Family – Auxiliary Memory

Helen Imojean Delaney Harris (1898-1981)

by James Wallace Harris, 1/14/25

This essay is about memory and history. What can I remember? What can I document with photographs or research with Ancestry.com? What can I find on the internet? I want to know as much as possible about Helen Harris. I plan to update this page as I find more information. The photo on the left at the top of the page is me with my grandmother around 1953. I was her first grandchild. The next photograph is of my grandmother with me and my sister in 1959. The last picture is just the best portrait I have of her. I believe it was taken in the 1960s.

Helen Harris was my grandmother, my father’s mother. I’m learning to use Ancestry.com by researching her records. This essay aims to show how genealogy research works and to push my memory to remember everything I can about my paternal grandmother. I’m also using clues I found on Ancestry.com to research on Google. Here is the current state of my family tree.

I’m going to start with my grandmother’s birth and work forward in time.

1900 United States Federal Census (June 20, 1900)

I cannot find a birth certificate for my grandmother. I discovered on Google that Indiana didn’t require birth certificates until 1907 (but some counties had them as early as 1882). I’m not exactly sure where my grandmother was born. The first official document that lists my grandmother is the 1900 United States Federal Census.

Helen is listed as a granddaughter living with John I. Martin and Mary A. Martin, her maternal grandparents. My grandmother’s mother is listed as Margarete Delany and her father James Delany lived with them. Delaney was spelled without the e. Spellings, especially first and last names were often inconsistent in historical documents.

They lived on 484 Third Street, Hoopeston, Grant Township, Vermilion County, Illinois. The census was taken on June 20, 1900. My grandmother’s grandfather was born in Ireland in 1848. His wife came from Ireland in 1857. I don’t know if they were married in Ireland or America. That puts me five generations from being an immigrant on that side of the family?

Third St. Hoopeston is now divided between north and south. There’s no telling where 484 would have been. This photo shows a 2024 view of 452 and 498 of N. Third. The house in the back looks old. Maybe 498 could have once been 484?

This is about where 484 S. Third Street should be.

This brings up the question: Why was my grandmother living in Illinois at one year and seven months when she was born in Indiana? Vermilion County is right on the border with Warren County, Indiana. Evidently, it’s close enough for dating. I wish I knew where my grandmother was born.

1910 United States Census (April 10, 1910)

Helen Harris was 11 and living on Cedar Street, Williamsport, Washington Township, Warren County, Indiana. Her father was listed as James H. Delaney (44) and her mother Margrett Delaney (33). My grandmother now had a 4-year-old sister Ruth. That validates real life because my grandmother had a sister Ruth. The names have different spellings. This map shows how close they were to Vermilion County, Illinois, and the location of Williamsport. In 1910, the town’s population was only around 1,200.

I was always told she was born in Indiana, but I can’t validate that in any way. Was Williamsport her birthplace and family home? Later records claim she was born Helen Imojean Delaney on November 28, 1898, to James Henry Delaney (1863-1947) and C. Margaret Martin (1877-1968). I might find out more when I research Margeret Martin.

Here is a photograph from Williamsport in 1910. My grandmother would have been eleven. I wonder if she is in this group of people? How far can I go with this research? Just how many pieces of evidence of our lives do we leave behind? I wonder if I drove to Williamsport if I could find more clues?

My next bit of evidence comes from 1915. I don’t know where this clipping came from. It appears to be a look at the past. My grandmother is about 16. She’s third from left in the back, wearing the weird hat. It’s the earliest photograph I have of her. (Strangely, I also have an old newspaper photograph of my mother on a basketball team.)

The next record I can find about my grandmother is a marriage notice in The Grand Island Daily Independent for Monday, January 5, 1920. Helen Delaney married George W. Harris, 22, an engineer. She is listed as 21 and a school teacher.

I wonder what they mean by an engineer? Was he a college graduate? After he moved to Florida, my grandfather worked as a border agent. Supposedly, his picture was once in Life Magazine arresting illegal aliens coming in by boat. My grandmother once told me she had been a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse. So that fits. My father, George Delaney Harris, their first child was born on October 12, 1920.

How did she meet a man from Nebraska? This is the earliest photo I have of my paternal grandfather, George W. Harris. He is on the far right. Those are his parents and brothers, my great-great-grandparents. He looks older than 22 there, so I’m guessing it was after 1920.

1920 United States Federal Census (June 2, 1920)

My grandmother and grandfather are living with her parents in Williamsport, Indiana. Was the Nebraska newspaper notice of their marriage just a notice, and they weren’t living in Nebraska? Or had they gone there to marry, and then returned to Indiana to live? My grandmother is unemployed, but my grandfather is now an electrical engineer.

Sometime during the 1920s, they move to Florida. I have no proof of when or where. The next record to validate their existence does put them in Florida. I’d love to know the story behind the move.

1930 United States Federal Census (April 4, 1930)

I never heard anyone in the family saying they lived in Melbourne, Florida in Brevard County. The census document says they live at 101 “Wolfe” Street. But I’m not sure of the handwriting. Can’t find a Wolfe street. My grandfather’s occupation is now listed as a federal employee and an emigration officer. That fits with family stories. My grandmother is still unemployed, but now has a second son, my uncle Jack.

1935 Florida Dade County Census

They rented a house at 193 NW 54th St. My grandfather was a federal inspector. All three sons are now here, including my Uncle Bob. My dad was 14.

1936 City Directory

My grandmother is listed as living at 324 NW 53rd Street in Miami. Here is a current Google Maps Streetview photo. This

1940 United States Federal Census (April 8, 1940)

They are now living in Dade County, where Miami is located. However, I can not make out the township. I would love to know their address. I remember visiting my grandmother in a little house in the early 1950s. My grandfather had died in 1947.

My grandfather is now an Immigration Inspector, and my father, 19, works for a newspaper. I have a clipping from a Miami newspaper, describing my father studying advertising layout in high school. I won’t include it here, just evidence for my grandmother. Uncle Jack is 15 and Uncle Bob is 8. I have one photo from around this time. My Uncle Bob is in the middle, and he looks like a teen, so I’m guessing it’s around 1945?

Here’s a picture of my grandmother with my mother. My mother and father got married in 1945. I assume this photo was taken before I was born in 1951.

1953 City Directory

My grandmother is listed as living at 1131 NW 55th Terrace in Miami. I would have turned two that year. I remember visiting her in the mid-1950s, in a small house. This could have been it. Evidently, she was living alone by then. Here’s what it looks like from Google Maps Streetview. My memory is of a house on a corner surrounded by lots of trees looking like the two below.

I can’t find any more resources on Ancestry.com for my grandmother. She’s not in the 1950 United States Federal Census, and Ancestry.com doesn’t seem to have access to censuses from 1960 forward. Nor can I find any more city directories. I wonder if my grandmother didn’t fill out a 1950 census. She was a widow by then, and I assume her three boys had moved out.

My Memories

I mainly grew up around Miami Florida. That’s where my father’s side of the family had been living since the 1920s, or so I thought. However, my father and his father were from Nebraska, and his mother and family were from Indiana. I never knew how my father’s parents met. That’s the kind of mystery you wish pursuing genealogy would answer but doesn’t. My grandfather died before I was born, so I have no memory of him, and very few stories.

My earliest memory of my grandmother, Helen Harris, is visiting her in a tiny house in an old section of Miami. Back in the 1950s, Miami seemed mostly new housing divisions, but sometimes we’d visit older sections that were probably built in the 1920s or 1930s. I’d love to know where that house was located. This was probably mid 1950s.

My next memory of my grandmother was visiting her at an old apartment on 8th Avenue, which I believe is Flagler, and is now considered part of Little Havana. She was the manager, and this was in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The place was old. I loved roaming the old interior halls, with the ancient musky-smelling rugs, and talking to the old people living there.

Around 1959 my mother was diagnosed with TB and was sent to stay at a sanatorium in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. My father was in the Air Force and stationed in Canada. So my grandmother moved into our house in Hollywood, Florida to care for Becky and me for about six months. I have several memories from this time. (The center picture at the top of the page is from this time.)

After that, she moved to an apartment complex on Bayshore Avenue, right on Biscayne Bay. She stayed there, I believe until she died in 1981. But I’m not positive. My father died in 1970 and my mother, sister, and I moved to Memphis, Tennessee. I only saw my grandmother a couple more times after that when I would visit Miami to see a friend. The last time was in 1978 when I got married and took my wife Susan to meet her.

Most of the other memories I have of Helen Harris were when she came to family Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I did stay with her several times at the apartments on Flagler and Bayshore Drive.

I do have some specific memories. When my grandmother kept Becky and me in 1959, I was seven, and sometimes still wet the bed. She knew I admired her large leather-bound zip-up 3-ring notebook which she used to organize all her bills and paperwork. She told me when she came that if I didn’t wet the bed while she was there she’d give me her notebook when she left. I got that notebook. My parents should have tried bribing me earlier.

One of the most exciting memories I have of my grandmother is when I stayed with her at the apartments she was managing. I had seen the 1958 movie, A Night to Remember about the Titanic, and told her about it. She introduced me to an old lady living at the apartments who had been on the Titanic as a child. Years later, I wondered if I could track down who that lady was. I don’t remember her name.

I can’t remember too many details about my grandmother’s personality. She was jolly and I loved her. She collected glass figurines of dogs, so my sister and I always gave her a little dog figurine for her birthday or Christmas. I remember seeing her several times reading a book about the medicinal value of honey. She also talked about Edgar Cayce, the psychic. I can’t remember anything else she liked. I don’t recall her watching TV, playing music, or reading novels.

In 1965, I stayed with her at the Bayshore Drive apartments. I remember helping her clean out an apartment. I found an old tackle box which she let me keep. She didn’t see that it had a switchblade knife in it. I loved that knife and took it to school with me. I never told any grownups about it. I use the tackle to fish off the sea wall. While I was staying with her I would gather coconuts and unhusk them. I sold a dozen coconuts to a vegetable stand in Homestead for 50 cents each.

I remember she had friends named John and Alice. I believe we rented their house for a couple months in 1958 before we moved into our house in Hollywood, Florida. I think this might be Alice and John on the left, but I’m not sure. The other man was named Ollie. But that’s all I know.

The next photo might be the last photo I have of my grandmother. I believe it’s with her sister Ruth but it might be Alice. It was taken at the Bayshore Drive apartments, I believe in the 1970s. The last time I visited my grandmother was in 1978. I had just married Susan and we had gone down to Miami so I could introduce her to my grandmother.

Helen Harris died in 1981. I regret not calling or writing her more. If I had known I would one day be writing this essay I would have asked her a lot more questions. And I would have saved more documentation.

The faithful believe they will be reunited in heaven with their loved ones. That would be nice, but I’m not a believer. We’re often told that those who pass will live as long as someone remembers them. Helen Harris might be down to three people who remember her, maybe four. If by chance you do, leave a comment. I might have hordes of unknown relatives that remember her.

One last memory. Once my grandmother told me about her high school class. It was small. I want to say thirty people. She said they had agreed to a tontine, and the last person living would get some object I’ve now forgotten. Over the years, I wonder who won the tontine. I wonder if genealogy research could lead me to her graduation class.

We leave behind very little which proves that we were once here. Eventually, it all fades away.

JWH

Ancestry.com Isn’t What I Expected

by James Wallace Harris, 1/6/25

I joined Ancestry.com so I could upload old family photos. I thought they should be saved somewhere because all my family photos will be thrown away after I die. Many of my photographs have already been converted into digital files, so I figured it would only require looking up the person and uploading the files for that person.

Because the government knows so much about us, I assumed that kinship relationships for the last three or four generations would already be in the Ancestry.com system. That was a big false assumption.

Ancestry.com claims to have over 60 billion records. I don’t know if that’s 60 billion different pieces of paper or 60 billion references to individuals. The trick using Ancestry.com is to start with a name and then use all its records to verify the identity of each person. It’s not easy. You can’t trust any one record. You need to find several records with connecting information that’s already been previously validated.

My assumption was recent family members would be known and family from the past would be harder to identify. It turned out that parents, siblings, cousins, and grandparents are hard to verify but once I did, Ancestry.com offered a lot of hints about my great-grandparents, and their ancestors. However, the hints need to be verified. Those hints are probably based on distant relatives in the past, working up family trees, and those trees might not be accurate.

I was shocked by how many people have similar names, with similar dates of birth and death, coming from the same part of the country. I could very easily add photos of people who were not the people photographed.

Before I joined Ancestry.com and used it, I thought family trees were already well established, and I could quickly upload all my family photos. That won’t be the case.

Just to cover my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, I’ll need to research and identify 30 people. I only knew four of them. If I go back to another generation, that would add 32 more people. This completely ignores aunts, uncles, and cousins from each generation. Adding them to my family three would mean researching another hundred people, maybe two hundred.

Another assumption I had before working with Ancestry.com was the belief that building a family tree would help me get to know my ancestors. It hasn’t worked out that way. Finding names and dates to add to my tree reveals nothing about those people.

Genealogy is interesting and even educational. It’s revealing in unexpected ways. It shows that blood is not thicker than water. Kinship is meaningless. Actual interactions with each other are everything.

I’m not sure if saving my photographs will be of any real value. I’ll save them anyway, but I’m uncertain if anyone will care. Now I understand why so many people I’ve talked to about this project said they had zero interest in genealogy. They instinctively knew that people they never met were just meaningless names and dates on a chart

However, learning genealogy offers other rewards. It teaches research skills. It reveals how society knows and remembers people. Pursuing genealogy shows the limits of identity and identification. Unless a person is worthy of a biography, history only knows us by our names, marriages, addresses, birthdates, and death dates. And don’t those details say absolutely nothing about true selves?

Maybe I’m wrong. As I dig into the past, maybe I’ll find revelations I never expected.

By the way, genealogy should benefit greatly from AI.

JWH

The Meaning of Sharing Two Grandparents

by James Wallace Harris, 11/11/21

They say that blood is thicker than water. I’ve never been much into genealogy but ever since my cousin Harold Ervin died a couple weeks ago I’ve been thinking about my cousins and regretting that I didn’t spend more time with them. I keep asking myself why I didn’t and why I regret it so much.

It came to me that cousins are special because we share two grandparents. But what does that mean? I’ve always felt closer to my cousins on my mother’s side of the family. My mother was one of five sisters, and her mother, my grandmother, was a much-loved matriarch of the family. My sister Becky and I called her Nanny, and she had sixteen grandchildren (although one was by marriage).

I actually loved my father’s mother more. We called Ma. My father was one of three boys. But my father’s side of the family didn’t make over Ma as much as my mother’s family made over Nanny. Could sixteen grandchildren versus ten make a difference? I do think my cousin Alana might have made over Ma more. She was always my favorite cousin on my father’s side. It could be that I knew my father’s side cousins a lot less, and thus didn’t know how much time they spent with Ma. One of my big regrets in life is essentially forgetting about Ma after we moved away from Florida. I only went back to see her once.

The above photo shows the last time all sixteen of Nanny’s grandchildren were together. I’m the bald guy on the far left. I’m not even sure when that photo was taken. And I really wish it was a much better photo, one where I could see everyone clearly. But it’s what I have to help me remember, and the poor image is kind of fitting since the memories that day are fuzzy too.

Seven of the sixteen are now dead, and it seems like something very essential to my life is fading away. Even though I have strong feelings for these fourteen people (not counting me and my sister), I don’t remember actually spending that much time with them. I have spent far more time with people that aren’t kin. But these fourteen, and the eight cousins on my father’s side, have a large presence in my memory. Is that because of blood? The most intense memories of my cousins come from the years 1960-1970. Were the kinship experiences I had in adolescence the strongest not because of genetic connections but because everything was so strong during that phase of life?

Looking back I realized that I saw my cousins mostly when my grandmothers were alive. (I never knew my grandfathers.) After my grandmothers died I saw my cousins mostly when visiting my aunts and uncles. Then when my aunts and uncles died, I seldom saw my cousins again. Actually, I haven’t seen my cousins on my father’s side of the family since his funeral in 1970. I do regret that. I also regret that I don’t have a group photo of the ten of us.

Contemplating all of this I realized there are varying levels of kinship bonds. Parents and children are the strongest. But that relationship comes in two modes. Your relationship with your parents, and the relationship with your children. My wife Susan and I have never had children, so I don’t know the second mode. I’m guessing the strength of bonding is greater with your own children. I wonder if I didn’t want children because I never felt a strong bond with my own parents? My parents weren’t happy, and I’ve often thought having children is what tore their marriage apart. Their marital strife certainly affected my desire to have children.

The next most powerful relationship is between siblings. After that, it’s with grandparents. Next, is with aunts and uncles. Then comes cousins. Finally, it’s nephews and nieces. My connections to my cousins were at their strongest when my grandmothers were alive. After that, my aunts and uncles kept me close to my cousins. But once my parents and their siblings were gone the connections to my cousins just faded away. By then, they had their children, and grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. That’s sad that Nanny’s family has dispersed, but natural too.

The passing of my cousins might be hitting me harder because Susan and I are a dead end. I have no direct descendants going forward in time. All my connections to family are toward the past, and they are disappearing. I wonder if we could have felt what we feel now when we were young would we have chosen to have children? Strangely, Susan still doesn’t regret not having children, but I do. However, I don’t think I would have been a good parent, I’m too selfish. Most of my friends don’t have children, but of the ones that do, I see they’re having a whole different life in old age than us childless couples.

Writing this essay has answered my question about why I regret so strongly that my cousins are dying. They are the last of my direct line relatives. Susan and I have eleven nephews and nieces, and we like them very much, but they feel like they are on different branches of the family tree. We never got to see our nieces and nephews that much after they grew up, and they are now spread across the country. They have their own children, and in not many years, their own grandchildren. And how much blood do we share with our nephews and nieces? But I have such fond memories of my aunts and uncles, why hasn’t it gone the other way? Is it because I didn’t try harder?

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been recalling all the times I saw my grandmothers, aunts and uncles, and cousins. I’ve even thought about trying to write down every encounter I can remember – the number is quite finite. I’m starting to think there really weren’t that many meetings. Mostly we met at holiday dinners, vacations, weddings, funerals, and reunions.

For some reason, we have a special bond with people who have the same pair of grandparents. Is blood really thicker than water? Or is it because we knew those people when we were young and gathered on so many special occasions? I will continue to think about this for a while. I wonder what my cousins think? Maybe I’ll send them this blog.

JWH