Money Laundering in the Kitchen

Tracy Lowe was surprised to learn that her great-grandfather Alexander Menday was convicted of manslaughter, but not surprised that he had run-ins with the law.

She was ... familiar with the tale of how her grandmother had come home one day to find her kitchen decked out with improvised washing lines from which were hanging numerous soggy banknotes.

Menday, a Thames waterman at the time, had the job of recovering bodies from the river, and he and his son had relieved an unfortunate of the contents of his pockets before the authorities arrived - on the basis he didn't have any more use for them.

"We knew they were rogues, the sort of people you would cross the street to avoid," says Tracy. [Link]

They Abhorred Hoarding

Model Jodie Kidd's great-grandfather was a shipping tycoon and a baronet. He was also a convicted food hoarder.

In the final year of the Great War the Government introduced strict food rationing. Food cards were issued to everyone, including the King and the hoarding of food had become a serious offence carrying heavy penalties.

The Tyne and Wear Archives holds Gosforth Urban District Council records and specifically those of the Gosforth Local Food Control Committee 1917-1919, including the Profiteering Committee minutes, which details the conviction of one Rowland Frederick William Hodge for food hoarding in 1918.

Chief archivist Liz Rees explains: “We weren’t aware of the scandal. We knew his name and we knew that the shipyard had closed but we didn’t know the story behind it.” [Link]

A Clever Way to Avoid ATM Fees

Mike Harden's uncle found a way to make ends meet during the Great Depression.

Growing up, I knew only that my namesake Uncle Mike did "something in banks."

At 32, I learned that the "something" involved relieving them of their cash assets. He robbed banks from Hunterstown, Ind., to Washington, Pa. The job in Washington cost him a brother when police interrupted their 1930 escapade. Ed went down as the two tried to shoot their way out of town. Mike lived to rob again and to show up occasionally during the Depression to buy clothes and shoes for my mother and her 12 siblings. [Link]

Miriam Makes News

Congrats to Miriam for spilling the beans to a Spokesman-Review reporter. The article even includes a family recipe for soup.

Her most infamous ancestor was old Uzza, who was hanged in 1850 for murdering his second wife by putting arsenic in her soup, and it was later discovered that he had also struck a death blow to his own son.

I'm envious. I wish more of my ancestors had shown that kind of initiative.

Belle Letters May Identify Corpse

Belle Gunness was a serial murderess responsible for at least ten, and perhaps as many as forty or fifty deaths. She made a practice of enticing bachelors to her Indiana farm with advertisements in matrimonial columns, and then offing them.

Now Andrea Simmons wants to find out whether Belle is the same woman whose burned, headless body was found in the cellar of her farmhouse following a 1908 fire, or whether she escaped, as many suspect.

Simmons got permission from 63-year-old Suzanne McKay, a great-granddaughter of Nellie Larson, Belle’s older sister who lived in Chicago, to exhume the body. Because of the number of generations that have elapsed and the fact that McKay and her sister are descended from Larson’s son, Simmons said the forensic anthropology team decided not to use their DNA. The best DNA comparisons come from an unbroken line of female ancestors.

However, Belle’s letters to Andrew Helgelien, which once helped entrap him, could now help determine whether his killer got away with the farmhouse deaths, too. Some of the envelopes that Belle sent to Helgelien and his brother will be used to provide hoped-for DNA from dried saliva under the stamps and places where the envelopes are sealed. [Link]

For those who like this sort of thing, gruesome crime-scene photos may be found here.

The Good Brother

Albert Goering despised everything his brother stood for, but was able to put the family name to good use by simply writing it on official documents.

In this way he saved countless Jews from certain death in his role as a deliberately inept director at the Skoda armaments factory. The Gestapo were on to him, but he managed to slip through their clutches.

The tragedy of Albert Goering was that the surname that allowed him to make a stand during the Third Reich’s rise was the surname that condemned him following the Reich’s collapse. After he surrendered to the Americans, the interrogators refused to believe his protestations. He faced years in prison until his claims were finally verified. Following his release, his marriage collapsed and he eked out a miserable living as a translator. Nobody wanted to honour his name. He died, in obscurity, in 1966. [Link]

The Black Sheep's Brothers

Katrin Himmler's great-uncle was an infamous war criminal, and her in-laws were among his victims. But that didn't stop her from delving into her family's history and relating the uncomfortable truths in a new book, The Himmler Brothers.

As family history always had it - along with history in general - it was only Heinrich who was ever a committed Nazi member. He was portrayed as a black sheep; a kind of monstrous aberration, while both his parents, Gebhard and Anna, and his two brothers, Gebhard and Ernst, were seen as average sorts of Germans. Yet Katrin's father - Ernst's son - began to question this portrayal and so, in 1997, he asked his daughter for a favour: would she go through the federal archives to discover more on Ernst? Katrin didn't turn him down, despite her delicate position as the wife of an Israeli Jew. [Link]

President Criticized for Commuting Sentence

A Genealogue News Flash [What's That?]

Upon learning Wednesday that he is distantly related to Benedict Arnold, President George W. Bush immediately commuted the sentence of the Revolutionary War traitor.

Among the president's ancestors are William and Christian (Peake) Arnold of Rhode Island—the great-great-great-grandparents of General Arnold. This makes the men fourth cousins, eight times removed.

"I have given this matter a great deal of thought in the past ten minutes," said the president, "and I have decided that eternal damnation is too harsh a penalty for a man who devoted his life to public service right up until the time he stabbed his countrymen in the back."

A little-known provision of the Patriot Act gives the president the authority to overrule the judgments of God, though not of Dick Cheney. Arnold—who was condemned to Hell soon after his death in 1801—was being processed for release, and could not be reached for comment.

Democrats expressed outrage that a man who so famously betrayed the American cause would be granted a commutation, and accused the president of giving preferential treatment to a relative.

"I have to do what I think is right," countered President Bush, "even if it means letting one of my cousins off the hook. It may not be politically popular, but then neither am I."

In Pursuit of Pariahs

The Globe and Mail has an interesting piece on disreputable ancestors and the descendants who love them (including fellow bloggers Megan Smolenyak and Leland Meitzler).

[T]he pariah status of the black sheep is undergoing an image makeover. Last month, when an Alberta film crew announced plans to determine the identity of the notorious Mad Trapper of Rat River, a half-dozen families came forward claiming the legendary cop killer as kin after 75 years of silence. [Link]

He Won't Be a Bad Guy Until 2034

Jeff Scalf's grandmother was the half-sister of John Dillinger, which gives him the right to require anyone who uses the Dillinger name to pay up and portray the murderous gangster law-abiding citizen in a positive light.

"They all have to sign a clause stating that they won't present him as a murderer, cop killer or vicious or mean-spirited," he says. "It's fair to say that he was accused of one killing but was never convicted."

Under a 1994 Indiana law, Scalf and other family members control rights to Dillinger's name and portrayal for 100 years after his death, says Jonathan Polak, an Indianapolis lawyer representing Scalf. Just because Dillinger — and Marilyn Monroe and Rosa Parks, whom he also has represented — are dead, Polak says, "doesn't mean they are suddenly thrown into the public domain. … You're stealing a piece of property." [Link]

Horse Thief Almost Lost in Translation

The recently departed Alice Claire Lehmann Nelson was a devoted genealogist who took classes in German and French so she could translate historical documents.

Still, when she came across a copy of a newspaper article on her great-great-great grandfather, there was a glitch in the translation.

"She thought there was a distant relative who was killed by being run over by a horse," Don Nelson said. "Then she realized he was really a horse thief. He escaped from jail several times.

"Once she got the correct translation of it, it took her two years to tell my grandmother there was a horse thief in the family." [Link]

Descendants Are Always the Last to Know

Chris at The G Files has learned that his 3rd-great-grandfather played a key role in one of the darkest chapters of American history.

After realizing that the evidence against Ira was irrefutable, I then asked my mother, who knows all the family stories, if she knew. She hadn’t. In fact, I’ve talked to several other family members and no one has heard of Ira’s crime. It would appear that the authors and researchers of all the books and histories have effectively kept this a secret for 150 years, until now.

The Truth Is Sometimes Ugly

A writer for Iceland Review Online found that she descends from a Viking named Bjálfi—which means "idiot" in modern Icelandic—through his colorful grandson Egill Skallagrímsson.

Most of the Vikings of the sagas were heroes - beautiful, generous, well-built men, who always did the right thing but got caught up in the web of fate and died in a tragic way.

My ancestor, Egill, was not like this. In Egils Saga, Egill is described as remarkably ugly and dangerously violent. At the age of seven he killed his playmate in a hockey game. Unlike most other Vikings in the sagas, Egill had trouble finding a girl to marry because of his looks. On top of it all, Egill had a big problem with alcohol. (Ironically, the biggest brewery in Iceland is named after him). [Link]

Wife Swap

Australian genealogist Kate Wingrove has organized a reunion of the descendants of George Cribb: "convict, bigamist and general scoundrel."

Within six months of arriving in the colony as a convict in 1808 Cribb was advertising "fine fresh pork" to his neighbours in The Rocks. He was also living with another convict, Fanny Barnett, whom he married in 1811 - conveniently forgetting that he was already married to a woman in England called Mary.

Cribb was caught out when Mary wrote to say she was arriving in Sydney in June 1815. The butcher - by now prosperous - paid Fanny 300 pounds to leave for England on the same ship that deposited Mary. [Link]

Arsenic and Old Face

Robert Muscutt's great-great-grandmother Mary Ball was the last woman executed in Coventry. Whenever he wants to see her face, he has only to visit the Little Park Street Police Station's "Black Museum."

As he signed copies of his book, A Life for a Life: The Real Story of Mary Ball, in the Coventry police museum, he looked up at the death mask of his relative and said: "My feeling is that she should be more pitied that pilloried.

Mary's only crime was to buy a "penny-worth" of arsenic three months before her husband's death to "kill bugs."

Instead, she put the poison on a shelf at her home in Back Lane, Nuneaton.

When Thomas returned from a fishing trip complaining of feeling ill, Mary casually suggested he took the "salts" on the shelf as they would do him good. [Link]

A Clever Way to Make Money

Peter Kershaw is making a film about the Cragg Vale Coiners of West Yorkshire, and is hoping that some of their descendants will come forward to help.

Mr Kershaw said: "We want people who descend from the coiners or who have just grown up with the story."

The Coiners were a band of counterfeiters based in Cragg Vale.

In the late 18th century they clipped the edges of gold coins and milled them again, melting them down to produce fakes to supplement their small weaving incomes. [Link]

Fergie's Wild and Woolly Past

Yet another celebrity has offered sketchy details about her ancestry. This time it's a member of The Black Eyed Peas who once was the voice of Charlie Brown's sister.

Fergie, whose real name is Stacy Ferguson, discovered her relatives were sheep rustlers before they settled in the US.

She revealed: "I found out my ancestors are from Ireland. We stole sheep." [Link]

On the bright side, there are worse things her ancestors could have done with sheep.

[Photo source: Schaf by Patrick Gruban (license)]

Ready! Aim! Fine, I'll Tell Her Daughter

Konstantin Pogorely is a genealogist and proprietor of Genealogia.ru. (If text on the site looks like gibberish, it's probably because you don't read Russian—try here.) Over the years, he's learned that discretion is the better part of genealogical valor. Ancestors believed by clients to have been Stalin-era political prisoners have proved to be petty criminals. And at least one war hero proved even worse.

Pogorely said he always tried to prepare clients for the unexpected. In one case, he decided not to tell an elderly woman that her father had earned his medals in World War I not on the battlefield, but as the commander of a firing squad. Pogorely shared his findings with the woman's daughter, who thanked him for his discretion. [Link]

Instant KKKarma Gets Texas Reporter

Amarillo Globe-News reporter Joe Chapman requested some KKK membership documents from 1923-25, hoping to "out" some local families. Halfway down the first page, he found the name of his own great-grandfather—the man he'd been named for.

After telling a few co-workers of my surreal discovery, I got back to work and finished up the afternoon's task. The next day, I went to my parents' house and told my mom, Karen Chapman, what I had learned.

Her response was a casual, "Really?" She said, no, she hadn't ever known Grandpa Joe to have been in the Klan. With a bit of humor, she admitted if she had ever guessed, she would have thought her other granddad, who was more bigoted, might have been. [Link (reg. req.)]

So, What Did Your Grandfathers Do During the War?

DNA tests are underway to prove whether a 50-year-old electrician from Granada, Spain, descends from two notable Nazis.

In an interview in El Mundo, the man, referred to only as Guillermo, claims to remember hearing cryptic family conversations in German as a child. A photograph of the Granada man shows a striking resemblance to a juxtaposed image of Himmler, whom he believes is his maternal grandfather. Guillermo also claims his father is the son of Hitler, born in 1931 of a relationship between the Führer and his supposed Austrian lover, Geli Raubal. [Link]

As further proof, Guillermo submits that, ever since he was a young boy, he has had the overwhelming urge to invade Poland.