It’s Halloween weekend! However, it’s also the end of Daylight Savings Time – boo!

Randy Seaver has a fun challenge for us and, of course, it’s related to the holiday:

1)  Find an ancestor who has a life event (e.g, born, baptized, married, died or buried) on Hallowe’en (31 October).

2)  Tell us about him or her — who were his or her parents, spouses, children, occupation, residences, etc. 

Like Randy, I ran On This Date in RootsMagic and decided to go with the earliest date that pertained to a direct ancestor. By chance, it happened to be the first entry on the list.

Dorothy Austen is my 10X great grandmother and never came to the colonies. She was likely born c1560 and married (1) Thomas Foster on 20 January 1581 in Biddenden, Kent, England.

They had one son, my 9X great grandfather, Richard Foster, born c1582, but it was one more gneration before Dorothy’s grandson, Hopestill, was born and made the decision to leave England and settled in Dorchester, Suffolk, Massachusetts, c1641.

However, Thomas died soon after and Dorothy married (2) John Besbeech on 31 October 1586, also in Biddenden.

No information has been found about the occupations of either Thomas or John. Dorothy was likely a housewife or, perhaps, worked as a servant for neighbors.

Dorothy died between 27 December 1619 and 4 January 1620, probably in Biddenden, Kent, England.

I asked Claude the significance of Halloween (All Hallows Eve) in 1586. Its reply:

In Tudor England, 31 October was All Hallows’ Eve, the vigil before All Saints’ Day (1 November), followed by All Souls’ Day (2 November). Before the Reformation, these were major observances: bells rang through the night for the souls in purgatory, and people prayed for the dead, gave alms, and sometimes gave “soul cakes” to the poor in exchange for prayers.

By 1586, though, England had been Protestant for decades under Elizabeth I. Reformers rejected purgatory and prayers for the dead, so many of these practices were officially suppressed. All Saints’ Day remained in the Church of England calendar, but the vigil rituals, the all-night bell ringing, and the soul-cake customs were discouraged or driven underground. Some bell ringing and quiet traditions persisted in places, since customs rarely vanish on command.

Therefore, under Protestant England, 1 November remained as All souls Day in the church year, but 31 October had no official significance.

Thanks, Randy, for a fun Halloween-themed challenge this week.

Only a few days to go and October will be history, leading into the end-of-year holidays.

Randy Seaver has a non-holiday themed challenge for us this week, but one that is linked to historical events:

1)  An Ancestor Who Lived Through a Major Historical Event — Pick one ancestor who was alive during a war, pandemic, natural disaster, or economic upheaval. 

2)  What do the records tell you about how it affected them?

Even though I suggested this topic to Randy, I had to think for a while because I’ve already blogged about so many ancestors.

Samuel Scripture (c1650, England-after 1720, probably Groton, Middlesex, Massachusetts is my 7X great grandfather with several unique characteristics in my family tree.

First, Scripture is one of the unique surnames in my tree, in that most, if not all, of the Scriptures in the U.S. today are descended from this man.

Second, he is the only ancestor I have who also lived in the Caribbean. On February 20, 1662 Samuel apprenticed himself to John Swinerton, at Bristol, England, to serve for four years as an indentured servant on Nevis. Nevis is one of the British Islands of St. Kitts, of the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles, West Indies.

Third, and tied in with today’s challenge, is that I went to college only a few miles from where Samuel fought in the Great Swamp Fight in 1676 during King Phillip’s War.

King Phillip’s War, also called Metacom’s War, was a colonial war during which various tribes belonging to the Algonquins fought in New England against the colonists. It is estimated that over 5,000 native American died and 2,500 colonists before the war ended with Metacom’s death in 1678.

Samuel Scripture served as a scout under Captain Joseph Syll of Massachusetts and took part in the Great Swamp Fight in December 1676 near South Kingstown, Washington, Rhode Island.

The fight is sometimes called the Great Swamp Massacre because when the colonial militia found the Indian fort in Narragansett, 1,000 men attacked the fort and killed about 600 Native Americans. The fort was then burned down, leaving survivors with no winter rations. The colonists lost about 70 men.

Samuel Scripture likely volunteered to serve in this war because he had settled in Groton, Middlesex, Massachusetts, which was destroyed by the Indians on 13 March 1676.

While King Phillip’s War wouldn’t have much international historical notice today, it was a monumental event in Massachusetts, Rhode island and even Maine in the late 17th century.

Samuel was a young man, having married Elizabeth Knapp in 1674 in nearby Cambridge before settling in Groton. He lost his home in the March 1676 attack and the Groton settlers had to rebuild their lives.

The irony is that I earned my B.A. from the University of Rhode Island, which is a very short 4 miles from the site of the Great Swamp Fight. Of course, at the time I was at URI, I had never heard of the battle, but today I know that Samuel Scripture was at that bloody massacre.

Thank you, Randy, for this week’s topic.

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MyHeritage Scribe AI tool is one of my favorites so I loved seeing Randy Seaver’s challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun this week:

1)  MyHeritage introduced the Scribe AI tool to analyze, transcribe, translate, and provide historical context to a record or photographic image in the past year.  Have you used it?

2)  Pick one record image or photograph image from your collection and ask Scribe AI to do its’ task list for you. How did it do?

When Scribe AI was first released, I decided to test it out to see if it could read any of the trove of family letters I inherited from my Nana in 1985. The problem was that the family members who wrote from today’s Slovakia spoke Rusyn and/or a mash up of Slovak and Rusyn.

I met a distant cousin at Nana’s funeral who was born in the village and could read the letters, but she was elderly and not able to do full translations.

I’ve digitized all the letters and have placed the originals in archival albums to preserve them.

Enter Scribe AI!

This letter was written in Roku 1924/Year 1924 and I knew it mentioned Nana’s siter, Mary Tidik – written as mery Tidik. It mentioned Nana – Juli zabol/Julia Sabo.

This page isn’t signed – many of the family letters aren’t – but I suspect that there might be another page to it, which I haven’t matched up from all the pages I have.

I was absolutely thrilled with AI’s identification of the language as Carpatho-Rusyn dialect.

My cousin, Margie, said the letter was from Mary to Julia and she was crying about living in Pennsylvania, which she didn’t like.

Nana and Mary didn’t have the opportunity for much education – Grade 4 was about it – and my great grandparents had none. Others had to write what was dictated to them.

However, all the letters in the early 20th century begin with the typical Rusyn Greek Catholic greeting and the text tends to be very flowery.

In some of the later letters, I wondered how they could write 3 pages and basically say “Hello. How are you? We are fine.”

If you haven’t tried out Scribe AI, I can’t recommend it highly enough. I never expected AI to be able to identify and translate a Rusyn dialect that few speak today.

Thanks, Randy, for this week’s challenge. I love it!