​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.
​

Your option was Church of England or nothing, and being an agnostic or atheist was heretical. Heretics were all too regularly burned at the stake.

So when a group of folks wanted to "purify" the Church of England by focusing on reading the Bible and doing good rather than supporting a centralized church, they had limited choices.  They could try to reform from inside the church (and keep their heads down!) or they could leave England.  ​

Puritans established a society built on their own religion. The Bible didn't have trial by jury? Well then, neither would New Haven Colony. A sea-captain came home from sea after a few months and greeted his wife with a kiss –– and the Colony government (known as "The Town") stuck them both into stocks for their shameful display of fleshy affection.

The Puritans forbade religious diversity. The Massachusetts Bay Colony put Quakers to death. Quakers! Tortured and hanged, including the Quaker martyr Mary Dyer. Puritans even banned the celebration of Christmas.

To be fair, I should note that some Colonies were formed with the spirit of tolerance built right in, like the Rhode Island Colony. Founder Roger Williams not only believed in religious freedom (with no tax dollars!) and he felt that taking land from the Natives without paying for it was not quite morally right. Heartening news, that.

So meanwhile, back in Merry Olde England, the religious conflict deepened and developed into the English Civil War, 1642-1652. Oliver "Bad Haircut" Cromwell lead the Roundheads against the Royalists of King Charles I. 

Cromwell won; Charles was beheaded. There was a short-lived British Republic.  

​Republican rule in England meant that fewer Puritans felt the need to move West. Some early Colonial settlers even shipped back to England in the 1640's and 1650's.

Here are a few of the resources I used in researching this blog:


www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/anne-hutchinson/
www.history.com/news/when-massachusetts-banned-christmas
esoterx.com/2015/03/05/the-great-ship-of-new-haven-phantoms-puritan-hippies-and-the-reformation/
​dunhamwilcox.net/ct/new_haven1.htm
winthropsociety.com/doc_higgin.php
winthropsociety.com
www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/oliver-cromwell/
www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/charles_ii_king.shtml
bcw-project.org/timelines/
www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=2&smtID=4
avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mayflower.asp
www.catholic.com/tracts/the-inquisition
thehistoricpresent.com/2008/07/02/why-the-puritans-persecuted-quakers/
www.history.com/topics/mayflower
www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/judaism/history/350.shtml
http://www.history.com/topics/mayflower
www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-pilgrims
www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/geoffrey-robertson/remembering-regicides-350-years

My sister assures me that genealogy is absolutely, supremely, and irredeemably dull. Unless you are doing the research, it's BORING.

She doesn't sugar-coat it.

Yet even she was willing to admit that great-great uncle Aaron Augustus Chase* was actually kind of inspiring. 

Bit of background:  In 1871, coal miners in Scranton, Pennsylvania were protesting. The local coal companies had cut wages from  $1.31 to $0.86 per car-load of coal in late 1870. The miners joined the Miners' and Laborers' Benevolent Association, which called for a strike. That strike subsequently began January 1871.

On May 17, 1871, there was a large crowd of strikers (and their family members) protesting the scab laborers who were working the Brigg's shaft in the Scranton neighborhood of Hyde Park.

As reported  in History of Scranton and its People by Col. Frederick L. Hitchcock, published in 1914.  the protesting included "jeers, hootings, vile names and threatening gestures as the men went to and from the mine."  (ooh! hurtful hootings!)  "Opprobrious epithets" were flung. And then perhaps a stone took to the air, which lead like night follows day, to an escallation of violence. 

Two strikers, Benjamin Davis and Daniel Jones, were killed by a single shot from the squad of militia hired by Mr. W. W. Scranton, superintendent of the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company to guard the workers. 

Enter Aaron Augustus Chase. The editor of the Scranton Times, he called out W. W. Scranton and wrote that the killings of Davis and Jones amounted to murder. He ended up in prison twice, but refused to retract the statement.  

Yes, he was a Civil War veteran, which probably means he was a hero already, and his later life included a stint as judge and civil servant for the City of Scranton –– the town named for the family of the industrialist whom he called responsible for murder.  But moral conviction and action in the interest of downtrodden workers? It warms the cockles of my heart. 

 

*Aaaron Augustus was my great-great-great-great-grandfather's cousin, but seriously –– in the interest of a story, I am thinking he's an uncle.



PS. The Long Strike of 1871 was not, of course, the end of the labor troubles. The Great Strike of 1877 nearly shut down the country, and in 1891, 19 unarmed immigrant miners were killed in Lattimer, PA.  And on and on. As Kurt Vonnegut said, "So it goes."

While trying to identify a berry-bush on the Would-Be Farm this past summer, I turned to Newcomb's Wildflower Guide. I flip through this reference probably half a dozen times each year, trying to get a handle on the plants.

Names are important. Even if the name is only Latin for "hairy-stemmed yellow flower thingamabob," knowing it gives a person power. (Magical thinking about true names aside...)

For instance, pickle weed. It's a leafy little plant with sour, tender leaves that most outdoorsy folks have nibbled from time to time. It grows in the shade, has a little yellow flower. It tastes like dill pickle.

Pickle weed's actual name is Oxalis stricta. From the Greek, it translates to "sour sorrel," again showing that the scientific name is sometimes just a regular name dressed for special occasions.

Anyhow, look up Oxalis stricta and you can discover that (no surprise!) it's full of vitamin C, but it turns out to bind calcium when taken raw in large doses. Also, it might have been the plant St. Patrick used in his gentle conversions, rather than what we call "clover" these days. 

Or not –– pagan Celts held Oxalis sacred; there's probably a shipload of interpretive wiggle-room when it comes to what happened in 5th Century Ireland.  

But when I opened the wildflower book this time, looking that something looked a lot like elderberry, but not exactly like elderberry and wondering what the heck it was, a tattered four-leaf clover slid from between the pages.

A regular Trefolium repens ("three-leafed creeper"), the sort that mutates and grows a fourth leaf from time to time*.

It must have been in there for a decade or more. A flat, papery bit of luck put aside by Mumsie, who didn't necessarily know the Latin names of things, but who gave the lucky gift of curiosity.



*While proofreading, I discovered I'd typed that phrase as "from time to tome." I crack myself up.