Rhode Island: A Spirit of Independence (with Maureen Taylor) | Episode 106

What can a single vintage photograph tell you about your ancestors? Maureen Taylor, know as The Photo Detective®, has spent decades proving that old family photos can solve family history mysteries in pretty fascinating ways. Born and bred in Rhode Island and currently serving as president of the Rhode Island Genealogical Society, Maureen takes us on a tour of the 13th state’s unique history. She recounts stories of her great-grandfather’s paper hanging business in Pawtucket and her grandmother who crossed the border from Quebec to work in the textile mills. Along the way, she shares how a tiny state with fierce independence and a rich industrial heritage shaped generations of families, including her own. If you’ve ever wondered what the place your ancestors called home might reveal about who you are today, this conversation will inspire you to start looking.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

Transcript

Rhode Island Jokes And Identity

Maureen Taylor 0:00

And Rhode Islanders have their own way of doing things and they like things done a certain way. The joke in Rhode Island, which um I hope no one that listens to this will be offended because it is a Rhode Island thing. You can drive from one end of the state to the other in an hour. But for a Rhode Islander to drive 20 minutes to go somewhere is considered just too far.

Who Is The Photo Detective

Crista Cowan 0:28

Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America. Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us. So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us. There are some people that you meet in your life that are just characters. A lot of people come in and out of life. Some people are forgettable, unfortunately. But my guest today is one of those people who, for more than 20 years of my career as a genealogist, has been kind of a larger-than-life character. Maureen Taylor is known as the photo detective. And she's got this really fantastic, raspy voice, and she's very direct and opinionated. Over the decades, as I have gotten to know her, not only is she brilliant at what she does, but she's also very much a product of her environment. And I didn't really understand that in full until I had this conversation with her. Maureen is born and bred Rhode Islander. And I didn't know a lot about the state of Rhode Island. It is literally like 38 miles by 47 miles. Like it's teeny. I've driven from Boston to New York several times. Didn't even realize I was in the state of Rhode Island until one trip a few falls ago. My parents and I went on a leaf peeping trip and we made a point of stopping in Providence and getting to know a little bit about the state. It's so tiny that I'm from Los Angeles. The county of Los Angeles is like three times larger in square mileage than the whole state of Rhode Island. But Rhode Island is important for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is because it was the 13th state to ratify the constitution to become a state of the original 13 colonies. It was the last. And so as we head into these final 13 episodes of our America 250 season, I'm really excited that Maureen Taylor is the one who is here to represent the state of Rhode Island. And she does it beautifully. Not only is she the photo detective, but she's also the president of the Rhode Island Genealogical Society. And I think you're really going to enjoy my conversation with Maureen Taylor. Well, Maureen, I'm so excited to have you with us here today. You and I have known each other for what, almost 20 years, probably.

Maureen Taylor 3:32

Oh. How long have you been at Ancestry, Crista?

Crista Cowan 3:36

What 22 years?

Maureen Taylor 3:38

22 years.

Building A Career From Photos

Crista Cowan 3:39

Yeah, so there you go. Um, but I feel like I don't know you or your story very well. So I'm actually really excited to have this conversation with you. Um, of course, everyone knows you as The Photo Detective. Tell us a little bit about how you got into that business.

Maureen Taylor 3:55

Oh, the photo detective business. Sure. So I started my career as a like assistant in a historical society library working part-time in the graphics department and part-time in the reference department. And the people who came in in the reference department to do research, family research, never went upstairs to look at the photographs. And the people that came in to look at the photographs didn't always go downstairs to do the research. And I thought, this is wrong. These connect. And it took me a long time to have the guts to just go off on my own and say, I'm gonna do this. And then I got named, you know, the photo detective by Wall Street Journal. And that was pretty cool. So it's been a while. I've been doing this for a while, Crista.

Crista Cowan 4:43

Yeah, for sure you have. And that is how I was first introduced to you as well. I think you did some work with Ancestry Magazine back in the day. I did. Yeah. So, so tell me, like, do you have a story of like one of your favorite photographic finds?

Maureen Taylor 5:00

Oh, you know what? Here's the thing. It's a new one every day. It's a new one every day. The the most the one I'm working on right now is because I'm I'm about to go on a vacation and I'm going to visit the town where this photograph was taken. And so it is not a family photo, it's one I collected. It's a postcard, a photographic postcard of a young woman in a park painting a building in this little town in Ireland. And she the all these older people around her, which I think are her relatives, and she mails it to somebody. The here I am in the park, you know, and this is with named the prettiest village, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'm hoping when I go to the village, I can say this is where she was sat.

Crista Cowan 5:55

Yeah. That's easy.

Reading Context In Family Pictures

Maureen Taylor 5:57

Which would be pretty cool. So that's the one I'm working on right now. So there's lots of stories, tons of stories. Every one is a new one, you know, from the you know, great-grandfather that I didn't have a photograph of. And then somebody put him up on Facebook in a group, and I was like, really? Well, I didn't even think to look at the public library because he wouldn't actually live in this town, but there was the collection. So I feel quite foolish about that one. But um yeah, you know, everyone is a every single day is a different photo mystery or photo curiosity that I find. And it's fun.

Crista Cowan 6:36

Well, and we talk about, you know, there's that old saying about a you know, picture's worth a thousand words. Like there is literally a story behind every photo, too.

Maureen Taylor 6:46

There is, and a lot of people just want to know when it was taken. And the story goes way beyond when it was taken. It's about the people that are in it, it's about where it was taken, it's how that fits into your family history. You know, I deal in the nuance, the context of the photos. Sure, I can date it and AI can date it, but it's the other stuff that really reveals hidden history in family collections. Like somebody's wearing a pin and they forget to look at the pin because they're so focused on the face, or they're sure it's who it is. And then I'm like, no, this photograph goes back a generation before the person you think is in it. And they're like, what? I'm like, let's look at that tree. Let's look at that ancestry tree and see what we can find out. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun.

Crista Cowan 7:43

Yeah, I it sounds like a lot of fun. And I think what you do is such a service to the community. You mentioned AI. How do you see AI changing or augmenting what you do versus maybe replacing some of what you do?

Maureen Taylor 7:56

Uh yeah, it's definitely replacing some of what I do. It's an interesting time to be the photo detective. Yeah, but AI does not at this point do much about the context and fit it into your family history with all your other photos. So that's what I'm doing now is mostly working with people and saying, bring it all on. I want to see it all in one fell swoop. I don't want to see just one photo or three photos. I want to see what you can cover in the timing that we have. Bring out the boxes, bring out the photo album. Let's talk about it. And I love working on photo albums.

Crista Cowan 8:33

That's amazing.

Maureen Taylor 8:35

That really is the story.

Crista Cowan 8:37

Yeah.

Albums Boxes And Family Memory

Maureen Taylor 8:37

It tells a story.

Crista Cowan 8:39

Well, I feel like I'm gonna need to hire you. I inherited my great-grandmother's photo albums. She kept a cons of them that I got. They start in I think 1907 and they go through the end of World War One. Oh, and just like page after page after page of five and six pictures to a page. As uh after she married my great-grandfather, he went off to World War I and he would send her back photographs. So there's like a whole section of one of these albums that is his military service in Europe. I mean, it's just, but there's some pictures in there that I'm like, I don't know who these people are. And that's currently like what I'm trying to figure out is how do I figure that out?

Maureen Taylor 9:20

You want you want to know my favorite photo album I ever worked on? Yeah. Yeah, this was a good one. So a person came to me with this photo album, and in the process of telling the story and figuring out, like maybe who put the album together, we discovered that this album had been passed down to three sisters. As the sister who put it together died, it went to this second sister, who then rearranged some of the photographs, put some of her photographs in, then she died, and it went to the third sister who further monkeyed with the contents. Um, it was fascinating to work on. Absolutely fascinating. I was like, wait, what? What? This doesn't make any sense. And then we looked at the family tree and we broke it down piece by piece. I was like, this is a big story. These sisters really loved each other and they had a plan for this album.

Crista Cowan 10:15

Wow. Uh, I wish I could talk all day with you about that, but that's what we're here to talk about.

Maureen Taylor 10:19

No, that's not what we're here for.

Crista Cowan 10:21

But but tell me a little bit about like, so you got into this photo detective thing because of your work. You said it was the historical society.

Maureen Taylor 10:28

Yes, but really, I have to credit my mom because my mom had a small box, a couple of small boxes, cigar boxes of all things that I nobody smoked. I don't know why they ended up in cigar boxes, maybe because they were sturdy. I'm not really sure. But anyway, she had these small boxes of photographs of mostly her family, some of my dad's, but mostly her family. And she would take them out and we would look at them. And she loved to look at them and reminisce about the things that were in the photos and the people that were in the photos. And so every time we looked at them, it revealed a little bit more of the story. And, you know, I really credit her for that.

Crista Cowan 11:12

And is that something that she did your whole life or something that started as she got toward the end of her life?

Maureen Taylor 11:17

No, this started when we were kids. You know, it would be a stormy afternoon, and she'd say, Let's look at those photographs. And she'd take them out. And of course, I was just a kid. I didn't have a tape recorder. I didn't, you know, I would just listen to the stories. And um, it was great. And she had she had some on her bureau that I, you know, knew who the people were because she told me who they were. But then as I became the photo detective, I was like, okay, wait a minute. What? There's people missing. And the genealogist, right? The genealogist I mean, why are they missing? Where are they? Yeah. When was this photograph taken? So it became a reveal for me. But my mom.

Crista Cowan 12:00

Yeah, it sounds like you've been connected to family history and family story your whole life. I think that's beautiful.

Maureen Taylor 12:06

Oh, Crista, I saved my allowance money to buy Gilbert Jones' book in search of your ancestors. And then I convinced them on a vacation once. We went up to New Hampshire and I like really convinced my parents. I was like, can we please stop at the New Hampshire historical site? You were that good. I was that kid, that weird kid. So was I. I get it. And they did. They stopped. My mom came in with me, and you know, she was very interested in family history.

Crista Cowan 12:34

I love that. How many siblings do you have?

Maureen Taylor 12:36

I have two siblings.

Crista Cowan 12:37

And are were they at all interested or did the bug just bite you?

Maureen Taylor 12:42

The bug really just bit me. Okay. I mean, they're they're interested in listening to it. Sure. But they don't do it.

Growing Up Rhode Islander

Crista Cowan 12:49

Yeah. And so talk to me about growing up. Were you born and raised in Rhode Island? Have you always lived there?

Maureen Taylor 12:56

Yes. I have always lived here. This little tiny state uh has been home. I grew up here. I was raised here. I went to college here. I only actually have left the state for like a couple of decades to go live in the Boston area. So I haven't gone that far from home, uh, living-wise, anyway. No, I love it here. I love this state.

Crista Cowan 13:18

It's beautiful.

Maureen Taylor 13:19

I've been there a couple of times. Absolutely. I love this state.

Crista Cowan 13:23

What? Um, were both of your parents from there as well?

Maureen Taylor 13:26

Yes. Both of them. Both of them. Yes.

Crista Cowan 13:29

Wow. Tell me, do you know the story of how your parents met?

Maureen Taylor 13:33

It's probably not worth sharing, but they marry into each other in a public event, public place, and uh then um dated for a while.

Crista Cowan 13:43

Okay. Did they stay married?

Maureen Taylor 13:46

Oh, yes.

Crista Cowan 13:47

Yeah.

Maureen Taylor 13:48

My parents were married for 50-something years.

Crista Cowan 13:50

So wow.

Maureen Taylor 13:51

And how yeah, they were role models for sure. They had a lot of struggles, a lot of my dad had a lot of health problems, but my parents stayed together.

Crista Cowan 14:02

Good for them. Um, what did your dad do for work?

Maureen Taylor 14:06

My dad, so this is one of the things I wanted to talk about was the entrepreneurial spirit in my family. My dad, his dad, his uncle, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. It was inherited family painting and paper hanging business.

Crista Cowan 14:29

Oh, wow. Okay.

Maureen Taylor 14:31

I have some of their tools still uh in this house. Uh and my great-grandfather had a paper and paper hanging store at one point. I found him in a city directory and it's like, what? You had a store? And there he is on the back of my wall, which I'm sure is a picture that hung in the store, which was popular. Um, so my dad did that. He he he worked very hard. He was very good with um, you know, if they tested him, I sure he'd he'd turn out to be one of those super color identifier people because he could he mixed everything by hand.

Crista Cowan 15:09

Oh, okay.

Maureen Taylor 15:10

He was good.

Crista Cowan 15:11

That's amazing. So it was your great-grandfather that started the business.

Maureen Taylor 15:15

Uh, actually, either thing it was my great-grandfather or my great-grand great grandfather. I'm a little unclear as to which one.

Crista Cowan 15:22

And what town in Rhode Island?

Maureen Taylor 15:25

Uh, they lived in several towns, okay, but primarily in a community called Lincoln, which is actually the thing to know about Rhode Island is there are towns, but then there are villages.

Crista Cowan 15:38

Okay.

Maureen Taylor 15:38

And what is the difference? A lot of villages. The villages are really where people identify. Like you don't live in Lincoln, you live in Salesville. You don't live in Berroville, you live in Pasco. You don't live, you know, there's all kinds of towns in, I mean, little villages and post offices. My favorite is Biscuit City, which is basically two streets that cross. Um, but there's so many of them, and that is how people today still identify.

Crista Cowan 16:13

Wow. Okay. And so was your great-grandfather's business like you said there was a store. Was that like in a village, or did they work in a lot of different places? Did he end up with, you know, was it an enterprise?

Maureen Taylor 16:26

Uh, so that was that was George Taylor, and he had a store in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Um, but he also lived in Lincoln. And what I just sort of found out about him is he, it seems, uh took in English immigrants who lived with him and worked in the business.

Crista Cowan 16:50

And was he an immigrant himself? And so he had some sympathy for them or no?

Maureen Taylor 16:55

No, he was not.

Crista Cowan 16:56

Okay.

Maureen Taylor 16:57

His wife was.

Crista Cowan 16:58

Okay.

Maureen Taylor 16:59

So I think maybe there was a connection there.

Crista Cowan 17:01

Yeah.

Maureen Taylor 17:01

I'm not really sure. Like she, you know, sent a letter and said, send a couple of guys over. We have we have some extra work.

Crista Cowan 17:08

Oh, that's amazing. So, on that particular branch of your family tree, how deep do your Rhode Island roots go?

Maureen Taylor 17:14

George Peter Peter is the one who um comes down here from New Hampshire.

Crista Cowan 17:22

Okay.

Maureen Taylor 17:23

So my dad, my grandfather, my great-grandfather George, uh, and his father, Peter. So four generations.

Crista Cowan 17:31

Okay. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. And then on your mom's side, your mom was also raised in Rhode Island. Uh, were her parents from there as well?

Maureen Taylor 17:42

No. So her family history is French-Canadian.

Crista Cowan 17:47

Okay.

Maureen Taylor 17:48

And so they my grandmother, my I did, she died when I was one, so I didn't really know her. I only knew one of my grandparents. Um, and she lived in where were they living? Fall River or New Bedford. She was working in the mills. And my grandfather came down from Quebec, as was common. It was like a highway between Rhode Island and Quebec. And they were married uh in 1916. And then, as you probably know, Crista, but maybe some listeners don't know, because at that point she married a non-citizen, she lost her citizenship. Right. So they moved to Canada for a few years, and then the opportunities were better here, I think. So they moved back. Um, and then she uh applied, reapplied for her citizenship.

Crista Cowan 18:46

Did for her.

Maureen Taylor 18:47

Yeah, yeah. She was a very important my mother always said it was very important to her.

Crista Cowan 18:52

Yeah. Yeah. It's such a weird period of history, and it was only for a few years, right? But the we the way the law was written, right? A woman marries somebody and her citizenship is connected to his citizenship. So even if she was born here, was a US citizen, she lost her citizenship if her husband wasn't a citizen. Such a strange time.

Maureen Taylor 19:11

Such a strange time. So my grandfather was born in Canada, uh, in Quebec, uh, in a little town in Quebec. And uh we used to go back and forth sometimes and visit cousins of my mom's.

Crista Cowan 19:25

Wow. So fun. And is there a I mean, I feel like because of that connection and the highway between those communities, right? Like, like there's a lot of French Canadian influence in Rhode Island, yeah.

Maureen Taylor 19:36

Oh yes. Oh, yes, there is. Uh, there's a there was a community in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where my uh grandmother and grandfather and several of their relatives, I think my great-grandparents came down, and my grandmother's parents also lived there. They pretty much all lived on the same street in Pawtucket. Okay. And you know, genealogist Michael Leclerc, I think, who's a French-Canadian uh researcher. So we were doing research because we're our families are about from the same area. And all of a sudden he's looking at the census, and I'm looking at the census. I think this was the 1950 census. Um, and he goes, Those are the Alice's my that he talked about. I'm like, Yeah, that's my mom and my grandmother. He's like, What? He lived next door. Stop it. Stop it. He lived right next door. I don't remember if it's grandfather or great-grandfather, but they live right next door to my mother and grandmother. And so he would talk about the Alice's all the time. And those were the Alice's.

Crista Cowan 20:44

That's crazy. That's not unheard of in family history, but it's like every time it happens, I'm like, how like how many connections like that exist in the world? But because people don't know their family history, they never think to make those connections.

Maureen Taylor 20:58

They don't. And Rhode Island is a very small place, yeah, right, Crista. I mean, it's small. And one of the things you have to get used to when you first move here, this is what my daughter found out the sort of hard way, is everyone knows everyone else.

Crista Cowan 21:13

Yeah.

Maureen Taylor 21:13

And if they don't know you, they know someone that you know, or they're related to you, or they worked with you. It's a very insular community in some ways, in some communities. Um, so is that it was kind of normal for Michael and I to find that connection and to be good friends too. He's like, oh my goodness, look at this.

Independent Spirit Tolls And Bridges

Crista Cowan 21:36

Yeah. You know, it's interesting though, because I think sometimes like states have such identities, right? Like places, communities. Um, and and Rhode Island is small, but it's so surrounded, right? Like Massachusetts and Connecticut, and like it's not too far from some of those places. And so, what do you think it is about Rhode Island that it's been able to maintain such an identity?

Maureen Taylor 22:00

Rhode Islanders have an independent spirit. They they they love their state and they stay here for the most part and they believe what they believe. So I could give you an example of how independent. Um the statue on the top of the statehouse is called the independent man. And it comes all the way back from Roger Williams and Hutchinson, and you know, those people that came down from Massachusetts, they were banished. They started their own way of doing things, and Rhode Islanders have their own way of doing things and they like things done a certain way. The joke in Rhode Island, which um I hope no one that listens to this will be offended because it is a Rhode Island thing. You can drive from one end of the state to the other in an hour. But for a Rhode Islander to drive 20 minutes to go somewhere is considered just too far. And it's like you really need to think about well, what are you gonna do? Like what when you get there, how long is it gonna take you? And you know, we have all these bridges because we have all this water, we have Narragansett Bay, and we have rivers, and there's bridges everywhere. Uh, but one of the bridges that went from um a part of Rhode Island, uh eastern part of Rhode Island, into Massachusetts, they decided, I think it was the state of Massachusetts, decided they were going to put tolls on the bridge. And the people of Rhode Island just stopped using the bridge. They would prefer to ride to drive all the way around than pay that toll. They even lowered the toll. I think at one point it was 10 cents, and the people of Rhode Island said, no, we're not doing that.

Mills And The Rhode Island System

Crista Cowan 23:52

That is very telling. It's very telling. That's amazing. Well, you mentioned earlier your grandmother worked in a mill when she met your grandfather. Um, talk to us about a little bit about like the mills in Rhode Island and like what is the significance of that?

Maureen Taylor 24:06

Rhode Island has a lot of water, right? We have a lot of water. We have a lot of um water, like sort of mill dams that were built. So there were mills everywhere, big mills, small mills. But in the early period, you know, Samuel Slater is known for starting the Industrial Revolution here in this country. And he um what came over from England, uh, started the cotton thread mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. And then there were lots of small mills here. Rhode Islanders knew how to mill. They had gristmills, some of which are still in existence. You can go and have a Rhode Island delicacy called a Johnny Cake, which is made from ground cornmeal, uh, that are very good. And you they had gristmills, sawmills, small tiny mills in every of one of these villages. And I just want to say that in 2020, with COVID, um, you know, our state, we really weren't allowed to leave our state, which you'd really feel how small your state is. I mean, everybody here shops over the river in Massachusetts, so it was pretty tiny. Um uh my husband and I uh did tours of each and every town in the state and every village in those towns. What I have the background, I'm a local person. I love Rhode Island history and genealogy. This is what I did before I did the folder detective stuff. And so I did roots that we followed, and we found the foundations of a lot of the old mills that are pretty much undocumented. Uh, you know, it's there were little mills for a long time. And there's something called the Rhode Island system for milling, making textile mills for the most part here. And the textile mill owners asked for families to move here. They were particularly interested in having the children work in the mills because children were small, they could help with the machines, they were fast on their feet. Um, so once steam engines replace water power, one of the most spectacular things you can see when you come here, if anybody comes here, is to go to Pawtucket, go to the Slater mill, and then just go a little bit further down the road, and you can see the the power of that water rushing down the river. And we saw we tried to, we tried to categorize and find all of the mill dams that were in the state, and we thought we had done really well. And then the Department of Environmental Management came out with a list. We thought we'd we'd really we'd really done it, right? We found like 50 or 60, we'd done it. And then the list came out and it was like 600. I was like, oh man, we're never gonna find these. These are not findable. Uh, but anyway, so then once steam engines replaced pure water power, the mills got larger. And then you have, you know, there's more need. Um, there were lots of different textile mills here: silk mills, woolen mills, cotton mills, primarily cotton mills. There's this whole relationship between Rhode Island and the South, and the making of particular fabric used in the South. Uh, there were jewelry factories, silversmith factories, um, tool factories. I mean, I remember all of these. I'm old enough to remember when the mills were mostly still around. They're all gone now for the most part. So my family worked in the mills. It was an honest, it was an honest laboring job. Everybody worked in the mills. In the 1950 census, my mom is a cloth inspector and my grandmother is a a spinner, probably in the same factory, probably around the corner from where they lived, because there were big mills in the neighborhood. Wow. Um, so it's a whole big milling system. And my on the other side of the family, some of the family worked in the mills as well.

Crista Cowan 28:31

That level of industry for a community seems massive, right? Like massive. Compared to the size of the state, like it just feels outsized that that kind of a system was put into place. And the fact that they invited families to come and live there, I think that like the industry behind that is fascinating.

Maureen Taylor 28:52

Yeah, there are some of the mills have been preserved, a lot of the mills have been turned over to housing, a good number of them burned to the ground, you know. Uh, but you can still see how people lived. If you go to uh Cumberland, Rhode Island, and you go to the village of Ashton, and you can find that online. It's it's searchable. You can still see all the mill housing. And mill housing has a particular look. So when we were driving around looking for those mill dams, we could spot the mill housing and then think, okay, where's the mill?

Crista Cowan 29:28

Right. So they were cut, they were company house, it was company housing.

Maureen Taylor 29:32

There, well, first it was, yeah, there was company housing, and then the landlords took over. And so we have housing in Rhode Island called a tenement house, which is a three-decker, which is pretty unique here, I think. So you you have three apartments. Um I I lived in several of those apartments, and that's where you lived. That's where a lot of people live still. So around 1900, there's a big push to put in a lot of housing, these triple deckers.

Crista Cowan 30:02

So do you, I mean, being the photo detective, I have to ask, do you have any photos of any of your family in the mills?

Maureen Taylor 30:09

I have none. Really? I have none. None. None. Uh none. But I mean, Lewis Hine took a lot of photographs in the Rhode Island Mills. And there are people out there. There's a wonderful guy who who died a couple of years ago, unfortunately, and he was unraveling the stories in those Lewis Hine photos and actually finding the descendants. So I always hoped he would find maybe one of my descendants. And so I mentioned George Taylor, and I said his wife was from England. His wife in England, I found her in a census working in an English mill at age 11 with the rest of her family.

Crista Cowan 30:51

So is that maybe what part of the impetus for their immigration to Rhode Island specifically?

Maureen Taylor 30:56

Oh, her family, definitely. Yeah. They came over in about 1875, sure. Yeah, that's why they came here.

Crista Cowan 31:03

Okay. Well, there you go. That is so interesting. And so like it just feels so uniquely Rhode Island, right?

Jewelry Factories Pins And Education

Maureen Taylor 31:10

Yeah, and people don't think about it. Like Rhode Island was Rhode Island was named the the jewelry capital of the world in 1880. There were so many jewelry factories. And in fact, I I didn't, I think I mentioned you this to you. I mentioned this to you at Ruth Tech. But my mom, I you know, she she always talked about her work in the factory as the cloth inspector. She was very proud of that work. It was good work. She wasn't working with the machinery. Um, it wasn't as dangerous, probably paid better. And she had a job when I was a little kid, and my grandmother, my dad's mom would babysit me, um, working in a tiny little jewelry factory around the corner from our house. And what she did in that factory was um, well, I have examples here for you. I I have examples, it's show and tell. She would put all the little I did a little couple of ballerinas. She'd put the stones in, and I still have her tools. She could fix anything. You broke a necklace, she'd fix it for you. Uh, but I had these, and Crista, there was not a day of kindergarten in first grade and second grade where I did not go to school with a pin. With a pin. I had to wear a pen. I have an entire collection of pins.

Crista Cowan 32:47

That's amazing.

Maureen Taylor 32:48

I love these pins.

Crista Cowan 32:50

And are all of them made by your mom or some of them like yeah?

Maureen Taylor 32:53

She used to glue in the stones.

Crista Cowan 32:55

Okay. So so she would bring some home for you.

Maureen Taylor 32:59

Yeah, she'd bring them home for me. Yeah, oh, this is a cute little one. This doesn't have any stones, but it was a little, you know, everybody had a little cardigan sweater in those days, right? This is for your cardigan sweater. Oh, to keep the little closed at the top. So there's all kinds of things. The apple, the even you ready for this one? It's a little camera.

Crista Cowan 33:24

Oh, that's adorable.

Maureen Taylor 33:26

Yeah. Imagine that on my little like first grade little Peter Pan collar. Little fortuitous there. Yeah, I I could not leave the house without one of these pins.

Crista Cowan 33:37

Oh, that's so fun. And I love that she was proud of her work and wanted to show it off.

Maureen Taylor 33:42

Very proud of her work, but never wanted us to work in a factory.

Crista Cowan 33:49

Um, and that's an interesting thing, right? To come from a tradition of something that is honorable work, but hard work, and to have done it for her whole life, to have that wish for you. Why do you think that was?

Maureen Taylor 34:01

She valued education. My mom was very smart, but she had been forced to quit school because she got sick. And in those days, the it was you're too sick to go to school. And I'd be like, You're too sick to go to school, but you're not too sick to work in the mill. How does that work out? So she uh valued education. She went back as an adult when we were kids to get her um GED. Um, it meant a lot to her. It meant a lot to her that we get an education that we go further. They had no idea what to do with me. I was like, you know, they just didn't know what to do with me. Basically, um, I was the outlier in the family. Uh but uh it it my parents were were very good people.

Crista Cowan 34:57

That sounds like it. And I like I your mom just recently passed, didn't she?

Maureen Taylor 35:01

She did just a couple of years ago. She lived in '94.

Crista Cowan 35:05

Wow.

Maureen Taylor 35:05

She outlived everyone in the family. Um yeah, just a couple of years ago.

Crista Cowan 35:11

Yeah, to have her that long. What a gift.

Maureen Taylor 35:14

What a gift. Because her parents, her mom died. I've already outlived her mom, and her dad died in his 40s. So she never expected to live that long. She outlived all of her siblings. Like nobody lived to be 94.

Crista Cowan 35:33

Yeah. Uh, thank you for sharing her with us. She sounds like she was wonderful from start to finish as a mother, especially.

Maureen Taylor 35:43

She was good. She was tough. She was tough. I'm not gonna say she was the tough great stuff.

Crista Cowan 35:47

I'm the oldest. So am I. Yes, believe me, I know. My my youngest brother and I had entirely different parents.

Maureen Taylor 35:55

Entirely different parents. Uh, but you know, the wit the mill stuff here in Rhode Island is very important. The water is very important. Fishermen, my brother was a uh a shell fisherman for a long time. There are sort of unique ways to earn your living here in Rhode Island.

Crista Cowan 36:15

Well, and I would think there would have to be, right? Because the topography is unique, the smallness of the communities is unique. That I think the independent spirit that you talked about, I think that is rare fairly unique. And so it probably creates some unique opportunities for people or they create them for themselves to to live their lives and take care of their families.

Maureen Taylor 36:36

And I lost the Rhode Island accent.

Crista Cowan 36:39

How? Explain that to me.

Maureen Taylor 36:41

I practiced a lot.

Crista Cowan 36:44

Can you slip back into it or do you find yourself slipping back into it?

Maureen Taylor 36:48

Sometimes I slip back into it.

Crista Cowan 36:50

Yeah.

Maureen Taylor 36:51

Yeah.

Crista Cowan 36:51

That's fine. Well, you are now um are you the president of the Rhode Island State Genealogical Society?

Maureen Taylor 36:57

Uh it's the Rhode Island Genealogical Society. Okay. And in New England, we don't have state genealogical societies. They're all private. Yes. And we offer programs. We just celebrated our 50th year last year. So we've been around for a while. Um, we have programs about Rhode Island genealogy. We have a recognized journal. Uh, we're always looking for articles for the journal, by the way. If you have Rhode Island Ancestry, uh contact us. And we have a meeting coming up this week, actually. So we do four or five meetings and an annual meeting, which is an all-day meeting.

Crista Cowan 37:33

So it sounds like a pretty active group.

Maureen Taylor 37:35

Yeah, we're active. We've got a lot of members all over the country. So about 75% of our members don't live in the state.

Crista Cowan 37:43

Which is also kind of an interesting thing to think about. As we've been doing this series for America 250 of focusing on a different state every week, it's always interesting to think about. Like, there are some people who identify so strongly with something about their state. Like every once in a while, I'll get messages from people who are like, you told this story about my state, and that doesn't represent what I think about my state. And I'm always just like, you know what? That's the beauty of places and places as characters in our family stories, is that our experience is going to inform how we view that place. And for some people, I suspect their families were maybe brought over from England to work in the mills and only lived there for a generation or two before they moved on to somewhere else.

Maureen Taylor 38:25

Right. So the English came here, worked in the mills. The um the Irish came here and worked in the mills. And then the later, you know, the later immigrants, the French Canadians, the Italians, and there were all kinds of different industries. You know, there's some famous Lewis Hine photographs of children making cigars in the Italian section of Providence in a house. So there were household industries, there were small factories, and then there were the big factories that had everything from train service to water power to housing, you know, just like other places in New England.

Crista Cowan 39:07

Yeah. Wow. And so, yeah, you've got those people who pass through, and then you've got families like yours who stay for generations, right?

Maureen Taylor 39:15

Right. Um the bonds of family are strong. Not so much on my dad's side of the family, but my mom's side of the family, that those French-Canadian bonds are strong. I'm still in touch with all of my cousins. On my dad's side, I have a second cousin. Um, his grandfather and my grandfather were brothers. And he is also a genealogist, which is interesting. Lucky. And then uh I am in touch with there's a a cousin. Not quite, I never get that sort of level of cousins thing, but she's a cousin. Uh, but her mother and my grandmother were sisters.

Crista Cowan 40:02

Okay.

Maureen Taylor 40:03

And she's a genealogist.

Crista Cowan 40:05

That that is really rare in a family to have that many people that interested, I think. Yeah. That's what a gift. Yeah.

Maureen Taylor 40:14

You'd think we could solve all the mysteries, Crista, but we can't.

Crista Cowan 40:16

Yeah. Well, Maureen, we all if if they were easy to solve, I think we wouldn't care about it as much. It's, I think the effort, something about that gets us really pulled into their lives and their stories and their pictures and and makes us more interested than we might be otherwise if it was just easy.

Maureen Taylor 40:33

Yeah, family is great. Family is important.

America 250 Gaspee And Farewell

Crista Cowan 40:36

It is. Well, as you think about your connection to Rhode Island, right? We're getting ready to celebrate America 250, Rhode Island, of course, you know, part of the original founding of this country. Like, how would you sum up like your feelings about your state?

Maureen Taylor 40:53

Oh, well, I've lived here most of my life. And when I didn't live here, I wish I lived here. And then my husband is not from here, but now he loves it here. And our children spent their lives, most of their lives, in Massachusetts. But when we moved here, they moved here, and now they love it and don't want to go anywhere else. But Rhode Island has a long history, as I mentioned, of independence. And a lot of people are not aware of the burning of the Gaspi, which was one of the first acts towards revolution. And so there are a lot of 250 events here, like there are in all the 13 colonies. Wow. It seems to me like the Secretary of State is out every day and every night. I follow him on Facebook and I'm like, oh my goodness, you're so busy.

Crista Cowan 41:46

Well, but how wonderful that this state is taking the time and the effort to commemorate those events that were such a critical part of the founding of our country. I think that's amazing that the effort and time is being put into that.

Maureen Taylor 41:58

Crista, I want to thank you for doing this series on each and every one of the states.

Crista Cowan 42:02

Yeah, thank you. Studio sponsored by Ancestry.