Do you have Memorial Day off? What are your plans for Memorial Day?

@f00l That’s my everyday plan. Other than vanquishing the nagging feeling I should be doing something that crops up when my book gets slow it’s a pretty easy agenda to keep to.

@f00l

@lordbowen
/image Nicholas cage face off

@f00l
Update:
I was slightly useful to the universe and so myself yesterday. But only slightly.

Need to FOCUS!

/giphy "in the zone"

@OldCatLady We’re not doing much. Wanna meet for lunch?

@magic_cave
@OldCatLady

Ooooh, gossip!!!

Can y’all meet where there’s good scenery?

/image hot guy

@magic_cave Another weekend I’d love to, thanks. Last night I decided to drop a can of beans on my toes, and spent some time getting x-rayed. I’ll be sitting with my foot wrapped in ice. Still have to make baked beans, can’t have Memorial Day without them.

@OldCatLady Hope you are feeling better soon.
I came close to dropping a cinder block on my foot yesterday, that would have made for an unpleasant drive to the emergency room in my stick shift and a tough weekend hosting a cookout in my split level house, where the back yard is downstairs from the kitchen. People are going to be disappointed I’m not making my black and red beans, they are very popular. But there’s only a few people coming and I prefer to make the large crock pot full.

@OldCatLady
Ouchie!

@moondrake

I’m not making my black and red beans

: |

@meh

@meh You can’t just say that and not provide dog pics.

@Kawa

@moondrake thankssssssss

@meh
: )

@sohmageek Far west Texas. You are welcome to join us if you are in the neighborhood.

@moondrake
I am a little further from you than Colorado Springs or Phoenix or Yuma, but a little closer than Denver or Las Vegas.

@Shrdlu Too bad you’re where you are and we’re where we are, otherwise we’d come help you dig. We’d even bring the pastrami.

@Shrdlu

Tempted.

Sigh.

@f00l
@shrdlu

(To self)

Now, looking at that image, why do I suddenly feel like I might have fins?

@medz Nope. Hadn’t heard that.

@medz Is that a thing?

@luvche21 I thought the thing was to put the koolaid on your hair? My hairdresser told me I could do it with any problem (I’m considering pink) as long as I used koolaid so it would wash out easily.

@magic_cave koolaid doesn’t necessarily wash out easily. I know people that had stained hair for months.

@daveinwarsh I know what I want for Christmas.

@magic_cave

FWIW, I know NC is a hell of a drive from FL, but it’s a great drive. Hope you all find lots of excuses to drive it both ways.

@baqui63

Thank you for shaming us.

Ok, running shoes, where did I put you?

@f00l You’re welcome, though it wasn’t intended that way.

Note that I’ve been “going thru the crap in my basement” since late 2008, without much noticeable progress to date. Not much shaming there.

The biking… eh, I mostly enjoy it and know I’ll feel much better if I do it. This does not mean that it will actually happen. Some potential for shaming, I guess.

In truth, I’m occasionally reminded of the hassle and work involved when my mother finally died after a roughly year-long battle with brain cancer. We (my sisters and I) had to get rid of the crap left behind by her and my father (who’d died about 15 years prior). After we filled a 30 cubic yard dumpster, much of the house and garage was still loaded with stuff (I should mention that the house was four floors and 22 rooms, and the garage was a 4 car commercial height with attached shed… larger than my last two apartments).

Anyway, I really do not want to leave my mess for my daughters to deal with, plus in the short term, it would be really (really!) nice if I could find stuff I know I have without having to search for 30 minutes to a day or more.

@earmstrong sadly, around here, people treat it as a day to grill and party, giving absolutely no thought to why they have it off.

@earmstrong
@RiotDemon

I am close to those who fought in wars for the US, but have not been close to anyone who died in one.

Also, to the best of my knowledge, various ancestors of mine also survived their wars, even those in which they fought later in their lives.

I suppose I am wearing some “I got lucky” blinders.

@earmstrong Among genealogy researchers, this weekend is a good time to focus on finding records of veterans’ lives, their accomplishments, in-service deaths, and putting the records online. Some professional researchers give discounts for copying records files etc.
This area has many observances, from flag placement to historical reenactments, with speakers. One Sunday ceremony: ‘The “Field of Crosses” (or “Fallen Heroes Memorial Tribute”) individually names the fallen Florida-born military heroes from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Larger crosses are dedicated to heroes of all foreign wars.’

@OldCatLady
Geoneology research:

Help pls. Where to begin?

Now that I find out that I am an enormous disappointment to various illustrious family-member type persons, I might as well get the details and the scoop on all those “good and great” ancestors and relatives whom I’ve failed to honor.
(because I am incapable of living up to any reasonable standards whatsoever.)

Besides, Always-Right Grandmother would be so pleased.

@earmstrong In my former workplace during the week preceding Memorial Day some of the employees put up a 30’ long roll of paper and invite everyone from our department, other departments and members of the public, to write down the names and service information of those who served and a little something about them. They put out cookies and drinks and people come and read the wall.

I have a lot of friends and family who served, and I’ve been lucky enough not to have lost any of them in that service, although several have died since then, including my dad, my brother and my best friend. If I can, I’ll put something commemorative on the facebook memory page I made for Bob. But I’ve been really down lately, mostly missing him, and focusing on that loss drags me into a downward spiral that’s very hard to pull out of. But the lack of outward memorialization in no way means that lost loved ones are forgotten or unmourned.

@earmstrong To be truthful, the first thing I’ll do will be to try and arise early enough to cut flowers, and drive down to the river, and my favorite Memorial (it honors all the services, and is very lovely, and peaceful in the dawn’s light). I prefer being alone to joining in any of the local ceremonies.

One of the traveling walls (Vietnam Memorial) is here this week, but it’s a sorrow I still cannot bear. Maybe someday.

@f00l If your family has been genealogically inclined for awhile, you have a really good chance that someone has put the data into Ancestry.com already. It’s free to search and view, and if you want to enter data yourself, they have a free trial period. You can also look at Fold3, which has slightly different data. You can also look on FamilySearch.com, which is the LDS database. It has the very best collection of free databases in the world. I believe that if you want to check their family trees, you need to go in to a Family History Center and use their computers.

Short answer: always check first to see if someone else has done the work and put it online. Oh, and many graves have been put into the online memorial database FindAGrave. It’s free, and since it’s a volunteer effort, has many errors, but it’s got information not found elsewhere. If you have an unusual surname to research, it may be a gold mine. Me, I have Johnson, Williams, Stevens, Wilson…

@moondrake You may want to create an online memorial to them on FindAGrave. You can enter a few photos and biographical information. It’s free.

@f00l Some libraries may have Ancestry subscriptions. Of course that means actually going to that library and using the computer that has access.

The library in the next town over (last I knew) has 2 computers with such access. It used to let you print off genealogical stuff free, but changed that policy. Once that occurred I started taking a thumb drive to download the documents to.

Depending on the state, different types of records may be available for free online instead of having to request them from the state/county and pay a fee. For example, I can find marriage and death certificates online (including images of them) for some of my Missouri ancestors but those are not available for my Iowa ancestors.

@msklzannie The Ancestry Library Edition version is a pale shadow of a full Ancestry subscription. Many fewer databases and limited searches, just to start. If you really want to find source and database information, the gold standard is CyndisList. There are some excellent blogs, including blog summaries, like Genea-Musings.

@msklzannie
@OldCatLady

On a few lines of my ancestry things are really well documented. Some people commissioned and published a book, back in the 1960’s.

I’d love to get my hands on a copy, can’t find one. (no isbn i think); but my aunt and brother have one. AFAIK, no one has scanned it for online.

But in other directions things dead-end with barely a few words about great-grandparents.

That stuff can get fascinating if you really get into it. Someone I knew in Manhattan had an ancestor living on the frontier in the 1840’s or 1850’s, I think - or perhaps a bit after the Civil War. In central Texas.

When he was out alone one day, he was attacked by Native Americans - I think stabbed; for certain, clubbed, partially scalped, and left for dead.

He came to. I think he was sorta able to walk, barely - his horse was gone, of course - and he started trying to make his way back to a residence.

In the meantime, his family had decided he had been gone too long, and gathered a group to ride out looking for him. They found him, brought him back to town, and got the local doctor to try to help him.

The guy lived, and recovered. He was able to do farm work and ranch work again. The skin on his scalp never completely grew over the injury - there was a place where the bone showed. The doctor showed him how to try to protect it and keep it clean. He fashioned himself a kind of bandage-helmet for whenever he was outside, and a bandage for inside.

He lived more than 10 years after that, went out to work every day but Sunday. He did finally die of complications of the injury; more than a decade afterwards he got an infection at the scalping site, and couldn’t recover.

Those people - all of them: the descendants of voluntary and involuntary immigrants, and the Natives - weren’t all that concerned about "first world problems’’.

Acknowledging, but not at this moment going into all the good and bad things in American history; often I wonder if we deserve what they built for us.

@f00l If you’d like to read contemporary newspapers, there’s always the Library of Congress digitized newspaper collection (1789-1924). You can search by name, locations, topic… Even in 1850, there were a respectable number of papers, some of which have been digitized (and more are scheduled), and local interest stories were what sold papers. You ought to see the 1914 account of my grandparents’ divorce proceedings.

@f00l Oh, I think we do deserve it, but I also think they wouldn’t recognize our present system of government. I think Jeffersonian democracy has been knocked down to its knees, and P.T. Barnum is reigning.

@OldCatLady

I have that recent Bonhoeffer bio. I haven’t listened to it yet.

Daunting to think about that kind of courage: a kind of courage which was somewhat commonplace 70 years ago.

They had stupidity and blindness then, we have it now.

But I have to partially agree, partially disagree with your Bonhoeffer quote above. Ignorance and stupidity are, to me, the greatest sources of evil and disaster now. And in an age where media can be so easily manipulated, aren’t stupidity and ignorance the primary foes? But I have no clue about a path to offer.

I don’t think there is an e-book version of this one:

The Hidden Injuries of Class
Paperback – October 17, 1993
by Jonathan Cobb (Author), Richard Sennett (Author)

https://smile.amazon.com/Hidden-Injuries-Class-Jonathan-Cobb/dp/039331085X/ref=la_B000APH3BO_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496018271&sr=1-2

Right now, class in the US isn’t really about financial standing (to me). It appears to be about cultural origins, combined with educational exposure.

@f00l Numbers seem to show longer life is strongly correlated with birth class, which usually but not always, tracks with wealth. There is wiggle room if you consider born poor/wealthy later, but apparently the reverse is not true: birth culture outweighs adult SES. So cultural origins still outweigh bank balances. I have doubts about educational exposure. If, however, you want to argue:
http://prospect.org/article/poor-die-younger

@OldCatLady
Re class and other social science concepts:

I never took a science science class in college. (The school allowed that.)

I was quite interested. It was just a matter of “world enough, and time”. (I bet you recognize that.)

But I was always fascinated. I lived in a house for - was it 3 years? - where everyone else was a social anthropologist or economist or whatever.

I don’t know the concepts in any sort of formal sense. The reading I have is mostly not textbook or academic. And of course whatever I read I forget instantly. Point of pride, kinda.

So I’m going on an personally intuitive measure of class here, not a formal or verifiable or academically justifiable one.

And I see two personally useful ways to split it. One is the trad way, with measures of income, status, family social acceptance, education, social and economic “range”, stability of position and economic safety, etc, health and healthful practices. I know little of these beyond an occasional book or what shows up in the likes or WaPo and The Atlantic.

I have no doubt that the traditional likely limits on large scale class improvement hold here - or have gotten worse than even a decade ago.

But in many localities, I’ve both read and observed, there is another fault line.

The other measure of “class” I watch and wonder about is this one: who talks freely to whom? Who, intellectually, has trust and respect, reciprocally, for whom?

Who, esp among those with whom one has considerable political differences of opinion, can one speak with fairly freely and at some depth, with (mostly, politics can get emotional) no sense of condescension or “dumbing-down” on either side? Where both sides want the conversations to continue and deepen if both people have the time and energy?

Versus with whom does one instinctively avoid or pull back remarks (disagreement or agreement), because there is a sense of instant judgments being made, various slogans and myths being accepted uncritically, no visible capacity to listen or explain, and a lack of intellectual respect for the quality of the argument? And a true lack of enough tolerance for both sides to listen and gain?

And this fault seems to run partially on cultural heritage lines, and much more on educational lines.

This seems to have nothing to do with income or financial stability or trad class from lower to rich.

It does have a lot to do with a person’s cultural history. And with whether an educational tradition, whether a cultural, formal, or personal one, is focused around some traditional liberal arts topics.

And this is the divide I see and feel and read about everyday. It’s a perceptible part of daily life.

It seems to have very little do to with being economically conservative vs liberal, or with being R, D, or independent.

And it has a lot to do with ghettoization of news and cultural info sources.

So that perhaps in the end, all we might truly have in common are sports, tech, economic woes, family and work life ( which should mean a lot), and superhero films, and other big $ entertainments.

Everyone has their opinions on this.

Here, in this remark, I am not going for “whose side is at fault” or “whose side is wrong”. If I did want to go there, I sure wouldn’t do it in this topic.

Anyway, there’s a lot of fault to be passed around. I’ll drink my share of that cup.

I’m just thinking that the idea that we are split into groups who don’t have faith in the idea that “it’s intrinsically worth talking and listening to each other on contentious topics sometimes” has any value anymore is a source of sorrow to me.

I suppose I’m as guilty as anyone tho. I’m certainly not innocent.

@thejackalope

Can you give us a an idea of the topic?

Congrats on getting that far, and best wishes! Hope it’s about to go well and not give you a panic attack!

@thejackalope Good luck with your defense. Your advisor wouldn’t be letting you do that if s/he didn’t think your survive. You have a job yet?

@f00l
@Kidsandliz
Thanks for the encouragement! I’m feeling pretty good about things now. Just have to make it through the Q&A with my committee without
/giphy pudding-brain

My research has been on the driving forces and impacts of exotic plant invasions in an eastern deciduous forest community. Especially with respect to the influence of our overabundant white-tailed deer population.

I like this giphy. But I’m not sure if I would be the blank-faced starer or the randomly flailing person…
Probably blank on the outside, flailing on the inside.

This is long and since there is no PM’ing meh is stuck with it here. Likely you won’t be interested unless you are in the middle of a PhD program.

@thejackalope Just remember you know more about your topic than anyone on your committee. I dropped an entire Ho and no one even noticed LOL If you think you will forget something, then put it on a power point slide - either as a note (so you can print your slides and notes) or on the actual slide.

If you have people on your committee who are weak in something, explain it like you’d explain it to an undergrad. I had a committee member who had no clue about the statistics I used. So I gave a simplified explanation aimed (discretely) at him and as a result I got no questions about that portion of my dissertation from him. Also some of your committee will not have read all of your dissertation carefully, rather they may have picked a few things to challenge you and then shut up figuring they have done their duty.

The outside person is a crap shoot. Mine was so over his head (even though I dumbed down a few things for him) he kept his mouth shut and then brought up something where he sounded so stupid even some of my committee rolled their eyes (I still needed to treat what he said seriously and answer - and I really dumbed down the answer since he was clueless). Other outside people due their due diligence and behave more intelligently.

Also remember that some faculty think they have to act like jackasses and try to trip you up. I finally had to say to a committee member something along the lines of I realize that you are approaching this from a finance perspective. In this case I have used the org beh approach, as pioneered by X at Stanford (yeah name drop on purpose since is was S.t.a.n.f.o.r.d) and the definition I used is consistent with his (the stanford guy). As a result I did “Y” which is consistent with that theory. Perhaps at a future point in time someone should compare and contrast those two approaches and do a study to try to settle this.That shut him up.

Then at a job interview I got hassled in from their finance guy in the same way (only he was more aggressive) and I said that is a good point (butt kiss - not it wasn’t a good point) and actually the finance guy on my committee brought up the same issue, here are the points we discussed (and repeated the Stanford bit I wrote about earlier). Later the hiring committee said I handled that man better than anyone had in recent history in a job interview. Moral of the story is don’t let them rattle you. Some try to on purpose.

You are going to be interrupted. Count on it and realize that is the process. Fairly frequently faculty argue with each other over a point you made. Keep your mouth shut and let them battle it out (it also uses up your time and so spares you from further grilling later on). Don’t voluntarily let yourself be dragged in by trying to intervene or set someone straight when they are arguing with each other.

Think through how you will shorten your presentation and which slides you will blow through quickly if time starts to run out. I was actually asked just to briefly summarize my first 3 chapters since in my proposal defense I had 3 completed chapters. So I flipped past slides. They wanted more time on chapters 4 & 5. If your defense of your proposal was only on an abbreviated front end then likely you will get more questions on that.

And remind yourself - they WANT you to pass because your advisor will look like an idiot if you are allowed to defend when your advisor knows you aren’t ready. There is advisor prestige that “their” students don’t fail the defense and don’t have to do extensive revisions. So you advisor is fundamentally on your side (unless that person has a reputation for screwing students) and likely will defend you against unreasonable crap from other faculty - which is the other reason why you need to keep your trap shut when faculty are talking/arguing with each other rather than including you - let your advisor do the heavy lifting while that is going on - of course don’t miss when/if you are suddenly pulled in and your advisor shuts up. Once in my defense my advisor said to the finance guy (in the previously mentioned discussion when he tried to bring up the same stuff again) - “we will have to agree to disagree as what she is did used that theory in a mainstream way in her field”.

Your advisor should then give you a list of specifics on what you will be asked to revise (usually all faculty send what they want to your advisor and it is s/her job to decide who to listen to and who to ignore). If, instead, you are given conflicting information, ask your advisor which direction s/he wants you to go (then s/he will defend you if the committee squawks).

The goal here is to finish. Pay your zillion dollars to print it on cotton paper (remove a line of leading in the double space and you might get to shave off 25 pages or so for the library copy to save money - just don’t do it for your advisor’s copy), file it with the library and shut the door on your way out. Your dissertation is not a cross to die on. No one reads dissertations other than other doctoral students and your committee. If you don’t agree with what someone tells you do to, if you can’t convince your chair you are right then just change it. You can change it back when you write the article to publish. If the editorial committee of the journal tells you to change it then maybe your committee was right. Otherwise you win. It’s the article people will remember. LOL

I defended my dissertation with a 2 week old kitten in my pocket who I had just fed right before the defense. Fortunately for me she stayed asleep and never poked her head out. My committee never knew until AFTER everything was signed off on and turned in. I am not so sure some of them would have taken kindly to that but I had no other choice.

There was some drama in my defense from the (abusive) department chair who was pissed I didn’t put him on my committee (duh he was abusive - so why would I invite that?). He was being a jerk and my chair threw him out. He wouldn’t leave so my chair called security and he was escorted out. On his way out the door he told them to hold their noses when they signed my “skunk” dissertation. I had the last laugh though. Several months later I sent that jerk an email telling him the paper based on my skunk dissertation had been nominated for the Newman Award (best paper on a dissertation - didn’t win).

Good luck.

@Kidsandliz

Several months later I sent that jerk an email telling him the paper based on my skunk dissertation had been nominated for the Newman Award …

I think I won’t be picking fights with you.
Love that attitude.

@ACraigL Happy birthday, and many more!
/giphy happy birthday

@OldCatLady Thanks!

Happy @ACraigL Day! Day drink while you can, you never know when you’ll lose that talent.
/giphy chug beer

@ACraigL
Hey there! Happy congrats! Don’t spend it sober unless you wanna!

/giphy "happy birthday"

@ACraigL

@SSteve Awesome.

@OldCatLady
PBS annoyed me with that. I was out, but I wanted to listen to it.

But not on the PBS app, or through my local PBS station streaming.
Not thru Sirius.
Not thru Sling.
It was streaming live on Youtube. But you can’t minimize Youtube and have it keep playing, you have to keep Youtube in foreground. The concert wouldn’t come in on Youtube Music, which can be backgrounded.

I didn’t try a browser.

I did manage to hear the concert tho.

@msklzannie Good for you for looking. If you know the relative’s name, look for him in the National Park Service’s Civil War database.
It’s possible someone has created an online memorial for him at FindAGrave, too. Check both places

@msklzannie
@OldCay Lady

You just made me think I might go visit a great-great-great grandfather’s grave on Monday. (I think I got the the # of greats right.)

He did not die while serving in the Civil War. But many other relatives are buried there also - some of his children and grandchildren, 2 of my grandparents, my uncle.

Many of them were veterans. It may be possible at some died while serving in the Armed Forces.

Perhaps I’ll learn something.

@OldCatLady He had a stone in the old section of the cemetery; I’ve seen it in the past and have a photo somewhere. I just couldn’t find it today. I’m fairly sure he’s not buried there as I think he died in Andersonville, and I doubt they’d transport his body back to Iowa. He’d be some sort of uncle I think.

@f00l It looks like I was off a “great”. The stone I found was for my great-grandfather’s great-grandparents (my 5 greats-grandparents). I guess I’m generation 8 here instead. I do have a transcript of the land grant that he received. I know the people who own the land he received (not relatives though).

@msklzannie If he died at Andersonville, his name and military information will be in the NPS database. My grandfather was a prisoner there until 1865. If you have land grant info, you can find the original document for free here. They give details of his military service, as well as who got the adjoining land. Very often brothers, cousins and in-laws got nearby plots. No land grants were made for Civil War service, so the service would have been an earlier war: 1812, Indian Wars, and Mexican War. When you search the database, be sure to select ‘any state’ at the bottom of the list.

@msklzannie Are you in New England, New York, or Midwest? That’s a very long (and impressive) time for a family to stay in place.

@OldCatLady I am staggered with the mathematics of your statement about your grandfather being a POW at Andersonville. Let’s just say he was 25 upon release, which gives a birth year of 1840. Let us also suppose he had his last child at age 70 (year 1910), and that child would have been one of your parents (I expect a rational possibility of year of birth for you at 1945, in that case). Am I off, or was this perhaps your great-grandfather?

BTW, for those who depend on the list of names of those who died at Andersonville, you all owe a debt of gratitude to Dorence Atwater, who smuggled out a copy of the list of deaths there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_National_Historic_Site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorence_Atwater

@Shrdlu
@OldCatLady

i was kinda boggling at the year and generation counts.

My Civil War local grave ancestor (whose grave I am going to visit in a bit)

Is: (Counting, not entirely sure: I think I have to visit the grave to suss this out.)

Either two “greats” or three “greats”. Gotta resolve that because I know a little about the lives and I wanna fit the pieces together.

@OldCatLady we might have to Goat you again. It is totally your fault that I spent till 5 am on Find-A-Grave.

It’s curious that in some cases the site has less family data than Wikipedia. You’d think they would steal from Wikipedia.

I have some gaps that could be filled by the privately published book my aunt has. I think I have to scan that book.

But I did manage on mom’s side to go back to the 1600’s immigrants in some cases, and even to some graves in Shropshire and Northamptonshire or something.

I haven’t yet located all of Alway-Right Gramdmother’s royalty connections tho.

If she and her ancestors made all that up and bought into their own myths, I’m not totally shocked.

On the other side, I found out the names of my dad’s father’s parents for the first time ever. My grandfather left home forever, as I understand it, when he was 11 or 12. .

I have found traces of family all over the place. There are customary family name patterns.

(My name prob came to my parents after they were abducted by aliens, but nevermind.)

And little hidden family graveyards with 5 graves or something like that, on private property in Virginia. And other fascinating stuff. Special little graveyard parks where there was once an entire farm. I suppose there’s a lot of that in Virginia.

@Shrdlu @f00l I apologize for staggering and boggling. It was my GREAT grandfather Ephraim, 1834-1912. Aaagh. His daughter Addie, 1886-1975, was my grandmother, and she told us some of his history. I have visited Andersonville, in July, and have never walked a more haunted piece of ground. I had not known the story of Dorence Atwater. Thank you.

@f00l And THAT is why we do genealogy: to put missing pieces in place, and find some perspective. It’s the genealogy vampire bite, and you have been infected. On FaG, click on the name of the person(s) who created the memorial. If they have a few hundred names, they are very likely related, and are doing family memorials. You can email them and stand a good chance of finding family-specific resources. If they have thousands, they’re either a society or a -er- someone who wants large numbers because it fills some hole in their psyche.

@OldCatLady I’m in Iowa. My town is older than the state is. I don’t quite have roots here all the way back to its founding though. My dad’s side of the family is from here; my mom’s originally from Missouri.

The land grant was for my ancestor on my grandpa’s side; the relative who died in the Civil War was on my grandma’s side. My grandma’s side of the family has been here a long time too. Sometime in the last 5-10 years the century (plus) farm was sold. I’m not sure exactly how long altogether it was in the family.

@OldCatLady
3 of my grandparents were born in very late 1800’s.

One of them arrived when the 1900’s very brand new and all shiny.

A kind of funny story. Family lore.

Apocryphal at present. Doubt all you read.

But maybe …

Supposedly:
My Always-Right Grandmother and her family were in DC for legal reasons (Great-Grandfather was a successful lawyer) in a very early year of the century. Sometime 1901 thru 1903.

By train, I always heard. No horses for long distance travel then, between notable cities.

Anyway, my Great Grandparents heard about something something interesting happening down in North Carolina. At a place then called Kitty Hawk, to be precise.

So the family got on a train down to North Carolina. And were all supposedly on the sand dunes to watch some of the Wright Bros experiments with gliders and powered flyers or whatever.

When I was a child, I heard they all witnessed “the first airplane flight” or something like that. I don’t think so now. That’s what I understood then, being pre-school. I surely misunderstood.

According to Wikipedia, that can’t be; there were 5 people present, the names were known, and none of them seem to be my Alway-Right Gramdmother as a toddler. And she would have been aged 1, or 2, or 3, depending on the year this visit did or didn’t happen.

There was some hedging on what the story was, exactly? I heard skepticism from Mom. But I’m not sure about anything anymore. Were the parents there, but not the kids, perhaps? For some glider tests? Were they there at all? It’s pretty hazy. My younger bro might have some additional details.

She was among the younger children in the family. So if this event happened, and if they were present for something, surely some of her siblings remembered it.

Did it even happen at all? Were they even in Washington? Did they even go to Kitty Hawk? Who knows?

I suppose I might be able to track the law case that might have brought them to D.C.

Did Grandmother see something, remember something, or convince herself she remembered something? Apart from Grandmother, no one much obsessed over history when I was young.

We were all so used to her stories. We didn’t disbelieve her. She was accepted as a force of nature: sort of our local, reliable human tornado. But we just had other lives.

I so regret I never tracked this down.

I’ve got to ask my aunt about this.

It would be so kinda cool if some piece of it did happen.

@f00l Go look at the NC and TX newspapers for that time. Search on her maiden name, and see if you can find mention of the family’s trip, including a few months later. That’s what local papers did- lots and lots of social chat. ‘Mrs. E.C. Johnson and children visited her sister, Mrs. A.B. Stevens, at the latter’s home on Monday. The occasion was the birthday of Mrs. Stevens’ mother-in-law, Mrs. N.O. Stevens. Also present were neighbors Mr. and Mrs. F.G. Hoyt.’

@OldCatLady

OK. Newspapers, if they also function as deliverers of social news, will be amazing to look into. The last time I did much of that - I forget what I was looking for - it was all microfiche.

Among Mom and her two siblings, my aunt who is still entirely present and sharp as anyone, always had the best judgment about this stuff anyway. I need to have lunch or dinner with her. And Esteemed Younger Brother knows some good stuff. We’ve had some talks about it recently.

And my cousin has a huge stash of papers and historical stuff (the only son of the oldest son, etc).

My cousin had the most fascinating event happen about 2-3 years ago? He was in LA doing something, and a couple he knew put him up, and treated him royally. These two were both incredibly into woodworking.

My cousin had inherited a gorgeous lap desk. I’m a little sorry he decided to give it up, because I think it was not a normal purchase, but actually possibly a ceremonial gift to one of our great-grandfathers. But he chose to, it’s cool, and modern houses usually aren’t begging for more “stuff”. This lap desk - which could have been used in a army camp or on horseback, was beautifully handmade, with inlaid wood and hand dovetailing. Someday I hope to see some good photos at least.

Anyway, cousin decided to send this item to the woodworking couple, as a thank you for all they had done for him when he was their guest.

A few weeks later they called him. They were blown away by the lapdesk, and thanked him profusely.

But was he aware that the gorgeous lapdesk had a secret compartment?

It was full of letters. Love letters. The LA couple sent him all the letters.

These were from my aunt to someone she was completely in love with, from, say, about the ages of about 15-20 or so. Before she ever met and married my uncle. So it’s kinda surprising that she kept the letters in my uncle’s grandfather’s lapdesk. But she did. Perhaps my uncle didn’t know about the secret compartment? Or perhaps he did, but she loved truly beautiful things, and may have taken over the use of it.

She had been a stellar student, esp in languages. For her last year or so of HS, she received some sort of special scholarship to a language study center in Mexico City, where she would be properly chaperoned, and where she would go, not to a HS, but rather to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), which is currently considered by many to be the most important spanish-speaking university in the world, and is about as selective as a top Ivy League school.

She went, and stayed, I believe, for several years. And she excelled. And she fell in love, with a young member of one of the top aristocratic and very wealthy Mexican families. I don’t know who, but obviously my cousin does. And for a long time, these two were made for each other, and were inevitable. The letters were from when she was back and home, and when later she went to the UT. (She also studied in Paris and Spain, she won some major scholarships.)

But by the time she was in her early twenties, she was still in love with this young man, but having reservations. The culture was very traditional and macho. She was no longer 15 or 16. She had been to UT and to Europe as well as to a chaperoned world. Although she would have all the freedom she wanted to pursue her own academic interests, so long as she was terribly careful of the family reputation and dignity, and she was very traditional about family matters and running the household - his family were terribly impressed by her - she was certain she would have to put up with a mistress or perhaps more than one, by the time her prospective husband was in his mid-40’s. And in that tight and traditional and judgmental world, she would be watched. And perhaps judged, by others. She would have to accept that things were done that way. And she finally couldn’t sign on the dotted line for that life.

I understand that the breaking up was terrible for both of them. They were still in love, I believe. I suspect that if he had been willing to come to the US, or go to Europe (to somewhere other than Spain), she might have been eager to continue with this relationship. I think - she may have started to see things in him, and they both became more independent young adults, that led her to believe that although he had an excellent character and intelligence, he was also becoming increasingly traditional. He wanted a career of influence, which was seen as his birthright. She couldn’t see herself in a mandarin role to that world.

So she broke it off and married my uncle instead. She was really really brilliant - I think economics as well as languages, and I am told she spole French as Spanish so well that when she was in France or Spain, educated locals thought she was a native until she stumbled over an unusual word.

For her sake I wish she’d taken on the life of fully using her talents. But she chose something more traditional on this side of the Rio Grande.

When I mentioned this to my wonderful living aunt, it turned out she knew all about the painful love affair, and how sure they had been of being meant for each other, for so long. My living aunt used to talk with her about all this when my aunt was still in HS. Romantic stories, perhaps? I’m not sure. But it was my living aunt who knew why the relationship had finally died.

If you are right, my aunt who wrote these letters will have left other tracks. She grew up in a small farming town - surely if a local academic star leaves school early and goes off to a major foreign language university, there that would make the small town newspapers.

I can see how family research can be terribly evocative on a human scale. and you can connect your ancestors to the larger events of the time.

I went to the cemetery that has so many family members. My Civil War ancestor is my great-great-grandfather. A couple buried there were born too soon to be his children - it might be a much younger brother. And my great-grandfather and his wife are buried there, along with i think 4-5 of my great-grandfather’s siblings and their spouses.

From my grandfather’s generation, my grandfather and grandmother, and my grandfather’s brother are buried there. And I think 3-4 others from that generation? There are some about whom I confused, as to where they fit in. And there were three child headstone/footstones, one of which could not be read. And none of the child headstones have readable dates.

There were a couple of interesting things, to me: first, that the 3 families that have supposedly been intermarrying since before they revolution were still intermarrying after WWI. The changing middle and last name combos of these family names makes that clear.

Second, that I got the answer to something I;ve wondered about. There was a family naming pattern for the oldest son, with alternating names each generation. And then my grandfather was named identically to his father, and my uncle to his father. Why did the pattern change? The answer is, it didn’t. There was an older brother buried there, with the alternating name pattern. Once I saw his headstone, the stories came back to me. I knew there had been a relative who was supposed to be a lawyer and then a judge, or something, but who was instead a brilliant musician who never git it, and never married, and there was family pressure and disappointment for years. I had never realized this was my grandfather’s older brother, who inherited the naming tradition.

Quite a few of these people died only a few years before my parents married. I think we have relatives in Dallas and Houston, and various farming towns, here, in TN, and in VA, and also in OH and NJ and points west. I remember as a young child being taken to what seemed like grand houses, once each. My mother’s family. I was never quite sure who they were, and could not remember their names, but I imagine those family branches are still around. One of those elegant ladies fed me my first artichoke. I still love artichokes.

@f00l Your family is rich beyond measure in its stories and traditions. If you can document even a few them, I promise future genealogists will speak your name with reverence. There are conferences and courses to teach these things, and they’re enormous fun. For heaven’s sake- you live in TEXAS, which has so many of its vital record images online, for free. Birth certificates from 1903. Death certificates from 1890. County marriage records, with images, from 1837. And 4.5 million county tax roll records, from 1837. If your father’s grandparents had the courtesy to be hatched, matched or dispatched in TX, you will soon know all sorts of details about them and their forebears. Here, just look at a few, while you listen to music. Other states aren’t nearly as generous, but it varies wildly.

@msklzannie Iowa has many of its vitals online at FamilySearch. I just looked, and filled in a couple of names on my own tree. Third cousins twice removed, so not very helpful. However, you will certainly have more to look at. Here.

@OldCatLady

It’s wonderful for to see this stuff.

But seeing it also posses me off a little at myself. All this was here and available when I was growing up, and all the connections were in place to explore.

But tho we heard a few stories, we never explored. I could have known so much more.

I think this was part family dynamics relating to my Always-Right Grandmother’s personality.

She has very strong traditional opinions on everything. And she sort of verbally dominated a room. She Was Right And That Was That.

She almost worshiped her oldest child, he was her “son and heir”. He was plenty brilliant (he argued and won a case before the US Supreme Court - that permitted his client to sue the Federal Govt for some sort of negligence), but he was always the jokester and the prankster and the deflected. He deflected everyone away from parts of his life he preferred people not to see. Of course, this all may have nothing to do with family dynamics.

My mom was the middle child. And she was her father’s favorite I suspect. They had a special connection between them i don’t fully understand - he died when I was too young. The were, the two of them, the peacemakers and mediators and people-pleasers. They both seemed sometimes overwhelmed.

My living aunt was the much younger last child. She was and is matter of fact, was and is the stable one, practical, generous, incredibly kind. She was, I suspect, the only member of the family that her Mother couldn’t dominate. They didn’t fight and we’re terribly fond of each other’s company - my aunt simply was her own person, living her own life, pointing out the obvious when things got too crazy. My aunt is the one who doesn’t get blown around by hurricane winds.

But Mom and her Mom had a warm but strained relationship. They only lived about 2 miles apart? And Grandmother made the most of the proximity. She was also over, making Pronouncements About The Universe. And criticizing the company lot of Mom’s curtains or something.

So I think Mom made a pretty big point of not being too involved. Of stepping back. And so we don’t know a lot of stuff that we might have known in family with no such an outsized personality.

When we were all there with my Grandmother present, the phrase “Now, Mother, …” was heard every few minutes, as someone tried to mitigate the more extreme aspects of my Grandmother’s opinions.

When Grandmother visited US Rep Jim Wright’s offices in order to Explain The World To Him, he had people on staff on permanent assignment to take care of her and keep her from monopolizing him. I think some of the younger members of his staff, now long retired and elderly themselves, still remember her.

@OldCatLady @f00l

I’ve read every single word (yes, really) in this segue, and found it fascinating. I just wanted to add yet another place to consider on the search for relatives, and ancestral history. For other reasons, I finally sent off a saliva sample to 23andme a couple of years ago, and a side effect was that there were countless members of my extended family there.

The down side of 23andme (or any genetic matching) is that if you are female, you need a closely related male relative to get a full report. Please note that this was still very useful, and I strongly considered linking up to people that 23andme suggested as possible relatives (because they indeed were, on my father’s side). I’m intensely private, and linked up to no one, although I do allow that data I provided to be used anonymously.

I was genuinely fascinated with the potential connections I saw, since I could identify many of them as actual relatives. My family on my mother’s side has a smaller gene pool than most, since they have often married distant cousins. If you do the math, after a time, the family tree looks more like a grapevine than a tree. So it goes.

I had zero surprises, in my line. For the vaguely curious:

100% European
…Northern European
. . . . . .55.4% British & Irish
. . . . . .6.4% French & German
. . . . . .2.8% Scandinavian
. . . . . .22.7% Broadly Northern European
…Southern European
. . . . . .0.7% Iberian
. . . . . .0.4% Broadly Southern European
. . . . . .5% Broadly European

@Shrdlu
Someone here I had dinner with on Sat recommended 23 And Me to me.

She also said that Ancestry.com does that.

She recently found out that her Native American ancestry was part Native American and part African American. I suspect there are a lot of those cover stories floating around, for stuff people didn’t want to own up to a century ago.

I would be fascinated to discover I had something other than European ancestry. It would be so cool! And trying to figure out where that came into play, if it exists…

I think I read somewhere that they used to give out more info? And then the govt or someone got involved and limited what they could hand out that has medical implications?

So now you get the full “ancestry” part of it, bit if you want the full medical stuff you have to partner with a physician or something? Is that true, or am I recounting a myth?

I haven’t done that in part because I was worried about insurance implications and risky conditions. I don’t know I have any, but … Soon I won’t have to care about that. (I hope.)

Getting a male relative involved might not be prob - Esteemed Older Bro is a physician. He may have already done this.

As for privacy - I have grown up in a family where, in the old days of my youth, people disapproved, but did not interfere. Any only sometimes. And now they’re far looser than that.
We sort of live out our lives and connect every 6 months or 2 years or something. And then it’s like not a day has passed. We are all a bit on the same wavelength. We can talk about anything, instantly. This is all on my Mom’s side.

My family lets you be you. If you wanna be private, that’s fine. They still welcome you when you don’t. I would bet a decent amount that the extended family members I don’t know ate exactly like that. It’s a family “thing”.

One of the things about my Mom’s family is: the family is “interesting”. And aware of it, for better or for worse.

Everyone I ever met (except for looking in the mirror) possessed an astounding amount of social and personal dignity. (That’s right. Except me.)

If course I could be full of shit on that?

On Dad’s side. I know only one one living person, a much much older cousin, like 15-20 years older? I haven’t seen him in like 2 years? And I don’t have his contact info. One of my summer projects is to fix that. He was married and in the army in Korea when I was 4 years old.

My Esteemed Younger Bro just found some new people last month. Somehow we own 1 zillionth of an acre in a rural area near Houston. This was my Cooking Grandmother’s family farm. So Younger Bro visited the property and met like 10 relations - kids and grandkids of my Grandmother’s siblings. Now I have to go. These are good people. I know a few astounding stories from I think it was my Great-Grandmother’ life.

My Dad’s Dad’s Dad is the biggest black hole. He was the reason my Grandfather ran away from home, lied about his age, and joined the Navy when he was 11 or 12 years old. I know he had a really dark side in family life. I don’t know anything about his family or his public face.

@OldCatLady, would you start a thread for this? Family tracing and resources and such stories as can be told without outing oneself?

It would be treat to have it all gathered in one place.

Can anyone guess who the “walking social and bad-judgment disaster persona” in my family might be? Sometimes I’m astounded they still speak to me. I got lucky in the quality of my relatives.

And in the quality of the family stories. Apocryphal, but supposedly one in the Great and Good Ancestors had to hide in a wine cask to be taken secretly on ship and escape France, because he and his family had committed the crime of being Protestants.

Remember La Rochelle (my family wasn’t from there I think, but I think some of them may have been present during the siege.)

Remember the French Wars of Religion?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion

Well, why would you? Why would anyone not obsessed with French history remember any of that? But we tell the stories. Because it’s why a bunch of us are over here.

Supposedly, the Huguenot’s forced exodus from France was the greatest historical brain drain from Europe until the Nazis took power. It was an event with consequences: France essentially exiled, murdered, or persecuted many of their most innovative thinkers, businesspeople, and scientists. These were the people who were, as a group, least bound into and controlled by then stultifying religious/monarchal traditions of that time. And, according to some historians, France didn’t recover until the 1800’s, if they recovered then. The beneficiaries of France’s intolerance were Holland, Scandinavia, the U.K., and most notably, the 13 colonies over here.

Fun fun. I appreciate the interest from all of you. Can I return the favor?

Who else has great, non-identifying (we hope) family stories?

I love the idea that my family may have followed the practice that Florence King describes and stolen or purloined or faked our royal connections. We shall see, shan’t we?

If those relations are faked, that kinda does kinda destroy my idea that someday I ought to march up to Buckingham Palace, and demand to borrow a tiara for the evening tho.

Win some, lose some. ; )

BTW this is the part of King’s book that made me laugh so hard (while listening to it) that I had to pull over. I couldn’t drive for 10 minutes or something. I couldn’t speak or see for a bit.

/giphy tiara

@f00l Briefly, the medical bits that 23andme got in trouble for were solved sometime back. It’s interesting that I don’t have most of my family’s genetic predispositions to fearsome and early deaths (not entirely joking there), and I log on perhaps a few times a year just to see if there’s something new.

I prefer it to ancestry.com just because.

@Shrdlu @f00l The medical reports for all DNA testing services are no longer as detailed as they used to be. Not only that, but Ancestry does not list matches for people who have tested at 23andme and vice versa. However, once you have tested, you own the data, and you can download your test results. Then you go to GEDMATCH, create an account, upload your data, and in a day or so, you can see people who match your results from ALL testing services (if they have uploaded theirs, or you can choose to be anonymous), as well as some unique population tools. Then you go to Promethease.com, upload your data, and get more medical information about your genome and research results than you knew existed, based on SNPedia, q.v. Here I am, according to one GEDMATCH tool. It was quite a surprise.

@Shrdlu @f00l If you’d like some first-rate genealogy classes for free, you can register to stream the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree, 9-11 June. Here’s the list of classes, and here’s how to register to stream.

@OldCatLady
@Shrdlu

Aside from not wanting to ever be disqualified from insurance for some unforeseen bizarro reason (an issue that should go away from my life before much longer); when I have considered doing a genetic readout before, I have wondered about privacy and security.

Privacy - how much can a customer control over how much others can see about one being a potential close relative?

If the customer chooses to allow other persons to see that they might be close relatives, how much info does the other party get? If a customer wishes to contact possible relatives, do the companies provide their own messaging service or anonymized email link?

Do users of the service get each other’s addresses or names? If someone does contact or try to contact you as a putative relative, does the genetic service verify who this person is and that they are who they say they are?

Is that an issue, given that the match comes from genetics? Do people “borrow” saliva for strange and manipulative reasons?

It would seem to me that some interpersonal weirdnesses and schemes would not be out of the question. I would certainly want to be very very cautious of that aspect.

Besides, often i think I’d like to meet someone; and then I really think about it. Really. Hmmmm.

Not only about the other party; also about whether I want to disturb my own somewhat locally balanced lazy madness by adding a new person to it.

I usually only like to “meet” someone I kinda “know”. And already am interacting with, or wish to interact with, personally. If that makes any sense, which I doubt.

But the Victorians had their reasons (privacy-related, personal, and social), for insisting on personal introductions as a kind of limiter. That wasn’t entirely foolish, even if if was also often counterproductive and almost always unfair.

If there are genetics for good judgment, I fear those will show up as missing, badly damaged, or mutated, in my case.

Practically speaking, If I saw connections on Mom’s side and wanted to contact them, I guess I could start by asking my aunt what she knew, before pursuing it.

Regarding security: do we assume that this info will be or has been - or won’t be or has not been - hacked, stolen, or automatically uploaded to the NSA and the CDC and the National Laboratories and a bunch of other TLA’s? Or to foreign entities or nasty corporations?

These genetic readout companies providing out to the world only aggregate population data does not bother me. Personal data is another matter.

Do either of you ever feel odd about having done this? Do you know of poor or unwanted or unpleasant social or family outcomes?

Do either of you have knowledge of or fantasies of an “evil govt” or “evil corp” or “evil mastermind” or “evil renegade lab” buying or stealing the data and using it to be ultra ultra evil? Or to be a little evil, but evil enough?

Hmmm

I am also having a rather silly SF fantasy that, likely long after I am gone, someone might grow a clone of me for who knows what reason. Tho I have no info to suggest any uses why someone might choose my data in particular.

Which means that whoever grew the clone would either possess terrible judgment, a complete lack of morals, or be cluelessly and foolishly idealistic.

Hmmmm again. Not a great beginning, I fear.

Poor, pitiable being! I wouldn’t wish that existence on anyone - but, perhaps, me. With reservations.

And I would only somewhat wish it on me, and only then with necessary caveats: only because I’ve more or less learned (the hard way) how to put up with myself; and have gotten used to my own existence, sorta …

And I have never been able to figure out how to avoid and turn away from the less-than-wonderful task of being “me” (such as this creature in my skin with my sense of personal identity is);

and yet still follow thru on the biological imperative that what is alive is designed to try to stay that way;

and then there is the consciousness thing, and the opposable thumbs thing, and the brain thing, and the bonding thing, and the culture thing; and we are surely programmed to some degree to go forward as our species tends to go forward;

and so I “dance the human dance” so to speak; and therefore remain reasonably alive, somewhat marginally “aware”, slothfully “active”, and technically “semi-rational” (as these things go with regard to our kind).

I also remain way way way way way too too too wall-of-text-y. Sigh.

But I would much prefer not ever to be duplicated; most strongly, I believe, for reasons of mercy and pity toward another conscious entity, and toward the surrounding conscious entities.

Seems like those future human sorts should get fresh genetic starts, huh?

Or perhaps I’m just quite vain, and I want to be unique and special by some meaningless measure (given that events, environments, persons, choices, and habits make us, after conception); and I’m obviously busy refusing to step up and own the obvious vanity motivation as mine own.

Guilty guilty guilty? ; )

@OldCatLady

PS. Interesting about those birth certs being online in Texas. Because the county in which Dad was born managed to lose all their official certs from his era. I can’t remember if they lost them in the electronic era, or before that.

He needed one for some reason, and for a number of years including his, the county provided weird data-limited but legally valid substitutes.

The last time I went to get mine, if was also mangled. (Diff county). They only had a partial one, but it was legally valid.

Gotta look this up. ; )

@f00l My sister’s is like that, but she was born in Dearborn, MI. If I recall correctly, their courthouse burned down in the paper age.

@moondrake Michiganders have a unique set of problems. However, FamilySearch has lots of resources. If you want to find dead people in MI, their death certificates are online and free, up to about 1952. It’s changing as more records are added.

@OldCatLady I’ve never had too much interest in geneology. It’s cool to hear other people’s stories, though. I’m a bit interested in the genetics breakdown, as it turns out my dad wasn’t my dad, so I have no idea what half my dna is. I wish it was switched, I’d rather have his family’s procilivity for alchoholism than mom’s family’s proclivity for Alzheimers.

@moondrake

Alzheimer’s has some lifestyle components. I forget the specifics, but basically (I think), if you live an ultra-healthy life, fanatic-style, I think the Alzheimer’s risks fall considerably?

@moondrake Does your birth certificate list him as father? That’s what genealogists call a ‘non-paternal event’, BTW. Various estimates run between 10-20% of the population.

@f00l Yes, but as I’m fond of saying, eating strictly healthy foods doesn’t actually make you live longer, it just feels that way.

@f00l You have lots of company with your family stories. See this blog for an example.

@moondrake

I think there is some data indicating that healthy longevity in groups is associated with healthy, active, and and pleasant late-in-life years.

The healthiest, longest lived demographic group in the US is supposedly Seventh Day Adventist vegans. By some distance.

(many studies, I think. In addition to avoiding animal sourced foods, I think they avoid coffee, tea, soft drinks, and processed food. I forget whether they avoid alcohol. They do not use tobacco.)

The second healthiest and longebity group is Seventh Day Adventist vegetarians.

The third healthiest and longest-lived group is said to be Seventh Day Adventists who consume low-to-moderate meat and animal sourced foods.

By healthiest, I believe, if I’ve got the facts right: researchers found that they commonly regularly engaged in physiical activity, from exercise to gardening to generally active lifestyles, for a decade or more longer than general populations nearby. They also tend to retain strong mental acuity very much later than others, demographically comparable groups.

On the whole, they are notable for very low incidences of cancer and mental decline, as well as longevity.

I don’t wish to adopt the religion. Portions of the lifestyle philosophy and healthy practices do interest me. I haven’t exactly adopting all healthy or pure living in any part of my life (far far from it); but I’m better about that stuff than I used to be.

I am, personally speaking, addicted, more or less, to caffeine, at least.

Not sure I want a cure on that last one.

@OldCatLady

Turns out someone put our “family book” online at the LDS family research database.

I think you have to be physicallly in one of the LDS centers, possibly using one of their computers, to access the book.

The book has no isbn. There seems to have been a 700 copy print run. I’ve run quite a few searches and never seen one for sale at any price, which is understandable, I suppose.

My brother’s copy (used to be my mom’s) is in Ohio. But I suspect my aunt would let me have her local copy scanned for personal use.

It’s a pretty big book. Atlas sized, more than 300 pages. The person who did it was both a professional genealogical researcher, and a family member (I think?).

You got a copy by subscribing in advance if I remember.

There ought to be an extra copy floating around somewhere. Always-Right Grandmother also had one I think. And my mom and her siblings each had their own.

I don’t want a physical copy for me, unless I can find a loose one for sale somewhere, as I don’t have kids. It makes sense for the known copies to be passed down.

@f00l Put a search for the title on Ebay, and at AbeBooks etc.

@f00l Also check whether it’s on the Internet Archive and/or Google Books. I once spent hard-earned dollars on just such a family genealogy, and later found it both places.

@f00l I’m pretty good on the caffeine. I drink tea, usually green or white tea in the mornings, and water after noon. When I have soda I prefer diet root beer or caffeine free coke or pepsi, although at the theater I’m stuck with the caffeinated kind. That’s one reason I avoid going to the movies in the evening, I enjoy having popcorn and soda at the movies but I don’t want to be up all night.

@OldCatLady I looked and it does. But I was supposedly already born when they met, I wonder if they could have amended it. Evidently the answer is yes. I kind of remember something said to that effect. It’s all kind of vague, it was a deathbed revelation from my dad to my brother a few years ago, after my mom was already diagnosed with Alzheimers. On my recent visit with my aunt, who also has Alzheimers, she spontaneously told me some stuff, including the fact that I was already walking when my dad met me. Getting the details on the death of a step uncle I’d loved was more interesting.

@moondrake
That’s a fascinating and disturbing thing to happen to you - about your parentage - and then to have it all still unresolved. I would think that would cause some unusual internal emotional tides if something like that happened to me.

How much did you ever find out later?

Re healthy lifestyles and the Seventh Day Adventists:

I think it’s the community aspects, and the vegan aspects with a huge whole foods and unprocessed foods emphasis, along with no tobacco use, that likely matters in terms of health, longevity, low incidence of chronic or degenerative disease. I’m not certain caffeine use is a big factor.

Community aspects, in the sense that it’s a lifetime practice complete with learning as children, and associated lore and habits you pick up while growing up. Makes staying on the path pretty easy when about everyone dies it and wants to do it.

Plus in the towns the Adventists have built themselves, where the population is heavily SDA, they have just about zero junk food and fast food and drive-thru places. Like, nothing. And the grocery stores don’t carry all the stuff that health experts tell you to avoid. They often only have the good stuff.

If you drive thru one of those towns, you see a lot of kids and adults who have the height/weight ratios people commonly had everywhere 60 years ago. Remember the pix of kids at rock festivals and how skinny they/we all were? Like that. But back then, the Adventists also showed high healthy active mentally sharp longevity and very low incidences of phisical and mental degenerative deseases, cardiovascular issues, and cancer. They never had the heart attack, angina, and stroke epidemic of the mid-century.

The healthiest and longest-lived verifiable population anywhere in the world used to to be in Okinawa. They weren’t vegan - purely vegan eating is very rare unless mandated by religion, or in a very educated first world society. But they traditionally consumed only small amounts of animal-sourced foods. Animal-sourced foods, even seafoods, were often treated as condiments rather than main meals.

Okinawa has very reliable records going back well over a century, as the Japanese colonial admin mandated this.

Then the Americans and American money and bases and KFC and McD and spam and packaged processed American grocery and restaurant foods common in a US grocery took over the cities and the places with lots of jobs.

People who live and eat traditionally in the higher rural areas of Okinawa supposedly still possess their legendary exceptional long health. Get near one of the bases, where are many good jobs that appeal to younger generations, and there are huge %'s of people with obesity, metabolic disorders, and higher rates of everything horrible, and much shorter average lifespans.

Supposedly “Blue Zone” type research indicate cares that over the world, healthy and long lived groups often treat animal-sourced foods as condiments or eat them rarely, often consume probiotics of some sort (such as kefir, for instance), eat locally grown unorocesssed foods prepared traditionally, eat a ton of mon-starchy veggies, have to some degree, more active lifestyle than are common here (the Adventists are a possibly exception, they live first-world lives), and eat reasonable quantities of legumes and regularly eat sweet potatoes. Aside from ceremonial meals, they consume few desserts except fruit.

They have cultural traditions of not overeating. Their family and group meals tend to be warm and relaxed low-stress pleasant gatherings. They usually have traditional community values that emphasize empathy, humor, and hard work, and are not condemnatory of small foibles. They traditionally value good jokes, and good cheer.

Live and let live, as long as everyone works and no one is doing harm. They tend to traditionally try to bind people to decent behavior using humor and participation and gentle teasing and encouragement, rather than by heavy emphasis on rules and punishment. They tend not to be strongly authoritarian or totalitarian.

Of course, many of these groups have been studied in somewhat isolated areas where they have a sufficiently small local population and sufficient isolation from the big bad world, that it’s kinda easy to live this way there with little extra self-discipline.

Some persons in the US who, upon retirement, wanted to be healthy, deliberately moved to be near Adventist communities. Easier to pull off a healthy lifestyle there without working so hard at it.

Adventists also sometimes find their own hospitals. (These are normal hospitals with the same normal medical gold standards of treatment, and the staff is not necessarily Adventist. The hospital food might be a little better than usual hospital fare.)

I wish I knew more of the Adventist lifestyle specifics. I outta do some reading.

@OldCatLady
Re rare family book:

I hadn’t checked the Internet Archive. Good idea. And it’s been a while since I tried Google Books.

I do have a perpetual search on Ebay for it. Never seen it there. Every few weeks for the last 6 months or so, I’ve run a search on Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder will pick up many possible sources; if something can be had, usually they find it.

But no sightings so far. I’ve thought about getting a professional rare books store involved. But I haven’t decided how high I might go, so I keep putting that off.

@f00l Thought you might be interested in this. Apparently it’s the blood test plus an app that connects you to others in their database based on the results. Family Finder DNA Ancestry Test. $59, use coupon code “sale3” today for 10% off. I don’t know if that’s a good deal or not, just saw it and thought of you.

@djslack Well, technically that’s a plan.

@OldCatLady Haha, you got me there. I suppose it is.

@djslack Yeah, yesterday a friend from my old workplace told me she was being audited this coming week and asked me to come to the office and do her filing while she finishes some reports. It’s just about the last thing I wanted to be doing today (or any day, I hated filing when it was part of my paying job). But she’s a good friend so I promised her three hours and I’m just not going be able to clean house and bathe the dogs before the party this afternoon, bummer. I’ve been up since 6:30 doing daily dog walking and training, poop patrol, and mulching and raking the yard. I’m taking a short break for breakfast then I’m meeting her at the office.

PS When you think about government waste and inefficiency, think about this: in a wrongheaded effort to save money, local gov’t eliminated all the clerical and secretarial positions. Professional staff were told to do their own clerical work. Their workload was of course not decreased, and even increased as other positions were attritioned out to reduce the budget. So now we are paying our top professional staff five times a basic clerk’s hourly wage to file, shred, and run documents around to the various “City Hall Campuses” (they tore down city hall to build a baseball park, and spread City services across five different locations). The professional work doesn’t get done because the staff is busy doing clerical work. Just stupid.

@moondrake
I don’t know if FW has gotten rid of clerical staff.

But they at least have courier rounds to each office each day to handle paper movement that can’t be emailed.

You are a great person.
I think you might have a little General Patton in you.

If I were having guests, I would already be in such a mess that if I left home to do someone a favor for a few hours, both my home and my head would explode. Literally. Like “leading the news crawl worldwide” literally.

I would prob do the favor if I weren’t having guests.

Or if I might to the favor If i were having only guests who are seriously used to and tolerant of my highly anxious total confusion and incompetence and pretty much expect it.

/giphy salute

@f00l I got home 45 minutes before the start of the bbq and had that much time for cleanup and food prep. The pork ribs were a hit, I simmered them in apple juice till they were cooked through and finished them on the grill with a chutney I made of crushed pineapple, fresh orange habanero, tamari sauce and rice vinegar. But the real star of the day was the corn on the cob. I bought variegated white and yellow corn of excellent quality and dredged it in coconut oil, sprinkled it with pink Himalayan sea salt, wrapped it up in foil and grilled it. It came out gorgeous and delicious. Attendees brought campfire beans, salad, and a mountain of pastries. Party was a success, kitchen is still a mess.

@moondrake
Just omg.

I wanna come live secretly in an air-conditioned invisible little cubbyhole, and be the gremlin who sneaks out secretly to steal food at night. omg omg.

You are not particularly helping my plan to eat salad for a week here, ya know.

@f00l ‘Decoration Day’ was an occasion to take a picnic lunch on a family trek out to decorate the graves. My grandma (the one whose father was in Andersonville) did it for her family, complete with lawn chairs for the elderly. Here’s a little more on the tradition. https://nourishingdeath.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/decoration-day-and-dinner-on-the-ground/

@lisaviolet Hope you are feeling better soon. I have a cracked vertebrae in my lower back that thankfully has behaved itself for years but it’s excruciating when it gets out of whack, so I understand.

@lisaviolet
That sounds agonizing.

I encourage you to take lots of pain meds.

And I hope you give this cat many many strongly hostile glares as you pet it and stroke it and fuss over it.

/giphy evil cat

@lisaviolet How are you and your back getting along now?

@OldCatLady Thanks for asking. I’m feeling more human each day. And I’m sleeping more than an hour at a time a night. I’m not sure why, meds, pressure, but I was having to pee every hour. That’s really not conducive to a good sleep.

We actually went to a movie yesterday. (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.)

I’m looking forward to getting rid of some of the weeds in my garden and trying more pepper seeds. The tomatoes, catnip and corn are all doing wonderfully, but the pepper seeds never sprouted and the weeds have taken over that space. A little each day should get it done in no time.