There are some fine folks around town who have told me I ought not to make fun of the Midwest, especially the Akron-Cleveland area because I have Midwestern roots.
I always said that is true and spoke about the Chicago connections not knowing that I had and maybe still have relatives in the Akron-Cleveland area too.
Yeah, I know that was a kick in the pants to me but hell, I found out one of my relatives was on the football team at Indiana, and those aren’t the really interesting stories.
Anyhoo, this genealogy thing has been pretty darn interesting and at times frustrating.
Why?
Some of it is because I can’t get questions answered with the kind of ease I want and some of it is because there has been some pretty sloppy research done.
Some of the fine folks doing it have connected the wrong people and I want to ask them if they paid attention to some of the big clues.
Tombstones can give you a decent amount of information, especially the more traditional that use Hebrew inscription because they often use the father’s name.
Add immigration and naturalization papers and you have a host of details that you can use to pore through and over to crosscheck what you think you know.
You’re Full Of Ship
I have enjoyed reading about the ships some of my kin took over from the old country and wondered what that experience was like.
Some of my English relatives took the Queen Elizabeth here though I haven’t any idea if they were steerage or in a “higher class.”
Still working on tracking down the Irish relatives and nailed down some of the South African.
Every time I dig into these stories it occurs to me how different my life could have been if some of them had made different choices or taken a different path.
Thought about that today when I got word about associates who tested positive for Omicron.
Haven’t spent any time with them since summer so I am not worried about exposure but figure it is just a matter of time before I get word again.
Hell, I expect we’re all going to get this eventually but hopefully by the time that happens it will be more like a cold or flu on a large scale.
Hopefully we’ll be in a place where exposure doesn’t mean quarantine and the like but we are not there yet.
Keeping my fingers crossed we get there sooner than later and reminding myself my great-grandfather survived the Spanish flu so I got that going for me. Of course Parkinsons took him out so I guess I have got that potentially going against me.
Hell, my old man collected a few diseases and even Pancreatic cancer took a while to take him down so maybe we’re mad of sterner stuff. Who knows.
Unplanned Writing
Didn’t plan on writing tonight and played around with taking the week off. Played around with doing it all by hand to see what kind of collage I could whip up with a traditional pad of paper and didn’t go that route.
Used to put together all sorts of fragments that way, especially during my university days when I would get lost during lectures.
That used to make some of my classmates crazy because I would stop paying attention and still do as well or better on the tests than they did.
Don’t tell them my secret, but there is no real trick to regurgitating information. If all I have to do is pay attention to learning a chapter of “repeat what I said” I could generally pound that out.
And if you asked me to pound out an essay about that information well that generally wasn’t a problem either.
Someone once said that science would kill me but it never did because I liked it. Wasn’t hard to pay attention when I needed to.
It was math that drove me crazy because so much of it seemed useless to me. If I went to school now I would do far better now because I see things differently but the likelihood of me going to school is low.
Not impossible though, might do it when I retire. Might go for a masters, PHD and a handful of other degrees just for kicks.
Or I might just remain a member of the school of life and write stories that people actually read.
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