What? Genealogy Breakthrough

Today we cracked the code. Mrguy and I have been trying to figure out what happened to his grandfather's first wife for decades. Last week he picked up the search again, and today he had an out of the box idea. He researched one of his half aunts in a local paper that is only found in a local history library. It listed one of her survivors as a mrs somebody of Los Angeles.

I took that and found her in the census, under that name, with a grandchild whose name we recognized. It was her. Mrguy's grandfather was a traveling shoe salesman for a while, and his first wife divorced him for desertion. We learned this years ago while researching his second marriage. In the marriage application you had to confess your previous marriages and he stated clearly that he had been divorced. I asked for the divorce decree, and they couldn't find it. Thanks, Doug-who-was-going-to-call-me-back-the-next-day-a-year-ago-and-didn't. At least Doug didn't cash the check.

Anyhoo, we would have never known about his step-grandmother's next life if he hadn't found that obituary today. We spent the whole rest of the day doing genealogy.

I'm headed to the land of my birth tomorrow afternoon, to go to the funeral of that nice guy's mom. Such a lovely obituary. Really interesting. And I know obits. It got me thinking, again. So I spent the last half of the afternoon researching that nice guy's family. Sooooper interesting. On his mom's side they come from Ukraine in the early 20th century. Excellent Eastern European surnames. Fantastic job titles.

That surely cheers a person up. The ability to dive in and imagine the past, retrieve the information?

Love it.

One Pound of Bees

800 years ago, when leathery wings flapped in the sky, I was a Medieval Studies undergrad at an agricultural college. Why? That's what I was into. I didn't even really care where I went to college, except that I needed to get away from my parents and my boyfriend. So I went to the college that smelled like alfalfa (bonus) and contained the fewest people who were like me (not a bonus).

Once I got to the point in my studies where I actually had to write research papers, I combined things that I liked (say, entomology and history) with things that my advisor said I should write about (Norway. I went to college on a Norwegian scholarship). That really led me in some fun directions.

The college itself was at the age in which its 75 years of physical library collections going back to the late 1800s still fit in the library, and I spent many happy hours in the bowels of that library reviewing decades worth of beekeeping journals for a paper on beekeeping and bee-based remedies in the Middle Ages. So fun. I made oxymel (Medieval Persian honey-and-lemon cure-all which we are still using to this day). And I made something (can't recall) that required actual bees. Was it perhaps the poultice for baldness in the beard that called for ground up bees and the excrement of shrew mice? Either of these ingredients could be easily obtained on campus but I only pursued one of them.

I called up the Bee Biology department, and talked to the professor who had given the gripping lecture on bees earlier that quarter to my entomology class. He asked me a stumper of a question: "How many bees do you need?" "I dunno. A pound?" So on a very rainy day I rode my bike out to Bee Biology and met up with the apiologist. He went to his freezer and pulled out a baggie with one pound of frozen bees in it. I guess that's how you dispatch bees. Poor little fellas. I remember toasting the bees on a baking sheet in the oven at our dorm, then grinding them using a hammer and a Dr. Scholl's sandal (who has equipment when they're a sophomore?). We presented our papers at an end-of-quarter open house, and I recall wearing some of my Medieval reenactment clothes. And when I came home for the semester the bees came with me. It seemed wasteful and disrespectful not to do something with them.

Occasionally over the next few years my mom would complain about the bees that lived in a danish cookie tin in her chest freezer. She'd open the tin from time to time thinking that there was something delicious inside, only to find dead bees. At some point we decided the bees needed to go. 

Thank you, bees, for your service.

Hawaii 2019, Day 8

Big finish, Peeps!

After days of hearing mrguy proclaim how much he loves Maui and planning for our next trip to Maui, *this* trip to Maui was coming to an end.

We had a lovely breakfast and noticed a songbook by Helen Desha Beamer on the piano. There was even a photo of Kimo Henderson, for whom she composed Kimo Hula, which our band loves to play.

We went to the library and looked at all of the local history books. Found the books about presidents, and mrguy couldn't help but make a tableau of contrasts for us:

We looked at a bunch of city directories and almost had a fight about it. Mrguy was right about whatever the argument was.

For the last two days we'd been trying to determine the GPS coordinates of the Wailuku Ditch, because that's very close to where the family house was. We went in search of the ditch, which is on the way to the dump. People really drive fast there, and crossing the road was treacherous but we did it.

Picturesque, innit?
After this we went to the Makawao Cemetery, and the military cemetery next door, because this is where some of our people are buried.

We were standing out in the cemetery with an electrical storm coming and I was pretty sure we were going to be turned into human yakitori, but it worked out ok.

And then we met farmer's daughter at Rock & Brew, which has a horrible name, but is so much better for hanging out at than the quaint place where we were supposed to meet. It was great to come together after we'd been to the places where she'd sent us.

So there you go. We had an amazing time. We learned interesting things about the family. Like Toshiko Takaezu was the family's maid for a while. I want to learn more about this experience from Toshiko Takaezu's perspective, of course.

And that's it. Hawaii 2019 is complete. We have plans to go back to Maui in October, unless we die before then.

Grafting

One current obsession: grafting.

It started with a painting. Mrguy had a painting reframed and hung it in a place where our view and the painting lined up. The painting, a watercolor of the bay, was painted by a former neighbor and friend who lived nearby when we lived in the "old place". Seeing the painting in a different setting made me think of the painter, and I remembered a personal detail -- she liked to graft roses.

What is that, I wondered? So the obsession began. How does it work? What does it take? What could I graft onto what? My first thought was of grafting another kind of citrus onto our lime tree, which has suddenly become robust after many dweeby years.

Research led me to the knowledge that it is illegal to graft citrus in our state. The only place to legally buy citrus scions is here.

But in the meantime, I learned that the local rare fruit growers group was having a scion exchange at my old school. A scion, since you're asking, is a green stick -- the bud wood that you are going to graft onto your existing plant or tree to make whatever you're grafting grow on your tree. You make a notch on a branch of the recipient tree, then whittle the scion into a point, line up the cambian layer of both, do some other stuff, and with any luck the new thing will grow on the existing thing. Some people have apple trees, for example, with lots of different varieties of apples on it, that they've grafted onto the existing tree. And you can graft a quince onto a pear, I learned. How did I learn? At a grafting class, taught before the scion exchange. Packed! I sat on the floor.

What's a scion exchange? People bring small lengths of budwood to an exchange. They put them in a plastic bag and label it. Someone lays out the budwood on tables, organized by the type of scions. There were zillions of different kinds of apples, for example, all laid out together. At the scion exchange, you pay an entrance fee and then you may take anything you want with you. You bring your own ziploc bags and masking tape and a pen, choose a scion you want, and use the masking tape to label the little sticks of budwood you've selected, so you know what you are grafting.

The class was great, and the scion exchange was a little intimidating. I only have citrus trees to graft onto, so I mostly just browsed and hyperventilated. I went home with some plants grown by the horticultural club and a gigantic sack of Cara Cara oranges.

Countdown To Irishness

I originally started the Irish citizenship quest in 2017. Because my grandfather was born in Ireland, it is possible for me to apply for citizenship. I first gathered a lot of documents. I had a lot of success on this, but then I stalled. My grandfather died at home. His house stood at the crossroads of three different municipalities. It took a lot of research to find the right one. And when I found it, the state of New York said that they would not give it without a court order.

That really knocked the wind out of my sails, so I stopped trying. Can't recall what finally got me off my keister again, but I decided to hire a fixer. She helped me navigate the problems, and there were many:

1. My grandparents never married, which was pretty unusual. Ireland assumes that parents will be married. So we had to write an affidavit about them not being married. And gather extra documents about my non-Irish grandmother
2. My grandfather's birthdate on his death certificate doesn't match the birthdate on his birth record in Ireland. I knew this was the case, but because of the combination of names of his parents, which are unusual, and the fact that those great grandparents are the parents of children whose names match many of my grandfather's siblings, he has to be that child, no matter his "wrong" birthdate
3. I had to call someone in a records office in Ireland and help him find the birth record while we were on the phone. I knew which page it was on in the registry book and where on that page. When he found it, he said he wouldn't have known that this was the one I was looking for. Sigh.
4. We had to write separate affidavits for the date discrepancy, as well
5. We had to hire a translator for the Norwegian documentation, and none of this was cheap

So many items had to be notarized, as well. Luckily the factory has several notaries, and their services are free. This was a huge relief. Having to go to a notary would have made me nuts.
 
At the end of all of this, there was the application fee. The application was received in the beginning of August and I have no notice as to where I am in the queue or whether this amount of time elapsing is normal or not.

Maybe before St. Patrick's Day? Not that I like that holiday, but it would be kinda fun to show up at my old Irish pub with my Irish birth registration to show it off to the owners.

Tamunuts

So I'm minding my own business thinking about the holidays. It's been a poopy time at the factory and I'm beat. Mrguy has been seriously sick with the flu for ten days. Christmas approaches at the end of the week and I've barely prepared. I'm depressed. But I still want to do something fun. So I decided to make Chex Party Mix for the first time.

Of course I wanted to go back to the beginning and try to make the original recipe. But now I hear maybe I have a gluten issue, so I'll make it gluten free. I searched Newspapers.com for a recipe, sorted by date (oldest first) and came up with some recipes. Then one recipe called for Tamunuts. Wow. Am I going to have to order some? What's a Tamunut?

Had I thought about it for a minute, I would have figured out that it was a food product produced by Texas A&M University, but I let the intertubes do the thinking for me. Here is a really great article about the history of the Tamunut. It's an edible cottonseed that is high in protein and tasty, and making it into a food product solves the problem of ginning the cotton and being left with cottonseed waste as a byproduct. I never thought about cottonseeds much until our recent trip to Texas, when our cousin mentioned, offhand, that he'd played on cottonseed golf courses in his youth. I couldn't quite picture it. Wouldn't it just blow away? Here is a story of how cottonseed surfaces entered the world of mini golf.

Back to the Tamunut. Man has long known that cottonseed contains valuable oils, but the oil that was produced was an ugly color. In order to beautify the nut they created a hybrid cotton that developed without a gland that produces gossypol. Nearly every article about Tamunuts spoke of the glandless and gossypol-free oil and nut. I love biology as much as the next guy, but Tamunuts needed a better press agent who didn't use those words as often. 

These days, in the world of the internet, a person might find out that studies show gossypol is a contraceptive. The mind reels with the fantasy of housewives of the 1960s making her chex mix and swapping in gossypolische cottonseeds as a natural form of population control.

Mine, however, will contain almonds. 

A final word here is that everybody I gave it to was super into it. Think I'll be doing this for years to come.