WAAGNFNP Posted by peter ramus, 20 Apr 2007 05:35 pm

Lost or Stolen Appellations: A Case Study

Once, gone with the Da to the Genealogical Society’s cubby in the Santa Cruz Main Library.

It’s off to the side there as you enter the building, full with all manner of raw harvested names of the past, folks registered for what must have seemed good and sufficient reason at the time with the age-old compulsive exactitude of the scribe. Stuffed with polling lists, that space is, registries of addresses. List of passenger arrivals on ships entering SF Bay 1860-1889. Reams of privately printed brochures: family trees of folks forever otherwise unremarked in history (The Johnsons of Sussex, World Concordance of Burgesses, that sort of thing). Great midden heap of ur-history in that small room, primary source material, checklists of myriads of common selves living lives only now and then winning the bare notice of public record. But, too, local newspapers on microfilm.

Two articles we’d come to see, printed by the once-lively presses of the Santa Cruz Daily Surf January 26 and 29, 1906, occasioned by the doleful end of James of the Hanahans. First, on the 26th, a curt report under a stark headline from the Central Valley town of Newman:

THE BODY OF JAMES HANAHAN

William Hanahan has received a telegram from a brother who went to Newman that he had unmistakable evidence that the body buried here as Frank Nolan was that of James Hanahan.

And then, on the 29th, another, lengthier piece, written in the newspaper style of the turn of the 20th century, a style still struggling to shrug off formal elements of English prose, to subsume those elements in a plainer style incorporating the easy, arch colloquialism of the frontier work of Harte and Twain.

Apparently the man who owned the corpse in question had come into Newman a few days before Christmas and drunk himself to death.

A fellow no one knew at all well, perhaps he’d called himself James Nolan, and, didn’t he mention a sister living in Santa Cruz? The Santa Cruz Nolans were contacted, notified of the sad particulars.

“James, you say? James Nolan? Sure if he isn’t right here in his bed sleeping it off,” replied the the spokesman for the Nolans (or words to this effect).

Some confusion on the Newman end of the conversation, naturally, followed by full disclosure: scant true knowledge of the deceased, really, description of the body, previous occupation, something about a sister in Santa Cruz. Suddenly it dawns on the Nolans!

“Ah! Oh no, if you aren’t after indicating Frank Nolan that’s the brother of James!” they all cried (we are convinced they all did cry, though the record is silent on this point).

The newsman sees his opening and takes it, noting that the ensuing confusion was sealed because the two men in question, or rather the body of the one and the “Frank” of the other, were easily conflated in that they were “both ranch hands of dissipated habits.” He goes on to report that the mistaken identity held “. . . until Frank Nolan turned up and positively denied the report that he was dead.”

So, in the event, “James Nolan” was found out, his alias, adopted for a reason now never to be known, stripped away from him, and another, equally inaccurate name briefly proposed and then revoked, and finally, at last, the deathfreight of due grief transferred to its rightful owners the Hanahans. History has nothing more of him. A broken life, long since summed in this droll headline in a defunct coastal newspaper, the ghost of its original pages now available only on microfilm:

IDENTITY ESTABLISHED
HANAHAN WAS HANAHAN
AND NOT NOLAN

I look to him,The Da with the sage eye always, taking in this tale in his measured way, unperturbed. Not one to overdemonstrate sensibilities even when confronted with this, his poor grand-uncle’s tale: his grandma’s brother it was, James Hanahannotnolan, whose gravesite we’ve visited, not three blocks distant from my own house here in Santa Cruz. Holy Cross Cemetery in Santa Cruz, the various collected dusts of the Hanahans sunk in earth there, surrounded by a low concrete curb. His mother’s people.

In the library we wind back the spool of microfilm and place it in its box. We give each other our brief looks: shared unwritable language of eyebrows bearing the brunt of meaning.

I see it clearly, the Da failing, no longer nearly spry, catch myself hoping uselessly against his passing.

“Well, I’m thinking you’ll be my executor, eh?” he says abruptly.

We laugh for all the reasons.

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Responses to “Lost or Stolen Appellations: A Case Study”

  1. on 23 Apr 2007 at 7:56 am 1. JP Stormcrow said …

    Ah, you are clearly the person to unravel the mysteries surrounding the following book from 1912:

    A thrilling story of James Hanahan alias James D. Burton, auctioneer;: Fifty years a fugitive
    by James Hanehan

  2. on 23 Apr 2007 at 10:04 am 2. peter ramus said …

    Mercifully, J.P., I see that Hanehan’s thrilling tale (or would that be Hanahan’s thrilling tale or Burton’s thrilling auctioneering, or the thrilling fugitivity of any of the three of them?) is currently unavailable, and “…We don’t know when or if this title will be in stock again.” Just as well, I’m thinking, what with the current workload of the Bureau and all.

    As an aside, looking closely at the title, A thrilling story of James Hanahan alias James D. Burton, auctioneer;: Fifty years a fugitive (Unknown Binding) , the semi-colon followed immediately by a colon, if intentional, represents a fresh and not unwelcome addition to the arsenal of authorial effects which if widely adopted could by common consent stand for that familiar place in the crafting of a manuscript where the author coughs up an inadvertently swallowed grape seed or some such just before the big finish, mm?

  3. on 23 Apr 2007 at 12:41 pm 3. Seattle said …

    What? Ok, clearly I’m as dense as a cantalope, however I’m groping for understanding.

    “…catch myself hoping uselessly against his passing.”

    So this is what this post made me think of: a phone call from my mother this weekend. How? She has pneumonia or maybe severe alergies and she’s feeling her mortality-says she’s got a 50/50 chance of making it at her age with this kind of health issue, so she wanted to arrange for me to call her every morning and for her to call me every evening. We’re to the checking in on Mom every day stage of life. What I find odd is I’m not freaking out about that. I’m in a “we live, we die” frame of mind and her time may indeed be close. I’m sure once she’s no longer there at all I’ll feel bereft of support that’s always been there.

    As for Hanahan, odd and amusing headlines aside, what a way to go. I would hope never to be so disconnect from family and friends.

  4. on 23 Apr 2007 at 1:40 pm 4. spyder said …

    So two weeks ago, i get an interesting email (i have changed a couple of the names to avoid deigning my siblings and close cousin undue issues; they are not of this particular GNF spectrum ):

    I am the one that was trying to trace the Lewis family back to Virginia, beyond Jesse Lewis in Kentucky with the Boones. I had inquired at Ancestry.com and maybe elsewhere and drew blanks.
    My grandmother was Ida Lewis Felch. She was the oldest daughter of Thomas and Martha. There were Ida, Sue, Mary, Flo, Nell and a son Frank. I never met my grandmother as she died in 1924. My mother was one of her daughters and she had another daughter, Elaine and a son, Lewis.
    I have a copy of Nell’s manuscript and have read it several times. Nell spent several Christmases with our family as she lived in Seattle and later Des Moines, WA. My wife and I traveled to Montana 3 1/2 years ago and I found the original homestead property near Stevensville. The man who owns it now said it had been in his family since the late 1800’s. His grandfather bought it from the person Thomas sold it to. The log cabin Thomas built is still there and I have some photos of it I will send you. It is now used for hay storage.
    We visited the cemetery in Missoula on our trip and found the headstone of Thomas plus there are small markers for Martha and also Nell who is burried with them.
    It is interesting that you have contacted me now as I was contacted by Xeenod Wallflower in January. Is she your sister or cousin?{indeed my sister} She lives in New Jersey and has a brother living in Bellingham, WA. {yes, one of my brother’s homes is there} Also, there is a cousin in our area, Chaotic Slim. {yep, he is} Xeenod is going to be here in May so I plan to meet with her as well as her cousin Chaotic and his wife, also my sister and brother plan to go.
    I have been trying to find the birth and death dates of all the siblings of Ida but cannot seem to find them. Do you have this information? I do have a few old photos that Nell’s grandson Sir Gallahad sent me.
    I look forward to hearing from you. Tell me about yourself and I will do likewise in my next e-mail.

    I had no clue who this guy was, or that i had cousins along that family line, or that some of them lived so close to me. My grandmother Sue was quite an amazing woman in her own right (first woman graduate of the Univ of Montana in geology), but the stories she told about Ida and Mary were even more outrageous than her own. Their brother Frank was named for “daddy father thomas’s” best friend growing up in Missouri in the 1840s and 1850s, Frank James (yep, that one and that family) {aah those Frank’s and James’s from the 1800’s}. I suppose i should try to attend this family reunion in May, though i can’t stand my sister or brother. And while i didn’t know Sir Gallahad all that well, his brother and i were pretty good buds for a number years in the wayback; hell we even surfed Steamer Lane and Pleasure Point together a number of times.

    This family tree business could be addictive, if you can keep all the names, appelations, and lineages accurate?

  5. on 23 Apr 2007 at 5:08 pm 5. James Killus said …

    Now this is odd. “Hanahan” Googles as common enough, a full 834,000 hits. Add “James” to it, and it drops, but only to 175,000. Yet “James Hanahan” is rare, rare, I tell you, with a mere 110 hits, and the mighty Google be insisting that only half of those are interesting; t’others are “very similar.”

    This goes against my own experience with my favorite subject, me. There, Killus shows 57,000 hits, even counting the metal bands and German computer systems. Add the “James” and it’s down to 32,000, but “James Killus” only takes it down a smidge, to 27,400, and that’s neglecting the times I used J. P. Killus (admittedly not so often as to make much difference).

    Just to check if “The Algorithm” has gang agley, I checked on Alta Vista to this result:

    Hanahan - 269,000
    James Hanahan - 180,000
    “James Hanahan” - 76

    Killus - 24,800
    James Killus - 5,200
    “James Killus” - 2,140

    What is it about the Hanahan’s that they so fear to name their children James? Could it be The Incident in Newman, of which all know but none dare speak? Or is it something even more sinister, an Illuminati plot, or time travelers out to rid the world of James Hanahans, to what purpose we may only speculate…

  6. on 23 Apr 2007 at 7:21 pm 6. peter ramus said …

    “What is it about the Hanahan’s that they so fear to name their children James?”

    I don’t know, but based on the stories of sad James of Santa Cruz and thrilling James the fugitive above, it’s entirely possible that people named both “James” and “Hanahan” instinctively and uniformly reach out for an alias, leaving only a trace of the original appellation among the rare remainder of contrarian James Hanahans with the gumption to stick with the name they were born to.

    (Just a thought;: the Bureau takes no position on this issue)

  7. on 23 Apr 2007 at 7:54 pm 7. James Killus said …

    (Just a thought;: the Bureau takes no position on this issue)

    The Bureau seems wise in this.