Living in the Past: A Family History

The other day, I read a NY Times article on the graveyard at a state asylum in Mississippi, and this led me to think again about a family member who died in Camarillo State Hospital in California, Mabel Manson Ortmann.  I've wanted to be able to tell the story of her life, which was sad and maybe even tragic, but I've been stuck on learning the diagnosis that led to her admission in 1930 and finding information about why she remained there until her death in 1967.  My two requests to the CA state archives yielded nothing, not even a letter saying they couldn't release information to me, so I had put those questions back behind the brick wall concealing this part of Mabel's life.




The article set me to wondering whether I could find out if she had been buried in a similarly unmarked grave in Camarillo, so I began the process of googling here and there.  I came upon something called the "Asylum Projects," a wiki full of information about asylums in the U.S. and …

This is a blast from the past, but one worth re-sharing, I think:

I've been thinking about some of the "side benefits" that come from doing genealogy.  These take various forms:  the cousins you discover, the friends you make in the genealogy community, the satisfaction you get from seeing a brick wall come down.  But one of the most enjoyable parts of genealogy, to me, are the subjects and bits of history that open up along the way.  These things can expand our world view greatly, and keep the synapses of those of us pursuing genealogy in our senior years firing.  Here are a few things I've learned about along the way:

1.  The history of the North German Lloyd Company:  My grandfather worked for North German Lloyd for many years, as a machinist, going back and forth from Germany to New York and other places around the world.  Here are the NDL docks  in Hoboken, New Jersey.




2.  The process of emigrating to America -- what it took to get there, what shipboard life was li…