Saturday, January 31, 2015

Cousin Alfred Dougherty, grandson of Isaac and Rachel Dougherty


ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON HIGHWAY ONE YESTERDAY AND THEN KING LEAR

Every day we cross HWY One in order to get to the Pacific Ocean. It's the nastiest crossing in Morro Bay because  when you are coming down the hill you curve up to a frontage road, Main Street, where there is a stop sign, then wait for your turn to cross to the light on HWY One (three cars can line up).  Sometimes you are stuck there on the east side of Main Street through 2 light changes on HWY One. OK. On the return from the beach you wait at HWY One until the light is green and then cross fast (the light is very brief), watching out for crazies in the northbound lane who are not going to stop as they turn right ahead of you then in 20 feet watching out for other crazies who do not stop at the stop signs on Main Street on the south side or the north side and wait for you to cross. It's always iffy, and Adrian, the great senior-citizen driving-refresher-teacher acknowledges it as the most dangerous crossing in town.

Normally heading home is not so dangerous because you can see the crazy right-turner and pause to make sure you can see if someone from the north hidden by cars waiting to cross ONE is not aware that you are crossing.

Normally, I look at what is coming from the north on HWY One. Yesterday I did not. I had been fiddling with the sun roof, and when the light turned green I started across.

A big white car heading south at 65 or 70 miles an hour ran the red light. I slammed on the brake just in time. We were not hit.

All my plans for ORNERY PEOPLE and the last NN volume and the 3rd NCE of Moby-Dick could have been wiped out. I would have been gone, and my less exposed companion might have been gone. Who would have told the cat?

We are always cautious. I always look to the left before I cross, I think, but I know that yesterday I did not.

Then we watched the PBS Christopher Plummer program on KING LEAR in which a man in his 60s or 70s, comparatively juvenile, makes a really bad decision, and I think of a dear friend who died recently after making a catastrophic decision and other dear friends who made horrendous decisions and think about being in my own right mind.

Lately I have been playing at becoming a boy historian, with three pieces online in a good place and another being reviewed.

I had better stop accumulating documents for ORNERY PEOPLE and figure out how to present it.

All this eating of more fruit and vegetables than anyone else in the Middle Kingdom. All this baking less marvelous bread and eating less of it. All this giving up alcohol in the mid-1980s. All this exercising every day, running since 1978 except for the time recovering from surgeries, every day every day with the rarest exceptions. All the physical therapy for knee or shoulder or hip, one after another. All the glory of the new eyes last year, letting me write this without glasses: toric interocular implants smashed by a big white car. All the attempts to stabilize and preserve and nurture and survive a little longer in good health, and one crazy in a big white car blowing through a red light on HWY One trying to get us. I had better plans, a trip to the end of the newly rebuilt Cayucos pier when the time comes.

And then to worry about not making bad decisions like Lear, whom I have known since I read a Pocket Book under a locust tree cow patties all around in a pasture in Red Rock, Oklahoma, in 1952, and other old men I have known and who made bad bad decisions.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Rosalynn Carter--another cousin who popped up today

So Rosalynn is a Pottenger and an Isaac, too. And Jimmy is a Terrell, which means he is kin to all my cousins who descend from my GGGGG Grandpa Joseph McGehee's first wife but not to the children of the second wife, where I fit in. I'll settle for Rosalynn.

Later, I counted. Rosalynn is a GGGGGG Grandchild of Richard Isaac and Sarah Pottenger and I am a GGGGGGG Granchild. Rosalynn is a little older, and the generations are not quite parallel.

In this South, this is kin.

Jeff Carter's book is too expensive for me to buy. I wish all the index had been put on Google Books!

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

The Hofbauer's wife and the short unhappy life of GGGGGGG Grandfather Holtzapfel

Was the horse her husband's?


Hans Jacob Holtzapfel was born 1662 in Gerabron, Frankfurt Am Main, Germany, and died June 17, 1684 in Michelfeld, Sinnshein Baden, Germany.  He married Anna Maria Margaretha Klein June 04, 1682 in Michelfeld Lutheran KB, Michelfeld,Germany, daughter of Hans Klein and Margaretha Volcker.  She was born October 27, 1658 in Michelfeld, Sinnshein Baden, Germany, and died May 05, 1684 in Michelfeld, Sinnshein
Baden, Germany.

Notes for Hans Jacob Holtzapfel:
- According to the entry of the church register of Michelfeld nr. Sinnsheim (Michelfeld Lutheran KB) this Jacob Holtzapfel was seen on 12 May 1684 by the Holfbauer's [Hofbauer's?] wife committing the act of sodomy with a horse.  He was beheaded and burned at the stake for his crime.

Observations....
Anna died on May 5.
Hans was seen committing the act of sodomy on May 12
Hans was beheaded and burnt at the stake on June 17


There is more to this story

I was feeling so young until I read Kirsch on M. H. Abrams a couple of years ago




When Henry James paid a visit to his native country in 1905, after decades living in Europe, he was struck with a kind of pious horror by the spectacle he found on the Lower East Side of New York City. As a novelist, James was bothered most of all by his fear of what these “swarming” Jews would mean for the future of the English language in America. Visiting Yiddish cafés, he saw them “as torture-rooms of the living idiom; the piteous gasp of which at the portent of lacerations to come could reach me in any drop of the surrounding Accent of the Future.” To James, the English language and English literature were the inalienable possession of the Anglo-Saxon race—a common feeling that persisted long after James wrote. As late as the 1930s, while Jews made up more than their share of Ivy League students—and would have been even more overrepresented if not for quotas—they were still virtually absent from the English faculty.
Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling studied Arnold at Columbia, and Harry Levin studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel wrote the biography of Henry James, and Hershel Parker wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.
Of that pioneering generation, one of the last survivors is M.H. Abrams, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on July 23. (Abrams is also still publishing: In August, Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.) Abrams’ name will be familiar to just about every English major of the last half-century, if only because it appears at the top of the spine of each edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Abrams created in 1962.

Monday, January 26, 2015

F. Scott Fitzgerald--Muriel, here's another Warfield Cousin

Snowden-Warfield
Family Stories · F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author
(Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who graduated from Princeton in 1918, became one of the most beloved writers of the 20 th Century. Considered the "Great American Dreamer", he wrote stories with "epic grandeur" and "elegant style". His books include "This Side of Paradise", "Tender is the Night", "The Great Gadsby", "The Beautiful and Damned", "Love of the Last Tycoon" and "Jazz Age Stories". He married Zelda Sayre on April 3, 1920 in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
F. Scott was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He died on December 21, 1940 in Hollywood in Los Angeles, California. Zelda, who was born in 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama, died on March 11, 1948 in Asheville, North Carolina.
F. Scott, known as "Scottie" to his friends, was a descendant of Richard Warfield through the following lineage:
•  Scottie was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Edward Fitzgerald (1853-1931) and Mary "Mollie" McQuillan (1859-1936).
•  Edward Fitzgerald was the son of Michael Fitzgerald and Cecelia Ashton Scott.
•  Cecelia Ashton Scott was the daughter of John Scott, Jr. (1789-1840) and Eliza Magruder Key.
•  John Scott, Jr., was the son of John Scott, Sr., and Elizabeth Goodwin Dorsey (1769-). They were married in Baltimore, Maryland on May 15, 1788.
•  Elizabeth Goodwin Dorsey was daughter to Henry Hill Dorsey (1735/36-1772) and Elizabeth Goodwin.
•  Henry Hill Dorsey was the son of Caleb Dorsey, Jr., (1710-1772) and Priscilla Hill (1718-1781). They married in Anne Arundel County on February 10, 1734/35.
•  Caleb Dorsey, Jr., was son of Caleb Dorsey, Sr. (1685-1760), and Elinor Warfield (1683-1752). They married on August 24, 1704 in Anne Arundel County.
•  Elinor Warfield was the daughter of Richard Warfield, Sr. (born 1646/47 in England-died 1703/04 in Anne Arundel County), and Elinor Browne (born 1649 in Manchester, England-died 1718/19 in Anne Arundel County ).
Richard Warfield was first indentured to a John Sisson, who paid for his transport from England to "The Colonies". In John Sisson's will, dated March 16, 1663/64, he "bequesthed his servant boy Richard Warfield to Cornelius Howard. Warfield completed his service to Howard in 1669. Richard's occupation was a Planter, Captain of the Militia (1689) and a member of the first Vestry at St. Anne's in Annapolis. He owned the "Black Horse Tavern", nine miles west of Annapolis. He held tracks of land named "Wayfield", "Warfield's Right", "Hope", "Increase", "Warfield's Plains", "Warfield's Forest", Warfield's Addition", "Brandy" and "Warfield's Range".
Elinor was the daughter of Captain John Browne. She inherited two adjoining tracts of land, "Hope" and "Increase".


And  I remember the day in 1945
when another Warfield cousin did his duty.

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr.

Cousin Hight C. Moore, move aside for Warfields including Wallis and F. Scott Fitzgerald


A couple of years ago I noticed that the wife of the chairman at USC in the 70s was posting on my Hill site and it turned out we were cousins all the time without knowing it. We are both Clarkes from a sister of the mother of Richard Warfield which meant, to our chagrin, that we were stuck with Wallis as a cousin. I just noticed that we are also stuck with F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Well, I co-wrote a terrific piece long ago on TENDER IS THE NIGHT and a now-chaired professor stole my copy of THE GREAT GATSBY and published a confused article from my very clear interleaved teaching notes.
Distant cousin of ours, Muriel. I am so sorry that you can't claim cousinship to Hight C. Moore.
Or can you?
Will my copy of THE GREAT GATSBY appear in my mailbox?

Saturday, January 24, 2015

General John Butler in 1781--New Piece in JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION



http://allthingsliberty.com/2015/01/john-butlers-want-of-good-generalship/

My problem with being a boy historian is that I have to clear bushes out of the way before I can do what I want to do, which is to write about the men my GGGG Grandfather Ezekiel Henderson rode with (as best I can establish) in the last couple of years of the Revolution. He does not say he rode out against David Fanning, but the names of his officers indicates that he did, so I am tracking individual soldiers and officers. Then it became necessary to write about how David Fanning changed after he got his fancy Red Coat but before that I had to deal with the inept General Butler who should have retaken Governor Burke in 1781 and with how DF got to Charleston when he finally decided to leave and then you need to write about the significance and the great faults of Governor Burke and to write about verifying Fanning's Narrative and then to deal with false reports of Fanning's raids in South Carolina in 1783 but I am reaching the point of wanting to work on ORNERY PEOPLE, the actual writing of it. I think it has to be chronological.

Friday, January 23, 2015

Revolutionary War veteran, Cousin Daniel Moore's 1842 Horseback Ride from NC to Illinois at 77--To See His Daughter


From the Lenoir TOPIC 7 October 1891

Cousin Robert Tucker sells corn to Jesse & Frank James and the Younger Boys




Notes for LUTHER FRANCIS (FRANK) TUCKER:
Works Progress, Indian-Pioneer History, April 1938, #13802
Frank Tucker, P.O. is Eufaula, Ok., was born March 7, 1877 in Tobucksy County, Choctaw Nation, near Eufaula. His father, Robert Tucker, ran a ferry at Rock Ford, Ok., born in Mississippi. His mother, Tilda Edmiston, born in Missouri.

I was born in 1877 in Tobucksy County, Choctaw Nation. My father had come from Mississippi many years before. He made the trip in wagons drawn by ox teams. At the time of my birth my father ran a ferry across the South Canadian at a point known as Rock Ford where the old Texas Trail crossed the river. I think you will find that the Missouri, Kansas and Texas line through Oklahoma follows pretty much the route of the old Texas Trail as it was in territorial days.  Andy Edmiston, my grandfather on my mother's side, was the first bridge watcher for the Missouri, Kansas and Texas line in this part of the country, at Eufaula. The firebox of a train in those days was so loosely constructed that there was danger of live coals dropping from it and setting a bridge on fire. My grandfather's duty was to prevent bridges from burning. My boyhood was quite like that of other boys of that time. I went to school as did others in a shirt that reached below the knees. The length of it did away with the need of trousers to go over it. When I was about ten years of age, our family was at dinner one day; we heard someone hail us from our yard. We went to the door. There on horses that had fancy saddles with trimmings, dressed very neat and nice, sat Jesse and Frank James and the Younger boys. They needed corn. Father asked 50 cents a bushel for the corn. The outlaws paid him $1.00 a bushel. The South Canadian ferry happened to be out at that time; the stream was quite swollen, however, this didn't slow the outlaws down any. They plunged their mounts into the stream and swam them across. 

Monday, January 19, 2015

ENTERING THE 21ST CENTURY THIS MORNING



Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 10.1 - White for $310 or Black for $330




Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5: White or Bronze - same price $449


roocase Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 10.1 Case










Jon Talton is the king with THE DEADLINE MAN but here is Connelly again on the death of newspapers, in THE BURNING ROOM

The Scarecrow

The Scarecrow
by Michael Connelly
Edition: Hardcover

650 used & new from $0.01

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A Loving Obituary for American Newspapers, August 10, 2009
This review is from: The Scarecrow (Hardcover)
This is one of Connelly's best mysteries. It is also an obituary for all newspapers, although focused on the Los Angeles TIMES. Not everyone will grieve with Connelly as I do. I was in email contact with an editor at the LA TIMES on a day when 140 people were let go. I have spent months, all told, in the old NYPL Annex and many other libraries reading nineteenth-century newspapers, my head in a microfilm reader or standing in pain over low flat tables turning big pages or, very rarely, working at a high slanted stand kind to the back. I have a special love of American papers when 10 or 12 papers were in tough competition and another 20 or 25 catered to special audiences. Many, many other readers of Connelly will bring their own newspaper history to THE SCARECROW, and grieve in their way. This is a fine mystery, but it is more. This early tribute to the vanishing newspaper may remain one of the most heartbreaking anyone ever writes.

Here is Connelly in THE BURNING ROOM ON THE LOS ANGELES TIMES:
In 1993 it was big and strong, its editions fat with ads and stories produced by a staff of some of the best and brightest journalists in their field. Now the paper looked like somebody who had been through chemo--thin, unsteady, and knowing the inevitable could only be held off for so long. (p. 160).