Walking the Berkshires

Taking Care of Business

We shall momentarily be off to Vermont to celebrate the New Year with myriad in-laws.  I do not anticipate much likelihood of blogging until I return, when the first item on the agenda will be to role out the January 2 edition of the Anthropology/Archeology Carnival Four Stone Hearth. 

The Fourth Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focusing primarily on four lines of research:

• archaeology
• socio-cultural anthropology
• bio-physical anthropology
• linguistic anthropology

Do send along any posts appropriate for this carnival via submit@fourstonehearth.net or directly to my attention at greensleevesenviro AT sbcglobal DOT net. 

Blessings be upon you and yours in the New Year.

An Olmsted Rediscovered: Adventures in On-Line Genealogy Blogging

One of the real joys of genealogy blogging is the unexpected connection it frequently establishes with living people - often unrelated - but with research interests that intersect with parts of my family history.  One such connection happened yesterday, when I received an e-mail from an 11th grade AP history student in Philadelphia who is embarking on an extensive research project documenting everything that can be found in primary sources about individuals buried during the Victorian era in one of their city's churchyards.  She and three of her classmates selected the grave of Henry Charles Olmsted, my Gr-gr-great uncle, and in the course of her on-line investigations she found this blog and contacted me.

Henry Charles Olmsted was the younger brother of my direct ancestor William Nisbet Olmsted and I knew immediately who he was although was less certain where to locate the obituaries and newspaper clippings I was certain were contained within our family archive.  It also caused me to remember a similar query I received a year ago at this time about the maternal grandparents of these brothers, Michael Nisbet and Clarissa Cohen from someone who had taken on the task of transcribing the baptismal records from Christ Church in Philadelphia from the 1780s through the 1840s.  As I keep virtually all of my e-mail, I was able to retrieve those messages and add them to the growing list of leads I started to develop for the AP students.

This afternoon I hit gold in the most fragile part of the family record: the brittle and yellowed scrapbooks - one of them a Mark Twain patent - kept by my gr-great grandmother Mary Athalia Stearns and her daughter Margaret Stearns Olmsted.  My Great Aunt Margie once pulled them off a lower shelf in her Upper East Side apartment to show me when I spent the weekend with her in New York during college, so when her effects were being boxed I was able to recall their location and make sure they were included in her genealogy archive.  I am very glad I did, for there is information included upon these crumbling, glue-stained pages and within the busted scrapbook spines that is unavailable elsewhere.  I rarely burrow to the bottom of the container that holds these scrapbooks, as they fall apart at the touch and are the devil and all to conserve from further damage unless left in situ.

Nonetheless I found what I was sure was the right volume and sure enough, there was a page with half a dozen obituaries for Henry Charles Olmsted from February, 1893, when this unfortunate lawyer and rising star in Democratic political circles slipped on the ice and was confined for several weeks to bed, only to die of pneumonia. 

I do not know whether he had any interest in his family history, but as he died without issue, his Uncle Henry Morse Olmsted passed along his genealogical papers to my great-grandmother and her brother Ned Olmsted, which in time came to my Great Aunt Margie, and so in 2003 to me.  I had not read all the material relating to Henry C. Olmsted in our papers before this query, and am very glad to have had the prompt to do so.  In the process, I not only rediscovered a collateral ancestor, but found a photograph of his grandmother Clarissa (Cohen) Nisbet (1792-1867) which I had failed to note in previous forays into the family archive.  Her husband Michael Nisbet, above, held high masonic office in the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, and I located this portrait of him on-line in the historic collections of that organization.  Alas, I have not found a picture yet of Henry Charles Olmsted in our files, but will keep looking.  Like genealogy itself, our family archive is a never ending source of surprises.

I am sure that some of this information will be helpful to the AP students in Philadelphia, but their inquiry has most assuredly been of excellent service to me. 

More Christmas Memories From Mom

By popular demand, and because I am really proud of her storytelling ability, my Mother returns today as guest blogger with More Memories of the Season with Gran:

"I have been reliving childhood memories, as have we all I feel certain, and today two different ones are in my head and making me smile.

They both have to do with holiday traditions, so as each one of us is creating and repeating our own with our own families, we can think of the childhood excitement of four little girls as we dressed in excursion clothes and all tried to take mom’s hand as she drove us to Back Bay station to take the special weekend excursion train to New York City to visit Gar and Aunt Margie and to sightsee along Fifth Avenue on one of the weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas each year.

Ordinarily, we drove to New York when we visited Gar, but on this occasion we got to go by train, which was half of the excitement for me.  I can still see the city of New Haven going by our smoky train window and vividly remember seeing the first wild swans I had ever seen on the Sound somewhere in Connecticut after we had passed New Haven.  I can still remember going by the Pallisades and slowly creeping into 125^th St station which was the gateway to everything strange and different and exciting about New York for me.

Finally we would arrive at Grand Central Station which seemed to be an entire city and a huge church underground as far as I could tell. I can see the stars on the ceiling and sense the pulse of more people rushing by than I could ever imagine. 

Even the elevator and the buzzers we had to use to get to Gar’s apartment were part of the excitement.  I loved everything about that apartment.  The extraordinary portraits of sea captains on the walls, the Gracie china on top of huge bookcases in the livingroom, the box of ivory mah jong  (sp?) chips that were intricately carved and endlessly fascinating even if we never knew how to play the game that they were really designed for. We would snuggle in all over the house and the next morning Aunt Margie would perform her ritual of pancake making at the table with sausage and bacon, not just one but both!  All the while we children could hardly wait for the rest of the day to unfold, when we would all go up and down Fifth Avenue looking at every mechanical display in every store window, listening to brass bands playing Christmas music on every avenue corner, seeing buildings that you couldn’t even see the tops of from down below, and perhaps the most magical of all standing for endless time both outside and inside FAO Schwartz company watching incredible model train displays on multiple levels and seeing more miraculous toys than I could even believe existed.  Somehow mom made it perfectly clear that all these things were just to look at.  We never expected to find one of those marvels under our own tree,until years later when we finally realized that Santa did take a detour there himself when he picked out the tiny Stieff animals that appeared in the very tops of our Christmas stockings year after year.  We certainly couldn’t blame him for thinking that his elves couldn’t have done any better if they had made them themselves!

...The other memory that is with me is one of Mom sitting in the little livingroom in Brookline with her Christmas music playing on the big Victrola ( that is what we called it, though I don’t know if it really was one) with her stacks of Christmas cards which Dad had taken and printed in the cellar, writing long letters on every single one.  I can still see her addressing letters to families they had befriended when they, and we, moved from base to base across the country before Dad was sent overseas duringWWII. I can see the card she sent every year to the torpedoed British sailor who ended up on our doorstep one night looking for the only family he knew in the U.S. and finding that they had moved and we had bought their house.  Since the war seemed like ancient history to me who had very few memories of that time, I marveled that Mom kept close ties with even these long ago friends."

Mom Guest Blogs: "More Brookline Memories"

My mother Betsy Abbott, in addition to her tremendous artistic talents, is a wonderful storyteller.  Please welcome her as guest blogger today with a tale of Christmas past from her girlhood in Brookline, MA.

More Brookline Memories

By Christmas Eve, we five children were almost beside ourselves with anticipation in the big house on Upland Rd. with the pillared front porch and the bright red door.  We were convinced, and it was probably true, that we were the only family on the whole of the hill that didn't yet have a Christmas tree.  For weeks we had watched the neighbors decorating theirs, the colored lights twinkling from windows up and down the street as soon as it got dark each evening.

Finally, it was Christmas Eve, and we knew that this was, at last, our own special day.  Besides that, it was even more so because this would be almost a full day with Dad, and all such days were an adventure from beginning to end.

It was years before we were old enough to understand that making this adventure last as long as possible was his express charge, so that Mom could have a peaceful day to herself to wrap the presents she had been gathering in the near attic without having to juggle the five of us with all of our pent up excitement at the same time.  By the time we figured this all out, we wouldn't have changed a thing about the rituals involved of the wonderful chance to range far and wide looking for the biggest and best Christmas tree still left on Christmas Eve.

When every last boot was pulled on, Dad would don his own wool overcoat and felt fedora, his blue eyes sparkling, and we would tumble out the door on our ritual quest.

The first stop was always close to home -- one of a handful of tree lots which took up residence in vacant lots between store fronts in Brookline Village, or took over most of the parking space at the local ESSO station at the foot of the hill.  Like so many puppies, we would tumble out of the station wagon and race to the trees where dad would bring out his measuring rod, shake out one scraggly or enormous tree after another and wait for our chorus to declare than none of them would possibly do.  None of us could bear to let the adventure end so quickly.  Brookline Village trees never stood a chance.  Besides, on Christmas Eve there was every likelihood that the only trees left in these small lots were indeed too scraggly, too small, or only fit for a church's vaulted spaces.

Back we would tumble into the car with cold noses and icy fingers to see where Dad would take us next.  By the time we had ranged over Brookline and often across the river into Cambridge as well and ad visited six or seven different lots, we finally urged him to drive us to the place we knew we had been aiming for all along: Faneuil Hall Market in downtown Boston.  There, all the hucksters would be hawking their wares -- mounds of oranges and other fruits and vegetables in disarray on this last day before the holiday.  Chestnut vendors would be roasting their nuts over barrel fires, and the vendors of Christmas trees with their many accents and ringing voices, knowing that this was their very last chance of the season to sell a tree, would be willing to bargain with anyone foolish still enough to be without a tree on this day.

This was the spectacle that we ad all anticipated.  Dad played his role with a twinkle in his eye and laughter that made even the tree vendors join in to do their part in front of such a flock of entranced children.

Never mind that by this time. here too there wasn't a normal-sized tree left in the bunch.  Dad needn't have brought his measuring rod at all.  We always went home with a tree so enormous that we knew it was never fit in our stand.  It would have to be propped up in a two-gallon pail (even after cutting it down heavily on both top and bottom) and then tied by guy wires of our father's own devising to the four sides of the big living room awaiting its arrival back home.  Never mind, fr it would indeed be the fattest tree we had ever seen, leaving us plenty of room for the ornaments that ranged fro the beautiful to those that dad derisively referred to as Mom's "dirty little smelts", so named because one of them, a remnant of her own childhood, was indeed a small fish with a jointed silver body that we all looked for each season.

Once at home at last, we would all race to the kitchen, warmed by its big black cook stove and devour hot soup and sandwiches while dad rigged p the tree and tied on the lights, leaving us the entire afternoon to ritually pull out remembered ornaments one by one, finding the perfect place for each one, with the heaviest saved to weigh down errant branches or hide bare spots we had not noticed in the frenzy of Dad's grand bargaining at the Market.

By the end of the afternoon, just as our exuberance was waning, it would be time to tumble once more into the car to pick up Gar and Aunt Margie, and later just Margie herself, from the train at Back Bay Station.  There, exhausted after a last half day of work on Christmas Eve, they would nonetheless arrive from New York with joy and still have energy at the end of the day to laud our beautiful tree and play their own role by placing each separate strand of tinsel, the real tinsel in those days, in its right place.  They never allowed us to just toss it in clumps so we cold declare the tree finished at last.

Tired, but exquisitely happy, we would sing carols by our beautiful tree until it was time to dress for church and watch the beautiful Nativity Pageant that would usher in the real meaning of Christmas for us all once more.

Rock a Pella

Fans of Coverville have already seen and heard this: a treat for fans of a capella music who also appreciate reinvented cover versions of holiday camp and pop kitsch.  Sorry frumiousb, but if it's weren't for a capella, a whole bunch of us geeky guys would have gone through our college years without dates.  O.k., maybe the slightly dangerous looking ones in biker boots who wrote poetry would have had a shot, but the rest of them would probably have wasted their time inventing the Internet or something.

'Twas the Night... (The Illustrated Version)

A Visit From St. Nicholas

By Clement Clarke Moore

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her ’kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a long winter’s nap;

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be Saint Nick.

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and Saint Nicholas too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney Saint Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

"God Bless Us, Everyone."

Father Christmas visited Apamama Atoll in 1944 when my grandfather was stationed in the South Pacific as a navy surgeon with Marine Air Group 15. In the middle of the war, just below the Equator, they mustered up a tree and tinsel and a red suit that while a little short in the sleeve was long on holiday spirit.

Blogging will be light between now and New Year's, and I wish you all, dear readers, all the blessings of the season.

Calls For Posts: 3 Carnivals at WTB in January

Send in the clowns.  Walking the Berkshires will host not one, not two, but three blog carnivals in the month of January.  Lord knows what I was thinking in agreeing to this schedule but they are each terrific carnivals and well worth taking the time to investigate, and better yet, to contribute.

On January 2nd we welcome the 31st edition of the anthropology carnival four stone hearth, the latest installment of which can be found at The Greenbelt.  Anything of interest relating to four sub-fields of anthropology - Archeology, Socio-cultural Anthropology, Bio-physical anthropology and Linguistic anthropology-  will be considered so send along your best or choice sherds you have found in your reading elsewhere.  The best way to contribute to this Carnival is via  submit@fourstonehearth.net or directly to me via e-mail to me at greensleevesenviro AT sbcglobal DOT net. 

Then on January 7th its the 8th Military History Carnival (you can read #7 at the Osprey Publishing Blog). Any well-written post on this broad subject relating to events prior to the 21st century qualifies for inclusion.  The submission form is the most efficient way to nominate posts for this carnival, or you may e-mail me.

Finally, the 3rd edition of our own Cabinet of Curiosities rolls out on January 21st (submission deadline January 19th).  This has proved very popular with genealogy bloggers, as well as those with a taste for the unusual, the slightly twisted, and fantastic in the things we collect and the stories behind them.  It has always been my intention that this carnival rotate hosts, so if anyone would like to take in one in future months please let me know and I'll gladly hook you up.  Meanwhile, you can submit your posts here.

Bisy Backson

"GON OUT
BACKSON
BISY
BACKSON
C. R."

(A.A. Milne)

That about sums up my life at present, so alas nothing new to blog until late tomorrow night.  Meanwhile, you might care to learn whether worms have any rights that Australians are bound to respect, or enjoy yesterdays post of the 2nd Cabinet of Curiosities blog carnival.

BACKSON

G.T.

Cabinet of Curiosities (1st impression, part 2 version)

"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends
We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside
There behind a glass stands a real blade of grass
Be careful as you pass, move along, move along."

(Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Karn Evil 9; 1st Impression, part 2)

It's Cabinet of Curiosities (1st Impression, part 2 version), the blog carnival that celebrates the sideshow barker in all of us.  Who better to raise the curtain on this installment than Charles Wilson Peale, whose 1822 self-portrait "The Artist in his Museum" appears at left (courtesy collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)?  The Peale Museum was a wunderkammer of the first order, and its famous mastodon skeleton can be seen looming in the shadows behind the curtain.  Peale financed scientific expeditions to collect natural history specimens for his marvelous museum, which was eventually sold to P.T. Barnum and fellow showman Moses Kimbell, who had previously collaborated to exploit "a curiosity supposed to be a mermaid" but which was in fact a clever fake.

Still, it's all just pheasants under glass and other odd meaningless bits without storytellers to animate and give them significance, as The Human Imprint notes in this post about a museum display on Native American storytelling.  She muses; "So who are our storytellers today? Who will pass our heritage from generation to generation? We may not get others to gather around us literally any more, but can we do it virtually?"  That's as good a raison d'être for why I blog and for this carnival as any I can think of.

The objects in a curiosity cabinet often defy easy categorization while inviting viewers to make what associations they may among seemingly unrelated things.  Janice of the blog Cow Hampshire shares the strange story of a an early nineteenth century court case "relative to the question whether a whale is a fish" and the disdain that the New-Hampshire Gazette heaped upon the verdict that a whale is not, but its oil is.  One wonders if the learned men who investigated this vexing taxonomic conundrum in 1819 might have taken a page or two from the wise Sir Bedevere: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Scene 5:

VILLAGER #1:  We have found a witch.  May we burn her?
CROWD:  Burn her!  Burn!  Burn her!  Burn her!
BEDEVERE:  How do you know she is a witch?
VILLAGER #2:  She looks like one.
CROWD:  Right!  Yeah!  Yeah!
BEDEVERE:  Bring her forward.
WITCH:  I'm not a witch.  I'm not a witch.
BEDEVERE:  Uh, but you are dressed as one.
WITCH:  They dressed me up like this.
CROWD:  Augh, we didn't!  We didn't...
WITCH:  And this isn't my nose.  It's a false one.
BEDEVERE:  Well?
VILLAGER #1:  Well, we did do the nose.
BEDEVERE:  The nose?
VILLAGER #1:  And the hat, but she is a witch!
VILLAGER #2:  Yeah!
CROWD:  We burn her!  Right!  Yeaaah!  Yeaah!

This gorgeous curiosity cabinet image comes from Heather Blakey at Chamber of Horrors, who back in 2005 composed this poetic ode to wunderkammer:

"A cabinet of wondrous curios
A delightful collection
Objects,
Carefully placed
Lying, seeming unconnected
Next to each other
Evoking,
Triggering memories
Permitting the mind to
Wander to faraway places..."

Savor the whole thing. 

Meanwhile, Bioephemera, a connoisseur of curiosity cabinetry, points the way to purveyors of winged cats and other vintage taxidermy ephemera.  No jackalopes need apply.  This blog may well be the mother load of wonder cabinets, with a whole archive dedicated to the subject.  Rather than plucking posts from this trove for successive carnivals, why not indulge yourselves now?

At Destination: Austin Family, Thomas MacEntee unabashedly reveals in marvelously written account that he is A Man With Dolls. 

"I didn't always have a love of dolls, especially the female type, but those in the picture...have special meaning to me. They are six of the over 100 dolls my mother had at her house in New York. I remember, not fondly however, sleeping in my former bedroom, which had become the guest room and more akin to It's A Small World, and it was downright creepy. Imagine falling asleep with over 200 eyes staring down at you, waiting, waiting . . ."

Matt Andrade of Jerub-Baal Blog sends along a post from this December 8th offering a fabulous look at his own curiosity cabinet, and describes its evolution over time and the significance of each wondrous relic.

"On the upper shelf, you can see on the left a glass jar with the finger-bones of a coyote, which I found along with its skull and much of it's skeleton in the woods. The skull is to the right (on top of the remains of a pull toy that had belonged to my mom, and may be from the 20's or before). On the second shelf, on the right, is a small jar of knucklebones from the same unfortunate beast, and one of its thigh bones is on top of a cast metal level that has passed down through the family from my great uncle. The books on the second shelf are all antiques from the library of the house I grew up in."

Well worth perusing, especially to find out whose ponytail is in that jar on the right.

At 100 Years in America, Lisa offers A Ring, Yellow Roses & a Flying Cloud, saying "I don't have the Flying Cloud in my possession, but I hope it qualifies as a curiosity with a good story behind it."  It most certainly does, and any virtual curiosity cabinet would be proud to have it.  Speeding along with the top down takes me to the local oddities served up daily at Roadside America - "your on-line guide to offbeat tourist attractions" - where your concrete teepee awaits, along with Cordele, Georgia's Confederate Nuclear Missile and the largest ball of string, not twine.

From Ghana, Koranteng Ofusu-Amaah unveils the latest in his "timepieces of shame": a campaign watch supporting "that suffocating, murderous and dictatorial rogue, General Sani Abacha — late, unlamented and so forth."  Koranteng  writes;

"I'm a avid collector of this kind of historical artifact and you'll sometimes find me bidding for a mint copy of the Franco sings for Mobutu album, to take a recent example and different rogue (quite a good album actually). The Abacha watch, while in the mode of praise singers and sycophants, is not your standard piece dictator chic, it's much more functional and thus perhaps more insidious... For the record, the battery never worked."

Jason Mueller has a cautionary tale from the Belgrade Zoo concerning three killer "Bs": Beer, Bear and Body Bag.  I'm not sure quite which drawer in the CofC to place this post, but the odd fact that a half eaten naked man's clothes were found intact inside the bear cage might qualify them as curiosities.  Tenuous relevance established.

Terry Thornton is up to his eyebrows in gourds at Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi.  Meet "Lorena". 

"Several years ago while my wife was into gourd painting, I tried making a bust from the top of a large gourd that had fallen off the workbench and hit the concrete floor and broke. When I cut away the broken bottom, the remaining piece reminded me of a folk art bust I'd seen. So I started painting a figure --- and pictured here is the result."

Denise Olson of Moultrie Creek is laying down the relics of her brief stage career with the venerable production Cross and Sword: The Story of the Founding of St. Augustine, Florida.

"Being the first season - and the 400th anniversary - no expense was spared in producing this spectacular drama. We were Indian maidens - at a whopping $15 a week salary. For two young girls, this was a huge amount of money - and our days were still free to spend at the beach! It was a great summer job with some unexpected benefits. National Geographic magazine covered the actual birthday celebration (see Fiesta!) at the end of the summer and included a couple of photos of the cast - including us - in their article. Another is this special treasure - a copy of the original season’s brochure autographed by many of the original cast members. "

Be sure to read Buttonhook of Rebecca Catherine (Snook) Westaby to find out the significance of this item.  Miriam Robbins Midkiff of AnceStories: the Stories of My Ancestors laces up a grand family tale with allusions to "Little House" and a link to The Buttonhook Society for those in need of more information about this most useful, obsolete household item.

Finally, I reveal the story behind The Here Lies Stool, a gorgeous piece in our home fashioned from a cherry round and gouged with amateur precision with an unfinished epitaph.

As I wrap up this carnival, I am struck by how much the Christmas Tree across the room from where I type is its own curiosity cabinet.  Perhaps some of you will find things on the branches of your own to post to the next Cabinet of Curiosities on January 21st (submission deadline Jan 19th).  Feel free to use the handy submission form or e-mail me directly, and as always I welcome offers to host future editions.

"Performing on a stool we've a sight to make you drool
Seven virgins and a mule, keep it cool, keep it cool
We would like it to be known the exhibits that were shown
Were exclusively our own, all our own, all our own

Come and see the show, come and see the show
Come and see the show
See the show."