April 18, 2006

Genealogy has always been a part of my life. A long while back, when I was in my 20's and first working on my family history a friend asked “Why are you interested in all that? Those people are all dead”. And, of course, she was right. My interest and focus has always been in the older generations. It’s all about the past for me. And the history - I find it fascinating to study the history swirling around my ancestors....I have a need to know what was going on in the world during their lives and how it affected them and subsequently, me. It is, after all, just one long chain from one generation to another.

My project had been put away in boxes for many years. The last time I worked on it you had to make inquiries through the mail. All my correspondence copies are carbon copies. Really dating myself here. Now, we have the internet. OMG, the information out there.

So, now, during this Clay drought I have drug it all out again and find myself again obsessed with ancestors who forged the first road through Ohio, ancestors who started a couple of glass companies you would have heard of, ancestors who emigrated from Austria because of religious persecution, ancestors who didn’t do much of anything but run a mercantile - but lived from 1833 to 1929 and saw so many changes in the world.

I was working on the glass companies guy (My great grandfather) and while searching on a name in a database I was interested in I started lamenting that my name was so common you had to weed out a lot of “wrong people” hits. So, on a lark I typed in one of my more unusual ancestor names - Christopher Retallick Short. Short, of course, is not uncommon but the Retallick sure is. Christopher's mothers maiden name was Retallick.

And, wow, I got some interesting hits. So I did a complete reversal, put glass company guy on the back burner and headed to Cornwall. As was my father I love being an “armchair traveler”. He would have loved the internet. Cornwall fills my mind with thoughts of quaint little cottages, smugglers and pirates (after all, that’s where Penzance is!!). It’s a place I have always wanted to go, ever since I first heard of Christopher Retallick Short many years ago.

This old Raphael Tuck postcard reminds me of how I envision Cornwall.






Now, the name Retallick was probably originally Tallick and the Re a pronoun like “those” as in “those Tallick’s”. Another theory has it as a place name and there are a couple of “Tallick” homesteads in Cornwall, one of which is now called “Retallack” and is an American type amusement park. If it were a place name, the correct spelling would have been Tretallick, or “the house of Tallick”. However it came about, the name originated in Cornwall and any Retallick, Retalic, etc. throughout the world can probably trace their ancestry back to Cornwall.

I also discovered this week that I was pronouncing it all wrong. It is not Ret-a-llik, but R'tallik (rhymes with metallic).

There is a project underway to transcribe all Cornish records into a database for access on the internet and in that database I found 1841 census records for Christopher Retallick Short and his wife Mary Anne Williams at her father’s residence in Lanivett, Cornwall, England. They had a one year old son, William. The Short’s were about to leave for America and my great grandmother Mary A Short was to be born on the boat on the way from England. Unfortunately, her mother died during the voyage, whether from complications from the delivery or a disease, I do not know. Christopher, his son William and brand new daughter Mary arrived in Perry Co, Ohio in 1842.

In 1909. that baby's daughter, my great aunt Molly, visited Cornwall. This postcard was sent to her father John D. Allen (the husband of Mary A Short) on July 13, 1909. She says “ Lunch here at White Hart Inn. We visited this church and are spending the day in the village. Molly”. Christopher Retallick Short was baptised in this church on 4/30/1815 and his parents were married here, as well.






I have spent days wading through Cornish records. There is lots of information to dig into. One of my research problems is the same names keep being used over and over and over. Then I discovered why - During the period from about 1750 to 1875 many families in Cornwall used the following naming pattern:

The first son was named after the father’s father.
The second son after the mother’s father,
the third son after the father,
the fourth son after the father’s eldest brother.

And the same convention with the girls. So, there are lots of Christopher and William and John - over and over again. Gets very confusing.

The Retallicks of Cornwall were farmers or, if they left the farm usually showed up in the tin mills or the mines. Christopher Retallick Short’s occupation in the census of 1841 is shown as “Iron Miner”.

The mining is finished in Cornwall, as is the fishing. Cornwall is quiet and picturesque and relies heavily on tourism for survival.

I have a lot of work yet to do on this family, but I do know that if I ever get a chance I would love to visit Cornwall and see the places where my ancestors lived and walked and worked. I expect if I could sleep in one of those old cottages for a night I might have dreams of King Arthur. And, maybe I could stand in the moonlight watching the standing stones and feel a connection with my Cornish ancestors.

Who knows, maybe Clay will tour in England one day and I won’t be able to resist killing two birds with one stone.

Oh, and I have some old pictures that I know must be Short’s (some of them tintypes) but I don’t know who they are. Daddy could never tell me any more than they were “Shorts”. But, here is one of the baby girl born on the boat on the way from England. She looks a bit stern, but maybe 9 kids will do that to you!! LOL.






Mary A. Short Allen
1842-1900