And you are…?
My Grandfather was Roger Williams Birdseye
A digital legacy is not as easy as you think
My grandfather, brother of the famous Clarence Birdseye Jr. of frozen food fame, was a writer like I am. Roger swam. I swim. He bowled. I bowl. He led groups. I lead groups. He had a sense of humor. Well, you get it…
He died before I was born but, through his journals of life in New York from 1908 to 1912, World War I in France 1914–1918, and later his southwest travel articles from the ’20s (New York Magazine, National Geographic), I feel a connection with him.
Tip: Keep journals! Descendants and others not yet born will know your life and travel through time with you.
Because he is my maternal grandfather I do not share his last name. To make matters worse, “Player” is not my birth name. I chose Mike Player as my professional name. Don’t ask. I’m proud of it.
After I’m gone I want to be connected with my grandfather in a literary lineage, however humble. But there are roadblocks.
I have no descendants. The first step is to get his material preserved.
His journals and letters from 1914–1918 span his time spent fighting on the front lines in France in World War I. He earned the Distinguished Conduct Medal for bravery in action in the second battle in Ypres.
He met my grandmother, nurse Effie Dixon, in a sanitorium in Ontario after the war. She was recovering from a gas attack in France and he from tuberculosis. Between the two of them I have hundreds of photos, his diaries, and letters.
They both fought for Canada so I approached the Canadian War Museum to donate the originals of all of the material. My donation was approved. I was informed, however, that I can’t be listed (except in private records) as the donor grandson Mike Player. The museum has a “no conditions” policy for accepting material. Essentially, the diaries will be exhibited as if they just appeared out of thin air.
Why does this matter? Numerous articles have been written about the Birdseye family and my grandfather and, as I stated above, I have no descendants to tell our story accurately.
In “First Across: The Letters of Roger Williams Birdseye, 1915–1917” by Leonard G. Shurtleff (Stand To Magazine, January 2001), my grandfather is described as having “fathered several children,” and “Of Birdseye himself, we know little else.” Untrue. My mother was an only child, and I have his complete writings. Roger went on to work for the U.S. Geological Survey team in the Southwest during the 1920s and published articles and wrote short stories.
“Once a rock broke away under my hand in a thin red sheet and the inner side was one delicately beautiful tracery of fossil ferns. Ferns…in that blazing waterless, titanic place!” (From the article “Flaming Trails”)
Later, he worked for Fred Harvey before becoming General Advertising Manager for the Santa Fe Railroad.
To be fair, the writer, Mr. Shurtleff, acquired his information for his article from a great grand-niece of my grandfather who did not know my branch of the family but had only a copy of his WWI letters (bound in book form by the family). I have everything else.
Am I so hard to find? I changed my last name. We’ve all Googled people from our past and found nothing, presumably because they had common names or married into a new name, or just are very good at staying hidden from the great digital diaspora.
Another legacy roadblock occurred when a second cousin found me on Genealogy.com. She knew of our mutual relative Ellen Birdseye Wheaten. I had a photo copy of a 1923 family-published volume of the original diary kept by Ellen in the 1850s. My second cousin pleaded to have a copy for her family. I happily sent her one. She turned around and published it in book form on Amazon. She had never mentioned this was her intention. She thanked me in the preface and used my original last name “Michael Gay” even though I requested she use “Mike Player.” When I mentioned this faux pas she responded, “Well that’s what your name is in Genealogy.com.” I don’t care that she makes money from the diary I sent her even though I felt a bit like I’ve had my backpack stolen. My concern was that I have no digital trail as Michael Gay. I don’t exist as Michael Gay. There is no link to my grandfather or the Birdseyes that way.
Plus, beyond glaring typos and basic spelling errors, she published the whole thing in cursive font (all 449 pages of it). Try reading that for longer than five minutes.
The real crime is Ellen Birdseye Wheaton’s diaries are fascinating. Abolitionist. 1850. “…7th of May commenced the convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which was held in the Market Hall (Syracuse, NY), and attended by a large collection of people…Mr. Garrison presided, and the three days passed off without disturbance. Present George Thompson, E. Quincy — and Fred Douglass (Frederick Douglass), as well as others of note — and many very good speeches were made.”
The diaries deserve better.
If you want something done right, do it yourself, of course. I didn’t transfer and edit and assemble the voluminous information from Wheaton’s diaries for self-publishing.
I also didn’t write an article for Stand To Magazine about my grandfather.
I can’t complain.
But I can correct inaccuracies. I can assert my existence in the Birdseye lineage.
Although, really, I’m not sure how I feel about that either. My grandfather’s brother, Clarence Jr, the original patent holder of the modern frozen food process, was an odd bird. Nice guy. Odd. Favorite hobby was taxidermy. His father, the lawyer Clarence Sr., went to Western Penitentiary in Ohio in 1920 at the age of 65 for conspiracy and fraud. The Birdseyes I knew were mostly a cold and reserved lot.
I reached out to a few of my other second cousins whom I had met years before just to say howdy. No responses. Do I really want to be linked with these people?
I don’t even know whether my grandfather and I would have liked each other. I am queer. That was not a cool thing in his day. The one thing we shared was our writing. Our journals. I can see his world through his eyes and I find commonalities. Certainly not 100%, but I do feel like he lived an earlier extension of life for me. “Sunday January 17, 1915 — Another one of those long and very interesting days whose history would fill this book, but of which eventually little is ever said –”
On our behalf, his and mine, I am here to say: His war diaries and my grandmother’s photos are not anonymously donated. He fathered only one child. A lot is known about him. Michael Gay is no longer my name. Don’t self-publish using cursive font.
And, if we don’t write our own histories…others will.
