Today I was reading Kimberly Powell’s column at About.com about the occupations of ancestors. As she says, I have lots and lots of farmers. One of my most oft-spoken phrases is “Give me one of those Southern Confederates, and I can track him from now to Tuesday,” which is pretty much the truth. Farmers had good land records, as a rule, and it really is all about the land. In North Carolina, as Jo White Linn says, you have to know the waterways–I think that’s true for most any state that has lots of creeks. But whatever the lay of the land, land meant tax revenue so there are records–usually even if the courthouse burned.
Anyway, I was thinking about my only non-Southern, non-rural line. Of course they started in New York City (you know, where the bad salsa comes from). At least that’s as far back as I can track them for now–late 1700s. There’s a story about old William Ball on the front page of my website at All My Ancestors–his burial site kept getting moved. Guess you could say he was an early victim of urban renewal.
He was a shipwright–I found him in the early city directories for New York City. I have to admit that I’m still a little overwhelmed by trying to track him down–I can’t tell from the addresses if he moved every year or so or if the address kept changing. From what I can tell, he lived and worked right down on the tip of Manhatten.
He evidently had a business–I found listings for Ball and Weaver, Shipbuilders. Jacob Weaver was his partner–I’ve spent many hours trying to track that man! Do you have any idea how many Jacob Weavers there were, especially in Pennsylvania? I haven’t come up with a way to sort them yet, or to even determine if one of them is the same guy who was in New York building ships. All I know is that he was a grocer for a year or two after his partner died and then he disappears. William and his wife named their first son Jacob Weaver Ball, so it makes me think there might be a family connection. (No, I don’t know Mrs. Ball’s name, either.)
Family lore says that the sons did stints in their father’s business. The son from whom I descend, William G., was only about 12 when his father died, so I suppose he may have spent some time there. He turned out to be a doctor–I don’t think he went to medical school. I believe he studied with a doctor in Clark County, Indiana, and did his training in that informal manner. But his oldest son, Simpson, is frequently listed on the census records as a cooper–did his doctor/father learn about shaping and bending wood into staves for buckets and barrels in his father’s shipyard?
Dr. Ball, though, despite his being a physician, was also a farmer. I can’t help but wonder where he learned to farm. When he ends up in Warren County, Iowa about 1848, he acquires a farm and is one of the founding members of the county agricultural society. A few summers ago Hubbo and I visited his land–it was great fun to look over the fields that he and his sons must have worked. They had soybeans planted on them that year–but they also adjoined a stand of trees along the creek that the Ball’s used for timber, I think.
This week I was working on a project for someone else and I came across “grizzly man” listed as the occupation. This, of course, conjured up all sorts of Grizzly Adams and even Bigfoot pictures in my head. But I looked closer and noticed that the man in question probably worked in a zinc mine.
So I did a little internet search for a mining dictionary, which I found here. A grizzly is evidently a screen or set of rollers through which ore is passed–for sort of a rudimentary first sort and breaking-up. So the guy who dumps the ore from the cars (underground) is called a “grizzly man.” Makes sense.
I don’t think I have any grizzly men (or women, for that matter) in my family. But it’s a colorfully named occupation. And I do have some colorful characters in the tree.
I’m trying to keep up the tradition.