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: 20 More Questions

Hmm, this week's questions for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun actually require a little bit of thought.

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

(1) Ellen Thompson-Jennings wrote 20 More Questions About Your Ancestors and Maybe A Few About You this week and Linda Stufflebean thought it would be a great SNGF challenge.  I agree!

(2) Copy the questions from Ellen's post or from my post below and insert your own replies.  Be sure to comment on Ellen's blog so she knows you wrote about it.

(3) Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or on Facebook or Google+.  Please leave a comment on this post with a link to your post.

Thank you to Ellen for her post and to to Linda Sufflebean for suggesting this topic.  If you have an idea for an SNGF topic, please let me know.

Q1:  Why do you love doing genealogy/family history?
A1:  Solving the puzzles.  No two families are the same, so the answers are never exactly the same.

Q2:  How far have you traveled to research an ancestor?

A2:  Only to Connecticut.  But I sent my brother on research in Manchester, England. 

Q3:  What do you think your favorite ancestor would think of our lives today?

A3:  I'm not really sure that I have a favorite ancestor.  If I have to pick someone, I guess it would be my great-great-grandfather Gershon Yitzhak Nowicki (~1858–1948).  His occupation on the passenger list when he arrived was given as wood turner, but in the United States he became a Hebrew teacher.  From what I have been told, he was a pretty lively guy, even right up to the end and apparently adjusted reasonably well to living in this country after moving here at the age of about 64.  I think he would be curious about our lives today and willing to learn new things.

Q4:  What do you think that your ancestor would like/dislike?

A4:  That's a damned good question.  I haven't a clue.

Q5:  What was the most unusual cause of death that you’ve found?

A5:  I can't think of any particularly unusual causes of death that I've found in my own family.  In my half-sister's family, I did find four generations of men who all (but one) died of heart attacks before reaching the age of 60.

Q6:  Which ancestor had the most unusual occupation?

A6:  I must have a pretty boring family, because I don't recall any particularly unusual occupations.  The aforementioned great-great-grandfather, who was marked on his 1922 incoming passenger list as a "likely public charge", probably because of his age, was enumerated eight years later in the 1930 census with the occupation of Hebrew teacher, however, so he was still working at the age of about 72.

Q7:  Have you ever gone to where your ancestor lived and it felt like home even if you’ve never been there before?

A7:  Unfortunately, no.  That happened to me the first time I came to Portland, but I have no family connection to the city.

Q8:  Do you have a distant ancestor (several generations back) that looks like someone in the family?

A8:  Sort of.  I have a copy of a photograph of an unidentified man whom I believe to be my 3rd-great-grandfather, because he bears a strong resemblance to my great-great-grandfather (his theoretical son) and has the distinctive Gorodetsky ears.

Q9:  What is the oldest ancestral photo that you have?

A9:  The oldest photo I have is of my great-great-grandparents Victor Gorodetsky and Esther (Schneiderman) Gorodetsky and their first child, Etta.  It was taken in Kamenets Podolsky, Russia (now in Ukraine), probably about 1890.

Q10:  Did you have an ancestor that had an arranged marriage?

A10:  Not that I know of, although it's likely that some of my Jewish ancestors did have arranged marriages.

Q11:  If you could live in the time period of one of your ancestors what year would it be?  Where would it be?

A11:  About 1834 in Manchester, Lancashire, England, the year after my 3rd-great-grandparents Richard Dunstan and Jane Coleclough married.  I especially would ask Jane who her parents were and where she was born.

Q12:  Which ancestor was married the most times?

A12:  My father and his father were each married three times, but my grandfather also had a long relationship with my grandmother without benefit of marriage, so he probably wins.  Grampa married Elizabeth Leatherberry Sundermeier about 1922, Anita Clarice Loveman in 1953, and Adelle Cordelia Taylor in 1961, and he lived with my grandmother Anna Gauntt from about 1934–1952.

Q13:  If you’ve tested your DNA, what was the biggest ethnicity surprise?

A13:  The 12% Irish ancestry that Ancestry said I have, and then also said that my brother has.  So far I have nothing in my research to substantiate that.  On the other hand, I don't actually believe it, either.

Q14:  Did you have a female ancestor who was different or unusual from other females from that time period?

A14:  My mother, who was not inclined toward domesticity and worked outside the home from the earliest that I can remember.

Q15:  Did your ancestor go through a hardship that you don’t know how they managed?

A15:  Not an ancestor, but a collateral relative.  According to information from the 1900 census, my 3rd-great-grandfather's brother's wife (I said collateral, remember?) had three children who were living, but in 1910 she reported that she had had three children and none of them was alive.  Losing all three of your children within a ten-year period would have to be devastating.

Q16:  How often do you research?  Are you a genealogy addict?

A16:  I do some research almost every day, but even if I'm not researching, I do something related to genealogy every day.  I'm definitely addicted.

Q17:  Do you have someone in your family that will take over the family history?

A17:  Not yet, and definitely not for my own family.  So far the most interest has been shown by my older stepson, in my research into his family.

Q18:  Have you had a genealogy surprise?  What was it?

A18:  By the time I finally got the results of the DNA test it wasn't that much of a surprise, but I did confirm that my paternal grandfather's biological father was not the man his mother married.

Q19:  Are you a storyteller?  What’s your favorite family story?

A19:  I am a pretty good storyteller, which works well when I'm giving genealogy presentations.  My favorite family story is about how my father competed on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour and came in second place to Gladys Knight.

Q20:  What was your greatest genealogy discovery?

A20:  Learning that the Sellers family is descended from Alexander Mack, the founder of the Schwarzenau Brethren (Dunkers), even though I've since learned that I'm not actually a descendant of Mack because I'm not biologically a Sellers.

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

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.

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.