My second great uncle Frank Edward Weiss was born on 30 May 1862 in Cassville, Wisconsin. He was the third child of Anton Weiss and Clara Voigt. Around 1890, Frank married Nannie Conaway from Illinois. The two of them lived in Pukwana, South Dakota, where they had four children, one of whom died very young. Frank operated a hardware business like his father and three brothers. He died on 5 August 1927 and is buried in Community Cemetery outside Pukwana.
I just got back from the Sounders vs. Columbus game. I can’t not comment.
Eddie Johnson needs to learn how to pass to his teammates. Bryan Meredith comes off his line far too much. The defense can’t turn the ball over to the opposing team in our third. Our free kicks looked awful. And for heaven’s sake, we need to be able to pass the ball through the mid-field instead of turning the ball over. The Sounders live and die by the 50/50 ball.
The strong points: other than the free kicks, Fredy Montero combined hustle and skill and turned nothing into something more than once. Flaco got himself into dangerous positions several times. Mauro looks a bit off, but still a solid play-maker.
My 2nd great aunt Dina Margareta Öman was born on 22 May 1904 to my 2nd great grandparents Albert Öman and Brita Johanna Strand in Håkansön near Piteå, Sweden. She died on 16 Mar 1907 (age 2). As was common in Sweden, Albert and Brita named their next daughter (born 4 months later) Dina Margareta.
I will be heading to WisCon next weekend. It’ll be my fourth year attending. At the moment, I’m thinking of canceling, though I probably won’t do so. I have no problem spending two months on my own, but the idea of being in a convention where I know only one or two people for a weekend gives me the heebie jeebies. I love the programming topics, which is why I go.
I do wish I knew more people who were interested in the kind of science fiction that’s discussed there, so I could talk them into going and not feel so on my own. (I should probably start talking it up in like, January, and see if there’s interest. Not wait until 6 days before my flight when it suddenly hits me that I’m gonna be on my own.
The best year was two years ago when Kim went. When Kim’s around, I’ll feel at home.
Sara will be there (if her flight plans don’t get messed up like last year), so there’ll be at least one person I know. And I will love the discussions.
I just had the first practical need for the family history information I’ve assembled. The heirs for aunt Babe’s estate are all nieces, nephews, and grand-nephews, since she never had children and outlived all her siblings. The lawyers for the estate needed to know when her siblings died to establish that they are, in fact, dead. None of the living relatives were even alive when Babe’s oldest sibling Joe died in 1931. I just saved the family a bunch of money to research all of that.
I came to popular music late, something which affects my relationship with it, though I can’t tell you exactly how. Mom was pretty religious and a homebody. She liked listening to hymns, church music, and Through The Bible Hour. Dad liked old style country. Mostly Johnny Horton played on repeat. Neither of them encouraged me to engage with popular music, and sometimes actively discouraged it. We also had to pinch pennies so I didn’t get my own radio until 1983. I can’t remember why they bought a new family stereo then, but I got the old one. Something on it was probably broken, though I don’t think it was the record player part. I remember using that.
1983 or 1984 is when I first started listening to popular music at all. I started listening to K-PLUS when Kent and Alan started at the station. I remember a big promotional effort touting their new morning show on the station. I listened to Rick Dees weekly Top 40. Being the OCD person I am, I listed the songs played on that show religiously. If I missed a week for some reason, I would fill in the blanks in subsequent weeks when Dees announced that a song had moved up or down X slots.
K-PLUS and (as it later became) Z-101.5 was my only real exposure to music. Maybe a little bit of K-JET that my ride Craig Adams played in the car when he drove to school my last year of high school. Then I went off to college, and Idaho was a wasteland of music. One Top 40 station, one classic rock station, and other stuff I never payed attention to. I listened to a lot of hair bands.
Anyway, the point of all this is I don’t have a lot of memories of music. So when Donna Summers died today and Facebook exploded with people remembering her music from their childhoods, I don’t get to participate. This happens to me lot. I have little in the way of nostalgic associations for any music.
My connection to songs continues to be ephemeral. I started going to clubs in 1999 and listening to a lot more music. But most of the music only stays in the present. I recognize a lot of the songs played because they’ve been played so often, but I couldn’t tell you who recorded them. Oooh, that’s familiar and catchy, I need to get out on the dance floor. I still have a predilection for catchy and dance-able music. If the song doesn’t have a great hook, the chances of me liking it diminish quite a bit.
Unlike other people, I don’t have the radio on all the time as background at home. My stereo and giant speakers were taking up space for no real reason, so I finally got rid of them a few years ago.
I’m also quite ambivalent about my lack of attachment to music. Sometimes I think I’m really missing out, so I’ll make an effort to listen and understand. And lots of times it just seems like a lot of effort and a waste that I don’t feel bad foregoing.
Time to consider getting contacts I think.
I can’t read the computer screen wearing my glasses. I get glowy blurry double vision. I can read it just fine with my left eye without glasses, which is essentially what I do.
But it’s tiring.
(No, it’s not my prescription. The glasses work just fine when I’m reading a book or even my tablet screen. There’s just something about the brightness or frequency of the laptop screen that messes with my focus.)
My 2nd great grandfather Albert Öman was born on 16 May 1856 in Håkansön near Piteå, Sweden to Johan Öman and Maria Johansdotter. He was the 9th of 10 children. He married Brita Johanna Strand on 18 December 1886, and they had 10 children, 3 of whom died before age 20. The other seven children, including my great grandfather, all emigrated to western Washington. Albert and Brita remained in Sweden, where Albert died 21 June 1929 also in Håkansön.
Monday I spent most of the day at the Wisconsin Historical Society looking through their microfilmed newspapers. Mostly I was looking for obituaries and a couple of marriage announcements that happened in Cassville and Glen Haven Wisconsin. They have a rather large collection of Wisconsin newspapers, as well as a few newspapers from elsewhere in the country.
The most important item I sought was an obituary for William Dennis Ryan, my 2nd great grandfather. I found his grave last year, so I knew he died in 1919. A brief mention of his death in a Colorado newspaper (where several children lived) narrowed the time frame to some time before the end of August. The nearest town with a newspaper was Bloomington. At the time, the Bloomington Record was a weekly newspaper. So I started at the last issue of August and worked backward. Found it. Which means I now have a date and location for his death.
I also found obituaries for Mary Weiss, Agnes Weiss, Peter Voigt, Gertrude Voigt, Alonzo Teasdale, Clara Teasdale, James Ryan, Elgie Ryan, Archie Ryan, Glenn Ryan and Martha Klaus.
On Wednesday, I stopped in at the Dane County Register of Deeds to pick up some vital records. I requested the death certificates for Alfred and Mae Sorenson as well as their marriage certificate and the birth certificate for their daughter Evelyn. They found the first three, but no birth certificate. I was hoping the death certificates would have information on Evelyn, but they did not. The marriage certificate gave me Mae’s maiden name, Gibbons. Though since she was a ward of the state as a child, I don’t know if that name is that of her parents or was given to her in some other manner.
Theoretically, everyone born in Dane County after 1907 should have a birth record on file. However, a fair number of births never were registered. I know Evelyn was born in 1914, but I don’t know the exact date. In Alfred and Mae’s obituaries, Evelyn was listed as living in California. She was on her 4th marriage at the time, but I haven’t found any reference to her after 1958. With an exact birth date, I could list everyone in the Social Security Death Index with her date of birth whose first name matches, and could figure out which one was her. There’s also an outside chance she’s still alive as well. Sadly none of the Sorensons born in 1914 matched her.
I found out one really nice thing about Dane County: I can actually search through their records myself. All I had to do is fill out a form, give them a piece of ID, and they let me peruse through the records without supervision. The Wisconsin Historical Society has pretty liberal access policies too. No ID needed. Just walk back among the microfilm stacks, pull out what you need, and start looking. The King County vital records office, by comparison, works behind a glass partition.
My 2nd great aunt Alice Ryan was born the 10th of May 1865 in Glen Haven, Wisconsin. She was the first child of my 2nd great grandparents William Dennis Ryan and Mary Parker, farmers in Grant County of primarily Irish descent. Alice never married. Instead she worked as a dressmaker while living with her father (Mary Parker Ryan died young). She moved to nearby Bloomington shortly after the turn of the century where she operated a millinery until she died on the 6th of May 1953. Alice is buried in Saint John’s Cemetery in Patch Grove, Wisconsin with her parents.
This is the first in a series of posts I plan to write about people in my family tree on the anniversaries of their birth.