Prison Records: the genealogist's pot of gold

[Uncle Buddy]

I research old-time inventors, and like anyone else, inventors can and do make bad mistakes. Sometimes unforgivable ones. That doesn't mean we should brush them under the rug and forget them, even if that's the treatment they got during their lifetime, and it might have been. Families sometimes want to forget someone who had a brush with the law. My experience in genealogy is the opposite: get that prison record. I've bought three of them and don't take this the wrong way, but when an ancestor got arrested, genealogy must go on. There could be a wealth of information in that file gathering dust in some government archive. Do you want to remember your ancestor as a name and a date and a scary, worrisome fantasy? Or would you rather have a true story to go with the names and dates?

I study inventors, not criminals, and so far I have not found a criminal lurking in a prison record. I have found a human being.

Continuing this thread I'll post some examples.

[Uncle Buddy]

Roy J. Meyers was arrested at least four times and I bought two prison records for him. The other two included a trumped-up case brought by shark-investors trying to steal his invention. Another time he was accused of burning down his house for the insurance money, to try and finance an invention. I don't know how that one turned out, whether he was found innocent or guilty, or what.

In both cases I bought (bad check complaints) he was homeless, hungry, and keeping bad company, and that might have been his only crime since he said he was lied to by a friend who tried to get him to cash what turned out to be a stolen check. He was said to be a very naive young man who would do what anyone wanted him to do. Fortunately he married a good woman and worked hard all his life. Socially naive and stupid are definitely two different things. Roy was not stupid.

Roy was the most famous air car inventor of the 1930s. But in 1912 he was famous for the first time as the convict inventor from Arizona. I happily sank my whole Christmas fund into buying the 1912 prison record from Arizona but it was his second arrest so I took my chances and bought the first one too, from California. In both cases I was richly rewarded. Here are some things I can say about Roy because of his bad luck which turned out to be my good luck as a historian or collector of trivia or whatever I am.

Roy started working to support his mother and sister at age 11 when his father died. His sister also died, and when his mother finally remarried he took off and experienced that childhood he'd never had, landing in prison twice when he was between jobs. He bought a restaurant but was ripped off. He wandered from Alaska to Arizona and taught himself electrical engineering and machine shop skills. He was a genius who loved nothing better than to sit and think, but he was not socially very competent and it took him a long time to learn what kind of people to stay away from.

Roy was married to the same woman his whole life. She was from a rich Southern family. They had one daughter.

When he was first imprisoned as a very young man, his mother collected references from former employers and sent them to the prison officials along with her own letter begging for leniency. More than ten years later when he was imprisoned in the brand new, politically liberal state of Arizona, a woman who was interested in prison reform told the governor and state legislature about the invention he was working on and the legislators took up a collection from their own pockets to send Roy to Washington DC on his own recognizance to apply for a patent. There was a lot of publicity. Roy and the governor became friends and the governor got Roy a job in a town near the prison where he spent the rest of his prison term working as an electrician instead of sitting in a jail cell.

I could go into more detail because there's a lot more in the files but I think I've made my point in this case. Roy obtained several patents during his life. The last one was for a teeter-totter-powered merry-go-round, a patent that was granted to him two weeks after he died. I actually played on one of those things when I was a child, and it was a truly magical device.

[Uncle Buddy]

Antonio Soro was a true genius who was apparently emotionally and socially incompetent. He was given to throwing fits and did not know how to get his way. And he was lighting his house with a solar air engine in 1912 when his world came crashing down around him because of a wicked investor. Antonio lost his grasp on reality and is now remembered as a murderer. But mostly forgotten, because he ruined his life and his chances for marketing an invention by losing control of his invention and then his mind. I'm not making excuses for him. The man killed someone, and is lucky he wasn't hanged. Or maybe not. I'm sure he often wished he had not survived, because he had to live with what he'd done.

As a young engineer and Navy veteran from Italy, Antonio and his mother and sister had emigrated to Australia. Besides being a master mechanic, Antonio was a musical savant who could play several operas from memory on several different instruments. But his music teacher would come to rue the day she met him.

The Italians where Antonio lived were all in the fruit business, including his brother-in-law who had a partner. The partner loaned Antonio money to patent his invention in several countries, and once the patents started being granted, the financier started leaning on Antonio for his money back. Of course having a patent doesn't make someone wealthy; the financier must have known what he was doing when he loaned the money, and when Antonio figured this out, he kinda lost it and tried to escape by stowing away on a ship going that-a-way, but was caught and hauled back by his brother-in-law and the evil partner.

Antonio told a tall tale which he might have believed, we'll never know. He said he'd been kidnapped and taken for a long ride in an airplane that crashed in a lake. More likely he tried to drown himself and failed.

Next we find the evil financier accused of stealing the key secret part from Antonio's invention and hiding it under his sick wife's pillow so Antonio couldn't get it back. There was a loud court case with lots of publicity but as you might expect the quivering, shaking, tremulous little inventor was no match for the respected businessman who'd ripped him off. The courts do not exist to protect nutballs from successful businessmen.

So Antonio left town, moving in with his music teacher, a middle-aged woman with a daughter Antonio's age. Antonio was drinking too much wine, working too hard on his invention, not getting enough sleep, and in love with the daughter who was engaged to someone else. It was a horrible situation, to say the least, and I'm not making excuses for Antonio. He ended up shooting the girl in what he claimed was a suicide pact, a claim that no one believed. He tried to shoot himself in the head but he was subject to nervous tremors, and his hand was shaking so badly that the bullet only grazed his cheek. He only had one bullet left and it misfired.

Antonio was sentenced to hang but his relatives in Italy clamored for his release and got him sent to Italy to fight for the Italian Navy in 1918. Then he snuck back into Australia to be close to his mother when her end was near, and he stayed in Australia secretly the rest of his life. He never married, kept to himself, made no friends, and probably drank too much wine and wished he was dead the whole time. At one time someone burned down his house. He was interviewed twice because of war security since he was an immigrant, but there were no computer databases in those days and apparently the authorities never caught on that he was the murderer they'd evicted in 1918.

One of Antonio's nephews was a very successful businessman credited with being the father of the marina industry in Australia. This man spoke of an uncle who used to take him out on a boat when he was a child. He never mentioned the uncle's name.