Ginny in Black and White

Today is the birthday of my stepmother, Virginia "Ginny" Ann (Daugherty) Truby Sellers.  She and my father were married December 4, 1980.  She was my father's third wife; he was her second husband.  Their marriage lasted longer than both of his first two marriages put together.

I am sure my father took this photograph because it's in black and white.  He loved working in black and white.  The photo was in the bonanza that my sister sent me a year and a half ago (I'm still working my way through it!).  My best guess is that it was taken during the 2010's, but I can't narrow it down more than that.

I'm not sure what to make of the look on Ginny's face.  It's kind of like she's giving Daddy the evil eye for taking her photo.

Well, evil eye or not, Ginny, happy birthday.  We miss you.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Celebrate Mother's Day and Show Us Some Photos

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, so it was to be expected that Randy Seaver would have that as the focus for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post.  (Today's topic revisits the same one from 2018, with updated social media links.)

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music), is:

1.  Sunday, 11 May, is Mother's Day in the USA.  Let's celebrate it by showing some of our photos with our mothers.

2.  Extra credit:  What did you call your mother during her life?  What did your children call your mother?

3.  More extra credit:  Have you written a biography or tribute to your mother?  If so, please share a link if you have one.

4.  Share your photo(s) on your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack, or BlueSky post.  Leave a link on this blog post to help us find your mom photos.

1.  I remember that the last time Randy challenged us to share photos of ourselves with our mothers, I could only find a couple.  Since having received the photo bonanza from my sister, however, I have many, many more!  Here's a small selection.

This is the earliest photograph I have found of myself.  The photo was developed in October 1962, and I was born in April, so the oldest I can be is 6 months.  The shadow on the skirt of my mother's dress has to be the head of my father, the person likely taking the photo.

I've estimated I'm about a year old in this photo, so it's probably from 1963.  I was told by my cousin Beth (who is in a different photo with me in the same location) that this is Disneyland.

I like the whimsical nature of this one, which had to have been taken by my father.  It's June 1964, and my mother seems to be pregnant, so the absolute latest the photo could have been taken is June 16, and then only if she gave birth to my sister Stacy later on the same day.  This photo might have been taken in La Puente; I'll ask my sister Laurie if she recognizes the house.

This photo was taken in June 1969, when my mother took all three of us kids to Florida for our cousin Gail's wedding.  From left to right we are my brother, Mark; our mother, Myra; me; and my sister, Stacy.  My brother looks miserable for some reason.  I look happy, though.

This photo was developed in June 1973 and was taken at the trailer park where my family lived in Niceville, Florida.  I believe, from left to right going into the trailer, it is me, Mark, Stacy, and our mother.  I'm pretty sure my father took this photo, but I can't imagine why.

This is me and my mother standing on the porch of my Aunt Dottie's house in Niceville.  I'm about 16, so it's roughly 1978.  We're obviously dressed up to go somewhere (I remember that dress!), but I don't remember this at all, so I don't know what the occasion is or why we were having our photo taken at my aunt's.  I'm going to be asking my brother, my sister, and my stepfather what they recall.  If my aunt were still alive, I'd ask her also.

I find it interesting that the three photos I'm pretty sure my father took are black and white.  That means he probably developed them himself at home.

2.  I called my mother Mommy her entire life.  My stepsons never met my mother, as she died young.

3.  I have written a tribute to my mother, as a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post in 2017.  I have also written about her many times for Mother's Day separately from SNGF posts.

Honoring the Nurse in My Family on National Nurses Day

I know of one registered nurse in my family to celebrate on National Nurses Day:  my grandaunt Florence Meckler.  Specifically, she was a pediatric RN.  She was one of my maternal grandfather's younger sisters.

Florence was born December 22, 1915 (coincidentally, the exact same date as my maternal grandmother's oldest brother) in Brooklyn, New York.  I don't know where she attended nursing school or when she graduated, but it must have been before 1939, because on January 1, 1939 there was a photo of her in the newspaper holding the first two children born in the new year at Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn.  I am lucky enough to have the newspaper clipping because my grandmother saved it and had it in her photo album.

Exactly two years after that brush with fame, Florence married Moshe Amine, on January 1, 1941, in Brooklyn.  Florence and Moshe had two children:  Yedida, who was born one year after my mother, also on Armistice Day (now called Veterans Day); and Beth, six years later.  Some years later Florence and Moshe divorced, and 20 years after that Florence married Max Stewart.

I don't know how long Florence worked as a nurse.  I really should ask my cousins about that, shouldn't I?

I never met Moshe, but I knew Florence and Max.  I visited them several times in Las Vegas, where they lived, when I went to conferences and trade shows there.  I continued to visit Florence after Max passed away.  We would usually go out to one of the big buffets in one of the casinos on the Strip.

Eventually, Florence moved to Scotts Valley, California, at the behest of her older daughter.  And then I visited her there, in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  I took her out for lunch and to go shopping.  I drove a cargo van at the time, and I remember she had trouble stepping up high enough to climb in (she was a tiny person), so I started bringing a step stool to make it easier for her.

During all that time, I don't think I knew that Florence had been a registered nurse.  But she definitely fussed over me about health stuff, trying to make sure I was taking care of myself.

And here's a photo of Florence holding me when I was about a year old, proving that we go back a long way.  The teenager next to her is her younger daughter, my cousin Beth, who recognized herself and told me that we were at Disneyland.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: How Many Autosomal DNA Matches Descend from Your Eight Pairs of 2nd-great-grandparents?

My participation in tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver is not going to be pretty.  Or fun.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  How many autosomal DNA matches do you have descended from your eight 2nd-great-grandparents (they would be your third cousins)?  Do you know how they are related to you?  Have you corresponded with them?  Why are your numbers high or low?

2.  Share the number of your autosomal DNA matches for each of your 2GGP and answer my questions above on your own blog, on Facebook or other social media, or in a comment on this blog.  Share the link to your post on this blog, so readers can respond.

Oh, this is going to be painful.

First, I need to mention a couple of clarifications.

I do not have eight 2nd-great-grandparents.  I have sixteen 2nd-great-grandparents, as does everyone else.  I have eight pairs of 2nd-great-grandparents, which I'm pretty sure is what Randy meant (and what I changed the title of mine to).

And not all of my autosomal matches who descend from any given pair of 2nd-great-grandparents are going to be my 3rd cousins.  I can have other relatives in addition to 3rd cousins who descend from one pair of ancestors.  If the question was intended to be "How many autosomal matches do I have who are identified as 3rd cousins?", that's significantly different from what Randy wrote, and he wouldn't have to ask, "Do you know how they are related to you?"  Maybe he started with one idea and it morphed into another.

Now that I've cleared the air on that (once an editor, always an editor), on to the disaster of my response for this challenge.

I have mentioned before (particularly when the question of DNA comes up) that my mother was Ashkenazi Jewish and that Ashkenazi Jews suffer from high degrees of endogamy due to lots of intermarriage.

Well, on Family Tree DNA, my current results show that I have 24,697 autosomal matches.

I'm sure that the vast majority of those are on my maternal side, and I have no idea (and probably never will) how they are specifically related to me, due to endogamy and the lovely obstacles that can exist for doing Jewish research in the former Russian Empire in general, particularly in the former Grodno guberniya, where three of my lines go back to.

For reasons unknown to me — I have not actually done much with my FTDNA matches in quite a while and have not kept up with all of the announcements — 1,525 of those matches are identified as paternal, 38 as maternal, and 710 as both.

I have very few matches on FTDNA where I have identified the specific relationship I have with them.  So I have no idea how FTDNA has come up with the numbers of matches that are paternal, maternal, or both.  I'm pretty sure I have not identified 38 relationship matches total, much less 38 on my maternal line alone.

And there is absolutely no crossover in a genealogically relevant period of time between the paternal and maternal sides of my family.  Absolutely none.  Period, end of report.

So I have no idea how FTDNA has identified 710 of my matches as being both paternal and maternal.  That is just flat-out wrong.  Unless there is another way to interpret "paternal and maternal" that I'm not coming up with on my own.

On top of all that, I don't even know one set of my 2nd-great-grandparents, because I as yet have not identified the biological father of my paternal grandfather.  If I don't know who that great-grandfather was, I don't know who his parents were.

As for the number of matches I have who are descended from my eight sets of 2nd-great-grandparents?

To quote Randy:

The number of autosomal DNA matches I have on FTDNA with a known common 2nd-great-grandparent is:

NONE.

The number of autosomal DNA matches I have on AncestryDNA with a known common 2nd-great-grandparent is:

Three total.

• James Gauntt (1831–1899) and Amelia Gibson (1831–1908):  2

• Mendel Hertz Brainin (c. 1860–1930) and Ruchel Dwojre Jaffe (c. 1866–1934):  1

Some days it's just not worth chewing through the straps.

I do have additional cousins who descend from various of my 2nd-great-grandparents and for whom I know the exact relationship who appear as autosomal matches in both databases.  I have corresponded with almost all of them.  Several of them I was able to determine the exact relationship only because I corresponded with them.  Some I recognized by name and knew the relationship immediately.

The huge numbers of matches on my maternal side I already discussed above.  I don't really know that I would characterize the numbers of matches on my paternal side as being particularly low.  It's more that I don't know the exact relationship for most of them.  That is due mostly to a lack of response when I have reached out, particularly with matches on AncestryDNA.  I attribute that to the fact that many, many people who test at Ancestry do it strictly for the cutesie-poo (and mostly useless) pie chart and don't care about anything else.

Was There Really a Ghost?

I grew up believing in things such as ghosts because my mother did.  Ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, hauntings, déjà vu, superstitions, my mother believed in all of it and taught me to also.  But I was always more than a little disappointed because I had not observed nor experienced any of it myself.

Until I did.

I was living in Los Angeles, just on the edge of East L.A., at 459 East Adams Boulevard.  It was a beautiful three-story Victorian house.  The house was owned by my friend's uncle and his partner.  After buying it they needed renters to help pay the mortgage, so five of us moved in:  my friend and three more prior-enlisted Navy, all now attending USC as Navy ROTC midshipmen, and me.  I lived on the uppermost story and had a huge walk-in closet which I loved.

I never heard what made my landlords curious enough to do this, but one day they hired a medium to come and check out the house because they were wondering if it were haunted.  And the medium told them it was.  A young boy who had died in a train accident was haunting it.  He didn't die there — no railroad tracks right next door or anything like that — but he had spent many happy times there visiting his grandfather.  So that's where his spirit was drawn when he died.

After hearing about the results of the seance, my housemates decided we would try to contact the ghost.  We set ourselves up in a room on the second floor with a Ouija board and a candle, and they started asking questions.  Nothing had happened, and they were getting frustrated.  Then someone asked, "If there is a spirit here, show us a sign", or something pretty close to that.  Suddenly the candle went out.  Which normally wouldn't be that big of a deal, but all the windows were closed, and there wasn't any breeze going through the room.  So we took that to be a sign, but it made some people nervous, and we wrapped up pretty quickly after that.

Okay, one little candle goes out.  Not much of an experience, right?

Ah, but there's more.

Some time after that, Bill and I were on the ground floor on a Saturday.  No one else was home.  I was reading a book.  I don't remember what Bill was doing, but he was in another room.  And suddenly I heard footsteps running downstairs from the second floor.

I looked toward the stairs, but I didn't see anyone.  I was starting to wonder where whoever it was could have gone, when I remembered — Bill and I were the only ones in the house, and he was already on the first floor.

It had to have been the ghost!

I ran over to find Bill and asked him if he had heard the footsteps also.  He hadn't, of course, but I knew what I had heard.

My only experience with a ghost.

Today, May 3, is National Paranormal Day, so it's a good day to record that experience.

Nobody seems to know how National Paranormal Day started or who created it, but it's listed by several of the sites that track events.  National Day Calendar and National Day Archives don't say anything about when it started.  Days of the Year, National Today, and There Is a Day for That agree that the observance began in 2013.  But according to Holiday Calendar, it began in 2011.

Image by Aberrant Realities.  Downloaded from Pixabay and used under the Pixabay Content License.

Focus on Black and White

It's May, so it must be National Photography Month!  And that means another excuse . . . er, reason to show off my father's photographs.

Daddy liked to work in black and white, and while I was growing up he usually had a darkroom in the house somewhere and did his own developing.  What's interesting about these photos is that, even though they are black and white, almost all of them were taken at his home in Mary Esther, Florida, and he didn't have a darkroom there.  I don't know where he found a place to develop them for him, because so few places do it anymore.  Maybe he found a vendor online?  I really don't know.

Daddy would take photos of the same things again and again, sometimes from different angles, sometimes in different light.  I have learned that's what a lot of photographers do.  They look at the world differently than I do.  So most of these are subjects that we have many, many (many!) representations of (especially that lamp).  The majority are in color, probably because he had problems finding someone to develop the black and whites.  But he must have had a roll or two of black and white, because these were sprinkled in with the color photos.

front door of the house in Mary Esther

table lamp that sat in the family room

a small selection of Daddy's camera collection

a tree in the back yard

the base of the same tree

bird bath in the back yard

little pig statue in the back yard

a sad-looking dog in a truck in a parking lot
(he must be patiently waiting for his person to return)

Wordless Wednesday

Intellectual Property in My Family Tree

Annually, April 26 is World Intellectual Property Day, which was first celebrated in 2000.  It was established by the World Intellectual Property Organization to raise awareness of the impact of patents, copyrights, trademarks and design on daily life.  And some members of my family have patents and copyrights, so I'm going to celebrate them.

My cousin Al Lore, who worked as a chemist at DuPont, told me he holds five patents, relating to composition of matter and textile finishes (hospital nonwoven gown finish).  I was able to find three of them in the patent database by searching with Google.

Fluorine-containing terpolymers, as Albert L. Lore with Stuart Raynolds

Fluorosurfactant leveling agent, as Albert L. Lore

Oil- and water-repellant copolymers, as Albert Lynn Lore with Edward James Greenwood and Nandakumar Seshagiri Rao

I took chemistry in high school and got all A's, but I have to admit that I don't understand any of what Al's patents do.  I guess I'm not an organic chemist.

My cousin Sam Brainin, who was an electrical engineer, is in the database with one patent.

Space stabilization of a search pattern, as Samuel M. Brainin

My aunt Mary Meckler has written several books, for which she owns the copyrights, as far as I know.

The Magic of Tobias Twissle, as Mary Meckler

Aimsly's Attitude, as Mary Meckler

Tangled in Life:  A Lainey Kelso Mystery, as Mary M. Meckler

Everybody's Grandma, as Mary Meckler

Jangled Lives:  A Story of Love and Fear, as Mary M. Meckler

I had the pleasure of editing Tobias Twissle for my aunt.  I think I did some editing on Tangled in Life also.

My sister Stacy Fowler has cowritten two books.  I believe she shares the copyrights with her coauthor.

A Century in Uniform:  Military Women in American Films, Stacy Fowler and Deborah A. Deacon

Military Women in World Cinema:  A 20th Century History and Filmography, Deborah A. Deacon and Stacy Fowler

I know I have a thank you in the second book, because I translated several Russian titles and credits for Stacy.  I think I have a thank you in the first book also.

Maybe by posting this, I'll find out I have even more talented relatives!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Be a Time Traveler

I think Randy Seaver has previously posted a challenge similar to that of today's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, but it's an idea that deserves to be revisited multiple times.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  We all wish that we knew more about our most elusive ancestors — the ones we might not know the surname for, or the one who was probably adopted, changed his name for some reason, or lived through war or a natural disaster.

2.  Be a time traveler.  Where would you go, whom would you speak with, what would you ask them?

3.  Share your time traveler adventure on your own blog, on Facebook or other social media, or in a comment on this blog.  Share the link to your stories on this blog, so readers can respond.

Randy didn't state this was only one trip, but that's how he wrote his response, so I'll stick with that.

Since I'm time traveling only one time, I have to choose to be there when my cousin Raymond Lawrence Sellers was adopted.  This probably took place in Cumberland County, New Jersey, with a small chance of it having been in Burlington County, New Jersey instead.  Raymond was born September 23, 1945 and apparently was surrendered for adoption by my Aunt Dottie soon after that, possibly before the end of October 1945.  So those are my estimated time and place.

As for whom I would speak with, I'll try to cover the bases.  I want to talk with the adoptive parents and anyone else who participated in any steps of the adoption.  If it was a documented adoption through the court system (the second version of events that I was told), that would include a presiding judge and any administrative personnel who observed the process or handled paperwork, either in the court system or at the adoption agency.  If it was an informal adoption to friends or extended family (the original version I heard), then probably the only other individuals would have been additional family members or friends who were there.

The one question that I would be asking is the name given to Raymond after adoption.  Without that piece of information, my research has been stalled for the almost 10 years that I have been trying to find him.  New Jersey still keeps its adoption records sealed since 1941.  My aunt registered with New Jersey as being willing to speak with Raymond if he ever contacted the state to try to find his birth parents.  Not only have we never received any communication from New Jersey, Dottie died in 2021.  I have not checked with the state to find out what alternatives might be available for contact given that fact, because I'm not optimistic that there are any, but I still need to do so just in case.

If I can learn Raymond's new name, I can try to trace him through his life.  I can look for school records, marriage records, birth records (of possible children), and death records.  I might find out he died young as a child.  But I also might discover that he married and had several children and grandchildren.  I concede that I consider the latter unlikely, as I have not been alerted to any DNA matches, and I have all of the databases covered with close and fairly close relatives who should match Raymond or his next generations if they test.  So either no one among Raymond and his possible progeny have tested, or it was only him, and he either has not tested or died without testing.

But even if the answer were that he died young and had no children, no one to connect with, I would finally have an answer and could tell his siblings, particularly my cousin Pattie, who since Dottie passed away has been the primary standard bearer hoping for a resolution to the search.  I'm sure that, even posthumously, Dottie would appreciate that we knew what had happened to the son she gave up.