Since we’re mentioning it

My grandfather on my dad’s side, codename “Gaza,” was a physicist who worked for the government. His real was Rudolph Langer. He lived from 1899 to 1999. I don’t know anything about his family or early life. It was all pretty secret. He would bring uranium home from work and set it on the dinner table for decoration. He never bought a car that cost more than 200 dollars. He never threw anything away. When he died, they found a jar of powdered mustard in his kitchen from 1912. A few years later, they discovered he had had a secret second family in Wisconsin.

My grandfather on my mother’s side, Hugo DelTorto, came to Ellis island from Italy when he was about seventeen. (No one knows his exact age, because he had two different birth certificates.) He was one of twelve children. He and his brothers formed a gang in New York in the 1940s. He ultimately became a tap dancer which is how he met my grandmother, Nedina Njedlik. She was from Czechoslovakia, and was also a dancer. Her troupe toured Europe with Nat King Cole. Eventually they settled in Cleveland and had four children, the youngest of which was my mother. Hugo started a “real estate” business, a mafia front that actually ended up selling some houses. He sold the three houses across the street from his own to black families in the 1970s, and no one in the neighborhood would talk to him for thirty years.

We were a gun-totin’ family.  My father had at least half a dozen hunting rifles, of which he was very proud.  After his death, my mother kept one (loaded) in her bedroom, for emergencies.

Yes, I know. Mammy Yokum. Ma Kettle. But she knew how to use it.

She continually fought moles in her beloved garden; she set traps for them, mean little miniature bear-traps, stuffed down into their burrows.  (If you’ve ever seen a mole, you know how small and delicate they are.  But, to my mother, they were Lucifer incarnate, because they ruined her garden.) Sometimes, however, they triggered the traps and then ran away unharmed, and this infuriated her.  So she came up with the idea of chaining the trap to a metal post.

One morning she looked out the window to see the post rocking back and forth frantically.  Moles (as I said) are pretty small.  She’d obviously caught something much bigger.

It turned out to be a big mean angry badger.  It was caught fast, and it growled at her and ran back and forth, and tried to get free

.

And she shot it dead.

Story number two:

On one of my visits to her in the earlyt 1990s, I woke in the middle of the night to hear an odd scraping sound outside. Mom’s house was miles from anywhere, out in the woods, so there was normally complete silence outside, apart from wind and rain and the howling of coyotes. I mentioned this at breakfast. She looked grim. “I heard it too,” she said. “Goddamned porcupine.  Chewing on the back steps. I’ll get it one of these days.”

(Editorial note: porcupines like to chew on wood that’s been handled by human beings. The wood gets impregnated with salt – generally from our sweat.  And porcupines are infatuated with salty wood.  They will eat the handles of axes and mallets and hammers, just to imbibe all the delicious salt that’s in there.)

Within a few weeks after my return to Providence, Mom told me the following story:

She started waiting for the porcupine, and finally one evening, she surprised it, and came out of the house toting her rifle.  Being a smart little porcupine, he flattened himself against the house, reasoning that Mom wouldn’t be so stupid as to shoot into her own house. 

He didn’t realize how resourceful she was.  She put down her rifle, picked up a broom, and started spanking him.

Squalling, he ran from her, out into the yard.

And then she shot him.

I come from tough stock, people. 

Beware.

Power of Kilfane (The Gentry
This ten page ebook describes the family history of the Powers of Kilfane. The name of Sir John Power, the head of the dynasty, is synonymous with hunting while the name of his brother Richard is synonymous with theatre.

When you are researching your ancestors it is important to understand where they came from and what records were collected.  One of the best places to start is the Ancestry.com wiki:

The wiki has the entire contents of both the The SourceandRed Book

Let’s say you find you have ancestors from Kentucky.  You can start on the Kentucky page, by going to state research and then scrolling down to the state in question.

Kentucky Family Research gives you an overview of the state and on the right hand side specific discussions of types of records:

Looking at Kentucky Vital Records will give you specific information about when birth, marriage and death records were recorded.

Clicking on the Kentucky County Records will give you the overview of the when the counties began, when they collected vitals and the address of the courthouse.

Understanding your state and county will help you understand what to look for.

Look for Search #8 : Message  Boards tomorrow, or review yesterday’s tip: Search Tip #6: City Directories

Happy Searching!

Ancestry Anne

sometimes I feel left out because I 100% missed the 90s music of my childhood. While my peers were growing up pretending to be Spice Girls and debating over which Backsteet Boy was hottest, I was listening to Green Day and the Beach Boys and Blink-182 and Simon & Garfunkel.

(my mom has always been into alternative/rock music, and my dad listened to the hits of the 60s and 70s)

one of the first songs I ever learned every word to were Eve 6’s “Inside Out,” Don McLean’s “American Pie” [I felt goddamn accomplished for that one, too, and I was probably seven or eight? My brother and I would sing along, and he was probably three or four] and Blink-182’s “All the Small Things.” True story, I hated when “All the Small Things” came on the radio in my mom’s car because I always felt awkward singing the lyrics “Work sucks, I know” in front of her. Because I guess I thought “sucks” was a bad word when I was seven.

my friends would know every word to the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” and I’d be like “I CAN SING ‘TIME OF THE SEASON.’”

nobody listened to pop music until approximately four years ago, which is when I moved to college and there was suddenly less competition for the radio in my mom’s car.

anyway whenever someone says something like “ooh remember N*Sync” I’ll be like “I couldn’t tell you who was in that band if it meant my life.”

also I have a distinct memory of me mentioning the spice girls to my father once — I do have passing knowledge of them, though I have no idea who any of them actually are with the exception of Victoria Beckham because David Beckham — and he’s just like “Only ‘Ginger’ is a real spice.” And then I think he made a quip about using babies as spices?

tl;dr I am bizarrely proud of stupid things like missing out on 90s music and my parents were better than yours at music.

though somehow I didn’t know Mom was a Led Zeppelin fan until I was in high school and she saw one of my classmates with one of those Swan Song shirts and was like “I saw them on that tour. I think I have that shirt somewhere in the garage.” So yeah. Best mom.

Awwww ulumol! may chinese blood kamo? Hahaha

Hehe I dunno. Sa kay papa cguro hambal man nila haha.

This question reminds me that I should start digging my father’s genealogy. We never was close to his side of the family and was a bit hard to get information.

Our works on my mom’s genealogy on the other hand had gone a long way already so bravo for that :)