Reference & Adult Services Archives - Patchogue-Medford Library

PatchChords: Graduation Day

June 16, 2018 By Gary Lutz

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

And we present this prestigious degree to…

Johannes Brahms, one of the most famous composers of the Romantic period, had a great body of famous and successful work, and it was only a matter of time before academia took notice and awarded him honorary credentials. But, caring little for such things, his academic credentials and awards were often shunted into a desk drawer and all but forgotten.

This attitude was to change slightly in 1880.

That year, he was offered the prestigious degree, Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Breslau. However, still sticking to his attitude, and true to form, he acknowledged this prestigious honor by mailing a penny postcard. But, it was gently hinted to him by a friend that Breslau deserved better; in fact, this friend urged him to compose a piece of music for the occasion.

So, amidst speculation and anticipation as to the form of the work he would eventually produce, Brahms set to work.

When the University finally heard the work, they were amazed. Brahms had tackled the task in a brilliantly obvious, ingenious way by putting together nothing less than a potpourri of old student songs, appropriately titled “The Academic Festival Overture”.

The score, at the Library, of the Academic Festival Overture

A recording, at the Library, of the Academic Festival Overture

More, at the Library, about Brahms

Recordings, at the Library, of his music

Scores and other printings, at the Library, of his music

Play Ball!

March 27, 2018 By Gary Lutz

Baseball

Major League Baseball’s Opening Day is upon us, with all of the requisite nostalgia, excitement about the blank slate and the promise of a new season, and hopefulness for, and dreams of, a championship year.

From 1937 until the late 1940s, Patchogue was graced with its own local independent baseball team, the Cubs.

1937 saw the organization of the squad, but the second World War forced them into a lengthy hiatus, after which they regrouped under Manager Paul Andrisani. The April 4, 1946 issue of the Patchogue Advance lists the names of the squad’s intrepid nine at that time, along with a request that any other team wishing to play against the team contact Mr. Andrisani. Fundraising was also apparently on their minds, and several ideas were mooted, including, as is commonplace today, showcasing, on the team’s scorecards, advertisements for local merchants.

Although it’s well known that many famous Major League Baseball players served their country in the second World War (among them Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio), this team was, possibly uniquely, composed entirely of veterans of the second World War.

Later in April, 1946, Newsday reported that the team was actively seeking a berth in the South Shore Baseball League, although Patchogue was, also according to Newsday, already represented in the League by an un-named club. But, just a few more days later, Newsday reported that the Cubs were apparently successful in their bid for the berth. The team’s home field, Wiedner’s Park, was located on Medford Avenue (Route 112) in Patchogue.

Soon after, in early May, Newsday listed George Dioguardo of Patchogue as the manager of the squad, and an open appeal to any other team on Long Island interested in playing against them was published. Under what circumstances the team’s story eventually ended is unknown, although newspaper coverage of the team’s activities can be found as late as the summer of 1947.

Also of note is the Medford Athletic Club’s baseball team, seen here in this photograph, taken on May 5, 1929. Can you help us identify its members, coaches, and umpire? If so, contact us.

March is Women’s History Month!

March 26, 2018 By April Earle

Researching female ancestors can be challenging due to several factors.

First, most women take their husband’s surname when they marry. This makes it tricky, although not impossible, to learn about your female ancestors’ lives before marriage. If you can’t find your female ancestor’s maiden name, that maternal line can become a brick wall in your research. Look for marriage records at city halls or marriage registrations at you ancestor’s church.

Second, there is the historical fact that women have lacked equal rights to men thus leaving much shorter paper trails. For example, if a woman couldn’t legally own property in her lifetime, it’s unlikely you’ll find her name on any deeds or that she will have left a Last Will and Testament of her own.

One way to learn about your female ancestors’ lives, though, is to really read the records you can find for them, like census records. We’re often so excited to find their names listed on a record that we don’t really read the full record.

The 1900 and 1910 U.S. Federal Censuses both offer interesting glimpses into the lives of our female ancestors through fields known as the “fertility questions.” In both censuses, women were asked how many times they had given birth and how many of their children were alive. This was done in an effort to learn about the rate of infant mortality. This information can help you discover children in your family history who died between the censuses. It can also help you to gain a deeper appreciation for the struggles your female ancestors endured. Note that these questions were asked of all adult females regardless of their marital status. Many researchers might be surprised to see how many single-parent households existed back then.

In the case of my own great-great-grandmother, the 1900 census indicates that she had three children, two of which were alive at the time. In the 1910 census she was recorded as a widow; having given birth five times, she had three living children.

Armed with this information, I was able to search for those children’s’ birth and death certificates. I learned the names their mother gave them, the dates she gave birth, the causes of their early deaths, and the cemetery where her children are interred. I can only imagine the impact these losses had on great-great grandma and the extended family.

I also learned from the 1910 census that as a single mother of three, she took a job at the Aqueduct Raceway in Queens, New York. I don’t know exactly what she did there but I sure hope she bet on the ponies once or twice and won.

So I recommend you read census records closely and maybe you too can gain a clearer picture of what life was like for your foremothers.

If you need help, don’t hesitate to contact our reference desk to schedule an appointment with one of our Genealogy Consultants.

Happy Heritage Hunting!

PatchChords: The Music Of Outer Space

March 14, 2018 By Gary Lutz

In celebration of Long Island Reads, PatchChords examines the music of outer space.

Outer space conjures up many images – danger, nothingness, a deadly vacuum, a new frontier to be explored, eerie mystery, the twinkle of the stars, infinity, and even a touch of romance. One finds it easy to imagine that our ancestors, thousands of years ago, improvised music as they stood under the night sky to celebrate and commemorate the breathtaking panorama of shimmering stars that greeted them after every sunset.

One of the earliest operas to feature the idea of space travel was Franz Joseph Haydn's opera buffa, Il Mondo della Luna, written in 1777, about a man who falsely believes that he has been transported to the Moon. Also, Haydn's choral and chamber orchestra piece, The Creation, was conceived after discussing music and astronomy with the astronomer (and, incidentally, oboist), William Herschel, and it could be argued that the vast, empty void of outer space can be heard in the piece, with its softly pulsating high violins and wind instruments above low cellos and basses, leaving an enormous, unoccupied void between them, in both the orchestral and the spatial senses.

And Gustav Holst's famous suite, The Planets, of course, immediately springs to mind. Written before the discovery of Pluto in 1930, it, as many have noticed, does not contain a movement for the dwarf planet, Pluto. Holst, in his lifetime, however, expressed little or no interest in writing one, but, eventually, a movement for Pluto was created by British composer, Colin Matthews in 2000. And then, there is the "Aquarium" movement from Camille Saint-Saëns' famous Carnival of the Animals, a piece seemingly often drafted into service to evoke outer space, with its descending "twinkling" piano figures, although, as the title indicates, it was originally intended to evoke something much more terrestrial and aquatic.

Sound, being nothing more than air vibrations, does not, by definition, actually travel in the airless vacuum of space, however objects in space (the Sun, planets, stars, quasars, pulsars, galaxies, etc.) produce signals that, if received through radio astronomy dishes and processed, can be perceived by the human ear as audible sound. Moving into the modern era, Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen, David Bedford, Henry Brant, Henryk Gorecki, Philip Glass, John Cage, Rued Langgaard, and George Crumb are just a few of the composers who have explored the potential of such sounds as the basis for their musical compositions. And space travel has even been used by rock musicians as a metaphor for loneliness, two of the most notable examples being Elton John's Rocket Man and David Bowie's Space Oddity.

The blackness and silence of the night sky, the glow and whisper of planets, the fire trails and crackling of comets, the darkness and roar of black holes, and the twinkling and ringing of stars – the great ethereal gulf of outer space conjures up many images…and musical sounds.

Digital PML: New Photos Added To The “Patchogue & Medford Miscellanous Historical Photos Collection”

March 1, 2018 By Gary Lutz

A new group of photographs of Patchogue and Medford has been added to Digital PML's Patchogue & Medford Miscellanous Historical Photos Collection, including photographs of First Grade and graduating classes of Patchogue's schools in the early 20th Century. The collection features miscellaneous historical photographs of Patchogue and Medford, including photographs of businesses, school class portraits, and views of areas of Patchogue in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Digital PML is the Patchogue-Medford Library's repository of digitized materials, containing scanned books, postcards, photographs, maps, virtual exhibits and more.

New Celia M. Hastings Local History Room Website

February 27, 2018 By Gary Lutz

The Library has published a brand-new website for the Celia M. Hastings Local History Room, https://history.pmlib.org, showing the Room, its collections, its services, its policies, and its history, and with a scope including the history of Patchogue, Medford, Brookhaven Town, Suffolk County, Long Island, and New York State.

Curious about what happened here in the past? In East Patchogue, Medford, North Patchogue, Patchogue, the Pat-Med Area, in Brookhaven Town, in Suffolk County, on Long Island (as a region), or in New York State? This website is a great place to start, browse, read, explore, answer questions, do a little research…

It includes:

New York State History, including information on census, naturalization, vital & related records; colleges & universities of New York State; county histories; cities of New York State (New York City and its boroughs); Governors (Colonial & State); and U.S. leaders from New York State (Presidents, First Ladies, Vice Presidents, and Supreme Court Justices).
Long Island History, including Indian prehistory & history, county histories, town histories & records, and village histories.
Patchogue-Medford Area History, including histories of local Associations; biographies; business & industrial history; educational history; Fire Department history; historic buildings & structures; literary history; maritime history; Police (Constabulary) history; and religious history.
Library History, including period histories, chronologies, directories, images, haunts (Library locations), and a walking tour of Library history.
General Research Tools, including Digital PML, the subject headings in the Room's Vertical File, links to where to find historic newspapers, and our index to the Long Island Forum.
Specialized Research Tools, including lists of Long Island Genealogy Reference works; our birth, marriage and death index to the Long Island Advance; information on researching the history of your house; subject guides to Long Island history; historical commemorations & celebrations; and information on Long Island Espionage & Long Island in the Revolution.
Other Useful Contacts, including where to explore more about Patchogue-Medford Area history, Brookhaven Town history, Suffolk County history, New York State history, and Long Island history.

For more detailed information about what's on the site, visit this overview of the site.

Any questions or comments? Contact us.

PatchChords: African-American History Month

February 15, 2018 By Gary Lutz

In honor of African-American History Month, PatchChords examines the life of Henry Thacker "Harry" Burleigh (1866-1949).

Henry Thacker "Harry" Burleigh (1866-1949)

Born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1866, Burleigh received early instruction in singing from his grandfather, who taught him and his brother traditional spirituals and slave songs. Further studies in vocal music followed, and, during and after his high school years, young Burleigh became known, with his striking baritone voice, as one of Erie's most accomplished classical singers.

Subsequently, at the age of 26, he was accepted, with a scholarship, to the prestigious National Conservatory of Music in New York, eventually playing double bass in the Conservatory's orchestra. While there, he came to the attention of one of the Conservatory's professors, the noted Czech composer, Antonín Dvořák, and Burleigh became a huge influence on Dvořák's interest in, and advocacy of, African-American melodies, which reached its apotheosis in Dvořák's employment of the pentatonic scale in several of his compositions.

In 1894, Burleigh became a soloist for St. George's Episcopal church in New York City, despite racially-motived opposition to his hiring. And, in 1946, he retired from the position after 52 years of service. Around the start of his time at St. George's, he began to publish his own arrangements of art songs and, indeed, to compose his own songs, gaining a reputation as one of America's best-known composers of art songs, composing, in his lifetime, somewhere between 200 and 300 songs.

At the age of 82, in 1949, he passed away back in Erie, Pennsylvania, leaving behind a rich legacy which lies in his prolific original compositional output, in his role in teaching and establishing many African-American soloists (such as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson) on America's recital stages, in his promotion and advocacy of the spiritual as a musical form, and in his introduction of African-American music to classically trained artists.

Printings, at the Library, of his music

African American Family History Research

January 31, 2018 By April Earle

February is Black History Month and thus a good time to examine the records available to those doing African-American family history research.

The basics of doing U.S. based genealogy research requires working back from yourself a generation at a time. Most frequently the U.S. Federal Census proves to be an excellent resource for tracking family groups back one decade at a time. For so many of those with African-American ancestry, though, the 1870 U.S. Federal Census is the end of their research trail or at least it can be.

The 1870 U.S. Federal Census was the first one in which formerly enslaved people were listed by name. In the previous 1860 census enslaved people were recorded in what are called the Slave Schedules where they were listed under their owner’s name by sex and age – not by their own names. This often proves to be a brick wall to going any further back in time.

However, there are some lesser known resources that may prove incredibly beneficial. The library provides you free in-house access to Ancestry’s databases in which there is a record set called the Freedman’s Bank Records, 1865-1871. Ancestry describes this dataset as follows:

The Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company was incorporated in 1865 by an act signed by President Abraham Lincoln. The purpose of the company was to create an institution where former slaves and their dependents could place and save their money. The original bank was first headquartered in New York and later moved to Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter branch offices opened in other cities, primarily in ones in the south where there was a larger population of African Americans. Eventually there were 37 branch offices in 17 states with approximately 70,000 depositors (over the banks lifetime) and deposits of more than $57 million. In 1874, as a result of mismanagement, fraud, and other events and situations, Freedman’s Bank closed.

This collection contains the digitized images of the forms depositors had to fill out when opening an account. The forms asked a plethora of personal information. Granted not every branch asked the same questions and the questions varied from year to year but if you are fortunate to find ancestors in this dataset you could be provided with an extraordinary amount of personal information regarding depositors’ parentage and extended family. This includes but is not limited to the depositor’s date and place of birth, parents’ names, marital status, spouse’s and offsprings’ names, a physical description (height, weight, distinguishing marks, etc.), and even sometimes the name of the plantation they once worked on or their former owner.

As always you want to be sure to view the actual image of the original document associated with your ancestor and not just the indexed information. The image will include much more information – often very enlightening information about one’s ancestors during and immediately following emancipation.

If you need assistance in starting or advancing your family history research, feel free to contact our reference desk to sign up for an appointment with our Genealogy Consultant.

Happy Heritage Hunting!

Frames Of Reference: The Time Machine (1960)

December 26, 2017 By Gary Lutz

New Year's Eve, 1899. The dawn of a new century. Four Victorian gentlemen assemble on a cold, snowy night to accept the invitation of their mutual friend, George, to dinner and a demonstration of his "time machine", as he explains to them the novel concept of the "fourth dimension".

What happens next challenges their "modern" perceptions and understanding of science, and George is plunged on a fantastic trip backwards and forwards over humanity's past and future, all the while observing it all through his learned, scientific and Victorian eyes.

Otherwise a relatively faithful adaption of H.G. Wells's original novel, the film eschews Wells's cynical observations about the British class system and about mankind's ultimately insignificant place in an indifferent cosmos, and features the young Australian actor, Rod Taylor in the lead role (giving the character youthful, optimistic and idealistic qualities) and an increased emphasis on heroic action and adventure. The other ingredients in the mix are the Academy Award-winning special effects of the day (blue-backed traveling mattes, double-printed background sets, time-lapse photography, and models and miniatures), and a story of love across time, not to mention a glimpse of the Victorian era as seen through the eyes of a 1960's design sensibility. And the idea of fantastic technology archaically wrapped and realized in brass, rivets, art nouveau arabesques, and crystal mechanisms can arguably be seen as an influence on today's steampunk genre.

And, as the final drop of celebratory champagne, one of the film's final lines presents the ultimate question for the avid bibliophile; consider…which three books would you have taken?

Check out, from the Library, the film

Check out, at the Library, the original book

and…

More New Year’s-themed films

PatchChords: Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht…

December 1, 2017 By Gary Lutz

One of the most enjoyable experiences of the Holiday season is listening to or performing the enormous body of celebratory music lovingly written for the Holidays over the centuries. And, each Holiday season, scores of worshipful singers re-create Silent Night, a song born in humble, desperate, eleventh hour circumstances almost two centuries ago this year.

And therein lies a tale.

On Christmas Eve, 1818, celebrations of the Christmas holiday were very much on the minds of the people of Oberndorf, Austria as they prepared to gather together for midnight Mass to celebrate the birth of Christ with prayer and song. Foremost on the mind of Curate Joseph Mohr of the Church of St. Nicholas, however, were more worrying concerns; he had discovered that the church organ was badly damaged and, no matter how hard the pedals were pumped, only a scratchy wheeze could be cajoled from it. And repair of the aging instrument in time for the Christmas celebrations was, alas, out of the question.

The young cleric dispairingly retired to the quiet solitude of his study. Although blessed with musical talent and an aptitude for the guitar, he felt that the guitar would perhaps not be the best choice of instrument upon which to play the traditional carols employed at that time in Christmas celebrations. Mohr decided that the solution was to prepare a completely new song for his congregation. And so, he lifted his quill pen, and, soon thereafter, six simple stanzas telling the story of the Nativity flowed from it.

As quickly produced as they were, the stanzas still needed to be set to music, and midnight Mass was fast approaching. Realizing that he needed help, Mohr paid a timely visit to the living quarters of his friend, Franz Xaver Gruber, the Church of St. Nicholas's organist and choirmaster, and asked for his help with realizing the song for two voices, chorus and guitar. Gruber set to work immediately, and, employing three of the most basic harmonies in music theory, weaved the famous melody with which we are all familiar today to complement Mohr's words.

Both men arrived back at the church before midnight, barely having time for one precious rehearsal, and agreeing that Mohr would sing the tenor part and play his guitar, Gruber would sing the bass part, and the church choir would join in four-part harmony at each refrain.

And, at midnight, the congregation of the Church of St. Nicholas, as they had for many years, filed into the pews. Guitar in hand, and with Gruber and the church choir at his side, Mohr told the congregation that although the majestic, full-throated sounds of the church's organ would not be heard that night, a special different kind of music would be heard.

And thus, it was ensured that music still played a part in the Church of St. Nicholas's Christmas Eve midnight Mass.

Stop by the Library and see our Holiday Collection, which offers Holiday music for all ages and musical abilities, from the beginning caroler to the seasoned Holiday musicmaker!

Printed music, at the Library, for the Holidays

Recorded music, at the Library, for the Holidays