Birthday Bio -- Mom -- Lavinia Cresap, Mrs. John B. Gilbert 16 June 1915 - 10 Dec 1997

• She was the oldest of four children born and raised in the Phillipines.
• She matured very fast -- pictured here she is only 10 years old, her sister, Florence on the right is only 2 years younger. left to right: Ida May, Lavinia, Andrew Bruce, Florence Cresap
• She grew to be nearly six feet tall, had the carriage of a queen, but was a bit of a trickster.  
• She always seemed like a fairytale figure.  
• She could play harmonica, stand on her hands, make the best billy goat cookies and grape jelly.
• She learned to fly a plane in the 1920's landing on dirt fields and soloing over Clear Lake. 
• She was the first in her family to go to college -- University of California, Berkeley class of 1936.
• She managed to be at great world events -- the 1936 Berlin Olympics where she saw Hitler, Mussolini's Italy, and Pearl Harbor the day it was bombed.  
• She stood up against McCarthyism, helped establish the first Orinda library, volunteered at Contra Costa County's juvenile hall, and was on Cal's scholarship committee. 
• She was an active member of St. Stephen's Episcopal congregation in Orinda and the DAR.
• She was an independent voter.
• She was a founding member of the first book group I ever heard of back in the 1950s. 
• She was clever with her hands -- a terrific seamstress and weaver.
• She loved to sail.
• She was rarely idle, and each Christmas her Wizard of Oz and angel figures adorn our tree.   
• She raised four rascally children while her husband traveled at least half the time for his job.
• She loved her grandchildren and kept the freezer full of popsicles.
• She is missed every single day.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Birthday Bio: Lavinia Murdoch Bruce born Jan 20th 1850 -- died March 16th 1886

When Lavinia Murdoch Bruce was born 20 Jan 1850, she was named for her mother, Lavinia Murdoch Thistle, wife of Henry Magruder Bruce, just as I was named for my mother, Lavinia Cresap, who was Lavinia Murdoch Bruce’s granddaughter. I sometimes think of us as the four Lavinias. Today’s birthday bio is for Lavinia #2.


Lavinia #2 was the 5th of 8 Bruce children. When she was born, the eldest ,George Normond Bruce, had already died at 3 years 8 months in 1847.  When she was just 16 months old, her older sister, Sarah Magruder Bruce, also died (aged 6y 4m). Lavinia #1 buried her elder daughter just a month after birthing another child, Henry Clagett Bruce.  And he died a short 11 months later.  In the end, Lavinia #2 was one of 5 surviving siblings.

Losing children wasn’t the only tragedy to hit this family.  Although Dad was a successful lawyer, they lived in Cumberland, Maryland, and Maryland attempted neutrality during the Civil War. This guaranteed armies sweeping back and forth laying waste to the area.  It also guaranteed brothers fighting against brothers. 

Lavinia’s father was a staunch Union man, and one of her uncle's was Col. Robert Bruce, Union.  But her aunt, Elizabeth Bruce, married Col. Walter Gwynn of the Confederacy and they were stuck in the siege of Vicksburg.  After the Civil War, another uncle, Upton Scott Bruce, despite being married and having had 9 children before the war, spent the rest of his life alone in a wild state.  According to Charles E. Hoye in his article on the Bruce Family in "Garrett County History of Pioneer Families" in the "Mountain Democrat" of Oakland, MD September, 1937 Upton Bruce, Jr. "led a half wild life in the woods east of Oakland until some ten years after the Civil War. How or why he came to this condition we do not know, but old residents of Oakland remember that Upton Bruce used to live with Lewis Thompson in winter, his board and clothes supplied by relatives in Cumberland.  But in summer he would go out into the woods, build himself a little shelter and spend the days roaming in the woods; so he lived a harmless but useless life, shy of adult company but willing to talk to the curious boys who sought his retreat and marveled to see his long hair and beard and ragged clothes.  His most faithful friend was Eli Trudy, a former Bruce slave who resided in Oakland after the Civil War.  Old Eli did what he could for "Marse Upton", taking to him newspapers and food at intervals. - So ended the history of the Bruce's at Ryan's Glade."


The emotional effect of the Civil War on Lavinia’s family is impossible to know, but events around her were dramatic. When she was 13, Stonewall Jackson's brigade rode through Cumberland on its way to Gettysburg, and Lavinia's 16 year old brother, Maynadier Thistle Bruce, ran away from his Union supporting father, took a horse and joined the Confederates. He stuck with them, eventually joining McNeil’s Rangers, and afterwards settling in Texas. Many of Maynadier's escapades were written up in Four Years In the Stonewall Brigade, published in 1893 by John O. Casler.

At age 25, on 16 November 1875 in St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Cumberland, Lavinia married her 2nd cousin, Robert James Cresap. He had recently buried his first wife and a namesake son. His marriage to Lavinia may have been arranged as was her younger sister's, Grace Neill Bruce's marriage to Martin German which took place in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1885. Both Grace and another sister, Julianna Bruce (who married J. Byers Smith in Lavinia's living room in Cincinnati) moved to San Diego, California and eventually brought their widowed mother, Lavinia #1, to live with them there.  My grandfather bought the family heirlooms from his Aunt Grace in the 1930's.

After their marriage, Lavinia #2 and Robert returned to his home in Cincinnati, Ohio  where they lived for 11 years. They had five children. The first, another Robert Jr., died at 5 months. The 2nd child was our grandfather, Andrew Bruce Cresap. The 3rd, Eloise Josephine Cresap lived into her 40’s but, sadly, died a suicide. Her unhappy marriage to Charles B. Weltner, also was said to have been arranged.  The 4th child of Lavinia and Robert, James Henry Cresap, died at 8.  Lavinia didn’t mourn these two children because she was already dead when they died.  She did not survive the birth of her 5th child. He was a 3rd Robert James Cresap, jr., and he died one day after birth. Lavinia #2 lingered for 4 more days, and died in Cincinnati, Ohio aged 36 years, one month and 25 days.


Grandad missed his mother always, and  when he lived in the Philippines he had a portrait painted of her from the first small photo shown above. The portrait is presently in Orinda at the home of Ida May (Cresap) Sipe.

                                                           Grandad and his mother.


Happy Birthday, Lavinia.

December 7th, 1941 -- "Nice going on the part of our secretary, Miss Cresap..."

Where do you go, I asked, with genealogy?

I probably was born to this, and certainly named to it.

My birth year, 1945, the most popular girl's name in the US was Mary followed by Linda.  The top ten included Susan and Sharon.  It did not include Lavinia.   My maternal Grandad's mother, Lavinia Murdoch (Bruce) Cresap died when he was seven, and he named his first born, my mother, for her.  And I was named for my mother.  I would learn later that Lavinia Murdoch Bruce was named for her mother, Lavinia Murdoch Thistle, who also married a Cresap.  I had to explain my name on the first day of school every year.  "What an unusual name," the teachers would exclaim.

But I only got into genealogy ten years ago, right after my father died.  My mother had died 16 months earlier and us four children had the task of dividing up their stuff.  I "the family historian" as Dad said, was willed the boxes of photos, and my mom's DAR files.  I stared at them and almost put them in storage.  But my friend Pam offered a trip out of town.  "Just to get away," she said.  She was going to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City to do genealogy which she had been interested in for years.  "What's genealogy," I asked, "and where does that take you?  She answered brightly, "I think you'll like it.  It takes you anywhere you want to go.  That's the joy of it."  "But I don't know how to do it," I whined.  "I'll teach you," she replied. 

I grabbed a binder from my newly inherited boxes and flew to Utah.  I didn't know what was in it, just that it had to do with my mother's mother, "Pi" (short for sweetie pie which she called my brother, her first grandchild, and he tried to call her the same but only got the "pi" out and the nickname stuck).  We lived with my Cresap grandparents in Berkeley off and on during the first 5 years of my life, and I adored her so I took the notebook with Grace Arnold written on it.

This slim blue binder contains tintypes, old letters from my grandmother's aunt to her, sepia photos, baptism certificates and more.  I would never risk traveling with these original documents now, but I knew nothing then and into the library I went with my beginnings.  I grasped pretty quickly that I had entered a world I loved, a world of transitions, epiphanies, and movement.  I have learned that Genealogy will break your heart, and it will mend it again.  So many things I've collected over the years fit into it -- old maps, for instance.

Right away I learned I'd be tracing migrations, and that records are mostly kept at the county level.  So I bought a big US map with present county boundaries on it and I labeled my families with color -- red for Dad's dad, (Gilbert) yellow for Dad's mom (Sale), green for Mom's dad (Cresap), and blue for Mom's mom (Arnold).   I outlined the places each family lived in with their color -- the rainbow being California.  Then I slowly began to mark their migrations west.