Nearly a year ago, I wrote about my great-aunt, Helen (Tubbs) Judson, my genealogy angel providing so much insight and research on the Tubbs and Orcutt families. The Orcutt family, my great-grandmother Cora (Orcutt) Tubbs’ line is the one that takes me back to the Mayflower.
Bertha "Birdie" Elizabeth DeBoer
(Enhanced by MyHeritage)
Today, I would like to share about a different type of genealogy angel who provides me (and hopefully you) with inspiration. This is Bertha “Birdie” Elizabeth (DeBoer) Breyfogle, my husband’s paternal grandmother. I never had the pleasure of meeting Birdie, she passed away our freshman year in college. All four of Birdie’s grandparents emigrated from the Netherlands to the United States in the 1850s & 1860’s and settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her mother Aafke (Eva) Van Dam born in 1871 was the 2nd oldest of 10 children and her father William DeBoer also born in 1871 was a twin (definitely not identical!) and the 4th/5th of 11 children. Family, the Dutch Reformed Church, the United States, and education were extremely important to them. Bertha was born in 1901 and the youngest of 4, with 3 older brothers. Her three brothers all served in World War 1 and ended up in careers in various government agencies. She was a woman ahead of her time and given opportunities that a lot of contemporary women were not offered. She was given the opportunity to attend Olivet College and transferred to the University of Michigan to finish her Bachelors and also Master’s degree.
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| William DeBoer & Eva Van Dam Family c. 1911 (Enhanced by MyHeritage) |
Women & College
Women might be inspired by her being among a small number of women earning a bachelor’s degree ’22 and also a master’s degree before 1925. Just imagine, when she graduated from high school and began college it was 1918 and women didn’t have the right to vote!
I was curious, how unique was it that she was attending college in the late 1910s and 1920s? In investigating how many women were graduating from high school and college, I came across some very interesting and enlightening statistics. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in a table that collected the percentage of persons 25 to 29 years old with selected levels of educational attainment by race/ethnicity and sex (estimated from census data):
in 1920, 22% of White and 6.3% of Black people completed high school,
Bertha DeBoer
University of MI DiplomasAlso in 1920, 4.5% of White and 1.2% of Black people earned at least a Bachelor’s degree.
For comparison, in 2013, 40.4% of White and 20.5% of Black people earned a bachelors or higher.
What was striking to me was the ratio of men to women. I had always assumed that women were significantly underrepresented in college, like 5-10% of the people in college were women. It turns out that in 1920, 47% of the people in higher education were women! (We won't, however, talk about what they were welcomed to study!) So while it is true that a very small percentage of White women were in college in the 1920’s, it wasn’t that they were women, rather so few people, overall, were college-attending. After 1920, the number of college attendees began growing but the number of men outpaced women, so women's attendance did fall to 40% of the total college-attendees by 1930 and 30% in 1940 but unsurprisingly in 1944 it surged to 50% and the women have (for the most part) kept pace or exceeded the college attendance.
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| Birdie as a young woman c. 1920s |
Birdie’s Inspiration
Additionally, I am inspired by Birdie’s record keeping! As I peruse her scrapbooks of her time in college, I am in awe of the meticulously detailed notes that she kept, especially of photos. I am sure that I would have loved knowing Birdie and we would have gotten along famously well and might have even scrapbooked together! My scrapbooking friends always make fun of me for my need and desire to “journal” on the scrapbook pages. (For those not familiar with scrapbooking, journaling is the text that you put on a page to help conjure up memories from the event or highlight the importance for the viewer.) But Birdie is my hero and inspiration!
As I flip through pages of her sorority and musical events, I am getting a sense of some of the social things she engaged in and what college would have been like for her and other people at the time. Here’s an example. She became a member of the Sigma Beta Society at Olivet College (it still exists today at University of Olivet-yes, name changed this past year!), this is the same college that my great-grandparents, Florence Stoddard and Edward Leach, attended and met at in 1903 (yes, funny coincidence!).
Sigma Beta’s held an “Annual Public”, which appears to be a night of performance. I’m not sure if Birdie was the photographer (I’m guessing so), but she had two photos of the scene/performers along with the program. The performance was a stage adaptation of the book “Old Lady Number 31” (1909) by Louise Forsslund (Mary Louise Foster) and made into a Broadway Play in 1916-1917 and a silent film starring Emma Dunn released 20 April 1920. Birdie included on the back the names of all of the women in the photo. I’m not sure why, though, that she wrote at the top “Old man 33” at the top of the back of the photo. I was confused, was this a different play, a spoof on the one that they were actually doing? I compared the photo with the program and indeed all of the people seem to be the same as the program. Was this just an inside joke? I’m not sure that I will ever know, but what I do know is the names of every person in the photo and the parts they were playing! I can’t say the same about most of my photos. 
Birdie's Scrapbook Page 
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| "Old Lady Number 31" Sigma Beta, April 1919 |
What I am so inspired by is the way that on EVERY photo, she identifies (almost always!) every person in the photo! I recognize that they took much fewer photos back then, but she always included as much as she could remember and that can’t be said about the thousands of photos I see in flea markets.
We probably all have thousands (if not tens of thousands) of photos with few of them identified. I, for one, am trying to make it a habit to enter in a title or description and name (tag) the faces in my electronic files. Maybe not all of them, but the special ones you upload into MyHeritage or Ancestry or some other format and the ones that shouldn’t ever be deleted!
I hope Birdie inspires you, too, so that all of your great photos don’t end up in the trash by some relative who hasn't a clue of who is in the photos or at a flea market with no prospect of being picked up my someone like me looking to reconnect them with possible descendants!
