L. M. Kokernot the elder

I had another of those creepy moments a couple days ago--the one where I come across a nugget of information that I know no one else knows. I'm sure Einstein felt the same way when he learned that E equals mc squared. The only difference is that in my case no one cares. But that doesn't change the feeling. Anyway, I learned when, where, and how David Kokernot's father died.

Before now, all we knew was what David Kokernot told his grandson Walter, that his father, "L. M." had drowned in Lake Pontchartrain around 1825. Kent Gardien combined that with the knowledge that he was a dry goods retailer and always lived around water (Amsterdam, New Orleans) to speculate that the elder LM drowned while peddling by boat. It turns out he was actually bathing in the lake.

All this comes about from a wonderful new resource I've only just found. GenealogyBank has the largest online collection of historical newspapers I have found and, better yet, the pages have been OCR'd and the full text is searchable. A search for "Kokernot" in Louisiana for the 1820s turned up two items, shown here. The first, in the August 25, 1827, issue of the Louisiana Advertiser announced that LM had drowned while bathing in the lake. The second, two days later, announced that his business was being taken over by his widow.

OCR, the process of converting a photograph of text into a text file that can be edited or searched is notoriously difficult to do accurately. It's more than difficult with old newspapers with poor printing quality further deteriorated by time. That search for "Kokernot" was actually a search for "Kok*t" which will find common misspellings such as Kokenut, Kokernut, Kokernott, and the rest, and also immunize against some OCR errors, such as confusing "r" and "n." Even so, there are doubtless other occurrances of "Kokernot" that OCR failed to recognize. The patient researcher would, of course, scan the pages online by eyeball. That is possible now for many, many, old newspapers that were unavailable online before GenealogyBank.com.

The Old Man

I wrote this short essay in December 2005. Kent Gardien, the "Old Man," died June 26, 2006. Progress on the book mentioned is at Kokernot book.

In November I visited an old man in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Cousin Barbara Jo Brothers and I went with the sole purpose of meeting him, yet I had the feeling that I already knew him, and even that I was seeing myself twenty or thirty years hence. He was extremely frail and only once in my five visits did he rise from his chair, using a walker to make his halting way to the adjacent room where we took dinner.

I felt like I knew him because I’d followed his tracks for a decade. We think alike. We were chasing the same ancestor. I counted as victories the rare times I discovered something he didn’t know, or even visited an archive that didn’t already have his name in the visitors’ log. And I saw myself in him because he had done what I feared doing. He accumulated a huge amount of knowledge about his family—our family—which will go to his grave with him, untold. The last thing he published on the topic was thirty-five years ago.

His tracks ended twenty years ago. I assumed he was dead until a cousin asked me “Why don’t you just give him a call? Here’s his number.”

Soon I was settled into a hotel three cobblestoned blocks from his home in the oldest part of an old city. Each morning I rang his doorbell at the hour designated, usually eleven, and left when invited to leave, usually at two. In between we sat in his upstairs library overlooking Fray Bartolome De Las Casas and he told wonderful stories. Stories of growing up a child of wealth in depression Texas. Stories of his (great-grand) “Aunt Gus” and “Aunt Beck,” both sisters to my own third-great-grandmother, Elizabeth, born in New Orleans in 1831. Stories told him by his (grand-) “Uncle Walter,” who grew up in the home of his own grandparents, David and Caroline Kokernot, who in turn told of the death of David’s father, a waterborn Jewish peddler, on Lake Pontchartrain in the 1820s.

The old man was unpredictable. “I’ll never remember these stories. May I tape record them?” “NO!” “May I take your picture?” “NO!” “I can’t take notes fast enough. May I copy these papers?” “Why don’t you just take them all with you?” When I left town it was with forty pounds of paper in the overhead bin, which paper has been deposited at the archives of Gonzales County, Texas.

And I left with a determination to finish what the old man started and what I started: a published history of our family. Of course it’s made more difficult by all the new information he’s given me, but it will be better for it.