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Death Finds a Way: A Janie Riley Mystery by Lorine McGinnis Schulze Janie Riley is an avid genealogist with a habit of stumbling on to dead bodies. She and her husband head to Salt Lake City Utah to research Janie's elusive 4th great-grandmother. But her search into the past leads her to a dark secret. Can she solve the mysteries of the past and the present before disaster strikes? Available now on Amazon.com and and Amazon.ca |
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Try an Ancestry.com Free Trial and Ancestry.ca Free Trial Genealogy Mystery Book!Death Finds a Way: A Janie Riley Mystery by Lorine McGinnis Schulze Janie Riley is an avid genealogist with a habit of stumbling on to dead bodies. She and her husband head to Salt Lake City Utah to research Janie's elusive 4th great-grandmother. But her search into the past leads her to a dark secret. Can she solve the mysteries of the past and the present before disaster strikes? Available now on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca Genealogy NewsletterJOIN the FREE Olive Tree Genealogy Newsletter. Be the first to know of genealogy events and freebies. Find out when new genealogy databases are put online. Get tips for finding your elusive brick-wall ancestor.
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Mohawk Shelters & Homes
My ninth great-grandmother, Ots-Toch or Alstock, who was born circa 1620 in the Mohawk village of Canajoharie, New
York, was the reason for my delving into the culture and traditions of the Mohawk nation. Ots-Toch married a Dutch settler,
Cornelis Van Slyke, but never left the Mohawk village. I became intrigued with her story and wanted to know more about her
heritage and mine. Brian Brown generously shared his own research, much of which you can read on these pages.
The longhouse was made of elm bark over a framework of poles.
(Birch does not grow far enough south to be widely used by the Mohawks: elm
worked just as well). There was a door at each end. Inside, a 10-12 foot
wide hallway ran the whole length of the house. Fireplaces lined the middle
of the hallway, about every 20 feet. On each side, there was a
"shelf" which was about 2 feet off the ground. This was high enough to sit
comfortably and allowed people to sleep off the cold ground. The shelves
would be about 10 feet wide. An upper shelf, 6 feet above this sleeping
platform, was used for storage or as a place for the children to sleep. Under
the lower shelf was additional storage.
A family had a section of these shelves to themselves. They shared
the fireplace in the middle of the hall with the family on the opposite side.
Anywhere from 30 to 100 people might live in a longhouse. All of them
were related through the mothers. When a man married, he went to live
with his wife's family. The women of the longhouse were, thus, either
sisters or else cousins, through a female ancestor.
The Iroquois seem to have considered the longhouse an important
social institution and a cozy group home. Whites who lived in them said
they were smokey, noisy, utterly lacking in privacy and that children and dogs
scampered about at all hours.
The organization of the community into longhouses based on
matrilineal descent is reflected in Iroquoian kinship terminology. A
child addressed his mother's sisters (who lived in the same longhouse) as
"mother" but father's sisters (who lived in another longhouse) were "aunt".
First cousins through the female line (who lived in the same longhouse)
were "brother" and "sister" while those through a male ancestor were
"cousin."
Apparently, when the longhouse got "big", there was a tendency for it
to separate, with a portion of the population moving to another site,
perhaps only a few feet away, and building their own longhouse. The cause
seems to have been that, when the population got too large, the internal
bickering mounted. In a large longhouse that had existed for several
generations, some of the women might be only 3rd or 4th cousins, without
close ties. Thus, one of the older women might. for example, take her
several adult daughters and their families and move next door, starting a new
longhouse. This would reduce the overcrowding and tensions in the longhouse
they left and, since the people who remained in the old longhouse were now usually more closely related, it would actually increase the stability of the group left behind.
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