Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Five Questions for an Ancestor

Randy Seaver went way over his allotment of five questions in his post, so maybe I'll do the same for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge.

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

1.  If you could go back in time to interview one of your ancestors, what questions would you ask him or her?  Tell us your selected ancestor's name, birth and death years/locations, and spouse's name and marriage date/location.  List at least five questions to ask that selected ancestor.

2.  Tell us about your selected ancestor and your questions for that person in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook comment.

Ah, so now I see that Randy allowed for more than the allotted five questions by saying "at least five" in the more detailed instructions.  I can work with that.

I'm going to choose my great-great-grandmother Beila, who was married to my great-great-grandfather Simcha Dovid Mekler.  As her given name is pretty much the only fact I have for her, I'm going to start with much more basic questions.

1.  When and where were you born?  What were your parents' names?  What was your full name before marriage?  Do you remember when your parents died?  When and where did that happen?

2.  Did you have siblings?  What were their names?  When and where were they born?

3.  What were the names of your grandparents on both sides?  Did you know them?  Do you remember when they died?  When did that happen?  What did the family do at that time?  How did you commemorate them?  What are their yahrzeiten?

4.  Did you have aunts and uncles?  What were their names?  Do you know when and where they were born?  Do you remember when they died?

5.  When and where were you married?  Was it a civil marriage as well as a religious marriage?  Who attended the wedding?  After you were married, where did you and my great-great-grandfather live?  What did my great-great-grandfather do for a living?

6.  How many children did you have?  When and where were each of them born?  How many survived to adulthood?  Which of them married during your lifetime?  Did you get to know any of your grandchildren?

7.  What was everyday life like for you and your family?  Were there other Jewish families where you lived?  What was the community like?

8.  What do you remember about the end of your life?  Do you remember how old you were?  Did you become ill?

I can think of so many more questions!

Wordless Wednesday

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Ancestral Home Description

"Ancestral" might be a bit exaggerated for my answer to this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver, but at least I have an answer.

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

1.  Do you recall the layout of one of your family homes (a parent's home, a grandparent's home, your first home with your spouse/SO, etc.)?  Can you estimate the size of the house and the size of the rooms?  What features were in each room?  Can you draw the floor plan, showing doors, windows, etc.?

2.  Tell us about your selected family home in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook comment.

As I have reported previously on this blog, by the time I was 21, I had lived in 22 different places.  So it's hard for me to think of anywhere I have lived as an "ancestral home."

I thought about writing on the one home for which I have always remembered the address, the last place my family lived before moving to Australia:  434 Randy Street, Pomona, California.  We probably were there for a year to two years.  But I already wrote about it for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun in 2020.

So this time I think I'll write about our customized double-wide mobile home, which we had in Villa Tasso, Florida.  I don't think we had an actual street address, because Villa Tasso barely had streets.  We had roads made of Georgia red clay, none of which was paved.  We had our mail sent to a post office box in Niceville.  We lived in Villa Tasso from about 1975 to 1979 (or at least I lived there until 1979, when I moved back to California for college).

Our "double wide" was a 60' trailer and a 40' trailer with a custom addition joining the two together.  We had the longer trailer in a mobile home park in Niceville before purchasing the property in Villa Tasso.  I don't remember the history of the shorter trailer.  The longer trailer was moved to the property first, and later we bought the shorter trailer.  Then my father started working on the addition, which of course took longer than planned.  But eventually it was finished, and we had a spacious home.

The main entrance was the door to the longer trailer, which had a wood porch and stairs.  You entered the trailer in the living room, and the kitchen was to the right.  To the far left was a hallway that went most of the length of the trailer.  The first room on the left was originally my and my sister's bedroom.  Then came my brother's bedroom, the bathroom, and my parents' bedroom at the end.

The 60' trailer while it was still in Niceville.
Walking up the stairs and onto the porch, right to left:
My mother, my sister, my brother, and me

When the addition was completed, a large chunk of the wall on the right side of the hallway went away and opened to the addition.  At the left end, my father had a piano, which I liked to try to play.  I could pick out melodies, but chords have never made sense in my head, so that somewhat limited how well I could play.

The other side of the addition opened to what had been the living room in the shorter trailer.  It became the family den.  We had a big TV in there.  When I won a copy of the home version of Pong in a K-Mart coloring contest, we used to play it on that TV.  That's also the TV I was watching when I heard someone's arm break during an arm-wrestling contest.  I've never watched arm-wrestling since then.

There was a room to the right.  At first I wasn't 100% sure about that, but you can see the doorway in this photo from my high school graduation day in 1979.  The photo was taken at the opposite end of the den from the TV.

Back row:  My mother, my sister, my grandmother
Front row:  Me, my brother, my mother's Sheltie
June 1, 1979, Villa Tasso

At the far side of the den to the left was a short hallway.  The first room, to the left, was a small bathroom, and my new bedroom, which I did not have to share with my sister, was at the very end.

It just occurred to me that there was no kitchen in the smaller trailer.  Maybe the room to the right of the den had originally been a kitchen before my father adapted the trailer for our use.  I do not remember what we used that room for.

I have no idea about measurements beyond the lengths of the trailers.  I suspect trailers were made to fairly consistent specs, so it might be relatively easy to find that information, if I am inspired to do so someday.

Wordless Wednesday

 

Wordless Wednesday

 

A Pool Shill?

Today, August 9, is National Billiards and Pool Day.  It is noted as such on two of the "national day" sites (Days of the Year and List of National Days), although neither has any information about how it started.

I'm celebrating the day on my blog because my mother used to tell me about how she and our Aunt Sam (who was not our biological aunt, but my mother's close friend, so we called her "aunt") used to play pool.  My mother, as she told the story, was not that great a pool player, but Sam was.  So my mother got someone to play against her, and she would lose, then setting up the poor stooge to play against Sam.  That made my mother the shill.

Coincidentally, I actually found photographs in the "photo bonanza" showing my mother and someone I believe to be Sam playing pool!  Some people in other photos are playing pool or look as though they are in the same location.  I don't know who most of them are, but all the pool players are women!

This is the only easy identification, because it's my mother.
I think the woman on the right here is the one in the last photo (see below).

I think this is Aunt Sam, but I'm not sure.

Aunt Sam had a daughter named Cathy.
Could this be her?

This photo makes me wonder who the photographer was.
It could have been my father, but I don't know.

Here's the girl from the previous two photos,
with another girl and a man.  No idea who they might be.

And here's our final player!
Unidentified, of course.

Wordless Wednesday

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Rabbit Hole!

I haven't had much time recently to do deep dives in genealogy, but I can come up with something for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.

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

1.  Have you been down a genealogy rabbit hole lately?  What was it, and what did you find?  (If not, go find a rabbit hole!  Try your FamilySearch Notifications or Ancestry.com Photos or Stories.)

2.  Share your rabbit hole chase and results in your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack, BlueSky, or other social media post.  Leave a link to your post on this blog post to help us find your post.

My last rabbit hole was when Randy asked us to play around with FamilySearch's Full-Text Search two weeks ago.

As I described at the time, I didn't find any of my ancestors, so I started hunting around for other families I am researching.  The most productive search was for my aunt's maiden name of McStroul:  42 results!  And most of them were documents and stories I had not previously found.

A lot of what I found was newspaper stories.  I naturally put them into chronological order, so I could see how the family changed and developed over time.

I found it interesting to be able to follow stories about my aunt's brother over several years.  In early 1962 he completed training in the U.S. Army.  In 1969 he started college (presumably after leaving the Army, but I didn't find an article about that).  In 1973 he graduated college.  In 1978 he visited his mother from out of town for Christmas and was studying at a seminary.  In January 1980 he and his wife-to-be obtained a marriage license.  Sometime between January and May they apparently married, because his wife graduated college in May 1980 with her married name.

I found four World War II draft registrations where my aunt's grandfather was the registrar.  I figure he probably registered more than four people, so maybe the AI hasn't recognized his signature on others.

I found my aunt's mother's obituary and the obituary for her second husband.  I also found my aunt's parents listed in several deed indices in Erie County, New York.  I have a vague recollection that one of the children was born in Buffalo (I can't look it up right now, because my new computer is still in transition), so I guess they lived there long enough to buy and sell some property.  More to follow up on!