Maiden Voyage: Captain Henry B. Smoak

I’ve long been wanting to start a blog about my ancestry research. As anyone who has ever searched for a relative online knows, genealogy is a rabbit hole that can quickly take you down endless twists and turns until you find yourself researching the residence of an obscure 18th century aunt.

To keep myself focused, I’ve decided to just dive in an start writing about my research and discoveries. At some point, I’d like to do some long form writing about my family history, but these blog posts will hopefully serve as a good jumping off point without having to be too long, to structured or to tied to one person or topic.

MY GRANDFATHER

Captain Henry Bethea Smoak is my maternal grandfather and he has been the focus of much of my research. He was a career seaman, and when he passed away in 2004, I inherited all of the correspondence he and my grandmother Hester wrote from the time they met and started dating up until the time he retired in the mid 80s. There are hundreds of letters, telegrams, cards, and other documents like tax receipts, menus, and postcard that tell the story of my grandparents mid-century American life. I feel compelled to document their experience as a kind of culture touchstone for future generations. My grandparents wartime wedding set the stage for a pattern of life and expectation that was shared among so many others of their time and cultural profile. I hope that by telling their story I am providing a window into postwar life.

CURRENT RESEARCH

Today I searched for Henry’s enrollment and enlistment records. I did give in and subscribe to Ancestry for six months because their access to source documents is so robust, and I wanted to specifically find new information about granddad that I hadn’t found before.

DRAFT CARD

The first record is an image of his draft card. Although I had the information from a prior search, I had not seen the actual image:

MUSTER ROLLS

Although there may be some ship manifests and logs somewhere in my vast collection of papers, I was delighted to find some new source documents during this search. One kind of document is WWII muster rolls. One question I have about grandad is when he left the farm in South Carolina and why. I knew he mey my grandmother some time in 1941, and they were married in 1942. I assumed his military service began with the draft in 1940. But the records I found today indicate that he was already in the Navy much earlier, with his first documented service aboard the U.S.S. Savannah in March of 1939:

Here he is listed as Rating “Sea.1c” (seaman, first class) and his enlistment date is listed as 15 October 1934. This is much earlier than I realized and he has already been in the Navy for about 7 years before he met my grandmother. Not sure what the ratings mean yet; I will have to do more research there.

By September 30 of 1939, his rating has changed to “CM.3c” which is most likely carpenter’s mate, third class but may also have been a machinist’s position. He stayed on the Savannah for another year with this rating, until he is listed on the Navy Receiving Ship in San Diego California on September 30, 1940. That is the period covered by the WWII Muster Rolls that I have found so far.

PASSENGER AND CREW LISTS

The final source I found in this round of research consists of Passenger and Crew Lists for ships entering the united states. These indicate times when Henry would have entered a U.S. port after being at sea. On these documents my grandfather is listed as a member of the crew. For example, here he appears as the First Mate on the vessel S.S. L.P St. Clair into the Port of San Luis, CA on November 23, 1945 from the port of Vancouver, B.C.

My next research will be to see if this is a merchant marine vessel. It would make sense that grandad would have started his Merchant Marine career after the war and that by 1945 he was no longer in the Navy. The passenger manifests I found indicate departures and arrivals between 1945 and 1951 all up and down the west coast of the U.S., many with passengers.

I’m curious to know where this next branch of my research will lead, and I know that I have letters that correspond to all of the dates and locations after 1941 listed above that detail more about grandad’s everyday life aboard the vessels. This will be the next bread crumb I pick up on my journey back in time.