Re: Scarborough/Smith etc
-
In reply to:
Re: Scarborough/Smith etc
Julie Smith 11/30/11
Hi Julie:Oh, no, goodness no.White pages simply means that they are residential numbers and not business numbers. Business numbers are usually reserved in what are called the yellow pages. It's carried over to online phone and address directory searches. It has nothing to do with anyone's racial identity. To my knowledge (though I could be wrong), address directories were never segregated. But it does remind me of a story a cousin told when I was visiting some years ago. It was during the bad old days of segregation. She was new to the city and very young.She went to do her laundry at a coin laundromat.There were 2 rooms.One said "whites only" and the other said "colored."She thought it was odd, but thought maybe they did things differently in the city, so she duly separated her white laundry from her colored laundry and took the colored laundry into the other room to put it in the washers in the colored room. She said she got some very odd stares.It wasn't until later of course that she realized they weren't referring to the laundry....(ahem).
Anyway, I have not yet found what I've been looking for on my Scarborough relation. It gets tangled when you have two people of the same name appearing in the same general area but can't find supporting documentation to either confirm that they are actually one person or to verify that they are actually two different people and 2 different families. The 1850 and 1870 censuses are somewhat notorious for missing people (which would have helped if both Washington Scarboroughs had been counted).Also, people did move around, did die, and generally muddle things for genealogists.I'll just have to keep picking at it until I can unearth evidence.It's not the first time I've had this happen -- had one ancestor living in a county in Georgia, as did another person from a different branch. Same name. Same time period. And had wives with the same first name.
You never know. You know what they say about the six degrees of separation. We could end up being related somewhere along the line. I have numerous English ancestors in my family from my mother's side. I haven't taken them across from America back to England, but I do know the families were from all across Great Britain.
best regards, Patricia