Today’s exciting find: a historical 103-year-old world map, hidden in Grandma’s steamship travel journal!
This 1922 antique world map (made by the George F. Cram company, Chicago; for Kiggins and Tooker CO, New York) reveals how far the British Empire and other ruling empires extended. (You can see the color-coding chart, bottom R on the map.)
The map also includes dashes showing steamship travel paths through the seas.
This helps me trace where Grandma’s ship sailed and stopped in 1926. The color-coding shows me who ruled the countries she passed through at that time (unless that changed shortly after the map was published.)
As a bonus, note also the solid lines marked in the seas, indicating submarine cable lines from World War 1.
(Later in this post you’ll see how the map unfolds from the journal.)
Sometimes I think my own home is a historical wonderland!
I have so many boxes of antique handwritten photos, letters, and other memorabilia, it’s easy to lose track of what I have. I joke that I came from a family of hoarders. But I DO relish items hoarded now for over a century which are now in my possession.
It’s a historical writer’s dream, right?
For the past year, I’ve searched for such a map online. In the meantime, I had this all along!
[My excuse for missing this map: I was temporarily derailed for a few years, assembling and editing a 1950s-1960s collection of vintage scifi short stories, written by yet another family member. See Gremmie’s Reef, now in print.]
It helps that I’ve now switched my office research piles from vintage science fiction manuscripts back to the India artifacts. So I now have more at my fingertips, including this travel journal.
Here’s how this antique world map physically unfolds:
When Gladys wrote in this journal, she’d just begun her steamship journey. It would last 51 days.
She noted that she boarded the S.S. President Garfield in San Francisco, California in August of 1926. She then had various stops in other countries and ship changes before finally landing in Madras, India to marry Grandpa Ken.
A bit of their romantic history:
Ken graduated from high school in Walla Walla, WA with Gladys in 1915. They then both attended the University of Washington in Seattle.
After college graduation, Gladys went to San Diego to teach.
In 1923, 25-year-old Ken (J. Kenneth Pearce) was sent to South India, to work as a Forest Engineer for the British Indian government.
In the fall of 1925, Ken got a short home leave to visit Washington State. He then proposed to Gladys. It was about time! For ten whole years they’d been close friends. But during that visit, sparks flew.
Gladys and Ken would live in India until 1933: first in South India, and later in the Andaman Islands.
The Andaman Islands
The Andamans are tiny specks on this world map, in the Bay of Bengal. The islands are east of the Indian mainland, near Burma (now Myanmar) and Siam (now Thailand.)
This particular map has the Americas in the center (being published in the USA.) So the R edge of this map shows the mainland of India, while the L edge has the Andaman Islands.
If you zoom in close you can see where Gladys put an arrow pointing to them. Seeing it on a globe or other-centered map might make it easier to visualize this.
Still, what a great find this is! I now have this map as my computer screensaver.
I’m sure the cartographers who drew it 103 years ago could have never imagined THAT.
What’s in your own attic, basement, or closet? What surprise about your own ancestors awaits you…or have you already found?
Please share your own discoveries in a comment, or email me via my Contact page. I’d love to hear from you.
This post is in the series Stories from Family Memorabilia, on researching family history, via odd objects and papers.
Today’s historical mystery is a 1938 4th Grade report card. It’s a strange report, from an odd location.
And as usual, I can’t pick up any old family paper without it stimulating my curiosity. Like Paul Harvey, the old American radio broadcaster, I want “the rest of the story.”
Despite the missing first name on this paper, I realize quickly I’m looking at my dad’s report card, since in 1938 he was 10 years old. Still, Inoticed odd things about this report.
Harsh Teachers
For starters, one teacher’s comments were over-the-top insensitive. I’m not a fan of participation trophies, so mentioning he was sloppy or untidy was acceptable. But for his English teacher, H.D.H., to call him–any kid!–“lazy and unintelligent” raised my Mama hackles.
Dad as an adult was both industrious and bright, working as a creative landscape architect. So I put on my psych cap. (I formerly worked in both psychiatric and educational Occupational Therapy.) What the heck was going on with Dad at age 10?
Words from less harsh teachers described him in this report as “content with something much less than his best”, “aught to have done better”, “inclined to be erratic”, “rather mischievous”, disobedient, silly, slack, and forgetful. Ooooh, this is beginning to sound like a boy who had potential, but didn’t give a rip. But why?
Conversely, his French teacher wrote “He is keen and intelligent and well ahead for his age.” His Scripture teacher wrote “listens well and answers intelligently.” And while Dad was 10, the average age of the class was 11 years old. Hmm. I’ve worked with gifted children who misbehaved out of sheer boredom.
Children on the Move
Finally I notice the words at the top: Form: “Remove” and in the tiniest cursive imaginable at the bottom of the report, “Knowing he is leaving has unsettled him, I think.”
So Dad was leaving. To go where? And where, in the world (literally) was this school, teaching French and Latin to 4th graders?
The odds were high he had just come from another country, and soon leaving for another. You see, Dad was the son of an American foreign service officer. I have a list of dates of dates and places where Dad’s family lived.
This list below, created by one of Dad’s sisters, reveals that Dad moved four times in his first 10 years of life. Born in Winnipeg Canada, he then lived in Arlington Virginia, Trieste Italy, and Plymouth England, then later that same year to Lynchburg, VA.
Dad was born in 1928. He lived in four countries before age ten.
Where was Ravenswood School?
The location of Ravenswood School puzzled me. In 1938 Dad lived in two places. Historical sites for Lynchburg don’t show any school by that name, yet four hours from there is the town of Ravenswood, West Virginia. Three schools there had the name Ravenswood.
I found in my ancestry app that while Dad was at Ravenswood (in January) his grandmother had died in Lynchburg.
So the Lynchburg timing was right. But wait! But why would they dump him in a school four hours away at age 10, unless it was a boarding school? They didn’t have boarding schools in WV, right?
Also unusual to me was the inclusion of Latin and French in an American 4th Grade classroom, even in 1938. The wording was weird too: “Form 4” instead of “Grade 4” with the school term was labeled “Easter.”
I called my lifeline (my brother) who said dad had been in a boarding school at some point in his life. So thinking the town of Ravenswood, WV might be a red herring, I Googled Plymouth, England. Lo and behold, there was a Ravenswood School in England, too.
Then began a deep dive for me down a dark hole for two days.
British boarding schools for 8-year olds?!
That Ravenswood was indeed a boarding school. And from the dates on the report card, I realized Dad had been there at ages 9 and 10. Possibly at even a younger age. WHAT?
Although my grandparents were American, it was particularly common for children of diplomats and others in working government service in other countries to send their children to boarding schools. The justification for it was that it would supposedly give children more stability and an excellent education.
But for some reason, I always thought this involved the teen years, not children still clutching teddy bears and wanting mom to read bedtime stories to them.
I was shocked to finally understand one of the lines in tiny print at the bottom of Dad’s report card: “too many stripes for silly behavior and disobedience.” That meant beatings with a cane. I was also distressed reading about how much bullying and even more extreme abuse took place within early boarding schools, meted out by older children.
Dad, born in February, at the time of this report card was only 10 years and 1 month old, so the report was mostly about his behavior at age 9.
Boarding school documentaries reveal harsh truths
I then watched two documentaries on YouTube showing 8 year olds being sent off to boarding school in more recent years. I was disturbed by how it distressed those particularly young children. Leaving Home At Eight | Boarding School Children follows four little girls, and The Making of Them (1994) (also connected with Nick Duffell) several 8 and 9-year-old boys.
Listening to one little boy in the latter documentary broke my heart. He had quickly learned to shut down his emotions and be a brave little man. Boys who cried for their mothers were particularly targeted for bullying.
Strangely, those two modern documentaries revealed distress in some of the mothers who felt pressured to send their kids to boarding schools. They were truly persuaded it would be good for them. Some believed it would give their children more stability, what with the family moving often with Dad’s work. Many of these women had husbands who had been in boarding schools themselves, so for the fathers that was all they knew.
I urge you to watch those documentaries, but with a tissue handy.
Raising resilient kids at on the move
This deep dive has me appreciating the permission I always had, being an American, to educate my children in a variety of ways and even when moving to new locations. As a child, I moved every three years: Dad had apparently caught the moving bug.
I feel that caused growth in me as child and helped me to learn to adapt well. My husband and I while raising our three children lived in three different U.S. states and one other country (Norway.) Of course, it was not always easy for the kids changing schools. But they all grew into adults who love to travel.
Educationally, depending on each of my own child’s individual needs, we used a variety of methods. Our children experienced a mix of public school (including in Norway) and home school–depending on each one’s individual needs at the time–growing up to be brilliant and loving adults now teaching their own children to explore.
Fresh understanding
Now I know more than I wanted to know from a single piece of paper from my vintage paper pile. But it’s got me thinking about my dad and how it may have affected him.
It also has given me more insight into my Grandmother’s writings about living in British Raj, India. She had commented with some horror on young children being sent away from India to England to boarding schools, while both parents remained in India. Once they were shipped off, some children didn’t see their parents for years. Grandma had come from an extremely tight and loving family, so this shook her.
I want to weep for all the precious moments British moms missed (as did my Dad’s American mom) with their children in boarding school. Some of you know I wrote a book called Delight in Your Child’s Design (Second Edition, Kindle) so know my passion for that. I can only hope that those moms now know there are ways to educate children well, while keeping them close.
I’m holding a letter typed 56 years ago, signed by Damon Knight (1922-2002.) It was sent from The Anchorage, in Milford PA, to author John Hayden Howard.
Image of Damon Knight’s home called The Anchorage. It burned down in 1979, according to the Times Herald-Record.
He and his sci-fi writing wife Kate Wilhelm co-founded the Milford Science Fiction Writer’s Conference, and hosted workshops in their big aging Victorian home, The Anchorage.
One of his Knight’s stories, written in 1950, became an episode of The Twilight Zone. In “To Serve Man,” men find an alien cookbook with a recipe titled by the same name. They think it’s about how to feed humans. Spoiler Alert: it becomes apparent that they are the meal. I’ve seen that episode, which makes it even more fun having his signature in front of me.
Knight also wrote for the Captain Video television show. (Incidentally, Hayden Howard was later asked by his agent Scott Meredith to audition to write for Captain Video. However, that would have involved a move to New York, so he didn’t go for that. He loved living in Santa Barbara!)
Back to Damon Knight’s letter:
At first glance, Knight’s letter to Hayden Howard looks like a simple a rejection letter. Those always sting for writers. Wrote Knight:
I return this one with regrets. I grok some of it, but am not sure what the story as a whole is intended to mean.”
Grok? I see now that means grasped. Yay, a new fun word to use. You grok that?
But then Knight followed that comment up with thoughtful questions about Howard’s plot and characters in the story he was rejecting, The Brave Candidates.
I have an original copy of that. It’s interesting, yet agree that it’s not one of his best (unlike the other 17 stories I chose for the Reawakened Worlds anthologies). The Brave Candidates is a political story set on a planet where aliens (Earthmen) intrude.
Howard had better success throughout his writing career with publishing other politically themed stories, so remember authors: no writers bat a thousand! In 1971, Hayden Howard’s political story To Grab Power was published by Isaac Asimov in one of his anthologies. It’s now being included in Reawakened Worlds Book 2, coming soon. So that one hit it out of the ballpark.
On serialized stories vs. stand-alones:
Knight mentioned that the story felt incomplete, “. . . as if it were one of those segments of novels Fred Pohl keeps printing.”
Ironically, before Knight wrote this letter in August of ’68, Hayden Howard’s works had actually been serialized by Pohl, in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine. One novelette in that series was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards. The resulting novel, The Eskimo Invasion (1967, Ballantine) was also nominated, for best novel.
Back to Fred Pohl: Frederick Pohl–in the same writing groups as Knight–was the 12th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, awarded by SFWA. Pohl also was later inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. So I suspect what Knight was saying (referring to Pohl’s segments of novels) was that he (Knight) was seeking standalone stories instead.
A redeeming final comment from Knight:
In Damon Knight’s letter to John, he revealed openness to more of Howard’s work:
If I have missed the point, please forgive–and send me some more.”
That makes this letter– in my opinion, one Holy Grail of a rejection! Any writer should feel fortunate to get such an intriguing and affirming rejection–as well as honest advice–from a future Hall-of-Famer.
Fast-forwarding to the future, you can now download some stories by both Knight and Howard for free here, to read online or via Kindle, at Project Gutenberg.
The book The Henna Artist (by Alka Joshi) includes scenes set in the Indian palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur. That brings alive a 1920s invitation in my possession–from that maharaja to my American grandfather, J.K. Pearce.
This is an invitation to my grandfather from His Highness the Maharaja of Jaipur. The location and time: At Home (the palace) June 1st at 4 P.M. (most likely a year between 1923 and 1926.) The event was a Gymkhana (featuring races and competitions) on the Horse Show Lawn.
While this seems a huge departure from my recent blog posts on vintage sci-fi and Reawakened Worlds, it’s not quite the stretch you imagine. Yes, 1920s historical nonfiction and 1960s science fiction are different genres. But what they have in common is the past.
The connection between the two genres is an abundance of artifacts inherited from my own family. They surround me in my home office.
On one hand, I possess vintage science fiction manuscripts, author-agent letters, and magazines (Galaxy, IF, and others) with short stories written by my stepfather in the ’60s.
Yet I’m also surrounded by 1920s ephemera. That includes photos, film reels, diaries, letters, and unusual objects from my maternal grandparents’ time in British Raj India (1923-1933.)
Sometimes I can’t recall which time period I’m in, particularly 2024!
But back to how Grandpa met the Maharaja of Jaipur, and why a young American man from Washington State was in India to begin with…
Grandpa studied Forest Engineering at the University of Washington, then as an associate professor attended the Pacific Logging Conference. There he met a man who was working in the logging industry in India. That man encouraged my grandfather Ken (J. Kenneth Pearce) to apply for, take over, and expand his position.
So at about age 26, Ken was hired by government of India (then under control of the British.) He assumed a position of high authority in South India which he held for ten years. His job was to oversee elephant logging camps, introduce machine power into the camps, and help establish sawmills. At times he also functioned as a district magistrate.
In India, Ken he was called Sahib and Master Pearce, and Grandma Gladys was his Memsahib.
That felt awkward to them at times. There was great pressure for them to hire many servants. Yet both of my grandparents were highly industrious, hard-working people. They often simply wanted to do the work themselves.
Grandpa worked from sunup to sundown, often shoulder-to-shoulder with his Indian laborers (most who were ex-convicts.) Grandma sewed clothes for herself and Ken. As a physical education teacher, she was hired to evaluate physical education programs in schools in Madras and other cities.
As for the Maharaja of Jaipur–I believe this particular invitation was for just Ken, before Grandma Gladys sailed to marry him in 1926. Then Ken and Gladys lived in Tamil Nadu region until 1929, primarily in Madras (Chennai) and Ooty. (1930-1933 they lived in the Andaman Islands.)
Ken managed logging camps throughout South and Southwest India. The University of Washington archives hold artifacts related to the forestry work of J.K. Pearce in India. However, I hold all his personal mementos from that time and place, plus additional logging ephemera.
Grandma also met a maharaja: the Maharaja of Mysore, who had a summer palace in Ooty (the Fernhills Palace.)
Gladys wrote of a funny (or disconcerting?) event that took place on the palace lawn. Before moving to India, she had saved money from her job as a junior high physical education teacher. On the steamship ride over, during a stop in Asia, she bought her first set of pearls and treasured them.
At the palace, a young child (one of the princes) approached her bedecked with jewels. He pointed at her pearls and demanded to have them. As you can imagine, she clutched them, and gave him a firm “No.” She had worked too hard for those!
