My ancestry: parents’ story, and what I have pieced together from the Internet

My ancestry: parents’ story, and what I have pieced together from the Internet

I am attaching some documents here that relate to family history. I asked my father to get his story on paper while he remembered it, and he did. Although he writes about my mother doing the same, I do not recall ever seeing the document.

My mother’s father Josiah Scott Brown was the last of eight children on a farm in Illinois. His father, and namesake, had been born in 1824, and died before he was born, in 1875. My grandfather was therefore raised pretty much by his elder siblings. He was a promising child, and somehow the family managed to send both him and an older sister to medical school. You can read about the family, mainly names and dates, in the history provided by a link below.
Josiah Scott Brown did his internship in Chicago, I believe, and Monroe, Michigan. Somewhere along the line he met Henrietta Munde and they married.
Henrietta Munde, born in 1881, was raised in New York City with her sister Eleanor. They were adventuresome kids. It was a rather prosperous family, living in a large single-family house somewhere north of the middle of Manhattan. One of the family stories is about the two sisters writing by themselves downtown on the horse-drawn trams, totally self-assured, and known to the tram drivers. Her father, Charles Augustus Munde, was the son of an immigrant of some prominence by the same name. Before leaving Leipzig he had developed the “water cure” for all the details you and had written at least one book about it. I found that book in the Library of Congress and read it.
Henrietta was more worldly than J. Scott Brown. She liked the finer things, like cut crystal glassware. He was fond of his Presbyterian Church. The crystal wine glasses were passed off as sherbet cups – don’t know if he knew the difference.
He had a large house on Sixth Street in Long Beach, and a huge Packard car, but was otherwise not given to ostentation. He worked as an orthopedic surgeon, not retiring until he was eighty. Henrietta never drove. My mother got her driver’s license at the age of 14 so that she could serve as chauffeur. Though my grandmother is attractive enough in the photo I have of her when my mother was about 12, for all the years that I knew her she was quite overweight. She may have eaten out of pure boredom – she and J. Scott did not have a close marriage.
The family moved to Santa Barbara about 1960 to be near their daughter Mary, who cared for them in later life. Henrietta died in 1966 and J. Scott in 1968. He spent his last two years living with my parents in El Cerrito, where I saw him occasionally. His mind wasn’t that sharp, and he told his history the way he would have liked it to have been: he had gotten his medical degree from Yale, where he had been on the football team. My mother never did much like him, but she did her Christian duty in making his final years comfortable.
My parents met in high school in Long Beach California. Neither of them had any other serious romances in their lives. My mother spoke of a boy, “Peach Blossom” who asked her out at one time, and my father spoke of another girl who tried it one time to seduce him, without success. My mother’s father did not approve of my parents’ match. My father’s family were tradesmen, whereas he was a doctor. He was an early advocate of careers for women; his two older daughters were professionals, one never marrying, the other doing so only at age 65.
When my mother graduated from high school, two years after my father, they packed her off to John Brown University in Arkansas. I gather that the place was rather fundamentalist Christian. The academics weren’t all that great, and the social environment was claustrophobic. Mother complained loudly enough and long enough to get relieved. They then sent her to Mills College in California, from which she graduated in 1939.
My father’s written recollections cover his career during this period. In any case, they got married on June 16^th, 1939, just after mother graduated from Mills. There are some wedding photos among the family heirlooms, some of which I have posted on my website. The scandal of the wedding was that father wore brown shoes with a blue suit. Mother’s father had the photos retouched to make them black.
My parents remained in the San Francisco Bay area after getting married. Father started working at the Moore Drydocks in Oakland sometime early in the war. I have no idea how he learned sheet-metal work, but he was an amazingly handy fellow and I’m sure that when the opportunity came he taught himself very quickly. One of my fondest recollections of my father is our tour of the American West in 1999 after mother had died. He told me that sheet-metal work was the thing he had enjoyed most in life. He had a singular genius both for envisioning how a flat piece of metal should be cut to come together into the appropriate three-dimensional product, and for executing the moves that it took to get the solder to make it happen. It was proud of what he did in the realm of chemistry, but I don’t recall him ever speaking as glowingly about that.
My mother went to work as a secretary for the Naval headquarters in Oakland, California, Admiral Nimitz’s operation. She was a fast and accurate typist and a smart woman, who knew how to make an office work.
I was conceived about four months after the United States entered the war. Dad was working night and day to crank out liberty ships. There was a lot of sheet-metal work, especially in the galleys, latrines, and morgues.
If I recall the stories correctly, my parents lived in a rental on Milvia the street in Berkeley when they met. They moved for whatever reason and Carlton Street in Berkeley, touches where they lived when I was born. During the war, with a good income, they moved to a nice house on Monta Vista Street in Piedmont. That is where my sister and I believe my brother were born. Actually, we were all born in Alta Bates hospital, Dr. William Marsh attending. And that brings us up to the beginning of my own biography.
Here are the links to materials on my web site:

My father’s oral history of his own life http://www.grahamseibert.com/ells_seibert_oral_history.pdf

Stories of my mother’s mother’s family. http://www.grahamseibert.com/henrietta_munde_family.pdf

The genealogy of my mother’s family, back to the Mayflower and before http://www.grahamseibert.com/brown_family_tree.pdf

The genealogy of my father’s family, back to the Saarland about 1500 http://www.grahamseibert.com/seibert_family_tree.pdf

1^ If you listen closely to Bob Dylan lyrics from this era, you find that they are as much a critique as an endorsement of drugs, sexual freedom, and dropping out. Youth of that time were certain that he was totally on their side. He was not. As a dour prophecy, “Its All Over Now, Baby Blue” seems to anticipate the world we live in today. Alas.

2^ Murray, Chapter 6, “The Founding Virtues.”

3^ “Evolution and Ethics, 1943, available online as a PDF

4^ Evoluton and Ethics, page 81

5^ Fertility rates from the CIA Worldbook; intelligence from “IQ and the Wealth of Nations,” Lynn and Vanhanen