Last person to receive a Civil War pension dies

Let me start by saying:

Black Lives Matter.

I don't want to ignore or pay lip service; I recognize my statement does little to help. I recognize that I do not write/exist in a vacuum. I put that statement out into the Universe from my heart for the Universe to absorb and manifest change. And, yes, I recognize that is not enough, but by putting it out there, I pray for it to help me in my every action to manifest the change that we as humankind need.


A couple of weeks ago I realized I missed getting The Week Magazine. I love the little distillations of the news of the day. And I love the different perspectives. I really only watch one national news program and sitting beside a spouse that does not view the world the same way I view the world has made me notice that perhaps the news outlet I watch is not quite as diverse in perspective as I was convinced it was. I hope* resuming my subscription to The Week will allow me to see outside my bubble a little better.

However, my reason for popping up today of all days is because I saw something written by Catherine Garcia in The Week that brought me back to genealogy and family history. Of course it is perhaps ironic that it should be something about the Civil War - AND, to boot, that it is about someone who started out as a Confederate and changed to become a Union soldier.

Irene Triplett, whose father Mose Triplett served in the Confederate Army before defecting and joining the Union, died Sunday at age 90, following complications from a broken hip. The North Carolina resident was able to receive her dad's Civil War pension — $73.13 every month — because she had cognitive impairments and qualified as a helpless adult child of a veteran.

Military records show that after two years as a Confederate soldier, Mose Triplett "deserted" in 1863, just one week before his old regiment was nearly wiped out during the Battle of Gettysburg. He applied for his pension in 1885, and Irene Triplett was born in 1930, when her father was 83 years old. Her mother, 27 at the time, was his second wife. Mose Triplett died in 1938 at age 92.

One of Irene Triplett's relatives told The Wall Street Journal she had a rough childhood, with kids saying her father was a "traitor." Later in life, she found friendship with other residents at Accordius Health, a nursing home in Wilkesboro. Jamie Phillips, the activities director, told The Washington Post Triplett like playing Bingo, listening to gospel music, and telling her friends about what she heard on the news. "I never saw her angry," she said. "Everything was funny."

I just cut and pasted that above from the digital version of the magazine. In the print edition, it mentions that Irene's father, Mose Triplett, fought with the 3rd North Carolina Mounted Infantry, a Union Regiment known as Kirk's Raiders, which carried out a campaign of sabotage.

The Smithsonian Magazine has a nice write up about Ms. Triplett here. It that article it mentions when the last Civil War soldiers and widows died.

The last two veterans of the Civil War died in the 1950s at more than 100 years old, according to U.S. News. The last Confederate widow, Maudie Hopkins, died in 2008 at age 93, while the last Union widow, Gertrude Janeway, died in 2003 at age 93.

The Smithsonian article directed me through a link to Digital Heritage.org's article on Kirk's Raiders. Digital Heritage indicates that it is "Connecting Appalachian culture and traditions with the world." It is created and maintained by students of Western Carolina University. I have to say, what a rabbit hole this has led me down. And a lot of same shit, different day. A lot of gray and nuance and history-is- written-by-the-victor kind of thing. If you read and believe this article, though a Union soldier - you know, "the good guys", George Kirk sounds like a psychopath. [But I was not there and I am not trained to identify a socio- or psychopath.]

Well, that was more than I bargained for.... I just thought I was observing the passing of an era. It might be interesting to spend some time with the women who married the veterans to secure the pension. That action certainly suggests an interesting context for family history.



* Yes, I recognize that just hoping is inadequate.

Where your atoms came from

This is so interesting. I recently re-watched Bill Moyer's PBS interview with Joseph Campbell and what struck me was that Joseph Campbell used the existence of myths as the conduit for understanding our connectedness to the universe. That myths are our way of understanding that everything that we are made up of is in essence the universe. Powerful stuff.

And it brings me to my father... he was also very struck by this realization. He gave me the book The Power of Myth before he died. I wish I had asked my father more questions about what resonated for him - meaning, what in particular it was that struck him so profoundly. I wonder if he used the Hero's Journey to understand some of the aspects of his own life.

It is worth the watching. And now I need to go out and get the book again.

Taken from the Joseph Campbell Foundation web site.

As much as half of all the matter in the Milky Way, including the atoms that make up the human body, may have come from distant galaxies up to 1 million light-years away, reports NBCNews.com. Researchers at Northwestern and other universities used supercomputer simulations to study how galaxies evolve over billions of years. Exploding stars, known as supernovas, eject trillions of tons of atoms into space with such force that they can escape the gravitational pull of their own galaxy. Carried by powerful galactic winds consisting of gas particles from the supernova explosion, these atoms can travel across the universe at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second to another galaxy—which can then “steal” the material. It was previously thought galactic winds weren’t powerful enough to transfer a significant amount of mass from one galaxy to another. But this new analysis finds that the Milky Way absorbs about one sun’s worth of “star stuff” each year. In a very real sense, says co-author Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, “we are extragalactic visitors or immigrants in what we think of as our galaxy.”

Taken from the August 18th edition of The Week magazine.

When the Post Office was Cutting Edge

I have cut and pasted this very long article here because I have two great grandparents who worked for this fine institution. I have more information about Oliver Tree Lee than John Maher. (Here we have some information about one of his daughters Lillian.) The Post Office seems to be the reason that Oliver left NYC and moved to Troy where he met my great grandmother - so I have the post office to thank for my very existence. Eventually I will get back on to family research... I have been distracted recently.

For nearly 200 years, mail service in the United States was a hotbed of new ideas and innovation, said author and researcher Kevin Kosar. Where did it all go wrong?

A pneumatic mail tube in Brooklyn, 1899

In 1897, a year when mail was still largely delivered by horse and wagon, construction began on an innovative scheme beneath the streets of Philadelphia. Using an intricate network of compressors and metal pipes, the new system could shoot a capsule holding a few hundred letters across a city in several minutes, far faster than a postman could get it there. The investor in this new technology wasn’t some kind of delivery startup, the FedEx or UPS of its day. It was the U.S. Post Office.

Behind the experiment was Postmaster General John Wanamaker, who was inspired by Paris, London, and other European cities that were trying out pneumatic posts. It seemed a natural fit for America’s growing metropolises, where mail was hauled by horse cart and carried on foot. Wanamaker had the sense not to try to concoct such a system in-house, since the agency had no such expertise. So he did something clever: He called for private proposals to build pneumatic tube systems.

The Pneumatic Transit Co. of New Jersey was the winning bidder, and a public-private partnership was born. It agreed to pay to build the system, then to charge the Post Office for its use. The first tube could shoot a capsule of mail nearly three-fifths of a mile through a 6.5-inch tube from the city’s main post office to the East Chester Street post office. Soon, similar systems were installed in Boston, St. Louis, and Chicago. New York City’s system, the largest, could move 6 million pieces per day at 30 miles per hour from the Bronx to Manhattan and Brooklyn. Collectively, the Post Office’s pneumatic tube system ran more than 120 miles, with 130 postal “rocketeers” feeding mail into it every 15 seconds.

When Americans think about the most innovative agency in the government, they think about the Pentagon or NASA. But throughout much of its history, that title could just as easily have fallen to the Post Office, which was a hotbed of new, interesting, sometimes crazy ideas as it sought to accomplish a seemingly simple task: deliver mail quickly and cheaply. The Post Office experimented with everything from stagecoaches to airplanes—even pondered sending mail cross-country on a missile. For decades, the agency integrated new technologies and adapted to changing environments, underpinning its ability to deliver billions of pieces of mail every year, from the beaches of Miami to the banks of Alaska, for just cents per letter.

We think a lot about how innovation arises, but not enough about how it gets quashed. And the United States Postal Service is a great example of both. Today, what was once a locus of innovation has become a tired example of bureaucratic inertia and government mismanagement. But its descent into its current state was not foretold. A series of misguided rules and laws have clipped the Post Office’s wings, turning one of the great inventors of the government into yet another clunky bureaucracy.

A mail wagon in Boston around 1895

In a sense, innovation was baked into the Post Office from the beginning. America’s national postal service precedes the founding: It was born in July 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence was ratified. During the American Revolution, the U.S. postal system’s duty was to deliver communications between Congress and the military commanders fighting the British. And for the first postmaster general, Congress appointed an inveterate tinkerer, Benjamin Franklin. He rigged up a system of contractors to haul mail by horse and on foot. It worked.

From the start, the Post Office Department, as it was called until 1970, had to be innovative. There was little money to fund the startup agency, and its task—delivering mail to anywhere in the country—was immense. In turn, Congress gave the agency a good amount of operational freedom. In 1785, Congress authorized the Post Office to hire private stagecoaches to deliver mail. It was a smart idea that leveraged private-sector investments in transportation but did not commit the agency itself to bearing the great cost of purchasing horses and hiring riders. Later, the Post Office would contract to have mail carried by steamboats, railroads, and private delivery companies.

The agency also had the authority to erect post offices, but at first it licensed tavern owners to provide postal services to thirsty customers instead. That changed during the 19th century, when the postal service expanded massively. In 1790, the nation had 75 post offices; by 1900, there were more than 76,000. Then came home delivery: Mail reached many city dwellers at home by the mid-1860s and expanded to farmhouses and remote houses in the 1880s. Henry Ford built his first car in 1901. Four years later, the Post Office was experimenting with mail delivery by automobile.

The first half of the 20th century was a dynamic time for the Post Office. It immensely improved delivery by adopting innovations from the private sector and abroad. Much like the pneumatic tubes, some of the schemes incorporated new technology we no longer even associate with mail. During World War II, the Post Office adopted V-Mail, an idea pioneered in England. Families wishing to correspond with soldiers overseas would write the letter on a V-Mail form, which was placed in a capsule and shipped to a facility where it was scanned to microfilm. The hundred-foot rolls of film, which could hold 1,700 letters, were carried overseas and unsealed, and then the letters were individually printed and delivered to GI recipients.

Overshadowing all the invention, however, was the creeping sclerosis of the Post Office as an institution. As a monopoly, it was insulated from competitive pressures, allowing inefficiency to creep into its operations and management. Worse, political interests had sunk deep, with Congress setting postage rates too low and too frequently trying to dictate the location of post offices and mail-sorting facilities.

Booming business, however, enabled the postal system to avert a crisis for decades. In 1900, 7 billion pieces of mail were delivered; by 1960, the agency was moving 63 billion letters and parcels. The department often ran a profit, and it sowed those profits into new mail-delivery technologies.

Things began to change in the 1960s. Postal workers unionized, and President John F. Kennedy authorized them to bargain collectively in 1962. Despite growing mail volume, the Post Office ran perennial deficits, and its investment in the guts of the system—mail receipt and sortation—lagged. The system broke down in Chicago in 1966, and 10 million pieces of mail were backlogged for days.

After a wildcat strike broke out in New York City in 1970, Congress abolished the Post Office Department and replaced it with the U.S. Postal Service, an independent agency. The Postal Reform Act removed some of the congressional involvement in its operations. In exchange, policymakers reduced the agency’s dependency on the U.S. Treasury and demanded it become self-sufficient.

This new-look postal system had been conceived by a Nixon-appointed corps of brain trusters and businessmen with the aim of turning the agency into a public corporation with minimal political interference. Instead, the plan infused the new agency’s DNA with some of the same clashing political interests that were hobbling the agency. Big mailers benefit from subsidies written into the law. Postal workers must be unionized and are entitled to bargain collectively. Folks in far-flung Alaska and Hawaii are entitled to the same postage rates and services as everyone else—no matter the cost—and Congress continues to insist that mail be delivered six days per week to appease certain big mailers, postal unions, and some rural residents.

Innovation at the agency flagged. Upgrades in mail-processing machinery were delayed over union objections that jobs would be lost. So, too, were attempts to contract out more postal work to private carriers or delivery companies. USPS operations became increasingly governmental as collaboration with private-sector companies flagged.

At the same time, technology was rapidly catching up to the Postal Service. The first threat was actually a miss: Although the electronic fax arrived in the early 1970s, it did not eat into the USPS’s business. So when cellular-phone technology arrived in the late 1980s and the internet erupted in the mid-1990s, USPS officials mostly shrugged. Annual revenues climbed, and the USPS’s employee cohort rose to nearly 800,000 before the end of the 20th century.

The USPS did upgrade some of its internal technology. Its letter-sorting machines have sensors with optical character recognition. Yet relative to the world around them, these improvements are nothing compared with the Post Office Department’s innovations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the new sorting machines have not been reliable, and the agency’s parcel logistics lag behind those of private-sector companies like FedEx and UPS. It is as if the agency has given up on innovation and is utterly confident that mail volumes and revenues will grow forever.

Which has been a huge mistake. In 2008, the Great Recession’s teeth hit the mail business. Most mail is sent by big mailers, many of whom slashed their postal budgets and accelerated transferring their communications to less costly online means. Mail volume is down 25 percent since 2008, and the agency has hemorrhaged money. More of what USPS carries is advertising mail, which generates low profits. The mail-volume crash laid bare the cost of the USPS’s loss of innovation mojo. It is a labor-intensive, paper-toting company in a digital age, and USPS leadership has belatedly awakened to the reality that mail is not a growing business.

Private-sector companies may soon eat even more of the USPS’s lunch. Amazon is building a delivery network of its own, with lockers instead of post office boxes, and experimenting with drones. Uber also has nosed into the delivery business, and other companies are experimenting with autonomous delivery vehicles and robots.

USPS so far appears unable to innovate its way out of the mess it is in. The agency has $15 billion in debt and has shown little imagination to fundamentally transform the way it does business.

The agency has piloted a grocery-delivery business, despite the 2006 congressional prohibition on the agency entering new non-postal businesses. To date, the USPS has not released any financial results for this experiment, which seems doomed to fail. Why grocers would rather pay highly compensated letter carriers, rather than less costly bicycle delivery people or Uber drivers, is anything but obvious.

Nothing may sum up the Postal Service’s inability to innovate more than its failed partnership with Staples. A few years ago, the Postal Service agreed with Staples to expand consumer access to its shipping services. Upon entering select locations of the office-supply chain store, shoppers would “find a familiar-looking counter resembling a mini post office containing the most popular postal products and services,” the agency crowed. It was “one-stop shopping and shipping,” and Staples postal counters would be open seven days a week. The agency began piloting the Staples arrangement in November 2013 in Boston. More than 500 Staples stores nationwide had retail postal counters by the end of last year.

At first blush, the USPS-Staples partnership looked like a win-win arrangement. But the American Postal Workers Union did not see it that way. It decried the deal as an effort at union busting, because Staples personnel would man the postal counters.

Earlier this year, the National Labor Relations Board killed the USPS-Staples deal. Too weary to fight or fearful that it could not win in court, the USPS capitulated, and the Staples postal counters are being dismantled.

Pneumatic tubes didn’t survive, either: They became a victim both of their design and the Post Office’s success. Mail volumes grew fantastically over these decades, and the tubes could only carry so much. Ripping them out and replacing them with bigger tubes was deemed too pricey. Moving mail by truck would be more efficient. So the Post Office shut down its pneumatic mail tubes on Dec. 12, 1953.

That was an investment decision—the kind any company would have made, and one that allowed the Post Office to keep growing. The Staples deal, by contrast, drowned in a bureaucratic swamp, tangled up in politics and labor relations. Absent fundamental changes to these kinds of structural obstacles, the odds are long that the USPS will become the innovator it once was.

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in Politico. Taken from the September 22, 2017 The Week Magazine.

Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving.

Hope you are having a wonderful day.
I am off for a meal with people who share a family name with someone with whom I share DNA. So even though I have not known them long, they may be a cousin of my cousin.
How's that for a happy coincidence?

Origins of Humans

Honestly, I have no idea how scientists do it... study one little fossil like this jaw bone and extrapolate to certain conclusions. I would never have the patience, so God bless them and their willingness to study these fossils. Can you imagine what these scientists fantasies must be like? Dreaming for a discovery like this in order to advance the science? Wouldn't it be miraculous if DNA were discovered....? Maybe we cold have Jurassic Park for prehumans... and then we could see whose tree was the oldest. Kinda like when scientists did a DNA analysis on Otzi, the man found in the Alps.

Scientists have unveiled what they believe are the oldest Homo sapiens remains ever found, a major discovery that potentially upends our understanding of when and where our species evolved. The fossils—a skull, bones, and teeth from five ­individuals—were unearthed in a remote area of Morocco, in what was once a cave. After using advanced dating analysis on stone tools and a tooth found at the excavation site, researchers determined that the bones are between 300,000 and 350,000 years old—100,000 years older than any other known Homo sapiens fossils. The individuals had a mixture of modern and primitive characteristics, with a face and jutting jaw nearly identical to that of a modern human, and an elongated brain case characteristic of early humans. Until now, it was widely believed Homo sapiens evolved from earlier forms of the Homo genus in a small region of East Africa about 200,000 years ago, then spread out across the continent and the world. This discovery suggests our species arose much earlier, and that the process took place over a wider area. “We did not evolve from a single ‘cradle of mankind,’” paleoanthropologist Philipp Gunz, who co-authored the research, tells The New York Times. “We evolved on the African continent.” That conclusion remains controversial. With no universally accepted set of features that distinguishes modern humans from our older ancestors, some paleontologists say the new remains are merely an example of early humans just before they evolved into Homo sapiens.

Taken from the June 23rd print edition of The Week Magazine.

Emma Morano

This makes very sad to read:

The last surviving person born in the 19th century died at her home in northern Italy last week. Emma Morano, 117, was the world’s oldest person, and attributed her longevity to her genetics and her diet of three eggs a day—two of them raw—as well as her decision to stay single. Violet Brown, who was born in Jamaica on March 10, 1900, is now the oldest person on Earth.

I'm certainty glad I saw the blurb, though, letting me know of her passing. We met Emma here and here.

Rest in Peace, Emma.

I read this in the April 28th edition of The Week Magazine.

Firstborns are smartest

Being a second born.... I'm not sure I want to agree with this. And besides, my younger brother told me that Dad told him he was the smartest! (Do we think there might be some sibling stuff going on here?)

And what about the story about Europe's most fertile man from three years ago on this blog? If he has had 98 children, is the 98th less smart than the first? Or is it all about doting parents and not aged telomeres? I wonder if it's worth the investigation. It was always the mother that was blamed for problems in the past, but aged sperm also contributes to issues.

Here’s one to fuel sibling rivalries: New research suggests the order in which brothers and sisters are born may influence their relative intelligence. Researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Sydney analyzed data on roughly 5,000 American children, who were followed from pregnancy until age 14. They found that firstborns consistently outperformed their younger siblings on IQ tests—including for reading, matching letters, and picture vocabulary—and that the disparities began just 12 months after birth. The team speculates that this advantage may be traced back to the extra attention doting parents give to their first child. “First-time parents tend to want to do everything right and generally have a greater awareness of their interactions with and investments in the firstborn,” the study’s co-author, Jee-Yeon Lehmann, tells Today.com. With each additional child that parents have, Lehmann explains, they tend to have less time and energy to devote to activities they perceive as nonessential, such as reading, arts and crafts, and playing musical instruments. Another factor could be that first-time mothers are less likely to drink, smoke, or take part in other risky behaviors during pregnancy.

From my favorite news source, the distilled Week Magazine, March 3rd.

Good Week for:

Alone time, after an international study found that highly intelligent people tend to be happier when they spend more time alone, working on their goals and interests, and less time socializing with other people.

Hmmm. what does this say about the people in Lafayette, Louisiana? The happiest people in the United States? Just teasing.... I suspect we can possibly assume that the reason to live is to love and be loved, so community is what makes most people happy. And food, let's add food to what makes people happy.... At least for me.

I notice that New Orleans is not on that list... And New York, the most unhappy? Yikes. What does that say about all my ancestors? Guess it's a good thing we left!

Tidbit taken from the December 2, 2016 The Week Magazine.

OMG - a little German Family History

Without telling me she was doing so, or even that she had the information, my mother mailed me a substantial box filled with wonderful family history. If I were to guess, I'd say a lot of it was used to create the book "Our Heritage" written/assembled/gathered by my grandparents after WWII and privately published in 1955. Much of it, is 'modern', though - being birth announcements and news paper clippings about weddings and engagements. I also have some items in German which I will need to scan and post to the German Genealogy Facebook page I use and where I find very thoughtful and kind fellow users. As I write this, I realize that much of the files my mother gave me are for my mother's maternal line, the Dommerichs and the Siedenburgs.

Louis Ferdinand Dommerich - immigrant

Reinhard Siedenburg - first generation

As I write this and think about the current immigration situation here in the United States, I reflect on the fact that these men developed wonderful careers and amassed some wealth for their families and participated in the US economy. L.F. Dommerich had a dry goods store, Oelbermann, Dommerich & Co. and R. Siedenburg was the President of the New York Cotton Exchange. They both participated significantly with New York German banks and Insurance companies. It seems perhaps I have not written about these men yet, but I wrote about the Siedenburg immigrant here. 

I seem to have reflected a bit more on the Dommerichs - examples are here and here.

Oddly, though, some of the daughters of the Siedenburg line choose to take their father's money and head back to Germany and hitch themselves to some wealthy industrialists or titles.

(Researching the spelling of LF Dommerich's partner I found the link above. I will have to contact Mr. Walter Grutchfield to see what his connection is with the dry goods store.)

Baby Blanket

I learned just before Christmas that another branch is being added to the family tree, so I dug out my knitting needles and made the little one a blanket.

I used a free pattern by 'maanel' from Ravelry. Very simple, just a little texture.

I used Cascade Yarns Ultra Pima Paints 100% Pima washable cotton. The yarn itself was fine to work with, but I don't think I would use the bold variegated colors again for the blanket. I was told a the yarn shop that the current 'trend' in baby items is bold, not pastel.

I am happy to have something made with love to send to my cousin.

Happy Thanksgiving

I know I haven't been writing much, but I did want to take the time to put out to the universe that I wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving and I hope we all work towards peace and that we are kind to one another.

Orphaned Sisters Reunited

How fortunate they are to have found one another. What a wonderful, crazy story. (I wonder what their tree looks like...)

Two orphaned sisters who were separated in South Korea more than 40 years ago have been reunited after they coincidentally started working at the same hospital in Sarasota, Fla. Holly Hoyle O’Brien, 46, born Pok-nam Shin, and Meagan Hughes, 44, born Eun-sook, struck up an instant friendship while working as nurses on the same shift pattern, and began to suspect they might be related because of similarities in their stories. Both had “abandonment” listed on their orphanage papers, and both had been adopted by American families. The pair took DNA tests, which confirmed their kinship. “My first reaction was like, ‘Oh my God,’” said Hughes. “I have a sister.”

I have been carrying this story around with me for a while meaning to blog about it... Taken from the October 23, 2015 edition of the Week.

Family boosts longevity

Yikes. I thought it was friends. Our society is screwed, as we all move further and further away from our families. Dang, I need that tribe!

However, I have to say I have had fun connecting with far-flung relatives this four weeks. I have met probably a dozen or so second cousins on two different branches of my tree. Some people I knew their names, some I didn't know... and I found some aunts and uncles born in the middle of the 19th century, too... and they need a little exploration.

It’s become conventional wisdom that having lots of friends is essential to happiness and longevity. But a new study at the University of Toronto suggests that family bonds are far more important to adult well-being than friendships. Researchers surveyed some 3,000 people between 57 and 85, asking about their closest relationships, health, and well-being, and found that those who felt “extremely close” to several family members had a 6 percent risk of dying within five years. By contrast, people who lacked close family ties had a 14 percent mortality risk over the same period. Even those who weren’t close to their relatives had lower odds of death than people with little or no family. “Because you can choose your friends, you might expect that relationships with friends would be more important for mortality, since you might be better able to customize your friend network,” study author James Iveniuk tells WashingtonPost.com. “But it is the people who in some sense you cannot choose, and who also have little choice about choosing you, who seem to provide the greatest benefit to longevity.”

Taken from the September 9th edition of The Week Magazine.

The baby with three biological parents

I wonder how this might effect the DNA testing we are now doing to find family. And how would one express this in a family tree? Will cousins of the donor egg show up in the DNA testing?

A baby boy with genetic information from three parents has been born with the help of a controversial new in vitro fertilization technique. The procedure, called mitochondrial transfer, was created to prevent women with genetic mutations from passing along devastating diseases to their children. The first beneficiaries were a Jordanian couple who had lost two previous children and four pregnancies to Leigh syndrome, a fatal disorder that affects the developing nervous system. To enable them to have a healthy baby, New York–based fertility specialist Dr. John Zhang took the nucleus from one of the woman’s eggs and inserted it into a healthy donor’s egg that had had its own nucleus removed. The resulting egg contains the donor’s mitochondria but genetic information from the mother that will determine traits like eye and hair color; it was then fertilized with sperm from the father. About 99.9 percent of the embryo’s DNA came from his mother and father, with a tiny percentage from the donor mitochondria. The boy, now 6 months old, is healthy, but his birth has sparked criticism, since three-parent embryo techniques are banned in the U.S. because of fears they might lead to genetic abnormalities. Zhang performed the procedure in Mexico, and tells New Scientist he was justified in what he did. “To save lives is the ethical thing to do,” he said.

Taken from the October 14th edition to the Week Magazine.

Recent Irish Immigrant buys real estate - Thomas L. Wright

Gosh, so pathetic.... I did this research a while ago, but never put anything into context. I remember being delighted while searching through the dusty tomes in the Troy City Hall or Recorder of Deeds or some such place - see, sad, I don't even know where I was. What a terrible researcher I am.

I know from directories of the time that he lived at 301 4th Street. Here is an image from Google maps of the house as it appeared when the Google car went through the neighborhood.



In book 139, page 497 I took the following notes:

Thomas and Jane Wright
sold for $1,700
West side of 4th Street between Adams and Jefferson
certain map of the south part of the city of Troy made by Jared S. Weed for the Warren Farm Company - 11.17.1847
as lot 67
25' wide
120' long



I see that Prospect Park was not given to the city of Troy until 1902, so should we assume that the Warren Farm Company owned that land where the Park currently exists? Was the Warren Farm Company also the Warren Family, as mentioned at the Prospect Park website?

Prospect Park is a city owned park centrally located within the City of Troy. One of three major parks in the City. The park consists of approximately 80 acres of land conveyed by the Warren Family to the City of Troy by deed dated December 23, 1902. Prospect Park opens each season in early April and remains open through early November.

I found an extensive biography of the Warren Family of Troy here. Obviously very well-to-do. They sound a bit like that other Oliver Lee mentioned in a previous post here.

What a time to live, eh? Obviously it was not easy, but don't these stories make it sound like it *was* easy to make a fortune?

More notes, though with less information...

Book 60, Page 129 (so isn't this an earlier purchase of property?)
Thomas Wright with
Francis M. Mann, John P. Cushman Jacob

(What could that mean? I think I may have looked those people up in the Troy directory and I *think* they were lawyers or some such, so maybe Thomas *did* hitch his wagon to other up and coming people in town.)

Book 111, page 165
Thomas L. Wright
West side of 4th street between Adams and Jefferson
Lot 67
boarded by an alley

What was I telling myself? My notes don't seem helpful, do they? Argh!

Olive Lee is accepted to college

We are talking going to college in 1922 for a woman. I am very happy about it. As we have already mentioned, Herb was the first to "attend" college in my family, at least the Kirkpatrick/Wright side. I assume the Lee side, too. But Olive graduated! I should imagine her parents were exceedingly proud. I am, 94 years later.



So, no long essays, I guess. What a difference a century makes for applying to college!

We see that Secretary Doris L. Crockett signed Olive's acceptance letter. It seems that Secretary Crockett became Dean Crockett and has an award named after her:

Crockett Medal Award

(Dean Doris L. Crockett award for distinguished service)
Criteria:
To be considered for the Crockett Medal Award, the highest award given by the Alumnae Association, candidates should meet the following qualifications:
Should have shown loyalty to and consistent interest in the College.
To have demonstrated outstanding achievement in a chosen career field or in significant community service.
Be recognized for having high level of integrity of character.

Tribes

Sonofabitch, if I wasn't complaining to my friends last night about not being a part of a tribe... (Obviously it has been on my mind after reading that article about the guilds in the June 3rd edition of The Week Magazine.) And then the very next day this review of a new book entitled Tribe comes out printed in the Guardian UK, forwarded to me by the very friend listening to me bitch.

I guess, actually, it has been on my mind for a long time, as researching my German branches I learned that the early German settlers in New York clearly helped one another with organizations and politics. One of my great, great grandfathers was a founder of several banks and insurance companies. There is nothing today that I might rely on... even family is a little too dispersed to be counted on. (And, of course there is this scam among amateur genealogists of people claiming to be your cousin and then asking for financial support.)  

Photo taken from here

During John Ford’s celebrated western film The Searchers, John Wayne’s character spends years hunting for his niece Debbie, kidnapped as a child by Comanche Indians.

When he finally finds her, she initially wants to stay with her Comanche husband rather than return home.

Although shocking in the film, it’s historically accurate. White people captured by American Indians (author Sebastian Junger’s preferred name for Native Americans) commonly chose to stay with their captors - and the book cites a case of a captive woman who hid from her would-be rescuers.

Even more astonishingly, from the earliest days of Europeans in America, settlers of both sexes ran away to join Indian tribes. This wasn’t just a few people, it was hundreds and hundreds. The practice was so rife that in the early 1600s settler leaders made it an offence with harsh punishments, but over the following centuries people still ran off in huge numbers.

And it hardly ever happened the other way. Indians didn’t want to join white society.

The attraction, argues Junger, was the sense of community, the importance of the tribe, evident in other primates and in primitive human societies. The superficial attractions of American Indian life were obvious: sexual mores were more relaxed, clothing was more comfortable, religion less harsh.

But mostly it was the structure of Indian society that appealed. It was less hierarchical, essentially classless and egalitarian. As the people were nomadic, personal property hardly mattered, since it was limited to what you or your horses could carry.

What changed this natural way of living for humans was first agriculture, then industry. Accumulation of personal property led to people doing what they thought best for themselves, rather than for the common good. But, suggests Junger, we’re not happy like this. We’re wired to the lifestyle of the tribe.

Take the London Blitz during World War II. Before it began the government feared there would be riots and maybe even revolution as people fought one another for space in bomb shelters or for food.

In fact, exactly the reverse happened. People from different classes mixed in a way they hadn’t before and joined together in the face of a common enemy.
Historians credit the ‘spirit of the Blitz’ as the cause of the Labour landslide victory in the 1945 election, its strong feeling for community leading to the foundation of the NHS and a robust welfare state.

Those caught up in the bloody conflict in Bosnia often say they were happier during the war. The reason, they say, was they all pulled together, felt connected and part of something bigger than themselves.Junger, an American journalist and former war correspondent, gives many examples of what our modern way of living has cost us. In a modern city or suburb you can go through an entire day meeting only strangers. As affluence and urbanisation rise, rates of suicide and depression go up. According to the World Health Organisation, people in wealthy countries suffer eight times the depression rate of those in poorer ones. But when we revert to the tribe, things improve.

Junger spent time embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and says he was never alone there. Soldiers slept a dozen to a shelter. You couldn’t stretch out an arm without touching someone. Men of all colours, classes and creeds bonded as they had to look out for one another.

In a tribe the survival of the individual depends upon the survival of the group. The lack of this brotherhood is what makes it so hard for returning combat veterans to reintegrate into contemporary, fragmented societies.Community spirit in the U.S. rocketed after 9/11. The suicide rate dropped dramatically. There were no rampage shootings in public places like schools and colleges for two years.

Interestingly, such shootings happen only in middle-class rural or suburban areas. There has never been one in a poor inner-city location, where gangs provide a tribal sense of belonging.

This sense of bonding with the larger group begins almost at birth. In less developed countries, children sleep with or in close proximity to their parents and often an extended family group.

It’s only in Northern European countries (and the U.S.) that small children sleep alone. It’s only here that they go through a well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals or so-called ‘comfort’ blankets.

In Junger’s small, but convincingly argued, book he quotes the self-determination theory, the things necessary for contentment. People need to feel competent at what they do. They need to feel authentic in their lives.

Above all, they need to feel connected with others. It’s a good starting point for rethinking the way we live our troubled modern lives.

In the book I mentioned the other day, New Orleans: Race and Americanization, at least one of the essayists mentions how enslaved Africans would flee to the Indigenous Peoples, in this case the Choctaws and the Chickasaws, but it wasn't a matter of "sexual mores were more relaxed, clothing was more comfortable, religion less harsh", obviously.

Here's an update... I was looking back on some old posts and apparently I was bitching about tribes (or not being a part of one) way back in May 2015

Where Wealth Endures Centuries

Isn't this interesting? If only shoemakers from Northern Ireland were wealthy.... (Though I have an article below from the Week Magazine, it is not their article which I read first which talked about the showmaker's guild being one of the wealthiest guilds. The article may have mentioned the Medicis, but that was not the original thrust...)

I was thinking about this for present time. Where do those of us who are not associated with a profession fit in when writing about or studying history? What are the current merchant's guilds? I was never a member of a union which has rosters and meeting minutes. And any professional organization of which I was a part was not for life; and in many cases there were no meeting minutes. How will that group be studied? How will historians deal with gathering primary source material? With blogs, for example, will they be archived? And how much information do we need and whose job is it to sort out what should or shouldn't be kept?  I have journals from a great uncle chronicling a road trip when cars were new. It's not all that interesting, but it is precious to me. Particularly given he died at 20 of appendicitis.  (We all die, so why that makes him more special, I have no idea. I was told my grandmother adored him, but that is inevitable when you are a decade younger and he died when you are a child of the opposite sex.)

Image taken from Found the World

Previous economic research has suggested that a family's economic advantages (or disadvantages) usually dissipate within a few generations. New research by Italian economists Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Moretti begs to differ. The Bank of Italy economists used a unique tool, a 1427 census of Florence, to compare the wealth and occupation of Florentine families 600 years ago to those same families in 2011. "The top earners among the current taxpayers were found to have already been at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago," Barone and Moretti explain in an essay on their findings at the Center for Economic Policy Research's Vox site.

If you're looking to see how the Medici family has fared, you're out of luck — the researchers replaced family last names with letters to maintain confidentiality. But Barone and Moretti did find "evidence of dynasties in certain (elite) professions,"they write, noting that there's a higher probability a Florentine today will be a lawyers, banker (like the Medici family), medical doctor, pharmacist, or goldsmith if he or she has the last name of a family that was intensely involved in the same profession in Renaissance Florence. They also report finding "some evidence of the existence of a glass floor that protects the descendants of the upper class from falling down the economic ladder."

Barone and Moretti say they can't universalize their findings, noting in their working paper, "Intergenerational mobility in the very long run: Florence 1427-2011," that "Florence in the 15th century was already an advanced and complex society, characterized by a significant level of inequality and by a rich variety of professions and occupational stratification." But Quartz's Aamna Mohdin says that the new findings are "further evidence on how the rich remain rich," including research in England that a family's socioeconomic status can persist for more than 800 years. You can read more about Florence's lack of economic mobility, including Barone and Moretti's methodology and caveats, at Vox or in their research paper. Peter Weber

Taken from the June 3rd edition of the Week Magazine. 

Her Search For Her Mother Touches An Entire Chinese City

This story made me cry when I heard it the other day - one of those stories that you stay in your car to hear the whole thing, even though you have arrived at your destination.

I wanted to embed the interview, but I am not clever enough to figure out how to include it. Click here to find it.

Jenna Cook was born in China and abandoned on a street in the huge city of Wuhan in 1992 when she was just a baby.

Cook was adopted by a single American woman, a schoolteacher in Massachusetts, and later co-adopted by her godmother, who is her mother's partner.

Cook was accepted at Yale University, and at 20, she decided to go back to Wuhan in search of her birth mother.

A local newspaper in Wuhan wrote an article about her, touching off a strong response in the city and far beyond. Cook says she was contacted by people in every province in China. Some said they had given up children and others said they were simply taken by her quest.

Cook ultimately met with 50 families to see if she was their daughter.

In those talks, she discovered many things, including the collective pain of Chinese families who had given up children. In most cases, the families had wanted a boy and decided to give up the child when it turned out to be a girl.

Her efforts in China became her college thesis at Yale and an article in Foreign Policy. She spoke about her experience with Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep.

On how she went about searching

Maybe it was really naive of me, but I was hoping that maybe somebody would see my face and think, "Oh, she kind of looks like my cousin," or something like that. Like maybe my own body could serve as a type of evidence of my family, of where I come from, my own genes. I also ended up publicizing the story in Wuhan through the newspapers and through the television.

On who came to see her

In the end we met with almost 50 families that summer. So we heard 50 different stories, and I imagined that it would be mostly women, but I was definitely wrong. There were birth mothers who came alone, but there were also many birth fathers who came alone, and some families brought like the entire family. There would be moms and dads with the grandparents and then other siblings and then the grandkids. There would be like eight or nine people in the room. It was really incredible.

On what she heard from birth families

If I had to kind of extract one coherent narrative, I think they talked a lot about missing this daughter and they really worried about her. They wanted to know if she had survived and if she was OK — kind of like people coming out of a war or refugees or someone emerging from a large disaster and just wondering if the other side had also survived as they had.

On parents who hoped she might be their daughter

One birth mother brought a piece of cloth. She had used the cloth 20 years ago to sew a baby suit for the day that she and her daughter would part. And then she hoped that if she and her daughter were to reunite later, her daughter would have the baby suit and then she would have the scrap. It would be kind of like a lock and key. But I definitely didn't have such a baby suit.

On what she heard from mothers who gave up a baby

For most people it was the combination of needing a son, wanting a son, and also the fact that they already had so many children. I have to say, it was surprising, because in the U.S. we hear "one-child policy," we think, "Oh, there's just one child that the families kept." But I don't think I met any families with one child. They all had like three, four, five, six, seven or even eight children, and there was a pattern in that most of the children of higher birth order were female and then they would keep having children until they had a son. And so the missing daughter was usually not the first daughter. They would usually keep that one. The missing daughter was usually the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, etc.

On whether she found her birth family

I didn't. But I feel like going through the search and listening to the different stories has given me some idea of who they might be or what kinds of things they might have confronted. I am still looking but in a less active way. My DNA was left at a local police station. I figure I just kind of leave it up to fate.

I put one copy of the search poster in my file at the orphanage. It was like the first 30 pages were all other people writing about me, this small infant with no voice and really no ability to choose her destination or fate in the world. And to be able to come back 20 years later with a search poster that I had written about myself and to kind of add that in as the last page, that was really something that felt satisfying.

Olive Lee Retires - February 29, 1968

I post Olive's announcement forty seven years after she announces her retirement after forty three years of service to Cluett Peabody & Company. She doesn't sound exactly thrilled at the company, which is a shame.

Just as an FYI, from wikipedia:

Cluett Peabody & Company, Inc. once headquartered in Troy, New York, was a longtime manufacturer of shirts, detachable shirt cuffs and collars, and related apparel. It is best known for its Arrow brand collars and shirts and the related Arrow Collar Man advertisements (1905–1931). It dates, with a different name, from the mid-nineteenth century and was absorbed by Westpoint Pepperell in the 1980s. The Arrow name is still licensed to brand men's shirts and ties.

The company manufactured shirts and collars in a historic building at 123 First Street in Leominster, Massachusetts.

The building was constructed in 1902 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.

I have no idea what happened - did she break her leg/hip at work, hence the joke? Obviously she was at home for quite a while recuperating.

And who is 'we' she refers to? I know her mother, Nellie Jane, was living with her. Were sister Margaret and husband Myron living with her, as well? It seems she has moved with her mother to Bronxville by November of 1968.

I'm afraid I don't recall where I took these Cluett Peabody & Co. photos - I can't seem to recreate my search to give them credit. Oops. Could have been wikipedia or could have been the Rensselaer County Historical Society.

Olive is the third from the right in the back row.
The Cluett Peabody Ladies 

Olive is standing on the far left
Was this her retirement luncheon?