Genealogical Musings

By Dennis Ford

For a quarter century, I’ve pursued genealogical minutiae—the particulars of family compositions in the townlands of Eastern County Mayo and nineteenth century records of the Juchnewicz families of Girdziunai village in Lithuania. But genealogy is more than the obsessive collection of baptisms, marriages, and deaths. The study of family history is also the study of history.

Musings traverses the sometimes grim, sometimes odd, events that occurred at the fact-jammed intersection of family history and history—a Revolutionary War massacre, the Black Tom munitions explosion in 1916, the embarkation of troops from Hoboken in World War I, the Women’s Army Corps in World War II, the lives of longshoremen in the New York harbor, and the lives of slaves on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. In our time—and a step ahead of a category 4 hurricane—Musings explores the history and culture of Jacksonville and Saint Augustine.

We meet memorable characters on these journeys through time—miserly German spymasters, a psychologically astute general, a luckless Polish legionnaire, groundbreaking female soldiers, two runaway slaves in a Virginia jail, and the Cazique of Poyais, sovereign of an imaginary country. And we meet two timeless characters—the banshee and Count Dracula.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532060236

Dennis Ford

Dennis Ford is the author of nineteen books, including the recent novels Tracks That Lead To Joy and World Without End. He lives on the Jersey Shore, where he walks the beaches and thinks about ghosts.

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Copyright © 2018 Dennis Ford.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-6022-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6024-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6023-6 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 10/12/2018

The cover photograph is of Chesapeake Bay

taken from the beach at Cape Charles, Virginia.

for my family, immediate and extended

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1     Jersey City, My Hometown ~ Explosions at Black Tom

Chapter 2     Hoboken, My Hometown ~ Embarkation to the

War in Europe

Chapter 3     Little Egg Harbor, My Hometown ~ Massacre of

the Pulaski Legion

Chapter 4     The Women’s Army Corps in World War Two

Chapter 5     The Hard Lives of Longshoremen in the New York

Harbor

Chapter 6     Florida Jaunt, May 2015 ~ Graduation from Stetson

Chapter 7     Florida Jaunt, November 2015 ~ Island Hopping

Chapter 8     Florida Jaunt, October 2016 ~ A Step Ahead of the

Storm

Chapter 9     Jaunts to the Eastern Shore of Virginia

Chapter 10   Juchnewicz Families of Girdziunai, Lithuania ~

19th Century Records

Chapter 11   Family Structure in Annagh & Bekan Parishes in

the 1901 Census

Chapter 12   Disappearing Bekan Parish

Chapter 13   Whatever Happened to the Banshee?

Chapter 14   Dracula ~ Dennis Ford’s Journal

PREFACE

This is a book mostly about people and places that no longer are. And this is a book mostly about events that happened in the long ago.

For a quarter century I’ve collected genealogical minutiae in Ireland, Lithuania and America. I’ve gathered a trove of family records that fills volumes. I’ve also gathered a trove of background information on the social and political events our ancestors experienced—although we may not realize it, we’re enmeshed in the events of our time in the same way the people of the past were enmeshed in the events of their time. Genealogy is more than the fanatical collection of baptisms, marriages and deaths. The study of family history is also the study of history.

Genealogical Musings offers a medley of what we find at the fact-jammed intersection of the story of our family and the sometimes grim, sometimes odd, story of history.

Musings opens with a selection of defining events that occurred in the places I’ve called home—the 1916 Black Tom munitions explosions in Jersey City, the embarkation of doughboys from the port of Hoboken in World War One, and the massacre of Casimir Pulaski’s legionnaires in Little Egg Harbor in the Revolutionary War.

Musings next explores the creation and service of the Women’s Army Corps in World War Two—my mother was a member of the corps at the end of the war. Musings then describes the extraordinarily harsh lives of longshoremen in the New York Harbor—my paternal grandfather worked in the holds of steamships for nearly 50 years.

The next four chapters are in the spirit of my 2008 book Genealogical Jaunts. The first three chapters explore the history and culture of the Jacksonville – St. Augustine coast of Northeast Florida. The third jaunt was made a step ahead of a massive hurricane. The fourth chapter explores the culture and history of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. We encounter some memorable characters on these jaunts—notably, Napoleon’s brother who came face to face with the Jersey Devil and a world-class confidence man who successfully passed himself off as the sovereign of an imaginary nation. And, sadly, we encounter two African-American slaves awaiting their fates in a Virginia jail.

After these wide-ranging excursions, Musings delves into the minutiae of genealogical studies in the next three chapters. The first chapter is a collection of early nineteenth century church records of the Juchnewicz families in the Lithuanian village of Girdziunai—one of my maternal lines lies among these families. The second chapter describes the kinds of household situations found in Annagh and Bekan Parishes in Eastern County Mayo in 1901—two of my paternal lines emerged from these places. The third chapter investigates the disappearance of people in Bekan Parish using the Irish censuses of 1841, 1851 and 1901.

For the majority of the book Musings travels through historical time. In closing it wanders into the timeless realms of fiction and the supernatural. In the final chapters we ask whatever happened to the banshee, a chthonic figure who appears to no longer haunt the Irish countryside, and in the spirit of Bram Stoker’s novel we review Dracula under the most baffling and mysterious circumstances.

CHAPTER ONE

Jersey City, My Hometown ~ Explosions at Black Tom

This is one of those places you wouldn’t believe how it looked before.

In our time the southern tip of Liberty State Park is a tranquil family-friendly place. Benches stand in the shadows of trees. Charcoal grills are available for picnics. A food stand at the visitor’s center serves soda and snacks. A grassy lawn extends far into the Hudson River. Visitors sunbathe on blankets. Other visitors toss Frisbees and play catch with rubber balls. Assisted by gravity, toddlers practice maneuvering on two legs. Couples and want-to-be couples make small talk. Radios play in several languages. Flags of many nations lazily wave in the sea breeze. The views of New York Harbor, of Ellis Island and of the Statue of Liberty, are unsurpassed.

I spent many happy afternoons there with my Mom and Dad. They rested on the benches at the entrance of the park. I hiked the half mile to the former terminal of the Central Railroad of New Jersey at the northern tip of the park. The terminal is a kind of museum now, but in its heyday it served as the origin of countless treks westward. It was the station where immigrants boarded trains for their trips inland. Thousands of people a day left the terminal to start their lives in Middle America. I made the hikes on a breakwater that paralleled the river. The breakwater was always crowded with fishermen and with photographers. The former tried to catch dinner. The latter tried to catch the best views of the spectacular Manhattan skyline.

The site looked very different a century previously. Locally, the area was called Black Tom. Originally, Black Tom was a small island located in the Hudson approximately where the visitor’s center now stands. By 1916 the island had been connected to the mainland by landfill. The site included a number of warehouses and a vast reticulation of train tracks. The warehouses belonged to the National Docks and Storage Co. The tracks belonged to the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

In 1916 the War to End Wars relentlessly continued in blood-soaked savagery in Europe. America had remained neutral—technically neutral, although the Wilson Administration provided massive amounts of munitions to Britain and her allies. If America was the self-proclaimed arsenal of democracy, Black Tom was the depot. It was the main loading site for war materials sailing to Europe. In July 1916 there were as much as two million pounds of artillery and small arms ammunition in the vicinity. Estimates placed more than 600,000 pounds of TNT and 59,000 pounds of black powder in the freight cars in the Lehigh Valley terminal. An additional 2.7 million pounds of TNT laid in the holds of barges owned by the Johnson Lighterage and Towing Co. There were other goods in the vicinity of Black Tom beside explosives—40,000 pounds of sugar sat in tankers waiting to be loaded on ships.

In the early morning of Sunday, July 30, 1916, all of this disappeared.

At about 12:40 AM workers noticed fires in the rail yard. The Jersey City Fire Dept. was called. Workers hurried to pull trains out of the yard. Crews hurried to release the barges into the river. Their efforts were to no avail. At 2:08 AM cars on track 16 detonated, causing a gargantuan explosion. At 2:38 AM Johnson barge #17 detonated, causing a second massive explosion. Secondary explosions followed for hours. Fires burned for days.

Estimated at 5.5 on the Richter Scale, the initial explosion may have been the loudest sound that ever occurred in New Jersey. The blast was heard as far away as Philadelphia and Delaware.

The explosions produced immense roundhouses of power propelled in every direction for miles. The shock waves were atmospheric tsunamis that carried the strength of airborne locomotives catapulting at maximum velocity. Most famously, the shock waves punched out windows for miles. Shattered glass and empty window frames are what people remembered about the explosions at Black Tom.

Any window facing the river was at risk of shattering—this is shattering in the strictest definition of the word, as in breaking into innumerable needle-sized shards. Shatterproof glass, now standard in windshields and public buildings, was serendipitously discovered in 1903, but was not used in cities until after the World War.

Windows in nearby factories shattered. Windows in tenements and in stores throughout Lower Jersey City shattered. (This is the section of Jersey City that runs along the Hudson.) Windows on Ellis Island shattered—500 immigrants and sick people had to be evacuated by boat. Miles away, windows in the tenements and stores in the Jersey City Heights shattered. (This is the inland section of Jersey City atop the Palisades cliffs.) A man was seriously cut in Christ Hospital in the Heights when the blast blew out the window where he stood. Windows shattered in the tenements and stores in nearby Bayonne and Hoboken. The Hudson Dispatch reported that the shopping district on Washington St. in Hoboken was a sea of broken glass. A boy at Fifth St. in Hoboken was seriously cut by flying glass. Windows across Manhattan Island and in Brooklyn Heights shattered. Windows in the New York City Public Library at 42nd St. and Fifth Ave. shattered.

The wicked winds were no respecter of religion. Stained glass windows throughout churches in Hudson County shattered. St. Patrick’s Church, the house of worship nearest to Black Tom, suffered $20,000 worth of damage. Stained glass in churches as far away as St. Joseph’s in Hoboken and St. Paul of the Cross in the Jersey City Heights blew out.

The shock waves blew windows out of their frames. They also blew people off their feet. Two policemen were rendered temporarily unconscious when they were knocked to the pavement. A man walking near Dickinson High School in the Heights was smacked to the sidewalk and seriously injured. People in Midtown Manhattan were knocked off their feet. People were shoved out of their beds. Pleasant dreams concluded on scatter rugs. On Central Ave. in the Heights an infant died when the blast flung him out of his crib.

The shock waves opened unlocked doors. Probably, the shock waves opened locked doors. Phones started ringing. Other phones went dead. The blast triggered burglar alarms and car horns in two states. Statues in parks toppled. Headstones in cemeteries collapsed. Garbage cans bounced like bowling balls. Unsecured objects on the sidewalks skipped to new locations.

Segments of the roof of the Montgomery St. post office collapsed—if the blast occurred during the workday, there would have been fatalities. Shrapnel scarred the walls of Jersey City Hall. Four miles distant, the clock at the Jersey Journal building at Journal Square in the Heights stopped at 2:12 AM when it was struck by shrapnel. The Brooklyn Bridge swayed. The Statue of Liberty was scarred and damaged. It’s on account of the explosions at Black Tom that the raised arm and torch of the Statue is inaccessible to visitors. We’re lucky Lady Liberty didn’t become an amputee.

Not knowing what was happening, people stepped into the chaos. The Jersey Journal noted on July 31, From every section of the city scenes of the panic were reported. Women and children who had been thrown out of their beds by the force of the concussion ran into the street in their night clothes crying piteously. Men cowed by the terrific explosions and not knowing the real cause of their rude awakening became panicky also. As the night sky turned red many people dropped to their knees in fear that Armageddon had arrived.

My grandparents and the people of their generation would have rushed into the street. Pawel Bielawski, my maternal grandfather, told my mother that one night all the windows in their apartment blew out—he didn’t call it such, but it was the Black Tom explosions that caused the damage. They lived at the time at 143 Pavonia St. Cocci Blanche was two years old and Zofia, my grandmother, was six months pregnant with Cocci Anne.

Pat and Catherine Ford, my paternal grandparents, said nothing that is recalled about the explosions, but it’s possible the glass in their apartment in Hoboken shattered. We can’t say with certainty where they resided—it may have been at 9th & Park Ave. It’s likely that they would have joined the dazed crowds on the sidewalk. My Uncle Dennis was two years old. My Uncle Thomas was three months old.

The sounds and sights would have been startling—these were religious people who never expected Jesus to arrive in such a tumultuous manner—and the street would have been a dangerous place. There were a number of subsidiary explosions and the air was thick with flying glass, bricks, bullets, shrapnel and burning cinders. The fields across the Emmitsburg Road the third day’s battle at Gettysburg couldn’t be deadlier. The Federal artillery packed canister with nails and metal debris aimed at the Rebel regiments. Photographs of the carnage show body parts strewn on the grass. Similar deadly material flew along the streets of Jersey City. Firemen had to lay on the sidewalk in the attempt to hose down the fires. Anyone standing risked perforation by the fusillade. People didn’t realize that when they left their apartments they put their lives at risk congregating on the sidewalks.

The sun rises early in the middle of summer. It revealed an amazing scene when dawn broke on Jersey City. The sidewalks twinkled with glass. Debris covered the streets. Soot covered cars. Crumbled sashes carpeted stoops. Objects were not where they were left the night before. Houses stood with gaping holes in the windows and door frames. The morning air smelled of burning metal—it was the noisome smell of a battlefield. Depending on the direction of the wind, pebbly smoke drifted over neighborhoods.

The Jersey Journal reported in a special edition published the morning of the blast that 50 people were killed and scores wounded. (An odd report was that 100 Negro laborers were missing.) Fortunately, the count was far lower. About 120 people suffered concussions and lacerations from flying glass and debris. The official death toll is seven—this is an estimate, since there were transients who lived near Black Tom whose bodies may never have been recovered. Three bodies, their names unknown, washed ashore in the days following the blast. The captain of Johnson barge #17 was killed. Jersey City police officer James Doherty was killed when he was stoned to death by a wall of flying bricks. Ten-week old Arthur Tossen (or Tarson) died of wounds when the blast tore him out of his crib. Cornelius Leydon, chief of the Lehigh Valley Railroad police, was killed in the blast. A witness reported that Leydon was blown to atoms, but that can’t be true. Leydon’s mangled body was recovered days later.

Property damage was enormous. The Jersey Journal reported that 1,000 homes suffered damage. The New York Times estimated glass damage alone as high as $350,000 in New Jersey and New York. Total property damage was estimated at 20 million dollars—this is several hundred million in the currency of our time. Some of the damage was covered by insurance. Some of the damage was covered by landlords and by the residents of the tenements. Like our grandparents, many of these people were immigrants and poor, living paycheck to paycheck. They hadn’t disposable means to replace vacant window frames or doors unexpectedly blown off hinges.

The site of Black Tom was devastated. Four barges, six piers, 13 warehouses, and 85 railcars were destroyed. Photographs show a hellish scene. Tankers were converted to flatbeds. Railcars were stripped to the wheels. A ten-foot deep crater longer than a football field was at the heart of Black Tom. The crater was an oily moat filled with burning flotsam. Literally, Black Tom had become Blackened Tom.

In the days following the blast city officials and citizens attempted to make sense of what had occurred. Very prematurely and very mistakenly, the Jersey Journal concluded on July 31 that there was no sign of outside interference in the origin of the explosions. Public safety director Frank Hague—he was not yet The Law, but still very much in charge—had executives of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, National Docks and Storage Co. and Johnson Lighterage arrested on charges of manslaughter based on criminal negligence causing the deaths of Cornelius Leydon and Officer Doherty. (The executives were never brought to trial.) In fact, there were major safety violations at Black Tom. The amount of explosives stored in the rail yard and the mooring of barges loaded with explosives far exceeded safety standards. There were insufficient fire hydrants in the vicinity. There was minimal security at the site. There were no locked gates and no guards at the water’s edge. A handful of underpaid watchmen patrolled the site. One of the rumors about the origin of the explosions was that watchmen lit fires to keep mosquitoes away.

Hague and city officials attempted to have the transport of explosives through Jersey City banned. Railcars stuffed with explosives regularly rumbled through the densely populated city—a hundred had arrived in the week before the explosion. The Interstate Commerce Commission overruled the ban. The Hudson Dispatch reported on August 5 that The commission has no power to prohibit the railroad from using their public delivery tracks.

The newspapers were thick with conjectures about the origin of the explosions. It took a while for the truth to emerge into the scorched sunlight—sabotage by German agents and their American collaborators had rocked Black Tom.

The United States was neutral in the first three years of the War in Europe. President Woodrow Wilson claimed, We will not ask our young men to spend the best years of their lives making soldiers of themselves. This was not political posturing. Wilson saw himself as a peacemaker and broker who could bring the warring sides together. He was committed to a League of Nations that would prevent future calamities. And he may have honestly wanted to keep Americans out of a pointless bath of blood.

Despite this nominal neutrality, the United States was aligned with Great Britain. Popular opinion in America saw Germany as the originator and aggressor in the war. The United States supplied the Allies with vast amounts of war materials and other products. Not incidentally, exporting these materials was hugely lucrative to American firms. Even if it was politically desirable, supplying Germany with equal amounts of goods would have been impossible. German U-boats ruled the depths, but Britannia ruled the waves—the surface of the ocean. As a sign of Britain’s naval strength, German steamships were interred in Allied ports, eleven in the New York harbor.

This preference for England was a dicey thing. Ten percent of the American population was first or second generation German. The percentage of Germans in the port city of Hoboken was especially high. I recall old-timers in Hoboken reminiscing about the German "bund (league)" that held rallies and ceremonies in celebration of their heritage. This practice continued until the advent of the Second World War. There were, in addition, vast numbers of Irish and Irish-Americans who worked on the docks. These laborers were not friendly toward England.

Ultimately, Wilson could not keep America out of the conflict. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, he said to Congress on 2 April 1917, but the world must be made safe for democracy. Battalions of uniformed American souls soon joined the procession into Hades.

There were a number of factors that contributed to Wilson’s decision. The U-boat war on the open seas was relentless. Supported by their commanders in Berlin, U-boat captains did not distinguish among ships. Anything on the water was fair game for torpedo attack. The most notorious attack and the one that remains in collective memory was the 7 May 1915 sinking of the liner Lusitania. More than 1,000 passengers, including 128 Americans, drowned. Acts of German sabotage on American ships and in American manufacturing plants could no longer be overlooked. And the notorious January 1917 Zimmerman letter became public. The letter instructed the German ambassador to negotiate an alliance with Mexico to mount an attack on the southern border of the United States.

Publicly, Germany responded to the American alliance with Britain by trying to sway popular opinion. Privately and very aggressively, Germany responded by engaging in acts of sabotage. Clandestine operations were run on the East Coast out of New York and Baltimore. The New York operation was conducted from a safe house and bordello at 123 W. 15th St. maintained by a former opera singer named Martha Held.