AND MORE MIDGETTS & MORE INDEXING

To get back to the story of all the Midgetts….

Actually, the last place I would think of to find a Midgett would be in California. But strange things happen sometimes. In looking for more Midgetts, I came across a nice US Coast Guard website that in May of last year featured a story on the Midgetts, told by Tod Midgett, a native of North Carolina who is now serving in the U.S.Coast Guard at Humboldt Bay in Northern California.

He said when he was a kid he heard a lot about his family history from his grandfather. According to the family story, the first Midgetts to land on the Outer Banks were two brothers who left Ireland. They managed to gain passage on a ship heading to America. The ship grounded and wrecked near Rodanthe on Hatteras Island. But the brothers made it ashore safely. That was the beginning of the Midgetts’ history with shipwrecks.



Just for fun I checked the 1790 North Carolina census and found there were already 21 Midgetts listed as head of household, all living on two coastal counties, Currituck and Tyrell. These Midgetts were Banister, Christian, Christopher (2), Daniel, Jessie, John (2), Joseph, Joseph Jr., Mathew, Maurice, Richard, Samuel, Samuel Esq., Samuel Jr., Thomas (2), Timothy, William, and William Jr.

Experience taught these families how to live in relationship to the sea and the weather, and from early on they were involved with volunteer life saving measures and shipwrecks. Then called the Life-Saving Service, it took from about 1847 to 1870 to get a well-trained, well-operating, government funded lifesaving service up and running, and the Midgetts, along with some other long-time Outer Banks families were early participants. Around 1917 this service merged with the Revenue Cutter Service and became what we now know as the U.S. Coast Guard.

And yes, over the years many Midgetts have served in the U. S. Coast Guard.

For those of us on the West Coast, we don’t have much of a history with shipwrecks. We are mainly without the kind of weather that made the Outer Banks waters into the “Graveyard of the Atlantic.”

Finding Tod in California made me wonder if we have many Midgetts here, but as attested by the white pages and the various death indexes, we have had, and we do. And I guess I expected to find them living near the water, but most didn’t – and don’t. But I do know that in this day and age there are still plenty of Midgetts in North Carolina. Their occupations mostly seem not to be connected to the water, which is understandable. Hatteras Island still has Midgetts but they are now running more needful businesses, like cleaning services, appraisal services, realty, construction, insurance, tractors, and auto sales, to name a few.

One thing I noted from doing indexing in the 1910 North Carolina Census was that by and large all the heads of family I indexed were born in NC and so were their parents. The censuses I have used in researching my own families showed a pattern of westward movement. The Indiana people were born in Ohio, The Kansas people were born in Illinois, the Colorado people were born in Kansas and so on. What I found in NC was that the families were born there and stayed there. Certainly the Midgetts did. And while those people may not now remember how they are related to each other, I am sure they all have family stories of how they were related to the Life Saving Service.

In Tod Midgett’s story, there is a paragraph that says, “Ten Midgetts have been awarded the Life Saving Medal. John Midgett, for whom the Coast Guard cutter was named, received one, but there were other Midgett heroes. Rasmus Midgett was given a gold medal by the Secretary of the Treasury for rescuing some of the crew from the vessel Priscilla. The vessel hit a shoal off of Hatteras Inlet and broke into pieces. Rasmus heard the shipwrecked victims’ cries from shore and swam into a storming sea. He rescued 10 men from the broken boat, carrying them to shore, one at a time. The award read, “To Rasmus S. Midgett for Rescuing Single-Handed Ten Men from the Wreck Priscilla, Aug. 18, 1899.”

The picture below is not of Rasmus but of Nelson, another of the Midgetts, whose photo certainly is exactly what I visualize when I think of a man on the Outer Banks battling a storm. Don't you agree?


So you see that my little hobby of indexing often sends me off on little adventures –which are of no consequence really but which I find interesting, informative and worth sharing. I’m still working on the North Carolina census but have also started indexing birth certificates for children born in Jamaica in the early 1900s. Gosh, are there some interesting possibilities there! Think of a baby named Ignatius Hieronymous…..