Hitting the Mother Lode!

Me in my improvised "crash" helmet

Thwack!  Thwack  Thwack!  That’s me running into a brick wall.  Repeatedly.  So much so that I've taken to wearing a "crash" helmet.  (See the photo to right.)  No, not really, but I sometimes wish I could soften the blows.

 
I’m sure we’ve all run into a brick wall if we’ve been working on our family tree for any length of time.  In the beginning, I ran into many brick walls, and it was a long time between attempts to pursue a specific area of investigation.  As time has passed, however, the brick walls became fewer.

When I started my family tree about 30 years ago, there was no Internet so research was very limited.  Then along came the Internet.  At first it was a bit slow, and the data was limited.  Over the years, though, it got faster and the data became more plentiful.

My paternal grandfather and uncle were ventriloquists so that has been a specific line of research for me.  I started to look for any information on either of them about 15 years ago.  I don’t think I found anything on my grandfather initially, but I found quite a bit on my uncle. 

My grandfather was Howard A Olson, aka The Great Chesterfield.  To me he was known simply as Gramps.  He started as a ventriloquist in Vaudeville about 1910.  He also got married about that same time, had a family, and got a real job.  He did, however, pursue his love of ventriloquism over the decades. 

My uncle was Howard M Olson, aka Howie Olson and Chester LeRoy.  Gramps got Howie started in ventriloquism when he was about 7 or 8 years old.  Unlike his father, Howie was able to pursue ventriloquism as a life-long career. 

Armed with just their stage names, I did Internet searches and over the years I found more & more about Gramps & Uncle Howie.  Still, there were more Internet references about my uncle, because he went on to be part of a TV show in Wisconsin. 

As a child I remember outings with my grandfather and my parents.  We went to Show Folks of America parties, ventriloquist conventions, and the Vent Haven Museum (VHM) in Kentucky.  A couple of months ago I decided to write to the VHM to see if they had any information that would confirm my 60 year old memory about the family trip to the museum.  All I remembered was a garage filled with about 300 “dummies” which are nowadays called vent figures.

Museum sign as of 2016

I heard back from Lisa, the curator of the VHM, just a few days after I sent my initial email. (Yes, there was, finally, a website for the museum which made it possible to submit an online request.)  Lisa graciously replied and she included an attachment.  It was a scan of a letter that Gramps wrote to William Shakespeare Berger, the founder of the VHM, aka known as WS.  The letter outlined our planned trip to the VHM. Wow!  I hadn't expected that.

The letter about my family's trip to the VHM

Wait.  There’s more.  Lisa told me she had a file of correspondence for my grandfather beginning about 1910 and ending about 1970.  What?!?  Yeah, that’s right.  She had decades of correspondence in the file.  She also had a file on my uncle. Yippee!  I had struck the Mother Lode!

WS collected vent figures and anything to do with ventriloquism.  Over the years he corresponded with people from all over the world.  He exchanged letters with my grandfather and they visited each other in their respective homes.  Fortunately, WS created files and saved everything.  Additionally, he made arrangements for everything to be saved after his passing.  If not for that, the correspondence between WS and my family would most likely have been lost years ago. 

I expected maybe one email with a brief reply when I sent that first email to the VHM.  Instead I got a few dozen emails and about 250-300 scanned pages of correspondence. Again, I struck the Mother Lode! I was able to glean many new details to add to my family tree.  How often does anyone get that lucky?  It makes up for all those thwacks. 

If you have an ancestor who had a special interest, see if there is an organization that may have kept records of membership, correspondence, newsletters, or anything else that could be related to that interest.  I’m afraid many organizations are now defunct, and there won’t be any records left behind.  It doesn’t hurt to look into it anyway.

If you’re lucky, you may reach someone who knows something, and they’ll be able to send you some information.  The chances of hitting the Mother Lode are slim but you may find a few nuggets.

PS - I wrote this in April 2015, just 2 months after sending that first email to VHM.  I just discovered it in my computer files while doing some cleanup.  I’m not sure what I intended to do with it.  Perhaps I was just waiting to start a Genealogy Blog!

Buna, my Romanian grandmother

Buna (left) and her sister Vetica, aka Betty.

My maternal grandmother, was born in Chicago to Romanian parents, Vincent and Fema Muntean. She was known to me as Buna, and known to most as Helen although her Romanian name was Elena.  She was born in 1906.

I have early memories from the 1950s of Buna in her small kitchen.  She made wonderful baked goods.  I often watched her roll out dough on the Formica-topped table with the chrome-like trim.  I’ve always liked that her pastries weren’t overly sweet.  I still like my desserts that way.  

She and my grandfather lived on the second floor of a small flat in Chicago.  My grandfather’s Romanian name was Dimitrie but he had it changed to Michael when he was naturalized in November of 1937.  The flat was near Wrigley Field.  I remember going to Wrigley Field with Buna and my mom on Ladies Day.  I was too young to know anything about baseball at that time, but I am still a Cubs fan.  Buna was a Cubs fan until she passed away at the age of 103-1/2.

Buna in her Cubs cap at her 102nd birthday.

I didn’t see much of Buna for years because my mother left when I was 8 years old.  We didn’t hang out with that side of the family any longer.  In later years, however, I made a point to visit Buna.  I think I started mostly after I had my daughter in 1968.  About 1990 I started to make more regular visits to Buna, and I asked her about the family.  I made notes and even made some audio tapes of her answers and some Romanian words. 

Buna had quite a few photos.  Some were in albums and many were loose.  Fortunately, she had written on the backs of almost all the photos.  During a couple of visits in the mid-1990s, I took the photos to a copy shop and made photo copies of the front and back.  Then, I asked Buna about the people in the photos and made notes on the copies.  I embellished on any notes from the back of the photos.  Those copies have been a great help.  In addition to the photos, Buna had saved all of the memorial cards from the funerals she had been to over the years.  They, too, have been a great source of information.

This is just a brief introduction to Buna.  I’ll tell more about her in later posts.  I mostly wanted to mention the great information I got during my “interviews” with her during my visits.  See a later post for the results of some sleuthing I did based on notes from one of those interviews.

AdVENTures in Blogging

       
 Is anyone wondering why the letters V-E-N-T are uppercase in the middle of a word?  (See the word AdVENTures.)  Well, in case you're wondering, VENT refers to ventriloquism. Since ventriloquism has been an important part of my life, I chose to emphasize the letters VENT.  My paternal grandfather, Howard A Olson, was a ventriloquist in Vaudeville.  His stage name was The Great Chesterfield. To me he was known as Gramps.  I was exposed to the world of ventriloquism quite a bit in my early years because my parents and I lived with Gramps when I was a child.  Gramps raised me after my mom left and my dad got sick.  He was a good soul, and I'm fortunate he was a big part of my early years.

Gramps introduced my Uncle Howie to ventriloquism as well.  Early on Howie’s stage name was Chester LeRoy.  Later he was better known as Howie Olson.  His figure, Cowboy Eddie, was well known to some because Howie and Eddie spent a number of years on TV in Madison Wisconsin.  Uncle Howie spent his entire adult life as a ventriloquist and figure maker.  Gramps, however, had to get a real job to support his family.  

In recent years I searched for information about Gramps and Uncle Howie.  At first there was very little information about either of them.  I stuck with it though, and I eventually began to find sites dedicated to ventriloquism.  In fact, earlier this month, I went to the Ventriloquist ConVENTion in Hebron Kentucky.  That trip deserves its own post so I’ll end this post here.  

Overcoming Barriers

 
(Break on through to the other side...)

This is my second attempt at a blog over the years.  My other blog, Kayo’s Misc & Etc, had no focus and I haven’t posted to it for quite some time.  This blog is for posts about my family history and related research.  (I may include some of these posts to my other blog that still exists.)  This blog is just getting off the ground.  I hope to include some of the successes I’ve had in finding information in recent years.  I will also include some failures and hope that others can offer some tips for further research.

I’m still learning how to set up my blog.  I hope to make it visually more interesting over time.  I also hope that my writing gets easier over time as well.  Just as most of us run into brick walls during our research, I run into a brick wall when it comes to writing.  I’ve always been good at math and science.  For some reason I thought that meant I couldn’t write.  Any brick wall takes action to break through.  With that in mind, I’ll write, and continue to write, until it gets easier.  Additionally, I’ll continue to hack away at the brick walls to find the family history gems I know are waiting for me out there.