Papier mache

Coffee and cardboard puzzles do not mix.

I spent today working very hard on this frustrating puzzle.

 

I finally got the whole map part finished...not easy with all that teeny tiny print...but in the process managed to spill my coffee onto the puzzle.  I got it mopped up quickly, but it did ruin three pieces, which I hope to put back together again when they have dried.  We started this puzzle, thinking it would be a good mental exercise for Walt, but I think Ned and I have done most of it!  I'm not surprised.  This is MUCH more difficult than the last three we made.

As I worked on the states I was remembering how I learned the states as a kid, and wondered if Brianna could find the states if asked.  Karen and I had a wooden puzzle that we made over and over and over again through the years.  Because of that I know pretty much where most of the states are, and if I don't know exactly (like the New England states), I at least know approximately where they are.

It was another quiet day.  Marta snuck out of here at 6 a.m.  Polly only barked twice and I wasn't sure she had actually left.  Walt had a fair night, which is a good thing.  And we had nothing on the schedule for the day.

Walt is still working on organizing his office...so far no little gems like he found yesterday.  I spent a lot of the day working on the puzzle and then discovered Who Do You Think You Are? OnDemand and watched the show about Matthew Morrison.  I always confuse that show with Finding Your Roots.  I enjoy both and I haven't seen Who Do You Think... broadcast recently.  I give a slight edge to that show because the subject does a lot of the sleuthing themselves and it's fun watching where they go and what they see and do.  But Finding Your Roots, which does all the research for the subject, traces the family trees back a lot further.

I know that doing one of the DNA kits is all the rage these days and I always felt that the cost didn't justify the results especially since my cousin traced our roots on my mother's side back all the way to Robert the Bruce (apparently our x-times relative was a buddy of Robert).  My mother even visited the family castle (Closeburn Castle) when she visited Scotland (it's still in the family and looks more like a hotel than a castle)

 

She even got a tour of the place from the current resident who, I believe, is a member of our family.

But I know absolutely NOTHING about my father's family.  I know his father's parents came over from Ireland and that my grandfather had four brothers, but my grandmother hated the family and so I never got to know any of them, except the brother who was my godfather.  I know nothing about my grandmother's family except she had a brother named Leo, and I'm not sure I ever met him.

Listening to Henry Louis Gates explaining DNA results to his subjects makes me wonder what my DNA would show about my grandmother's family.  I know her mother was German, but I don't know if she was born in Germany or in the US.

One reason this fascinates me is that my genes from my mother are Irish an Scottish and I feel at "home" when I go to Ireland (less so in Scotland, though my Scottish genes are stronger).  I identify as Irish.  But a part of me has always identified somewhat with the Jewish people for reasons I have never understood, and I wonder if a DNA test would show that somewhere in my background there are Jews.  Given that our history is from Germany, this may be a possibility.

I should have bought a kit when they were on sale in December.  Ancestry DNA (the one I would get) is $99, but in December it was only $59.  Maybe it will go on sale again next Christmas.  But Walt's brother did and I will be anxious to see what he finds out about their family.  Maybe that will give me to impetus to buy a kit myself.

Falling Leaves

OK. How many people watched the new TV show "Who Do I Think I Am?" last night? The program followed Sara Jessica Parker as she traced her family roots. And who has spent a significant deal of time today mucking around on Ancestry.com?

Me! Me!

Peach has done a phenomenal job of researching my mother's family all the way back to a companion of Robert the Bruce, in Scotland. Not exactly a protoplasmal primordial atomicglobule, but since Old Robert was roaming the hills of Scotland in the 13th century, I'd say that's quite a trace-back.

However, nobody has done diddily for my father's side of the family, which seems logical since he was an only child and I'm the only child of his who survived into the age where such things begin to sound interesting.

So today I took to the internet and began rustling around in my family tree.

The hard part of creating a family tree is putting in all the beginning stuff. At least it is when your family is large, like mine is. Especially when you know that someone else has already done it elsewhere!

My friend Char has no interest in genealogy, though her husband has a passion for it. She sees no point in finding out what her distant relatives did. She is much more rooted in what her current relatives are doing! I can go either way,but I have to admit that I find it fascinating that if you check the work Peach has done on my mother's side of the tree you find writers everywhere. Everybody kept journals and letters...and their value to the family is evident in the fact that those writings were kept. So in a way, scrapbooking of some sort is also important to my maternal relatives. I come by it naturally.

I felt like a cliche commercial when I began putting names into my tree and discovered that someone named Jessie West, who is related to my father's father, is also reserching the same family. She had information I had never seen before.

Leaves began popping up on my tree, showing links to official documents. I have to admit that I was actually excited when I found my great grandfather on the census record of 1900.

The document shows that my family lived at 980 Harrison Street in San Francisco.

It also gives the birth dates of the children, which my grandmother would hate, since she changed her birthdate in the family bible and nobody knew exactly how old she was. Since she was born in 1892, she would have been almost 14 in the 1906 earthquake. No wonder she was so terrified of earthquakes her entire life.

If you follow this document over farther to the right you discover that Joseph Legler was a baker ... another family trait.

The 1930 census shows that my grandparents were living at 1675 Clay Street, where they lived until my grandfather moved into a convalescent hospital shortly before he died in 1970. It also shows my grandfather as the manager of a garage, a position he held his entire life, after he left vaudeville. The owner of the garage, Larry Barrett, wanted to make my grandfather a partner early in their long career together, but my grandmother refused to let him invest the money. They lived their entire married life in that 2-room apartment on Clay Street while Larry Barrett and his wife lived on an estate with an orchard attached on the peninsula south of San Francisco, and also had a luxury apartment in San Francisco. My grandmother wanted her whole life to be rich, but she thwarted herself at every turn, and never was.

To say I have scratched the surface doesn't even BEGIN to express how little I have found, but it's still kind of fun digging through all this stuff to see what I can uncover about my father's family. Maybe I'll even find out more if I communicate with Jessie West. She appears to be very young and I'd be curious to find out what got her started on this project.