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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. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: life, music
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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.
 - William Ryan obituary
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.
 - Alfred Sorenson - Mae Gibbons marriage certificate
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.
crossposted from King Rat. Tags: genealogy, klaus, ryan, teasdale, voigt, weiss
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In addition to meeting a bunch of second cousins and going to a funeral, one of the things I did yesterday (Sunday, that is), was to help clean out aunt Babe’s house. My great grandfather Joseph bought this house in September 1908. Babe has lived there almost her entire life. Since no living relative lives in Madison, it was clean now or leave it to people to do piecemeal when they are in town.
The house itself isn’t in great shape. It dates from the 1870s, when it was a one floor, two room building. An upstairs and a couple of rooms on the side were added later, though I have no idea when. Plumbing and electricity have been added, as well as a foundation. I’m not sure what’s holding it together. Floors sagging. Walls tilting. Portions of ceilings fallen in. It’ll keep lions and tigers and bears out, but not varmints.
I mention that because varmints have been getting in for years. But other than the rooms that Babe inhabited (kitchen, dining room, living room), what the varmints left behind (droppings, chewed up clothing, their dead bodies) hadn’t been removed for a long time. There was enough disease causing detritus in the dust that we all wore masks. Most of us wore heavy duty gloves as well. The pants I wore? They are sitting in a corner now and I’m not going to put them on again until they’re washed twice. We filled 40 or 50 trash bags with clothing, bedding, broken phones, curtains, old Christmas lights, and things we couldn’t even identify.
But buried in all that crud were some gems. Some of the furniture pieces are 100+ year old antiques. They’ll need to be re-upholstered and re-finished for sure. There were hundreds of photos and letters. Photos dating to the civil war. Those looked vaguely like my second great grandfather, Anton Weiss. But we’re not completely sure, because the photos where he’s positively identified were late in life where he’s about 75 years old. Aunt Babe’s letters from Bunny Berigan are there. The deed to the house was there, including the entire history of ownership of the property since 1843 (a lot of the important Wisconsin settlers owned the land at one point or another). There are books and jewelry, including some obvious wedding rings. We’ll have to have a jeweler look at those to see when they were made so we can guess as to whose they were. I’m salivating for when I can get copies of the photos. I did keep a bag of newspaper clippings that had been used as bookmarks. Most of them are obituaries of distant family members.
Anyway, the house wasn’t a hoarders lair. It just hadn’t been cleaned. If you are in the baby boom generation, do your children a favor and go through your stuff now. You’ve got 10 or 30 good years left in you. Get rid of the junk. Clean around the stuff that isn’t junk. Let your family spend their time around the funeral drinking to your memory, fighting over who gets stuck with the lime green chair you love, and poring over your photo albums and old love letters. That part is awesome! Cleaning rat feces, not so much. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: life
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I posted a brief note over on the LiveJournal that my great aunt Babe passed away Monday morning. But I locked it because not everyone in the family had heard yet. Not really knowing Babe, I have little to say about her. My main reaction is, damn, you had a good long life. She was born 14 July 1908 in Merrill, Wisconsin. Her family moved to Madison that September, and she lived in that city for the rest of her life. In fact, she lived in the same house for the rest of her life. She was a stylin’ single girl in the late 1920s and 1930s. She dated Bunny Berigan for a time. She worked as an office manager until the early 1970s when she retired. All of this is stuff I learned from reading her letters today or from family members.
So I came to Madison for the funeral. Not because I’m grieving for Aunt Babe. Because she’s the last of her generation in my family, I wanted to honor her life and to support the family members who were close to her. Babe, like her two sisters, never married. But she did a lot of the work raising her brother Glenn’s children after Glenn’s wife died. So his children and grandchildren were very close to her. I wanted to be present for them.
Another reason to come is that a number of those second cousins I haven’t previously met. Without Babe, I didn’t know if the disparate branches would continue to communicate. So I wanted to come to meet them and make friends. Present were my aunts Sue and Jane, her husband and my cousins Dave and Sarah. Them I know. My second cousins Katzi and Lisa came along with their mother. They’re from the Portland area, so I see them a few times a year too. I met Martha, Peter and Caroline for the first time. Those are Glenn’s children mentioned above. Peter’s sons Chris and Stephen came too. Chris I’ve met once, but Stephen was new to me. Another second cousin who came was Katherine. At this point, there’s only one second cousin in the Weiss family I haven’t met. I don’t know if we’ll stay in contact, but I didn’t establish contact, we certainly wouldn’t stay in contact.
Between my dad dying young, mom remarrying, and my grandfather getting divorced a few years before I was born, I don’t feel as connected to the family on my father’s side of the family as much, other than my first cousins from the Seattle area. With all the close family members who’ve died recently, I’ve been spurred to build those connections I haven’t had before. That’s a big reason why I’ve been so big into the genealogy since my grandparents died.
Anyhow, for the short term, mission accomplished. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: life
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This is another of the pies I made for Pie Night and it was quite the hit. This one had no alcohol in the pie itself, and just a couple tablespoons in the sauce for it. The recipe was adapted from a recipe I found at the Driscoll’s berries web page.
Ingredients
- 6 ounces worth of gluten free shortbread cookies
- 4 ounces worth of gluten free graham crackers
- 2 tablespoons crystallized ginger
- 3 tablespoons butter
- 1 package (¼ ounce packet) unflavored gelatin
- 1 cup canned unsweetened cream of coconut (not coconut milk)
- sugar
- 1/3 cup plain yogurt
- 4 or 5 limes
- 4 six ounce packages raspberries
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 2/3 cup confectioners’ sugar
- 2 tablespoons honey
- 2 tablespoons tequila
The gluten-free shortbread cookies had a lot of moisture in them, and didn’t work out quite like the original recipe called for. My first attempt at the crust from this turned into a cake. In my second attempt, I substituted gluten free graham crackers for some of the shortbread cookies, and that worked out much better.
The original recipe also called for sweetened cream of coconut. I was unable to find this product. Instead, I used unsweetened cream of coconut. Then I looked up online how much sugar was in the sweetened version of the product, subtracted how much was in the unsweetened version, and added the difference. However, I didn’t write down the amount. I think it was 3 tablespoons but I could be way off.
Crust
- Preheat oven to 350°
- Chop the ginger
- Process shortbread cookies, graham crackers and ginger in a food processor
- Melt the butter
- Add butter to the cookie mixture
- Process until thoroughly mixed
- Press into a pie plate
- Bake for 10 minutes
- Allow to cool
Filling
- Mix gelatin and ¼ cup water in a glass mixing bowl
- Simmer a pot of water on the stove
- Once gelatin has bloomed, place the mixing bowl over the pot of water until the gelatin has dissolved
- grate about 1 teaspoon worth of lime zest
- squeeze enough limes to get ¼ cup of lime juice
- Combine cream of coconut, sugar, yogurt, lime zest and lime juice in a large bowl
- Stir until smooth
- Mix dissolved gelatin thoroughly in
- Mix in one package of raspberries
- Pour into the pie crust
- Refrigerate 4 hours or until set
Sauce and whipped cream
- Process remaining raspberries in food processor until they are so much pulp
- Strain raspberry pulp into a bowl (i.e., remove all the seeds)
- Combine heavy cream and confectioners’ sugar in a mixing bowl
- Whip the cream until stiff peaks form
- Mix half the raspberry puree into the whipped cream
- Spread whipped cream over top of the pie
- Combine remaining raspberry stuff with honey and tequila
Serve pie with raspberry-tequila drizzle.
crossposted from King Rat. Tags: cooking, pie
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I have a rule of thumb. I’ll try three times to make plans with someone else without a definite response. After that, it’s up to them whether or not to do something. For instance, when asking someone out if I get three non-committal maybes, I won’t bother to ask the person out again. If they were secretly hoping for a relationship but were following some set of advice that says to play hard to get, it didn’t work. Or if they are just too busy to carve out an hour to hang out, I’ll know their time management would annoy the hell outta me if we were to date. This rule of thumb applies to making friends, business relationships, etc.
Any kind of definite response triggers the end of the rule. A no is obviously a no and I’m not going to pursue it. If the answer is yes, obviously the rule no longer applies. If the answer is something along the lines of I can’t do X, but how about Y that also counts as a definite answer.
It’s important to remember this is a rule of thumb, not something I apply rigidly. It depends on the person and the level of relationship I already have with them. But as a rule of thumb it keeps me from wasting my time.
Sometimes people just have to say maybe or cannot commit to a plan. But after three times it tells me they have a fundamental problem (perhaps justified) with being up front. It’s pretty demoralizing to keep chasing something while being strung along. I refuse to be strung along. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: life
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My headspace has been awful this week, and today in particular. So today I decided to head to the old multiplex and immerse myself in someone else’s story for a bit. Movies are good for that for me. It doesn’t last, but for 90 to 150 minutes I am totally not thinking about my own problems.
Anywho, Cabin In The Woods has been called in various places a meta-horror movie. The Slut, The Jock, The Scholar, The Idiot and The Virgin all head to a cabin in the woods for a weekend of shenanigans. They all have names, but so much do they fit the cliche that I’ve totally forgotten them already. But, as in all horror movies, things start trying to kill them one by one. The twist in this case (and it happens really early on, so I’m gonna spoil it) is that there is a control room of people orchestrating the horrors that befall the young coeds. Cameras. Remote controls. Etc. Like a reality show gone really wrong.
Does it succeed as a horror movie? I’m not really one to judge as I don’t watch a lot of them, but it wasn’t all that scary. I’m glad for that, as I don’t like to be scared. Because it follows the horror movie script for much of the time, you really know what’s going to happen. It certainly does something different in terms of plot after the first two thirds. So it gets some points for originality.
Does it succeed as meta-horror ? I don’t think so. It sure points out how much horror falls into script. It seems rhetorically similar to if it had a character break the fourth wall and tell the audience that we’re gonna follow the horror movie script. It’s really not spoofing, as it’s done not so much to make fun of the horror script so much as to give everyone in the audience a knowing wink.
It most certainly doesn’t subvert the tropes at all. There’s one scene where typically the Slut bares her breasts. The control room people (male) hope for it, and then stare slack-jawed as if they never get the opportunity to see bare breasts. They are trying to orchestrate her death. I’m all for showing boobs in movies (even gratuitously), but that was uncomfortably creepy. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: movies, reviews
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Last Sunday I participated in the Democratic caucuses. I also participated in 2008, but that was a very different experience. In 2008, I lived in Ferndale for 5 days of the week, and was here on weekends. It was in the midst of the primary between Obama and Clinton, so TOPPS school was packed to overflowing with people there to participate. I had to be back in Whatcom county the day of the caucus, so I couldn’t stay for the whole thing. I stayed long enough to register my preference for Clinton, but couldn’t stay longer.
This year, with only Obama on the ballot, participating was quite a bit lower. My precinct caucus was in the Montlake Community Center. Precinct 43-2001 had only three participants. Me and two women who had never participated in a caucus before. One had been working in France for a decade and had to vote absentee. The other was an Obama campaign volunteer whose parents were American and German, and she’d been living in Germany as a young girl during World War II.
They asked me to be precinct caucus chair, since this is my third caucus. So we all voted for Obama, and then had to select delegates to the county convention and the District 43 caucus. Due to votes in previous elections, 43-2001 had 7 delegates allocated to it. The other two participants could only attend the District 43 caucus. nevertheless, we voted all three of us as delegates.
We also got to propose resolutions that eventually could be made part of the Democratic platform. Those are not debated or voted on at the precinct caucus level. Every resolution proposed is forwarded to the county convention. I assume the organizers combine similar resolutions to avoid duplication at that level. The older woman had seen a resolution on auditing the Department of Defense, but had forgotten to bring it and couldn’t remember the lengthy wording (or any detail at all). So I proposed a short broadly worded resolution for her in the hopes that someone in another caucus was proposing the resolution the woman wanted, and the organizers would combine them. There was a global warming resolution being passed around, and we put it on our list too. I added a resolution that the Democratic party support marriage equality and the referendum on marriage equality that will likely be on the ballot this November.
The district caucuses and the King County Convention are next weekend at 10 a.m. (one event each day). At the point, I’m planning on attending both, if I can find out where they are. The locations were undetermined as of the caucuses last weekend. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: life, politics
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One of the current narratives that I see on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and all over a lot of blogs is that Mitt Romney is too rich to be voted into the office of the Presidency.
To which I call bullshit.
First off, we’re never going to have a poor President. At best, we’ll have someone who was poor at one point. But you don’t build a political base large enough to get into the presidency without having the skills to make enough money to live comfortably. The closest we got to poor might have been Harry Truman (a haberdasher) or Abraham Lincoln (who had a successful law practice). There are plenty of Presidents who weren’t rich, but all of them were at least comfortable before they became President.
The basis of this narrative is that a rich person cannot possibly be a force for the have-nots. That’s total crap. Franklin Roosevelt was very rich, but also enacted programs that are the basis for America’s modern welfare state. Not all kajillionaires are self-interested Koch brothers. Sure, many are, but the key thing isn’t that they are rich, but that they are self-interested assholes. And Mitt Romney has plenty of that in spades. I’d much rather that his lying, asshole nature be the focus.
Why does all this bother me? Remember when the media bought into John Kerry as a rich elitist out of touch with America because he wind-surfed? Instead, we got a second term of George Bush. He was folksy, but he was no less rich than John Kerry. But also, and this is the important part, he designed his policies unrepentantly to benefit rich people. But the media rarely talked about that.
Additionally, Mitt Romney, as bad as he will be for America if he’s elected, is a far cry better than some of the poorer Republican possibilities. Remember, Sarah Palin is only 6 years removed from being the mayor of a small podunk city in Alaska.
Sure, rich as an epithet might work at the moment, but it can also be used to tag our candidates unfairly. I’d much rather that the idiots be tarnished with brushes that can’t be used against us. Like his willingness to lie. Or the fact that he will cause the United States to descend into a fiery pit of hell. You know, things that matter. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: opinion, politics
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This pie turned out quite well. Everyone at Pie Night loved it. The caramel was a bit boozier than I thought it would be, but I coulda been doing it wrong. Recipe comes from Dennis Wilkinson. As is normal, I’ve modified it slightly.
Crust
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 stick cold butter
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- dash salt
- 1½ ounces cold water
- 1½ ounces vodka
Pretty standard crust, except there’s a bit more liquid than I normally would use for one crust.
- Mix the flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor
- Cut the butter into 1 tablespoon pieces
- Add the butter to the flour mixture
- Pulse the food processor until all the chunks of butter are less than pea size
- Transfer the flour mixture to a bowl
- Combine the water and vodka into a cup
- Add the liquid to the flour, alternately adding some and mixing it with a pastry cutter or fork
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- Work the dough until the liquid is pretty thoroughly combined and the flour forms a ball
- Mush the dough into a disc
- Wrap it in sandwich paper
- Chill for a half hour to an hour in the fridge
- Roll into a crust
- Place the crust in a 9 inch pie plate (deep dish works better, but I didn’t do that)
- Crimp the edges
- Weight with foil and pie weights
- Bake at 400° for 20 minutes, then remove the weights and bake for 10 more
- Remove from oven and allow to cool
Caramel
- 1 cup sugar
- ⅓ cup water
- 1 tablespoon corn syrup
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 2 ounces Grand Marnier (original recipe calls for 1 ounce, but I don’t have a 1 ounce measure)
- 1 orange
- Grate all the zest from the orange
- Combine sugar, corn syrup and water in a saucepan
- Cover and bring to a boil
- Remove the cover and continue boiling until sugar starts turning brown
- Swirls the pan on the burner periodically until the sugar is reddish brown (it really does turn a reddish brown)
- Add the cream and Grand Marnier
- Stir until dissolved
- Continue boiling until it’s pretty thick (original recipe says
thread stage which I have no clue how to judge)
- Add the orange zest
- Pour it into the pie shell
- Cool
The caramel was boozier than I expected. Perhaps sticking to the original amount mighta made it more acceptable to me, as I don’t drink or eat anything with more than a trace of alcohol left in it. I kinda expected it to have cooked off considering how long it was boiling.
Filling
- 4½ semisweet bakers chocolate
- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 2 tablespoons corn starch
- ⅔ cup sugar
- dash salt
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 3 eggs
- 1 can (14½ ounces) Guinness stout
- ¼ cup water
- 1 packet gelatin
- 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
- Combine the water and gelatin in a small saucepan
- Separate the egg yolks and discard the egg white
- Melt the chocolate in the microwave
- In a medium saucepan, combine the cocoa powder, corn starch, sugar, and salt
- Whisk in the cream
- Whisk in the egg yolks
- Whisk in the Guinness
- Whisk in the chocolate
- Cook and stir the mixture over medium-high heat until thick enough to coat a spoon
- Heat the gelatin until it dissolves
- Whisk in the gelatin
- Remove from heat and strain the chocolate through a strainer into a bowl
- Whisk in the butter
- Pour into the pie shell (the one with the caramel, not a new one)
- Cool to room temperature, then chill in the refrigerator until set
At this point, I had some leftover chocolate, though not a lot. I really should have used a deep dish pie plate. C’est la vie.
Serve with whipped cream.
Click through to the original recipe to see a lovely photo. I didn’t get a good photo of my edition of the pie. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: cooking, pie
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In addition to buying season tickets for the Sounders Men, this year I bought a season ticket for the Sounders Women. After they signed a bunch of women’s national team players, I figured it might be the only chance I get to see such great players regularly. The team is an amateur team, so it can’t normally get top flight players. But with the demise of the W.P.S., they want to play somewhere and apparently it’s for soccer-crazy Seattle. If WPS revives, we might not get a team simply because of travel costs.
Anyway, last night was the first match of the season. It was an exhibition against Seattle Pacific University. Seattle Pacific is out of season, so they didn’t have a lot of their players. Basically, we all expected a rout, and that’s pretty much what we got. SPU’s second half keeper was pretty good, and they had a forward whose play I liked as well. I didn’t catch either of their names. It was a chance for all of them to say they’d played against Hope Solo, Sydney Leroux, Alex Morgan, etc.
I noticed two big differences between the teams. First, the Sounders were much faster. They could run rings around SPU. And did a couple of times. Second, SPU players were really indecisive. When a ball dropped somewhere, Sounders immediately moved. Some moved toward the ball to pick it up or challenge for it. Others immediately moved for the pass. Even though they haven’t played together much, their experience tells them what their role should be. Their execution wasn’t always crisp, but they knew what to do. SPU players took a half second to decide, and they frequently appeared to change their minds two steps after starting.
Final score was 5 to 0. Hope Solo had maybe one save, and she spent a fair amount of time wandering around the midfield. If SPU had the skill, they could have easily scored on her with one well placed kick from midfield. But the Sounders dominated so much that wasn’t going to happen. Things will be different when they start played the regular season. But first another couple of exhibitions, one on Friday. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: life, sounders
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This morning the National Archives released the census schedules for the 1940 census. 72 years after each census, the government sends all that information into the wild. For a genealogist, this information is gold. Right now all it’s not searchable. In order to find someone in the census, a person has to know where they already are. Either that or stumble on them among the 132 million records released in image form. Which isn’t completely impossible. I ran into one relative while looking for another. But if you don’t know where they are, it’ll be a huge fishing expedition. Over the next few months, a few genealogy sites will be creating indexes and it will be searchable before too long.
Luckily, I know where a few people would have been in 1940.
Unfortunately, the main release of the records was a disaster. Archives.com is operating the official National Archives site, which is the only site that had all the records for the public, releasing them at 9 a.m. The site promptly fell over. It wasn’t until about midnight I could access any census schedules on it.
In the meantime, Ancestry.com, myheritage.com, and familysearch.org all got a hard dump of the images at 12:01 a.m. They’ve been putting them up since then, but it takes a bit of time to get them prepped and tagged by location. Ancestry loaded up Washington, D.C. first so they could tout that they found F.D.R.’s census record. Then they added a few territories and Nevada. I assume that’s because those places are sparsely populated and they could test their systems for classifying and loading the images. Then they added Indiana and Maine. Most of the family I’ve researched lived in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Washington in 1940. However, I did find a couple of distant relatives in the first couple of states. They are now working California, New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island.
FamilySearch is loading their states in a different order. I don’t remember what they’ve done, but when I first looked they had Colorado up. As a number of great great aunts and uncles in the Ryan branch moved to Colorado from Wisconsin. I was able to find all of the Colorado ones because either they lived in a small rural area that was easy to scan through, or they hadn’t moved since the 1930 census which gave me an address for them.
I haven’t yet looked at what MyHeritage.com has loaded up.
Around midnight, the official site got something working, and I could use it to access Washington records. I decided to look for Otto, Othelia, and Vera Hallin, my grandmother and her parents. I knew Gram grew up in Snoqualmie, and it’s not a huge place: two census districts comprising 44 images total. Pretty easy to scan through. I was slightly worried they hadn’t moved there by 1940. However, Gram was 11 by then, and she didn’t talk about spending a lot of time in their previous house in Skykomish, so my guess was they were already in Snoqualmie.
The first enumeration district I looked at (17-183) didn’t have them. It did have Otto’s brother Sivert Oman and his family though. I’m not surprised to find one of his family in the same town. They were all loggers mostly and Snoqualmie was a logging town.
Otto was on page 6 in the second enumeration district for Snoqualmie.
 Otto, Othelia, and Vera Hallin in the 1940 census Did I learn anything new about my grandmother’s family? Not really. But I do get to fill in details of their lives. I didn’t know they’d lived at least briefly in Everett. One set of columnns asked where folks lived in 1935. I’d always assumed they went from Skykomish straight to Snoqualmie. Othelia’s occupation is owning and running a restaurant. I only vaguely recalled that. From his job at the lumber mill, Otto made $1,740 during 1939, which is about $27,000 in 2010 dollars. Othelia doesn’t report any wages for her business; presumably any profit didn’t count as wages. Otto was either sick or got some vacation or leave, as he only worked 48 weeks out of 52. Othelia worked all 52 weeks.
And now I need to lay off the genealogy for a couple of days, as I have stuff to do. crossposted from King Rat. Tags: genealogy, hallin
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