Supper is a big salad with romaine, carrots, baby cucumbers, yellow pepper, and celery. I thought I had tomatoes, but I didn’t. Hmf.
Also shredded brussels sprouts sauteed in butter and olive oil, then drizzled with fresh lime juice.
Hohenberger Photo of the Day
This was one of the photos I worked on today. I wasn’t able to pin down who Lynn Logsdon was, but wanted to share the image anyway. The horse is fabulous. Doesn’t he look like a statue?
Source: The IU Digital Library Program and IU Lilly Library – Frank M. Hohenberger Photograph Collection, “Lynn Logsdon on “Bob King””
Adventures in Genealogy
1895 Minnesota State Population Census Schedule
Today’s adventures in genealogy haven’t been very exciting. I did turn up a great-great uncle who apparently spent some time in a mental hospital. (Lots of those in my family tree. Eeep!)
I’m not sure what the 0 in front of Alfred’s name indicates (or whether it’s an O or 0). It’s a code, and it surely has a specific meaning. For now I’m assuming it was used for folks who are not actually present in the household at the time of enumeration, but who the enumerator felt needed to be recorded.
I wish there were a way to find out more about why our ancestors were institutionalized, just to satisfy my own nosy curiosity. Alfred was supposedly a patient at what was then known as Fergus Falls Insane Asylum, which doesn’t look to have been a horrific place, but pictures can be deceiving. I’d love to know why he was there, and for how long. (The first photo was taken just five years after the above census, so it’s roughly contemporary with when Alfred was a patient there.)
Fergus Falls State Hospital circa 1900
Other than that, the most exciting part of my day was having a minor brain hemorrhage over how Legacy handles federal level census citations. It creates a master source for federal censuses at the county level. Totally bizarre. And I couldn’t get an explanation for why that was a good idea, when I asked about it in the Legacy user group.
The reason it’s a problem (in my opinion), is that instead of one master source for the entire US census for any given census year, Legacy will create a master for every single county. You could end up with hundreds of master records for every census year.
Why don’t they put the state and county level information in the source detail, where any logical person would expect it to be? That way you would have just one master source for each census year, the way the good lord intended.
I expect this is a “different people think differently” issue. Person A will solve a problem in a way that would never occur to Person B, but both will end up at the same end point eventually.
I wish someone could explain to me what benefit there is in Legacy’s handling of census master sources. Surely there has to be one? And it’s within the realm of possibility that there’s a good reason to do it their way, but so far, no one can explain it. The responses I’ve gotten have mostly been in the vein of, “You don’t have to do it their way.” No shit, Sherlock.
Logic Fail
Happy 2016! I’m starting the new year with a genealogy do-over. Since I had to migrate from Family Tree Maker to Legacy Family Tree, and since my sources and notes didn’t transfer as cleanly as I would have liked, I decided this was a good time to start over from scratch.
1930 United States Federal Census, entry for Louis C. Couvrette
I am forever grateful to the folks who transcribe old records. Without them, searching for genealogical information would be a nightmare. However, sometimes I have to wonder what they’re smoking. The above transcription at Ancestry.com indicates that Louis Charles was an assistant preacher at a theatre. Does that make even a tiny bit of sense? No. No, it does not. Treasurer assistant makes much more sense, yes?
The scan of the original census page at Ancestry.com is really light and difficult to read, so I understand why the transcriber had trouble. Luckily for us researchers, though, all of the big repositories have made their own individual US census scans, so we aren’t stuck with the crappy scan available at Ancestry.com. I checked Family Search and Find My Past. Family Search had the best of the three, so that’s the one I used here for my illustration.
Lesson 1: Don’t trust transcriptions. They are several times removed from reality.
Lesson 2: If the US census scan provided by the repository you’re searching is illegible, try a different repository.
Spoons
Every night, Piglet gets in bed and spoons with Frances. After about 10-15 minutes, he gets up and goes to his own bed.
Things! In! Bags!
The Friday of finals week, a coworker took it upon herself to clean out the department fridge, without warning anyone. Usually the departmental secretary would send out an email on Monday, warning everyone to mark their food, then send another warning email the day before. This time there was no warning.
That would have been annoying enough. However my container of hummus was thrown out. I didn’t take a lunch the next Monday, thinking I had something to eat at work. Nope. I also had no money, not that it mattered, because the cafeteria was closed for the semester break.
Annoying, right? But that wasn’t the worst part. The coworker who cleaned out the fridge dumped food down the disposal. The disposal in our kitchen can’t deal with actual food. The sink has now been completely blocked for almost two weeks, along with the two water fountains that share the same drain.
So not only did she throw out people’s food, but now we’re having to hike to find water for the tea kettle and coffee pots.
Someone needs to tell her to stay the hell out of the kitchen, because she’s a damn menace.
Lee Brown Family
Brown / Marion Lee 1862-1930 / Lourena 1864-1930 / Paul 1901-1930
I took this photo at Lanam Ridge Cemetery in 2010. I wondered then how and why all three of them had died at the same time. Surely there was a story there?
Fast forward a few years, and by strange coincidence a coworker and I were drafted to work on a photo cataloging project, researching and adding subject metadata to a collection of historic photos taken by Frank Hohenberger, a local photographer. Within the collection was a group of photos of the investigation into the murders of the Lee Brown family of Brown County, Indiana.
Now, I wasn’t the one who was researching that particular set of photos. My coworker was. She messaged me and asked me to come over to her cubicle to look at something. While trying to figure out the story behind Chester Bunge and the Lee family murders, she found my photo of the Lee headstone at Findagrave.
So now I know (sort of) what happened to the Lee family and why they all died at the same time. They were murdered. (And part two, covering the coroner’s inquest.)
Source: Frank M. Hohenberger Photograph Collection – “Group at Brown murder scene”, Lilly Library, Indiana University
Hurry Up and Wait
I had a strange dream the other morning. I woke up then went back to sleep, which seems to be when most of my bizarre dreams happen.
My whole immediate family were living in my mom’s house, which is biggish, but not big enough for eleven people. I mean, there’s only on bathroom, for crying out loud. Totally ridiculous. Also, my ex-step-father was living there, in the present. I have no idea why.
In my dream, we all went to the local Renaissance fair, held in the town’s historic district. ALL OF US. At the fair, my niece disappeared. We thought she’d wandered off, but we came to the conclusion she’d been abducted. We tried to call the police, to report it, but I was the only one with a cellphone, and my phone had disappeared. We finally put two and two together and decided that my niece had grabbed my phone, as she was being abducted, because she’s a smart cookie that way.
So instead of calling the police, we decided to go home and wait for my niece to call us. Which she eventually did. And when she called, all she wanted to do was discuss random minutia, like what the kidnapper had fed her for lunch and what color she wanted to dye her hair next. I finally got her attention by telling her that she was going to run down my phone battery, if she didn’t hurry up and tell us where she was.
She told us that the Magenta Lady had kidnapped her, because she wanted a girl of her own. I have no idea who the hell the Magenta Lady is, but in my dream it made perfect sense, and it was actually a good thing. We knew the Magenta Lady wouldn’t hurt my niece. Also we knew where to find her. Also also, this information made rescuing my niece less of an emergency.
And that meant that the second half of the dream involved my whole family, who were all living in one house, trying to decide whose room my niece would stay in, after she was rescued. (Um, how about the one she was staying in before she was kidnapped? PLOT HOLE, AHOY!) After much arguing, my room was chosen. That meant that I had to clear out a whole bunch of crap, because I am–in dreams as in real life–a junior-league hoarder.
We spent all day boxing up junk and carrying it down to the car, to take to Goodwill, at which point my ex-step-father had a damn melt-down about how long it was taking us. He wanted us to hurry the hell up. Okayfine, but every time I took a box of junk down to the car, my mom had to go through it and take 2/3 of the things back out again. I yelled right back at my ex-step-father that it was not my fault we were late. I was bringing things out of the house as fast as I could, and my mom was taking them back to the house just as fast. It was like packing sand down a rat giant hole.
So then my ex-step-father stomped back into the house and locked himself in the bathroom. At which point I woke up.
That last part of the dream, where my ex-step-father yelled at everyone for taking too long to get in the car, and then having a melt-down and stomping back into the house and locking himself in the bathroom? Every. Single. Morning. He would yell at us for making him late for work, and then as soon as we were all in the car, he’d go back in the house and use the bathroom. Totally ridiculous, and it used to piss me right the hell off.
Seal Ears and Bitty Teefs
Frances went back to the vet today. She’s had a rash on her belly that wasn’t improving (or getting any worse). I tried giving her Benadryl for 36 hours, and then tried topical Benadryl spray. No change.
That was actually good news. An allergic reaction, like hives, could mean that she’s got another mast cell tumor growing. We don’t want that!
So I think allergies can be ruled out. The vet put her on a course of antibiotics, with the assumption that it’s a post-op staph infection. Hopefully that will clear everything up.
(That’s her “You aren’t shoving treats into my mouth fast enough” look.)
O Frabjous Day!
Cumberland Family Tree seems to have been resurrected. Ira Lund stopped supporting it a few years back, which gave me serious sadcakes.
I’d been using CFT happily for a few years, then upgraded to a 64-bit version of Windows. And found that CFT was not 64-bit compatible. Ira had made a 64-bit version of CFT, but it had been released, and then he’d quit supporting or distributing it, before I’d upgraded my computer. So I was stuck. After much hunting, I found a kind soul who was hosting the 64-bit compatible version for download, and I snagged a copy of it, and it’s worked fine. But now, Ira is back to updating and distributing CFT. It’s a Christmas miracle, yo.
It’s a very Windows 3.1 feeling program. No frills. It’s not the program you are going to use to generate pretty books for your relatives or to create a gorgeous website. But what it does have, and what other programs I’ve tested lack, is a powerful global search and an easy, effective way to locate people who are in the same place at the same time, across your whole tree. That allows you to see connections you would miss if you’re using other programs.
I also like the way it handles source citations. Much sleeker and efficient than Family Tree Maker, and much easier to navigate than Legacy Family Tree. (The latter has a powerful and flexible sourcing module, but you could literally spend half your life learning it, and that seems excessive to me. The point of source citations is to lead others to the place where you found the information you are providing. If your source citation does that, then you’ve met your obligation as a researcher.)
I’m going to continue exploring Legacy Family Tree, because it does have all the bells and whistles. However, for my single name study on the Basquilles, I’m going to stick with Cumberland Family Tree.
red paper boat 