To the Manor Born

In a fit of domestic avoidance last weekend, I plunged – as I do periodically – into the genealogical fray. 

In part, this was motivated by my grandmother’s bringing up for the eleventy jillionth time how she wishes she knew something about the Tatham side of the family. 


My grandmother is a Tatham.

As was her father. (Duh.) 

And his parents (Tathams too – go figure) emigrated from England in 1888 and settled variously in Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

That’s where the trail goes cold. We don’t know squat about the Tathams before they came to America.

The story goes that one of my great-grand-uncles did some research in England and then destroyed what he found. Ostensibly because there was a particularly odious sister-in-law and he didn’t want the glorious Tatham ancestry to go to her head. Personally, I suspect he found a particularly odious ancestor and didn’t want to sully the glorious Tatham reputation. 

It had been a while since I looked into the whole Tatham thing, and Sunday was rainy and cold, and like I said, I was avoiding cleaning the house.

Since the last time I checked, more records have come on line, and almost immediately I found my great-great-grandmother’s death certificate, which named her parents, which set me off on a day-long slog through various British parish records and census data as far back as the late eighteenth century.

Here’s what I found: 

• The Tatham family trees on that popular genealogy site are dead wrong.
• One great-great-great-grandmother was illegitimate (as were most of her siblings).
• Far from being those Tathams (the ones in the “landed gentry” section of Burke’s Peerage), the three generations preceding my great-grandfather were a motley collection of uneducated (and often illiterate) laborers, coal dealers, bricklayers, farmers and weavers.
• Someone with the same name and living in the same town as my great-great-great-grandfather appears twice in the court records for “shopbreaking.”

So we still don’t know for sure what the Tatham deal was, but a rough picture begins to emerge.  I'll take this over to my grandmother this weekend and see how it sets.

Mutant zombie robin of doom

We rarely see my stepfather these days, but one surefire way to get him over here quick is to send him an e-mail along the lines of "hey could this be a <insert name of obscure bird here> in our yard?"

So when we started seeing this white-headed robin hanging around the house, of course, I sent the e-mail saying "hey have you ever seen a robin with a white head before?" and sure enough, the minute his shift with the ferry service ended, he was banging on my door and yelling for binoculars, and as it happened the robin obligingly showed up in the yard that very moment.

My camera is lousy at zoom, so the pic is fuzzy, but you get the drift:

This is the result, apparently, of a rare condition called leucism, which is a lack of pigment in some cells.  It's the weirdest damn thing. 

My stepfather was very excited.  He's probably called all his birdy friends and by this time tomorrow there will be a couple dozen of them milling around the edge of the property - you know how they are.

Wasn't there a movie about this recently...? 

First hike of the season

One of the many conveniences of where we live is proximity (which can be measured in yards from the back door) to the Georges Highland Path.  Yesterday was a grand, warm early spring day, so Himself, Thing One and Wilson the Agoraphobic Goldendoodle went walkabout.

They started at a trail head maybe half a mile from the house (as the crow flies) and hiked the GHP back to the house - about six miles, mostly vertical, along the stretch of the trail that runs along the summits of Ragged and Spruce Mountains and offers breathtaking views of lakes, mountains, and the bay.

Our house is visible in the shot above if one knows where to look.

Incredible, isn't it?

I mean that literally.  After eight years, it still about knocks me out, what a beautiful place this is and how fortunate we are to live here.

Hours of fun

Thing One found this:

http://www.dramabutton.com/

Every workplace has one

In my previous post, as I was writing about how Himself's friend B is not a kook, I couldn't help but think of my colleague D.

My colleague D is whip smart, a talented engineer, and one of the nicest guys out there even though he can be a bit annoying in that oblivious Asperger's kind of way.

He is also a kook.

A card-carrying, tin-foil-helmet-wearing, ultra-paranoid, anti-government, gun-hoarding, gold-stockpiling kook. 

The most recent manifestation of this kookiness is the regular deliveries of entire pallets of surplus MREs which have started showing up on our loading dock.



This is one pallet of 48 cases of MREs which he has loaded into his truck.

That's 576 MREs and this is just one of the several pallets our long-suffering warehouse staff has received for him.

Seriously, hundreds upon hundreds of MREs? Someone would rather eat those than starve to death?

Himself has about 100 gallons of wine percolating in the basement.  There's a very old single-shot .22 rifle down there, too.  For my part, if society as we know it collapses, that's all I'll need.  That plus one bullet. 

Actually, I would just go live with B.

Vicarious trip report: Sailing in the Keys

Himself went to Florida for a week of sailing.

With his friend B.

B is a pretty interesting dude, actually.  Navy vet.  Outward Bound Wilderness instructor, which is how Himself met him, when they led a veterans' course together a few years ago.

B has made something of a name for himself as a survivalist... teaching and writing about it.  You remember the scene in Cast Away, the "I have made FIRE" one?  He was the consultant for that part.

He's not one of those nutty Apocalypse types stockpiling rice and guns.  He just likes to be able to fend for himself and has a deep dislike of wasting anything.  When he kills a deer, it is with a bow and arrows he has made, and he will use the brains to tan the hide.  That sort of thing.  Once when he was staying with us, I came home from work to find freshly baked muffins made from acorns he'd foraged in the yard.  Why would anyone not use perfectly good acorns, there for the taking?

Anyhoo.  Couple of days of sailing (B's boat has no motor; go figure) got them to Dry Tortugas, where they visited Fort Jefferson.

 Along the way, they ate whatever they caught.

 A very different experience than cruising Penobscot Bay...  starting with the 80-degree weather while back here in Maine we had a snowstorm.