This & That

The orange-painted idiot made me upset again with his "shit hole countries" comment, so I've stayed away from the blog.  Then the accidental Ballistic Missiles Incoming message in Hawaii on Saturday was frightening, with the White House comment that it was a normal drill for the state, a hateful follow-up.  -  I must say that I am looking forward to Steve Bannon giving testimony to the Intelligence committee, and to Mueller...
 
     My cats are fine and dandy, and I'm currently watching over (taking care of) Pip and Squeak.  They get two meals each day that are served in two separate servings - both girls had intestinal blockages requiring surgery when they were less than a year old.  So they get a mixture of canned food, cooked squash, and water for the first course of each meal, followed by a heaping tablespoon of dry food.  They also get L-Lysine every other day mixed into the wet morning meal.  They are both very loving kitties, and greet me at the door, pawing at the glass each time I arrive.  They make me feel good.

    In genealogy, I've been cleaning up  and placing "standardized" dates and places into the family tree on the Family Search website....  I've spent two days working on straightening out one set of cousins.   In Virginia, between 1860 and 1920, births were reported to the city, county, state, and voting district the parents lived in.  A lot of the children, while having a birth date recorded, were also marked "sex unknown;"  someone has gone through those birth registrations and entered both a boy and girl baby to the family, without checking to see whose birth date matches the registration.  It's a bit frustrating, but I also feel good about getting the records set straight.  (As in, no, this couple did not have 23 kids, they had 12 - eleven of the entries were over-zealous double and triple entries...)
   I'm working on my family tree at the moment, because I know and recognize the names easily.  When I'm working on Beatrice's tree, I get frustrated because of several factors - the spelling of  French Creole names is very arbitrary, and I needed a respite from trying to imagine any and every way a name could be spelled.  I looked a long time for the parents of a lady named Lorinda Cadie (according to her husband's death certificate); I found that her father's first name was Toussan, or a variant thereof.  I finally found her parents, whose last name was spelled Cadet, by looking up the first name Toussaint, with a guesstimated birth date, in and around the Parish where the girl was born. 
   It's always a learning experience when doing the family tree - I've discovered several more Beebe family and Quillen family connections in my clean-up efforts - and also found that we are related to the Captain Timothy Hill family, which I didn't know before....

Family Genealogy

Instead of blogging, I spent the weekend working on my family tree.  Since items and histories are added to the internet on a daily basis, I can usually find something new.  Sometimes I'm lucky in looking for a specific person, and sometimes I look for years without any entries turning up.  I've been looking for my maternal Swedish great-great-grandparents since 1981, and a few months ago, discovered that my great-grandfather's brother had filled out his parents' names on his wedding license in Manhattan, New York City in 1901.  In 1940, the third brother's widow filled in completely different names on her husband's death certificate.  I have both sets of names, but I trust the son's memory more than I do the daughter-in-law's.
   Many people have problems sorting out different generations when there are repeated names, and especially if the surnames are common ones - say, Smith, Jones, Green, White, Carter, Johnson and Hall, in the United States.  I was going through one of my family trees and realized that a connection I had accepted as correct simply could not be correct - unless the woman had had a child in her 60s. (Now, that might be possible today, but in the 1700s - no.)  So I erased that entire line and am starting over with what I can prove.
   Mom's family line is mainly English, with a strong helping of Swede, and two generations back, the addition of a Dane.  I can trace the Dane's family back to the 1500s, thanks to the Lutheran Church's records in Gylling, Aarhus, Denmark.  Still seeking information on all the Swedes, and Englishmen who settled in Accomack County, Virginia and Chincoteague Island.  I know that some of them flowed down the coast from the more northern settlements, and I'm continuously checking on that.
   Dad's family is the one that has a lot of very traceable lines - I'm still looking for the forebears of Thomas Nock, who was born in England in 1617 and came to the colonies before 1642.  The Clevelands can be traced back to Rollo, the Viking first Duke of Normandy.  Then there are the Lancasters, the Washbournes, the Winslows, and the Crewes'.  In looking at the family tree of Job Winslow yesterday, I realized that I had no information on his wife other than her name - Ruth Chase Cole.  I started digging with pleasure and went to bed this morning at 2 a.m., having traced her family back to a man born in the year 880....  Talk about exciting!  Writing down information about an ancestor who lived more than 1,000 years ago is mind-boggling, for me...  I wonder exactly what kind of life they had - what would they have considered as a "special treat?"  It's just amazing....

Busey Family and Vikings Spoiler

I awoke feeling completely energized this morning, which is totally strange, because I didn't go to bed until 2:30 this morning, and hopped up when the alarm went off at 6.  During my sleep, I dreamed constantly of two characters on Vikings, Athelstan and Floki; but I can't figure out why I awoke with Hank Williams' original rendition of "Jambalaya" playing continuously in my brain.  I know my brain works on various levels, but I just can't connect an English monk, a Viking shipwright, and the bayou togeth...   Ah. I think I've got the connection.  A wandering Viking visited Ragnar in last night's episode and told him how to find the mouth of the Seine....  OK.  I can accept that....  And two plus hours of Vikings last night - including Athelstan's Journal - it was a fantastic treat!
   If you didn't see Vikings last night, and will see it before next week - don't read anymore of today's blog - it'll be a spoiler for you - just be sure you view all two hours that aired last night. Athelstan has been torn between two cultures and two beliefs, since his abduction by Ragnar.  This comes to an end in this episode - and Floki, too, has a vision.  The handling of Athelstan's religion and views on his friend (first his owner) Ragnar have been handled deftly in this series - the meeting of two inquiring and curious minds discussing beliefs has been understated, yet strikingly portrayed.  It is clear that both men have influenced each other.  Floki, the shipwright, on the other hand, believes in the Old Gods completely and he frequently acts under their influence.  He takes Athelstan's life in this episode, something that I have been expecting since the early shows of the second season...  They are both too different, and Floki does not accept the change that Athelstan represents.  And it seems that Athelstan expects, and even welcomes, Floki's final intrusion into his home.  Floki manages to enter and exit Kattegat without being seen, so the death of the Englishman cannot be laid at his feet.  Ragnar then buries Athelstan  in the place where the priest taught him to recite the Lord's Prayer. It was very fitting.  So was Ragnar's request that Athelstan forgive him for what he would do in the future, while wearing the golden cross that Athelstan had worn.
  I also ran across an intriguing item listed under a cousin's name last night (Matthew Logan Busey)...  I found a page under The Busey Family Organization, located in Fort Lauderdale Florida that was titled: "Unorthodox:  Who Are We? Really?"  The Organization can be visited at:  http://busey.org  and the page I'm quoting from may be viewed, in its entirety, at http://www.busey.org/unorthodox/index.html    The part that I found very interesting was near the end: Sometimes we discover something unpleasant.  Like I wonder what economic hardships caused two of my great-grand-fathers to put bullets into their own heads?  If times were so hard, why did they figure that taking out the chief breadwinner was going to help the family?  The women were pretty strong in those days, and maybe those guys realized it.
Or what about another great-grandfather who died all by himself, thousands of miles from his wife and children?  "Sir, I have the honor to report that the name of the above-described pensioner who was last paid $30, to Sept. 4, 1915 has this day been dropped from the roll because of " . . . and there is blank filled in with that word . . . "death."
Why, when Matthew Logan Busey had applied on 15 January 1898 for a pension to the Department of the Interior, as a Civil War veteran, did he first tell the examiner that he was a widower?  Only to change his mind and to have had that line crossed out?  Did he temporarily not know or not want to believe that his wife was doing quite well, that she had packed up the kids and crossed the continent to start a new life?  This may have been a family secret, but I'm only revealing what is published for the world in the National Archives.
I feel deeply the pain of these people long gone.  I wonder what was going on in their minds.  Did they have the luxury of time to think about where they were going?  Were they locked into a society that had fewer choices than today?  I doubt that they had mental health counseling.  A part of me wants to relive those lives, to see if there's some way we can fix it for them posthumously.
So, what's the point?
1.  The first thing is obvious, that genealogy is mostly about dead people.
2.  That proves the next thing, that life is relatively short.
3.  Next thing is, since everybody dies, it doesn't matter who you are or where you came from.
4.  Which brings us back to #2, which is that it's all what you make of life. "
Guess I'll need to keep digging!

Family Genealogy and Stuff...

It's a sunny Monday, 25 degrees out, and something spent a lot of time on my patio last night. Whatever the something was, it had both kits looking out the window and the door off and on all night long. I looked out, myself, a couple of times, but never saw anything except leaves blowing around. Both kits spent a good deal of time this morning sniffing the edges, legs, and seats of my three rattan chairs that stay on the patio - but I haven't a clue as to what was out there. It could have been a raccoon, fox, cat, or skunk - who knows....

  Yesterday I watched the Broncos game, then the Jets game, and, finally, the Texans game. The Jets lost, but the other two teams won; and the Saints beat the Falcons - so I had an enjoyable day of football. And I didn't put a toe outside my doors... had on warm, woolly socks; blue Gators sweatpants, and a long-sleeved orange Broncos shirt - a nice way to spend a day where the high temperature was all of 29!

  I'm doing some genealogy research for family members, and I need to get back into transcribing the family tree onto the web. I must say that in following my family tree, I have found some very interesting connections, and have run across some memorable names... My sister likes Marmaduke de Thwang, a very old Norman ancestor in England; I still like Hepzibah Starbuck Hussey, and, in Jim Snow's family, Eliphalet Pease. Seeing that I am distant cousins with Presidents Franklin Pierce and Grover Cleveland had me delve into their histories; and finding the same distant cousin connection to James Dean and Mary Ann Mobley had me viewing films.

  One of the things that fascinates me most about genealogy is that how there seems to be the tale of an "Indian princess" marrying into the family in a majority of family stories. The most usual tale is that it was a Cherokee maiden who married outside the tribe, and completely gave up the Native American lifestyle. I have had ten genealogy clients who were very certain that this was true. I told each of them from the outset of my research that I would only report what I could document - I was able to trace all ten clients' families back to England, Scotland, or Ireland - and none of them had a Native American in the family tree. Now, I admit that there are gaps in histories, especially in the South where a lot of records were destroyed by fire during the Civil War - but I always note that fact. My mother told me that we might have some Indian blood in her side of the family - but that it would be Native Americans native to the Eastern Shore peninsula, if it was true. I have not been able to verify any Indian blood there. My father told me (as he had been told) that his mother, whose surname was Lancaster, traced her family tree back to John of Gaunt; and that his father's family had "some Cherokee" in it... Grandma Grace's Lancaster ancestor was a man of French descent (according to the National Geographic genome program), who had lived in England, and then moved to Virginia. Dad's family can be traced back to John of Gaunt, but on his paternal side, not maternal.  And there is a possibility that we have some Native American blood on his side of the family - but I'll write about that tomorrow.