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.

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."

Ephemera: items of fleeting use, or lasting a single day. A single item would be called an ephemeron.

​In the course of history, "ephemera" has described a fever (perhaps a 24-hour bug) and actual
insects like mayflies. But at present, ephemera usually refers to the scraps of paper that show a glimpse into the specific past.  

Like my grandmother's Red Cross Life Saving Corps certification card:

And this a ticket stub:

Which give a little color to this snapshot of Ruthie:

Ninety years of fleeting days since she was a kid at college with her life a big unknown ahead of her. 

Once upon a time I was rich in grandparents. My trove included five full sets of grandparents hale and hearty up until my middle-school years or so.  

They multiplied by virtue of divorce (in the 1950s! quelle scandal!) and re-marriages, plus a slightly confusing second marriage that joined a pair of in-law great-grandparents. Mimi's mom married Bompa's dad? Wha--?

I had ten grandparents, most in town and ready to babysit. They told stories about their parents and their parents, about dogs they'd loved, and horses that pulled the wagon even when the driver was tipsy. Snake bites and clairvoyance, kidnaps and practical jokes, consumptives and stowaways, scalawags and underage soldiers, and a cousin of Mamie Eisenhower. No wonder I'm interested in where they came from.

Those storytellers have passed beyond the stage-curtains now, leaving behind metal boxes of snapshots and documents. Still interested, I've been shuffling through the short stack of notes in various handwritings  –– how strange it is that my grandfather Bompa and I make the same neat humped m's –– about family history.  

Enter Hepzepia Elizabeth Vaughn. The iron-willed grandmother of my Granpa Navy who raised a family alone after her husband Russell –– one of the scalawag rascals –– lit out for parts unknown. With a name like that, she should have been one of the easiest people to research: a rock amid the flood of Marys and Ellens and Earls and Charleses.

Ten years of idle pasttime research and no Hepzepia in the right time or place. No Vaughns. Not even a hint of rascally Russel. And then, like a stubborn padlock finally opening on the hasp, I found this in the 1880 Federal census:

The right timeframe, the correct county, the right names and ages for the youngsters, but Hessy? Married to Jackson.

​Imagine stern grandmother Hepzepia as a young woman, keeping home with a handful of kids. Perhaps she was light-hearted. Possibly in love. Maybe her husband (a first husband? A good-hearted brother to awful Russel?) answering the census-taker's question, filled in his pet name for her.  The census-taker, dipping his pen in the traveling inkwell, taking a stab at the spelling.

Click click click, another few hours, and here's what I find out: Russel often used his middle name on official forms, as Russel Jackson, or RJ or R. Jackson.  And on her death certificate (cancer of the bowel and stomach –– no wonder she seemed stern), there it is: Hepsie Vaughter. Not Hepzepia at all. She was Hepsie, a rhyme with Pepsi. Imagine that.

New neural pathways, curiosity, adventure, exploration –– all kind of the same thing, right?   Family stories are big in my family, but researching them has been fascinating to me lately.  

I vaguely remember my grandmother Mimi talking about her uncle the soldier –– how maybe he came back from the Great War a bit shaky and how her father (the real-estate guy who used to embarrass her so by yanking up his pant-leg to show off his snake-bite scar when her friends were visiting!) got him set up in real estate...but I don't remember hearing that Uncle Robert Coburn was decorated for retrieving wounded fellow soldiers in that war under heavy machine-gun fire.  Huh.
 

The sacred roster of good dancers from high school, the horsey adventures with best-friend Sue, the thrill of getting her own first apartment and a sports-car -- I inherited these adventures from my mother. Like the bone-structure and the need for glasses. As well as this wordy impulse to turn incidents into epic.