Milwaukee Week
Sunday PM July 24, 2011
After setting up the trailer (no awning in this urban setting) I drove down to the Post Office to see if they had a Sunday pick-up since I wanted to mail my anniversary card to Karen in time for our 42nd anniversary on Wednesday. They didn’t have a Sunday pick-up, but I dropped off the card knowing that it would be processed at 10 a.m. on Monday. The downtown area has gentrified the old buildings and the old Third Ward District where the Bretons lived is now “The Arts and Fashion District.” Driving around on this sunny afternoon, it looked very inviting with folks eating at sidewalk cafes, people strolling to window shop and intriguing displays in the shop windows. I want to come back and explore it more on foot.
The “campground” is next to the state fairgrounds and is all asphalt with hook-ups for the RVs. It’s totally non-scenic. There were no Mourning Doves to gently encourage me to wakefulness. When the place advertises “Easy on and off freeway” you can read between the lines that the freeway is close. That closeness brings a constant roar of trucks, the rolling thunder of Harley-Davidsons (This is their hometown after all), howls of sirens, and the low roar of jets leaving the airport, which must not be too far away. It’s just a matter of adjusting, especially when you’ve already paid. So I’ve adjusted, but cherish my quiet nights and mornings back at the Leon Valley Campground.
Monday
On into the heart of the big city beast. The freeways were a bit of challenge with racing vehicles, lane changes, sign reading, and Garmin instructions, but the truck’s height gave me an advantage of getting a good perspective for my next moves. Off the freeway and onto the streets of Milwaukee led me without too much circling to the huge old courthouse. I parked in a garage and shagged myself to a lowly basement entrance. No one gets to use the wonderful old multi-door entrance…security again. Utilizing my past successes with the Register of Deeds to identify property I went first to that office. I guess because of the size of the town, they don’t keep the records by name, but by the property description. Since I wanted to know the addresses, there was no way to proceed further there. The lady suggested I check at City Hall to see if the Tax records would reveal who paid for what. After a hot walk I learned that they too also keep their records by property description. I left there and by this time the big library was open. So I then went to their microfilms for newspaper mention of Sarah Breton’s birth, which our records show to have been in Milwaukee in 1863. No mention of Sarah, but I was surprised to read the accounts of the New York draft riots and reports for the Civil War battles that were decimating both sides. Well, at least I could plug in the laptop and do some writing. Even this turned into a disappointment, as I seemed to have lost some of my earlier work. The morning had pretty much been a washout.
Before leaving I asked the Periodicals Librarian if there was a part of the library that dealt with genealogy. She pointed me down the hall to the Humanities room.
A patient lady there suggested I look through the old City Directories. This was a resource I’d not utilized in the smaller towns. Perhaps they didn’t have such resources. These Directories were so old that the covers had come off of them and each one was held together by a paper with the year number on the spine as it was wrapped around the volume with a fancy string with a slide eyelet holding it all together. It was really a privilege to handle these old resources. As gently as I could I opened the 1859 volume and soon found in the B range. “John Breton, shoemaker “ with his home address given. I continued through to 1871 when they no longer appear, but by then had learned of other places he worked and gotten three more home addresses. These discoveries and handling such treasured resources was the bright spot of the day for me. These were wonderful specific facts and exactly what I needed to take back to the courthouse on Wednesday where I have an appointment to look up Sarah Elizabeth’s birth record. She is J.W.’s youngest sister and the one who married into the Sawyer family. Actually she married Lizzie Sawyer Breton’s brother, Uzell. It was a smaller world back then.
While looking in the 1863 Directory I was perplexed to see an ad for the Chicago and Indiana Air Line. Planes in 1863…? No way! I showed it to the Reference Librarian who looked it up and informed me that Wikipedia lists over fifty railroads that had the phrase “air line” in their title. Like “beeline” or “as the crow flies” it meant a route that was straight, flat, and direct. All aboard! Something new everyday, right?
That evening I got a call from Jean Weber telling me that I wouldn’t be able to meet with her husband, John Weber because he’d been hospitalized. This was another disappointment since I knew that Karen’s grandfather, William
Haag did not spend much time in Milwaukee before he worked his way to San Francisco. My hope in coming to Milwaukee was to establish a link to the descendants of his sisters who had stayed and married in Milwaukee. Karen’s parents and grandparents had each made trips to this town to maintain those family bonds but the younger generations seem to be less inclined to maintain those relationships. I’ll keep trying but there’s not much I can do while I’m here. Too bad. The other cousin who has been of help is out of town, so I’ll have to confine myself to researching rather than bonding.
Tuesday got off to a slow start as I made calls to line up a stop at an RV place to refill my 1947 propane tank and then check out the source of my propane leak. I had run dry after just one cooked meal, so if I wanted any more hot meals I had to get that fixed. I was also calling local libraries to get their hours and Wi-Fi connectablity (‘nother new word?).
At some point I walked to the Milwaukee Historical Society headquarters, which are in a restored old bank building. Just being among the gilt wall décor and huge bank vault doors was impressive. I joined the Society and as a member began looking through old Milwaukee court records to see if there was any legal actions that might be enlightening. I couldn’t find anything though so I suppose the early Bretons were either law-abiding or really clever criminals. Wanting to know more about when the family immigrated and knowing that they had Naturalization records I was shown their card file in an old wooden card file. Going through the B’s there was no listing. That meant that Naturalization had not been granted n Milwaukee. Another strike and a miss! On a table nearby lay another big old ledger titled, ‘”Declaration of Intent. I thought that that referred to the first step in the naturalization process and so I, as a member can only do, moved the book to a table and looked in the B section. It’s kind of a thrill to find something you’re looking for and I was thrilled to see John Breton listed with a file number. The file turned out to be a single sheet that was his legal declaration that he intended to give up his allegiance to Queen Victoria and become a citizen of the United States. That was in 1859, two years after they’d arrived. Most importantly, he’d listed their port of entry and approximate date as New York, June of 1857. This was new knowledge for me and I felt that I’d really found a nugget that I’d long be seeking. I lingered a bit longer but then felt I needed to move on, since my time is limited.
Armed with that new knowledge I went to the other resource that Gen Web contacts had previously told me over the Internet would be a good source of information. It was the Family History Center at the Mormon Church in the Milwaukee suburb of Hale’s Corner. FHCs are at many churches but are totally non-sectarian and no pressure. The folks at the FHC in Mountain Home have been very good to me and are responsible for many discoveries that have led me this far. Using Karen’s gift GPS I found my way there and settled in. I began looking for FHC. Hearing my success in finding the month and place of their arrival one of the ladies there began exploring on the computer to see if she could help. I hadn’t asked but everyone loves to find treasure so, unbeknownst to me she went to work. What cued her in to my quest was that I had asked to see their National Archives microfilms of the New York Passenger lists for June of 1857.
I began the challenging task of scrolling through each day’s microfilmed, handwritten records of ship arrivals and passengers beginning June 1. I knew that they had left from Southampton, but that didn’t mean that that was the original starting point of the ship. The ships were listed by where they started from, not their last stop before arriving. So, I had to look at each European ship, but could discard the ones coming from the Caribbean and other spots. I had spent about half an hour and was up to June 23rd 1857 when the lady, Odessa, by name, brought me a Xerox copy she’d made of the passenger list with the Breton family, mis-transcribed as Bretton on it! Another breakthrough! Here’s a stupid realization…the computer could search faster than I could. The same roll of microfilm that I was looking at had also be transcribed and made a part of the resources searchable on Ancestry.com. “Searchable” means that you can enter a name and the computer looks at the resources and then shows the matches. I could have done this at home, but wasn’t patient enough to go through all the possible misspellings of Breton. They were on a ship that started from Bremen, but made a stop in Southampton, picking up about twenty passengers. There was John, Margaret, Mary and Johnny with a Mary, aged seventy with them. Who was she? …and no Margaret (Maggie, who later married Abram Thompson and is buried in Huron’s Riverside Cemetery). Looking a little further down the list, there was Margaret. I guess that in boarding the ship some others got in front of her so she was briefly separated from the family, she was only four years old. She was behind another head of a family, so maybe the two families were from Guernsey and traveling together. We know that she got back together with her family for the trip and that poor Johnny died at sea, but again, who was the seventy-year old lady listed as a Breton? Looking at the next (1860) U.S. Census we see that a 73-year-old lady named Mary Garvey is still part of the Breton household in Milwaukee. I suspect she’s an aunt of John’s. John’s father, Niclolas, married a woman named Rachel Gavet, so I think this might be a sister of hers. The difference in Garvey and Gavet can be simple miscommunication. John Walter doesn’t mention her in his “Memoirs” as being part of the family trans-Atlantic trip but there she is. She boarded with the family and was counted as a Breton, when she probably shouldn’t have been. She was a family member, but not a Breton. New knowledge!
The Fairgrounds workers are gearing up for the State Fair; the Comet roller coaster is being erected right in front of my camping parking spot. I’m parked so near that I’m sure the swells in their big, flashy RVs think I’m one of the carny folk. The fair is definitely coming to town. Every day there are more trucks with carnival rides parked across the street. Today I went to the laundry room and there were three guys passed out asleep while waiting for their laundry.
At the other end of the spectrum are $200, to $300,000 motor homes that come to this campground for its ability to handle such large units. They take pride in the number of slide-out sections that expand the living rooms, bedrooms and so on. Some may have up to five, the slides may be not very wide or they may be a super-slide which can include the living area and the kitchen. People have described one to me that expands vertically to make a split-level motor home. Rather than feel impoverished I can feel proud that my RV has four slides too. Each window slides out to allow max ventilation and such innovation is the seed from which these modern units grew. They should be thanking me!
We’ve had rain on Wednesday, but nothing serious. The rain slowed me down in my wish to walk the streets where the Bretons did since they lived here for thirteen years. To get a birth certificate you have to make an appointment two days in advance. I had done that and Wednesday was the day for me. Since I had such success with the City Directories at the library, I also thought I could look up the deeds to those addresses and see if the Bretons owned or rented. their housing. Despite another rainy morning I got there ahead of time and the ladies at the counter were very nice and went to look for the record. They came back a few minutes later and said, they had no record for her, but that was not too unusual, records were not required until 1923. They didn’t charge me the $20 fee for that research so I returned to the Register of Deeds lady I’d talked with on my first visit to the courthouse. Today I had the addresses but boy what a challenge. I admit it was too much for me. The properties have changed hands so many times, been expanded or shrunk, and their old residential neighborhood is now such an office building district that it proved to be more than I could follow. The records were on microfiche with the dark blue background and supposedly white lettering. All the records I looked at were all hand-written and scarcely legible. After peering at over twenty sheets of 12 pages on a sheet I gave up. The lady said they were all for the same property but I have my doubts.
I left the courthouse and drove downtown to see if I could see the addresses. Not one was still visible. They each had been subsumed into bigger, taller properties as the downtown values escalated and the area expanded. I had planned a nice walking tour of this restored Third Ward area, but it was still raining and since I had no family connection to it, I headed back to the fairgrounds. While jogging that morning I’d noticed a nice restaurant and so dropped in there and had a Spanokapita Dinner with tsatsiki sauce, feta cheese, Greek olives, peppers and a bowl of mushroom soup for $7. Thinking back on my time here though I wish I had found a German restaurant and sampled some of that cuisine. There’re still a few days left, maybe Thursday on the way to the rally?
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