Day 2 - Your earliest memory

Day 2 - Your earliest memory

My mother was always amazed at the things that I remembered. I would bring things up in conversation that she had forgotten but that she could then confirm. I'm not sure of the exact age of my earliest memories, but as I was still in the wooden playpen that we had and my sister was still in the bouncy chair (metal frame, cloth seat) as she couldn't sit up by herself yet. That means that I was probably a little less than two years old. I have a number of related memories from this time frame and I'm not sure which is the earliest.

Our playpen was a heavy wooden one. It was painted (probably with lead-based paint!) a light blue-green color and folded up with a plywood base. I didn't have a lot of toys, but there were two that were favorites. One was my stuffed giraffe. Most kids had teddy bears, but I had a giraffe. He was probably 15-16" in height. The second was my "bus book". I was a very early reader and the bus book was cut in the shape of a bus with wheels fastened to the front cover so you could roll it along - making it both a book and a toy.

Speaking of books, my mother often related the story of how people would come over and I would be sitting in the corner with a book - not the little kids books, but something like one of the childcraft series that had been given to us when I was born. I was sitting very quietly and they would comment on how nicely I was playing with the book. My mother would respond, "Oh, he's  not playing with the book, he's reading it!" and the people would be astounded that I was actually reading at such a young age.

30-Day Writing Challenge - Day 1 - Five problems with social media

Introduction

A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook a 30-Day Writing Challenge. I thought it would be interesting to participate in this and post something to my blog each day in the month of April. Each day will have a new topic.

Day 1 - Five problems with social media

1 - It lasts forever. While those who have lots of "friends" see things fly by and so the impact of what you write can be pretty fleeting, it does remain there essentially forever and cannot be recalled.

2 - You can't recall it once it's been released. Even those forms of social media which have been designed to disappear shortly after being viewed have been shown to be able to be compromised by taking screen shots, etc. If you change your mind later, it's already too late.

3 - It falsely puts all relationships at the same level. Research has shown that the number of "close" friends we have is not very large. But when I see people in Facebook who have hundreds, or even thousands, of "friends" it diminishes the value of the real friends that one has. I try to keep my friend list relatively short and to ignore all the suggestions of "friends of friends" that are recommended to me. I want to have a connection outside of Facebook that my friend list is a mirror of. I would like my friends to know that they are really valued, not that they are just one of a long list.

4 - It tempts you to share things that you would not typically share otherwise. I am very sparse when it comes to sharing pictures, but I see other individuals who share multiple pictures every day with all the myriads of people on their friend list. If these were actual photographs are they ones that you would carry around with you and share with practically everyone you meet?

5 - It often inappropriately elevates the importance of what you are sharing. I know that the great dinner you had was appealing, but I really don't care about the pictures you took of it. And I know that your kids are cute, but seeing what they look like at every week of their development gets a little old after a while.  How am I supposed to know what is really important to you amid all the other daily trivia that you are posting?

The Last of His Generation

This past weekend my cousin (first cousin, twice removed), Robert Earl Russell, passed away at the age of 90. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to visit him just before Christmas. Besides the wonderful legacy he leaves in his children, one of the significances is that he was the last of his generation in the Russell family.

My great-great-grandfather, Walter J. Russell, lived from 1852 to 1895. He was the youngest son of Silas and Hester Russell. His first wife and my great-great-grandmother, Lois Ann [Cook], died in 1883, and his second wife and the grandmother of Robert Earl Russell, Cornelia [Sutphin] died in 1897. Walter had a total of 10 children through his two wives, the first, my great-grandfather Louis Russell, having been born in 1871 and the last in 1894. James Walter Russell, the father of Robert Earl Russell, was the second youngest, having been born in 1893. The last one to pass away from this generation was my great-great-uncle Earl who died in 1977.

Many of these 10 children passed away without any offspring, but between them they had 23 children. These 23 were all first cousins of one another. The oldest cousin was born in 1893, the youngest was born in 1926. My grandfather, Erskine Russell, was one of the oldest, having been born in 1894, Robert Earl Russell was born in 1926.

I am the oldest son of the oldest son of the oldest son of the oldest son of Walter J. Russell. In contrast, Robert Earl Russell was the youngest son of the youngest son of Walter. So while Robert is generationally in the same generation as my grandfather, he was 32 years younger than my grandfather and 6 years younger than my father.

My grandparents all passed away in the decade between 1969 and 1979. So it’s been nearly four decades since I have had a living grandparent. Until I started doing genealogical research just a few years ago, I thought that the last of my relatives from that generation was my great-aunt Edna who died in 1997 – nearly 20 years ago. So, at least for me, discovering my cousin (twice removed) Robert was like being an archeologist who finds a lost tribe in the Amazon jungle.

Now, at the age of 90, my cousin Robert is no longer with us and he can celebrate with his wife and all his other relatives who have gone on before him. Just on the Russell side, he will have quite a celebration – with two siblings, twenty first cousins, and (as best I have been able to document) another dozen or more second cousins!

He was truly the last of his generation in the extended Russell family. And I am so glad that I can say that I knew him! His daughter, Kim [Russell] Thompson, put it this way in her announcement.

“It is with mixed emotions that I let everyone know that heaven gained an angel today. Our dad, Bob Russell, left this world to join our mom and all his other friends and relatives who went before him. We miss [him] very much already, but know he is up there walking, driving, drinking wine, and having the time of his life. Just remember, life is fickle – eat dessert first!!!” [the last sentence is a quote from Bob.]

DNA Testing – Lots of Confirmation and One Surprise Connection

Several weeks ago I decided to take advantage of a discount and get my DNA tested through ancestry.com. I paid my $79 (normally $99), received the testing kit, filled the tube with spit and sent the packet back. Last week the results arrived (electronically).

There are two parts to the response. One is an approximate breakdown of your DNA by comparison to a carefully chosen test group and assignment to the various people groups from which those DNA markers come. The second (and because this testing is run by ancestry.com) is a list of individuals to whom you might be related. These might be individuals who have family trees and thus they can show you the common people in your trees (or common names in your two trees if both of you do not have a common individual), or they might be individuals who have gotten their DNA tested but whom do not have a current tree in ancestry.com. You can then contact these individuals to confirm your relatedness.

DNA Breakdown

There were no major surprises in my ethnicity. Here are the percentages (each being the mean of 40 different tests that they do) together with a commentary.

·         African – 0% - no surprise, my research has not found any connections here

·         Native American – 0% - no surprise here either, but most people hope to find some

·         Asian -- <1% South Asian – no idea the cause for this, but it’s so small that it could have creeped in anywhere

·         Pacific Islander – 0% - wouldn’t have expected any

·         European – 96% - yep, with the following breakdown:

o   Ireland – 22% - one of my great-great-grandmothers was Anna Soan who was an Irish immigrant

o   European Jew – 20% - my paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Vera Levy. Although she was always in a state of denial about her Jewish background, this is confirmation of it. And although the Levy family were immigrants from England, this also shows that their heritage was probably in Eastern Europe before, and that it was kept pretty “clean” by only marrying other Jews

o   Great Britain – 19% - although both my mother’s and my father’s family were in Great Britain for nearly 600 years before they came to America in 1640, the fact that they only contribute a combined 19% indicates that they were originally not native to this area, nor did they intermarry frequently with the native population, but they likely married others from their family background

o   Europe West – 14% - my mother’s family immigrated to Great Britain from Normandy France. Although I have not been able to trace them back much farther than the late 10^th century (980 AD), this indicates that they were probably in this area for many centuries before.

o   Scandinavia – 14% - my research into my father’s family indicated that although the family name started in Normandy France about the same time as my mother’s family name, that the original Russell (Baron de Rozel) was a close descendant of the Viking “king” who conquered Normandy in the early 900s. There is a lot of probability for error in genealogical research this long ago, so I was very pleased to see this genetic confirmation that my research was correct.

o   Iberian Peninsula – 5% - not sure about this one. It’s not a large percentage, but more than just a trace. But one’s family tree gets so broad when you go back into the 1700’s and beyond that there are a lot of places to have to look for this. Some further investigation needed.

o   Finland - <1% - probably through the Scandinavian connection, but it’s so long ago that finding information beyond the paternal ancestor is pretty impossible.

o   Europe East - <1% - I suspect this trace amount is through the European Jewish line above, but too small to say definitively

·         Caucasus – 2% - my research through the Scandinavian line went back 1800 years to the original king of Sweden. He was not a native, but was from Turkey. This DNA percentage being more than just the small trace like some of the others is further confirmation that my research all the way those many centuries is correct.

·         Middle East – 1% - another trace amount that is difficult to determine, perhaps introduced through the Caucasus/Turkish connection

So, no real surprises, but a very gratifying indication that my research into the origin of both my mother’s and father’s family lines were accurate.

Cousin connections

In their database of DNA results, ancestry.com connected me to 120 individuals at various levels of “cousin-ness”. Among them there were 110 shared ancestors – some individuals being connected to me in multiple ways, and others not having a known connection, or not having a family tree.

Many of the connections are through shared ancestors from 7+ generations ago. I will eventually check out many of these, but here I’d like to just comment on the top 5 (actually 4, since two are a brother-sister combination).

The most obvious was my 3^rd cousin, Bob Kraft, the historian of the Pierpont Family Association. I’ve known Bob for many years as our families were in the same town in Connecticut and even now he lives just an hour away in Pennsylvania.

The second is another 3^rd cousin on my mother’s side. I’ve not spent a lot of time building a “cousin tree” on that side of the family, so I did not have her in my family tree. Thus is is nice to get to know one of these new cousins.

The brother/sister connections are DNA indicated to be cousins somewhere in the 4^th to 6^th cousin range. I’ve started a conversation with the sister to determine the exact connection. We have several from more distant common relatives, but are still looking for the one that is as close as the DNA indicates. Maybe it’s just that we have multiple connections at the 7^th to 8^th cousin level that “fools” the DNA testing into predicting a closer connection.

But it’s the final one of this group that generated a surprise. I’ll devote the below discussion to it.

A Surprise in the Family Tree

One of my highest DNA matches was to someone whose name I did not recognize at all. Since her tree in ancestry.com is private and she has not responded to my messages from the past few days, I started looking through her messages about research in ancestry.com to get any hints. She has some of the same distant Scandinavian heritage that I do, so it appeared initially that it was probably a connection through my father’s side of the family.

I found a few notes that were interesting, including one that said that she had information about Silas Russell who is my great*3 grandfather. So my suspicion about her being a cousin on that side of the family was confirmed. But I have built a very robust tree of all my Russell cousins, including all my 3^rd and 4^th cousins. How could I have missed her?

Then I found a note where she indicated the names of her parents. So I thought that I would try to build out a family tree for her and see where the Russell family intersected – looking for a connection at the 3^rd cousin (i.e. great-great-grandfather level). Since I know all the family information, I really only had to find her great-grandfather/grandmother on the Russell tree and there were just a few possibilities.

I worked her tree back, hit several paths that were clearly not going to connect as they were not in New England. Then a name came up at the great-grandmother level of Charlotte Hoyt. That was her married name. There was a Charlotte Russell who was a sister of my great-grandfather who I showed as born in 1876, but who was noted as having died in 1902 without any change in last name, indicating that she was unmarried. Could my family tree be wrong?

All the other family trees that were built by others had the same set of facts. Charlotte/Lottie could be found in the 1880 census when she was only four years old. And there was a grave for Charlotte Russell in that part of Connecticut indicating a date of birth of 1876 and a death in 1902. So how was it possible that this potential cousin was descended from Charlotte?

Using the name Charlotte/Lottie Hoyt, I did some further checking. I found Charlotte and her husband in the 1900 census with two children (her third child, the grandmother of my potential cousin, was not born until 1902). But this census also unveiled a key fact. Living in the same house at the time was one “George H Russell” with a notation of “brother-in-law”. Since another brother of my great-grandfather was George Hall Russell, and the ages matched, this seemed to be confirmation that Lottie Hoyt was in fact the married name of Charlotte Russell. But did Charlotte die in 1902?

That seemed possible as the death was in December of that year and the third child of the family and the grandmother of my potential cousin was born in June. But then I was also able to locate Charlotte/Lottie and her husband in later census records as well. It appears that the Charlotte Russell who was born in 1876 and who died in 1902 is not the same Charlotte Russell who is in my family tree – or in all the other family trees which record the same “fact”.

I have now traced all the descendants of Charlotte/Lottie Russell Hoyt, add several new relatives to my family tree, and added a new page to my list of Walter Russell descendants! What a great find – and all possible because of DNA analysis!

Wedding Anniversary

After writing my last blog about cousins who have died relatively young (at least younger than I am now), I thought I’d write one on a much happier subject – long-lived marriages among my relatives. This July will mark my 45^th anniversary. While traditionally that is not one of the “significant” anniversaries such as 40^th (Ruby) or 50^th (Gold), I’m told that the jeweler’s association calls it the Sapphire anniversary (in order to sell more jewelry I suppose). But here is a look at my immediate relatives who have long marriages. (Note that some of the years below may be off by one since I don’t always have the exact date of the marriage, etc.)

My father’s relatives

While my father’s parents divorced and re-married, thus not ever celebrating the length of marriage that qualifies as “long” in this blog, there were other of his relatives that did so. (I’m going to name them as I knew them, so the “great” that belongs in front of some of these is missing.)

49 years – Aunt Loretta and Uncle George Macnaught

63 years – Aunt Pauline and Uncle Harold Scott

51 years – Aunt Dot and Uncle Bob Hill

60 years – my parents (actually just a couple of days less than 60)

My mother’s relatives

My mother’s family was marked by many long marriages, including all of my mother’s siblings.

50 years – Grammy and Grampy Pierpont (cut short by his premature death due to an accident)

58 years – Uncle Zeke and Aunt Babs

38 years – Aunt Alie and Uncle Joe (she married later in life)

65 years – Uncle Dick and Aunt Trudy

54 years – Aunt Vi and Uncle Tony

My wife’s family

My wife’s relatives included numerous divorces and re-marriages, so among her close relatives, only her parents had the long marriage that you can see was common in my family as listed above. This trend of divorces (and in one case death due to cancer) has continued among my wife’s siblings, so none of her siblings will ever be on this list.

60 years – Charles and Mary VanDeCar

The current generation

The tradition of long marriages among my mother’s relatives will be continuing, as I have several siblings and cousins who have already passed the 30 year mark and may eventually pass me depending on how long each of us lives. I wish all of them many more years together so that we may each celebrate our Ruby/Sapphire/Gold/Emerald/Diamond/etc. anniversaries. (The years are how many years I believe each of us will be celebrating in 2016, hope I got these right and haven’t forgotten anyone).

45 years – my wife and I (July 17^th)

35 years – my brother Chuck and his wife Joanne

33 years – my brother Edd and his wife Ingrid

45 years – my cousin Dave and his wife Bev (in June – he’s got a four week head-start on me!)

35 years – my cousin Rob and his wife Judi

43 years – my cousin Cindy and her husband Chris

34 years – my cousin Ron and his wife Nadine

Cousin Memoriam

In the past month two of my cousins have passed away. This makes a total of five of the cousins that I grew up with who have now passed away at a younger age than I am now. I’d like to dedicate this blog post to them as I recount how my life has been affected by theirs.

Bruce Hill (1/14/1948-1/27/1992)

I was close to Bruce during most of my growing up years. Since we were both born in 1948 we were in the same grade in school. However, since his family lived at the other end of town, we only attended the same school during our high school years. There were a lot of other reasons why we were close. My father and his father were also the same age and were best friends during the last few years of high school as well when they lived just around the corner from each other. My father’s older sister married his father’s older brother. So while Bruce and I were technically not cousins (i.e. we did not share a grandparent), we had cousins in common (i.e. he was my cousin’s cousin) and we always acted like cousins.

Bruce’s parents married just a short time after my parents. Since my parents had purchased a house and his parent’s home was not yet ready for them to move into, his parents stayed for a few months in one of the semi-finished bedrooms on the second floor of my parents’ home. There was a dark brown metal-framed double bed (and not much else) up there that they used. But his parents had a somewhat rocky relationship and when things weren’t going well Bruce would often come to stay with us. I have a number of pictures of the two of us playing together as toddlers and then young children. Even though he lived about 5-6 miles away, it was not unusual to find him walking up the street to our house until things “blew over”.

When his parents finally divorced, his father was given full custody. That was a pretty unusual thing back in those days, but gives some indication of what the relationship was like. Although I didn't see him much after we graduated from high school, he remained in contact with my mother, who had a very loving and accepting attitude. He stayed in contact with her periodically for the rest of his life.

Bruce adopted the homosexual life style at a time when those types of relationships were more often kept “in the closet”. He died from a complications of AIDS just a few days after his 44^th birthday.

Bob Hill (10/5/1944-9/7/2010)

Bob (“Bobby”) was four years older than I and he was the cousin in between Bruce and I. While the age difference meant that we not as close growing up, there were still a lot of connections. As the oldest in my family, one would think that I would get all the new clothes and would pass them down to my younger brothers. But until I got to be taller than Bobby in my high school years, he was the one who got the new clothes and then passed them down to me first. So I grew up wearing his hand-me-downs.

When it came time to choose a college I was conflicted between a smaller school and a larger one. Although the larger one would offer more opportunities, I came from a small high school and a graduating class of about 160 and the thought of a large university was pretty scary. But Bobby had gone to Michigan State (enrollment back then was 44,000 on their single campus) and he convinced me to at least visit it and try it out. I did so, ended up liking it, and then attended there for the next five years (three years as an undergraduate and two years of graduate school).

He had graduated by the time I started my freshman year, but had also married and was living just a few towns away. Thus, my relationship became closer during those years. This continued even through my early married years when my wife and I would stop to visit on our annual visit to Michigan to see her family.

Bob and his wife also had a pretty acrimonious relationship and they later divorced with her getting custody of their two children. Bob had his degree in education and he then moved to Florida where he taught for many years, where he married and divorced a few more times. I did not see him but once or twice during the remainder of his life, but his primary contact, like Bruce’s, was through my mother. He would often come back to Connecticut during the summer and stay with her. He passed away at the age of 65.

Gary Pierpont (8/26/1952-1/20/2014)

Just as Bobby was four years older than I, Gary was four years younger. He lived only a couple of houses away, but as he had an older brother, Dave, just a few months younger than I, as well as an older sister, there were few reasons for us to get close, so he was the “pesky little brother” and Dave and I usually did not want him around.

Gary got his degree in Bible from Baptist Bible College. He did not lead a church, but he had a lot of other positive characteristics that enabled him to work with and help others in his quiet way. I didn't see him much in his later years. He passed away at the age of only 61 from a heart attack.

Craig Hill (2/18/1951-1/7/2016)

Craig was the younger brother of Bruce. Thus, just like my relationship with Gary was not close as I was much closer in age to Dave, so I had a close relationship with Bruce and not Craig. He had the same type of relationship with my mother though and she was the primary contact with him for many years.

Craig served with the Army during the Vietnam War and became one of the many individuals who were exposed to Agent Orange. By the time he returned I had moved to Pennsylvania and so I lost personal touch with him. It was not until my mother’s memorial service in 2012 that I saw him again when he came up and re-introduced himself to me. Our relationship then became closer and he hosted an extended Hill-Russell family gathering at his home the following summer.

But by then it was apparent that his exposure to Agent Orange was going to be the eventual cause of his death. He had survived one serious bout of cancer, but when the second one happened he decided that the chemo and other treatments for it were not worth it. So, although the official cause of his death will be attributed to cancer, it was really his exposure to Agent Orange that was the start of it. He was only 64.

Pat (Pierpont) Burns Gatewood (10/28/1957-2/6/2016)

Pat (“Patty”) was the only one of these cousins who did not grow up in the same town. Her family lived in Prospect, the next town to the south. But 10 miles is not much. Since she was more than nine years younger than I and the opposite gender, I had little in common with her growing up. When I went away to college she was an eight-year-old. So she and my youngest brother had more in common – and their paths crossed many times over the years.

Our paths did cross during one significant time in her life. When she got married, the service was in a church only ten miles from where my wife and I were living, so we had the opportunity to attend. The ceremony was quite unique so I have always remembered it.

Following the wedding ceremony, she and her new husband had a joint baptism ceremony. Their being immersed and thus giving a public profession of their faith together was a very moving experience. What a great way to start your married life together!

She and her husband moved to California where for several years they lived not that far from my brother and sister-in-law. Later all of them became involved in missions. Pat was the Chief Administrative Officer for Global Teams (global-teams.net). Her daughter Steph (Burns) Villafranca also works for the same missions agency.

Pat passed away suddenly last weekend at the age of 58 as a result of a genetic brain condition and seizures. Although I have not physically crossed paths with Pat in several decades, it is nice to know that we will see each other again someday.

Bristol Radio/TV – WBIS and ESPN

These days the city of Bristol is associated with ESPN. They have a 100+ acre campus, over a million square feet of office and broadcast space, and nearly 4,000 employees in Bristol. But ESPN was a new startup company that only began operation in 1979, which is after the time when I lived in Wolcott.

In the decades before then, the only “media” company in Bristol was WBIS, a local AM radio station. Their 500 watt transmitter was only enough to reach residents of Bristol, but for those of us who lived in the extreme north end of Wolcott, because we were on a hill overlooking Bristol we could pick it up. They only operated during the day and with a very small staff who were on the third floor of a building in downtown Bristol. The transmitter was up on the hill on the south side of Bristol and was only two crow-fly miles from my house.

In the early 1960’s one of my friends from the neighborhood was Dana Powell. He and his family had moved to Wolcott when he started high school and they lived in the last house on Idlewood Rd, which at the time was a dead-end road. Dana was a year older than I was. One of his “claims to fame” was that in the fall of 1960 Bob Carroll did his student teaching in the elementary school in Plainville where Dana had come from. When Bob graduated from Fairfield University his first job in the Wolcott school system was as a 7^th grade teacher at Alcott School and I was in his class. Bob then moved to Wolcott High School and I had him again in 9^th grade for Civics and yet again my senior year for Contemporary Issues. So while I had him three times, Dana had him first.

In the summer of 1964, one of the DJs/operators at WBIS was someone whom Dana had known from when he lived in Plainville. Dana was able to get him to invite us to come to the WBIS studio at a time when he was on duty and spend some time in the broadcast studio. We rode our bicycles down the long hill into Bristol one summer morning (I didn’t ride into Bristol very often, because while the ride down the hill was one long downhill of a couple of miles, that also meant that it was a long uphill climb on the way home and all we had were single-speed bicycles).

Since this was a small-town radio station with a very low power transmitter and a limited audience, the equipment in the studio was fairly sparse as well. As I recall there was a swivel chair with a work surface that had a small mixer and a microphone/earphones, two turntables, a rack with a couple of reel-to-reel tape decks, and a teletype machine. The turntables were each about 2’x2’ that were mounted on springs so that vibrations from passing trucks would not make the records skip (yes, the primary media of the day were vinyl records!). The room next to the studio was filled with racks of vinyl records from which the operator/DJ would choose the records to be played during his shift.

What was being played was a combination of pre-recorded shows (which were on tape), music (on vinyl records), and “live” news and weather each hour. But it was this latter “live” portion that was the most intriguing to me.

Shortly before the time for the news, the operator would get up from his chair and go over to the teletype machine (I believe it was connected to the AP (Associate Press) wire service. He would rip off anything that had been printed during the prior hour, scan it and circle any items that looked they would be interesting to the audience. For the news/weather time, he would first put on a record that consisted of solely the sound of a teletype machine (both as a signal to the audience and to give the impression that you were in a newsroom?). The record was pretty beat up since it got used multiple times each day. He would start it off loud, then use the mixer to back the volume off as he began speaking. He would just read, sometimes with a little commentary, what he had circled from the wire service report.

For the “weather” it was even less formal. He would wheel his office chair over near the window that faced west (the studio was a corner office on the third floor with windows facing both west and south, and thus he had a pretty good view of the sky to the west of the city). There was a thermometer fastened to the window frame outside the window. He would glance at it and then look at the sky to the west (the direction from which most weather comes). His words on the air would then be something like, “It’s 75 degrees in downtown Bristol with mostly sunny skies. Looks like a good chance of rain this evening…”. A totally on-the-spot report based on nothing more than a thermometer and a west-facing-third-floor window! I was a little shocked. Compared to today’s professional meteorologists and sophisticated computer models, this was rudimentary indeed.

But such was the technology in small-town USA back in 1964. Little could one suspect that Bristol was going to become the hub of the largest sports media network in the world in the decades that followed.

If you want some additional information, you can read about the history of WBIS here - http://www.hartfordradiohistory.com/WPRX__WBIS_.html.