Ron Seckinger | Putting Together the Stories of Poor Ancestors

Ron Seckinger | Putting Together the Stories of Poor Ancestors

Heather Murphy: Hi, today I'm here with Ron Seckinger and he is been willing enough to share his story about his research into his family history. Hi, Ron, how are you doing today?

Ron Seckinger: I'm very well. Thanks very much, Heather, for having me here.

Heather Murphy: Great. Could you start off just by introducing yourself a little bit, please.

Ron Seckinger: Certainly. I was born in Emanuel county, Georgia. And I mentioned that because that's the site or the members of my family are introduced to them, which were most of them that were born. Uh, I was raised in a small town called Wrightsville Georgia, but when I was 12 moved to the Atlanta suburbs and from there, I went on to Duke University and later studied, uh, Latin American history.

And had I got a PhD in University of Florida. So when I decided to talk to do some research, I was familiar. I was professional historian and I knew what I was doing and getting started, but I had never done research on U.S. History before. So it was basically using some tools to approach that particular topic I had chosen.

Heather Murphy: And why did you decide to start researching your family history?

Ron Seckinger: Well, I asked my mother to gather some photographs for me because I wanted to frame them and put them around. My home is decoration and I didn't have an awful lot of the family. So when I arrived at her home for Thanksgiving, she showed me these photos And she started telling me about the people in the photos stories I had never heard before.

And I was so impressed by the, pathos the tragedy . That my family had suffered and many members of the family had suffered the loss of a child, a teenage child, somebody leaving his family, his sharecropper. the pathos. I said, it just struck me that this was really an interesting group of people who had some fascinating stories. And even at that time, I had no idea how extraordinary these stories were, but I found that out as I began to do the research.

Heather Murphy: And so what did the path look like when you started, how did you start approaching, researching this, this family?

Ron Seckinger: I started this when I was at home and in Alexandria, Virginia in that time. And so what I did was go to the national archives, which are right here in Washington, then just started doing basic genealogical research for this family. Uh, but by the following summer, I was beginning to take trips to Emanuel county and to interview relatives and people who knew relative. at that time again, I was really interested in the eight siblings and my grandmother being the oldest of the eight from this particular generation living in, in the first half of the 20th century. , the interviews are absolutely critical, but what I will discover to my amazement is it really, it was possible to recreate a lives of these very poor ordinary people. They didn't leave archives. They weren't written up in the newspapers. They didn't make a fortune in Hollywood or discover the cure for a disease. They were just ordinary folk, but the degree of information available and courthouses and in a weekly newspaper, the Swainsboro Forest Glade and along with other research that I did, I just found an amazing amount of material and could really lay out what their lives were like. And in some cases with great specificity, the, some of these tragedies that I had been so impressed by were available there and, and, uh, sort of the real memories of people who lived through them and also from the kinds of records that I'm indicating.

Heather Murphy: What kind of people were you interviewing? Was it family members, community members. How did that look for you?

Ron Seckinger: It was both. First I would go and say, I'm interviewing about the Straud family, my grandmother's generation and what you know about them? But what I discovered is it was just a step to learn something else that was really extraordinary and took, took the research in a totally different direction.

Totally unexpected. example, I was chatting with a gentleman one day about, uh, he had been a high-school companion of the student. I mentioned he was killed at a young age and his death was so devastating to the family. And so I had gotten information on, on this young man, and as I was about to leave, I, I just, for some reason, asked him a question.

I said, do you remember, Steve Johnson? Steve Johnson was an African-American man who killed his wife and sister-in-law and was convicted. And he was the last person executed in Emanuel county. That was in 1923 to my surprise. He said, I knew Steve Johnson. He was a friend of mine, and it turned out that he and his best buddy, who was the son of the sheriff, would go into the jail and talk to the prisoners.

And Steve Johnson would sometimes lower a tobacco can with a dime in it or a nickel and asked him to go pick him up a snack, a banana, or a cake, and bring it back to him at the jail. But, well, I knew the, the Steve Johnson case, but to have that kind of information by someone who actually knew him, visited him in jail and knew all the circumstances just took me totally by surprise. And this is not the only time that happened. So just once you began digging you're to me, it was an extraordinary to find out how much that I could discover.

Heather Murphy: Were any of your grandmother's generation still alive at that time? Were you able to interview them?

Ron Seckinger: Oh, that's a very good question of the eight two we're still living and the widows of two others were still living. So I had that enzyme. It's so unfortunate of course, that I did not think of this 20 years earlier and I kind of interviewed my grandmother and my aunts, and I could have had a, an entirely, a much deeper story, but that's beside the point. The oral traditions that they've passed on and where's. The most important things. And, uh, there were a lot of people who knew these folks, uh, people in their eighties and nineties, and were talking about things that had happened 60 years before, sometimes with great specificity and her attention to detail.

Heather Murphy: And so then you also said you were able to look at other records and pull together a story from those, where your ancestors mentioned, like in the newspaper or were just the circumstances. How did you pull the information from those sources to apply to your family?

Ron Seckinger: Right. Well, in the case of the newspaper was a weekly. And like most weekly, our small town newspapers, it was, there was a large social importance attached to it. And so there would be little notes. Like my grandfather's name was Duncan Fields. And one time there was a note that said "we heard Duncan Fields, slaughtered a hog, and we think it's still early in the season to be doing that.

And the day, of course, if there were an accident or a death or a murder, or there would be some write-up in the papers that would, would help. one of my, informants was, an elderly black man who had been. 10 years old and 1917. And he had been a close associate of my uncle who was the same age and they got an all kinds of mischief together.

But for example, they talked about going to see the first airplane in Swainsboro, a fair, and then that was reported on in the newspaper. So I could actually document the event and know the time that had happened and that kind of thing helped quite a bit. Of course in the courthouse records were even easier to use because they're organized by name and there's an index.

And so you entered the birth of marriage and death, uh, real estate transactions, criminal charges. I found out that my grandfather had been arrested three times for drunk and disorderly, for example. So that all fit together. In a way you, one thing that I actually managed to do was to get overhead imagery of my grandfather's farm and then the farm, my grandmother later worked on shares.

This was in the national archives and it was photography that was taken by the federal government in the 1930s to monitor the crop allocation program. So you would find out by looking at the overhead, if one of the persons who had said he had 120 acres actually only had a hundred and he was cheating at the margin, that kind of thing. So I was able with someone who was still alive from that period to identify the particular homes of individuals or the church was, and that kind of thing from, from a different perspective,

Heather Murphy: Well, those crop images are something that I hadn't heard of before. What other resources did you use to put together the stories of your families that weren't maybe typical, like your typical court records?

Ron Seckinger: Court records were, were typical, but I did find some surprises. There was when the first news from the first movie theater was opened in Swainsboro. the school board decided that children couldn't go during the week, they should have allowed to go there in the week because they couldn't really focus on their studies.

Well, the theater owner and another parent sued, and the case actually went to the Georgia Supreme court and the court decided that was not unreasonable and students shouldn't be allowed to go. But as I said in the book, a lot of people would have, could have told them that dog wouldn't hunt. Because very quickly, the older students just kept going and finally everyone gave up and the students would go whenever they wanted to.

So the, there were, in that particular case, you had Supreme court records, as well as the court records are. In the case of Steve Johnson, whom I mentioned was convicted of murder a lot of the white people in town decided that he should, not that they, they objected to the death penalty. there was no question that he was guilty, but they wanted him to the sentence to be reduced to life in prison. And so there was a lot of correspondence and a lot of material and in the courthouse records might not have been there except for those particular circumstances.

Heather Murphy: Well, that's interesting, like with the, with the theater that you were able to get something that happened in the community that was going to affect your ancestors, even if that record wasn't about them.

Ron Seckinger: Exactly. And, uh, we were talking about before about the, the general context. One of the things that I did. Was to do research and secondary studies on topics that affected them. For example, the railroads that came into Georgia and the last part of the 19th century, the introduction to the automobile in the early 20th century, the fact that highways were just mud streaks at that time.

And so their federal government had started building a US 1, which comes right near my home in Arlington Virginia, when he came all the way from the Canadian border in Maine, to Key West, Florida. And so the construction of highways, other things, cotton culture, the efforts to try to switch away from cotton into tobacco. the search for, for employment, which led a lot of Southern men to go to Detroit in particular, to try to get a job with Henry Ford. I put, tried to put all of those in so that one Could understand that. How those broad changes affected these individuals and how they adjusted their behavior to fit in with those broad changes that were taking place.

Heather Murphy: Could you share an example from one of your ancestors or your, those relatives of how doing that research to help you understand that person situation better?

Ron Seckinger: Well, yes. Uh, as I said, some of these people, I didn't know at all, some of them died before I was born. And, others, I just hadn't, hadn't really heard of very much, but one example is a Maud, the youngest of the eight siblings, the Stroud siblings. She had gone to stay with her brother and Detroit. And had fallen in love with the movies I'm in Detroit. Like other major cities have these large theaters is very luxurious in, in Detroit, she fell in love with the whole idea of movies. Back in Swainsboro, she would be sure to go to all the ones that she wrote off for, photographs of our favorite stars and would put them up in her room and everything. So she was a bit of a dreamer and she moved to Miami where she had a job in a beauty parlor and she got pregnant and she had decided to keep the baby, which was a very difficult possibility for her. Very difficult to try. Raise that she was shunned by a lot of the Earl, the people that she knew in Swainsboro.

And when he was five, she committed suicide. And she left this poor boy five years old, who was unfortunately not taken by somebody who really could have raised him. Right. But by a couple that didn't particularly want him. It was very unhappy cat child and he, left school at 16 to join the army or the air force. And later married a German woman. Uh, he had died before I was able to locate him, but I've talked to his two children who loved him and found him to be a wonderful man, but, but haunted by the loss of his mother and the, the rude upbringing

Heather Murphy: How long did it take you to do all of this research? till you found with all tell you that you've compiled everything that you did in your book?

Ron Seckinger: Well, I started this in 1980s, there was no internet. And so when I tried to find people, I use a telephone and the mail system and I would call the town and say, I'm trying to find, Robert High, this is in Miami. No, sorry, nobody here by that name. But then like on the third try, I said, well, this is Robert High, and it was actually the man I was looking for, who was the son of a couple that had hired Maud as a beauty stylist. And she had worked in cake taking care of their children for awhile. And then on top of that, the father later became, began working for Miami homicide and he was the detective who responded to the report of her suicide. Uh, so it just came together. Now I completed the research in about 11 years, but at that time I was unable to get it published. And besides that I had a structural problem. I was doing one, one of the eight children at a time. And that was a mistake. So eventually I rewrote it as a series of stories so that I can, 50 chapters in each one tells a story either about a broad issue like highways or the resurrection of the KU Klux Klan, or they would focus on something that happened to one of the individuals involved. And then, uh, I just put it aside and it's only now being published. The name of it is Emmanuel's Children: Stories of the Southern Family. And it's actually going to be released on September 27 that is already available for presale at Amazon and other retailers. But to get back to your original question, it's been 40 years since I started this process. And I don't think 40 years in the making is a very good advertising slogan. So I'm just telling you that because that's really what happened.

Heather Murphy: Yeah. You said that took about 11 years before the research was done. I know that's a problem for a lot of researchers to decide when they've done enough research on a certain ancestor relative, what was it for you? That was kind of the indication that it as complete as it needed to be.

Ron Seckinger: Well, one thing I did was I read all of the issues of the weekly forest blade, the newspaper in Swainsboro. And I, I read some of her work from other cities too, but that particular moment I read that from 1901 until 1945, 1 issue every week. So that was one indication that I had. I had exhausted that particular. I had seen everything in the Swainsboro courthouse so that I could find, my sources mining informants were dying year by year because they were all quite old. And so it was just a matter of coming to a feeling like I was at the limit of what I could expect to find. And that I had, I hadn't really what I needed to have in order to complete the book.

Heather Murphy: So in your introduction of your book, you say, her experiences and those of her siblings were not the stuff of history books, none occupied, a high public office, massive fortune started movies or discovered the cure for a disease yet drama filled their lives. Can you tell. The listeners, why it was important for you to document the lives of these people that otherwise nobody would have ever known about.

Ron Seckinger: I, as I heard this story is this woman and my mother kind of repeated in short, you know, these are some of the stories I've mentioned that I was really stunned by the drama by the pathos. And I thought that it was a story worth telling and as it expanded and I dealt with some of the people who married into the family, as well as the originally and some of their children. and I then moved on to put it within the broader context. What I, what I realized I had wound up with was a social history of this period. And it seemed through these, this particular family it's focused on. But it deals with, with very broad issues. And I mentioned a Maud, you know, the problem of the domestic with a, a child born out of wedlock and how difficult that was for her or my grandfather, gambling away, the family farm, and my grandmother left to raise her children as sharecroppers. There were just things of that nature that. relative, um, on one, any individual who was related by relative to the Stroud who went to Florida in 1925, when the lake Okeechobee region was developing and you were getting a winter vegetable economy there, and he lived through the hurricane of 1928 which was the second deadliest hurricane in us history, more deadly than Katrina. And, uh, the stories of that. so many people dead on the interior of Florida around lake Okeechobee, that they were buried in trenches, that there were funeral pyres to deal with the bodies. I said, it's an absolutely fascinating story and I had no idea. Did anybody I knew or was related to in any way had anything to do with it?

Heather Murphy: as people research their family history, then it also gives them the opportunity. If they choose to look at that larger context to see the social history that's going on, what benefit do you think that is to people to look beyond their family, to the circumstances in which they lived?

Ron Seckinger: Well, uh, you know, I'm not a genealogist, but I really appreciate the work that genealogists do. And I, I am impressed that they are dealing with practical issues of history. It's not like they're sitting in a class, listening, no, they're out there, actually digging for information and finding all kinds of exploiting, all kinds of records and finding information from different sources about their families. So it seems to me that to the extent that they can expand that and talk a little bit about the broader historical trends of the time, that it will be more interesting to them and to their relatives as they learn about the families. In other words, it's not just, Graham grandpa's involvement in world war two, but what happened to the men who came back? What were the issues they dealt with and so forth. That's just an example. I'm pulling out of the air at the moment, but, uh, I, I think that their stories about their ancestors will be far richer. If they do include the broader context.

Heather Murphy: And as a historian, what is your opinion on unlearning the social context and, doing that broadening, like, what is the benefit from your perspective as a historian?

Ron Seckinger: Well, I think that what this book wound up being is a S a social history, as I say, seen through the eyes of one particular generation. But it, it seems to me that that could be particularly if you've got several of these books that helps to knit together. So you're not using necessarily statistics, but you're actually using the living experiences of individuals who know that, who learned that, that those trends personally skin off their own backs, so to speak.

So I th I think it just makes for a richer. experience both for the researcher and for the person who reads it afterwards, people in my family are really eager to get their hands on this book because they don't know any of these stories. And the generations after me, my children and my grandchildren this is all new to them and it's not the kind of thing they're going to go out and find out on their own. So I'm glad I did.

Heather Murphy: Yeah. I have an advanced copy and I do like how you have it set up that it is set up in stories. It's not just a dry history of all the names kind of blending together.

Ron Seckinger: Yeah.

Heather Murphy: As you go down generations, it's the stories that matter to people. And that's what you put in this book. So how has researching these ancestors and coming to understand their stories affected the way you see yourself or your family?

Ron Seckinger: Well, I guess one of the things that I get from it is that the, the social mobility that is still possible in this country, then my grandmother and her siblings were born into. Dire, rural poverty. They all told to tell the stories and that generation and the next that on Christmas day, if they found a Sprig of raisins and an orange under the tree, they were pretty excited. That's that was Christmas. The fact that they started off so poor and yet their grandchildren And great-grandchildren have, uh, many of them have found an entirely different kind of life on the prestigious universities.

They've, uh, have good jobs. They're doctors, educators, business people. And just two generations ago, this was really a tale of deprivation. This is what my mother grew up with. It was only, it's only one generation removed from me and, their ability to, to go on, to make a better life for their children or their children to find a better way is impressive.

Uh, not the doubt that there are many problems now, but at least here are some examples of people who've actually managed to, do better. as far as for me, myself, uh, you know, somebody might ask, why are you writing about these people? Like your grandfather, who was a no account, an alcoholic and gamble, the way their family farm and all that.

And, uh, you know, I didn't pick my ancestors. As an historian, I was trained to follow the truth. And as an intelligence analyst, then my second career, I had the same kind of training. So I've done everything I can to try to present an honest picture, not to glorify these people or not to whitewash them in any way. They certainly had their flaws. But, I, I wanted to know what it was really like. I mean, what the truth was about their lives. And I, I feel pretty good that I found it.

Heather Murphy: And what advice would you give to someone who wants to do something similar to you and put together the stories of their ancestors?

Ron Seckinger: The most important information is start yesterday. If you know, every week, every day, you're running the risk of one of your key sources dying of old age. And the most important thing I could say was start early. Talk to people record their calm, your conversations, pursue them. Who, who do they think you should talk to and go to see those folks and be open to other things.

In other words, don't be so focused on, okay. Your grandpa has experiences in the war. I mentioned, that's not the only thing. What was his wife doing at the same time? What was his brother who didn't go to war? What else happened? And it will be a much broader, much more rich and rewarding experience to read if you do that.

Heather Murphy: That's great advice. Well, I will have a link in the show notes so that people can order your book. If they like again, it's called Emanuel's Children. And thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your experiences.

Ron Seckinger: it was a great pleasure. Thank you for having me.