Receipts from the Tobacco Warehouses of Southern Virginia

Pomp Fenity's receipt from Shelton's Warehouse
Gretna, Virginia 1917

Sometimes you won't immediately recognize the significance of what you're seeing when you're scanning documents at someone else's house. It took me until about a month ago to understand what these are.

Tobacco farming has a reputation for being the signature crop of wealth in the American South. I had no concept of how simplistic that understanding was until I saw the way my ancestors went about selling tobacco from their farm. Not to mention some of the meager profits they took home.

If you had a large plantation that could bring a large yield, certainly it was booming business. But for the more humble farmer, it was a very different story.

Tobacco was auctioned off in warehouses. You could only get what someone was willing to pay for the amount of crop you had. Whereas the market among the wealthy plantations was all about monopoly, the poor man's game was about being first and haggling a price. Warehouses could also charge auction fees, commissions, working fees--all sorts of ways to skim profits off the top of someone's paycheck.

There was no guarantee that the average farmer would make a decent profit on his crop. And once it was sold for a given price, there was no do-over. No second chances at a different warehouse offering a better price. It was just gone.

Pomp Fenity kept all of his receipts from what he made at auction. I have 19 of these receipts, ranging in time from 1902 to 1928. They come from nine different warehouses, so you can see how they shopped around. Once I looked over them carefully, I could begin to see that each one told a story about more than just a business transaction.

This one from Acree's Warehouse in 1918 is one of my favorites.

Callie Fenity on receipt from Acree's Warehouse
Danville, VA 1918

Note the giant red tribute to the liberty bonds and home front support of World War I. Pomp Fenity served his country during WWI, so caring for the farm fell to the other members of his family. The home and their family of 6 children would largely fall to Annie. She had lost a son in July the previous year, and another in May of 1918. With her husband engaged in supporting the war, her struggle must have born upon her with an unimaginable weight.

Surely this left a large responsibility of the farm to fall upon the children to support. In 1918, the two oldest children were John W. Fenity, 13 and Callie May Fenity, 11. The remaining children range in age from 3 to 9 years old.

I had always been told that Callie couldn't read or write especially well because she dropped out of school to "work the farm." But I never understood what that meant until I saw an 11 year old little girl selling tobacco on her father's behalf during World War I.

I treasure these insights into my ancestors' lives. Their struggle becomes palpable the moment you truly understand the fact behind the figures. The truth is found in some pretty surprising places, so be sure you don't miss a golden opportunity because something looks too ordinary to be interesting.

Making a Timeline... for your BLOG!

Check out this amazing new timeline I learned how to use! Complete with documentation and links to the originals. I can finally post all of the documentation about an ancestor in one convenient post without it going on for days!

Also, because it runs out of a Google Spreadsheet in Google Drive, I can make an infinite number of these timelines without it taking up ANY drive space!

Think it can't get better? Well, it just did. Because it's a Google Spreadsheet, it will update in real time. So every time you make a breakthrough and find more documentation, all you have to do is add a line in the spreadsheet. It will then update automatically and display your result in the original post.

Check out Timeline JS if you want to harness this sweet awesomeness!

Impossible?

At any point, I could have stopped. I could have said I had enough information on Charles and simply called it quits. But I didn't. I'm stubborn/persistent/obsessed, whatever you want to call it. As long as there's something else out there for me to find, I'm going to keep searching until I find it.

And that's why I'm good at what I do.

Behold, ladies and gentleman, my 3x great grandfather Charles Henry Pinheiro

Charles Henry Pinheiro

Born February 1856 in Barbados
Lifetime resident of Halifax, Nova Scotia
Died 13 July 1944 in Montreal, Quebec

Which is to say, the obituary from Halifax Public Libraries came in today!

Charles Henry Pinheiro's obituary
The Halifax Herald, 22 July 1944. pg 18

I was expecting the obituary. But I had no idea it would have so much detail, be so well written, and include a PICTURE. Pardon my French, but I never imagined I would see a picture of Charles Pinheiro at all! As a black man, I didn't imagine that a picture would have ever been taken, or would survive, or make it to a newspaper. I was still reeling from the fact that he even had an obituary. I never entertained the possibility that he would have the best obituary I have EVER seen!

I can't take all the credit for this find. HPL's footwork is the only reason it's in my hands today. Also to Judith Fingard for the source citation that took us in the right direction. I wouldn't have made it anywhere close to this moment without her. Mad props to them all!

And of course, you know what time it is now...

Happy dance time!

Genealogy in Halifax, Nova Scotia

Doing genealogy for Halifax, Nova Scotia has been like a frolic through a genealogical sunny meadow. I've never seen a place that made it so easy to find original records, to use a new website, or trace multiple generations of a family. Quite frankly, when I die and go to genealogy heaven, it's gonna look like Canada.

There's an essential trifecta which allows this to be the case, and our friends to the North deserve mad props for a job well done. So if you're doing Maritime genealogy, there are three resources you need to be using.

Library and Archives Canada

Before you sign up for Ancestry.ca, get your census records here! They have census records available for free, which you can download. The only one you have to pay to see is the 1921 Canadian census, which LAC sold to Ancestry.com. But if you take a visit to a local Latter-day Saint family history center, you can search the 1921 census there for free.

LAC is also your first stop for doing war research, especially WWI. My great great grandfather Lester Ince was one of the few black men admitted to the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in 1915. I got free access to his attestation papers, which I could also download for free. When I looked into what it would cost to buy copies of his personnel file, I was a little irritated to see it was .40 a page for a file of 25-75 pages. But it didn't last long, because I discovered that all of these personnel files are being digitized in honor of the 100th anniversary of World War I. By next year, I'll be able to download this information for free.

More countries should be taking lessons from Canada. 

Nova Scotia Archives, Historical Vital Statistics

The Nova Scotia Archives website itself is average. Every time I go onto it I find myself in a new section for the first time, not sure how I got there, and not really where I intended to go. But that's not the website on which I want to focus.

Buried in that website is THIS treasure trove: novascotiagenealogy.com

Not only can you search for birth, death, and marriage records... but you can search for them all on the same website... and you can see the originals!

I know, right?! Unheard of! But now that I've seen that someone has managed to do it, I can't for the life of me figure out what is wrong with the rest of the world.

Halifax Public Libraries

So my 3x great grandfather was a pretty amazing dude. He didn't let any sort of racial prejudice keep him from being a successful provider for his family. He lived a long life, fought the good fight, and after his death he actually had an obituary. And you wouldn't believe the struggle I've been through to find it.

I won't describe it, it's painful to my cerebrum.

Within 24 hours of contacting the Halifax Public Library and submitting my inquiry, they found the obituary I wanted. With incorrect information to search with, I might add. And not only are they going to send me the bill WITH the obituary, they're only gonna charge me $5 Canadian.

They didn't come at me with some nonsense about hiring a genealogist, or let's charge you $30 a year to be a part of our genealogy society first, or refuse to help me because I'm not a resident of their library system. Heck, I'm not even a resident of their country. But they gave my request their full attention until it was resolved, and they barely asked me for anything in return. And because of that, I'm going to give them a donation.