Celebrating Mary Lou

This year to celebrate the birthday of my half-sister's mother (my father's first wife; I'm still convinced that some language must have a one-word term for this), we have a two-person guest post!  My sister and my nephew each wrote something about Mary Lou.

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On November 13, 1976, my mother became a first-time grandmother to my son, Joel, and my 4-year-old sister, Shanyn, became an aunt.  Shortly after Joel’s birth, my parents moved to Virginia and then to Florida.

In the summer of 1983 Shanyn started spending part of the summer with us in Pennsylvania.  A few years later, Joel started making the return trip with Shanyn and visited for a few weeks to a month in Florida.

It was great fun for Joel, but I was always worrying that they were getting into mischief at Grandma’s instigation!

Of course, as Joel got older the visits were not as frequent, but my mother would tell anyone who would listen how proud she was of Joel’s military service and that he had given her the new title of great-grandmother, with the births of his sons Zachary and Connor.

In observation of Mary Lou’s birthday on October 16, I asked Joel if he could write a Grandma memory.

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I remember getting up at the wee hours of the morning to go fishing.  My grandmother, an insomniac, was already awake and vacuuming when the alarm went off.  There were several steps in the fishing process, first stopping so she could fill up her massive cup of Diet Rite cola at the convenience store.

Sand flea (Talitrus saltator) ,
by Arnold Paul / edit by Waugsberg
 - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.5

Instead of buying bait, we would catch it.  If we were fishing off of a pier then she had a cast net to grab some wayward mullet.  Mission complete, I thought, we had caught some fish!  If we were surf casting then she had a makeshift sand flea trap made from the remnants of an appropriated street sign and some chicken wire.  The trap went into the sand as the surf retreated to catch the little crustaceans.

Not long after the sun came up we would be headed back to the house.  There were always porpoises breaching in the intercoastal along the causeway.  Grandma James would look at the red and white smoke stacks of the power plants as her daily vision check.

I wasn’t much for the fishy part, but I enjoyed the time with my grandmother, who never met a stranger.  Oh, the stories!

— Joel Kent III

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Mary Lou (Bowen) Sellers James would have been 86 today.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

Baby Boy Brainin

Stillborn, January 1, 1915

Manhattan, New York County, New York

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Share Something Unexpected That You've Found While Researching an Ancestor

As for Randy Seaver's topic for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, if a genealogist has never found something unexpected while researching an ancestor, I'd say that genealogist hasn't done enough research.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1.  Share something unexpected that you've found while researching an ancestor.

2.  Share about your unexpected something in your own blog post or on your Facebook page.  Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.

[Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!]

One major fact that I discovered wasn't quite unexpected, so I guess you could say I merely confirmed it.

I was told by my cousin Ruth Anne that the rumor in the family was that my paternal grandparents had never actually been married.  This was strongly supported by a letter she had that was from a lawyer, in response to an inquiry my grandmother (who was also Ruth Anne's grandmother) had sent to him.  It was clear from the letter we had that our grandmother had asked about circumstances relating to a common-law marriage.  Now, that is not something you ask if you know that you signed a marriage license.

But the confirmation that they had not been married came when Ancestry.com added a database of an index to Florida divorces.

I was sitting around in an airport during a layover and discovered the database.  I figured it would be amusing to look up my father's and my grandfather's divorces.  And lo and behold, when my grandfather was divorced in 1953, it was from Elizabeth, his first wife, whom he married in the 1920's — not from Anna, my grandmother.  My father was born in 1935.  Oops!

So I called my father and said, "Guess what?  You're a bastard!"  Which he thought was hilarious.

(And yes, I realize that the possibility exists that my grandfather could have told my grandmother he wasn't married and entered into a bigamous marriage, but they lived in a pretty small town, and I'll bet that my grandmother knew his first wife and knew that he was still married.)

I did discover something unexpected about my great-great-grandfather on my mother's side, however.

I had been told by cousins that my great-great-grandmother had died while the family was still in Europe and that my great-great-grandfather had remarried, which made sense, because they had very young children when she passed away.  It's certainly common for men to do that, so they have a wife to take care of those children.

I found the record for my great-great-grandmother's death on December 8, 1908.  But when I found an index entry for my great-great-grandfather's second marriage, I learned that it had taken place June 8, 1911, two and a half years after my great-great-grandmother had died.

Um, say what?  You mean to tell me that he took care of those babies (including one who was a mere one month old when mom died) all by himself for those years?

So I asked my cousins about this apparent "modern man", taking on the mantle of mother while he was also a businessman.

And learned that no, he had not been the one taking care of the children.  The oldest daughter in the family, who was about 18 when her mother died, was still living at home, and she was the person taking care of those little ones.  My great-great-grandfather only remarried after Etta married and moved out.  While that's not quite what I was told the first time around, it certainly made that second marriage date make much more sense.

Have You Ever Baked an Angel Food Cake?

Today is National Angel Food Cake Day!  What, you haven't heard of it?  No, really, I don't make these things up.  See, it's right here and here.

I decided to post for the day because way back when I was just 7 or 8 years old, I made an angel food cake from scratch, and it turned out perfectly.

I don't remember why I wanted to make an angel food cake.  My best guess is that I fixated on the word "angel", but it's just a guess.  At this point, all I remember is that I wanted to make it.

My mother was generally very supportive when one of us kids wanted to do something, and this time was no different.  I don't recall if I needed her to help, but I don't think so, because, well, she wasn't very domestically inclined to begin with, and I can't think of a single time she baked any cakes herself.  But she may have helped me read the recipe instructions and figure out what they meant.

I definitely don't remember how I whipped the eggs.  There's no way I did that by hand.  Maybe we had a hand mixer.

So there are many details I don't recall.  But I do remember that it turned out as it was supposed to, and everyone liked it.

And then my mother told me how difficult it was to make an angel food cake and have it turn out right.

So I decided to rest on my laurels and didn't try to make one again for about 20 years.  And then I did it from a mix.

Wordless Wednesday

 

Wordless Wednesday