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I was having lunch the other day with one of my cousins and as is usual in our meetings, the conversation turned to a rundown of what is new with each member of our extended family. We don’t have a very large family but still, it seems that certain members see each other more regularly than others. I’m not sure if that is “normal” or not. I think it is.

So, I asked my cousin about some members with whom she is closer and the conversation went to a married couple in which the husband has been very successful financially. As I remember him, he was always the one to remind the rest of us about how he rose from being a shipping clerk to being the head of his lucrative company. Meanwhile, his well-dressed, bejeweled wife would sit in the background silently, smiling.

“Don’t kid yourself,” my cousin said to me at lunch. “She’s the whole show.” Of course, what she meant was that the quiet, subservient wife was, in fact, “the boss!”

It made me think about so many European families that I knew growing up as an immigrant in Portland, Oregon in which I saw that same equation at work. It seems to me, looking back at it all, that the Viennese culture I knew then required the husband/father to be the head of the family and thereby the one to lay down all the laws by which everyone under his roof was to live.

However, their wives somehow knew how to finagle their husbands into giving in to their wishes. My mother did it by crying. I’m sure others had other means for manipulating their husbands … without their even knowing it.

What was and still is clear though, is that everyone else among their acquaintances who knew the couple, knew exactly who was “the boss.”

I belong to the Ventura County Writers Club (California) which has an annual short story contest. This year I have been asked to be one of the judges to read the entries that have come in. I met with some of the committe a few days ago and after we went over the format by which we are to judge the entries, we each had a cup of coffee and got to know one another a bit better. In time, our conversation drifted to sharing stories about our children.

I spoke a bit about one of my daughters. My fellow judges told me that I should write the story. It is a fascinating and interesting one, I will admit, but I’m not sure how my daughter would like for me to make public any of her history. I suppose I could fictionalize it somewhat, but I know that if she were to read it, she would know that it is she that I was writing about.

Recently I read a blog on the site She Writes in which the author spoke about how difficult it was for her to write about her twins. Mind you, the twins are three years old. I think I would have no trouble writing about toddlers. I think I would have fun writing about babies. Their antic are cute and funny.

The antics of my daughter were neither cute, nor funny. Sometimes I wonder how I survived them. Even more important, I wonder how she survived them.

The good news is that she did in fact not only survive them but ended up being the most admirable of all human beings. Perhaps I will write about my daughter.

During World War II my grandmother had three brothers serve: Tom, Robie and Jack. My grandfather enlisted in 1943 and served in the Pacific as well. All of them came home but it was an incredibly difficult time for my grandmother and her family. Everyone worried, she told me, everyone worried about everything. The irony for my family is that it was not the soldiers who went overseas who were grievously injured; it was the one who never left.

The way she told the story, my great uncle Jack, who was in his early twenties, enlisted in the army and was sent to Kentucky for training before being shipped to Europe. He and two friends were assigned to go out into an inactive mine field. As they marched across it, the mines exploded around them, Jack found himself trapped in the middle, covered in pieces of his friends. The field was active and no one had told them or the officer who sent them into it. It was a colossal horrific accident. The explosions left him completely deaf in one ear and nearly so in the other. But even worse, when they got him out he was methodically gathering the pieces of his buddies and placing them in piles.

Jack was granted a Section 8 discharge for psychiatric reasons. He was on disability for the rest of his life. But more importantly, he was never the same again.

My grandmother said he was always quirky before the war - a different (dry) sense of humor, etc. But afterward he was simply "not right". He was not okay. He worked in a variety of jobs and businesses and found some semblance of middle class economic success. He was married four times - twice to the same woman and they had one child. His son, John Jr., was killed in a car accident as a young man. He had also been married twice by then and had three children. In the last years of his life great Uncle Jack lived in FL, very near my grandmother and used it as his base to visit his grandchildren. He died in 1984 and is buried near my great grandmother and grandparents.

But that is not all of his story.

None of his grandchildren attended the funeral. The youngest two were very small and the oldest (from his son's first marriage) lived some distance away. It was, to me anyway, as if he left no one behind. His brothers and sisters were there for him in the end and so was my mother and brother and I but that was all - it was almost like he should have died on the minefield that day as well and it had just taken a few extra years for him to go. I know its rather melodramatic to write that but of eight siblings he is the one they had least contact with and the one who is the only dead end. We simply do not know what became of his grandchildren; we do not even know their names.

A couple of years after his death Uncle Jack's eldest granddaughter called my grandmother. We have no idea how she found the phone number but she was nearby visiting friends and wanted to talk about her father and grandfather. They were on the phone for some length and she promised to phone back in the next day and come visit. We never heard from her again.

This is how families disappear. An accident or two, phone numbers and addresses never recorded, names forgotten. Somewhere out there are three children who know nothing about their father's family or what happened to their grandfather in Kentucky or that the Lennons came from Ireland. They might not even know what my Uncle Jack looked like when he was young. But here he is, just in case they ever go searching for John Lennon, of the Bronx, NY.

I keep waiting for someone to find me on the internet and ask if I was related to Jack Lennon. I think they will be surprised by what I have to tell them.

[Po

When I first started researching my family history way back in the late 1980s there was no internet and it was mighty expensive to find things out. So when my grandmother and her sister (my great aunt Marion) asked me to look into the mystery surrounding their father's grave it took a while to sort things out. First, you have to know that in NYC it is common for multiple bodies to placed (stacked) in one plot. In the case of Tom Lennon it was a three body plot but I have found as many as six bodies in plots owned by my grandfather's family. So having someone else in there with your loved one is pretty common but you usually know who you ended up with. My great aunt Agnes had visited Tom's grave a couple of years before and taken note of the woman buried beneath him: Margaret Rowland. No one in the family had a clue who Margaret was.

How do you resist a challenge like this one?

The first thing I did was write to St Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx and ask for the full names of everyone buried in my great grandfather's plot. I got back that Tom and Margaret were there together and also that the grave had been bought by Edward Rowland, husband of Margaret, when she died in 1918. (It cost $38 if you're wondering.) With the exact date of death I was able to send away for a copy of her death certificate for genealogical reasons (no Ancestry.com back then). We were thinking she was an aunt or cousin of my great grandfather but the death certificate proved to a be a bit more complicated. Margaret was born in the U.S. in 1875 (and only 42 when she died of uterine cancer). Her parents were both born in Ireland and their names were Bridget Waldren & John Lennon.

On one hand you have to take the names of deceased parents & circumstances of birth on a death certificate with a grain of salt, because they can often be wrong. But John Lennon was the name of Tom's father and my grandmother thought he had been married twice (maybe - all of her Lennon grandparents were dead long before she came along). Tom's mother was named Catherine (and we had his baptismal certificate along with his siblings' from the Church of the Sacred Hearth in the Bronx so we knew the names of John & Catherine were true.) So maybe Margaret was from the first marriage and thus his half sister? Bridget is such an unusual name and the Irish are infamous for keeping names for generations (we are knee deep in Catherines for example). For the past couple of decades we just looked at it all this way and put a big question mark next to Bridget and when she might have died.

Until I got all busy recently on Ancestry.com.

I was looking in the 1900 census for another family member - supposed sister or aunt of Tom - who had an unusual married name (more on her later - but she's another Catherine). And I found her, as a widow in the 1900 NYC census, living with her children and her sister Margaret (born 1874 - which is close enough) and her brother Robert (Tom had an Uncle Rob my grandmother knew quite well) and her mother, a widow named Bridget Lennon.

Talk about a shocker.

Bridget was not the first wife of John Lennon and her children were not Tom's half siblings. She was Tom's grandmother - married to John Lennon, Sr who was apparently Tom's grandfather (we had never gotten that far back but I'm so not surprised to find yet another John). Tom was buried with his aunt - not his half sister. Here's how it looks:

John Lennon married Bridget Waldren and they had at least four children: Catherine, Margaret, Robert & another

Sometime in the late 1960s, after my great grandmother Julia had moved in permanently with my grandparents (for years she traveled from one child's home to another until they kept her even though she was no easy person to live with), she dropped a bombshell on my grandmother. As I was told years later, they were watching television together, some innocuous program my grandmother could not even remember and Julia let out with the startling admission that she had come home one day and caught her husband in bed - in their bed - with another woman. She was furious at him, angry still beyond reason even though Tom had been dead and buried more than thirty years at that point. She gave this deep dark secret up and then sat back in the chair and my poor grandmother, who had a decent relationship with her mother but by no means one that involved personal revelations of any kind, did not know how to respond. Based on the woman he was found with though (and I won't share that here), my grandmother was finally able to understand a serious rift with this person that had occurred in her childhood. And she also knew what else had happened at very nearly the same time: Julia had met the woman who helped women lose their babies.

Finally, we understood why.

Unfortunately, my grandmother was so shell shocked by what her mother told her that day that she didn't follow up on it, ever. This kills me and my mother, (seriously - we have talked about it for years), but my grandmother said it was such an ugly admission - Julia was still so very upset that she didn't feel right poking and prying. Everyone else involved was dead anyway, so there seemed little point. She let it go and only told my mother and then years after that, told me. I don't even know if anyone else in the family is even aware that Tom cheated, or who he was found with.

What I have started to wonder in the past few years though is if this was the first time. Also, Tom was known to come home and pass out drunk. (My great aunt Agnes told a very sad story of coming home from school one day and happily seeing her father waiting for her near their building; when she got closer she realized he had passed out leaning up against it.) It is entirely possible that he was so out of it that he didn't even know who he was with that day, although I think that if this was the case Julia might have forgiven him for it. Or if it was the first time she might have been more understanding. What is clear though is that it was the end of Tom and Julia and all they could have been. Her anger at him was so great, her pain so complete, that she could not bear to carry his child. Can you wrap your head around what it must have been like for he to come to that conclusion? It's staggering. We know they did get together again at some point later because my great uncle Eddie was born in 1931, after that long gap. He was the last though because Tom drank himself to death and died at 44 years old in 1933. (The doctor told him if he did not stop he would be dead before his next birthday and he was.)

"Nana" died when I was four so I have only the barest of memories of her (we sat out a tornado together - not the sort of thing you forget). My mother knew her quite well and she was regarded as a stern no-nonsense woman by her and her cousins. She did love babies though and always remembered them; I still have some of the birthday cards she sent me. I can't imagine who she would have been without Tom Lennon - if she had met a man who loved

After tom and Julia (my great grandparents) were married in 1910, they began having children. Their first, James ("Jimmy") was born in 1912 and seven more followed: Tom (1914), Rob (1916), Catherine (my grandmother - 1919), Jack (1921), Agnes (1923), Marion (1926) and Ed (1931). Tom died in 1933 and so, of course, there were no children.

Julia, a widow at 43, never remarried.

When I was first researching the family history back in high school I asked my grandmother about her brothers and sisters, noting especially the gap between my Aunt Marion and Uncle Eddie. Except for that five year period, Julia reliably had a baby about every two and half years. But between the last two was a big gap. I assumed that a baby died at birth but my grandmother, who was certainly old enough to remember told me that no, all of the babies lived. Then I assumed there must have been a miscarriage or two but again, she said there were no babies lost either. I told her I thought the gap was strange and she dismissed it. "Things happen," she said. "It was a long time ago."

I let it slide, but I didn't let it go.
I found out a lot of interesting things in the first couple of years of research (like who was buried in my great grandfather's grave with him and that my grandfather had a sister who died years before he was born), but that gap constantly nagged at me. And I kept asking my grandmother about what she might remember and she kept dodging the question until I guess she decided I got old enough or maybe that it didn't matter anymore; that there was no reason left to protect that particular memory. I think she realized that it wouldn't matter to me, or that it wouldn't change how I felt about her mother.

And she was right.

"There was a woman who lived in the neighborhood," my grandmother told me. "You contacted her for only one reason, she came to visit for only one reason. She had something and she gave it to the women and after they took it, if they were pregnant the babies went away. I saw her at our apartment talking to my mother and my mother saw me. We never talked about it, but that was when no baby came."

Julia took something to force a miscarriage. She was clearly early enough along in her pregnancy that the loss was relatively unnoticed - she was not remarkably ill and the only reason my grandmother knew anything happened was because she knew who the woman was that came to the house and the reason why she would have been there. I do not know if any of her brothers were aware of the visit, although I think it likely that they would have been oblivious to who the woman was and what she brought with her. This was the 1920s and pregnancy, both having one and ending one, was much more the purview of women.

Clearly Julia was pregnant between her last two children and decided to end the pregnancy.

I wanted to know why. My great grandmother quite famously loved babies. She was known as a stern mother but became quite sentimental over babies. Although I can appreciate how difficult her life was at that point - seven children and a husband who drifted in and out of employment when he wasn't passed out drunk - abortion was still a major step for her. The way my grandmother talked about this mysterious woman however (I have forgotten her name unfortunately), it was not unusual for the neighborhood. While she w

Your parents break up when you are eight years old and for a long time you are angry and disappointed and sorry for all the impossible might have beens. Then you get older and grow up and start to see them as people not "parents" and you start to understand why things happened the way they did and how sometimes you just can't stop those things from happening. And then you blink and you are thirty and all the wishing in the world won't stop your father from dying and you think this emptiness in your heart can not possibly be there forever and then he is ten years gone and you still feel the weight of his hand in yours just like when you were a little girl.

And still you miss him.

Then a box of pictures arrives from your aunts - pictures from your grandparents' photo albums, pictures now sent out into the world as your grandfather also is gone. And you see yourself when you were small and you see your parents and your brother and now the only story you want to tell anyone any more is that you were born loving these three people more than anyone, more than anything, more than everything. The only reason you know what family means is because of them.

I could tell you my childhood wasn't perfect and that would be true. But when I look at this picture all I know is that in every way that mattered, it was. I have always been, and still remain, the lucky daughter of wonderful parents and the little sister of the best brother in the world. And that is by far the better truth.

Merry Christmas from the Mondor family, December 1972.

When I was growing up my family was all about the reuse of everything. We had the obvious (hand me down clothes) but also hand me down bikes and cars and furniture and pots and pans (my mother still uses pots from my great grandmother and I have my grandmother's colander). One thing that was absolutely forbidden however was used mattresses. My grandmother insisted that every mattress we ever use was purchased brand new from the store and sealed in plastic. No exceptions. This is why.

Evelyn was my grandmother's cousin, on her mother's side. (Her mother was my great grandmother's younger half sister, Ernestine.) Sometime in the 1930s, when Evelyn was married and the mother of three, her husband came across a mattress and other furniture items on the street in the Bronx. The occupants of an apartment were moving out and could not afford to take all of their things with them (not that uncommon). He brought the bed and mattress home and set it up for their son. Evelyn and the little boy (whose name we believe was Allen) laid down on the bed for a nap. And then they got sick - very very sick. And then they died, both of them, from typhus. Her husband, devastated and guilt-ridden, took his two surviving daughters and returned to South America, where he was from. And that was the last anyone knew of Evelyn's family. We never heard another word from them.

It is about the saddest story ever.

I do not know where Evelyn and her little boy were buried, and unlike my great grandfather's family, this side was not Catholic and thus I don't think I will find them in St. Raymond's Cemetery where all those relatives are. Searching the census databases, I hope I can find her married name, and then track down the death certificates. Evelyn was only a very distant relation and thus her life and death do not matter in the grand scheme of my family history research, but seeing this picture always makes me sad. It is an original photo my grandmother gave me - on the back is written "Evelyn and her son, Marie, Carol and grandmother - all are gone now but Carol". I don't know who wrote that (not my grandmother for sure) but it's a sorrowful note in the record of a family. Once these people were happy and then they were gone - and it was almost like they had never lived at all.

More on Evelyn if/when I find her final resting place.

[Post pic back row, Marie Gonzalez, her mother Maria Pressl - my great great grandmother - and her sister, Carol Redmond. Front row is Evelyn - Marie Gonzalez's daughter - and little Allen circa 1935.]

My great grandmother, who was by all accounts Austro-Hungarian and not religious at all, somehow managed to meet and marry my great grandfather, an Irish Catholic through and through. This is a huge mystery to me as it is unlikely that his family in particular would have been pleased with the match. I do not know how Tom Lennon and Julia Pressl met although one famous family story involves them being asked to leave a dance floor when they were dating as they were too close. When they did decide to get married they went to the justice of the peace in Ft Lee, NY which is shocking when you consider that the other Lennon marriages took place in churches in NYC.

For her part, Julia never attended church when her children were growing up. They attended with their father and then, after he died, on their own (which is pretty amazing because they were teenagers or younger at the time of his death). Tom was buried in St Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx, an old and now closed Catholic cemetery. Julia was laid to rest in FL where my grandparents and great uncles, all of whom moved south, are also buried.

Churches are wonderful when you are researching family history - especially the Catholics who always required baptisms. Often you will not even know a child was born if he or she died as an infant, but the church will have baptismal records for an entire family, and that's how you find long lost children.

The relationship between Julia and the church got complicated after her husband died. When Tom was dying the church insisted that they have a religious ceremony (they had all 8 children at this point) and the Monsignor then destroyed their civil marriage certificate. After Tom subsequently died, Julia had no civil proof of their marriage - and no way to obtain widows benefits. Reverend Cullen (interesting that it is "Rev" and not "Father") of Sacred Heart Church in the Bronx (where Tom and all of his family and the children belonged) sent a letter to the department of welfare requesting proof of her marriage so Julia could receive benefits. He included information on the church ceremony and acknowledged that the church destroyed their legal marriage certificate. My grandmother remembered the Monsignor coming to their apartment and I have a copy of the letter he wrote on Julia's behalf.

After all that, I wish they had a happy ending - but more on that to come.

[Post pic, Julia circa 1910 (she is wearing a wedding ring) and Tom, pictured center wearing cap, circa 1905-1910 - according to my grandmother, before they were married. The full picture is of a horse drawn beer wagon, which was a place where he worked.]

Okay. So every year I make fun of it, yet every year I go. I think that going un-costumed says something for a person. And going on professional day makes it totally worth it! No crowds, some interesting panels, and only a few Princess Leias to contend with.

First off I went to a panel conducted by Lana Adlawan and Alison Hendon from the Brooklyn Public Library, who presented a very nice core collection covering kids of all ages and young adults. The panel was well attended, and offered up some great advice to libraries collecting gns and a couple gentle nudges to the comic makers about things that would be great to see content wise (like how 'bout some diversity?).

Then off to the floor, I went. As I said, professional day made life so much easier. Compared to BookExpo and ALA it was as close to heaven as a body could get in the Javits Center.

One of my first stops was :01 (First Second), where a lovely special of $10 books and a buy 2 get 1 free special was on. So I got a personal copy of Life Sucks, some Little Vampire, and some Sardine.

Then off touring all kinds of indie stuff, which I love. And I finally ended up right in front of Jimmy Gownley. He is always so lovely. He signed my new Amelia Rules When the Past is Present, gave me some posters for my Amelia lovin' kids at school, and had a little bit of a chat. Now I'm kicking myself for not buying an Amelia t-shirt! But back to the books...

Amelia at 10 is at a bit of a cross roads. Not only is her mother going on a date, but Ninja Kyle has managed to invite Amelia to a sports banquet. Amelia's mom is not so sure about this, but Amelia assures her that this is not a date, since Kyle and the other Ninjas go to catholic school, and there will be a jillion nuns present! Amelia figures they have a lot to celebrate since Joan has just announced that she's not moving after all.

But when they are at the banquet, Amelia learns why Joan isn't going anywhere. Joan's dad is going instead, and since he's a military man, where he is going is no place good.

Told partly in the present, and with some flashbacks of Amelia's life in NYC with her friend Sunday, and also including a fantastic family history at the end, this latest installment of Amelia Rules is a winner. Super smart jokes (my favourite is the epi pen one!), witty banter, and spot on family circumstances make this graphic novel ring so true for readers. These are books that kids return to over and over, and for the first time in a long time, I shed a few tears over a gn. And as usual, I am hungry for more!

I just learned that my dad and my great-great-grandpa could about be twins. William Alexander Blair was a railroad agent, and the story goes (I have the details around here somewhere--I think in my interview of my grandpa) that he met his wife, Minnie Hested, at a railroad station in Irene, IL, where he worked.

It's hard to tell in the more formal shots, like the one I showed you below in the first post below about Bess Whitman's family, but as I've been scanning these negatives from Bess Blair's collection, here's where that family look comes from: the Blair side. Which makes it quite interesting that my dad's name is Blair. :D

From a couple shots of Grandpa Blair (William Alexander Blair) in about 1915:






And here's a picture of my dad from about 10 years ago.




Let me see if I can find a better, more current picture...




And then, let's compare side by side.






Notice William's lack of a tie. Why, I think the last time my dad wore a tie was at my sister's wedding in 1994. Love the mustache? Why, my dad loves his, too! (At this point, I think they're the same mustache.) And those eyebrows! And that hairline! I couldn't find a good shot to show it, but it's my dad all over again. (Not to mention at least half his brothers, but I'm looking at Dad right now.) If William's picture were in color, I bet his skin would be just as red and leathery as my dad's, from years of working in the sun as a farmer.

Not to mention, I love that this photo of my great-great-grandpa:



...was taken by my great-grandma when she was just about 20.

I took this picture of my dad when I was about 20, learning to use my own camera and play in the darkroom.



There's a story there. There are so many stories there (don't worry, I'm writing at least one of them.

When we were young boys, my brother and I swam in the surf off Montauk Point. We spent hours leaning into the strong waves, ducking under as the swirling foam crashed onto the beach, and pulling ourselves back to our feet, only to plunge into the icy water again and swim a few yards before another wave slammed into us and we'd stagger back to shore. Those were days when it felt like we were

The morning has slipped by without a warning. We're freshly back from Church and on to the task of making an early dinner. My mom will join us for our favorite meal of homemade Chicken Pot Pie, fresh green beans, corn on the cob, a nice big salad and a warm pan of cornbread. Desert will be mom's "famous" Strawberry Shortcake.

My Chicken Pot Pie

I love these early-ish Sunday dinners and the memories that they can create. It's a time to be together and enjoy the simple act of sharing a meal.

In the meantime, Gary and my youngest son, Brayden, have gone to pick up the last load of stones for my garden path. We need 120 stones altogether. We brought 63 home yesterday and today they have gone back to get the remaining 57. This will truly be a task, but one that will be worth the labor.

Garden Stones


Yesterday was a very busy and hectic Saturday, and as a result, I wasn't able to visit here, although I did list 2 collage prints in My Etsy Shop.

"Simple Bird #13" Collage ACEO Print


"Happy Glamour Girl" 4" x 6" Collage Print


I hope this finds all of you having a relaxing Sunday with hopes for a smashing week ahead!!

Until Tomorrow:
Kim
Garden Painter Art
gnarly-dolls
Kim's Kandid Kamera

The souls of the people we love rush toward us like waves during their life-time. They touch our lives with magic for a brief moment, embracing us with their love, then retreat into an ocean of time. In their wake, they leave memories. And the memories, like waves, return again and again to wash over us, reminding us of the days that we spent together. My aunt--Sylvia B. Kessler--would have

In her Newbery Honor picture book, Show Way, Jacqueline Woodson draws a long, bright thread through history that radiates her deep and abiding love for family and freedom. Woodson begins her story by remembering the life of one of her ancestors, a nameless slave in Virginia, and ends telling family stories to her own daughter, Toshi, born free more than a century later and living with Woodson in

Thanks to all who commented in the Lurking post.

I, of course, looked up those I could (some people didn't leave links; others had blogger accounts that were private.) And I added some links to my blogroll and bloglines. (If I missed you, either comment or email me because I did try to find you!)

As I was reading Grace Lin's website, I found this funny story about Grace was Pacy until first grade.

So, here's my true name story. Or, actually, my grandmother's (that's her photo I use as an icon.)

Nana was named and christened Bridget. She was the only daughter, so her nickname was Ciss. Actually, she was only called Ciss. When she started school, an older cousin took her to be registered. As an aside, this was because by that time, her mother was widowed, raising her own four children, two nieces, a nephew, and working full time. Can I say "busy?" And the cousin who took her to school didn't like the name Bridget; she preferred the name Beatrice. And that was the name the school wrote down. It wasn't until Nana went to get married that she learned her real name. Oh, and as an aside? The 1920 census has Nan's name as Frances.