All the Sevens ... or Way Past My Shelf Date

I’ve been feeling guilty as I haven’t updated my blog for about four months, and wondered what I should write about next. Well, today is my birthday and I’ve reached the august age of seventy-seven … so I thought perhaps it was time to blog about myself for a change. The first thing to think about was what should I call this post? The title “Way Past my Shelf Date” came to mind, based on that wonderful quote from Psalm 90, verse 10: “The days of our lives are threescore years and ten …” which would seem to suggest that to live beyond seventy is to do so on borrowed time … Which is why I prefer “All the Sevens”. In my teenage years and somewhat later I used to go to the Sergeants’ Mess at Up Park Camp with my pal, Sheila Bewley, whose older sister, Dawn, had married a Sergeant, Andy Taylor, who was stationed there. There we played Tombola, a type of British bingo, which, if I remember correctly went up to 99, and was not played under letters like B I N G O , but had its own language. So 77 was “all the sevens”, 99 was “all the nines”, but 66 was “clickety-click”. 21 was “key of the door” … any number ending in zero was “blind”, i.e. 50 was “blind 50”, yet 11 was “legs eleven”, and so on. Perhaps there are some of you out there who remember all this …



I was born on May 31st, 1935 at Nuttall Memorial Hospital, at Cross Roads, Jamaica

The hospital was founded in 1923 built on land purchased by the Diocese of Jamaica and commemorates the work of the Reverend Enos Nuttall, Bishop of Jamaica, after whom it is named.  My parents, Michael Levy and Maud Smedmore, already had one son, Mickey, born 2 April 1927. They were then living at 7 Anderson Road, Woodford Park. My father was a civil service clerk in the Government of Jamaica. There is a photo of my brother, Mickey, probably taken at Anderson Road

 I have no memory of this place to go on, only the photo.

 When I was six months old my parents bought the house at 5 Holborn Road. I found an advertisement in the Gleaner of 5 August 1935 advertising the house as follows:

 I guess they must have bought the house at that time. It’s the only home I remember. Here’s a photo of my parents with me as a baby in front of the house at 5 Holborn Road --

My earliest memory of my birthday is of my fourth … I vaguely remember having this huge tube, like a very large Christmas cracker, which when opened contained all sorts of goodies. I don’t remember the contents, but I do remember dragging the container around the yard of our home at 5 Holborn Road. Somehow this was much more fun for me than whatever had been inside it.

I remember my childhood as being a very happy one. In a way I was almost an only child, as my elder brother, Mickey, was eight years older than I was and would have nothing to do with me. I realize now that, as the only male child in the family he had been quite spoiled until I came along … My mother’s aunt, Aunt Tess, made much of me and poor Mickey’s nose was quite out of joint, as we used to say. This led, of course, to ill feelings on his part, which I now understand, but did not at the time.

Our family was not that large. There were, of course, the aunts and uncles, all Smedmores, and of whom I’ve written before in my blog. I knew nothing about my father’s family on his mother’s side, the Da Costas, something I have always regretted. On the Smedmore side I had two cousins … daughters of my Uncle Lucius who had married Carrie May Burke, aka Maisie. They were both older than me. There was my cousin, Marjorie

And my cousin, Gloria

Marjorie had been born in 1925, so was two years older than my brother, Mickey, thus ten years older than me, and Gloria was born in 1927,a few months after Mickey. Both of them would have considered me as a mere child, so I really had not much interaction with them. I had another first cousin, whom I never met.  This was my cousin, Walter Berner, the only child of my father’s sister, Essie, who had married Cort Berner, and who lived in the United States. He was known as “Bunky”. I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I have made contact since with his daughter, Cheryl..

In my next post I’ll reminisce some more about my childhood memories.

 

Looking for Leopold: My Search for my Elusive Grandfather

Back in November and December 2007 I wrote about my research into my Levy family, specifically my attempts to find out more about my elusive grandfather, Leopold Levy. In those posts I wrote of what little I knew of him -- the story that he came from Alsace, was proficient in seven languages and had supposedly married my grandmother, Alice Rodrigues Da Costa, in Haiti. I also described how I found out that the marriage had actually taken place in Colon, Panama, that they lived in Kingston where their seven children were born, how three of those children died in childhood and that the family had moved around, living at various addresses in Kingston. Later on, in 2009, I wrote about my grandmother, Alice Rodrigues Da Costa, but somehow I never returned to Leopold. It’s time for me to go back to my paternal grandfather and what little more I’ve been able to find out about him.


A few years ago I made contact with a cousin in the United States. My cousin, Cheryl, is the granddaughter of my Aunt Essie, my father’s sister. Although my mother did keep in touch with Essie and her daughter-in-law, Gloria, Cheryl’s mother, the family was never close, though I do recall that Essie would send us a box of Whitman’s Sampler chocolates at Christmas. Cheryl and I corresponded several times by good old snail mail, and she sent me a number of photographs which she had found in her grandmother’s possession. Most were not identified, but I am pretty sure that a couple of them were of my grandfather, Leopold, and of his wife, Alice. Here is the photo which I believe to be of Leopold:

Of course, I have no proof that it is him, but I like to think that it is. Also in the photos I received was this one, which I am quite sure is of Alice and two of her children, my father, Michael and his sister, Essie.

I see the resemblance to my father in the eyes of the little boy, but I’m even more sure of the little girl, especially when I compare her face to the one in this photo of my Aunt Essie:

It’s always been one of my regrets that I never knew either of my grandfathers, both being so much older and dying long before I came on the scene. Ironically, I have no photograph of my grandfather, William Dey Smedmore, but I certainly knew quite a bit about him, thanks to my mother and her siblings. My grandfather, Leopold, was a mystery. He was from Alsace, or as the family called it, Alsace-Lorraine, that unfortunate part of Europe between France and Germany which seemed to bounce back and forth between the two countries. I knew nothing of how he came to be in the West Indies, or how he met my grandmother. I knew that they had married in Colon in 1886, barely two months before the birth of their eldest child. I knew this because of a notice in the Gleaner which had been pointed out to me by Madeleine Mitchell who had come across it while extracting information from the microfilm of the Gleaner. Once the Gleaner went on line I was able to find the notice myself.

So now I knew exactly where they were married, but more questions arose. Where did they meet?  Was it in Jamaica? Did Alice go to Colon to get Leopold to marry her?  I wondered if Alice’s pregnancy had become a scandal in Kingston and that marriage was the only option. The notice in the Gleaner might well have helped to stop some of the gossip. Again, who knows? Leopold was Jewish, Alice was Catholic, and marriage in a church must have been out of the question, hence they were married by the registrar. Unfortunately I have been unable to find a record of the marriage. At that time Panama would have been a colony of Colombia and I assume records of civil registration for Panama in the 19^th century must be somewhere in Colombia, but I have not been able to discover how to access them.

From what little information I could glean about my grandfather it appeared that he was a traveller of sorts. According to the family story, he was an optometrist, and I found the same information in my father’s entry in the Jamaica Who’s Who of 1941-46, keeping in  mind, of course, that he would have given that information

However, I never found any evidence to support this. On the various records of birth and death for his children, I found Leopold’s occupation variously described as “merchant”, “book clerk”, “accountant”, “book-keeper”, and “clerk” – no mention whatsoever of “optometrist”.  He married Alice in Colon in 1886, was still there when Daisy, the eldest child, was born. He was in Kingston for the birth of his second child, Lucien, but was listed as being in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, when Essie was born in 1891. He was back in Kingston for the birth of Gustave in 1894, and I have no idea where he was for the births of Leo and Joe in 1895 and 1900 respectively, as he was not the informant for either event.  As I mentioned before in an earlier post, the family seems to have moved from one address to another in Kingston; in fact, they lived in seven different places in the span of fourteen years between 1886 and 1900.  

Apart from the above the only other tangible record I had for Leopold was his signature on two documents – the birth of his son, Lucien in 1887:

and as a witness at the marriage in 1907 of his wife’s niece, Naomi Da Costa, to Gabriel Oppenheim Alexander.

So at least I knew that he was in Jamaica in 1907, but that was all.  When did he die and where, and was it possible to find out when and where he had been born? In my next post I’ll write about the discoveries I did make as a result of finding a notice of Leopold’s death in the Gleaner.

The Levy Family -- Coming to America

Of the four surviving children of Leopold and Alice Levy three went to the United States. My father, Michael, was the only one who remained in Jamaica, to take care of his mother who had been widowed in 1917. Michael joined the Civil Service in 1908 at the age of nineteen and remained there until his retirement at age sixty. Here is a view of the Governernment Buildings as they would have been in his time there.

Michael worked in the Administrator General's office, eventually becoming Trustee in Bankruptcy in 1948. This photo of him was taken inside the government offices.

After my father retired from the Civil Service he took another job, as his pension was not large enough to support the family, but that's another story ... For now I want to write about my aunt and uncles who did not remain in Jamaica but made a life for themselves in America.

The story of Jamaicans is one of movement away from Jamaica ... to other islands, to Central and South America, to the United States, to Britain and to Canada, always on the lookout for a better life, a better job, or perhaps just to get away. Just as Jamaica attracted all sorts of people from various parts of the world so too Jamaicans have left the island and settled elsewhere. In the 1900s they flocked to the United States, most of them to live in New York. On pages of the 1930 U.S. Federal Census one finds Jamaicans living together in groups in such boroughs as Manhattan.

The Ellis Island database is a wonderful source for this movement of people to the U.S. Another great source is the subscription website, Ancestry. I have used both to try to find information on my father's siblings. I have found his sister, Essie and his brother, Joseph, travelling to New York, but Leo, the other brother, continues to elude me. More of him later.

At this point I must explain that I did know Uncle Joe, who visited Jamaica in the 1950s and whom I visited with my family in 1960 when we left Jamaica to go to Canada. Unfortunately, at that time I wasn't particularly interested in family history research and didn't ask the questions I should have, so much of what I now know about my uncle Joe has been through research carried out some time after his death.

The same year that my grandfather Leopold died Joe left Jamaica to go to the U.S. The story I was told about why my father's siblings left Jamaica was this: my grandmother, Alice, was afraid that the younger boys would have to join up to fight in the first World War. (My father, apparently, was not eligible to join up because of some medical reason.) She wanted them to go the U.S. because America wasn't in the war. Joe arrived in New York in September 1917, but the U.S. had entered the war on April 6, 1917, so this story doesn't really make sense to me. At any rate, I found Joe in the Ellis Island database, travelling to New York on board the ss Catherine Cuneo, leaving Port Antonio on August 28th and arriving on September 5th. Here is what the first page of the ship's manifest looks like.

Under the column "Name and complete address of nearest relative of friend in country whence alien came" Joe gave his mother's name and this is how I knew that by 1917 she was living at 22 Beeston Street. On page two of the manifest, under the heading "Whether going to join a relative or frined...", Joe gave the name, "Mrs. Warner (friend), 346 Summer Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y." I have no idea who this Mrs. Warner could be! So often the records we find produce more questions than answers.

In my next post I'll write about some of the other surprising things I learned about my uncle Joe.

Looking for the Levy Family

Some time after I started researching my family I realized that I knew far more about my mother's family than I did about my father's. My Dad did not talk about his family very much. My mother told me what little she knew and my Uncle Rodney contributed information as well. As I've mentioned before, I did know my Grandmother Levy as a child. She lived across from my mother's family, the Smedmores, at 22 Beeston Street, on the south-west corner of Beeston Street and Love Lane.

I remember visiting her as a young child with my parents, but I don't think we went there very often. We seemed to spend more time with my mother's family. I don't know the reason for this, but I suspect my mother was somewhat resentful of her mother-in-law. The story I was told was that she and my father had been engaged for seven years before they could get married because my father had to support his mother and help pay the mortgage on her house. My grandmother was a widow. Her husband had died a long time ago and my father's three siblings had taken off for the United States so he was the only one left to take care of her. Another possible reason for this lack of closeness was that my grandmother was Catholic and my mother was a staunch Anglican, and though it seems strange in these days of ecumenicism, back then there was separation between denominations of the Christian religion. In fact, there were even differences of opinion between high-church and low-church Anglicans!

The stories I was told about my grandfather were that he was a Jew from Alsace, an oculist by trade, and that he travelled throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America. He is supposed to have brought back a gold nugget from Brazil which was made into two signet rings, one each for my brother and myself. This is a picture of my ring --

It is engraved with three of my four initials, D M L, intertwined. Did the gold nugget really come from Brazil? I have no evidence that he was ever in South America. The few records that I have for him show him in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Colon, Panama; and Cuba, where he died. My grandfather was indeed a mystery.

Here's what I was told about him by my mother, who, by the way, never knew him as he had died some years before my parents married. His name was Leopold Levy and my father was given the name, Leopold, as a middle name. Leopold could speak seven languages ... again I wonder about this. Certainly he would have spoken French and most likely German, coming as he did from Alsace, a country which has bounced back and forth between France and Germany. He certainly would have spoken English and no doubt Spanish as he spent a great deal of his time in Spanish-speaking countries. I assume that as a Jew he may have spoken Yiddish ... that makes five languages and I've no idea what the other two would have been. I was told also that he was an oculist, and in fact that is stated in my father's entry in Who's Who Jamaica. Yet, in the few records I found that name Leopold his occupation is invariably given as "clerk", "bookkeeper", or "merchant".

How and where did he meet my grandmother? Well, that was another story, this time from my Uncle Rodney who told me that they had married in Haiti. What was my grandmother, Alice Rodrigues Da Costa, doing in Haiti? According once more to Rodney, she was operating a ferry service between Kingston and Haiti! I have not so far found any evidence of this. How many children did they have? Seven, I was told, but three had died young. And then there was this fanciful tale that Leopold had insisted the first child be brought up Jewish, but she died so he stated that the rest might as well be brought up Catholic! It sounded feasible, except that certain questions kept popping up in my mind. First of all, my grandmother was Catholic and Leopold was Jewish, so who would have married them? At that time I didn't think either the Jews or the Catholics would have done so. Secondly, if they were married in the Catholic Church then wouldn't Leopold have had to agree to bring up the children as Catholics? Finally, no child of this marriage would have been named in the synagogue as the mother was not Jewish. And the tale was pretty well disproved after I discovered a baptism, performed by Father William Spillman, S. J., in Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Kingston for the eldest child, Daisy Agatha.

So, here's what I knew so far. My grandfather, Leopold Levy, came from Alsace; met my grandmother in Haiti and married her; they had seven children and he died in Cuba. As for the children the names I had were Daisy, Lucien and Gustave, all of whom died in infancy, and the remaining four were my father, Michael, and his siblings, Essie, Leo and Joe, all three of whom moved to the United States. When I began researching the family I started with birth records for the children, all of whom were born in Kingston, between 1886 and 1900, and it was not difficult to find registrations of their births in the microfilm records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), aka Mormons. I have spent a great deal of time at an LDS Family History Centre and I am grateful to the Mormons for microfilming many Jamaican records, including Church of England parish records as well as the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths. I found birth records for all seven children and was therefore able to sort out their birth order: Daisy, born September 1886, died December 1887; Lucien, born November 1887, died April 1890, my father, Michael, born August 1889; Essie, born March 1891; Gustave, born May 1894, died December 1899; Leo, born July 1895; and Joe, born January 1900.

Whenver anyone asks me how to begin doing their family history I always repeat the well-known axiom: "Start with yourself and work back". Another one is: "Talk to your relatives and ask them questions." Good advice! I certainly did. But the next good piece of advice is: "Look for the records which should confirm that what you have been told is true". (I should make one thing clear ... I didn't really get started on the research until many years after I was told the "facts", so was unable to share the results of my research with my family as they were no longer alive.)

I was somewhat stumped by the fact that my grandparents had got married in Haiti. I had no idea where in Haiti they were married -- Port au Prince was a possibility, but how to get the record? I assumed that the marriage must have taken place around 1885 as Daisy was born in September 1886, but for the longest time I had no proof of this particular fact, and then I had an email from Madeleine Mitchell, an indefatigable Jamaican researcher who is also the co-ordinator for the Jamaican Genealogy page on Rootsweb. Madeleine had been going through microfilm of the Jamaica Gleaner and had come across something of interest to me in the paper for 1886. (I also for a while went through the early issues of the Gleaner on microfilm, which I got on interlibrary loan from the Library of Congress, but at the time that I heard from Madeleine I had not yet got to that year. Now that the Gleaner is digitized and on line it is less onerous to search.) Madeleine had found evidence of the marriage of my grandparents, and it wasn't what I was told! They had not married in Haiti; in fact, the marriage took place in Colon, Panama, and not in 1885, but in July 1886! Here is a copy of the notice as it appeared in the Gleaner of July 23, 1886:

So, there was one "fact" proved wrong. I now had what appeared to be something of a scandal in the family, in that my grandmother was some seven months pregnant when she got married! Which brings up another question, namely, when and where did Alice meet Leopold? Was he living in Jamaica and then took off for Colon, as a result of which Alice went after him? She did return to Jamaica as Daisy was born there at 106 King Street. A Mrs. Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa was the informant on the birth record and Leopold's occupation was given as "merchant of Colon".

So it turns out that finding that piece of information brought up more questions than I had previously, such as, who was Mrs. Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa? The answer to this would lead me to a whole new family that I knew nothing of previously, but before that I would investigate the Levy family more thoroughly.

School Days ...

Remembering my mother's schooling and teaching career got me thinking about Jamaican schools and school days in general and what I know about the various members of my family and what schools they attended.

The following is the entry for my father in the Jamaica Who's Who, 1941-1946:

I'm not familiar with the Kingston Board School ... perhaps someone knows more about it, but I did know that he went to St. George's College, and was nineteen years old when he joined the Civil Service. Here again is a picture of St. George's College, courtesy of the website of the St. George's College Old Boys Association, Toronto Chapter.

In his book, History of the Catholic Church in Jamaica (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1988), Father Francis J. Osborne describes the founding of St. George's in 1850 by a group of Colombian Jesuits who were newly arrived from South America, having been ejected from Colombia by the president Jose Lopez. There were objections on religious grounds from Protestant citizens, but the school went ahead offering the following curriculum: Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, English, Rhetoric, History, Mathematics, Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, Drawing, and Calligraphy

Thanks to the Jamaica Gleaner online I've actually found a few items about my father's school days! The Gleaner of December 18, 1905 reports that St. George's College held an elocution contest at Gordon Hall on December 15th, at which "the large hall was packed, not only with the Roman Catholic community, but also a large number of citizens of other denominations". The article went on to report that Master Michael Levy of the junior division opened with "'Mary Queen of Scots' which was very nicely rendered'. Among the other contestants from the junior division were Master Harold Brodhurst, Master John Cassis, and Master Brian Sicard. The Gleaner stated that "the names of the successful competitors would be announced at the annual distribution of prizes to take place at the Theatre Royal on the 21st instant"

This was indeed the case, but unfortunately my father did not win the elocution contest. In the junior division the gold medal went to Vernon Purdon, with John Cassis, Jnr. and Brian Sicard getting honorable mention. However my father won honorable mention in several subjects at the prizegiving, including Academic, French, Arithmetic and Christian Doctrine.

This is my father's younger sister, Essie Gertrude Levy.

I don't know for sure what school Essie attended, but most likely it would have been the Convent of Mercy, St. Mary's, known as Alpha, named for the property on which the orphanage and girls' school was founded in 1880.

The above photo of the present Alpha Academy is from the website, Network for Mercy Education.

I assume that my father's younger brothers, Leo and Joe, would have also gone to St. George's. These two schools, along with Immaculate Conception Academy, founded in 1858 and first located on property at East Queen Street, a gift of Henry Vendryes, would have been the schools that children of Catholic families would have attended in Kingston.

The First Man in My Life ....

.... was my father, Michael Leopold Levy. (I've borrowed the heading for this post from Sandra Martin, whom I heard read from her new book, The First Man in My Life: daughters write about their fathers, published by Viking, 2007).

This is a picture of my parents and myself, at 5 Holborn Road, probably taken shortly after they had moved there. I remember as a child that my father would carry me around on his shoulders and sing to me in a high sweet tenor voice such oldies as "Silver Threads Among the Gold" or "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen". He would also sing opera arias ... this may be where I got my love of opera. I definitely remember him singing "M'appari" from the opera, Marta. And he would tell me stories ... he made up a whole series of tales about two little dogs, Blackie and Whitey, who just happened to exist on the label for Black & White Whiskey.My father was the breadwinner of the family .... my mother had worked as a teacher before she married but didn't work after marriage. As I mentioned in a previous post, they lived across the street from each other in Kingston. My father worked in the Jamaica Civil Service in the Administrator-General's Department which he joined in 1908, at the age of 19. He had attended St. George's College, on North Street in Kingston, a Catholic boy's high school, which had been founded by the Jesuits in 1850.

This photo of St. George's College is from the website of the St. George's College Old Boys Association, Ontario Chapter.

My father eventually rose to First Class Clerk and by 1948 was promoted to Trustee in Bankruptcy. I remember that as long as I knew him his hair was perfectly white. My mother said it had been like this from his youth, though it does not look quite like that in their wedding picture. This is a copy of the photograph which appeared in The Gleaner when they were married on April 27, 1926 at the Kingston Parish Church.

My Dad was the most easy-going guy I ever knew. Although he had been brought up Catholic and had gone to a Catholic school, he went along with my mother who was adamant about remaining Anglican (and high-church Anglican at that) and so they were married in the Kingston Parish Church, after being engaged for seven years, as my mother told me ... but that's another story.