Month: September 2016

News & Politics

Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis?

Shelly

“We must think of Sousa Mendes’s heroism in today’s context,” Jorge Helft, a Holocaust survivor who as a French boy received one of Sousa Mendes’s visas, told me. “I have dinners in Paris where people start saying we have to kick all these people out, there are dangerous people among them.” He paused and added, “I remember being on a ship to New York and hearing that some Americans didn’t want to let us in because there were Nazi spies among us.

“Yes, there might have been Nazi spies, but a tiny minority,” he said, just as there might be spies among Syrian refugees today, but again a tiny minority. “Ninety-five percent or more of these people are decent, and they are fleeing from death. So let’s not forget them.”

Source: Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis? – The New York Times

It’s easy to say you would. Of course you would! You aren’t a monster. But would you really? And what are you willing to risk to help refugees now? I think this is something we need to consider carefully, and we need to think about it in light of the similarities between what is going on in the US today to what happened in Germany as the Nazis were rising to power. It’s easy to think you’d stand up for others, and it’s easy to think that would never happen here, but I fear that when you are in the thick of it, without the benefit of perfect hindsight, you might not recognize just how bad and how dangerous things are until it’s too late.

And as a side note, did you know that Anne Frank was also a refugee? Her father, Otto Frank, tried to obtain US visas for his family. His requests were denied–despite having powerful people working to help him from within the US–largely because Americans feared that Jewish refugees were actually Nazi spies.

Refugees are fleeing terrible circumstances. They don’t just decide on a whim to pull up stakes and disrupt their entire lives so they can start over again, with nothing, at the other end of the world. It’s a long, complicated, and I can only assume exhausting process. Refugees are well vetted. They are not spies, except in some people’s fever dreams. They deserve our aid and compassion, period.

Genealogy

Puzzle Pieces

Shelly

In addition to my own family genealogy, I’ve been working on a One Name Study of the Basquill family. In sort, I’m collecting all the Basquills and trying to fit them together. Sometimes it’s easy going, but other times there just isn’t enough information to hold two threads together.

This is the situation I found myself in with the family of John Basquille and Mary Kerrigan. They aren’t “my” Basquills (as far as I know, at this point), so when I hit a brick wall with them, I wrote up some brief notes and let it go.

Today, as I was looking through some of the entries in the Irish death registry, I came across this record for a John Basquill of Lackaun who died in 1898 of influenza. He had been married, with his wife preceding him in death. Do you have any idea how many John Basquills there are in my one name study database? Even just looking at the ones in the Lackaun area with daughters named Bridget, it was impossible for me to figure out where he belonged.

Death Register

But then I found that note I’d made.

John Basquille Notes

I’d wondered why the four youngest children had emigrated to the US when they did. I didn’t know for sure that their parents had died, but I couldn’t find anyone that fit their description in the 1901 or 1911 censuses. Emigrating seemed like an ill-advised venture, though, given that the kids did not fair especially well once they got here. One son ended up spending time in Willard State Hospital. (Yes, that Willard State Hospital.)

I would need more confirmation before I’d want to unequivocally state that this John Basquill is that John Basquille, but as a working theory, I’m going to go with it.

Genealogy

Irish BMD Register Images

Shelly

Death Index

I don’t think I mentioned that the Irish birth, marriage, and death index images are now online and available for free. You can search them at IrishGenealogy.ie. These are just the registry entries, but they have most of the information you’d find in the official certificates. They’re a goldmine, if you have Irish ancestors.

The page above is from the death register and contains the entry for my great-great grandfather, Walter Basquill. If I’m deciphering the handwriting properly, he died of infirmity and cardiac weakness.

Music

An Early Orionid

Shelly

I saw an early Orionid this morning. It’s far too early for the Orionids (late October is their season), but there it was, nonetheless.

Thomas was having a serious sniff around someone’s mailbox, and I was looking up at Orion. Like you do. And a meteor dropped from his belt. It was like it just fell straight down to the ground.

There are occasionally perks to getting up at 4am to walk the dog.

And of course I always think of this song, when I see a meteor.


Emily by Joanna Newsom

Pa pointed out to me, for the hundredth time tonight
The way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light
Squint skyward and listen
Loving him, we move within his borders
Just asterisms in the stars’ set order

We could stand for a century
Starin’
With our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don’t keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Till we don’t be
Told, take this
Eat this

Told, the meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor’s just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite’s just what causes the light
And the meteor’s how it’s perceived
And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee