Happiest Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday. I'm 48 years old.

Today is also the Feast of St. John of the Cross, my hero in Carmel.

As we say down here, "We po'fokes". I told Assistant Offspring to save their money and not get anything for me. What they did for me has made me giggle all afternoon. They bought a card, and baked a small chocolate cake.


The cake is amazing. Here it is with my halite lamp behind it, sitting on a coverlet that's more than 100 years old. It was made completely by Mary Alice Fisher. She was my maternal great-grandmother. Keeps me warm of a night.







Only one candle but it looks like it's on fire... :)


But the card took the cake. Open it, and it plays--The Hampster Dance.

I screamed. We all sang at the tops of our lungs. I love Hampsterdance. And Assistant Offspring knew and had bought this card a while back and saved it for me.

Microwaved birthday cake and a Hampsterdance card. And love, so much love.

Have I ever had such a wonderful birthday? If so, it was nearly 30 years ago...

I love you all.

Hampsters and the Kung-Fu Gerbil battle it out

Three Sisters or, What can I do for you, Grandson?

I don't talk about my First Nation ancestors very often. When I was growing up, that part of our tree wasn't...valued.

The Cherokee People are described here by William Bartram:

...Their complexion is a reddish brown or copper colour;

One of my mother's sisters had that marvelously beautiful complexion. All eight of the siblings who lived to adulthood were slightly more dark complexioned than my grandmother who had the fair complexion of the Northern Europeans (that I inherited from her and from my father's side). That has led them to postulate that the First Nation blood from family legend came from my grandfather's side, the Lambs, the first of whom came to Alabama in 1798.

I'll be doggoned if I can sort out which Lamb though. *happy sigh* This sort of challenge is why I love genealogy.

I imagine most any family line that's been on this side of the Pond for as many years as we have will contain at least a few ancestral lines illustrating the melting-pot aspect of American culture. My maternal grandmother Mayo's line came over from England sometime before1650 landing in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Our William Mayo, father of Valentine and his sister Sarah, was born in 1650. We're descended from Valentine's son James Mayo Sr. My great-grandmother Mary Alice Fisher who married Walter Steele Patton Mayo, was descended from Johann Adam Fischer, the Silesian Black Forest Baron von Fischerbach. The Fisher line came over, according to family legend, at the invitation of William Penn as part of his Holy Experiment. They were not Quakers but Roman Catholics. Still sorting out that legend too.

Anecdotally, Baron von Fischerbach's son Adam was said to have received the invitation, but that seems unlikely due to the fact that William Penn was stricken with a paralysis and deprived of his memory in 1708 and suffered a stroke in 1712, and Adam Fisher was not born until 1710. Perhaps his father the Baron received the invitation, but there is no evidence to support this. Just my thoughts.

My father's side has more specific tribal information. "Black John" Daniel Swindle, b. 1780 no DOD known, was said to have been Cherokee. That would have made his mother, Elizabeth Utz, the Cherokee connection but there's some information that she may have been German. Was Black John adopted perhaps? *another happy sigh* I love genealogy challenges...

As the birthdates and physical features speak, it seems like the Lamb First Nation connection may be closer to me now.

This time of year, the woods call to me through my First Nation ancestors. One thing my ex (whose maternal grandmother was full Cherokee) and I shared was love of the woods. He and I would drive to Cherokee, North Carolina, every year about now for time alone in the woods. I know how he's feeling about now. Scroll down a little ways in the Wiki article above about the Cherokee People to the photograph of the older man named Swimmer, put eyeglasses on him, and that could be my ex. :) No idea if they're actually related.

Anyhow...

No trip into the deep green, red, and gold places of the earth for me this year. I've got a new vegetarian recipe though, my version of the Three Sisters corn, squash, and beans. It isn't authentic in that it calls for olive oil (lack of fats in native First Nation diets was a serious health issue) but it's simple, delicious and will give you three servings of vegetables at one whack if you have it as a meal-in-itself. Have a nice piece of cheese and some grapes for dessert.

Check here for the recipe, posted on my other blog Sparkling With Crystals.

I felt like I should explain why I often refer to the Earth as my Mother. My Christian readers have wondered, hopefully. :) My natural mother frequently looks to the land to provide what she needs for free--always has, and she taught us to as well. Referring to the Earth as my Mother is not a non-Christian thing for me but rather an ancestral nod. I AM is my Father and He created the Earth. What a sign of His true love to have given to us such a wonderful planet that can give us what we need, for free.

Like many people, I'm an odd mishmash of cultures, sometimes clashing cultures. I cherish my ancestry and will research it until I can find no other "he married...she married..." to trace.

So sit down, Grandson or Granddaughter, have some of the Three Sisters hot from the stove, and tell me what I can do for you?

Genealogy in the South, or Why I Hang Out in Cemeteries

The American Civil War was a bloody, demoralizing, family-destroying event in United States history. After the war was over, in the Southern states there were rumors that those who fought would be prosecuted as war criminals and their families denied war pensions. How did a few choose to address these rumors?

Courthouses that contained census records were burned to the ground, that's how. Even copies of census records kept in Washington were destroyed. The only census records for the year 1890 that still exist nationwide are a fragment from Perry County Alabama and a few tiny bits and pieces from here and there. So what's an enterprising Southern genealogist to do for information? Go cemetery-hopping!

Cemetery headstones and old church records contain the only collated information available about deaths and burials, other than whatever someone's Aunt Harriet might have written down at the bedside of an ancient relic who was about to pass on.

Cemetery headstones frequently contain not only birth and death dates, but parental information too. And you might find that individual's parents' graves nearby, and their parents' too, and their children, and so on.

One sad note about the graves of many of our fallen Civil War veterans: their graves are often unmarked. For the same reason that today's genealogists look to gravestones for information, there were fears after the War that the same information would be used to identify and prosecute war criminals and their families. So, many graves simply went unmarked and remain so to this day.

One big issue with gravestone information is that occasionally, it is significantly wrong! I've got this problem in my family, and we're wrangling about who is going to fork over the money to solve it and get the name corrected. So, always make a note that your source for the information you collect is a gravestone from Serene Cemetery off Highway 261 near Eastville, or wherever you happen to be. Remember that a picture of the offending gravestone is worth a thousand notes too.

Some churches have burial records that are more than a hundred of years old. I have a set of transcribed minutes for a Presbyterian church that kept burial records since 1827. A phone call to the church office, or a letter to the pastor if the small church doesn't have an office, many times will open a jewelry box of information that will only require searching for the names and dates you need.

If you're really on your genteel Southern manners, you might be able to get a referral from the pastor to an elderly church member who may already have long lists of old genealogical information compiled by his or her ancestors that might be the motherlode of information you've been searching for.

Come November through March, nothing excites me more than spending a whole Saturday in a new cemetery. Some of them are way, way back in the woods and haven't been kept up for more than a century. Need long pants and bug spray for those forays because the ticks are as big as muskedines. Some cemeteries are so huge it takes many Saturdays to explore them completely. Some are just a few graves that were placed on the grounds of a homestead now long gone.

I'm on a quest to photograph every headstone for every ancestor of mine that I can find. That will take me the rest of my life, I reckon. I figure I'm related to nearly a third of the state of Alabama, if their families have been here more than a hundred years. I know of one Civil War veteran uncle buried in Chicago where he died of dysentery in a POW camp. I know the plot number and everything, and someday I'll get up there to photograph his headstone too.

My father always goes with me in my cemetery wanderings. And he always takes his best friend 'Roscoe.' Can't be too careful.

If you decide to make a trip, always carry a notebook and pencil, water, cell phone, and most importantly tell someone exactly where you're going and when you're coming back. Give them the address of the cemetery and the name of the church, if one is associated with it.

And be respectful of the dead. Don't take things that aren't yours, because all states have laws against removing things from graveyards under 'grave robbing' statutes. Don't take your metal detectors either, because they're covered under the same 'grave robbing' statues. Don't leave trash, don't have a picnic on the graves themselves–be decent, folks.

Mostly, be ready to be awed and filled with reverence. Cemeteries are peaceful, restful places and I love to be in them. Weird as this may sound, I would buy property next to a cemetery and build a house (if I had any money!) because I haven't found many cemeteries in central Alabama that don't contain graves of my ancestors. I feel near to the past when I'm in a cemetery. The past, history, is my love, and I love my ancestors. We've been in Alabama since 1796. This ground where my ancestors rest is truly my home.

Meniere's and Migraine Madness
Another blog written long before today! I write these things on the fly, as I find clear minutes. Sometimes I feel better at, say, 2:45AM for 25 minutes. I write like crazy until I give out. I pick up again next time I have a few clear minutes, and that's how I get these things written.

I've discovered that this cognitive dysfunction I'm suffering from has had a rather interesting effect on my brain. I can be creative, but not cogitative. I can write music or a story or a blog or draw or sing--but ask me to fill out a form, or read and understand instructions for something like the disability paperwork I'm struggling with right now--cannot do it.

I cannot get rid of this migraine. The pain just goes on and on. As long as I hold my head perfectly still and try not to think, the pounding lessens. But I do have to get up every now and then, and that's when trouble hits.

Meniere's ear pressure is still there in both ears. The tinnitus is still loud. I was trying a tinnitus masking technique of listening to ambient music through headphones and actually heard the hearing in my left ear gradually fluctuate downward until I could barely hear at all.

I'm going back to bed now. When I'm flat on my back, it doesn't matter how many dizzy spells I have, or how bad my head hurts. I pray, and God listens, and sometimes He says 'yes' to my prayers and sometimes He doesn't. But He always listens.