Looking for Mr. Mundy (or a variant thereof)

Mount Munday (north aspect)*.  Maybe I'll discover I'm related to these Mundays!

Yesterday, to celebrate Father's Day on Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver asked us to write about four generations of our fathers, going back to our great-great-grandfathers.  I still have two men missing in that list:  my paternal grandfather's biological father and his father.  I've been searching for them since I determined through Y-DNA testing that Mr. Sellers was not my grandfather's biological father.  And until yesterday, I had been calling that great-grandfather Mr. X.

But I have made progress!  Just a day or two earlier, I was reviewing my father's DNA matches on Family Tree DNA, and I noticed something significant:  Instead of only one match at 111 markers, there are now four.  All four are named Mundy or a variant.  When you add the man on GEDmatch who matched my father, that makes five named Mundy/Munday/etc.  I call that a trend.

And so I decided to start calling my great-grandfather Mr. Mundy.

He has a name!

Today I spent some additional time looking around to see what else has happened since I had time to work on this particular problem.

One of the matches on Family Tree DNA has posted a family tree going back a few generations.  I used that information to search FamilyTree on FamilySearch.  FamilyTree is the big collaborative tree that everyone can contribute to and argue about.  It's FamilySearch's attempt to create the family tree of the human race.

I realize that not all of the information on FamilyTree is reliable.  Much of it has no sources, or the sources are a little sketchy.  But I figured it couldn't hurt to see where it would take me.

It took me several generations back, eventually to a Nicholas Mundy said to be born about 1645, although no one seems to know where.

Coincidentally, one of the pieces of information on Family Tree DNA led me to a Munday surname study.  And on that site, my father has been linked to the very same Nicholas Mundy based on my father's Y haplogroup and the research people have been doing.

There is a note on the site that my father's grandfather is still unknown and the connection of my father to the Nicholas Munday line is still a guess.

But that's still progress!

One of the tasks I had set for myself in researching the best possibility I have found so far for my grandfather's biological father is to order that man's divorce file, just to see if there is any information in it that can help.  I guess I better get going on that!

*Photo by Andre Charland, April 3, 2005.  Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Tell Us about the Fathers in Your Tree

Tomorrow is Father's Day, so we knew that fathers would be the topic in some way for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver.

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

1.  It's Father's Day on Sunday.  This week, tell us about the fathers in your tree — their names, their birth and death years and locations, their occupations, the number of spouses, the number of children, etc.  Go back at least four generations if possible through your known second-great-grandfathers.

2.  Share your father list information 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.

I can handle this!  Well, except for the chart.  Family Tree Maker and I could not agree on producing that, so I'm omitting it.  I'll try to figure out how to beat FTM into submission at a later date.

• Father:  #2 Bertram Lynn Sellers, Jr. (1935 New Jersey to 2019 Florida), automobile mechanic, 3 spouses, 4 children (3 girls, 1 boy)

• Grandfather:  #4 Bertram Lynn Sellers, Sr. (1903 New Jersey to 1995 Florida), civil engineer, 3 spouses, 5 children (3 girls, 2 boys)

• Grandfather:  #6 Abraham Meckler (1912 New York to 1989 Florida), taxi driver, 1 spouse, 3 children (1 girl, 2 boys)

• Great-grandfather:  #8 Mr. Mundy, unknown everything else except at least 1 child (1 boy)

• Great-grandfather:  #10 Thomas Kirkland Gauntt (1870 New Jersey to 1951 New Jersey), farmer, 1 spouse, 10 children (5 girls, 5 boys)

• Great-grandfather:  #12 Morris Mackler (about 1882 Russian Empire to 1953 New York), carpenter, 1 spouse, 7 children (3 girls, 4 boys)

• Great-grandfather:  #14 Joe Gordon (about 1892 Russian Empire to 1955 New York), furrier, 1 spouse, 4 children (1 girl, 3 boys)

• 2nd-great-grandfather:  #16 Mr. Mundy, unknown everything else except at least 1 child (1 boy)

• 2nd-great-grandfather:  #18 Joel Armstrong (1849 New Jersey to maybe 1921 New Jersey), laborer, 1 confirmed spouse, 3 confirmed children (2 girls, 1 boy)

• 2nd-great-grandfather:  #20 James Gauntt (1831 New Jersey to 1899 New Jersey), wheelwright, 1 spouse, 10 children (4 girls, 6 boys)

• 2nd-great-grandfather:  #22 Frederick Cleworth Dunstan (1840 Lancashire to 1873 Lancashire), file grinder, 1 spouse, 6 children (3 girls, 3 boys)

• 2nd-great-grandfather:  #24 Simcha Dovid Mekler (unknown Russian Empire to before 1903 Russian Empire), unknown occupation but carpenter would be a good guess, 1 known spouse, 2 known children (1 girl, 1 boy)

• 2nd-great-grandfather:  #26 Gershon Itzhak Novitsky (about 1856 Russian Empire to 1948 New York), wood turner, 1 official spouse, 7 known children (3 girls, 4 boys)

• 2nd-great-grandfather:  #28 Victor Gordon (about 1863 Russian Empire to 1925 New York), furrier, 2 spouses, 8 children (4 girls, 4 boys)

• 2nd-great-grandfather:  #30 Morris Brainin (about 1861 Russian Empire to 1930 New York), shoemaker, 1 spouse, 8 children (4 girls, 4 boys)

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Three Things for Father's Day

Since it was for Father's Day, I waited until today to do this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.

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

1.  It's Father's Day on Sunday.  Tell us three things about your father, or one of your grandfathers (or another male ancestor), that have influenced you in your life.

2.  Share your response on your own blog or in a Facebook post.  Please share a link in Comments on this post if you write your own post.

I've been thinking a lot recently about my father and racing, so that's my focus today.  And yes, his interest in racing has influenced me.

1.  The fact that I grew up watching a lot of racing in person and on TV meant that I ended up seeing a fair number of car crashes.  I grew up with a healthy respect for the damage that cars can do when they go fast.  It has influenced me to drive the speed limit perhaps a little more than the average person does.

2.  I cannot think of Memorial Day weekend without thinking of the Indianapolis 500.  We knew every year when Memorial Day came around what my father, and by extension we kids, would be doing:  The TV would be showing the Indy 500, and we would often watch it with Daddy, or at least I would.  I don't really remember the specifics of the races, but I remember watching them with him.

3.  I have an unusual recognition of certain landmarks.  Once I was driving east on I-10, and to the north was a huge empty lot with a big pile of dirt in the middle.  I kept looking at it as I was driving past because it seemed oddly familiar.  I realized it was the former Ontario Raceway, which I must have gone to with Daddy to watch some races.  Even stripped down to nothing, it rang a bell.

The same kind of thing happened to me when I drove from the San Francisco Bay area to Milwaukee in the summer of 1993 for a convention.  Heading east on I-80 this time, as the highway transitioned from Nevada to Utah, I saw a sign with Bonneville on it.  I was trying to remember why I recognized that name, and then I saw the vast expanse of white that is the salt.  I suddenly shouted out, "It's the Bonneville Salt Flats!" (which kind of surprised my traveling companions).  Daddy used to watch when people raced and did speed trials on the salt flats, and I watched right alongside him.

Lynn Sellers

 

Fishing with My Father

Today is not only Father's Day, it's also National Go Fishing Day.  I figured I could cover them both by writing about fishing with my father.  Brilliant, right?

Daddy used to like to fish for bass, but I wasn't that crazy about eating bass.  I liked fishing for catfish.  There's something about catfish and the steaklike texture of the fillets that I just love.

Since we were freshwater fishing in Florida, we would catch mud cats, apparently more properly known as flathead catfish.  They're scavengers that live on the bottom of creeks and rivers, ergo the mud in their nickname.  I don't remember what we used for bait, but the Wikipedia page about them says live bait is preferred, so it may have been small fish or possibly worms.

One of the interesting things about catfish is their skin.  They don't have scales.  Instead their skin is kind of like leather.  Like scales, you don't eat it.  Unlike scaling a regular fish, however, it's necessary to peel off their skin.

That was something I always left to my father.  I had a great time going out fishing with him, and I was always happy when we caught catfish.  But he was in charge of skinning them.

The way he did it was to nail the catfish's head to the porch and then, wearing heavy gloves, use pliers to peel the skin off the body.  I freely admit it was not something that I wanted to do.

Then we would have yummy catfish fillets for dinner.  I think my mother lightly fried them.  They were always delicious.

Another fun thing about catfish is that I was always told that their spines are poisonous.  I don't think it's supposed to be enough to actually kill you, unless maybe you're just a little kid, but I guess enough to make you sick.

One time when we had catfish for dinner, my brother was put in charge of taking the trash out afterward.  The spines and nasty bits of the catfish were on the bottom of the trash bag.  He took the bag out, dumped it upside down, and mashed it down so that the trash can lid would close — and stuck himself with a catfish spine.

He ran into the house screaming, blood spurting out of his hand.  My mother, who didn't deal well with blood in general and especially not her children's blood, became hysterical.  I had to tell my sister to get her out of the room because she was just freaking out.  I got my brother to sit down and I bled out the wound as best I could.  And now that I think of it, I don't remember my father being there.  Hmm, where was he?

I also don't remember if my brother went to the doctor the next day or did anything to follow up, but he didn't get sick, so I guess I did a decent job (or maybe the spines aren't actually poisonous after all).  He developed a small lump in his palm where the spine had stabbed him, and years later he finally had to have it removed.

photo by Bébéranol

Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Did Your Father Leave You?

As anticipated, with today being the day before Father's Day, Randy Seaver has chosen Father's Day as the theme for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) It's Father's Day in the USA on Sunday, so let's talk about our fathers.  

(2) Your father probably lived a complete life, and you probably have memories of him.  What memories and attitudes did he "leave" you with?

(3) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.

My father was Bertram Lynn Sellers, Jr. (1935–2019).  I was the oldest child of his marriage to my mother; he used to call me his "favorite middle daughter" because my half-sister, from his first marriage, is his oldest child.  Yes, he did leave me with memories and attitudes.

• Love of cars.  I've written many times about my father's lifelong love affair with cars.  He raced, he was a mechanic, he loved to hang around cars and other people who liked them.  I guess I was the kid who liked cars the most, and I used to hang out with him while he worked on engines.  I used to be able to identify all the engine parts and knew all the tools by name; he could ask me for a tool and I would run and get it.  I still love cars, and the smell of engine grease in a garage makes me feel at home.

• Love of music.  My father was a talented musician who might have gone far with it if (1) he hadn't been more interested in cars and (2) he hadn't been pretty lazy.  He played guitar and piano.  When he was 17 he competed with a swing band on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour and came in second to a young Gladys Knight, in her first televised performance.  He used to play songs on his guitar for my siblings and me when we were young.  I love singing and performing; I started young and kept up with stuff until my move to Oregon, where I have not yet found a compatible gig.  I have taken piano and guitar lessons, although I admit that I like my fingernails more than I like having to keep them trimmed to be able to play properly.  I don't have the same level of talent as my father, but I still enjoy the same types of music he did, mostly swing, novelty songs, and country and western.

• Love of spicy food.  Daddy liked his food spicy, even when his stomach didn't.  He would ask my mother to make the chili spicy and after dinner yell for his bicarb (bicarbonate of soda) to settle his stomach.  I've bumped it up quite a bit from the level of spice that my mother used to cook with and have added Thai and Szechuan to the styles I like to eat.  I don't know if Daddy would have liked the spice level I tend to go with nowadays, both at home and in restaurants, but he was the spark.

• I credit both of my parents, but more so my father, with my openmindedness and lack of bias.  I grew up with my parents having Black, Hispanic, and gay friends when that was not the average white family's experience.  Even though my father's swing band came in second to a Black singer, he didn't remember that; he only knew that they lost to a female singer.  He had no recollection she was Black until I researched his group's appearance (I was trying to find a recording) and discovered the winner was Gladys Knight.  I still find that impressive for a white kid from rural New Jersey in 1952.

• And since Randy mentioned ancestry, I have my father to thank for my interest in Quakers.  As I researched my paternal grandmother's family, I discovered that New Jersey is the real Quaker state; it's almost impossible to do research without tripping over Quaker families that have been there for hundreds of years, and of course have intermarried.  The vast majority in my family were hard-working farmers.  Some lines apparently trace back to the Mayflower, but I haven't worked on that yet.

 

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Father's Work History

As I expected, with today being the day before Father's Day, Randy Seaver has chosen fathers as the theme for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

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

(1) Sunday, 19 June, is Father's Day.  Let's celebrate by writing a blog post about your father, or another significant male ancestor (e.g., a grandfather).

(2) What was your father's occupation?  What jobs did he have throughout his life?  Do you know his work history?

(3) Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status post.

I don't have a detailed work history about my father.  Unlike my grandfather, who created a chronological listing of every job he had held, my father didn't do anything similar (but then again, who does?).

What I do know is that most of the jobs my father held during his life had something to do with cars.  During his younger years, most of those jobs were as a mechanic.  While my family lived in the Los Angeles area, he owned at least one garage of his own, and I suspect he worked at more for other people.

While we lived in Australia, he was again a mechanic.  (In fact, that's part of the reason we moved to Australia, because they were looking for skilled tradesmen at the time as potential immigrants.)  I know the name of one place he worked:  Frank Woodham Ford in Maroubra Junction, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales.  And I know that because a photo of my father working with a Sun 1120 Engine Analyzer (probably spelled Analyser in Australia?) was used by Woodham Ford in a newspaper advertisement, and my father saved a copy.  I used that photo with a blog post (coincidentally, one for Father's Day), and a fellow BART train operator recognized the machine.

When my family returned to the United States in 1973, my father was still a mechanic.  He had his own garage again by 1975, in Niceville, Florida, because that's where my family and my father's business partner sheltered during Hurricane Eloise.

As he started getting older and his arthritis became worse, he really couldn't do the mechanical work anymore.  I know he worked in at least one auto parts store for a while.  I think that was in Fort Walton Beach.

Part of the reason I'm having trouble remembering a lot of specifics was that my father's work history was apparently a little sketchy.  I remember him telling me when he hit retirement age that he was shocked to learn he had never worked more than five years at any job.  While that is not unusual nowadays, especially in the tech field, for someone born in 1935, it was not common.  He started selling stuff on eBay to help supplement his Social Security income; I don't know if that counts as a "job."

Father's Day without My Father

This is my first Father's Day without my father.  He died less than a month ago, on May 19.  He had been ill for some time, so it did not come as a surprise, but my world has shifted.  I am now a person with no living parents, and it feels different.

Surprisingly, my father, who outlived his first two wives, both of whom were younger than he, did not survive his third wife, who is older.  That's not how I expected it to happen.

When someone dies, there's an obituary.  Being the family genealogist, I was asked to write the first draft.  After some back and forth with additions and changes, one of the pieces of information that my sister added was that my father had served in the New Jersey National Guard for seven years.  After I thought about that for a little while, I realized it didn't add up right, based on what I knew of my father's moves to Florida and then back to New Jersey.  I told my sister about my uncertainty and that I did not think I could get verification in time for the obituary to be published.  She said she could just remove the reference; she was the one actually submitting the obituary.  When the obit came out, however, it was still there, albeit only as National Guard service, with no reference to New Jersey.

So then, as a genealogist, I was concerned that we had incorrect information in the obituary.  I had requested my father's records from the New Jersy National Guard, but, as expected, they arrived after the obit was online and in the newspaper.  I opened the envelope with a little trepidation, anxious to read just how long my father had been in the Guard.

You know how it's said that there's always something new to learn?  Well, that was the case here.  Daddy actually did serve in the National Guard for seven years — but only three of them were in New Jersey.  Four were in Florida!  Funny, he had never mentioned that when he talked about his time in the Guard.  But we only learned about it after he had died.

And little things like this help keep me distracted for a while.

Father and Grandfather

A few years ago I was lamenting the fact that I didn't have any photos of my father and his father together.  Recently, however, as I was doing more unpacking after my move, I discovered two old photo albums with the "magnetic" sticky paper.  I decided I really should take all those photos out as soon as possible, and in doing that, lo and behold!, I found what may be the only photograph of my father and grandfather together.  So here it is, in honor of Father's Day.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Did Your Father Love to Do?

Tomorrow is Father's Day, so I expected Randy Seaver to make the theme of this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun related to that, and he did not disappoint.

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) It's Father's Day in the USA on Sunday, so let's talk about our fathers.  

(2) What did your father really like to do in his work or spare time?  Did he have hobbies, or a workshop, or did he like sports, or reading, or watching TV?

(3) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.

The two things my father has always loved are cars and music.  He did things with cars both for work and his free time, and he played music in a lot of his spare time.

I don't know how young Daddy was when he first got hooked on cars, but I know he started racing when he was just a teenager.  He told me a story once about how he broke an arm when he was racing but was supposed to be doing something else, and he tried to hide it from his mother (my grandmother).  Years later he discovered that she had known all along that he was racing that day.

Daddy raced in Florida, California, Australia, and Texas, that I know of.  I think he mostly raced stock cars.  I don't know if he raced in New Jersey before moving to Florida.  He has lots and lots of trophies, which he has been threatening to get rid of, although I've told him he better not and that he should send them to me instead.  Somewhere (I have no idea where!) I have a photograph of him working on a car engine and my mother's brother hanging over the engine compartment on the other side.

When my family lived in Southern California, we would sometimes go with Daddy to racetracks, such as Pomona Raceway.  Years ago, while I was still living in Southern California, I was driving east on I-10 and drove through Ontario.  To the north side of the freeway was this massive empty lot with a huge pile of dirt in the middle.  There was nothing identifying the place, but it looked familiar to me.  I kept looking at it as I was driving past, and it suddenly dawned on me that it was the location of the former Ontario Raceway.  I couldn't have been there many times, but I somehow recognized it, even in its stripped-down state.

And Daddy's profession was being a mechanic.  He had shops of his own, and he worked for other people.  When we lived in Australia, he was photographed using a piece of expensive equipment for an ad that ran in the newspaper.  (A friend of mine told me that not any mechanic could use that equipment properly, so my father had to have been a damned good mechanic, which I knew already.)  When we moved back to the States and ended up in Niceville, the garage he had there became our place of refuge during Hurricane Eloise in 1975.  So I grew up around garages and racetracks, and the smell of engine grease is still oddly comforting to me.

My father's other great love is music.  He played guitar for my siblings and me when we were little, and we learned songs such as "Sixteen Tons", "Abba Dabba Honeymoon", and "Mairzy Doats" by heart.  Before he was married, he competed on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour with a swing band (The Court Jesters) that came in second to a very young Gladys Knight.  And he played piano and organ also; he always had a piano or organ in the house.  He recently decided to sell the organ he had, because he can't play anymore due to arthritis in his hands.  That was a sad day.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Three Stories for Father's Day

Tomorrow is Father's Day, so of course tonight Randy Seaver picked a relevant theme for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

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

(1)  Sunday, 18 June, is Father's Day.  Let's celebrate by writing a blog post about your father or another significant male ancestor (e.g., a grandfather).

(2)  What are three things about your father (or significant male ancestor) that you vividly remember about him?

(3)  Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status or Google+ Stream post.

I decided to write about my paternal grandfather.

• One of the first things I always remember about my grandfather is his prosthesis and amputated leg.  He never talked about the accident that caused him to lose his leg (we finally learned details several years after he died), but he let us kids play with the prosthesis when he visited us in California.  After my family moved to where my grandfather lived in Florida, it became a regular part of the routine that every now and then Grandpa had to see his doctor to have the prosthesis adjusted.  And one great adventure with my mother driving happened when we were going to Pensacola with Grandpa to see his leg doctor.

• Something very important in my grandfather's life was being a Shriner.  He was a member of the Hadji Temple (in Pensacola) Tailgater Unit.  He was an active participant in the group's outreach and fundraising activities and proud of his membership.  Every year there was a big Shriners Fair in our area, and of course everyone in the family went.  (One of the public benefits they offered was blood pressure checks.  I used to have lower-than-average blood pressure, and it always freaked them out when they measured it.  They would turn to my mother and express their grave concern, and she would assure them everything was fine.)  I think they did parades through Niceville, but I don't remember if they had the silly little cars.  I have only one photograph of Grandpa in his Shriner fez, and that's because my aunt brought it with her when I coordinated our little Sellers family reunion a couple of years ago.  But I don't know what happened to the fez itself!  (Hmm, I wonder if Shriners have records I should be looking for . . . .)

• Another vivid memory is my grandfather's stamp shop in Niceville, Florida.  It was attached to his house, so anytime we visited, we usually stopped in the store also.  And I worked for Grandpa in the shop, so I spent extra time there.  Sellers Stamp Shop was a homey little operation.  The front part was the retail area, which had glass display cases for coins, postage stamps (for philately, not for mailing), and associated paraphernalia.  He sold some other odds and ends also.  The rear of the shop was where we made rubber stamps, such as "PAID" and address stamps, with "hot lead" by hand.  (Nowadays it's all done with computers.  Feh.)  Working at the shop was my first job after babysitting, so I was very proud of the work I did.  And I got to hang out with Grandpa!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Three Stories for Father's Day

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver was not only timely but incredibly helpful, as I had not yet decided what I wanted to write about for Father's Day.

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

1)  Sunday, 19 June, is Father's Day.  Let's celebrate by writing a blog post about your father, or another significant male ancestor (e.g., a grandfather).

2)  What are three things about your father (or significant male ancestor) that you vividly remember about him?

3)  Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook status or Google+ stream post.

Father's Day 2013

My father is Bertram Lynn Sellers, Jr., born in 1935 in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey to Bertram Lynn Sellers, Sr. and Anna Gauntt.  He married my mother, Myra Roslyn Meckler, in 1961 in Miami, Florida and they then moved to Southern California, where I and my brother and sister were born.

(1) My father loves cars.  He raced cars, worked on cars, worked in garages.  I remember him racing when I was growing up in the Los Angeles area and going to racetracks to watch races.  He raced while we lived in Australia, in Florida when we returned to the U.S., and in Texas when he moved there.  He has a large collection of trophies and memorabilia from his racing days (or better still have them, because I told him that if storage was an issue, I would take care of them).  He told me one story about having broken an arm while racing when he was a teenager, and he tried to hide it from his mother (my grandmother).  Several years later, he discovered she knew about it all along.  Even now, when I go into a garage and smell the grease, it brings back happy memories.  If I ever have a question about car models, I know he'll be able to answer it.  He identified all the cars in the photos I took while I was in Cuba (well, except for the Russian "Moskva", which he had never seen before).

(2) My father was a great musician.  I grew up listening to my father play guitar and sing.  I learned the words to many songs, including "Sixteen Tons" and "Mairzy Doats", from listening to him when I was little.  Later, when my siblings and I were a little older, he would try to skip a verse and I would usually be the one who pointed it out to him, which would earn me a comment about being a "smartass kid."  He also used to play piano.  He performed swing music with a band called the Court Jesters that competed on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, coming in second to Gladys Knight.  I say my dad was a great musician because he can't really play anymore due to arthritis.

(3) My father looks a lot like his father.  This is kind of ironic, because the two did not often get along well.  Whether that was because of the ways they were the same or the ways they differed, I don't know.  But I have noticed each year how much he looks more and more like my grandfather.

Father's Day: Siblings and Children

This year for Father's Day I wanted to show a photograph of my father with his father, but I ran into a problem very quickly:  I don't have any.  I don't know if that was accidental or deliberate, but with all the photos I have, not a single one shows my father and grandfather together.  Admittedly, my grandfather was apparently the semiofficial photographer for the Sellers family, because he is in very few photos himself, maybe only half a dozen.  But it still seems a little odd.

What I do have, however, are photos of my father with his sister (half-sister, actually) from his mother, with all three sisters (half-sisters) from his father, and with all four of his children.

Lynn, sister Ruth, and niece Ruth Anne, Easter, circa 1942

Dottie, Carol, Lynn, and Mildred, 2009

Janice, Laurie, Lynn, Mark, and Stacy, 2011

My Father through the Years

Heavily weighted toward more recent years, but I was able to find photos with all three wives!  Happy Father's Day!

Things I Learned from My Father

Both of your parents influence and teach you, but you learn different things from each of them.  I know that some of what I learned growing up came from both parents, but some definitely came from my father.

My father probably never met a vehicle he didn't like.  He was racing cars when he was a teenager in New Jersey and won trophies there and in California, Texas, and Australia.  He also raced motorcycles and won with them.  I grew up hanging around cars, motorcycles, boats, garages, and racetracks.  I used to hang over the engine compartment when my father was working on a car and knew the names of most of the engine parts and tools (I'm a little out of practice now!).  I started riding behind my father on motorcycles when I was about 3 years old and got my first bike at about 13, a little 75cc Yamahauler (which my 6'1" father also used to ride around, which looked pretty silly).  I'm still hooked on driving; since I've been able to afford a vehicle, I think the longest I've gone without one is a week.  The smell of a garage takes me back to my childhood.  And one of these days I've got to get another motorcycle.

My dad was (and is) very talented musically.  He used to play piano and guitar (unfortunately, he can't anymore due to arthritis).  He would play and sing songs to us children.  When we were really little he would do the whole songs, but as we got older he would sometimes try to skip a verse.  Of course, we, being smart-alecks, always noticed and told him he had to sing the entire song.  I know I got my love of music from him (especially since my mother couldn't carry a tune in a bucket).

I learned to appreciate spicy food from my father.  When I was young he especially liked spicy chili.  Even though it bothered his stomach, he would tell my mom to make it really spicy.  Then, after dinner, he would ask (okay, yell) for bicarb (bicarbonate of soda) to help settle his stomach.  I've never had to use the bicarb, but I love my chilis.  I put them in almost everything.

I'm not saying my father is egotistical, but he taught me two great phrases about self-promotion:  "If you got it, flaunt it", and "I'm not conceited, I'm convinced."  I'm not sure how much of that I've taken to heart, but at least I remember the lesson.

Both of my parents were openminded and nonracist, which they passed on to us, but I didn't know just how color-blind my father was until I tried to track down a copy of a talent show on which he had appeared.  He had told us for years that he had been on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour with a band and that they had come in second to "a female singer."  That was all he remembered about her.  After several years of research, I spoke with the curator of the Amateur Hour collection (now housed at the Library of Congress).  He has an extensive index of the acts that had competed on the show.  He found my father's band (the Court Jesters) and was absolutely positive that no recording of that episode existed, as he himself had been trying to find one for many years -- it was the first televised appearance of Gladys Knight, who won that night.  And my father had no recollection that the winner had been black.  For 1952, that's pretty impressive.

Photos for Father's Day

I called my father today to wish him a happy Father's Day, which got me to thinking about my grandfathers and earlier generations, so I put together photos of all my "fathers", or at least the ones I have photos of.  I actually have photos for three of my great-great-grandfathers, which was a pleasant surprise to me.  Now I need to figure out how to find photos of the rest ....