Um, "Royalty"

The other day, for no good reason, I was thinking about my visit to the King Tut exhibit at the De Young in San Francisco some time in the mid '70s. I went with "the wife" (Ms. Ché) and her mother, "Gramma." I was very excited to get tickets as it seemed to be sold out. We drove from the Central Valley, at least 2 hours, and parked, I think, on Fulton St. It was whatever the street was behind the museum. And we only had to walk a little way.

Almost as soon as we entered the exhibit, I began to experience an abdominal cramp. Ultimately, I only saw the famous gold funerary mask and a few of the pretty things left in the tomb before I was in such severe pain that I had to leave. I sat on a bench just outside the doors, then lay down on the lawn in front of the museum, groaning. Maybe an hour or so later, Ms. Ché and her mother emerged from the museum and found me outside. I was still in a lot of pain, but slowly managed to get up and hobble back to the car. Thank goodness it was close. We had planned a number of other stops in San Francisco to eat and to shop, but we decided it would be best to drive home instead. I don't remember whether I drove or she did, but more than likely Ms. Ché did while I groaned in the backseat.

I considered this little aborted adventure one of my few brushes with Royalty, in this case the long dead King Tut -- Tutankhamun. I had a book that was published about that time -- still have it somewhere I'm pretty sure -- that detailed the search for and discovery of the tomb and pictured nearly everything that was found in it most thoroughly and in many cases beautifully. I haven't seen anything like it published since. I wasn't able to enjoy or much appreciate the exhibit at the De Young, but the book filled in most of what I missed. The experience wasn't the same, however.

The abdominal pain was nearly gone by the time we got home, and I didn't have another pain like it for many years. I don't remember ever having a pain like it previously, either. So I still ascribe it to the Curse.

Later that year, or perhaps the year previously or the year after, but still in the mid seventies, I remember lining up on a blacktop driveway with about 20 others working where I was in a little town named Solvang in the Santa Ynez Valley awaiting the arrival of Queen Margrethe and Prince Henrik who were touring the area and were planning on spending a few minutes visiting and having lunch with local dignitaries. I don't know how long we waited, joking about tugging our forelocks and whatnot, being lectured on protocol, etc.

Shortly, the motorcade arrived, led by two motorcycle policemen. The Queen and her consort were being driven in what I recall was a white Cadillac 4 door sedan, but it may have been a Mercedes. What it wasn't was a limousine. There were flags of Denmark and the US on the fenders. The car pulled up to the driveway, and the Queen got out. She was wearing a camel colored coat over a blush pink silk dress, though it may have been sky blue. She had a wide brim camel colored hat on at a jaunty angle, wore white gloves, pearls, and simple beige pumps. She carried a matching purse. As she got out of the car, the small crowd cheered, and she waved. The Prince got out of the other side of the car and came around to meet her. He was dressed in a plain suit, gray I think, and he was very handsome in a Scandinavian sort of way. The Queen, for her part, appeared very young and pretty. She waved and waited a moment while a couple of functionaries appeared from somewhere to lead them to the reception line. 

The Queen said "How do you do?" to everyone as she passed by and shook hands with perhaps five or six of those in the line. I don't recall whether I was one of them, though I can recall the feel of a gloved hand on my own. More likely, she shook hands with the missus who was standing next to me. I think she might have attempted a curtsy, but if she did, it was more in jest than not. 

Prince Henrik for his part followed the Queen at several paces behind, said "How do you do" and shook hands with everyone, thanked people for coming, and seemed quite jolly. The Queen stopped and spoke with the half dozen or so dignitaries and then waved to the rest of us and went inside. We didn't see her again.

For an encounter with royalty, this one was very brief, somewhat surprising, and pleasant. I remember we went to have lunch and chatter about it, then went back to work. 

In October, 2021, I revisited that driveway in Solvang. It was cracked and worn and lined with porta-potties and construction materials. It seemed so much smaller, shorter and narrower than I remembered. Had the Danish royal family really walked this path? I guess they must have, as we stood there in a line, tugging our forelocks and being asked/not asked "How do you do?"

Maybe a decade later, Queen Elizabeth paid a call on George Deukmejian, then Governor of California, in Sacramento. I don't recall whether Prince Philip was with her or not. We'd invited her to visit our workplace a few blocks away from the Capitol, but the Palace politely declined. We walked over to the Capitol to see the Queen, and all I recall is a white gloved hand waving a Royal Wave in the backseat of a black Cadillac limousine as it sped by and then the sight of the same gloved hand waving from the balcony of the Capitol behind thick bullet-proof glass. We didn't actually see Herself at all or if we did, it was only the briefest of glimpses.

I think she was wearing a blue dress and hat.

There was a lesson about these monarchs and their manifestations that we could learn from. They present a very carefully, indeed artfully conceived and prepared facade, rather like the stunning gold mask of King Tut, and they may -- or may not -- be pleasant enough when in the presence of the peasantry, but they don't deal with us rabble at all. No, they have People for that. The ones they deal with more or less directly are the "Dignitaries," the Important People, Those In Charge. Or, contrariwise, those with obscene wealth.

No one else except their staff.

It's been this way for as long as there has been royalty, monarchs and such.We the Rabble sometimes get to look on as They pass by, even now and then see them greet the lowly, but they are not really dealing with us at an official or human level. We are at best useful props, but mostly we're not even there.

This sense of "notness" when dealing with the lower orders is commonplace among many categories of the Upper Crust. The rejection of any contact with People Who Don't Matter is not unheard of. But usually it's a matter of separating and isolating oneself as much as possible while being... um, "polite" when contact can't be avoided. Always maintaining one's distance, keeping the lowly at bay.

Though Tut's tomb was raided and looted by Carter and Carnarvon back in the day, there's a kind of democratization in the presentation of the loot to the public. Anyone who could get a ticket could see the exhibits that have traveled much of the world, and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo showed much of the tomb contents for many, many years. 

While he was alive and at his funeral, his person and tomb contents were not for the view of the People. They were a Mystery.

And that is ultimately what all of those who rule us wish to be. Monarchs must have a public presence, but it's a mask. They hide behind the gloved hands and the "How do you do's". What else can they do? What should or could we do about it?

After a while, we might begin to understand how much they loathe us.

Then what?

My mother liked to tell a tale that she was "a direct descendant of Marie Antoinette." I never knew where she got this notion, but when she said it, she adopted a very aristocratic bearing, head high, nose up, chin forward, and spoke in a nasal pitch that was her imitation of posh. No, she wasn't an aristocrat, far from it, though she tried to marry into what she thought were aristocratic families -- well, for America -- and largely failed. But she said her mother's mother was independently wealthy and her mother inherited a fair chunk of money when her mother died. My mother's stepfather, may he rot in hell, then spent it on hairbrained schemes: a motor court and filling station on the Redwood Highway in Willits and then on a very bogus gold mine in Nevada that went belly up when the two "partners" took off with the cash leaving her stepfather to hold the bag, and he just barely escaped going to jail for fraud --- even though he was the main one defrauded. So he lost all the money, his and his wife's inheritance, and moved back to California where he went to work at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, while his wife, my mother's mother, wasted away from untreated stomach cancer -- they were Christian Scientists -- and died in agony a few months later. My mother never forgave her stepfather whom she blamed for her mother's death and for losing her inheritance.'

Much later through Ancestry.com, I learned what may have been part of the source of her claim of Royal descent. My mother's biological father was from a semi-prominent Indiana family that claimed descent from noble Huguenot refugees who settled in Scotland in the 17th century. That was their claim -- passed on to me through a cousin I never knew about who got it from a descendant of my mother's uncle still in Indiana.

I never found a shred of evidence that the story of descent from Huguenot refugees was true, but there was plenty of evidence of rebel Scottish blood coursing through the veins of that family.

Scots and English. Natural enemies united in the United States, raising six sons, maybe not so happily, but surviving and only losing one son to an accidental gunshot wound, and then, of course, losing their black-sheep son -- my mother's father -- to an accident (or maybe not an accident) that cut him in half in a St. Louis railyard when my mother was five years old. 

So it went. My mother was not raised in poverty by any means, but she never had the social status she believed she deserved. She didn't know poverty until she married for the first time. He was a gas station attendant working for her step father -- who always ensured she had "enough" and even gave her a new car in the middle of the Depression. Later her husband became an oil jobber -- selling petroleum products to stations up and down California -- and later still, he claimed to be a vice president for sales at Chevron oil. Was it true? I don't know. But it hardly mattered. He and my mother divorced in 1941, and she struggled for years until she got work at the air base and met my father, scion of what she thought was a rich family in Iowa. Well, that saga will have to wait. 

But this story is already too long. And I'm happy to say the only "royalty" I've found in my ancestry is the possibly bogus story of a Native American "Princess Snowflower" ancestress on my mother's side (she knew nothing of her) and deep in the past, complicated relationships with the Drake family in England. Sir Francis Drake's uncle Sir John was apparently an ancestor, and then there were threads through the British royals through him and his ancestors so deep in the mists of time, Camelot may just reappear in mystery and majesty. 

So it goes....

Bread Karma

Made some soda bread yesterday. We like it. It's quick and easy. No multi-day fermentation of poolish and all the other wonderful yeasty complexity that goes into practically all other forms of bread-making. 

We'll make yeast bread from time to time, but it takes time -- generally all day or overnight or in some cases a couple-three days to get things just right. I think about the housewives who made their own bread daily or every three days or every week or whatever, and I truly wonder how they did it, how they kept their sanity, how they kept their energy level high enough to oversee their yeasty dough, to knead it, to shape it, to patiently let it rise, to bake and cool it, and then to slice it for toasting and serving. They made their own butter to serve with it, too. 

Skill is not the half of it. Much more needed to go into it than merely skill. That's the quality of the bakery in town where skilled bakers create dozens of loaves of simple-same bread every day. They are fine. But they also lack some of the character that the home baker gives to their bread-products. So, my admiration goes both ways, toward the home baker and toward the bakery-baker. Skill and character.

Soda bread is our preferred option when waiting for yeast dough would take too long. A soda bread has no yeast, just bicarbonate and "buttermilk." Well, you can't get real buttermilk at the grocery store in our little hamlet, so we make a substitute by putting a tablespoon of white vinegar in two cups of whole or 2% milk (we almost always use 2%). It works fine. 4 cups of AP flour, 1 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt (or to taste), 2 cups "buttermilk"; mix thoroughly but gently. Do not knead. Put on floured or cornmealed parchment on a baking sheet. Form into a round. Cut an X or cross into the top. Bake at 425 for 20 minutes, then 375 for 20 minutes more. Check for doneness by tapping on the bottom of the loaf. Sound hollow? It's done. If a little dull sounding, bake another 10 minutes or so. Cool enough to be able to slice without crushing-mooshing. Slather with butter. Eat.

No skill required. Not much patience, either. Character? Sure.

I don't know whether any of my ancestors were into bread making. Probably not. I know my mother never made bread in her life, and I doubt her mother or grandmother did either. My father couldn't be bothered, and his mother had servants to do the housework. Did they make bread? Maybe. Then going back a little farther to the Irish and German immigrants who started my father's line in America: did they make their own bread? I think probably they did. The Irish ones probably made soda bread. The Germans, yeast bread. 

I don't know enough about their lives in Ireland and Germany, and apart from the Great Famine and all the wars, I don't know why they left for America when they did c.1849-1854.

My father never talked about it. My impression was that his grandparents -- the immigrants -- never talked about it either. I know his Irish grandparents made up stories about who they were and where they came from and sometimes those stories changed so much they by the time they got to my father and me they were so tangled up they were little more than nonsense. When I started untangling those stories and got rid of some of the fantasy, the "real story" was perhaps much sadder than anyone wanted it to be -- thus the many made-up stories of some grandeur. As for the Germans, I never knew much of anything about them except that my father's German grandmother never learned English, so it was hard to communicate with her, and my father's mother was deaf, so it was hard to communicate with her, too.

Karma enters into the equation when I consider who these people were and who I came from. Jack Kerouac wrote a biography of the Buddha called "Wake Up!" in the years before he became famous after the publication of "On the Road" in 1957. It's very simple and straightforward, something like the Lives of the Saints (for children) in Catholic literature. In it, Kerouac proposes that what's called "karma" is in reality mostly a matter of genetic inheritance. Your past lives are for the most part the lives of your ancestors and your genetic inheritance comes through them to you. And that is the basis for your karma; but it may not be the whole of your karma. There may be other elements, known and unknown, that shape who you are. The Buddha, after all, discovers there is more to his Being than simply what he inherits from his ancestors. Oh, so very much more. He has karmic inheritance through many twisted, tangled paths. Lives upon lives. Buddhas upon Buddhas. Universes upon universes.

Becoming aware of it all can be overwhelming.

And so for most of us, we live our lives without becoming aware. It's easier and safer in some ways. But in others, it's unsatisfying. One still has questions; one still wants to know. 

I've found out, though, perhaps more than I wanted to know. But only so much, in the end, that I could handle.

The inheritance from my ancestors is very twisted and tangled, and some of it, I think, is very tragic, horrible, and deeply sad. This comes through both parents. For a time, I wondered if my father was actually my father, for we seem not to have hit it off as father and son at all. How could he be my biological father if we were so distant from one another and never truly connected? Well, but that's part of the karmic load, I came to realize, that I inherited, and not just from him.

Why, I wondered, was my mother so... disturbed and often cruel. What had I done to trigger her rage? But then, I came to understand that she, like me, carried a karmic load she could not dispense with, nor indeed could I undo the karma I was born with.

My mother's maternal grandfather was murdered by his mistress. Her father may have been murdered, too. Her insight into these events was that both her father and grandfather were "bad men." Both her husbands were equally "bad" -- or maybe worse. And that all transferred to me and my sister.  My mother couldn't help the way she felt about us and them. It was her karma.

Lord knows how far back any of this stretched. I would say as far back as any of her ancestors could be traced, and just so with my father's tangled ancestry. Who these people were is as complicated as the most complex bread-making we can imagine.

I think of a sourdough starter for example that takes literally forever and lasts forever -- or it can. The yeast from the air which starts the process goes back to the origin of yeast, whenever that was, and the process, when done correctly, can maintain the "starter" indefinitely, indeed forever. Creating the Perfect Sourdough Bread is seen as a goal in life for some bread-bakers, to the point of obsession, of trying over and over and over again to get it Just Right, and never quite succeeding. Perfection is just out of reach. Something wasn't done quite right, so try again. And again. And again. Karma is a lot like that.

And then there's me and my soda bread. One and done. 

It doesn't have to be Perfect. It doesn't take Forever. It's Good Enough.

All this is vaguely related to our study text for this Practice Period/Ango, "The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi." At some point, I think I'll try to delve into what it meant to me 50-some-odd years ago when I first absorbed the teaching. How it affected and led to a profound change in the course of my life, and yet how strong and heavy is the karmic load I carry.

One day.... 😉

119

July 5, 2020 was my father's 119th birthday. I sometimes ponder how far back in time my parents and grandparents go. My father was born in 1901, my mother in 1911. My (half) sister was born in 1933. My (half) brother in 1935.

My mother's father was born in 1878. Her mother was born in 1889. My father's father was born in 1869 and his mother was born in 1875. Their parents were born in the 1830s, their grandparents right around 1800.

My ancestry is Irish, German, French (they say), and English with the addition of a supposed Indian Princess back in the 1700s. Well, some of her descendants dispute that she was Native American at all, as the stories of her being who it was said she was (the daughter of King Nummi of the Lenappe of New Jersey) only emerged in the 1850s, long after she died, and the competing story was that she was actually a mulatto slave of the man she eventually married, a British soldier who changed sides and fought for the Americans in the Revolution. Of course, that might not be true, either. Americans, made up stories of their ancestors and tended to glamorize them when truth might be better left unsaid.

That was certainly what my father told me about his ancestors. There was a standard story that apparently was passed down through the generations that "we" were descended from a prominent Irish Catholic colonial family from Maryland. The story was surprisingly detailed -- and utterly false. Made up. In researching the Irish side of my ancestry, I found that they weren't related to the Maryland family at all -- at least not after the late 1600s, if they were related to them even then. My ancestors were not descendants of the Maryland family at any rate, since they emigrated from Ireland in 1849, the height of the Famine, and the Maryland family was settled by 1710 or so, and had cut off ties with Ireland. The story of how my ancestors got to Iowa was mostly false. The only true thing was that they sojourned in Ohio until about 1855 when they moved permanently to Iowa. The rest of it, traveling by rail and wagon from Maryland, through Virginia to Ohio was false. In fact, it seems the Irish ancestors arrived in New Orleans in 1849, went up the Mississippi to the Ohio, then traveled by riverboat to around Springfield where they tried to settle in 1850. Didn't work. As Irish and Catholics they were harried and harassed and ultimately driven out. None of that was ever mentioned in the stories I heard.

Some of my father's German ancestors were already in Iowa when his Irish ancestors arrived. His German grandfather, though, didn't arrive until 1863. But he had left Germany -- the principality of Baden -- in 1854, when he was (apparently) 14. He arrived in New York the next year, and he stayed in Brooklyn as a bookbinder's apprentice until the Civil War broke out when he hightailed it to Iowa and hooked up with the German Catholic community there. He became a carpenter on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, a job he held until he died two weeks after my father was born.

My father told me almost nothing about the German side of his family. He didn't tell me, for example, that his mother was deaf or that her mother didn't speak English. I learned these things from a cousin I didn't know I had (the daughter of one of my father's sisters).

I've tried, but I haven't been able to nail down when my father's Irish grandfather arrived in the US. Most of his family -- parents and several siblings -- arrived together in 1849, but he doesn't show up in any records until 1856 in Iowa. He doesn't seem to have any records in Ireland after his birth in 1835. My father knew him (he died in 1913) but seemed to know little or nothing about him, or rather what he did know, he kept to himself.

My cousin, for example, didn't know that her Irish great grandfather was married to an Irish woman who died shortly after our grandfather's birth in 1869. He married another Irish woman in 1873, and it was she who my cousin had been told about and who she thought was our grandfather's mother. But no, she was the mother of the youngest brother only.

My father knew these things, but apparently those stories weren't shared with his sisters.

And I begin to think all this was so very long ago. Does any of it matter now?

Who Are These People?

My great-grandmother Carrie with three of her grandchildren, George, David, and Florence, c. 1910

Yes, who are these people?

While checking my Ancestry.com profile the other day, I came across pictures posted by someone descended from my mother's father's family tree. I don't know who it is. I'd seen one of the pictures before, but the rest were new to me. The one above was particularly interesting.

Carrie and three of her grandchildren... She had at least one other grandchild at the time, but it was complicated. There may have been others. Some she may not have known about.There was a boy living in Wabash with his mother. His father, Carrie's son  Clyde, had been killed in a hunting accident shortly before the boy was born. There would be other grandchildren later, including my mother. But these three were interesting to me for who they were.

George, David and Florence were the three children my mother's father sired with his first wife Maud. By 1910, Maud and my mother's father (Lawrence) had divorced and by the time this picture was taken, Lawrence and my mother's mother (Edna) were married. Maude, so far as I've been able to figure out, had moved to St. Louis and become a housemate/companion/wife? of Lawrence's brother Hal. The boys were sent to live with their grandparents. Florence, on the other hand, was sent to live with another of Lawrence's brothers, Frank and his wife, a different Edna. But exactly when that happened, I can't say.

So what I see in this picture is my great grandmother, two of my uncles, and an aunt. Though these children were my mother's half-siblings -- and there would be others -- they are my grandfather's children and thus are my uncles and an aunt, without a half-measure.

George came to visit my mother and me in the mid-Fifties, I believe it was 1956 or 57. My mother had tracked him down by calling everyone in the LA phone book with her father's last name, and sure enough, she located George. I'm not entirely sure that he knew of her or she of him beforehand. But they got together, and I remember him as a rather jolly fellow though I can't say that he seemed like any kind of relative at all. So far as I knew at the time, I didn't have aunts or uncles (later I would find out I had quite a few of them). I didn't have grandparents. My father was far away. My (half) sister had moved away when I was three and I very rarely saw her. I didn't even know she was living in Los Angeles the first few years my mother and I lived there, for example. She was a student at LA City College.  And trying to break into show business.

Through relatively recent research, I found out a bit about George. He had quite a life. When I look at the picture above, I see a striking resemblance to his father. What I remember seeing when he came to visit was a rather distinguished middle aged man, salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a suit and tie, polished shoes, smelling of Old Spice. I think he drove a black Buick. He smiled and laughed a lot while I was around, but my mother wanted to talk to him privately, so I went in the other room and watched TV while they talked. It seemed serious.

They no doubt talked about their father. George was born in 1898; my mother was born in 1911. There was quite an age gap. Another half-brother was also born in 1911, but I doubt either George or my mother knew of him. A half-sister would be born in 1914, and my mother certainly knew about her as she mentioned her to me by name (Helen) as someone she had seen/met at her father's funeral in St. Louis in 1916.

I wonder if George and David and Florence and Carrie went to Lawrence's funeral. The pater familia, D. H., probably didn't go, as he didn't look well in a family portrait taken the year before at the 50th wedding anniversary of Carrie and D. H. Given that Lawrence had established yet another family in St. Louis it was obvious things could get ... complicated.

George and David both went to Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, a rather prestigious technical school, but I have found no record that either of them graduated or even made it to senior year. If that's the case, it would be sad, to say the least.

Florence seemed to flourish in the household of her aunt and uncle, and died in Florida 92 years old. The boys didn't live so long. David died in San Diego at 55; George died in Los Angeles at 65.

Carrie died in 1918, I suspect she was one of the hundreds of thousands of Spanish flu victims in the United States. Her husband, D. H., died in 1921. By then, the boys were grown and one assumes they were on their own. Lawrence was dead. Maud moved back to Indianapolis.

Marie, Lawrence's wife in St. Louis, married the yard boss of the rail yard where Lawrence was killed and she died there in 1987, two days after my mother died in Butte County, California. Marie's daughter Helen committed suicide in 1940 on the anniversary of her husband's death from cancer.

I'm sure there are amazing stories for all  of these people, but for the most part, I didn't know anything about any of them. I wish I could have asked George about his stint in San Quentin when he came to call. But no.

Surprising how many records, though, turn up on Ancestry.com.

Joe

Joe was my mother's grandfather. That is, Joe was my mother's mother's father. Joe was murdered by his mistress Ella in Indianapolis in the summer of 1904, seven years before my mother was born.

While my mother didn't know Joe, I assume she knew something about him. She lived the first few years of her life with her mother and Joe's widow, Ida -- my mother's grandmother-- and some of Ida's sisters (all widow-women themselves) in a big rattle-trap farm house on the east edge of Indianapolis. The farmhouse burned down in 1914, or maybe 1913, and though my mother was only three or maybe younger when the house burned down, the image of the fire was seared in her memory for the rest of her life. A firehouse was built on the site in 1915. The family moved to a newer, nicer house next door.

How much my mother knew about her grandfather I don't know. She never mentioned him to me. But then he had been long dead by the time my mother was born, shot in the mouth by his mistress Ella during a drunken lunch at Ella's house which she shared with her husband Frank. The house was not far from the Marmon plant where both Frank and Joe worked as machinists.

What I know about Joe and his murder comes from newspaper reports -- the murder and Ella's trial were covered extensively by the Indianapolis papers. Ida staged a big funeral for Joe, with a procession to the cemetery passing by Ida's big ol' rattle trap farm house where the family were gathered on the porch in mourning clothes. According to the papers, it was quite a spectacle. The Nordyke Marmon company paid for the funeral.

According to the papers, Ella's trial was quite the spectacle too. Ida attended every day along with her widowed sisters and Frank, Ella's husband, as well as friends of both the deceased and his murderer.

Ella was convicted and sent to prison, but she was released to an insane asylum some six months later, and I have found no further mention of her. Nor have I found any more mention of her husband, Frank.

Ella claimed she acted in self defense when she shot Joe. She said she was merely his laundress, not his mistress, and he had threatened her and knocked her down, so she got her gun from the chest of drawers in her bedroom and shot him dead. Unfortunately for Ella, there were witnesses, neighbors who'd come over for lunch and beer with Joe and Ella (Frank had gone back to work at the plant) and they saw what happened.

According to the witnesses, Ella's and Joe's relationship was well known and had been going on for at least two years. Frank knew about it and he seemed to approve. However, Joe used a different name in his dealings with Frank and Ella. As if he were living a double life. How much Ida and her children knew about Joe's other life is impossible for me to know now. As far as anyone connected with Ella and Frank knew then, Joe lived with and took care of his invalid mother. His marriage to Ida and the children he had with her (daughter Edna -- my mother's mother -- and son Ralph, my mother's uncle) were apparently not known to Ella's friends. When Joe's invalid mother moved to Chicago to stay with her daughter, Joe attempted to sell her house and things to help support her -- and no doubt himself as well.

Joe had plans. What they were was never made clear, but his plans did not include Ella. At the fateful drunken lunch in the summer of 1904, Joe told Ella that he was done with her, and he wouldn't be seeing her any more. According to witnesses, Ella said that if she couldn't have him, no one could, and she got her gun and shot him. A doctor was called for and then the police. Joe's injuries were too severe -- one account said he died instantly -- and the police took Ella away to jail.

During World War 1, Ralph moved to Chicago with his mother Ida, but Ida moved back to Indianapolis within a few years. Ida lived in Indianapolis with one or another of her widowed sisters, one of whom remarried, until she died in 1935. For his part, Ralph married a prostitute in Chicago. Unfortunately, she was promptly confined to an insane asylum herself. Ralph didn't divorce her and didn't remarry. He stayed in Chicago working on lakeshore tugboats for the rest of his life.

Edna, my mother's mother, married in 1910, and my mother was born the following year in November. As it happened, a half-brother Edna and my mother knew nothing about was born in March of 1911. They had the same father. Different mothers.

My mother's father was arrested for a burglary he insisted he did not commit in May of 1912, and by the end of 1913 he no longer lived in Indianapolis. He'd joined his older brother in St. Louis. In 1914 he married the young daughter of German immigrants in St. Louis, and within a few months, she gave birth to a daughter, Helen. My mother's mother had sued him for divorce in August of 1912, not long after his arrest, but I don't know if the divorce was ever granted.

When my mother's father was killed in a rail yard incident in St. Louis in December of 1916, my mother and her mother attended the funeral (which my mother remembered being in Indianapolis, but it wasn't. It was in St. Louis.) My mother also remembered the Big Scandal at the funeral of her father: the discovery that he had another wife and daughter, making him a bigamist. Yes, her father had another wife and daughter in St. Louis. And his first wife also lived in St. Louis, married to his older brother. There were three children from his first marriage. The daughter had been taken in by another brother, and two sons were coming into adulthood at his parents' house. My mother's mother was his second wife (legally). The half-brother my mother knew nothing about was born to a high school girl in an unwed mother's home.

At least some of the menfolk in my mother's ancestry were... busy.

[I've written several other versions of this story, and I'll probably keep trying until I get it right!]

The Unknown Murder Mystery

Amid the crises and chaos -- oh my! -- I've been working on a post that could be called "creative nonfiction" about the murder of my mother's grandfather Joe in 1904.

Until recently, I knew nothing at all about it. I'm not sure my mother knew anything about it, either. The only mention I recall she made of her grandfather -- ie: her mother's father -- was that he died years before she was born, and she thought it was in an accident of some kind. But she didn't know.

She did remember Ida, Joe's widow, mother of Edna, my mother's mother. Ida always wore black, she was stern, and she was the matriarch of the house of women my mother was born into in 1911.

The newspaper articles about Joe's murder are pretty juicy, including plenty of salacious details, some gore, and statements from witnesses. My my, "Shorty," as he was called, was quite a character and so was Ella, his mistress/murderess.

In my research prior to discovering the murder story, I found a number of curiosities about Joe that I was unable to resolve, but there are some indications from this murder story about what was going on that are kind of astonishing when I think about it.

At some point, possibly around 1890 -- not long after Edna's birth -- it appears that Joe and Ida separated. I've found Joe apparently living with his mother Eliza, not with Ida. But I also found another Joe (we'll call him "Hastings" because that's one of the aliases he used) living elsewhere. On occasion, there were as many as three "Joes" -- that I suspect were all the same person -- living in different places in Indianapolis.

Then in 1904, the year "Shorty" was killed, Joe is listed as living at the same address as Ida, and someone  named "Francis J" is listed as living at Joe's mother's address. In other years, there is a "Joseph F" listed at Joe's mother's place, and Joe is not listed at Ida's -- except in the 1900 census, in which he is also listed at his mother's address. I'm pretty sure now that "Francis J," "Joseph F," and "Joseph M" are all the same person listed at different times. I have found no listing for "Joe Hastings" however.

Ella -- Joe's mistress/murderess -- and her husband Frank apparently knew Joe as "Joe Hastings." I suspect that Joe used the name "Francis J" sometimes when he was listed at his mother's house because of Frank Hicks, his mistress's husband. How drôle. They were apparently friends, as the newspaper report of the murder indicates that prior to the deed, Frank had invited Joe to stay for lunch with him and Ella.

From all accounts, Joe was a frequent visitor and had been visiting Ella and Frank for at least two years before the murder.

Ella claimed that she did Joe's washing. That's all. And that's why Joe came over as often as he did. But apparently neighbors knew that Joe and Ella were having an affair. Whether Frank knew, I don't know. I suspect he did.

These sorts of things weren't as unusual in the late Victorian era as we've been led to believe. In fact, casual couplings and long term affairs were pretty routine -- and from what I can tell, they were often accepted with little or no complaint or even much notice. Men and women both had affairs, though women (married or not) were at greater risk for consequences when they did.

I'd say such things are less usual these days than they were then.

In doing this research, I found that Ida -- Joe's wife, my mother's grandmother -- gave birth to her son Ralph more than a year before she married Joe. Oops. This wasn't all that unusual either, but still...

It gives rise to speculation: was Joe Ralph's father? Maybe, maybe not. About 18 months after Joe and Ida were married, my mother's mother Edna was born. Not long after that, as far as I can tell, Joe and Ida separated, and Ida, with her children, went back to live with her parents.

Ida's father, John, died in 1902; her mother Mariah Louisa died in 1908. After Ida moved back to her parents' home, she lived there with various relations. Then after her parents died, she lived there with her widowed sisters, her children, and eventually her granddaughter Virginia, my mother.

So from what I can tell, Ida was more or less independent after separating from Joe. But she did not divorce him, and after his death she staged a big funeral for him at her house and led the cortège to the cemetery a couple of miles away. From that day forth, she asserted she was Joe's widow, and she always dressed in black.

Ida also attended Ella's trial -- as the Wronged Widow Woman. Ella was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. I don't know what happened to Frank, or if Ella and Frank had any children. I've found no record of either of them except for the reports of Joe's murder.

It appears that Ida inherited property from her parents -- quite a lot of it if newspaper reports of her property sales are any indication. She was arguably quite well off from these sales. On the other hand, she claimed to be employed as a seamstress. From what my mother remembered of Ida, which wasn't a lot as my mother and her mother left the household in 1917 when my mother was only five years old, she was strict and stern, and I got the impression my mother didn't like her much, perhaps she was afraid of Ida.

Of course she wouldn't have known Joe, and I doubt she heard much about him. If, as I suspect, Joe and Ida separated not long after Edna's birth, then I doubt Edna had a lot of contact with her father, and she was probably much closer to her grandparents, but I don't know.

So much I don't know.

"Creative nonfiction" is about the only way I can deal with what I'm discovering, too.

Pondering the Dead Lists

As I'm old and ill myself, thoughts of mortality naturally enter into my consciousness -- perhaps more than I want them to. Death of course is part of the pageant of life, and I can't say I'm particularly frightened of shuffling off this mortal coil when the time comes, whenever that may be. For all my current health problems, I'm doing pretty well. Frustrations there are aplenty, but it could be so much worse, and so I'm grateful for whatever time I have left and whatever joy and insight I can find and share in that time.

In exploring my ancestry, I'm finding out about people and incidents of death and let's call it mayhem that I knew little or nothing about unmotil recently.

It started with my uncle Vincent who was tried (twice) for the murder of his wife in 1946. My father was one of his defense attorneys, so I knew something about it but not a whole lot. The main take away was that he was acquitted, but how that happened seemed a bit mysterious to me. What I gathered was that my brother -- who was there when his aunt died -- was interviewed in chambers, and subsequently, the court directed a verdict of acquittal. But I didn't know that this was his second trial, and that the first trial had ended in a hung jury -- 9-3, acquital. I also had no idea what the situation really was in Vincent's household and how his wife might have met her demise by cruel accident just as Vincent claimed in his defense.

His alibi was that he was at his mistress's house when his wife fell down the stairs, hit her head and expired. He found her body when he returned the next morning. Called the police, one thing led to another, and he was arrested and charged with murder 2.

One theory was that an intruder had come into the house -- for robbery perhaps -- and bludgeoned her to death. The other theory was that she had just fallen to her death down a flight of stairs, hit her head on a table and that was that.

The prosecution argued that in a drunken rage, Vincent had pushed her down the stairs and left her to die while he went to dally with his mistress in town.

That was actually what my mother believed to be the case, and there was always that kernel of doubt about what had happened.

But my brother was a witness, the only witness, really. He could not testify because he was ruled incompetent.He was 11 years old at the time and severely physically and mentally disabled. He had been raised by his aunt and uncle, Vincent and Garla, since his mother died at his birth. My father could not look after him and Vincent and Garla could not have children of their own, so they took my brother in and raised him as their son.

The extent of his disabilities were manifested over years. He couldn't stand up or walk on his own, he couldn't talk until he was about eight years old, he had repeated seizures. He was in much worse shape than I thought. I only saw him when I was an infant. He was in private care after Garla's death and it was thought unwise for me to see him or him to see me later on. So I never did.

As a witness, I'm not sure what he might have said, or if what he said in chambers made any sense. But apparently it was enough, combined with other evidence, for the judge to declare there wasn't a case for murder.

I learned from a cousin I discovered online that Garla had many problems herself. She drank heavily for one thing. But maybe worse, and what could easily have been the proximate cause of her death, was that she couldn't see very well. From her descriptions of what was happening, her vision would come and go -- she could see for a time, and then her central vision would go blank and she could only see peripherally, sometimes not even that. It can't be corrected with glasses, of course. If she was tipsy and lost her vision the night of her death, well... that would be that, wouldn't it?

Vincent claimed he had left the house in the afternoon to go see Pauline his mistress, and he stayed with her until the next morning. She corroborated his alibi in court. The prosecution's claim was that Vincent had dispatched his wife so he could marry Pauline. They both denied it vigorously.

Well, as it turned out, after his acquittal, Vincent and Pauline were married and they moved to Santa Barbara where they lived the rest of their lives. Hm. Stranger things. I didn't know they were in Santa Barbara -- I thought they'd stayed in Iowa. I periodically lived in Santa Maria, just up the road from Santa Barbara. Stranger things indeed. Vincent died in 1962 which was the last year I saw my father. I think there is a connection, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

Next on the dead list was my mother's biological father Lawrence. He died when she was five years old in 1916. She told me she remembered very little (I think nothing) about him, but that she clearly recalled attending his funeral where it was discovered he had another wife and daughter. Ooops. This supposedly led to a big scandal, and eventually my mother and her mother moved to California from Indianapolis "to escape the shame."

The shame? Yes. According to my mother, the "discovery" of Lawrence's other family at his funeral was scandalous because it meant that he was a bigamist.

But as I've explored the situation and the public record, I'm not sure it was such a scandal at all. Nor am I convinced that Lawrence's death was an accident.

According to the story I was told and my mother seemed to believe, Lawrence was killed in a streetcar accident in Indianapolis when he was crushed between the cars.

Except that's not quite what happened. He wasn't in Indianapolis, he was in St. Louis. It wasn't a street car accident, it was a railyard incident, and he was indeed caught between two rail cars, a freight car and a refrigerator car, and he was cut in half.

Yes, he had another wife and daughter in St. Louis, but whether he was a bigamist, I can't say. There are hints that he was never legally married to my mother's mother [Note: I found a marriage notice today (01/10/2017); Lawrence and Edna were married on February 4, 1910 in Louisville, KY, yet in April 1910, Lawrence was listed in the census as divorced] but I've found a record of his marriage to his St. Louis wife and to another wife in Indianapolis from whom he was divorced. He had another child by a young girl in Indianapolis (she was 16) the same year my mother was born, as well three children by his first wife, and another daughter by his St. Louis wife. There may have been others, who knows?

The point is that he was quite a ladies' man, and this is one reason why I'm suspicious of his death in the railyard.

For his St. Louis wife subsequently married the yard boss. How... convenient.

Railyard incidents leading to the death of switchmen weren't all that rare in those days as worker safety was not the highest priority, but it was certainly possible to arrange "accidents" should the need arise.

It may have arisen in Lawrence's case simply because... well, any number of reasons. At any rate, he died, and soon thereafter my mother and her mother and Leo, a friend of Larry's from his Indianapolis days who married my mother's mother, decamped for California and a new life. Things went well for them. And then they didn't. But that's another story.

Most recently -- yesterday in fact -- I came across the story of what happened to my mother's grandfather Joseph. He died in 1904, well before my mother's birth. His wife, Ida, then put on her widow's weeds (she always wore black said my mother) and... well, "mourned" is probably too grand a term. More accurately, she declared her independence, and she lived with her children and her widowed sisters and their children until the household broke up in 1917 with the departure of my mother's family to California. Ida went to Chicago with her son, Ralph. Ida's sisters, Nora and Lillian (or Josephine, her first name which she didn't use) stayed in Indianapolis. Ida would return to Indianapolis after Ralph got married c. 1920, an she lived there (as a widow) with one or another of her sisters (both of whom remarried) until her death in 1935.

Joseph, Ida's husband and Edna's father (Edna was my mother's mother) was shot and killed by his mistress Ella on May 24, 1904, apparently after he told her he was "through with her."

According to news reports, he'd been seeing Ella for years, and he basically hadn't lived in the same household as Ida and their children for years before that. Supposedly he moved out to take care of his ill and disabled mother across town. But then at some point, he sent his mother to Chicago to be looked after by his sister who lived there, and Joseph stayed at his mother's house while he prepared to close it. At least that was his story. He had taken up with Ella Hicks, a married woman, at sometime during his separation from Ida.

Ella claimed she only did Joseph's washing and when he made an indecent proposal to her that day, she defended herself with her revolver, thus the murder was actually self defense, don't you see? But apparently there were witnesses to actually happened, and who knew all about Ella's affair with Joseph. Though Frank, Ella's husband, was not a witness to the murder, he apparently knew about the affair, and...I guess he was OK with it. He and Joseph were apparently buddies at any rate. Since I derive all of this from newspaper reports of the incident and Ella's trial, I can't say how much of it is true. Make no mistake, media was just as filled with falsehoods and "fake news" then as it is now, if not more so.

Witnesses said that Ella was intoxicated and was quite deliberate in shooting Joseph when he told her they were done. She was not about to let him go back to his wife or to another woman, no way, no how, and she shot him.

The jury believed that account of what happened and convicted her. She was sentenced to life in prison, but her lawyers argued for a new trial. Apparently that happened, but I don't know the outcome. They were going to try to argue an insanity defense, and maybe they were successful, but if so, I doubt Ella would have been released.

And so... I don't know what these things mean, if anything, in the vast, eternal scheme.  Yet I'm bothered by it just the same.

I didn't know. I think that's the most bothersome thing. But I don't know what I would have done if I did know about these deaths and others among my ancestors and relations. As I find that misadventure plays a role perhaps as great as illness and old age in the history of deaths in the family, and that affairs play more than a little role in those misadventures, I have to think about how that all works -- especially in the contexts of the times.

We have an image of Victorian/Edwardian propriety, let's say, that simply isn't matched by fact. In doing research, I found out my father was married three times. I knew about two of his wives, but not the first one -- she was never mentioned. I knew he had affairs, but with whom or when, nope. Well, except for one, but I'll leave that for another time.

And so it goes. In discussing some of these things with my new-found cousin, she confesses there's so much she never knew about her own family and ancestors, so much that was never said. She didn't know about me, for example, nor did I know about her, even though we lived fairly close to one another in California, and there were other cousins (all now dead) much closer -- and we knew nothing about one another. No one ever said. She said there were other cousins too that she had no knowledge of, except their names.

She said she thinks I was privileged because at least I got to know some of the family in Iowa. She never did. We both wonder if there are any relations still living in Iowa, or did they all move to California?

We don't know.

She wants to know how as many of our relatives as we can find died, for she thinks there might be a genetic thread to follow. I don't know.

For example, we share a German great-grandfather who died in 1901 a couple of weeks after my father's birth. We don't know the cause, but we do have a picture, a family portrait taken perhaps five years or sooner before his death (there's no date, but the clothes and the ages of the children indicate it was taken in the 1890s). Reinhold, our great-grandfather, appears to have fallen asleep in the portrait while reading the newspaper. I look at it and suspect he had congestive heart failure -- which would be consistent with what we see in the portrait. May be. I don't know.

She wants to know how Vincent died. I don't know for sure, but I suspect alcoholism, as he was a heavy drinker like his late wife. My father died of cancer. My mother died of emphysema -- smoked like a chimney till the end, she did.

But my sister died of pulmonary thrombosis following surgery for shattered knees injured in a prison takedown. I think I've told the story before. She was 59. My brother also died of pulmonary thrombosis, but it appears he was in a coma for a long time beforehand. He was 32.

So many things we know, and so many more things we don't know. It is a wonder...

Hm. Things You Find Out On the Internet

For some time, I've been working on a follow up post to the one about the house where my mother grew up in Santa Maria. In order to work on it, I had to do some more research on where she and her mother, grandmother and aunts lived in Indianapolis.

The household in Indianapolis was a matriarchy because all the older women were widows, and my mother's mother (Grandmother Ida's daughter) would become a widow soon enough.

So today I was looking up some information on Ida's husband Joseph (I think I called him John in an earlier post) who died in 1904. (I may have said 1902. It seems I confused Ida's husband with her father.)

I found his death certificate today. It said the cause of death was "gun shot wound." That was interesting. I had thought he died in an accident of some kind, but had no idea he'd been shot. Maybe it was suicide? Murder? Something else?

Digging around on the Google Machine, I found news stories which explained plenty. He was murdered.

By his paramour, Ella Hicks.

Apparently, he'd been seeing Mrs. Hicks -- yes, she was married -- for some years, and one day, while he and she were drunk at her house, he told her he was through with her. She took her gun from the chest of drawers in her bedroom and shot him in the mouth, killing him instantly.

I had no idea. Well, I had some suspicion that something was up because Joseph had been living with his mother -- so he said -- at her house, which he used for his official address much more than the address of the house he shared with Ida and their children, Ralph and Edna (Edna would be my grandmother.)

Ella was tried in July of 1904 -- the murder was in May and apparently was witnessed by more than one neighbor -- and she was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Turns out Ida's sister Lillian was the widow of an Indianapolis policeman who was killed in the line of duty. Now I'll have to find out about Ida's sister Nora, who was also a widow. What happened to her husband? And then there is the saga of Edna's husband Larry, who would die under curious circumstances himself -- I've always thought he was murdered by "accident," but how would such a thing be proven? Ah, that's the cleverness of it, no?

British

I started a post yesterday in which I attempted consideration of US Independence Day vis a vis the Current Crisis of Britain as a consequence of the Chaos following the Brexit vote -- seen through the lens of my newly found British ancestry. Well, not surprisingly, it didn't work and I never completed the post. It may languish in draft form for the foreseeable future, or maybe I'll just delete it.

This post will take something of a different tack.

Today marks my father's 115th birthday. He was always very proud that he was born on the 5th of July (1901), as that made him a patriotic child of the new century. His birth, he thought, marked the transition from what used to be to what would become -- the Future in other words.

My father considered himself to be Irish-American through and through. His father was the son of Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1850 -- or thereabouts. This date contrasts with the story I was told about them, but that's another story...)

Actually, I haven't found the immigration date of my father's grandfather James, but James's parents (Alexander and Mary) arrived in 1850 along with several of their children and in-laws. James is not listed among them, nor are a couple of other of their children. I'm assuming they were still in Ireland and came over later, probably in 1852 or so. Family histories are murky about dates and such. At any rate, James, my father's grandfather, got to the US somehow at some date, and after settling into Iowa (his parents and siblings, after a relatively brief sojourn in Ohio where there were uncles and cousins, moved to Iowa in 1856), he acquired farms and land in Scott County, outside of Davenport. James married Alice (also an 1850s immigrant from Ireland) and they started a family on the farm. Alice died shortly after my grandfather's birth in 1869). James married again three years later, to a woman named Margaret -- who was also an 1850s immigrant from Ireland -- and they had one son together. As time passed, James retired from farming and moved upriver to Clinton, where his son (my grandfather William H) had a law office and James's daughter Katherine (also spelled Catherine) had lived for some time with her husband -- who was also descended from Irish immigrants.

My father's mother was German-American. Her mother, Veronica, was said not to have spoken English. Her father, Reinhold, did speak English, though his accent was said to be heavy. My father never knew Reinhold, his grandfather, because Reinhold died in 1901, two weeks after my father's birth. My father had little to say about his mother Elizabeth Veronica. She died in 1940, about a year before my father's father William H died, so I never knew either of them as they were long dead by the time I came around (in 1948). I heard some things about Elizabeth, my grandmother, specifically about how she faced prejudice during WWI, because of her German ancestry. My father indicated that her family were well-off enough to get through that difficult period, but he seemed to resent the fact that his mother had had to face the cruelties of American xenophobia at all. It seemed to affect him, though, in that he essentially buried his own German-American ancestry, rarely mentioning it, and typically focusing on the fact that he was Irish-American, and that's what he passed on to me. I therefore was Irish-American as well.

Yes, well... but what about my mother?

She claimed not to know much about her ancestry, but from what she did know of it, she claimed an aristocratic lineage. What she liked to say was that she was "a direct descendant of Marie Antoinette!" With a toss of her auburn haired head to express the exclamation point. Well, no, I don't think she was actually the sad French queen's descendant, but when I looked into her ancestry, I found it led back -- and back and back -- to the Drakes in England. Through the Drakes, she may indeed have had some tiny fraction of English royal blood, though I found no direct connection with English kings and queens.

I had long thought that her grandmother Ida was an immigrant from England. This was because my sister had had one encounter with Ida when she came out to California to visit from her home in Indiana -- where my mother had been born in 1911.

My sister said she thought that Ida was British because she spoke with an accent and had "that demeanor" about her.

Well, it turns out that Ida was not from Britain. She was born and raised in Indiana. Her father was from New Jersey, though, where his family had been since the 1600s. Their ancestors, in turn, were from England and it is through them that I found the connection with the Drakes.

There was also a connection with a New Jersey character named "Princess Snowflower," the daughter -- or perhaps the sister -- of "King Nummi," the "last of the Lenni-Lenape Indian chiefs of Cape May, New Jersey." Princess Snowflower was -- apparently -- my mother's grandmother's great grandmother. Got that? Good.

There is some dispute over whether "Princess Snowflower" was actually an Indian Princess at all, however. Some accounts say that the story of "Princess Snowflower" was made up in the 19th century to romanticize the history of a girl -- who was actually a descendant of someone who came over on the Mayflower. You would think her actual ancestry would be romantic enough, but apparently not.

I don't know what to believe about it. It's just another data point. At any rate, through her female line, I found nothing but English ancestry -- except possibly for "Princess Snowflower."

My mother's father's side provided some roadblocks, however.

My mother didn't know much about her father as he was killed when she was five years old, and she was raised by her mother and step-father. They didn't have a whole lot to say about her biological father.

I was able to find out a lot about him through Ancestry.com and various newspaper archives, none of which provided a flattering picture, but I ran into a roadblock tracing his ancestry. I could find nothing regarding his paternal ancestry prior to his grandfather who was apparently born in Virginia in 1798. Where the parents came from is something of a mystery. Possibilities include England, Ireland, Scotland, France or even Spain.

My mother's father's mother, however, was much easier to trace, as she was a descendant of the Lawrences of New England -- which would make her heritage English quite solidly.

If my mother's mother was (mostly) British, and my mother's father was (mostly) British, that would make me at least half British wouldn't it? Kind of puts the kibosh on my Irishness, no?

It's definitely disorienting.

I never had much regard for the British, and the current hoo-hah over the Brexit vote is kind of funny, actually. My Irishness makes me instinctively suspicious of British motives and actions -- there is little reason to believe much of what is presented as "truth" by the British because they lie. It's part of the culture. Who knows, maybe it's genetic.

Consequently, much of what we're told by the British is probably false, and the spectacle surrounding the Brexit vote is likely mostly phony and for show. That Tony Blair is being resurrected to explain is a sure sign of duplicity at the least.

There's also been some chatter-- yesterday at any rate -- that proposes the American Revolution was somehow a "mistake." Would things have been better if it had never happened? Possibly, who knows.

But it did happen, and here we are.

So many things that might have been never were and won't be because of what actually happened.

There is more and more speculation that Britain will not actually leave the EU, but that the kingdom itself may break apart. The breakup of the British Isles into component parts is somehow pleasing to an onlooker like myself, almost as if it were inevitable like the break up of the Soviet Union and so much of Europe following the collapse of the world that used to be. The EU has not been a pleasant replacement, far from it. So the EU may collapse as well. Led by the Brits.

If that were to happen, it would eventually mean the end of the USA as we've known it, wouldn't it?

Ah, that remains to be seen, but if it happens...

Leo the Incurable Romantic

Leo was my mother's step-father. He died before I was born, and I've never seen a picture of him, so I didn't know him and I have no personal knowledge of what he looked like. But since I've been on this journey of genealogical discovery, I feel like I've learned a great deal about him, enough, perhaps, to have a fairly good idea of what he was like.

I have little doubt that he was an incurable romantic.

He was second-generation American. He and his parents were born in the United States; his grandparents were born in Germany. That surprised me, for I thought he was Welsh or even Irish, but according to the records, he was German. He was born and reared in Indianapolis, and as far as I know he was a friend of my mother's biological father. That's what I was told by my mother, and the records I've found indicate they both worked for Indianapolis's streetcar company, and at least for a time they were neighbors.

Leo was a machinist for the streetcar company, whereas Larry (aka "Riley"), my mother's biological father, worked mostly as a conductor. When he worked. Leo was a member of the Sons of Pythias, and seems to have parlayed that and his own rather sunny personality into a much better life than Larry the Rebel was able to do for himself and his many offspring.

Larry would be killed in a railyard incident in St. Louis just before Christmas of 1916. He left behind a widow and young daughter in St. Louis and another widow and young daughter in Indianapolis. There were a number of other women and children, but those two households were primary at the time of Larry's death. The yard boss in St Louis married Larry's St. Louis widow Marie and adopted her daughter Helen, and they lived in St. Louis for the rest of their lives.

Larry's Indianapolis widow Edna would be married by Leo, and Leo, Edna and her daughter Virginia -- my mother -- would move to California in 1917 to start a new life. Leo never legally adopted my mother, but he treated her as his daughter and she used his last name as her own until she married.

Leo and Edna had no children together of their own.

In California, Leo started out as an auto mechanic for the Ed Reubel Dodge dealership in Santa Maria. He worked his way up to service manager, and he and his little family had a nice little California bungalow a few blocks away from the dealership. The house is still there and it still looks cozy and cheerful though it's now part of a multi-unit compound.

Sometime after 1930, Leo pulled up stakes and bought an auto court and filling station on the Redwood Highway in Willits called "U-Auto-Stop" where he and Edna moved. By this time my mother Virginia was married to her first husband, and shortly she would give birth to a daughter, Patricia, my (half) sister. They continued to live in Santa Maria where my mother's husband, Polk, worked as a mechanic and at other jobs for Ed Reubel.

In 1939, Leo sold the "U-Auto-Stop" and at first, I didn't know what had happened to them. Turns out he and Edna moved to Reno where he became the Secretary-Treasurer of a mining company. After some further search, I found out it was called the Jungo Mine, and it was located outside of Jungo, NV, the site of a very famous gold mine that had been extensively featured in Life Magazine. That mine was called the Jumbo Mine.

I found some ads for the Jungo Mine offering penny shares to all and sundry with extravagant promises of riches to come. Sacks of ore were being taken out of the Jungo Mine, some of them assaying at $12 and $15, so the ad copy said, and this translated to a remarkable return on a penny investment. "Get in now!"

Whether or not this mine actually ever operated, I don't know. There were lots of diggings around Jungo following the Jumbo strike in 1936, but whether any of them proved worthwhile is unknown to me. The ads I found for the Jungo Mine seem to have been placed only in 1940 -- I found none before or after -- and by 1941, Leo and Edna were living in Vallejo, CA.

Leo took a job as a machinist at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard -- where all those Liberty Ships were built to win the War -- and Edna took sick with the cancer that would shortly kill her. She died in October, 1941. Leo continued to work at Mare Island until his own death in 1945.

My mother spoke rather highly of Leo, when she spoke of him at all -- which wasn't often. Except that, when it came to her mother's death, she became hard and unforgiving. Suddenly her attitude toward Leo changed, and she blamed Leo for her mother's death at age 52. According to her, Leo and Edna had adopted Christian Science, and that meant Edna got no medical attention during her illness and according to my mother, she died in agony. There were hints in the story she told me that they had turned to Christian Science because they couldn't afford traditional medical treatment, and the fact that they couldn't afford it was due to Leo's profligacy.

That could be, but my mother didn't say anything to me about Reno or the mine or Vallejo. Her stories of her mother and stepfather stopped in Willits, which is where I thought Edna had died. But it wasn't so.

She lived at least briefly in Vallejo and died at the Solano County Hospital where she was taken when it was too late.

At the time, my mother was living with her husband and daughter on an orchard-ranch in Yolo County owned a Japanese-American family. Her husband, Polk, she said, was working as an oil-jobber, but according to records I found, he was a service station attendant. It's possible he was both. She divorced Polk in 1941 or 42 -- due to his infidelity, she said. She and my sister stayed on the ranch until some time after the Japanese family was sent away to the camps. Then they moved into town, Sacramento, just across the river from the ranch. Polk was also in Sacramento at the time, and he stayed there through the War and afterwards. In fact, he's buried in Sacramento, which surprised the heck out of me as he died in Walnut Creek where he lived with his second wife for thirty years or more working for Chevron, eventually becoming a vice president for sales.

But his new wife Jean was from Sacramento, and after Polk died she moved back to Sacramento where she lived the rest of her life.

This is getting far afield of Leo, however.

Leo's romanticism comes through in the path he follows from Indiana to California, from California to Nevada, and from Nevada back to California -- when it seems that his hopes in the mine were dashed.

In the end, I see his story as a romantic tragedy.

Leaving Indiana in 1917 and making a new life in California with my mother and her mother was in itself a romantic gesture, a supremely romantic gesture, it seems to me.

My mother's mother Edna had come from a rather well-off matriarchy headed by her mother Ida. Ida was a widow-woman who had apparently inherited quite a lot of property from her parents and her husband, land and buildings in the path of Indianapolis's growth during the 19th and early 20th centuries. She lived off the income and proceeds of sales of this property and provided a home for her sisters and son and daughter, and soon would be providing a home for her granddaughter when Edna gave birth to my mother Virginia in 1911. The house where they lived on N. Sherman Drive is still standing, and it seems like a rather modest place, though it's deceptively large. It's next door to a fire station which was built in 1915 on the site of Ida's former home, the place she'd shared with her husband and children. Though I've never seen a picture of that house, my impression is that it was an old two story farm house that was built when that section of Indianapolis was rural. It apparently burned in 1912 or 1913, and Ida sold the lot to the city -- for a fire station. The household moved next door to a house Ida also owned at the time.

These places on N. Sherman Dr were half a block from the Michigan Avenue streetcar line where Larry, my mother's biological father, worked -- when he worked -- as a conductor.

Larry was quite a ladies' man.

He'd been married in 1896 and had three children with his wife Maud, but they were divorced around 1907 and his children were farmed out. His daughter Florence went to live with his brother Frank and Frank's wife Edna, and for all anyone knew, Florence was Frank and Edna's daughter for ever more. Larry's sons, George and David, went to live with Larry's parents where they stayed until they reached majority.

Larry fathered other children, three of whom I found records of. One, Virgil, was born the same year as my mother (1911) to a woman (girl, really; she was 17) who never claimed to be married to Larry. My mother's mother Edna did claim to be married to Larry, though I could find no proof of it. According to what I did find, she claimed to be married to him in January or February of 1910. But she did not live with him as man and wife -- ever, so far as I could find out -- and she did not use his last name until after my mother Virginia's birth.

Larry's other child, Helen, was born to Marie, his wife in St. Louis. I did find records of their marriage, though he married her under what appears to have been an assumed name. My mother always claimed that he was a bigamist, and the scandalous discovery was made at his funeral when his "other family" was revealed. My mother remembered attending his funeral, and she recalled feeling sorry for his daughter Helen who was then two years old (my mother was five.)

She recalled the funeral taking place in Indianapolis, but it didn't. It was in St. Louis on the 23rd of December, 1916, and Larry was buried in Friedens Cemetery in Bellfontaine Neighbors just north of St. Louis.

I suspect my mother simply didn't remember the train trip of several hours from Indianapolis to St. Louis to attend his funeral.

My mother said she had few memories of her father, but I suspect she had none. Not only was he a ladies man, he was a somewhat notorious petty criminal, accused of numerous robberies and burglaries from the time he was a young teenager. In March of 1912, he was chased through the streets of downtown Indianapolis by a "merchant policeman" who was firing his gun at the fleeing Larry -- who he accused of burglarizing a drugstore.

Larry was apprehended by regular police -- who knew him -- and taken to the stationhouse where he denied everything. The proprietor of the drugstore averred that nothing had been taken from the premises. Larry was arraigned and the case was bound over to the grand jury but I found no disposition. He may have gone to trial, but maybe not.

Larry's father David was a prominent Civil War veteran who held a number of patronage positions in Indiana state government. He was the legislative parliamentarian, later the state land clerk, and he served in a number of other capacities. He had six sons, three of whom became prominent in Indiana in their own right. Larry, the second youngest, on the other hand, became notorious.

It seems that Larry's father got him out of one scrape with the law after another, but the 1912 incident may have been the last straw. By sometime in 1913, Larry had moved to St. Louis where his older brother Harold had long lived and worked as a printer and Linotype operator for the St. Louis Globe Dispatch. (As a side-note, David, the pater familias, had published a newspaper in Lebanon, Indiana, before moving to Indianapolis and taking up positions with the state government.)

After Larry died in St. Louis, Leo -- his friend in Indianapolis -- took it upon himself to "make an honest woman" out of Edna and to take care of and protect Edna's daughter Virgina. They moved to California to start a new life -- a project which appears to have gone very well.

The family's life was very different and better in California than it could possibly have been in Indiana. Indianapolis was rough and gritty and dirty, and whether she wanted to be or not, Edna was caught up in scandal brought on by Larry's misbehavior.

Given the "moral" standards of the era, Edna was sullied, and there was nothing she could do about it -- though she tried. Leaving was her best option, and the fact that Leo was there and ready, willing, and able to take the risk of building a new life in California with Edna and Virginia was a godsend.

It's too bad that Leo's romantic vision culminated with his mining adventure in Nevada -- which apparently came to nothing and left him broke, his wife ill, and his stepdaughter hating him.

It's a very common story in some ways, but on another plane, it may be unique to this particular group of people at this particular time in American history. I knew little about it because it all took place before I was born, and my mother was not necessarily forthcoming. She harbored great resentment -- indeed hatred -- towards Leo, blaming him and his incurable romantic vision for her mother's death. She could not and did not forgive him. I have little doubt he carried his own sense of guilt and failure to his own death a few years later (I believe he died of a heart attack -- or perhaps of a broken heart).

I didn't know Leo or Edna -- let alone Larry. I've never even seen a picture of any of them. But they had an influence on my life through my mother. Finding out about them -- who they were, where they came from, what they did -- is an adventure for me, something I could not have done to this extent prior to the advent of the internet.

Now that I've found living cousins I'm learning a whole lot about my father's family I never knew before, too. It's all quite a wonder.

The Jungo Mine

While researching my mother's paternal issues, I came across census information that her mother and  stepfather were living in Reno in 1940. Her stepfather, Leo, was listed as a mining company official; her mother was listed as a bookkeeper. Her stepfather's income was only $600, a very small amount even for those days, and her mother Edna's income was reported as zero.

This was interesting for Leo and Edna had owned and operated an apparently successful auto court and filling station in Willits, CA, for years, but they sold it in 1939. I had known about the filling station and auto court from an early age because my mother had told me about it. But I had never heard anything about a mine in Nevada.

My impression is that Leo had sold the auto court to buy into the mine.

He was listed as secretary-treasurer which indicated to me that he had an ownership stake, but I didn't know what mine, or any other details about the operation. Or even if there was an operation. Something told me this may not have been a legitimate company, but I didn't know.

I don't remember quite how it happened but I came across information that the mine was called the Jungo Mine and it was some distance outside Jungo, NV. There was another mine in or near Jungo, a very famous mine, the Jumbo Mine, and even in my research, it was easy to confuse the two. The Jumbo Mine had produced quite a lot of gold, but I could find nothing except advertisements about the Jungo Mine. They were mostly from 1940. And they seemed to deliberately confuse Jungo and Jumbo.

The ads offered penny shares in the Jungo Mine, and in one of them, a man is mentioned who was probably my mother's stepfather. He took prospective investors on tours. Leo seemed to have quite a gift for dealing with people.

The Jungo Mine seems to disappear after about 1940. In 1941, my mother's mother became ill with the cancer that would kill her. She and Leo moved back to California where Leo found work as a machinist at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo. Either they didn't have enough money for Edna's cancer treatment or they chose Christian Science treatment for other reasons, but Edna's condition rapidly worsened.

She died in Vallejo in October of 1941. She was only 52. Leo stayed at the shipyard throughout the War and died of heart failure in 1945 at 65.

My mother never forgave him for Edna's death, though I'm not convinced that there was much that could be done in those days by medicine or religion.

But I'd never known about the mining venture in Nevada. It gives me a much fuller picture of who Leo was.

"Ohio"

During the last couple of years, I've done a fair amount of genealogical research and I've posted some of my findings under the tag: "Who Are These People?"

I thought I knew plenty about my ancestors, but I found out I didn't know much at all. This was especially true about my mother's ancestors -- particularly on her father's side -- but I found I didn't know much about my father's side, either. At least not as much as I thought I did.

One of the enduring mysteries on my father's side had to do with Ohio. In family mythology, Ohio was named as a stopping point on my paternal ancestors' journey to Iowa where I was born and my father was born and where his father was born. My father's grandfather and all but one of his grandfather's siblings, however, were born in Ireland. That wasn't the story I was told, as I was told very little, but it was the story in the records I found. There was a surprising amount of information about my ancestors available online.

The records indicated that my father's paternal ancestors emigrated from Ireland in 1850 or thereabouts. It's not entirely clear where in Ireland they emigrated from -- some possibilities include Counties Tipperary and Offaly (called King's County prior to Irish independence from British rule.)  I choose to think my ancestors' Irish home-place was in County Offaly because that was the historic seat of the family clan dating back into the dimmest mists of time. Tipperary borders Offaly, so it's certainly possible that the ancestral origin was in County Tipperary as I'd been told by my father, but he never mentioned a specific location within Tipperary.

The records indicate that by July of 1850, part of the family was living in or near Springfield, Ohio. The missing part is my father's grandfather James. James's father Alexander, mother Mary, brother and sister in law Charles and Anna, and sisters Mary and Sarah are all there, but James is not, nor is his brother John. This suggests to me that they had not left Ireland yet.

They don't show up in the record until the 1856 Iowa state census.

1856 is actually an earlier date for their arrival in Iowa than I had previously thought. The stories I'd heard and read said they'd arrived in Iowa in 1857 or 1858. Yet here they were in Pleasant Valley, Scott County, Iowa, in 1856.

Something had happened to cause them to leave Ohio within six years of their arrival. It wasn't just my father's direct ancestors who left Ohio, either. Another branch of the family that had settled in the Piqua area of Ohio -- forty miles or so north and west of Springfield -- in the 1830s also left for Iowa at about the same time -- mid 1850s -- as my father's ancestors. The other branch settled in LeClaire, Iowa nearby my father's ancestors (LeClaire borders Pleasant Valley) and the records get confused from that point because both branches used many of the same given names, and of course they shared the same surname. Figuring out just who is who is a challenge I haven't yet mastered!

Meanwhile, the chief mystery remained: what happened in Ohio that made them leave en masse like they did?

There were no stories about it that I recall hearing.

The record is scant. There is only the 1850 census stating who among my ancestors was in Ohio and where they were and what kind of work they did -- and how long they'd been there and where they'd come from (a year or less, and Ireland). There was also a listing in the 1840 census for the head of the other branch of the family -- which showed him with a household of 60, most of whom were young men, none named. Was this a monastery? I don't think so. More likely, it was a canal-building crew of Irish immigrants. By 1850, his household was reduced to 15 and included a number of named Irish immigrants.

By 1856, all of them were in Iowa. Both branches of the family were in Scott County in neighboring townships, essentially on neighboring farms, but my father's great-grandfather Alexander was listed as a "farmer" while his brother and neighbor Edward (assumed relationship) is listed as a "contractor." In other words he assembled and supervised work crews for others. That's essentially what he'd been doing in Ohio as well. It's not entirely clear what Alexander and his family had been doing in Ohio, as the only indication is the 1850 listing of Alexander and his oldest son Charles as "laborers" in Springfield.

As I say, there were no family stories about the Ohio sojourn. All that was said was that it happened. And then they moved on to Iowa.

In a history of Scott County that included members of my father's family, it was noted that "opportunities were better" in Iowa -- compared to "more thickly settled" Ohio. I got to thinking about what that could mean in a historical sense.

Edward had been in Ohio in the Piqua area since the 1830s, probably arriving from Ireland in 1836 or 1838. The area had recently been "cleared" of Indians, though there were still some there, and if I understand correctly, Indians still live in the area, descended from those who didn't move west when the rest of their tribes were forced out under the various Removal acts.

Not only were there still Indians in the area, there were also free Blacks, brought to colonize the area from Virginia.

The leading citizen was named John Johnston, a Scots-Irish immigrant who was styled "Colonel" and who had been made Indian Agent for the region. He held many other positions as well. It is my understanding that he was a primary recruiter of immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere to the region around Piqua. My assumption is that Edward and Johnston were working together to recruit Irish immigrants and put them to work on projects -- land clearance, road construction, canal building and the like.

It's possible that Alexander's intention was to go to Piqua and join his brother when he emigrated to America, but he only got as far as Springfield. My suspicion is that he ran out of money, and given the tenor of the times, it's possible that what little money he was able to bring with him from Ireland was stolen.

By the 1850s anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment had reached fever pitch in much of the settled country. Ohio was no exception. There were many incidents of violence against Irish immigrants (and others) throughout the period of Know-Nothing political control of the state. Violence against the Irish included destruction of (Catholic) churches and other property and the robbery and murder of Irish settlers. It was an ugly time, and for the most part there was no recourse at law. The law, such as it was, favored the mob and their terror and violence against the Irish. Needless to say, the Irish were not the only victims, but they were most definitely preyed upon by the dominant white "real" Americans.

Something happened to my Irish-American ancestors during this period to convince them to move on to Iowa. I don't know what it was but it had to have been pretty awful, especially for Edward and his family. They'd been living and working in Ohio for decades.

One generally doesn't pull up stakes without a reason.

I believe the reason that drove my Irish ancestors to come to America was a desire for land -- something they -- as Catholics -- couldn't own in Ireland.

Alexander and his family had only been in Ohio for a few years, but it's my suspicion that they found that no matter how hard they worked and saved, they could not acquire land of their own because they never had enough money to buy it. They couldn't own land in Ireland, either, because the British had seized almost all of it and forbade Catholic ownership of what was left.

Why stay in Ohio where the land situation was similar -- or even more difficult -- and where routine violence against Irish immigrants went unpunished by the law?

There were homesteads available in Iowa for the claiming. Claim the land, improve it, live on it, and it was yours. No one could take it from you simply because you were... Irish.

And so they moved -- dozens of them -- to Iowa, where "opportunities were better" in a land "less thickly settled."

They acquired farms in Scott County -- in LeClaire, Pleasant Valley, McCausland, and Princeton. There may have been others I'm not aware of. I know that later they would also acquire farms in neighboring Clinton County. My uncle Vincent painted this scene of the Princeton farm when he was 11 years old (c. 1912):

The Princeton farm stayed in the family at least until my grandfather died in 1941.

Family members did not actively work the farms after about 1880 or so. They were either left fallow --- especially during the Depression -- or they were worked by tenants. But the land and ownership of the land were very important to members of my family even after their active farming lives ended.

Equally important -- if not more so -- was the law and government.

In my grandfather's generation, all the boys became lawyers. I thought that was also true of the boys in my father's generation, but I found out recently it was not so. In fact, my father was the only attorney in his generation. So far as I know, there are no attorneys in my generation, but some in the generations to follow have expressed an interest in the law.

The law became so important to members of my family, I believe, because the law did not protect them in Ireland -- just the opposite -- and they soon found it did not protect them in Ohio, either. Coming to America may have been the adventure of a lifetime, but it was not a solution to their problems.

My grandfather and his brothers formed a law partnership in about 1894 with branches in Davenport and Clinton, Iowa. It appears to have handled general law and -- importantly -- real estate law. My father became a partner in the firm founded by his father and uncles, and then -- after their deaths -- he was the sole owner and proprietor. And his focus, from that point on, was abstracts of title and real estate law.

Back to what might have happened in Ohio, I've been unable to find any evidence that my ancestors owned and worked their own land either in Springfield or in Piqua. As I say, there's not a whole lot of evidence that they were there at all, but there is some, and what there is indicates that Edward in Piqua assembled and supervised work crews for others as a contractor, and Alexander and his boys worked as laborers on others' properties in and around Springfield.

There is no indication that they owned their own property in Ohio.

In Iowa, on the other hand, there's quite a lot of evidence of my ancestors owning and working their own land in Scott and Clinton Counties at least until the 1880s.

According to one account I read, the "Famine Irish" refused to take up land for farming in Ohio, even though farmland was available at almost no charge in the Western Reserve.

This is somewhat hard to believe but it may be true.

Those of my Irish ancestors who arrived in Ohio in 1850 would -- I have little doubt -- be classified as "Famine Irish" even though, from what I've been able to find out about the famine situation in the central part of Ireland, they likely did not suffer from starvation or disease - or eviction for that matter.

The Third Earl of Rosse was the British lord of the region, and according to contemporary accounts, he was a great defender of the Irish and he assured that the Irish in his domain would not -- and did not -- starve. He was almost alone in his sense of responsibility for Irish welfare. But he did what he could.

The Irish left Lord Rosse's domain anyway.

It was a terrible time for Ireland, and the Great Famine will forever remain one of the (many) black marks on the British Empire.

Once in America, the Irish faced many hardships, most of which were the result of poverty. Most Irish arrived in the United States penniless or deep in debt to whomever had paid their fare out of Ireland.

Opportunities to make a living were scant, and there were multitudes of "real" Americans eager to exploit Irish poverty and naivté to enrich themselves. While some Irish, like my ancestors, came to America specifically for freedom from oppression and for land, others came for no other reason than to survive.

One history I read suggested that the Irish grossly exaggerated the discrimination they faced in America, and to the extent they faced any discrimination at all, it was their own fault.

Another history, specifically dealing with Irish immigrants to Ohio, also blamed them for their own problems and misery. The Irish were said to be "uncivilized," "ignorant," "dirty," "violent," and often drunken.  They were lazy, contentious, immoral, and illiterate. Their Catholic faith was little more than a superstition. On and on. Any sort of stereotype you can think of was being cited in a current history of Ohio to justify the mal-treatment of Irish immigrants in the 19th Century.

Apparently, to this day, Ohioans have little regard for Irish immigrants of long ago, especially not for the "Famine Irish."

And yet the Irish experience and memory of discrimination and mob violence against them is "exaggerated."

Interesting.

Apparently anti-Irish prejudice and Know-Nothing-ism was not as strong in Iowa as it had been in Ohio.

I've wondered why my Irish ancestors didn't press on to California and the Gold Country when they finally decided to leave Ohio. The Gold Rush was going full blast when Alexander and his family (my direct paternal ancestors) arrived from Ireland in 1850. Emigration to California was still under way when they left Ohio for Iowa in or about 1856. The lure of the Gold Rush must have been strong, and yet it wasn't strong enough to get them more than a few miles across the Mississippi River. What kept them in Iowa was the land.

The land situation in California was complicated by the unsettled condition of the numerous Spanish and Mexican land grants -- grants that were supposedly guaranteed to the grantees in perpetuity by the treaty of Guadalupe-Hildalgo ceding California and the rest of the Southwest to the United States. That isn't quite how it worked in practice, but that's what it was supposed to look like. So there wasn't really much land available for homesteading in California, and gold-finding was not what it was cracked up to be.

In Iowa, on the other hand, once the Indians were forced out, there was abundant land for the taking. Homesteading was possible, and if land had to be purchased, costs were apparently within reason.

Once they had land, my paternal ancestors could begin to build a future.

Apparently, too, the law in Iowa was on the side of the settlers, even if they were recent immigrants from Ireland.

There is also a German side to my paternal ancestry, but we'll not deal with that here.

My sense is that land was not available for my paternal Irish ancestors in Ohio, there was an increasing level of anti-Irish prejudice, discrimination and violence in Ohio, the law did not protect the Irish in Ohio, and Iowa beckoned.

The road from Springfield and Piqua, Ohio, to Scott County, Iowa, was a long one, but it was taken around 1856, and from that point on, the story of what happened to my ancestors in Ohio was forgotten-- or at least never spoken of --  much as the story of what happened in Ireland fell into the mists of time.

But whatever it was, what happened in Ohio helped make them who they were.