Designer ice for cocktails: Let’s review. Kold-Draft cubes? Old hat. Custom shapes hand-carved from “microwave-oven-size blocks”? Eh. Stealing more than 5 tons of glacial ice to resell as “designer ice cubes”? Now we’re talking.
(link via @adam_orbit)
At NPR.org, author Jonathan Segura lays into Jonathan Franzen’s (and others’) contention that e-books “can never have the magic of the printed page” (as The Telegraph puts it):
Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a print book person or an e-book person. It’s not an either/or proposition. You can choose to have your text delivered on paper with a pretty cover, or you can choose to have it delivered over the air to your sleek little device. You can even play it way loose and read in both formats! Crazy, right? To have choice. Neither is better or worse — for you, for the economy, for the sake of “responsible self-government.” We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.
(link via Library Journal)
John Metcalfe at The Atlantic Cities bemoans that “It’s rare for New Yorkers to bite into a snazzy public-art project that isn’t hiding a marketing hook.” He refers to a marketing stunt that involved a video of radio-controlled aircraft shaped like people that flew and swooped over the East River. On one hand, it was gently mesmerizing and like something from a waking dream. On the other, the video repeated so often in my RSS feed aggregator that I grew blasé and suspicious.
Metcalfe adds that that year-in-a-life of a New York City bicycle video was also a marketing stunt. I got suckered by that one; I posted a link to the video on my Google+ steam.
How I sigh and pine for those simple days before YouTube blew up, when a mysterious maple syrup-scented cloud could embrace and enchant New York City and have nothing to do with selling something.
(link lead via #GammaCounter)
This morning Kottke.org linked to a YouTube channel that purports to pronounce tough words correctly but doesn’t, for hilarious results. I tried but I didn’t find these funny, probably because I’m more amused by the stupid but correct pronounciations that occur naturally in English.
It also reminded me of two things:
Clayton Hartley at The New Sheridan Club reports that the UK is considering repealing the long-held excise duty exemption on Angostura bitters, which would raise the retail price of a bottle there by £2 to £3, or between 35% and 50%. This could be a big deal for bars and aficionados of cocktails for which Angostura are crucial, namely the Old Fashioned and Manhattan.
An undated press release from HM Revenue & Customs confirms April Fool’s Day 2013 as the tentative date for the proposed price hike and attempts to forestall any bitterness1 by claiming, “There will be a small negative impact on individuals and households who consume Angostura Bitters[.] [T]he product is typically consumed as a ‘dash’ (a few drops only) at a time.”
Likely the largest negative impact will be reserved for the product’s manufacturer, Angostura Limited, and the economy of Trinidad and Tobago, the binary island country where it’s headquartered. The most intriguing statistic Hartley gives related to this, a statistic also floating around, unattributed, on Twitter this morning, is that Angostura “represents 3% of Trinidad and Tobago’s entire non-petrochemical manufacturing GDP.” Three percent! That seems like a staggering portion for one branded product to command.
Liz Dwyer at Good notes that the most literate cities in America aren’t the weathiest. Citing the annual America’s Most Literate Cities study, which defines literacy as a combination of six indicators—“newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and internet resources”—in big cities.
This year, income figures were added to the data and it turns out that “wealthier cites are no more likely to rank highly in literacy than poorer cities.”
Take Cleveland—though the hard-hit city has the second lowest median family income of all cities in the survey, its library system is one of the best in the country. Cleveland also boasts the sixth highest newspaper readership and ranks fifth in magazine circulations. Despite its economic troubles, the city ranked 13th in literacy overall. [...] In comparison, Anchorage has the fifth-highest median family income, but ranks 61st in literacy.
Add this to a growing list of exhibits I must check out: Mannahatta, a map of Manhattan as it likely looked in 1609, when Henry Hudson arrived, is on display at the newly reopened South Street Seaport Museum. It was assembled from a blend of historic maps, including one from the Revolutionary War and another of farms from the early 19th century. (There’s still one farmhouse left in Manhattan!)
I missed this map’s original showcase at the Museum of the City of New York in 2009. And even further back, in 2007, I remember reading Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker article about the map. The abstract of that article notes that as late as 1782, “Manhattan had over seventy miles of streams and at least twenty-one ponds. The longest stream was the Saw Kill, which flowed from present-day Central Park to the 71st Street exit off the F.D.R. Drive.”
(link and photo via kateopolis via The New York Times)
For its recent “Workplace Confidential” series, New York magazine anonymously interviewed a Bronx high-school teacher1 who told a tale of an enterprising student:
The kids sell Pop-Tarts in school like they’re drug dealers. This one kid would go to Costco and buy in bulk and then sell Pop-Tarts in the morning. He actually made enough money selling Pop-Tarts to buy a car. So one day he got busted by security with a huge bag full of Pop-Tarts, and they asked him, “What is this?” He said: “They’re my snack.” And they were like, “No, they aren’t.” So he sat down and ate them all.
I wish I would have thought of this markup scheme when I was in high school! And those who doubt the popularity of Pop-Tarts for breakfast are forgetting what it’s like to be young and able to eat anything; as a high-school freshman and sophomore, I distinctly recall breakfasting on miniature powdered donuts washed down with a fountain Mountain Dew.
1 Who’s white, mentions the racism at his school, and suggests such racism is endemic in New York City, yet comes across as generally racist himself. [back]
Last night on my way home from work, I read William Finnegan’s New Yorker article (available online only as an excerpt) on the plowshare, one of the rarest and most-threatened tortoises in the world. I enjoyed these facts1:
Chelonians actually predate many dinosaurs. They have been lumbering around for more than two hundred million years, and have changed very little in all that time. Nobody knows how long individual plowshares live. Captain James Cook took away a radiated tortoise, the plowshare’s closest relative, and gave it to the King of Tonga, in 1777. It died in 1966.
1 Cursory Googling reveals variations to the Tonga-tortoise anecdote and outright challenges to its veracity but given The New Yorker’s historic dedication to fact-checking, I’m going to go ahead and believe it as such. (James Thurber recalled that if a New Yorker article mentioned the Empire State Building, founding editor Harold Ross “isn’t satisfied it’s still there until we call up and verify it.”) [back]
What a beautiful computer! What poetic specificity in its settings! Self-proclaimed veteran geek Nathan Zeldes explains (and translates) this camera-setting calculator from the 1920s:
Kaufmann’s Posographe is nothing less than an analog mechanical computer for calculating six-variable functions. Specifically, it computes the exposure time (Temps de Pose) for taking photographs indoors or out (depending on which side you use). The input variables are set up on the six small pointers; the large pointer then gives you the correct time. The variables are very detailed, yet endearingly colloquial. For outdoors, they include the setting — with values like “Snowy scene”, “Greenery with expanse of water”, or “Very narrow old street”; the state of the sky — including “Cloudy and somber”, “Blue with white clouds”, or “Purest blue”; The month of the year and hour of the day; the illumination of the subject; and of course the aperture (f-number).
(link and photo via bughouse)
Last winter, I tried making two punches using Batavia arrack, a funky high-proof liquor from Indonesia that’s similar to rum. I didn’t like either punch much, so I tried another this past weekend, United Service Punch, and it’s a keeper.
It appeared originally in Jerry Thomas’ Bar-Tenders Guide of 1862. I followed the adaptation by David Wondrich in Punch, which hews to the original almost exactly. (The recipe below is his, in my words.) Wondrich accurately describes the recipe as extremely conservative yet “fundamentally sound,” which reminded me that my previous pair of arrack-based punches were too alcoholly; I like more flavor diversity. The best punches blend the fundamental tastes of sweetness, sourness, bitterness, and, of course, booziness. This one delivers in all four departments with that precise number of ingredients, which I assume is the conservativeness of which Wondrich speaks: the bitter tea, sour lemon, sweet sugar and slap-bass arrack. Sure, it’s not complex but each element shines through and the end-product is a lip-smacker.
I actually screwed up this one by using the juice of only six lemons instead of eight. I though eight would make it too sour because, at the time, I’d been reading some weird, nerdy discourse about the size of Nineteenth Century lemons relative to the same today. With only six lemons (which yielded one cup of juice), the punch is too sweet. Not cloyingly so, but close; I’ve been thinning each Old Fashioned glassful I serve with about an ounce of water. Next time, I’ll follow the recipe below exactly or I’ll do that but also ratchet back the sugar by either 1/2 cup or 1/4 cup, under the reasoning that it’s easy to add more sugar to a finished punch, less so to remove it.
Also worth pointing out: mainly on account of the black tea and a lack of other colorful liquids, this punch isn’t visually arresting. If I needed to describe its color in terms of poetry or marketing, I’d go with “burnt orange” or “tan sierra.” In fact, the actual hue is closer to “rusty.” Like, if you saw a liquid this color emerge from your kitchen tap, you would let it run for a full minute before deciding whether to boil it. Also, this one gets a touch of sediment on top after it’s been bottled and racked for a day; a final strain through cheesecloth may be in order.
Last night, I made gougères using the 101 Cookbooks recipe on account of its simplicity and, well, beer. Delicious! I can’t pronounce “gougères” so I’m stealing a name and calling them Cheesy Poofs. They remind me of miniature popovers, only more savory and with creamier interiors. My mom has a Christmas pastry recipe that I believe uses a similar choux technique for the dough. You just wanna pop these things by the handful like they’re salted nuts. They’re a great cold-weather snack that would go great with drinks, or as an appetizer.
On and off, I’ve been reasearching some of the guys in my great-great grandfather’s political circle. He was a small-town councilman, but a salesman by trade, and the lives of his buddies are mostly to match: doctor, carpenter, grocer, butcher. But even some of the little guys get coverage in the big biographical compilations of their era. I’ve been reading them, some online but most at the Millstein, dusty back-breakers like Joseph F. Folsom’s four-volume The Municipalities of Essex County, New Jersey: 1666-1924 (1925) and William Starr Myers’ five-volume The Story of New Jersey (1945). They were the political Who’s Who of their day.
In a past life, I had to write about a dozen bios from scratch every year as part of a fraternal organization’s hall-of-fame induction ceremony and it wasn’t the condensing and the avoidance of formula and cliché that vexed me. It was the challenge of whipping air into the duller individuals who, frankly, hadn’t lived thoroughly enough to meet my word count in facts. I could have taken a tip then from the unnamed author of one of the bios I came across in my research, this one from 1898. I’ve stopped the quote at the point at which the actual biography begins.
Ceaselessly to and fro flies the deft shuttle which weaves the web of human destiny, and into the vast mosaic fabric enter the individuality, the effort, the accomplishment of each man, be his station that most lowly, or one of majesty, pomp and power. Within the textile folds may be traced the line of each individuality, and while all are merged into the great aggregate, yet the essense of each is never lost, be the angle of influence wide spreading and grateful, or narrow and baneful. He who essays biography finds much of profit and satisfaction in following out the tracings of a life history, determining the keynote of each respective personality and conning the lessons of life, “line upon line and precept upon precept.” The subject of this review is one who has wrought to goodly ends and has attained that well-earned success which entitles him to withdraw largely from the activities of business life and to enjoy the fruits of his labors in his beautiful home ... where he is known and honored as a representative citizen.
With a preamble like this, you’d think the rising curtain would reveal a maestro, but no. He was a politician from the village of South Orange, New Jersey. Well played, you mystery verbose scribe of yesteryear.
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker on “how the internet gets inside us”:
The digital world is new, and the real gains and losses of the Internet era are to be found not in altered neurons or empathy tests but in the small changes in mood, life, manners, feelings it creates—in the texture of the age. There is, for instance, a simple, spooky sense in which the Internet is just a loud and unlimited library in which we now live—as if one went to sleep every night in the college stacks, surrounded by pamphlets and polemics and possibilities. There is the sociology section, the science section, old sheet music and menus, and you can go to the periodicals room anytime and read old issues of the New Statesman. (And you can whisper loudly to a friend in the next carrel to get the hockey scores.) To see that that is so is at least to drain some of the melodrama from the subject. It is odd and new to be living in the library; but there isn’t anything odd and new about the library.
(link via Library Journal)
Revolutionary marching music during takeoff and landing? In-flight propaganda newspapers that appear to have been published with The Print Shop? Condensation—nay, fog—hovering inside the cabin?
You just may be aboard North Korea’s Air Koryo. Business Insider has select information and photos from flights on “the only airline in the world deemed bad enough to earn a 1-star rating from leading airline reviewer SkyTrax.”
(Yes, I, too, am shocked that SkyTrax awarded two stars to Ryanair, an airline so unapologetically cheap, its CEO alleges he’s considered “standing seats,” pay toilets, and getting rid of copilots on his fleet.)
(link via Coudal Partners)
In a 2004 “F.Y.I.” article in The New York Times, Michael Pollak and George Robinson get an explanation for one of my favorite quirks of the New York City subway system. If you’re standing on a platform near its center as a train enters the station, you should always see this happen as the train comes to a stop and the conductor sticks his head out his window, just prior to opening the doors:
Q. I have noticed that every subway station has long metal or wood strips painted with diagonal black-and-white zebra stripes. Occasionally I see a conductor point at that object when a train pulls into the station. What’s this all about?
A. “That’s the conductor’s board,” explained Charles Seaton, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “When the conductor is lined up with that board, he knows that the train is all the way in the station and that it’s safe to open the doors.” As for the ritual of pointing at the board, Mr. Seaton calls it “acknowledging the presence of the conductor’s board.” He notes that it is required by the system rulebook, “so that opening the doors isn’t just a reflex action, which could lead to mistakes,” like inadvertently opening the doors on the wrong side.
Why black-and-white stripes? “They stand out from the background,” Mr. Seaton said.
Here’s a photo of one of the conductor’s boards in the Wall Street station for the 4/5 train. (I tried multiple times to get a shot of a conductor pointing at a board but the action proved too fast and furtive to be captured by my slow reflexes and equally slow cameraphone shutter.)
Eggs, potato chips, sweet beverages, and plain old water are among the things science suggests consuming to best beat a hangover, according to Adam Martin in The Atlantic Wire. Matrin quotes a George Mason University researcher’s “terrifying little gem about where that hangover headache comes from”:
The body’s organs will attempt to replenish their own water, usually by stealing water from the brain, which causes it to decrease in size and pull on the membranes which connect it to the skull, which in turn results in a headache.
If true: yikes.
Frequent flyer miles are boring, for in general they only get you more time on an airplane. David Owen, in this week’s New Yorker, notes that “highly personable British kazillionaire” Richard Branson has a better frequent-flyer reward, at least for folks who travel a lot and who aren’t brain-softened by his airline’s pink and purple mood lighting:
One of Branson’s many companies, Virgin Galactic, has built its own spaceship[.] The company expects to begin taking non-astronauts into space a year from now. (Tickets are two hundred thousand dollars, or two million Virgin Atlantic frequent-flier miles, for a three-hour trip.)
Now that’s a frequent-flyer reward.
During a brisk lunchtime walk around my work neighborhood, I noticed a curious feature of the American International Building, at 70 Pine St., the tallest building in Lower Manhattan prior to the World Trade Center.
On the building’s Wikipedia page, this feature is noted only in passing, in a photo caption:
A miniature impression of the building is incorporated above its own entrance. The miniature impression contains its own miniature impression.
I’ve been trying to become less of a brand slave in my clothes shopping, but I distinctly remember liking the fabric, fit, and style of the J. Crew Ludlow suit when I first saw it in one of the retailer’s seasonal catalogs last year. Now I learn that many other men feel the same way, according to Alexandria Symonds at The New York Observer, who pins down the inherent Ludlowness of the Ludlow:
...the trousers are narrow, and the single-breasted iteration of the jacket has a two-and-a-half-inch lapel and rounded front corners. In addition, several elements are, discreetly, flattering: a lightly padded shoulder, which lends a more masculine silhouette, and a shorter-cut jacket, which makes men look taller.
So it’s understated yet stylish. On the other hand, Symonds suggests the Ludlow may have the same “loyalty and instant identification” once afforded the Members Only jacket, which aged poorly then ironically, with a temporary resurrection by Urban Outfitters last year. In sum: “it’s just a good-looking suit from a mass-market retailer. That may be exactly why it appeals to the Ludlow brotherhood: it’s cool, but not dangerous.”
All of which makes me wonder: do I still want a Ludlow?
(Ludlow suit photo via jcrew.com; Observer link via Jason Diamond’s Paris Review article, “The Book Club,” a nice read on books “becoming the dressings for brands”)
I missed this in the Wall Street Journal in late November, but Brooklyn wiseguy Colin Hagendorf has completed a quest to sample nearly every pizza sold by the slice in Manhattan.
Aaron Rutkoff reports:
“It’s become a chore,” [Hagendorf] admitted recently, over a lunchtime slice. Folding the pizza lengthwise, he watched glumly as the end sagged, unsupported by a doughy crust. A proper slice, Mr. Hagendorf avows, should crease when folded and droop only at the very tip, “just like Johnny Cash’s nose.”
. . .
Mr. Hagendorf began his project with the aim of trying every slice in New York City's five boroughs. But with more than 1,600 pizzerias in town, according to a health-inspection database, he soon realized he had bitten off more than he could chew. So he narrowed his focus to Manhattan and set simple rules: only order plain cheese pizza; only eat at places selling individual slices; and no going back after canvassing an area to catch newly opened establishments.
That’s 362 slices eaten and blogged about over 2.5 years. The best slice in the city? Pizza Suprema, at 413 Eighth Ave., which Hagendorf awarded his coveted 8 out of 8 slices rating.
For a dinner party last New Year’s Eve, I made USS Richmond Punch and for a similar party this New Year’s Eve, I tried Light Guard Punch.
I’d made this one once before for a small get-together at my apartment, but I wanted to reprise it because it was delicious, easy, and turned out well, and I figured it’d go over well with a slightly larger group. I think it did. In short, where the USS Richmond is more or less a red punch, the Light Guard is a yellow punch: sweet but not sickly, crisp, very citrusy (actual citrus + a majority of alcohols with strong citrus notes = very citrusy), and of course golden-colored, on account of the many straw- or amber-hued liquids.
Although I used David Wondrich’s suggestions for assembly (and precise amount of sugar) from his book Punch, I’m pleased that this recipe can be replicated more or less exactly how it would have tasted when it was published in 1862 in Jerry Thomas’s The Bartender’s Guide: How To Mix Drinks. I halved the recipe for our group of nine; the original 20-person recipe by Thomas is listed below with my consolidation of Wondrich’s instructions.
Sauternes, a French dessert wine, commonly comes in 375 mL half-bottles but I assume the “1 bottle” in the original recipe refers, like every other liquid ingredient, to a full 750 mL bottle. Some versions of the recipe I’ve seen don’t assume that but I have little use for leftover Sauternes and it’s the most expensive ingredient; I selected the cheapest half-bottle I could find, a Château Grillon 2009, and it still set me back $22. In another section of Punch, Wondrich admits there’s no such thing as a cheap Sauternes even though that’s what you want for punch, where it’s used “chiefly as a softening agent, to tame the brandy without making the Punch watery.” Instead, he suggests looking “for a dessert wine from the Loire area, such as a Coteaux de Layon,” but my short, less-than-thorough search turned up nothing cheaper than the Château Grillon.
I selected an equally cheap pale sherry, Tio Soto Fino, which costs under $6 and comes in a classy, opaque gold-colored bottle. (Hey, it served me fine last year, and this is punch not a highfalutin, savor-worthy cocktail.)
For Cognac, I used a Pitaud VSOP. Normally I’d dumb it down to a VS, but this was leftover from the USS Richmond Punch I made last New Year’s.
And for the topper, I hate Champagne and I’d rather support the Italians than the French so I used the dry, citrusy Mia Prosecco Colli Trevigiani, a staff pick at Astor Wines & Spirits and often on sale there for about $7 a bottle.
I can tell you this: fruit at the bottom of a punchbowl is always a sodden treat, but I found that by merely waving around some of the supersaturated pineapple rings from the dregs of this recipe and the fumes alone made me more tipsy. As my brother has noted, “It wasn’t named punch due to its soft caress.”
Like the philosopher Bertrand Russell doubting the existence of the table he’s sitting at, scientific research continues to demonstrate that “the world we perceive is not an identical copy of the physical world,” whatever the latter may actually be. Writes Travis Riddle in Scientific American last month:
Hills appear steeper when we are wearing heavy backpacks, objects appear closer when we desire them, and, as shown here, the world appears larger when we are in a smaller body. Although the world does not actually physically change in these ways, our mind seems to be constructed in such a way that allows a surprising degree of flexibility in perceiving the physical nature of the world.
(link via @GammaCounter)
Here’s an account of Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, a reading list of Donald Barthelme from the 1980s, a syllabus of David Foster Wallace from the mid-1990s, and another Wallace syllabus from the mid-2000s. I like that Wallace larded his reading list with titles such as Stephen King’s Carrie, Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, and Jackie Collins’ Rock Star, just as Vonnegut emphasized entertainment:
He told us in workshop classes, “You’re in the entertainment business.” He impressed this upon us over and over again. Therefore, he said, “Your first job is to hook the reader. Your second is to keep your reader reading.”
(Vonnegut link via Coudal; DFW link via Slate via Daring Fireball)
I saw this T-shirt at the Upper West Side Century 21 last night, another victim of the wily apostrophe.
Kale: it’s this season’s “it” vegetable, getting hippies taken to court and ranking among the top so-called superfoods, a word I dislike.
Superfood, you say? Well, last night I grabbed my shallow Le Creuset casserole and made this recipe, posted by Megnut from the 100-Mile Diet: Local Eating for Global Change cookbook and reprinted by the NYC Greenmarket Recipe Series, and I can tell you: this is kale’s kryptonite. Yes, it includes a pound and a quarter of kale, which shrinks considerably when simmered, like many leafy greens. But then the healthfulness gets asphyxiated by butter, cheese, heavy cream, “crunchies” (homemade bread crumbs), and bacon, which science has shown to be the polar opposite of kale.
It’s amazing. The cheese, cream and kale combine to be somewhat reminiscent in consistency and taste to that of equally bad-for-you spinach-artichoke dip, offered by everyone from Alton Brown and Martha Stewart to T.G.I. Friday’s. And the bacon and the breadcrumbs: oh, man. Often a gratin is merely a side dish but this one’s a meal. I’d like to make it again but I’ve noticed the avability and quality of greenmarket kale sliding as the price rises. I did have the foresight to buy two bunches on Saturday but I’ve reserved the spare for my other favorite kale recipe, ribollita.
Census data is the weirdest source material for genealogical research and I will tell you why: it’s the easiest to come by and it’s frequently mentioned as the best place to start with one’s family research. But it’s also among the most inaccurate—perhaps the most inaccurate—data available.
Census-takers didn’t fact-check. How could they? People who answered the door for the enumerator—people who may not have been even related to the people the census-taker was looking to enumerate—frequently gave wildly inaccurate details. Birthdates, birth places and immigration years were fudged or guessed. Ages were wrong. Nicknames were supplied instead of given names. Spelling errors popped up everywhere.
I had a problem. I was tracking back a family as far as possible using a combination of the federal census (taken nationally every 10 years since 1790) and the New York state census (taken in Brooklyn every 10 years between 1855 and 1925). I knew my family’s data from the 1865 state census was accurate to a very high degree of certainty.
But the data from what seemed to be the same family in the 1860 federal census was sketchy. I knew I was comparing two families from the same large geographic swath of Brooklyn but neither street names nor addresses were recorded on either of the censuses, so I couldn’t match up those. The given names of the family’s two children matched but they were common names. Some of the ages seemed off. The spelling of the family’s surname was mangled—or was it the correct spelling for a different family altogether? The head of the household had the correct job title but I knew his name was Edward and this census clearly listed it as “Geo,” presumably George. And his wife was listed without any first name at all, just “Mrs.” I got a strong whiff of lazy nineteenth-century census-taker.
I’d let this fishy record sit because I didn’t want to deal with it. But it nagged me. Then I remembered something forehead-smackingly obvious. Census-takers, whether federal or state, didn’t track the families of their district however they pleased. They traced their way around blocks consistently and methodically, with the happy side effect of preserving next-door neighbors. Here’s a diagram from the Census Bureau’s Instructions to Enumerators showing how to canvass a city block for the 1920 census:
That’s when I realized the solution to my problem: in both censuses, I could try matching-up the family just before (and/or after) the one I was trying to prove. Only five years had passed between the two censuses; many families likely had stayed put. And they had. Thanks to my family’s next-door-neighbors, the Watkins’.
A snippet of the 1860 federal census is on the left. The 1865 New York state census is on the right. The names don’t completely match up and the ages aren’t all right—and see how the 1860 census taker cuts the same corners as he did with the family I was tracking, such as listing “Mrs.” (twice!) instead of a given name. But the similarities are numerous, and there are others, including job titles and countries of birth, that I’ve cropped out. I’m now convinced the family I thought I found in 1860 is the same one as in 1865.
(diagram via Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy (3rd Edition, 2006), edited by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking; census snippets via Ancestry Library Edition)
Sunday morning, I took a Montauk-bound train across the south shore of Long Island to visit my “long lost,” far-flung relatives that I found via genealogical research and an out-of-the-blue letter. They have a large, comfortable Victorian house on the shore of the Great South Bay, and I got to meet Phil, his wife, and the young families of their son and daughter. There were a few requisite blind-date jokes about how none of us seemed crazy enough to grift or kill, although we soon learned there had been a death in the family. As Phil wrapped up a tour of the grounds, a friend of his son-in-law stopped by on his way to the taxidermist to show off an eight-point buck he’d shot that morning and loaded into the flatbed of his pickup. The kids climbed in to get their picture taken with it. Everyone was promised a ration of venison later. (It makes great chili, apparently.) All of this made me feel relaxed and more at home, as I felt it was along the lines of something that could have transpired at a gathering of my Dad’s side of the family.1
Back in the sunroom overlooking the bay, Phil unrolled a batch of age-darkened ancestry charts on a table and weighted down the curling corners with reference books. They’re in German and rooted sometime in the 1200s, the patres familias running up the trunk, the boughs and branches of their families spanning for pages. Budding on a distant terminus are a few of my direct, comparatively recent ancestors: my paternal great-great-grandfather and three of his four children. The absence of the fourth dates the drafting of the tree (or at least that page of it) to the early 1890s. Several double-Manhattans later, Phil and I determined, via a hastily penned and much more concise pedigree chart of our own, that our precise relation is second cousins, twice removed, although we both really like Manhattans, so we have at least that to bring us closer.
Phil’s duplicating his charts for me on one of those wide-format engineering photocopiers and I left him with a large photocopied batch of census forms, and birth, death, and marriage certificates detailing his direct ancestors during their early post-immigration years in Brooklyn. He said that when he’s in New York City next, he may visit the family gravesites at Green-Wood and The Evergreens, which would give us an opportunity to hang out again. I’m sure we’ll keep in touch.
1 One family reunion a few years back, some of the guys got bored and used a cutting torch to dispatch an entire car into pieces small enough that every family head received a handsome parting gift of a plaque mounted with two keepsakes: a family-reunion photo and a random morsel of the car. [back]
Probably the most grueling portion of my genelogical research has been skimming the minutes for the Township Committee of Franklin Township, an area of Essex County, New Jersey, that became Nutley in 1902. This is even more grueling than newspaper research because at least those are press-printed, not handwritten in spidery cursive.
The books of minutes themselves, which are stored at the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, are beautiful: five legal-size hardbound ledgers, thick pages ruled in blue, covering the early modern era (1883-1902) of a small town growing fast. They’re scrapbooks, really. Here and there are artifacts, some inserted, some glued, including correspondence, election day announcements, a rules and regulations booklet for Franklin’s first fire department, and a published obituary for a past Committee member. The minutes are exhaustive and exhausting, with details on bills paid, roads paved, sewers proposed, and the passage of many now-meaningless motions.
I’m pawing through these to find mention of my paternal great-great grandfather, Philip, who moved with his family from Brooklyn to Franklin in 1890. He’s on the record at least once that I’ve found so far, complaining in an 1894 letter to the Committee about a damaged slate wall in front of his house. (The Committee resolved to write him back and inform him that it had no jurisdiction in the matter.)
The complaint I’m most amused by, and which appears sporadically over the years, involves random citizens attempting to have the township reimburse them for chickens of theirs that had been killed by dogs. Here’s one from May 1, 1893:
Mrs. Elizabeth Cornell presented bill for 23 chickens killed by unknown dogs $17.25[.] On motion the [above?] bill was laid on table.
Incidents similar to this happened in Nutley well into the following century. On September 15, 1932, an above-the-fold page-one article in The Nutley News mentioned that one of my paternal grandfather’s two younger brothers, Andrew, then aged 17, had submitted a letter to the Town Commission “in which he sought reimbursement from the town for two flocks of pedigreed chickens which were killed by a dog[.]”
That distant cousin I wrote last week, requesting information on the family of my great-great grandfather’s wife? He called me yesterday.
Phil confirmed we’re distantly related. He also said he has in his possession the complete genealogy of that branch of the family dating back to circa 1256. So not only did I meet my Speed Genealogy Challenge by finding a specific living relative, I found a family historian. That’s as unlikely as it is convenient.
Phil is a recently retired college professor who’s married with two adult children and five grandchildren. He tells me he’s very excited to have a new, “long-lost” relative, and he has a fair degree of free time, so I’m hopping a train later this month to pay him a half-day visit. I imagine we’ll exchange facts and anecdotes about our nutty shared ancestors. I’ll let you know how that goes.