Surname Saturday- The Saucier Debate

Saucier 

      It is hard to believe a year has gone by since the great Facebook debate over how to pronounce my maiden name. We all went on for days over how to correctly pronounce this old french surname, that even a city in South Mississippi is named for. It became a very heated debate to say the least. People who did not even carry the name were the most argumentatively defensive. It seems the most popular way to say it was So-Sure and most were adamant that they were saying it that way and would not change for anyone. My father and I argued that it was our name after all, and the city was named after an ancestor, so we think we know how to pronounce it. We prefer the correct French pronunciation of So-See-Ay. We will even accept So-shah, or So-shay. When I was a kid you could always tell when a telemarketer was calling because they would ask for Mr. Sauce-e-er please. Like tomato sauce is saucier than another kind of sauce. Eww, I cringed at that. I mean this was one of the oldest names on the Coast and it was being butchered daily. The people of Louisiana have kept more in tradition with the pronunciation of French names and they always pronounce it correctly. 

     Sadly here on the Mississippi Coast we have lost sight of our traditions and our Creole heritage. Growing up in the 70's I always heard my father, who ran a local store, referred to by all respectfully as Mr. So-see-ay. Then we had an influx of military people coming in with all the bases that we have here on the Coast. They could not pronounce the local names of Dedeaux,(De-Dough) Saucier, Gautier, (Go-t-ay or Go-Shay), even our towns of Gulfport and Biloxi (Buh-lux-e) became Golf-port and, By-lox-e. That's all okay, I mean I can't say some names I am not familiar with either, but the problem lies in the fact that we were too lazy to correct them and eventually went on to say things the way they said it. That means those people of the younger generation that were so defensive during the Saucier facebook war, never heard it said the correct way, so had no idea really. Which is sad. 

      Which is why there are those of us out there trying to educate our youth on our rich and fantastic history. After all if you wear the name of Saucier, you should know that you are descended from one of the very first settlers to the Coast, in what was then known as the Louisiana Colony, and now is Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Jean Baptiste Saucier was his name and he came from Canada with D'Iberville in 1699 to the wilderness and marshes of the Coast with an uncertain future. He later married a Casket Girl named Gabrielle Savary, who came from France specifically to marry a colonist. They had a large family who populated the Coast as well as the Illinois and Missouri territories. We should be proud enough of our heritage to preserve it, which includes the French language that they strictly spoke as late as the 1900's. 

     So, try to remember, that when I ask you to kindly say my name correctly, I am not being obstinate. I just wish to hear my name said the way it was meant to be pronounced. After all you want to be called by the right name too!


by the way it's ME-shell!   :)

Friday Finds-1940 Alabama/Georgia Census

Hooray! The 1940 Alabama and Georgia Census are now fully searchable on Ancestry.com Hoping Mississippi and Louisiana will be soon!!

Today Ancestry.com sent out notifications that they have several more states completed. Those fully searchable now are; Alabama, Arizona, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin.
 
Found an Uncle in Georgia, he was apparently in the Georgia State Penitentiary.Wasn't expecting that! 

 Found Aunt Ruby and Uncle William in the Alabama census. I never knew what they did for a living. Uncle William was a repairman for a Billiard Hall and Aunt Ruby worked as an assistant  photographer.  Wonderful little glimpse into the lives of two people whom I dearly loved.



Monday Madness- A Woman Scorned

Today I came across a fantastic article in an an old copy of the Daily Herald from June 6, 1929.

GULFPORT POLICE COURT

Mrs. Edgar Knight of Gulfport was fined $10 in Mayor J. W. Milner's
court this morning on a charge of assault and battery on the person of Miss
Tillie Moran -in a local Ice cream place Saturday night Edgar Knight, 

husband of Mrs. Edgar Knight, had, according to the evidence given 

at the trial, taken Miss Tillie Moran in to the ice cream place and 

had purchased an ice cream cone for her. Mrs. Knight appeared upon the scene
while her husband and Miss Moran were enjoying the ice cream and seizing
Miss. Moran by the hand threw her on the floor. It appeared that
the difficulty was later continued on the outside and that several blows
were struck between the parties on both sides. His honor thought that
Mrs. Knight was guilty of  first assault and fined her. $10. 

Moral of the story....Men don't buy ice cream for other women in a small town where your wife just may happen by. 



The Genealogy/XBox War

In my home we seem to have a problem of too many wireless connections to the modem. In a household of five people all connected to some wireless device this can lead to an all out war. There have been many arguments of "ALRIGHT who is downloading something while I am trying to play my game, watch a movie, etc...."

I have for years just trudged along without worry about how slow or fast my pages were loading as long as they loaded. Despite this, lately I have cringed when my name is yelled out from the living room, "Michelle are you online???" I am just doing genealogy is always my reply, to which he yells back "Each page you load is killing me!". Well lately, when my husband decides he wants to play his Call of Duty game online, he simply pulls the plug on the rest of us. Arghh... how can I survive three hours without my precious internet? Sure I can do things offline, like transcribe things that I have been meaning to, but just haven't found the time. (Most likely because I am really too busy pinning on Pintrest, or checking Facebook, but he really doesn't need to know all that!)  But, it always seems that this unplugging of the precious wireless flow tends to come at a time when I am right in the middle of a genealogy lead that I have been working on for awhile, and my page just sits frozen until he plugs me back in.

This leads to resentment on both sides. He sees it as unfair that he can not fully enjoy his game when we are sucking his bandwith and I feel he is taking away my research time. We have actually had screaming matches over the stupid internet! There is no right or wrong solution here. We need to take turns and play nice with each other, but it just does not seem to be working out that way!!

I seriously am thinking about getting a second line just so he can play his stupid game and leave the rest of us in peace!!

Oh, the modern age!



What is Your d'Aboville Number ?

 Randall Seaver of  Genea-Musings has come up with a new genealogy mission involving the d'Aboville number system. I saw his latest Saturday night mission and thought, "No problem! I know all about the d'Aboville number system and how to use it." I did not however, factor my software program giving me a hard time! My problem lies n the fact that nearly every person in my database is related to one another due to the fact that we are all descended from the same few original colonist to the Gulf Coast area. In fact I am married to my own 5th cousin, and his parents were related as well as mine, but that is another blog. So, what happened was when I tried to do a descendant report on the Legacy 7.5 program, it kept looping me telling me there was an error due to the couple being repeated. Well, yeah that's gonna happen a lot!! So, needless to say after hitting the continue button for WELL over a hundred times to ignore all these error's, I realized that I could bypass this by asking the system to ignore duplicates. Forehead slap!! So, what should have been a quick and easy blog mission turned out to be a torturous never ending click of the keyboard.

Now on to the mission at hand, find out what the d'Aboville number was for each of my four grandparents through the paternal line back to the first of that name in the line.

• From Joseph Joachim Wiese (1835-????) 1.3.2.3.2

•  From Christian Ladner (1690-????) 1.1.2.9.5.1.2.7.1.2

• From Charles Saucier (1672-1723) 1.1.2.3.5.6.3.5.1.2.7.1.2

• From Daniel Austin Anderson (1755-????) 1.1.1.4.7.3.4.1.2

Now how I did it. I used as I said the Legacy Family Tree  Maker 7.5, and went to descendant reports. From there I chose d'Aboville in the numbering system. Then selected preview and on the easy two (Wiese and Anderson) my nine page report popped up allowing me to quickly view my d'Aboville number.




Surname Saturday- Buhr Family of Louisiana

Buhr

Another German name in my family collection of names. I suppose most folks would pronounce it as Burr, or Bo-er. My family pronounced it as Bow-er. Now, there are not many with this surname in Louisiana, and I have had zero luck in tracking anyone down who has this surname and is related.

For unknown reasons a young man left his homeland of Germany behind and came to Louisiana around 1850. His name was Phillip Buhr. He married a young German immigrant named Catharina Hartmann. They had four daughters between 1855 and 1862, with one dying at two years of age.

• Phillip joined the Union Army during the Civil War and is found listed as:

• Phillip Bohr Co:C Unit 5 La Infantry, Private

• He lived on Dauphine Street, and worked as a lamplighter. 

• He was born in Diededfeld, Pfalz, Germany, about 1829. 

My grandmother did not know much of him, saying only that he had died and her great grandmother had remarried and had more children. 

An obituary in German for Phillip Buhr was in my collection as well as one in German for the little daughter who had died. Not knowing anyone capable of reading this obituary, I turned to the Ancestry Message Boards for help. I soon received a reply asking for me to scan the image of the obit and they would translate it for me.

It came back with a grim warning that I may not like what I was about to read.

The obituary told of Phillip Buhr having died on July 4, 1864 by committing suicide. He had jumped off a bridge and drowned. 

He was only 35 years old. His children were 9, 7, and 2 years of age. What could have made a person who had so many things to live for choose to end his life this way? It was obviously something never talked about in my family. He came to America to make a new start, what went so wrong?

Secrets are the tragedies of genealogy research. 

One more mystery to solve in the tangled tree of my family. 



Kicking the Genealogy Bucket

To Kick the Bucket according to Wikipedia: To kick the bucket is an English idiom that is defined as "to die" in the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785).^[1] It is considered a euphemistic, informal, or slang term.^[2] Its origin remains unclear, though there have been several theories.

Therefore one must have a Bucket List before they kick the bucket! Making a bucket list became popular after the movie of the same name came out. Although I am sure that way before the movie many people had a list of things they wished to do before they died.

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings recently came up with a fun idea of creating a genealogical bucket list. 

After much thought about places I would love to visit, and things I feel I must do, I narrowed it down to four main things that I feel are essential to my Genealogy Bucket List.

1. Complete the family history book that I have been writing for years. In which my husband constantly complains that I will never finish because I keep saying I must add more. I must learn that genealogy will never be complete because tomorrow someone will die or be born, and I can always write a volume II. 
2. Visit every family cemetery and transcribe to my hearts desire.
3.  Visit France, most of all St. Eustace Church in Paris.
4. Copy all old photos onto disk, label and place in a binder for quick reference and quick leave taking. If Hurricane Katrina taught us anything about preserving our history this was just one of the many! 

Of course there are many, many more things regarding genealogy that I would love to get the chance to do....So, with that in mind I hope my bucket kicking will wait another day!!