 There's history here! And here. There's history there! History is everywhere! I am a quilter. And I started quilting young back in the late 70s when it was polyester and not very nice fabrics. And I didn't do well. So I put it on the table for a while. And then later, when the bicentennial came along, and they started holding quilt classes, I took a class, and then I was off to the races. I have made traditional quilts for many, many years. And in the last four years, I have started making art quilts. It's been my mission to get the art quilts into art galleries because many times art galleries do not accept quilts as an art artistic item. So that's been my mission. So I have things on display down at the Rogue Art Center, Rogue Gallery and Art Center in Medford. I've got things around on display. So I'm glad to say that people are getting a little bit more accepting about quilts. Yes. All right. So our title is Bertha's Red Work Summer Quilt. And this is Bertha. And the picture of one of the blocks on the quilt. So hello and welcome to our presentation centered around my second great aunt's Bertha's quilt. Her name was Bertha Ann Custer Solander. And we will be discussing the genealogical hints and clues that I discovered from the dates and the names written on the quilt behind me. And it is a summer quilt or a coverlet. And I'm going to tell you about other discoveries I made about my mother's research and my mother's family, Bertha's part of my mother's family. But first let me show you the summer quilt she embroidered. And just tell you a little bit about red work and how it's used in quilting. So this is the quilt. Quilt's also behind me. As I said, this is a summer quilt. And it has no batting. It is a finished bed cover that usually is lined. This one in this case is not lined. Sometimes they are tied. There's usually no quilting involved. These were used for summer covers when it got hot. And then they were put away for the winter and the winter quilts were brought out. Bertha made this cover from squares of bleached muslin. Sometimes unbleached muslin was used. I believe it's a sheet. It appears to be a sheet. It's been cut into 14-inch wide by 16-inch long rectangles. And she used embroidered it with turkey red cotton embroidery floss. And it is stitched together. The blocks are stitched together by a sewing machine. Now some of the blocks appear to be original drawings that Bertha may have drawn herself because some of the blocks up there, I've never seen those designs. And then the blocks that have the dates and the names are definitely ones that she created. And others are from commercial patterns that were published in magazines and newspapers. And Bertha's quilt does not, I mentioned that it doesn't have the lining. She may have intended it as a tablecloth. Basically, you notice it's square. But I have a feeling she used it on the bed. It has a lot of wear where the threads have worn off where somebody might have sat on it. But I don't know for sure. It shows quite a bit of use and was probably used as a coverlet. And the final task when you make a redwood quilt is after you sew the blocks together, which she did by machine, then down these seams, and you can see it on the quilt, you do a finishing stitch. In this case, I believe it's a feather stitch with that embroidery. So she got it finished and she used it. Now I want to talk a little bit about redwood before we get into genealogy clues that were in this quilt. It was very popular during the Victorian age. And it followed the trend of making crazy quilts. And crazy quilts were irregularly shaped pieces of fabric. So, you know. And they were stitched by hand or machine onto the back of usually muslin. It's called foundation piecing. And after your block was all stitched up, then you embellished it. And the Victorians used snippets and scraps from dressmaking or from some of the clothes that they had discarded. But most of them were clippings because they were new when they used them. And then they made these blocks. This is one block that was made by a lady from Shady Grove. And she dated it. That's her initials. Van Dyne, I think it's her name, Van Dance, Zance, Van Zance. And she made it in 1998. And so this is just one block. Now if you wanted to make a whole crazy quilt, the next thing you did was stitch your blocks together. And in this case, we see the block here. It's a diamond shape, meaning that this quilter set her quilt on point rather than what Bertha did, putting everything on square. This is the crazy quilt that was gifted to Ginger Rogers in the 1930s. It belongs to this group. And it's currently been loaned to the Aurora Colony Historical Society Museum because they're having their 45th annual quilt show in October, October 13 to 22nd. And they do have a website. And if you want to know more about them, there's a little flyer right there that gives you all the information you want. It's a wonderful show. It is in their museum. So the setting is just wonderful. There's four buildings. So you tour the whole museum as you go to the quilt show. And their theme this year is crazy about quilts. So that's why it was taken up there on loan. Usually these quilts, crazy quilts, were not this large. They usually were quite small, like a throw. So they would be like that size. This one is very well made. It's in very good condition and is unusual in the way that it has been preserved over the years. So Ginger took good care of it. So red work was popular after this. This is another close-up of the Ginger Rogers quilt where you could see the elaborate fabric and embroidery. So here we have red work. It lapped over crazy quilted and red work kind of slowly made their trend change over. And it started about 1880. And it featured, again, bleach or unbleached muslin for the backing. And you see over here I have some samples of red work. And this is a modern sample of red work. It's still very popular. So again, they were embroidered with turkey red, embroidery cotton, embroidery floss. It was color fast. And it did not fade when these quilts were washed. That was very important. And sometimes they used blue embroidery floss and sometimes black. Now, a folksy design, this case, some bonnetsu, was transferred to the muslin. And it was embroidered with a simple stitch. A back stitch, an outline stitch, or a stem stitch. And I think these are a stem stitch. Now, it was important when you embroidered red work that the back of the red work was supposed to be very neat. This one isn't the neatest. But you would want to hide your knots. And you wouldn't want to carry your threads over like they've done here, because it would show through on the front. So generally, the back of red work was really neat, neatly done. The embroidery stitch was simple enough that it could be taught to a child. It wasn't as elaborate or as difficult as it was doing the crazy quilts. And the designs were usually of animals, flowers, toys, landscapes, sometimes famous people, famous landmarks. But quite often, they were of children, like we're seeing on these samples. And here's another one. This is one that you would see quite often. They were often called pinning squares. And women would decorate everything in the house, the back of their washbasin splashes and their towels, the collars on their children's clothing. And they took their task really seriously. So when women get involved in a task seriously, they drive the industry, the manufacturing industry and the publication industry and the commercial enterprises. So that's what happened with red work. Cottage industry even got involved. And they did it by stamping these blocks. And so the newspapers would publish articles of how, you know, with a pattern on it that you could mark. And the ones over here. We forgot to tell us how she knows the birth year was wrong. That's good. We'll leave it to you. I know the first year was wrong because the birth certificate was filled out by her brother and after the family had moved. But it often happened there were pre-stamped. And then on this quilt is the actual birth date. And I figured that she was by them at Woolworth's or some of the stores which is on this quilt in your town. And they would be like a quilt. She wouldn't have put the wrong date on her own quilt. Red all came together. And maybe even a pattern to show you that. So it was a big deal. And it's still popular today, but not like it was back then. So women began designing and stamping their own blocks to sell to their friends at fairs or in booths, that sort of thing. Newspapers and magazines would publish how to make a finished product. Merchants, like if you could go to your country store and ask for a penny square. The merchant would have the squares in the back pre-cut. And you could either, while you wait, you would pick a design. And he would go back and stamp the design probably with chalk. I really don't know how they stamp the design. And then he'd bring it back and you pay him a penny and you take it home and embroider it. So that's how it got going in small towns. So hence they got the name penny squares. And then when you got enough of them, you usually stitched them together without sashing. And what I mean by that is this quilt right here has sashing between the blocks. This one does not. The blocks were butted up against each other. And almost all the very few of them have sashing, the ones that were made then. They were very simple. So Aunt Bertha, also my great, great Aunt Bertha, also made. She made a crazy quilt with my grandmother. But it got burned in my aunt's fire in Gold Beach. So it doesn't exist anymore. And this is a pieced quilt that she put together just the top. And it's about a twin size. And I knew Bertha and she would run. It wasn't really an inn, but she and her husband never had any children. So they always kept their guest room full. And she had a one room that had twin beds. And I can picture this one was probably going to be intended for that. So it's unfinished. This one is hand pieced. And you're welcome to touch it afterwards. You want to come up and look at the back to see how that's pieced together. It wasn't pieced on machine. But I believe the sashing, just the blocks were hand pieced. And the sashing was added by machine. So our story begins. Our story about Bertha begins in Eagle Rock, Virginia, where she was born. She was born in Badatort County, Virginia. Some of you may know that, pronounced a different way. How many of you have heard Badatort pronounced Batatot? That's the way my grandmother pronounced it. But I'm going to do Badatort because it's kind of the way it sounds. And this was a small town located along the James River. And that county was up in the northwestern part of Virginia. And she was born here on March 25, 1880. I know that from my family records, which included an oral history. And the family pages filled in with important dates from the Custer family Bible, which unfortunately also burned in the fire. But we have photographs, and that's helpful. And that Bible belonged to Bertha's mother. Her name was Nancy Kessler, Custer. And she carefully recorded in the registration pages of the Bible the names of the birth of her children, deaths, weddings, that sort of thing. So that's one record that many genealogists used to do the research. I also know when she was born, because Bertha wrote a memoir about her family of 13. She called it the original 13. So I have that. And I also discovered that she put it on the quilt behind me, her birthdate. Another form, another picture of Eagle Rock. It was named, you see the James River running there. It was named Eagle Rock because of that huge mountain behind it is limestone. And so they would dig limestone out of, quarry it out of this mountain or surrounding an area. And they set up little kilns all over the town of Eagle Rock. And smelted, is that the word, they got the limestone out. And so when I visited there in the 1990s, a lot of these backyard kilns were still there. And each one would have a little plaque up by it, saying which family ran it, and that sort of thing. And I think they called that Mountain Eagle. There you go. So she was born there. And I think I've got another picture. Yes, that's when my mother visited Eagle Rock in the 1970s. And the railroad track runs right down beside the river. The town is strung out right beside the river following the railroad track. And then the rest of the town goes uphill because this part of the country is very hilly. And I think when I was there in early 2000s, I just felt like as I walked down those streets that my grandmother and my Aunt Bertha, if they had been with me, they would have pointed to the little white clapboard houses and said, so and so lived here and so and so lived there. It hadn't really changed much. It was very quite and unique. And I got to visit the cemetery when I was there. So back behind me on Bertha's quilt, you see that she put dates. And I was able to look up many of the dates. There's names back there. And at first, I thought these blocks were made by the people who are named on the quilt in Eagle Rock that they were part of the granges. And maybe they made a block and gave it to Bertha when she moved away from Eagle Rock to Spokane, Washington in 1902. But then I noticed that the dates were older. So I began to realize that, no, this quilt was put together after she made her move in 1902. And it was probably assembled between 1905 and 1915. But it was her red work quilt that caught my attention. And I started comparing the dates on it with what I knew about my Aunt. And some of the dates didn't make any sense. So I did some more research on that. There are names and dates on this quilt that I looked up this one, this block. Thinking they were from Virginia, they were not. They were from her new home in Spokane. And they were neighbors. They were a Swedish family. And they became very, very close. And for some reason, she wanted them on that quilt. And those may be signatures. The people may have written their own names on there. Or she might have done it herself. But what we know about building a quilt is that you take pieces. And you prepare them and sew them together. Building a family history is just like making a quilt. You have bits and pieces, all kinds of records, books, maps, photographs, diaries, letters. And you fit them together and compile them into what you call family sheets or profile sheets. Is that the correct name, Ann? One of these things here? Family group sheets. Yeah, that's just hers, her page. So this page gives, and it's hard to see. I'm sorry about that. Gives all the information. Whoops, we went too far there. Let's go back. That's Bezel's. It gives all the information about Bertha, where she was born, the date, Eagle Rock, death. And then down this row here is all the things that happened to her along the way. When her dad died, when her brother died, whatever. And then over here, you have the sources that you found to back those facts up. So we've got one for Bertha. And notice she was born in 1880, but I did notice that on the quilt, she puts her birth date down as 1881. So, I'll get back to that, but just remember I said that. But all the records have her in 1880. And then she married a man named Bezel. And he is right here, which you can't see, but you'll see later. His last name was Sollander, and he's on the quilt. Sollander, the name Sollander's on the quilt. And so they got embroidered into the quilt. Also, that was an important time for her. So we also have a sheet for her husband, Bezel, who was a few years younger than she was. And kind of a handsome young man. And then you could make these sheets for each member of Bertha's family. She was the baby of the family. There were 11 siblings. Most of her, interestingly enough, most of her brothers and sisters were born during the Civil War. And here is one of the birth records of Bertha. I think it was probably put together later, because I see there's a date on here down at the bottom that it was filed between 1880 and 1898. And the other thing that's interesting about this is that the information came from John W. Custer, who was Bertha's oldest brother. And he was the one that stayed back in Virginia and he probably provided birth information on many of his siblings. But there's so many things you can learn from a birth certificate or a death certificate. And here we learn, we know she was born in that county. This is Commonwealth of Virginia. They gave her birth as 1880, which is wrong according to her information up here. And her firm name, the A student for Anne, Bertha Anne Custer, female, she was born alive. We have her father's name, John Custer. We have her father's occupation, pretty cool. He was a miller. I thought he did like flower milling where he grind wheat. He was a sawmill man. And I learned that by reading her memoir. He lived on the Allen's branch of the James River, so they lived a little bit out of town. And her mother's name was Nancy Custer. They didn't give her maiden name here, but it is Kessler. And her brother gave the information. So these types of documents provide a lot of clues where you can go and research it out and find other documents that support what's on there. And sometimes they have mistakes. Cause they're only as good as the person filling them out. Now, the next thing that happens when you're researching a person is you can fill out, again, this is kind of blurry, but you get the idea, a family ancestor chart. So this one works this way. This is Bertha and her information. That's her parents, John Custer, and her mother, Nancy Kessler. And this whole line here are her grandparents. Yeah, you got four grandparents. Notice you double your grandparents every generation you go back. She's got eight great grandparents. And then that's all I have of her great, great grandparents. But what I found remarkable about printing this out was so many of Bertha's ancestors were born and raised and died right in Boddatorick County or nearby in the state of Virginia. We get back here, we find some other names, Maryland and some other names, but they pretty much were there for a long, long time. So we got that filled in. And then I'm lucky enough to have Bertha's wedding photo. And where they were married, notice that they were not married in Virginia. They were married in Burlington, Des Moines, Iowa. And it's on the quilt. She inverted it on the quilt. And this was a big puzzle to me because all I knew was the family moved from Virginia to Spokane around 1900, between 1900 and 1905. So I did not understand why they were in Burlington. I did look up the marriage record and you can go into courthouses and find these books or places like the genealogical library here where information on marriages and deaths are recorded. The old county courthouses used to record them. When my mother was doing research, she could go to the courthouse and find these books. And we learned that Bertha's extended family were attending the wedding and that Basel, her husband's extended family, were also attending the wedding. And after the wedding, Basel's parents went back to Virginia and I found them in the census records there, but all of Bertha's families were in Spokane, Washington by 1905. And they may not have come out all the same. Now my mother told me that they came by railroad. So I Googled Burlington Northern Railroad and learned that it was a hub and another hub was Spokane, Washington. So that's what took them to Burlington. They must have had a big celebration, I'm guessing. I'm still looking into that. And then they parted ways, got on the train and they got as far as Spokane, a town called Hilliard, which was a railroad town. And that's where they stayed and they lived in that part. So let's see what we have next here. Photographs are another wonderful way to learn about your family, another piece of information that you can make and stitch into your family history. And this one is of their home taken, oops, I always push the wrong button there, 1894. So that's quite a bit before Bertha got married in 1902. There's Bertha. She is about 15 years old. She looks older. She was a very tall lady. These are her siblings and she was a youngest. So these are older. Her older sister here, her husband, oldest sister's three children, my great grandmother, her name is Lizzie Elizabeth, Bertha's older sister, my grandmother. So I was able to kind of date this picture by the age of my grandmother. I knew when she was born. My grandmother's brother, I know knew these people very well. And my great grandfather, Lafayette Harlow. So Lizzie Custer married Harlow. And this man was visiting. He was a cousin from another state. He didn't want to be in the photograph and he looks kind of sheepish. The lady in the middle is Bertha's mother, Nancy. They called her nanny. And she's holding one of her grandchildren. This is her home after her husband died. And it was located again, really close to Eagle Rock. I visited the land where it was. And so I wondered what happened to this family between the time this photograph was taken and that they made their move. Because in the 1900 senses, they're all, most of them are in Virginia. And in the 1910, they're in Spokane. And we see Basil Solander and Bertha Solander living on, that says Gladys Avenue. And next door to them are Nancy Bertha's mother and two of her unmarried siblings, Jacob and Nanabelle. And they are living next door. And not too far away were my grandparents and they stayed together in Hilliard in Spokane. So census records are also another way of finding family information. By 1906, I have found almost everyone in her family had moved to Washington except for her oldest brother. And he stayed back in Eagle Rock. And this is a postcard from Eagle Rock that was in my mother's collection. Again, you see exactly how I'm telling you the railroad track ran straight down by the river, the river's over on the left and the town just strung right along there. So he stayed there and that picture was taken probably around the time that the family moved from Eagle Rock. Now the brother that stayed back was named Jim. This is the brother that gave the birth information from that birth certificate. And this is their beautiful home. And it was on the Allen's branch a little bit outside of Eagle Rock. And when I visited it in 2000, it was for sale and then it was empty. And I wish I would have had time to contact a realtor and go inside the home. But my mother visited it several times with her mother and her sisters and brothers. And it never left the family. This family always lived there. This is Mrs. Hamilton Custer. She's his wife. These are their children. One of these boys got married. The other three children did not get married. And they are the ones that stayed in that home until the day they died. And when the home finally got put up for sale. And my mother always loved visiting these people. And in the land records, we found, my mother and I found a sale that was dated July 5th, 1888. And it was recorded in Fincastle, which is the county seat of Batatort. And it was a sale between John and Nancy Custer. Those are Bertha's parents. They sold a track of land located on the Allen's branch, which is a tributary of the James River to John E. Custer for $150. I don't know how much land it was, but it was part of the land. And he is the one that built this beautiful house. I would guess sometime around 1900 after the family moved, he built a big house. And he also ran the family business, which was a sawmill business. There's another child in this picture that died in 1917. So the first picture, this was taken later or earlier, and he was gone. He wasn't in the family by then. But this is a mourning, a funeral picture of the family. And I was able to tell that because one of the daughters has a rip in her dress. You rent your clothes and you rip your clothes and everybody's somber and in dark. And so in my mom's collection, I found an obituary, another piece of information we used to build family histories. The death of Charlie Custer. His name was Charles Adam Custer. He was 11 years old. You read through the obituary. He died working in the sawmill. Got caught in a belt. It was instant. But terribly unfortunate. And it upset, even though it happened in Virginia, of course the family in Spokane was very, very upset about it. So we have a newspaper clipping, another piece of our family history that you can research and get information out of these. And then we've got a cemetery record that shows where, this one I think came from Find a Grave, and where he's buried and what cemetery he's in. So that was really sad. But again, it caused them to save this information, which I could put together later in research. This is his death certificate. Remember I told you that these certificates tell a lot of information. He was in Fincastle. That was the closest town or this was the county seat. And he lived in Eagle Rock. That's his name, Charles Adam Custer. His male, white, single. This is the date of his birth, 1906. He was 11 years old when he died. And his death date is here. And then it gives the parents' names, James Edward Custer of Wich County. And I think her name was Mary Ellen Hamilton. That was her maiden name. So you get a maiden name there off that certificate and where she lived. And very sad down here is James Edward Custer, the father of this child that had to fill out to inform the information. And then this is about the death, how they died. And down here is usually the funeral home and sometimes you even get on death certificates a cemetery where they're buried. So these are very valuable. Now let's see what's next here. Oh, these are the family Bible records that I told you the Bible got burned. So before the fire, I had written to my aunt Joe who lived in Gold Beach and said, she had the Bible. And I said, I wanted her to take photos but she ended up writing me a letter that had the information about the family and what was written in the Bible. So I was really glad that that happened because we do now have that letter that has that information. But family Bibles are very important and interviews, personal interviews, like I talked to my aunt about the Bible and asked her what she remembered about the family. This is the memoir that Bertha wrote. It's called The Original Thirteen. She wrote it in the 1940s, she died in 1964. And her great niece, Virginia Brown, was the person that typed these handwritten records up and put them in these folders. And this folder belongs to Boyd, who was her nephew and one of my favorite great uncles, and distributed them to the family. She had a lot of information in this memoir. She even had a picture of the natural bridge because her sister Lizzie, her favorite sister Lizzie, my great-grandmother was married there. And here we know that the names of the children, she's down here. These people died about the same time in a diphtheria epidemic. She even put the names of people that did not marry. Now this was not unusual, I understand that children that were born during the Civil War, now Bertha was born in 1881, but these guys in here were all born during the Civil War. It is not unusual for those children that were born during those years not to marry, to stay together in the family. And also I learned from the memoir that her father, although he lived in Virginia, was a union sympathizer and he had to move away and leave his family because Virginia declared that they were a Confederate soldiers. So the family did go through some trauma during that time too, but Bertha never really knew it because she was born later. This is a postcard that was in my family's possession. Letters and postcards are another way of finding family history. She told a sad story in the memoir about her sister who was forbidden from marrying her first cousin, Jonathan. And Jonathan kept, would write to her and she would write back and sometimes the letters would get stolen or hidden or not given to her. And Jonathan's writing there say, you ask why I haven't answered any of your letters. It says I answered every single one of them. So she didn't get them, but she got this one. And so that's in the memoir, a little sad story that goes along. This is Bertha and her husband, Basil, and her mother, Nancy, in their home about 1915 in Spokane. This is one of the ladies that's on this quilt back here. It was one of her neighbors. And I did find that her maiden name's on here, but the married name is on the back of the picture. And this is a nephew. She had a lot of people. And of course the family dog is in the picture. This is my grandmother, Lizzie and Lafayette and their home in Hilliard, not too far from where Bertha lived. This is a four generation photograph. Bertha's mom here, Bertha's sister here, my grandmother and my aunt, the oldest child of my grandmother. Those are awfully nice to have and they tell a lot of information. This is Bertha, again, the youngest child with her mother, Nancy, taken shortly before she died. This is Bertha, when I knew Bertha. She was like to dress up and go shopping. My mother told a tale about going shopping with her grandmother, with her mother and Bertha in downtown Spokane and sliding off of the wicker seats on the streetcar where every time the streetcar would stop. And she had her own version of the shopping trips and the elevator was so scary and not being able to see above the countertop when the transaction was made. But this is how I remember Bertha. I did get to go to her funeral, but when this is my grandmother, Mary, my brother took this photograph and she was, she named me and that's how I got my name. My name is Charlotte Lee and my grandmother gave me as a Southern tradition, I was called Char Lee, not Charlie, Char Lee. She was a lovely lady. This is Bertha's brother. He was, as you can read down there, he lived with Bertha, he's in most of the censuses. Mysterious death, another brother, older brother was murdered in 1905. Washington, the state of Washington during these years was having labor union disputes and it got kind of violent. And although there's no, I haven't yet discovered any records, I suspect that this particular death and maybe this one, they worked as railroad people. They were called blacksmiths or carpenters that they may have been associated with that. That's for me to discover. Notice that Bertha's stone does not have her date on it, but she was, Basil died first. So that's my next project is to, my cousin and I are gonna get together and get that date on there. And it's possible that somebody already did that and this is an old photograph. But I have to find her death certificate and then we'll take a trip up there and take care of that for Bertha. In Washington? Yes, at home. I think the Washington death certificate is from a lot of mothers. Yes, and I just haven't done it. I didn't realize that I didn't have her death certificate. I wanna tell you a little bit about this photograph. This is a Harlow Cabin on Elliott Creek, California, Northern California. It is a double story log cabin built by Lizzie, my great-grandfather Lafayette. And we had a family reunion up there not long ago. And I just thought it was kind of cool that you can connect modern times with old times. And why is it in Northern California? You might ask, because they were in Spokane. For a brief time in the 1920s, my mother's family lived in Ashland. And the grandparents moved with them to Ashland. And my grandfather was, he had built log cabins before. And he and his son, my great-grandfather must have been in his 60s. And his son, who was probably 20 or 30, built this cabin up in the Siskius and ran a placer gold mine up there. And in the summer, my mom and her siblings got to spend their summers up there. And then about the time my mom graduated from high school, for whatever reason, the whole family moved back to Spokane. But that's just a little side story. So this concludes my presentation on Bertha, my great-great aunt, and how the pieces of her life and the pieces of her quilts can be twined together and useful in family research. This is around her home. They must have had significant, I think this is when she met Bethel, her husband. See, maybe she met Bethel right here. I know her, but she's got his last name here. I must have heard of her, too, so. Well, some of these dates, I'm not able to tell.