They were the colors of spring in their light blues and lilacs and pinks and yellows. They were either someone’s collectibles or they were handmade. They were also very clean, unlike much of the vintage, dingy and much-handled items at auction.

There were about a dozen of them, selling as a lot. And they were not the only bird-themed items there, I later learned.

Earlier, I had been intrigued by a group of a dozen small glass containers that looked like miniatures of those old bathroom wall light fixtures, the ones that sat flushed against the wall, covering the bulb. These were no more than 4×2, rectangular in shape, curve around the side with ridges on the back and a small opening on the other side. They were made of clear glass, ceramics – one had been painted a deep green – and white porcelain.

I couldn’t figure out what they were until the auctioneer offered them up for auction. These are bird water-feeders, he said, fingering them, and they are the old ones. People would fill them with water and put them out for birds, he added. I suppose they could also be used for feed, too.

I overheard a man next to me tell another that he would put stuff in them in them to keep birds away (what specifically, he did not say). I’m not sure if he was joking or telling the truth, because everyone’s a jokester at auctions. It’s a way to bond and pass the time between your own bids.

Bird-feeding, bird-watching and providing houses for wayward birds is a national pastime for many people. Googling these words brought up tons of sites that sell products, show you how to make a house for them, how to feed them (I found one woman who made lovely feeders out of tea cups), how to identify them and more. You can take bird-watching trips, join a national society of other birders and visit bird museums.

We’re all familiar with that granddaddy of bird groups, the Audubon Society. Quoting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Audubon site noted that birding is the number one sport in America, attracting 51.3 million people.

That was obvious just by reading my local newspaper this morning. The home section had two stories about birding: A design feature with photos of some neat birdhouses and a story about an Illinois woman who photographed birds in her back yard. The newspaper’s auction column mentioned a metal bird up for bids: a 1956 Ford T-Bird with fins, 25,000 miles and still running. Some months ago, I wrote about a husband-wife team who created art pieces from antique items and found metal objects, using birds as the focal point.

I don’t recall how much the bird feeders went for at auction, but someone probably got a good deal. In Googling, I found the names of several makers of what are now antique bird cages – Hendryx, Art Cage, Osborn and Crown – that the feeders could be used with (they apparently hang on the sides). On one shopping site, the vintage feeders were selling for $40 to $100 each. They were cheaper on Ebay, though.

As for the bird houses, the entire lot went for $12.50.

Related posts:

1. Alden House and the 1955 auction
2. Bird watching
3. Stangl Christmas plates at auction

  
I was standing outside, watching disinterestedly as the auctioneer sold off boxes of items I couldn’t use: books, glassware, electric hedge clippers. Then he mentioned that some of those items were part of a bigger lot from one household, the rest of it piled on tables inside: new bathroom towel sets, comforters, a paper shredder, foot spas and more.

I perked up. My shredder had died on me, and if I could get one for $5, I’d do it. So I went inside and found the shredder on a table that I had checked out before. I had completely missed it, perched there at the back of the table. The Tech Solutions TS4500 shredder was in the original box, foam packaging still around it. It wasn’t a heavy-duty shredder – it only shredded seven sheets of paper (crosscut) at a time – but it could work for me.

The shredder was among four household items I saw that I could use in my home. Here are the others:

A small stool for my desktop computer’s CPU. The unit sits under my desk on what has now become a rickety and unstable stool, made that way because it is so heavy. On one of the auction tables, I came across a sturdy tightly woven old wooden stool about 10 inches tall, the right height. Unfortunately, another bidder had her eye on the stool and three pieces of silver-plated serving dishes that she had combined as a lot. We bidded the items up to $15, way more than the $5 they should have fetched. (I had asked the auctioneer to separate the stool from the silver-plates, but he was in a testy mood and didn’t. So I ended up with all of it.)

A Stangl salad/serving bowl in the Carnival pattern. The bright pink and green colors (Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority colors, in fact) and a crazy design endeared me to it. It was a big beautiful bowl, large enough to hold food to feed an army (it’s actually a foot wide.)

The main item for me was a Shaker-style rocking chair. I’m a Southern and we have a thing for rocking chairs and porches, and all the nostalgia that go with the image. The rocking chair was dark wood, stained, with a tightly woven seat. It sat majestically on top of a table in the furniture room in the back of the auction house. I hung around waiting for it to come up, wondering if I would be out-bidded. I did get into a back-and-forth bidding war but I got the chair for $35. It looks great on my enclosed porch. All it needs now is a comfortable pillow for the seat (and also to cover up what looked like accidental drops of dark stain that someone had tried to remove).

Auctions (and flea markets) are not only a good bargain for vintage and antique items but also for household goods.

Oh, I got the shredder for $6. Should’ve been 5, but someone else wanted it, too.

Related posts:

1. Buying a used mattress at auction
2. Alden House and the 1955 auction
3. Alpha Kappa Alpha history book

The exhibit has been up for the last four months at  the King of Prussia mall near where I live and will be ending this weekend. It’s a national touring exhibition of covers, illustrations, sculptures and paintings called “Rockwell’s America: Celebrating the Art of Norman Rockwell.” The tour began in 2004 in Nashville, TN.

It’s a wonderful presentation that celebrates and educates about one of this country’s best and well-known illustrators – who was actually a storyteller. Look at any of his works; you can draw his story from it or create your own.

“I paint life as I would like it to be,” intoned Rockwell in a quote on a wall at the exhibit. And that he did.

Rockwell’s is an idealized and homogenized view of America – suburban neat, not urban gritty. Where little white boys sneaked a dip in forbidden swimming holes, where an old man sat snoozing in a fishing boat with his dog, where a country cop hid behind a fence to catch city slickers driving too fast.

I learned a few things myself about the man:

He scoured antique shops and auction houses – a soul-mate? – for props for his illustrations.

He always sent his illustrations framed to his editor, even if the canvas was still wet. Rockwell felt that a piece was not completed until it was framed. He’d been doing that since a student of illustrator Thomas Fogarty who told him to “step over the frame, Norman, over the frame and live in the picture.”

He hired photographers to take pictures of his subjects, and he chose the props and costumes.

His studio burned down in 1943 after a smoldering ash from his trademark pipe ignited in a trash can overnight.

The following steps were on a wall at the exhibit. I’m not sure if Rockwell ever did either, but I found them amusing:

This is how to get a chicken to stand still: Pick it up, rock it back and forth a few times and release it. It’ll stand still for 5 minutes.

This is how to get children to stand still: Pay them 50 cents.

As I meandered through the exhibit, I searched for signs of black life in Rockwell’s world. I found very few; it was as if we lived on another planet. That’s the opposite of what I saw at an exhibit last year of works by another Post illustrator, a woman named Ellen Pyle. I was pleasantly surprised to see an illustration she created of a little black girl holding a turkey that was presented to Post editor George Lorimer in 1923. It was summarily rejected because he  didn’t think his audience would tolerate a black person depicted as equal to a white person on the cover.

The first image of what looked like a black person in a Rockwell illustration at the exhibit was from July 9, 1949, called “Road Block.” It was a scene of a little dog blocking a truck. One of the truckers – who looked to be a black man - tried to coax the animal out of the truck’s path as neighbors – including a little black boy and girl with their backs to us in the foreground – watched and helped. Did he sneak them into the illustration?

The second image was near the end of the exhibit in the Tribute Gallery, framed covers of most of Rockwell’s illustrations. In the Dec. 7, 1946 cover called “New York Central Diner,” a black  waiter smiled down at a little boy holding his change purse and looking at the menu, trying to figure out how much he could afford.

One of Rockwell’s most famous and iconic paintings came near the end of the exhibit: Ruby Bridges being escorted by white marshals to her first-grade class in an all-white elementary school in New Orleans in1960. The painting “The Problem We All Live With” was on the wall in all its brashness and defiance. It was the work of a new and enlightened Rockwell, who seemed to have cast off the idyllic world as he’d like it to be and drew one that was. His idealistic world was unraveling, smacked down by the civil rights movement and the reality of racism and prejudice.

The illustration appeared on the cover of Look magazine on Jan. 14, 1964.

I’ve stumbled onto Rockwell covers at auction before but still have not found the Ruby Bridges’ one. The most recent was from 1971 (he died in 1978), which contained an interview with Rockwell and a photo of  him on the cover talking to a young newspaper hawker. I know Ruby is out there somewhere, and I’m sure I’ll eventually come across her.

The last room in the exhibit (just before the gallery of Post covers) led me back to Main Street-Christmas: Post holiday covers on the wall, cookies for Santa near the fireplace, a sculpture of a little boy trying to play a horn (image from a Post cover) and “It’s A Beautiful Life” playing on an old TV.

Vintage Rockwell. You can click here to see if the exhibition’s coming to your town.

Related posts:

1. Illustrator Ellen Pyle and the Saturday Evening Post
2. Vintage Ebony covers on greeting cards
3. Black soldiers and World War II

As I comb through box lots or clean single items, there’s always that question in the back of my mind. In the quiet of my living room, I listen or look for something – a sound, a movement – but nothing happens. I’ve never felt a presence with me in the room. I do feel a reverence toward these people who lived years before I even existed.  

Are they looking over my shoulder as I sit there going through their “stuff”?

Is the woman who left the stack of metal and bone knitting needles remembering the last shawl she made? Is the little girl who wrote her name and troop number in her Girl Scout Handbook remembering how proud she felt? Is the mother who carefully catalogued the family slides of the addition to her house remembering the construction mess?

Even if their whole spirits have gone, I do believe that each of them left a dab of themselves behind. We tend to put our hearts into the things that make us happy, so it makes sense that a snippet of us remains. Those snippets, I believe, are the things that connect us living beings with those who no longer live, a continuation of the life cycle that runs like a thread through mankind.

We all know the story of the most famous of spirits. The three that guided Scrooge in Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” opened up his poor small miserable life into one that welcomed others inside. Scrooge emerged from his Christmas Eve journey through his past – and future – a changed man who embraced family, love, giving and food.

I suspect that any spirits I bring home are of the same sort. I buy art at auctions, African American art in particular. The art speaks to my soul, and I believe that the artists painted from a place of joy, from the same place inside themselves that caused their creation to touch me. It’s a positive energy imparted through the paint and the lines and the colors and the subject matter. So if their spirits followed me home, they came as guides to help me experience and appreciate their works.

I do have a pencil drawing I got at auction by Philadelphia artist Julius Bloch called “Two Faces,” though, that gave me pause. The artwork hangs on a wall in my bedroom, and it took me aback once when I saw it from a distance: The bottom drawing looked like a spirit forming. It is the faint outline of the face of what looks like a little black girl. The top drawing has her in full form: her hair filled in, a ribbon tried around it in the back, puffy lips.

It’s a bit creepy, but a lovely drawing, perhaps a study.

I have to ask: Do spirits even exist? What about ghosts? I’ll leave those metaphysical questionsto my friend Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb, who writes the Soul Rhythms blog. Religion and spirituality are her bailiwicks, and she’s better inclined to speak about them than me.

In my auction finds, I’m even more curious when I come across old photos taken by people posed in their best Sunday outfits. I really do want to know who they were and what their lives were like.  Photos, on the other hand, unnerve my auction buddy Janet. She left a group of old photos in her car for a month once, she said, refusing to take them inside her home. She doesn’t believe spirits follow her home but she won’t take any chances, though.

As the one who’s living, maybe I’m spending too much time wondering what the dead may be thinking. Maybe they’re just enjoying the afterlife and don’t even care that I’m going through their “stuff,” because they really don’t need it anymore. Maybe they just want me to enjoy it and leave them alone. If they do, I thank them and ask that they not follow me home.

Or just maybe they are watching over my shoulder and what they see is someone who respects what was once theirs and treats it as if it were my own.

(By the way, the photo below is African American photographer James Van Der Zee’s depiction of a ghostly spirit, a little handiwork apparently done at the request of this patron.)

Related posts:

1. Nostalgia, paper dolls and auctions
2. Fela, spirits and African masks
3. 10 ways not to be a jerk at auctions

The letter was from a doctor-soldier recounting what he had experienced at a liberated concentration camp in Austria, near Salzburg. The remnants of humanity he found in the Nazi’s aftermath were heart-wrenching – even for a man who had endured the horrors of war for the past few years.

His letter was a carbon copy, neatly typed and folded, dated May 24, 1945. The soldier, a medical doctor named Irv, had been sent to the camp to evaluate and report on the “tremendous medical emergency” there.

Right now, the man on trial in Munich is accused of being an accessory to murder at another camp, Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943. That camp, though, was no concentration camp where Jews were put to work. Prosecutors say that defendant John Demjanjuk served at an extermination camp – its sole purpose was to kill.

Demjanjuk, 89, a retired Ohio autoworker deported from the United States in May, is accused of being an SS guard at Sobibor. Prosecutors say that he and fellow guards guided Jews from the trains into the gas chambers. On Oct.14, 1943, Jews there revolted and half of the 500 people escaped. The camp was closed and trees were planted to hide what had transpired.

Demjanjuk, who is wheeled into his trial in a wheelchair, has denied the charges, saying he was a Russian soldier taken prisoner by the Nazis and actually spent his time in prison camps during the war. In 1987, the Israeli government tried him as the SS guard Ivan the Terrible who inflicted suffering at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. He was convicted and sentenced to death. The conviction was overturned in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court, which found that he was not that man.

During World War II, some six million European Jews died at the hands of Hitler and the Nazis in a systematic and brutal plan to exterminate a race of people. The total does not include the non-Jews who were also killed.

Some families of Jews who died at Sobibor don’t know if Demjanjuk was complicit in the extermination or not, but they say they want to make sure the world knows what happened at the camp. And they are right.

That’s why letters like the one that Irv sent back home to his family and that I picked up at auction are very important. His is an impartial observer’s view of what he saw and heard and smelled at that Nazi concentration camp near Salzburg, Austria:

“And what I saw there, I can’t get out of my mind, and I shall never forget! But, believe me, when I say that of all the experiences that I’ve had so far, this was by far the most horrible. What a masterful, brutal, systematic method of eradicating whole races of people the Nazi’s had! The human misery, I’ve never actually conceived it! Believe me – you must actually see, smell, feel these wretched masses of beings, have them touch you, speak to, or scream at you with their parched throats, before you realize what has actually gone on here in Europe. They cry with joy – they are so dehydrated from lack of food and water that no tears come out. Their tear glands are even dry. They have been given a daily ration 1 slice of bread and a glass of water. Their tales of misery, you can hardly bear listening to – you get so choked up – but are almost ashamed to cry.

“I take back what I said in my other letter about the Jews being extinct. There were a thousand of them in this camp of ages ranging from about 12 to 70 years old. They were the worst treated of all. The Gentile political prisoners tell me that their only crime was the fact that they were Jews. The average Jew lived no more than 6 weeks here. He was treated brutally and if he didn’t die before the 6 weeks were up, he was clubbed to death and burned. The Jews slept 4 or 5 to a single bed, the rooms were so crowded, the heat from their feverish bodies plus the stench of infected, infested, ulcerated bodies – almost knocked you down. In one bed I noticed one Jew dead. The other three bed-mates were too weak to remove him – so he was left there to occupy the precious space. In that same bed the other three had defecated. The excreta was all over them and everywhere. They were wretched with hunger and pain. I saw them fall down and die everywhere. Some “skin and bones” ran out into the woods to die, some died on the camp roads. I gave adrenalin to one that collapsed – it was hopeless, he died a few minutes later. Many more collapsed and died – I estimate about 300 during the time I was there. One made his way to a nearby village and begged for food. He ate a lot and then fell dead – the strain of eating and the dilatation of his stomach was too much for his weakened body. Two men fell over dead into the reservoir while trying to get water. Other men, dying of thirst, washed and drank from this same reservoir.

I went to bed last night, as I said, but couldn’t get it out of my mind. However, one thing is sure, now I really know why we fought.  I thank God, we did.”

I was thinking about Irv’s letter last night while watching the Academy Awards on television, particularly the mention of Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Inglorious Basterds.” It’s the story of a team of Jewish-American soldiers called “The Basterds” that terrorized and slaughtered Nazi troops in 1941. For me, one of the best lines in the movie was uttered by Brad Pitts’ character, Lt. Aldo Raine:

“We’re going to be doing one thing and we’re going to be doing one thing only: killin’ Nazis.”

I’m sure Tarantino loved writing that line; it made the movie. The film had always been my “go-see list” but I never saw it. Now I will.

Related posts:

1. Letter buried in camera case
2. Long road to a black (Disney) Princess
3. Seeking that million-dollar auction find

Some of the recipes were on faded and yellowed paper, lined notebook paper and index cards. Some were handwritten and others typed. They were from magazines that no longer exist (The Gentlewoman 1929, Household Magazine 1931). But the recipes themselves were very familiar, indicating little change in what appealed to us: pumpkin pie, chestnut dressing, cornbread, biscuits, ice cream, fried chicken, chocolate cake.

There were tell-tale signs of the ones that this saver – a woman, I’m sure - went back to often: the recipes were stained with food and grease.

She seemed to also be into menus. The box contained several copies of a food column called “Three Meals A Day” from the Chicago Daily Tribune (1931) that offered daily menus:

Tomorrow’s menu:

Morning: Egg Poached in Milk on Toast, Toast, Butter, Strawberry Jam (with recipe), Coffee, Cream

Noon: Cream of Asparagus Soup, Chicken Salad Sandwich, Stuffed Olives, Milk

Night: Lamb Chops, Mashed Potatoes, Mint Jelly, Buttered Peas, Jellied Pear Salad, Roll, Butter, Boston Cream Pie, Tea.

I’m sure this woman, like me, also had her share of cookbooks. Unlike her, though, these days I go straight to Google when I want a recipe. I still have a few trusties that I go to in my black binder of clipped recipes, but I’m one for trying new dishes from the Food Network and other sites.

The recipe choices from my auction find were pretty basic, and I don’t think anyone would confuse her – or me – with being a chef. But I do enjoy the chef competitions on cable TV. And I especially enjoyed a two-part series that recently ran in my local newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, about George Washington’s chef, Hercules.

Hercules was one of nine slaves in the president’s household in Philadelphia in the 1790s.  He was described as one of the first great chefs of Philadelphia – a dandy of a guy whose work earned him an income, fancy clothes and the freedom to walk about the city unfettered.

Hercules escaped his life of slavery on Washington’s 65^th birthday after he was transferred to the president’s Virginia plantation. Washington was afraid that Hercules was planning an escape and wanted him out of Philadelphia.  

The series included several of Hercules’ period recipes, along with photos, kitchen logs and other information. Here’s also an NPR story from 2008 about Hercules and Jefferson’s enslaved cook James Hemings, a PBS video about Hercules and a  video of Philadelphia chef and restaurateur Charles Staib cooking a dish from Hercules’ time.

Related posts:

1. Cookbooks: How I found Julia Child & Abby Fisher
2. Buying auction items I can actually use
3. A love affair with the automat

It was a large white round bowl on a stand with lovely blue decorations along the sides – either a punch bowl or fruit bowl. It stood out like a gem among the other items in the cabinet.

I wasn’t into pottery much then – I especially wasn’t into manufacturers – and so I bought the bowl for its beauty, and then researched it. A couple years later, I found a little tea strainer that was as cute and delicate as it could be.

Delft pottery was first produced by 32 factories in Delft, Holland, back in the 17^th century, according to an article on the homestyletoday.com website. Also called “Delftware,” the pottery was hand-painted earthenware designed by craftsmen. By the mid-19^th century, Delftware faced competition from European porcelain makers and its popularity declined. Today, only a few factories still produce the pottery.

I sometimes find souvenir and real pieces of the trademark blue Delft at auctions or antique stores. I’ve even come across lookalikes at flea markets and on roadside tables, especially the Dutch clogs. The true collector knows to bypass these and look for the correct manufacturer’s mark on the bottom: apothecary jar, initials JT and the word Delft. Or if you’re like me, you just buy what you like.

Besides the pottery, the town of Delft is also known for one of its most famous artists, Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), who captured his birthplace in a painting called “View of Delft” around 1660. Vermeer is considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age primarily for his masterpiece “Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665).”

At auctions, I still check out any blue-and-white pottery I see with intricate designs, along with the obligatory Dutch windmills, shoes, ships and lighthouse scenes.

Once, I found a piece with an unusual mark on the bottom and discovered during research that it had been made by the Oud Delft factory in Holland. What was unusual was the Colonial Williamsburg connection: The Virginia history site - a reconstruction itself – had sanctioned two Holland companies to make reproductions of its own antique pottery, including original jars, vases, flower frogs, wall pockets, lamps and other pottery. Here are some examples.

Another time at an outdoor flea market, I came across a pair of Delft-like earrings, a dangly pair in a silver-plated casing with blue windmills on a white background. Were they real Delft? Probably not, but they were nice.

My other Delft finds were a flower-frog reproduction made by Sleepy Hollow Restorations in Hudson, Valley, NY, a strawberry planter/candle-holder and tiles. Most of the pieces did not have the authentic Delft trademark – they had the inscription “Delft Holland” – but they were neat repros, including that sweet little tea strainer.

Related posts:

1. Miniature pottery
2. Stangl Christmas plates at auction

Was it possible? I had wanted to find one (or two or three) of these original programs forever. For nearly 20 years, the club held one of the pre-eminent black art exhibits in the country, and the programs are hard to find.

The first one I ever saw was at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and I believe it was also from the 1940s. So when I saw the program up for auction recently, nestled behind two pencil studies of a nude African American woman and man, I knew I had to have it.

The Pyramid Club was founded in 1937 by Dr. Walter F. Jerrick and a group of black professional men as a cultural and social outlet at a time when they were excluded from white organizations. The group eventually purchased a building on Girard Avenue to hold events - the most important of which became its annual art exhibitions, which began in 1941.

Many up-and-coming black artists were given their first nudge by the club, and became renowned through its very popular shows. The exhibits were headed by Philadelphia artist Humbert Howard, who by the late 1940s had expanded the artists’ list to include whites who painted black subjects – raising the ire of some members. Among the white artists was a Russian-born painter named Ralph Taylor, who drew the studies for the nude man and woman accompanying the program at the auction.

The program I bought (for $12.50 in back-and-forth action with another bidder) was apparently from Taylor’s estate, and the artist had an oil painting in the exhibit called “Life Class.” I passed on the study, though, because the auctioneer said that others of Taylor’s works would be auctioned off later.

The show featured works by 57 artists and ran from Feb. 20-March 20, 1948. It was held at the club’s headquarters (the building was padlocked in 1963 by the IRS for nonpayment of employee taxes, and the club basically dissolved. The building is now on the market for $1.2 million).

According to the program, several of the club’s members also exhibited their own paintings in another gallery. Included were Howard, John Harris, Dox Thrash, Frank Syres and Beatrice Clare Overton (who’s listed among the members although the club excluded women up to some point).

This eighth annual invitational exhibition was held in memoriam to artist Laura Wheeler Waring, a Philadelphia artist, who had just died on Feb. 3, 1948.

What I found fascinating about the program was the names of the black and white female artists whose works were included – some of whom I had not heard of before and could find little information about. Waring was a familiar name. The others were Etelka Greenfield, Elsie Reber, Edith Townsend Scarlett, Reba Klein, Naomi Lavin, Elizabeth Coyne, Hilde Foss, Sarai Sherman, Maude C. Lewis and Overton.

Although the club did not admit women as members, it did have a Pyramid Wives Club and a Women’s Coordinating Committee, which managed the  reception at the exhibit, according to the program. Women were also on the club’s exhibition committee.

Other featured artists I recognized were Allan Freelon, Julius Bloch, Paul Keene, Edward Loper, Samuel J. Brown and Claude Clark.

This is a wonderful piece of ephemera that I intend to keep.

Related posts:

1. Black women artists at fine art auction
2. Women’s club, Henry Hudson Hotel and facial tissue
3. African American art

Maybe it’s not the type of document parents keep along with the baby photos or recordings of first words or steps. It’s a state document that we ask for when we need it.

Birth certificates came to my mind this morning because today is my birthday, and I actually have a “certified” copy of my birth certificate (it looks like a clipped version with very basic information). I think I may have needed it to get my Social Security card for a summer job after my freshman year in college – the issue date is 1970. I have both the Social Security card and the birth certificate in the same folder in my file cabinet.

I’m a baby boomer, born in the 1950s in the great Southern state of Georgia, and the information recorded on the birth certificate reflected the times:

Color: Col.
It was the 1950s and this was Georgia. I’m not sure why it doesn’t say “Negro” rather than “Colored.”

Did you know that birth certificates in this country are only about 100 years old? Births were first recorded in the 1900s, and before then they went unrecorded or some family member recorded them in Bibles.

The first birth certificates were issued for tax purposes, among other things, according to Wikipedia. Births were registered with churches, a practice that endured into the 19^th century. Births, marriages and deaths were first recorded in the United Kingdom in 1837, and government agencies were required to start keeping birth records in 1853.

Birth certificates are also important in this country because they officially prove our citizenship. At least they should, unless you’re the president of the United States and a few loose cannons don’t think you were actually born in Hawaii. President Obama’s birth certificate proves that he was born here, which really doesn’t matter since his mother was a natural-born U.S. citizen and thus, so is he.

Wikipedia also noted that for nearly 50 years, the U.S. Census Bureau designed the birth-certificate forms and kept the records nationally before the U.S. Public Health Service took it over in 1946.

For black people, birth records of our ancestors are few and far between. Maybe some were recorded in Bibles or kept in someone’s memory, but most are lost. There are the Census records, though.

Back in 1989, I checked Census records in the National Archives in Philadelphia to see what I could find for a family reunion newspaper. I found records of the family of my mother’s father at the archives in Philadelphia, but I was never able to find records about her mother’s side of the family. The information below was taken from the Census records. It showed the birth dates of the parents and children (The last child was born after the Census was taken).

The 1900 Census records showed that my grandfather’s parents were born during slavery, got married and remained married for 17 years. They had eight children who were born between 1886 and 1900. He was born in April 1852 and she in March 1855. His parents were from Georgia and he was born there. Rebecca’s father was from Georgia and her mother was from South Carolina.

I wish I knew and could find more. People who throw away all those records and photos that I see at auction are tossing away treasures.

Related posts:

1. Missing: Vintage black baby greeting cards
2. Long road to a black (Disney) Princess

Clackers, clippers and clappers, that’s what they’re somtimes called, depending on what type you’re holding. They should also be called racket-makers, because they are very very loud and annoying. You can find them in various types: rachet, rattle, shaker and paddle.

She found six of these noisemakers in vivid lithographic colors at auction recently, three with black figures and three with Halloween witches, blacks cats and pumpkins.

The black noisemakers appeared to be from the 1940s or 1950s, and the men painted on them were singing (they were described on the web as minstrels). The sound that came out of them was not harmony but ear-splitting noise – the kind you’d expect when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. Curious me, I decided to listen to their sounds. 

I gave the ratchets a twirl. Listen for yourself. Click on the Play button to the right on the player (you may want to turn down the Volume at the left to keep from disturbing your neighbor):

I also shook the witch noisemaker. You can listen to that one here:

And I paddled the ball:

Like just about everything else, noisemakers are collectors’ items. From my research, I found that collectors are always looking for the tin ones, which were made by several U.S. manufacturers. The name you find most often on them is Kirchhof of Newark, NJ, with its trademark wording ”Kirchhof ‘Life of the Party.’ Kirchhof, Newark, NJ. Made in USA.”

The company began making them in the early 1900s, according to the the website Country Joe’s Collectibles. Its earliest ones were made of tin with wood handles, according to the website, and they were later made with plastic handles. This site has some neat noisemakers for sale and also for viewing, including one with clowns. You can view more with black images on this site, and this one has some early wooden noisemakers (search for the word “wood”).

Other U.S. makers included T. Cohn, J. Chein & Co., and Bugle Boy. The black ones that Janet likes were made by U.S. Metal Toy Mfg. Co. I also came across some noisemakers made in Japan.

I also found Grogger, the Purim noisemaker, that worshippers sound when the rabbi mentions the name “Haman” in the reading of the Megillah on Purim at synagogue. The idea is to drown out the name ”Haman,” the villian of the story and an enemy of the Jewish people.

The website Welcome to Halloween noted that Halloween noisemakers likely began in Germany. You can see some images on the site.  

If you’re not a collector, there are plenty of websites that will show you how to make your own, and the process seemed very basic. There are also sites that will show you how to teach your children to make them.

Related posts:

1. The dollar sounds of motorcycles
2. Rubber stamps as collectibles
3. The life sounds of soul music