not judge them or think less of them. They did what they had to do for their families and their livelihoods.

©2014, copyright Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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Coming Over

7/16/2012

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SS Finland, Antwerp-New York, 1902-1927

Like most white Americans, husband and I are descendants of immigrants from European nations. My ancestors were from Poland, Croatia, and Italy, while his were from France and Germany. (Our kids are good ole European mutts, I guess :) Our relatives came over at different times, though, which made their immigrant experiences somewhat different due to improvements in technology and changes in American immigration legislation and processing.

Tony's ancestors came to America in the 19th century, mostly from 1830 to the mid-1850s. Many of them were farmers from small villages in northeastern France (Alsace-Lorraine) and northwestern Germany, but there were a few tradesmen (blacksmiths, coopers, etc.) that made the journey as well. At this time, the Trans-Atlantic journey took an average of about seven weeks, but it could take upwards of 2-3 months depending on weather conditions and steering currents. The following exerpt describes how two of my husband's ancestral families came to the U.S from France:

"The Grill(i)ots (in 1838) and Aubrys (in 1840) traveled to the United States on American sailing ships. Usually these packet ships carried cargo, perhaps bales of cotton, on the voyage from America to France. For the return trip, the empty holds were transformed into a semblance of living quarters for the emigrants. Shelves arranged around the walls, three tiers high, served as berths. Each family was assigned an appropriate space that some managed to curtain off for a bit of privacy. They went up on deck for exercise, fresh air, and to prepare food on cook stoves." Source: http://www.wmcnitt.net/aubry/emigrati.htm

Typical steerage immigrant quarters

Conditions in steerage were usually quite bad. The quarters were cramped and unsanitary. Air circulation was poor and temperatures became dangerously hot during the summer months. People did not bathe and, at this time, were expected to provide their own food, which, even if properly "preserved" did gradually spoil. The stench was probably pretty awful.  Passengers suffered from seasickness and other serious illnesses and injuries, and, unfortunately, there were occasionally deaths during the voyage.

In 1855, Congress enacted a Passenger Act as an attempt to improve conditions for immigrants heading to America.   It included provisions to limit the number of passengers per size of ship, increase the height of living quarters to at least 6 ft (it was usually 5.5 ft or less prior to this), provide adequate food, water, and ventilation, maintain a "quarantine" area for the sick and wash areas for all passengers, and provide some discipline to passengers who broke simple laws (theft was a large problem). There were fines if these provisions were not upheld; however, most historians agree that the law was not regularly enforced and the fines were not large enough to get every ship captain to adhere to the provisions.

It was about this time that the first steamships started making Trans-Atlantic voyages. By the mid-1870s, dozens of steamships were regularly carrying immigrants from Europe to America. While conditions onboard these ships were still cramped and unhygienic (for lower class passengers), the length of the trips was signifcantly less: About 5-7 days from English/Irish ports and no more than 2 weeks from ports in central and southern Europe.

My ancestors came to America between the 1890s and 1921, so they did have much shorter journeys. However, they also had to go through more red tape once they arrived at port, which included more thorough medical inspections, grouping procedures, and obtaining legal paperwork.   Another post for another day, though :) I also intend to write about WHAT may have driven our ancestors to leave their homes and make a long, difficult, and dangerous journey halfway around the world to start new lives.

Finding Ship Manifests

In 1819, the U.S. passed a customs law that required ship captains to list the names of each passenger traveling on his ship. Because of this law (and the good fortune that most of them survived to be preserved and catalogued), we actually have pretty good records of the immigrants on each ship passage. Ancestry.com is the best, most-complete online source of records and images of the original ship lists (known as 'manifests') that you can download. If you choose to get a 14-day free trial, these documents are the first ones I would search for, because, apart from visiting the National Archives in Washington, D.C, they are difficult to obtain elsewhere. Below is a sample manifest from 1853 when Andreas Braunswig, Tony's great-great-great-grandfather, came to America. It lists his name, age, country of birth, place of last
residence, place to which he is going, occupation, and pieces of baggage. Once in America, he used name "Andrew Brunswick." It was fairly common for immigrants to anglicize their name, so keep that in mind when doing your own searching.

Andrew Brunswick "Bessel" Ship Manifest 1853

There is a free site on which you can find some immigrant ship manifests. The Immigrant Ship Transcribers Guild is a network of volunteers who read through and manually transcribe original ship lists, which are then posted on the website. Because it relies on volunteer work, it is by no means a complete record of all ship lists, but I did find some of Tony's ancestors in their database, which is continually growing and being updated.

©2012, copyright Emily Kowalski Schroeder

Ship Manifest Source Citation: National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, DC; Records of the US Customs Service, RG36, Series: M255, Roll: 9
Source Information: Ancestry.com. Baltimore, Passenger Lists, 1820-1948 and 1954-1957 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006.

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Wedding Wednesday: Jean Nicholas Grillot and Marie Anne Aubry

Tombstone Tuesday: Jean François Aubry (Obry)

On the Practicality of Marriage

Coming Over

Finding Ship Manifests

Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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