King Rat

Initiative 1464 – Washington government accountability act

It looks like there’s going to be a lot on the ballot for the 2016 Washington general election, so I’m going to get started early on reading up on measures and candidates. These posts are not endorsements exactly, though some will end up being just that. Keep in mind that I am a liberal and I am not going into these posts unbiased looking for the ultimate correct answer.

First up, is Initiative 1464 which bills itself as the Washington government accountability act. It’s not really a general government accountability act. It’s a campaign donation accountability act at best.

The headline feature of the initiative is a form of public finance for state legislative and executive campaigns. I don’t hate the program, but I suspect it’s not going to have a transformative effect in Washington politics. The Democracy Credit Program lets each voter in the state make $50 donations to three candidates where the money comes from the program rather than the person’s own pocket. To be eligible to receive these funds, a candidate has to collect 75 small donations from voters within their district.

Reading a summary of Initiative 1464 for the state legislature, it appears that candidates have to forego all contributions besides the 75 qualifying ones. It’s for this reason why I don’t think this will have a transformative effect. Candidates who can collect enough contributions through the current system are going avoid the new program. The Democracy Credit Program is a lot more work, because it requires that candidates spend a lot of time cajoling people to give them one of their three $50 contributions. I think a lot of candidates would rather spend their time convincing people to vote for them. Smaller candidates may well jump on the bandwagon. But from the elections I’ve seen, they have less well thought out and comprehensive platforms, so we’ll be giving money to fringe candidates and not affecting how mainstream candidates fund raise.

The Democracy Credit Program would be funded by revoking the sales tax exemption we give to out of state residents. The appeal is that we publicly fund candidates with other people’s money.

The initiative also has limits on contributions, $100 per candidate for lobbyists and contractors who have business before the agency that the candidate would run. Note that this appears to be $100 total for such donors to these candidates, rather than the current limits which allow donors to start over at $0 after the primary.

What candidates can do with unused campaign funds would be more limited under the initiative. They would no longer be able to pay themselves a salary in excess of the state median income.

It would makes so-called independent expenditures count as candidate donations under a whole host of circumstances. For example, I campaign official could not leave the campaign to run an independent expenditure campaign and have the independent campaign continue to count as independent. So lots more could count against campaign limits.

The initiative would require political committees that advertise to list the top 5 donors while disallowing the committees to hide the ultimate donors’ names behind additional anonymous committees.

A new proscription means that an official cannot lobby their former agency for three years after leaving the agency. There are additional restrictions on lobbying for former state employees as well

The no campaign doesn’t appear to have a working web site. Looking at the PDC web site, they appear to have limited funding that comes primarily from the contractor and food industry. Supposedly they want us to worry about funding state education before we do this, but I don’t see them making any effort there, so I call bullshit on that point.

The Yes on 1464 campaign is generously funded, at just under $2 million as of this writing. One fourth of that comes from Connie Ballmer, wife of Steve Ballmer. That makes me very suspicious. Steve Ballmer funded the committee that opposed a state income tax initiative a few years ago, and he’s generally behaved like a jerk with respect to Washington politics. Connie Ballmer has also generously funded ($500,000) an attempt to defeat Barbara Madsen, the Washington Supreme Court Justice who wrote the opinion that invalidated one of her pet initiatives, publicly funded charter schools in Washington. Makes me think that she thinks Initiative 1464 won’t hurt her chances to get her own way.

Other contributors to the yes campaign do not follow the rules that would be enacted as part of this. Every Voice has contributed $300,000 to the campaign, but not filed any reports with the Washington State PDC. Neither does $100,000 contributor Represent US. Pretty sneaky for a campaign that supposedly is supposed to increase transparency.

I’ll be voting for this, but it’s not a strong endorsement. Given the Supreme Court’s declaration that campaign contributions constitute political speech, I just don’t see any way we can meaningfully reform campaign finance. Rich people will just opt out of any voluntary system. And frankly, if it fails I won’t shed a tear because the people behind the yes campaign appear to believe their proposed rules apply only to other people.

Mary Evelyn Frederick’s SS-5

An update on Mary Evelyn Sorenson, the daughter of Alfred and Mae Sorenson. Between Ancestry’s Social Security Applications and Claims Index database and the death certificate of the person who had that Social Security Number, I had an idea that I’d found what had happened to my first cousin twice removed. However, her death certificate did not list parents, so I wasn’t certain that I had records for the right person.

In July I requested the Social Security SS-5 for the person with Mary’s Social Security Number. That’s the original application for a social security number. It has date of birth and parents on it usually. Here’s what I got:

SS-5 - Mary Evelyn Fredericks — SS-5 – Mary Evelyn Fredericks

Many of the items in this application match what I know about Mary Sorenson:

Father’s full name.
Mother’s first name.
Approximate year of birth.
Place of birth.
Name matches the name of Mae Sorenson’s daughter in the daughter’s announced marriage to George Grantzow.

That’s a lot of matching points. And unless someone took over her identity it’s the same woman who died in 1990, the S.S.N. and date of birth match the death certicate. I’m considering it pretty safe to assert these are all the same person.

Armed with that information, I was able to find a marriage record for Mary Evelyn Sorenson and Herbert George Fredericks in Los Angeles from 1935.

Marriage certificate for Herbert Fredericks and Mary Sorenson

For some reason, Mary Sorenson thought her mother’s maiden name was Radtke. The other indication I have for Mae’s maiden name comes from Mae’s marriage record, which gave her name as Gibbons. She was raised in an orphanage, so I don’t know how accurate either name is.

I can start to put together a timeline for Mary Sorenson now:

Date	Event	Place	Source
9 Mar 1914	Birth	Madison, Wisconsin	Death certificate SS-5
1 Jan 1920	Census, recorded living with parents	Madison, Wisconsin	1920 US Census
8 Sep 1935	Marriage to Herbert George Fredericks	Los Angeles, California	Marriage certificate
24 Feb 1937	Residence	Redondo Beach, California	SS-5
1 Apr 1940	Census, living with Herbert Fredericks	Inglewood, California	1940 US Census
23 Nov 1943	Marriage to George William Grantzow	Unknown, but announced in Madison, Wisconsin	Two announcements in the Wisconsin State Journal
23 Jan 1948	Divorce from George Grantzow	Madison, Wisconsin	News in Wisconsin State Journal
7 Jun 1948	Marriage to James “Shorty” Reigle	Dubuque, Iowa	Announcement in Wisconsin State Journal
1 Nov 1949	Marriage license with James “Shorty” Reigle	Madison, Wisconsin	Announcement in Wisconsin State Journal
18 May 1951	Divorce from James Reigle	Madison, Wisconsin	News in Wisconsin State Journal
7 Jun 1951	Divorce from James Reigle vacated	Madison, Wisconsin	News in Wisconsin State Journal
26 Mar 1952	Divorce from James Reigle	Madison, Wisconsin	News in Wisconsin State Journal
May 1956	Name under Frances Marie Sorenson		U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007
Oct 1956	Name under Frances Marie Newton		U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007
Nov 1957	Name under Frances Marie Vonhauzer		U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007
16 Nov 1958	Residence, name under Evelyn Tanner	California	Mother’s obituary in Capital Times
13 Oct 1990	Death, name as Frances Marie Newton	Lynwood, California	Death certificate

There’s still a lot of gaps in her life that I could research and document, in addition to better documenting the known events.

how and when did her marriage to Herbert Fredericks end
what was the deal with incongruent marriage records for Mary and James Reigle
how did Mary get the name Evelyn Tanner, and did she marry to get that name
when and where did she change her name to Frances Marie
did she marry to acquire the surname Newton
did she marry to acquire the surname Vonhauzer

Ysola Chaves Ryan’s Sensational Will Contest

It’s no secret that I love a scandal in my family tree. These situations make for the best stories. I found this one involving my second great uncle Elgie Jerome Ryan earlier this week.

My second great grandfather’s first wife (my ancestor), Mary Parker, died in 1875. William Dennis Ryan re-married a year later to Mary Powers, and they had three children: Elgie Jerome, Glenn Alexis and Arch. William already had six children with Mary Parker: Alice, Frances, Mary, Julia, Laura, and Leo. Glenn and Arch died before age 30. Over the years, Elgie lived with his siblings in Merrill and Colorado before moving west to Tulare, California and establishing a very successful drug store.

Elgie’s first wife was Barta Holford, who was from Bloomington, Wisconsin, just a few miles away from the Ryan farm. Elgie married Barta on 22 Aug 1905 at the Eastern Star Lodge in Bloomington. Shortly after that Elgie and Barta were established in Tulare.

The following are photos of Barta and Elgie taken from a family photo album.

Barta Holford Ryan (left) with Allie Ryan (right)

Elgie died on 28 Jun 1926 in Tulare. The following obituary appeared in the Bloomington Record on 7 Jul 1926. I suspect the obituary is in the public domain, but out of caution I have included only the parts necessary to my story. Notice anything about the obituary? There is no information about who his second wife was.

Until this week, that’s all the information I had. It wouldn’t be too difficult to get Elgie’s death certificate to find that out, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to it. Last time I spent much time researching Elgie, I didn’t have access to too many California newspapers. But I recently upgraded to the “Publisher Extra” service at Ancestry’s Newspapers.com web site, which includes the Los Angeles Times. On a whim, I’d searched for “E. J. Ryan” and the following article from the 2 Mar 1927 edition of the Times showed up:

Headline from article on suit over Elgie Ryan will — Los Angeles Times, 2 Mar 1927, section 2 page 11 col 6, Sensational Will Contest

Now that’s juicy! I’ve included only the headline under fair use. Additional information that the article gave me included his second wife’s name (Ysola Chaves Ryan) and that an autopsy found poison in Elgie’s body! The death was ruled a suicide.

That was enough information for me to track down their marriage record on FamilySearch. I’ve no idea why I wasn’t able to find it earlier. They got married on 22 Mar 1925 in Los Angeles. Other articles in the Times say that Ysola was a teacher in the Tulare schools at the time of her marriage, but she appears to have resided in Los Angeles most of the time. Her sister was Mignon Le Brun, wife of silent film actor Cullen Landis.

Even stranger, at the time of Elgie’s death, Ysola may have left him and returned to Los Angeles. She maintained that Elgie didn’t commit suicide, but instead consumed strychnine accidentally. Now, it seems odd to me that a druggist, even a despondent one in ill health, would commit suicide in one of the most painful ways possible (strychnine) rather than a relatively painless one such as an overdose of morphine.

Eventually though, the courts ruled for Ysola Ryan that she was entitled to the entirety of the $118,000 estate ($1.6 million in 2016), and Elgie’s death remained a suicide officially, denying Ysola the benefits of Elgie’s life insurance. From the 5 Mar 1927 edition of the Santa Ana Register:

Santa Ana Register headline on resolution of suit of Elgie Ryan's will — Santa Ana Register, 5 Mar 1927, page 12, column 4, Wife of Suicide Awarded Estate

Ysola doesn’t appear to have remarried, dying in 1964 under the name Ysola Chaves Ryan.

Bowie and Prince as the Little Prince

With the death of two music icons recently, I’ve seen this image floating around the internet. It imagines David Bowie and Prince as the Little Prince. For those looking for the origins of the image, here’s the information in one place.

The Bowie side is a modification of Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s depiction of David Bowie as the Little Prince, created shortly after his death. Click the link to go to the original. The image is linked to his Facebook post.

David Bowie imagined as The Little Prince — Jarrett J. Krosoczka

The Prince side is a modification of Sean Gregory Miller’s image from a couple years ago. The image is linked to the original on DeviantArt.

Prince imagined as The Little Prince — Sean Gregory Miller

Images copyright by the artists and included here in small sizes only to provide enough visual idea to identify the pieces.

Alfred Jaquith dies in Mexico City

Because I research descendants of my ancestors, I get to learn about a lot more jurisdictions than I would were I to be researching ancestry only. My first cousin three times removed, Clara Josten, married an Alfred C. Jaquith. He was a businessman, and operated in Merrill Wisconsin, Des Moines Iowa, Dubuque Iowa, and Denver Colorado at various times. The Denver Public Library has an index of obituaries that appeared in the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, so I knew that Alfred died in late September 1927. I haven’t actually looked up those obituaries yet, and I assumed he’d died in or around Denver.

That appears not to be the case, however.

Ancestry.com now has index to civil death registrations from Mexico City, which is based on the death registration images from FamilySearch.org’s Mexico, Distrito Federal, Civil Registration, 1832-2005. FamilySearch’s index does not seem to be as extensive as Ancestry’s.

Ancestry’s index led me to this death registration for Alfred Jaquith.

It’s the same Alfred Jaquith. While I can’t read Spanish, there are references to Clara Kuchenberg (Clara’s step-father was Mathias Kuchenberg), Denver, and the dates match up with the obituary index.

So now I’m going to have to start learning a bit about Mexican genealogy records.

Header image Cathedral taken by Jeff Kramer (CC By).

Pedigree – color coded by birth place

I’ve seen this on a couple other genealogy blogs recently, and for once a meme has piqued my interest. The idea is to take a pedigree chart and color code the people in it by place of birth. The following is mine. Note that this is not the extent of my known pedigree; it’s the part where I’ve documented birth places.

Mine is all over the map. After coming to America, most of my family didn’t stay long in one place before moving on for more opportunity. Sweden, Wisconsin, and Washington are the places with the largest number of people. Not surprisingly, those are the areas I’m most familiar with researching.

Additionally, all my German ancestors immigrated before German unification. They came from countries like the Kingdom of Hanover, Bavaria, and Prussia, which is more complex research than Denmark or Sweden. Each of those states that became part of the German empire recorded information differently. A couple of relatives were born in the Province of Canada, that short-lived colony that predated Ontario.

With this many places, a genealogist has to become familiar with a lot of locations. In some ways, I envy people whose families stayed in one area for generations. On the other hand, I get a much greater variety of stories.

Anne Falconer (1926-2014)

I started working on my family history in 2010 at the request of my grandparents. I poked around for a while at my father’s side of the family. No one alive knew about our history before my great grandfather, Joseph Weiss. His father, Anton Weiss, died in 1910, and his mother, Clara Voigt, died in 1915. She had moved to California to reside with her children there.

That was family that none of us knew about any more.

I researched Anton and then began working on his descendants. Through that work and a little bit of serendipity, I got in contact with Anne Falconer. She is a great grandchild of Anton and Clara. Because Clara had gone to live with the California children, Anne had her photo album.

After emailing a few times, Anne very kindly made copies of the photos and mailed them to me. She even sent a 150 year old print of a photo of Joseph Weiss as a very young boy. The photos she sent were the first visual depiction of many of my family that I’d ever seen. The following was taken at Anton and Clara’s 50th wedding anniversary.

Anton and Clara Weiss 50th wedding anniversary group photo — Anton and Clara Weiss 50th wedding anniversary

I was browsing Find A Grave this morning and came across a memorial for Anne. She died a year ago. I never met her, but she was a help and inspiration for me early on in this pastime.

Old Time Newspaper Wankery

Newspapers didn’t always have pretensions to be objective. In the 1800s, they were often small operations. They printed mostly gossip. They were explicitly Democratic or Republican and received support from their party. In smaller cities, they were extensions of the publisher, who also served as editor and reporter as well. A newspaper was much like a blog today as far as its personality, including feuding.

In the 1880s, Springfield Illinois had two main newspapers, the Illinois State Journal and the Illinois State Register, as well as Sangamo Monitor. They were not friends.

From the Illinois State Journal, 11 July 1881, page 6:

Scooped, Illinois State Journal

Scooped.

With fiendish glee the Register and Monitor yesterday morning announced the death of Coleman Woods, the colored man who was sun-struck Wednesday. — Journal.

Just so: and the lazy Journal reporters would have made the same announcement, if they had been abroad, in search of news. They were safely housed, however, compiling from an old almanac the “best methods of preventing sun-stroke” and did not encounter the report of Wood’s death, which was prevalent throughout the city, and which was generally believe until the next day. Indolence is not always without its compensations, as is manifested in this case — Register.

“Just so” and if the over-enterprising reporters for the Register, who fiendishly declared that live men are dead, “had been abroad in search of news,” instead of remaining “housed up” in the effort to frame the above lame defense of an utterly indefensible action, they might have announced the three cases of sunstroke which occurred on Friday; the fact that two men were overcome by poisonous gases in the Court House well on the same day, and they also might have given a history of the operations of the counterfeiters, sentenced to the penitentiary by Judge Treat. Or if they had not been “housed up” Saturday, they might have been able to announce the interesting decision given by Judge Zane in the German American Savings, Loan & Building Association litigation, which the Journal presents this morning. “They were safely housed up, however,” and were consequently “scooped” by “the lazy Journal reporters,” just as they are again this morning. The fact of the matter is that the Journal is continually “scooping” its cotempories. The Journal is not afflicted with toadyism; it does not deal in “Personal and other Reflections,” but eschews personalities for the sake of legitimate news.

3 Ways to Tell if Your Distaste For Hillary Clinton is Sexist

Implicit messages are more insidious because they are consumed and deployed beyond the realm of consciousness. We need not think deeply to identify the racism in Donald Trump’s depiction of Mexican immigrants as rapists or the sexism of his asking if Megyn Kelly’s tough questions were due to her being on her period. Identifying subtler racist and sexist cues is more challenging, however, because no one is immune to these subtleties, even those among us who have engaged in personal and public anti-racist and anti-sexist work.

Source: msmagazine.com/blog/2016/03/17/3-ways-to-tell-if-your-distaste-for-hillary-clinton-is-sexist/

Philip Helfer is Phil Hartman

Recently, while tracking down the family of my great great grandmother, Maria Hein (Mrs. William Solle), I looked into her sister, Mrs. Anna Helfer.

On 9 Sep 1887, a Philip Halfer committed suicide in Springfield. The next day, both the Illinois State Journal and the Illinois State Register ran lengthy news reports on his death. I’ll write another post later about the circumstances of the suicide. However, there were two pieces of information in the Journal’s report that compel me to write before I’ve completed much additional work.

The Journal’s report does not give Mrs. Halfer’s name. She is merely referred to as Mrs. Halfer. But it does say she is a sister of Mr. Charles Warner of East Springfield. Emilia Kibele’s obituary lists her siblings, including Mrs. William Solle, Mr. Charles Werner, and Mrs. Anna Helfer. It appears that suicidal Philip Halfer is the husband of my 3rd great aunt, Anna Hein. I love it when I can piece things together and make a connection.

The second intriguing things was the item title: “Philip Hartman Finds Rest”. Throughout the article, the text refers to Philip Halfer. Philip Hartman sounded odd, but sometimes Springfield newspapers of the time were sloppy with spelling. Indeed, every other record gives the surname Helfer rather than Halfer, and his grave marker spells his first name as Philipp. Perhaps the paper was even sloppier than I thought. However, I didn’t completely read the article because the quality of the microfilm scan degrades toward unreadable the further down the page one goes. But it isn’t all unreadable:

Now that’s an intriguing tidbit! I’ve already got my great grandfather’s unexplained name from Öman to Hallin and the mystery switch of Mary Evelyn Sorenson to Frances Marie Newton. Now I can add the mystery of Philip Hartman to Philip Halfer. (More on the spellings later…)