My miniature shingled cottage sits unfinished –– without him it wasn't much fun –– but Daddo and I used his power planer to make itty-bitty hardwood floors, and we constructed nifty little jigs and clamps scaled to handle the delicate woodwork of the house. He helped me fabricate plaster fieldstones for the chimney. We had a ball.
 
At one point, when I had decided to scoot the dormer windows of the cottage a fraction closer together, Daddo looked at me and said, "You're going to make a contractor tear out his hair."

Not exactly a life goal, but...

I like to think I know my mind, but the thing is, it's hard to visualize construction until it's up... 

We returned to the Would-Be Farm in June and were not disappointed to see progress.

The trusty stone-quarry guy had installed a nice gravel driveway right up to the build, including culverts and a sweet level parking area that will be ideal for our friends with motorhomes.

And by the beard of mighty Hephaestus himself, the contractor and his gang were busily putting in trusses.

Ahhh. Trusses. With trusses, a girl can visualize what the place is going to look like...

The internet is one supersized overshare.

Along with the thousands of selfies and blogs about piffle, plus all those YouTube videos about optimal application of eyeliner, surviving the Apocalypse, cleaning scallops using a shop vac, and SO much more, sites beyond number offer deliciously random information to the careless researcher.

And by careless, I mean "easily distracted."

​By which naturally, I refer to myself. 

I was on the track of my namesake 3x gr-grandmother, Amy Cole Hall. She lived mostly in Pennsylvania, but also in Litchfield, Connecticut. ​

Somehow (and it's always a bit of a click-mystery) I ended up on someone else's compilation of documents pertaining to their ancestors, the Sturdevants of Luzerne, Pennsylvania. Naturally, I started reading. The Sturdevants connect to another branch of my family, but I didn't know that at the time.

Oh the eternal difficulty in resisting the temptation of other people's letters...

An exerpt from a letter 14 Oct 1842 from Dr. George Lane Keeney to Salmon Keeney, quoting from a letter from brother Seth: "My wife has been counting up while I notched a stick, and we find we have (9) nine living children, 4 girls and 5 boys."*

Does this seem –– um –– peculiar that a married couple needed to notch a stick to count their living children?

The internet link to the letters is here.  

Also among the paper-trail of the Sturdevants is what might be some of my new favorite letters* of all time. Anyone who commits words to paper is aware that the record will live on; it's kind of the point of putting words on paper, right?

I made a sound recording of one letter –– both for the interest of clarity, as the grammar and spelling was irregular, but also because it was fun to voice those words. 

*My previous all-time favorite letters? A series of wonderful schadenfreude-inducing Christmas newsletters from a certain childhood friend's unhappy wife (oh! how I looked forward to those each December! Even after their divorce, I kept getting these little masterpieces of misery bedecked with images of holly and jolly St. Nick! I should be more ashamed to enjoy them, but she had such a way with passive aggression!) 

In any case, herewith the letter 7 June 1842 from Asahel Keeney to his brother Dr. George Keeney.

It's a brutal catalogue of local gossip. Burn baby, burn.

There's another letter to their sister, Amy Keeney Hall –– not my Amy, but of interest anyhow –– mentioning that poor pitiful Phebe Wilson, who "quit hur husband to keep from starving."  Brother Seth writes "we callculated to have visited you this fall but my health prevented If I live untill another fall I will be sure to visit."

​I hope he had the chance. 

All happy families are happy in the same way, Tolstoy wrote, but every unhappy one is unique in its misery. Poke around in the high canopy of the family tree, and you see that unique as unhappiness may be –– still, patterns emerge. Familiar patterns even.

Abandonments and early deaths, illness and poverty, and of course, like smoke seeping from under the rafters, scandal.

Joseph and his new bride Rosella exchanged vows in Pennsylvania and then moved to the teeming metropolis of Kansas City.

It's easy to imagine Rosella as the youthful replacement wife, possibly a hussy, and that Joseph was more than a little bit of a creeper, but that's simply too easy a story. No matter how often it happens in real life.

Like they say, when the answer is too obvious, look closer: as I compare birthdates, I see that Cornelia is 12 years Joe's senior. When they first married, he was 22 to her 34. She was a school teacher. Oh lawsie, I wonder if she was his school teacher.

​Turning the tables on who's the creeper, maybe.

The imagination boggles. To divorce in 1880, and then –– a period of seeming quiescence, where Cornelia and Joseph both lived in the same small Nebraska town? Then for him to marry Rosella? 

What truth could match these data points?  Did somebody have a breakdown?  Perhaps Rosella was the original object. Perhaps Joseph just liked the family. Perhaps Cornelia organized the hand-off. Perhaps there was a lengthy epistolary courtship with letters coming in the mail. Perhaps one or the other was merely a marriage of convenience.   

I can see the new couple moving away from Nebraska. After all, Cornelia lived there, as did another older Newton sister, Catherine (and I wonder what she thought about all this), but why Kansas City? 
​​
And, finally, how would a researcher ever know?  Rosella and Joseph had no children (Or did they? Joseph's youngest is named Rose Ellen, born in 1879. Though a dozen documents say otherwise, one outlying reference lists her as the daughter of Rosella, and that she was born in Pennsylvania, not Nebraska). But again, if the children were Cornelia's, the surviving generations necessarily favor Cornelia's side of the drama.

It's possible that there was no drama.  

Except seriously, what happened? ​​

​Not that any of us should wait for a special day to recognize the good fortune and lucky stars that has got us this far so far.  

But tis actually the season for this sort of thing. Plus feasting.  

Ah, feasting.  We have missed a few years of Thanksgiving in the States. So the groaning board seems novel this year, despite its familiar elements. 

Perhaps as time marches along, I'll see the evolution of the meal go farther yet afield.  Tofurky maybe, or into the funky Cajun science of the turducken.  Both of which appall my Yankee sensibility even as the latter –– wet bread filling notwithstanding ––does pique my curiosity.  

​Well, I promise to be thankful if I have the chance to see that.
 

​

Lo these decades later, the vaccination still works. A little corn-snake lurking among some line doesn't bother me one bit.

​I wonder if he imagined he was invisible. He didn't have much of a grip on how complementary colors work on the color wheel. It's a like scene from a Michael Bay film. 

*Ooh, yeah, that Flickr site: so there's someone who re-creates Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons using Legos.
I may have reached the end of the interwebs.

 Most of us were supposed to have learned this in high-school biology, but here's a quick review:
​

As a big fan of metaphor, I keep wrestling with a good way to describe the complicated mixing of genetics.  Half an apple (father) plus half an orange (mamma) and each child is an apple-orange? Erm –– that does not clarify anything.  

Maybe a soccer playoff? Two leagues, 46 teams, they have to fall out into half-teams and play the final while paired with an unfamiliar other half-team? Hmm.  But what about the goalies? NO! Just nope! Sports metaphors, ratsa fratsa....

Or wait: what if you think of the mom as a margarita –– the good kind, with the top-shelf tequila, Grand Marnier, lime zest, fresh-squeezed Key lime juice, and sea-salt over ice. Which naturally makes the daddy an Old Fashioned, all muddled bitters and sugar, dark rye, a fat twist of orange peel with a maraschino cherry on top.

Unzip the spirals, mix, mingle and  –– poof!
​
One kid turns out a mix of tequila, bitters and a maraschino cherry. Another is Grand Marnier and rye with orange and lime zest.  A third child is a sour mix of lime and bitters and sea-salt. Another... you get the picture. 

That's why you aren't exactly like your sibling (unless you're an identical twin), but instead seem like variants on a theme: Mumsie's near-sighted eyes and Daddo's thick, wavy hair paired with different jawlines and frames.

Go to a family reunion and the mixology can be actively unsettling: the shared blond curls, the cousin's toddler child who is a ringer for long-dead great-Gramp Earl, and the vision of your parent's feet at the end of someone else's legs. 

Or maybe it's comforting, that ongoing flow of family genes. A river, maybe, even more than a mélange of mixed drinks. 


Science Links:

genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask128
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/resources/whats_a_genome/Chp1_4_2.shtml
http:genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask445
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/basics/howmanychromosomes

Naturally, there's more to say about the genetic side of genealogy, but this is enough for now, I think.

Which brings me, sideways, to the word "anon."  Anon can be short for "anonymous," but it's also an archaic adverb meaning "shortly." As in, I will write more about this anon. The etymology of the word (it strikes me that genealogy is the etymology of a person. Hmm.) gives it an Old English heritage. It meant "into one," which eventually referred to time, as in "at once."  

I am distracted, it's inevitable, by thinking about how the Old English (700-1100 A.D.) visualized time differently that we do.  

​Until later. Anon.

We joked about the cave as we sat in the 4WD mule and looked up the rock face. "Nice spot for a bear, ha ha ha!"  ​

In an earlier era, my sister was a Maine river-raft guide. While visiting her one Christmas, we startled a bear from its nap, the creature exploding out from under some brush in a mad flurry of snow and branches crackling as we three –– her big golden-retriever was walking with us –– stood frozen in shock. 

As I remember it, the bear bee-lined it over a nearby hill and out of sight like a cartoon road-runner. And the dog, bless his golden heart, commenced barking then as if he –– and only he –– had saved us from the danger. Perhaps he had.

I don't know if I was witness or audience, but another time, at the municipal dump in rural Maine, one of my sister's Mainer pals refused to drop his box of Triscuits. It was a thing to do of an evening: drive down to the dump and watch the black bears sort through the leftovers. That night, one bear (it was the size of a sofa) was in the mood for Triscuit crackers. My sister's friend was likewise craving those woven wheaty snacks. There followed a longish moment of hectic excitement as everyone demanded that the Triscuits be sacrificed ("No way, man, I am STARVING! These are mine!") and the bear lumbered ever closer and closer...

But back to my binge: I was poking into the history of my Wheeler kin.  They lived way up in the hills of  Franklin County, Georgia, fifty or so miles southwest of Asheville, NC.  My Grampa Navy would have pronounced that word as "he-ills." 

Franklin County held quite a number of likely Richard Wheelers who might be my great-great-grandfather, but he's been a sticky wicket.

In that steep corner of the world, Wheelers bifurcated like tadpoles in a pond. And they each named their kids after the same uncles and dads: William, Richard, John, James. ​

 Mr. Foreman used to insist that we pronounce the lyrics as befitted the song and its historical setting (just as a later professor taught me to read Spenser so that it rhymed). So when the chorus came up in my mind (and –– full disclosure –– throughout the living room) I sang it this way: “A-WAY! I’m bound away, across the wide Missor-ah.”
​
If Lu Ellar can be Sue Ellen, what about Massurah? Massurah, Missourah...Missouri.

Missouri? Click-click-click and it turns out that Massurah was the delightfully easier-to-track Missouri Caroline Wheeler. Her grandfather was my great-great-great grandfather.  I don’t yet know why she was given this unusual name, but I do have a better handle on Richard, son of Mary Freeman and William Wheeler.
 

New Haven included about fifty households (1,000 or so people) by 1640-ish, and I imagine each one of those households knew all about old William and poor Ann. The government was small, personal, and specifically religious. Morality was not a private affair.

​Imagine how claustrophobic that cozy little town might have been for a family on the down side of luck.
​