Genealogical flotsam and jetsam

Awprmwvwr 3, 2026

"The expression flotsam and jetsam originated as 16th- and 17th-century British maritime legal terms used to describe different types of debris from a ship at sea. [1] (https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/flotsam-2012-11-11), [2] (https://www.etymonline.com/word/jetsam)

Very appropriate for a note on the family history of people who came from a maritime lifestyle. Sometimes while doing something completely unrelated, family history notes crop up, just like stuff floating to the surface of a river after a ship has sunk. Today, it was writing about the Delaware River for the Red Bank Battlefield Walking Tour schedule that made my Philadelphia ancestors raise their bony hands from the grave and wave at me "visit us! don't forget us!" and I found myself looking up Great Grandfather Hiram (Scots Irish early ancestor) and Great Grandmother Lavinia Johnston (family born in Ireland before coming to Philadelphia and marrying Hiram McQuiston and starting our Philadelphia family tree.) Not to be ignored, the Garwood Cheesemand clan clamored for attention and once again, I found myself sorting through the bits and pieces for paper trails.

I think my quest began with two things - my natural curiosity and my gamily history mystery which bedeviled me until I began to unravel it. When I found out that my mother, Mary Lavinia (Goldy) and her sister Sarah, had been adopted by their Aunt Lavinia (Garwood/McQuiston) Lyons, I wanted to know what had happened to my mother's biological parents but my Grandmother was, ulike me, a very closed mouth and secretive woman. She evaaded my childhood questions and also made up unrealistic stories - the classic being that they were killed in an automobile accident. The truth as it turned out, was that the mother of Mary Lavinia and Sarah had died young in the tuberculosis epidemic that followed the Spanish flu epidemic. Her husband, Levy Goldy, the son of a New Jersey famer, was unable to care for the girls and put them into the Friendless Children's Home in Camden, NJ wher they remained with their sister Elizabeth, until their young Aunt married Joseph Lyons and was legally able to adopt them.

William C. Garwood had married Mary Lavinia McQuiston and had two daughters, one of whom, married Levy Goldy and then had two daughters and died. The Garwood line connects to the Peter T. Cheesmean line through Major Peter T. Cheeseman's only daughter, Rachel who married her school teacher, William Collins Garwood. That branch of the family grew in Turnersville where William C. Garwood was a tax assessor, a Justice of the Peace, and a storekeepr in the Turner store, as well as a school teacher.

I aam foggy, perhaps just this morning on how their daughter ended up with the (allegedly) feckless Levy Goldy. The daughters of that union were my great-aunt Lavinia and her sister Sarah. Great-aunt Lavinia was the one I knew all my childhood on 10th and Oregon Avenue with the bookshelf in the basement that made me a bookworm and school teacher like that long ago ancestor William C. Garwood.

So I spent this morning re-visiting this complicated shrub of ancestors and their complicated life stories. I ended up reaching all the back to our English origins in Suffolk England and the maritime world that threw up these human bits of cargo onto the shores of the new world. One of them was a Quaker and is buried in the Burnlington Friends Cemetery, so there is the mystery of roots - I became a Quaker like my one ancestor and a school teacher like another. Not that either of those two outcomes would have been unusual in the periods of time in which they fruited.

I pestered my poor daughter (living in England) with the information, which no one but me seems to find interesting or engaging. I am sorry for that. I don't know why it pesters me so or why I pester others with it but I do know I am not alone. Millions of people across America are fascinated with their origin stores and feel the same connection with these ghosts that I do, so much so that industries have been spawned from it, like ancestry.com. I would join back up but it is too expensive right now. My grope doesnt' stop with family tree information, however, I spend countless hours watching one documentary after another about our human origins as well - all the latest on Neanderthals, homo sapiens and our cousins Denisovans and the others. Rising Star Cave is one of the ones I have watched more than once. Just this week I must have watched at least four documentaries about tiny specks of bone giving up dna connections. Those researchers and I have a lot in common. We want to know - we don't know why, but we do. I have engaged in so much history during my first decades of retirement because I wanted to re-visit those days of my early ancestors and know their lives. Most recently the thread took me back through the Midwife's Tale both the book and the documentary and once again, I visited the life of women of the Colonial period and their (to me) horrific experiences in childbirth and illness. These threads run in so many directions and yet they make patterns, and the latest pattern runs right through to the headline news of this week:

Gloria Steinem, most influential activist of the Second Wave of Feminish died at the age of 92. The lives of women: our lives in romance, sex, childbirth and motherhood. Our careers as secretaries, nurses, school teachers, our struggles as single mothers. This morning I awoke feeling grateful and proud that I had been able to buy a house - a house of my own on my own with my own ernings. This is a very modern accomplishment. I remember my father bing so proud of me for it and aso both my parents being so proud of me for being able to go to college and graduate! A woman being able to buy a house on her own, a single mother is a very modern accomplishment not accessible to my own mother's generation - the generation before female 'credit' and careers with wages sufficient to independence. Not saying that no women had those accomplishments, just that the average woman did not. My mother didn't even have the chance to get a high school diploma having been adopted during the depression and required to go to work and help her family survive.

Thank you Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug and all the women with you and before you for all you made possible for my generation of women and thos eto follow!

wrightj45@yahoo.com