A friend, who is a published writer, has told me he is writing a story about a prodigal son who returns home to Nebraska only to be rejected by his family and by people of his native town. I don't know much about him (my friend) other than that he is from Nebraska and is not currently in Nebraska, and I asked him if the story was autobiographical. He laughed and said that no, it was inspired by a news story he had read in a newspaper about something that happened in New England, "and on what you told me", and he decided to transplant the locale to the places that he knows well.
Following the rejection the principal character first leaves the town, then after some time, months or years, returns to exact his revenge. Whether that part is also based on facts or imagined I am not sure, and my friend didn't explain. Nor did he explain what it was that I had told him that made it into his story.
Friday, September 26, 2014
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
92 Years Later
Her name was Hildegarde Nowak, she was a medical doctor and she married my paternal grandfather two years after his first wife, my grandmother died. They shared their medical office across the street from a hospital at the street address number eleven. Did they also live there with my father who was then 11? Seven years later my grandfather died and my father became an orphan at 18, starting his law studies. What happened to Hildegarde I don't know, as I don't know how my grandmother died,or where she is buried. I have found the location of my grandfather's grave.
All of this more or less, so to speak, information gathered from Internet searches, with little or no certitude. I found the name of Hildegarde Nowak, for example, in a digitized version of a newspaper published in a city some 75 miles from where they lived, four years after they married, and listing the names and addresses of thousands of doctors eligible to vote in the upcoming election of a medical society.
Is there more information to be found in archives of various institutions? What happened to the records and certificates of births, marriages, deaths, degrees? And if they exist, are they accessible to us, or are they guarded by bureaucrats sitting in forts made of reams of paper?
I suspect I am the last person alive who knows something about Hildegarde Nowak, and certainly the last person who knows something, very little as it happens, about my grandmother. It's been 94 years since she died.
People say that with today's technology more will be remembered and passed on to future generations. I doubt it. Unless you're a Rockefeller, Kennedy, or a famous serial killer, all knowledge about you (and me) will be gone 92 years from now.
All of this more or less, so to speak, information gathered from Internet searches, with little or no certitude. I found the name of Hildegarde Nowak, for example, in a digitized version of a newspaper published in a city some 75 miles from where they lived, four years after they married, and listing the names and addresses of thousands of doctors eligible to vote in the upcoming election of a medical society.
Is there more information to be found in archives of various institutions? What happened to the records and certificates of births, marriages, deaths, degrees? And if they exist, are they accessible to us, or are they guarded by bureaucrats sitting in forts made of reams of paper?
I suspect I am the last person alive who knows something about Hildegarde Nowak, and certainly the last person who knows something, very little as it happens, about my grandmother. It's been 94 years since she died.
People say that with today's technology more will be remembered and passed on to future generations. I doubt it. Unless you're a Rockefeller, Kennedy, or a famous serial killer, all knowledge about you (and me) will be gone 92 years from now.
Monday, September 8, 2014
Downtown Madmen
The cafe is a safe place. Patrons leave their electronics sitting on tables while they visit the restroom, stand in line at the counter or visit their acquaintances at far off tables. One older regular without a moment hesitation steps out the door to run errands downtown and stand in a long line at the post office, leaving behind his laptop computer set on top of a strange metal contraption which raises the screen and lowers the keyboard, all of it on top of a corner table which he must claim, I figure, early in the day.
On Thursday last week, I was sitting at a table against the back wall with my friend Roger, telling him jokes that I had found in a book of World War I memoirs, which were told by Hungarian soldiers marching to the Eastern front to be slaughtered in the battle of Rava Ruska during the early days of the war. The jokes sounded fresh maybe because they were Jewish jokes, the characters in them invariably named Cohen and Weiss.
Roger, another avid reader, who unlike me reads mostly non-fiction, popular science and history books (we like to recommend books to each other and never reach for those recommendations) but does not treat fiction with disdain as many science obsessed people do these days, was telling me about the languages of New Guinea, dozens or hundreds of them, still unclassified and unwritten, and dying.
Noah, another regular at the cafe, then left his 17'' Dell laptop on the table near the entrance and walked over to join us. He began to tell us about the growth of the Arctic ice in the past year or two, some 40%, he had read, all contradicting the disaster prognoses of the past decade.
A man shouting something outside was heard. I could see him from my seat, far out on the street, my companions could only hear him. He was threatening to kill everybody unless the war was stopped, is what I could make out. Then, a fire engine siren from the station around the corner sounded, heads turned again, the fire truck followed by an ambulance passed the cafe on the way to the disaster, and the gentle hum of the cafe returned. Classical music played on the cafe speakers. The three of us continued talking.
A man walked into the cafe and sat down at a table near the entrance, his back towards the room. I thought I recognized the shouter, but I said nothing. After a few minutes he got up, approached the counter, slipped a bill into the tip jar and walked out of the cafe. We continued our conversation and then Noah returned to his table and his Dell computer. He raised his arms in a sign of frustration. What happened?
It turns out that the man, this mad street shouter, had eaten Noah's sandwich, picked up the dollar bill which Noah had left sitting on the table, and generously tipped the cafe's sandwich maker before going his way.
On Thursday last week, I was sitting at a table against the back wall with my friend Roger, telling him jokes that I had found in a book of World War I memoirs, which were told by Hungarian soldiers marching to the Eastern front to be slaughtered in the battle of Rava Ruska during the early days of the war. The jokes sounded fresh maybe because they were Jewish jokes, the characters in them invariably named Cohen and Weiss.
Roger, another avid reader, who unlike me reads mostly non-fiction, popular science and history books (we like to recommend books to each other and never reach for those recommendations) but does not treat fiction with disdain as many science obsessed people do these days, was telling me about the languages of New Guinea, dozens or hundreds of them, still unclassified and unwritten, and dying.
Noah, another regular at the cafe, then left his 17'' Dell laptop on the table near the entrance and walked over to join us. He began to tell us about the growth of the Arctic ice in the past year or two, some 40%, he had read, all contradicting the disaster prognoses of the past decade.
A man shouting something outside was heard. I could see him from my seat, far out on the street, my companions could only hear him. He was threatening to kill everybody unless the war was stopped, is what I could make out. Then, a fire engine siren from the station around the corner sounded, heads turned again, the fire truck followed by an ambulance passed the cafe on the way to the disaster, and the gentle hum of the cafe returned. Classical music played on the cafe speakers. The three of us continued talking.
A man walked into the cafe and sat down at a table near the entrance, his back towards the room. I thought I recognized the shouter, but I said nothing. After a few minutes he got up, approached the counter, slipped a bill into the tip jar and walked out of the cafe. We continued our conversation and then Noah returned to his table and his Dell computer. He raised his arms in a sign of frustration. What happened?
It turns out that the man, this mad street shouter, had eaten Noah's sandwich, picked up the dollar bill which Noah had left sitting on the table, and generously tipped the cafe's sandwich maker before going his way.
Sunday, September 7, 2014
N not R!
Several ago, my brother-in-law, one of those dangerous people who having tasted a little of something think themselves the all knowing experts on the subject of this something, attempted to persuade me that some website company would perform genealogical research free of charge for anyone who asked. I was at the time beginning to become interested in the genealogy of my family having stumbled by accident on a sketchy genealogical chart which included my father and grandfather and was published online by a hobbyist professor at a San Diego, California university.
My brother-in-law convinced himself that the company behind this website would endeavor to fill for us in the holes in my chart and more, and ignoring my protests fed it information about me and my family. Free of charge. To the website, needless to say! Which was the point of this suckers' game. The website, one of many such enterprises, started out collecting information from gullible internauts, only to begin selling it back to them and others once it built its database. Voila! Neither my brother-in-law nor I have learned anything we hadn't known before.
Meanwhile, I continued my research, all of it on Internet as I reside far from the places where some physical records might still exist that haven't yet been digitized and published on the web. My parents didn't leave behind much information about their parents and grandparents, and who can blame them - living as they were through tumultuous times they had better matters to worry about than vanity projects like genealogy.
It's been as I said several years. I haven't found much new information, nothing about my mother's side of family, and just a few details about my father's family to supplement the San Diego professor's chart. My father's mother remains a mystery. She died when he was young, 9 years old I only recently discovered, and where she's buried I don't know. His father apparently remarried, of this second wife I know nothing. While the San Diego chart shows my grandfather's ancestors all the way back to the beginning of the 18th century, when it comes to my grandmother it only states her name and birthplace.
The other day a breakthrough of sorts. I dug up on one of the genealogical portals the names of my paternal grandmother, her parents and her two sisters. The records were added in July of this year by a man whose name sounds unfamiliar, and who, according to this portal, maintains 100 profiles there. Another hobbyist? While the portal promises additional information for the sum of $119.40 per annum (0.40?!), (and predictably demands your family information when you sign up for the limited free option), it also displays large font question marks next to most of those details it offers me for free. In other words, they ain't got nothing more!
Oh, and in my grandmother's maiden name the 'r' in the San Diego chart is replaced by an 'n' in this new finding.
I took this correction to be correct, but it didn't lead me anywhere. I spent another fruitless day searching the web for new clues, and ended up reminding myself that for information to appear somewhere on the net where it can be found, someone, a live person, has to have a reason to place it there, and then to act on this reason. The search continues.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Droughts
We are experiencing another drought in these lands, a regular, once in a decade disaster here. A desert will unfortunately remain a desert underneath all those skyscrapers, shopping centers, highways, palm trees imported from Mexico and eucalyptus trees from Australia. News media report that good citizens have been squealing on bad citizens to the authorities. Bad citizens have been observed by good citizens wasting water sprinkling their lawns, and washing their mega SUV vehicles, and they must be punished. Pavlik Morozov lives!
My own private insignificant drought has come to a temporary hiatus when I stumbled on two real-to-life stories, one of them only a conversation, actually, plus new info regarding my long lost mysterious paternal grandmother. Now all I have to do is write it all down.
My own private insignificant drought has come to a temporary hiatus when I stumbled on two real-to-life stories, one of them only a conversation, actually, plus new info regarding my long lost mysterious paternal grandmother. Now all I have to do is write it all down.
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