So the teaching gig is going all right. But not great.
Issues:
The no curriculum thing is really a drag. I don’t think I’d want to be stuck with slavishly following an existing curriculum. But starting off with no curriculum has been difficult. I spend a couple of hours each day planning what to cover in the four hours in the afternoon.
Classroom management. Specifically, I really don’t know how to handle the differing speeds at which each of the students are picking this up. One student struggles with the basics of HTML syntax, while another wants me to teach him Javascript.
Teenage attention span. I swear they all have A.D.D. They all want to try out the fancy HTML/CSS toys and go way off track. Which is fine to a degree, as I don’t want them to learn the one true way of Web development. But they get themselves into dead ends from which they don’t know how to extricate themselves. Getting them individually unstuck takes up a lot of time.
And lastly, while none of these issues are really all that major, I don’t have a teaching support network. I have general support and encouragement from friends, but that’s not what I’m looking for. Specifically, what I wish I had is people who can answer questions like I’m trying to do X, how do I do it? and this happened, what do I do? People I don’t have to seek out, but who are already there. I don’t have a breakroom with other teachers, for instance. That would be awesome.
Still glad I took the job, but wishing I knew how to do it better.
My great grandfather Joseph Peter Weiss was born on the 4th of July 1866 in Cassville, Wisconsin to Anton Weiss, a hardware dealer, and Anna Clara Voigt. Joseph moved to Merrill Wisconsin as a young man to operate a hardware business with his older brother Robert. In the mid-1890s Robert left Merrill and chased gold rushes across the west, leaving the business to Joe, who continued to operate it until 1908. In that year, he moved to Madison and became a hardware dealer in partnership with another older brother, Theodore, until he retired.
Joseph Weiss - early twenties
In November 1891, Joe returned to the Cassville area to marry Frankie Ryan in Patch Grove. The husband and wife returned to Merrill to start their family. They had six children: Florence Marie, Joseph William, Helen Catherine, Richard Glenn, George Archibald, and Laura Ann Frances. All were born in the Merrill area, though Frances’ birth came just months before the move to Madison.
In Madison, Joe purchased a house at 740 Jenifer Street, a mere 8 blocks from the Capitol building and 1 block from Lake Monona. He lived there 52 years. He died on the 7th of November 1960 aged 94 years, and was survived by his wife and 5 of his children. His remains buried in Resurrection Cemetery in Madison.
And in one other bit of news, I started this afternoon on a temporary part time job teaching a group of 8 high school students how to create and build web sites. So for the next two months I will not have the free time I have had. Instead of a flexible half-time schedule that I’ve been doing for my one client, I will be doing that work in the mornings and heading to South Park Community Centery in the afternoon for the class. A lot less flexibility and I’ll need to be way more organized to get my personal stuff done.
Also, this is the first time I’ll have taught in many many years. My previous teaching experience was as an assistant to someone else, or when someone else already prepared the material to be covered (when I worked at the Department of Employment). This time I have to come up with the lesson plans and activities myself, as well as hold high schoolers attention for 4 hours a day. Oh, and I had all of 2½ days to come up with the first day’s plan. I did a lot of breaking the ice activities today. Thought getting them talking would be good before we dived into HTML. Which will be the next few days. Once they have the hang of basic HTML and CSS we’ll move into WordPress and also cover “social marketing” and some basic web design.
Oh, and the cool thing about the program. If the students do well, they get paid for this.
Also last Monday, my aunt had a heart attack. I posted something about it, but locked it down to friends at the time. The situation was not good for a bit. However, the latest email update was from her instead of my uncle. And she gets released from the hospital tomorrow! Which is most excellent news! Likely to be no permanent damage even. I am thrilled because we’ve had enough crappy news in my family the last few years. We could stand to go a decade or two without more.
My brother called me last Monday and asked if I wanted to go to the Sounders vs. Earthquakes U.S. Open Cup match that was happening Tuesday. He kicked in some of his miles to make the trip happen. Dan lives about 8 blocks from Kezar stadium where the contest was to be performed. Flew down Tuesday morning on Southwest, which was an experience so much better than any other flying experience I’ve had in years. I picked up a Sounders jersey for my nephew Victor and also brought him one of my old season ticket holder scarves.
I tried to explain to Dan and Brenda about Seattle fans, particularly E.C.S., who made up the bulk of those supporting the Sounders side at the game. I don’t think she believed me when I said our fans have some mean chants. Her face contorted in different directions when E.C.S. started up a let him die! chant in response to an Earthquakes player who went down particularly easily. The you’re a bastard referee chant brought up some wide eyes too.
But the drama came when we sat down in the section next to E.C.S. instead of in the E.C.S. section. All the seats were G.A., but the stadium staff really didn’t want Sounders supporters spreading out. Three or four times the staff came up to us and asked or told us to move in with E.C.S. I refused because we had a 6 year old with us. He wouldn’t be able to see or hear the game in the midst of the jumping E.C.S faithful.
Eventually the guy gave me the line that it’s just that his supervisor told him and he was just following directions. I told him he needed to get his supervisor to come down and explain to the 6 year old that he’d have to stand behind the loud jumping people. Then about 30 other people (most with young kids) saw we weren’t budging and moved over themselves. About then the supervisor must have given up, because the staff guy just waved us into the section we were already in at that point.
The last time I really cared about a ballot measure was in 2008 when the Death with Dignity Act was an initiative. I have cared about other initiatives, but not to the point where I’ve been willing to go sign up to help out in place of other stuff I was dealing with. But this year there is one I care about: Referendum 74. Gay Marriage. As you can guess, I’m all for this. While I think having domestic partnerships was an important middle step in the political process toward approving same sex marriage, it was only an interim step. Now it’s time.
From the emails I’ve received, one of the strategies they are employing is to get out the vote as much as possible in Seattle, where the referendum is likely to have overwhelming support.
Thursday I get to spend an hour in training with Washington United for Marriage so I can volunteer. Saturday I’ll be participating with Washington United in Seattle’s Pride parade. I’ll be walking in the parade and handing out pamphlets. And before the official start and end I’ll be carrying a clipboard trying to get people to sign up to be part of Washington United.
I was looking for a genealogist the other day to do some in-person research I can’t do. The web site for one of the genealogist search places was down, so I looked at the site affiliated with Ancestry.com. They charge $1900 for 25 to 30 hours of research. Basic research. I joked on G+ that people should hire me because I’m much cheaper.
But really, people should should hire me. I’m pretty decent at this. And cheaper.
For example:
I was going up to Calvary Cemetery to get some photos of graves of relatives, so I decided to fill some of the photo requests for the cemetery. Today I traipsed around for 30+ minutes trying to find a request for a husband and wife. The plot is in the largest section in the cemetery, and not one I’m familiar with. Eventually found the plot but the graves are unmarked. Left a message for the woman asking if she wanted the photos I took of the unmarked plot. She responded a bit ago saying she did, and also if I came across an Amalie Stevens would I get a photo of her grave?
I leaped into action. The information I was given was that Amalie Bouchard Stevens was the wife of James Stevens, birth name Stefanski, and that she probably died between 1930 and 1942 in Seattle.
First I searched for her name in the Seattle Times archive. However, when an obituary was in the classified, the OCR is really bad and usually doesn’t find it. Next I looked up James Stevens, Amalia Stevens and James Stefanski on the Washington Digital Archives. I found the marriage certificate for James Stefanski and Emilia Bouchard. No information to go on unfortunately. Some marriage certificates have ages and places of birth.
Then decided to look at the online burial records for Calvary Cemetery. I didn’t look there first because I figured the requester had already looked. But there was an Amelia Stevens buried there, and her grave was located in a section I photographed last night. It gave her date of death in 1949. Went back to the Seattle Times archive and found a funeral notice in the classifieds. No next of kin was listed, so I wasn’t sure if it was the right one. And then I looked at my photos from the section, and realized she was buried right next to a Helen Bush who had a maiden name of Stevens. Also, the same person had requested a photo of her grave. So yep, that’s probably Amalie Bouchard Stevens.
Amelia Stevens 1891-1949
All figured out in the space of 15 minutes.
I’m not a pro-level genealogist, and some of this went smoothly because I took 700+ photos in two days for the fun of it, and some of it because the person happened to have records available online. But still, 15 minutes.
I’ve looked at hundreds of gravestones for relatives in the last couple of years, at least. Perhaps that number is in the thousands. I don’t keep a count, but the number is fairly high. What’s on gravestones is usually correct, but not always so. Do you know offhand how old your parents are? What about aunts or uncles or grandparents? Most of us do, but sometimes we are wrong.
My dad died before I was born. Had he been an only child I would have been the person mostly likely to fill out my grandpa Weiss’ application for a death certificate when he died in 1988. He was 84, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew he was in his 80s somewhere. When you send those in, the recorder’s office doesn’t fact-check them. They rely on your signature and the doctor’s signature that what you put down is accurate. And that’s the information that usually gets put on gravestones these days. The informant gives the information to the funeral director who fills out the application, everyone signs it, and then that information is sent off to the recorder, the Social Security Administration, and the people who make the grave marker.
So usually the information is accurate, but the year of birth can be off sometimes. I’ve seen that a couple dozen times, particularly on older graves.
I can tell a year of birth is incorrect because lots of records created throughout a person’s life reference their age, and many of those are available. Census records in particular give an approximate age. For instance, the approximate ages for a person might be 5, 14, 15, every succeeding decade until late in life. Then the last census before they died gives an approximate age of 79, and the year of birth on their gravestone matches that, I’m going to look at it with suspicion. A caretaker probably just didn’t know exactly how old grandpa was.
I’ve also seen cases where someone appears in documents well before the year of birth on the marker. One relative appeared on the 1870 census, so I know he wasn’t born in 1872 as his grave indicates. People lie about their ages fairly frequently. Sometime they want to appear older to join the military. Sometimes they want to appear younger to their prospective spouse. The lie ends up on their grave.
But not only that, the date of death can be incorrect too. You’d think that people would know that because it just happened, barring cases when a body is discovered an unknown period after death. But I’ve run into a couple cases where it isn’t. Usually when this happens I’m pretty sure that the family placed the gravestone years after death. Perhaps they waited for a spouse to die before engraving. Perhaps one couldn’t be afforded at the time of death. My third great grandparents Knapp have markers with only their initials and surnames scratch into them. We’re currently considering placing a nicer marker there.
I’ve probably missed a few cases because I haven’t even looked for corroborating evidence. I suspect I can generally rely on the date of death on headstones. Finding the 0.25% of cases where it happens isn’t worth the effort for distance relatives.
It’s harder to detect than issues with the birth date. There aren’t a lot of documents that are functionally public after someone dies. There’s a will and whatever else is filed in probate, and the death certificate. Since the person isn’t living any longer, they aren’t creating a continuing paper trail.
In the two cases I’ve found, what showed that the date of death was wrong was finding the contemporary obituary or other references in newspapers.
For example, here’s the headstone for my third great uncle Richard Smith Blake:
Headstone for Richard and Elizabeth Blake
It has a date of death of 27 December 1897. But then I was looking at the probate record, which was dated in February of 1897 and gave a date of death of 29 December 1896. That didn’t match up. I thought it might be possible I was misreading the handwriting. Lots of rural legal documents are in an almost illegible scribble made worse by poor microfilming, including this one.
Luckily, the local paper, The Ackley World (of Iowa) for 1896 and 1897 has been scanned and is online. And there was an obituary on page 1:
Obituary for Richard Blake
The scan is not the clearest, but it was most certainly published on 1 January 1897, nearly 12 months before the date of death on his headstone. My best guess is that the headstone was placed when his wife Elizabeth died almost 15 years later. Someone asked the family what to put on for Richard, and they ended up giving them the wrong date.
Now the lesson that professional genealogists would tell you comes of this is that one should never trust headstones alone and to get corroboration for everything. Strictly speaking, that’s true. But that’s not the lesson I take. If I run across discrepancies like this, I dig deeper. However, unless the person is a direct ancestor, it isn’t important enough for me to spend the effort to double- and triple-check everything. If a third cousin once removed has a year of death on his grave, that’s good enough for me. Richard Blake is my third great uncle by marriage. Had I not had the record of his will that contradicted the headstone, I wouldn’t have cared if the year was off by one.
On my cross country trip, I stopped in a number of locations to do some research that can’t be done via the internet (yet). One of those places was the Iowa Historical Society in Des Moines, which has microfilmed official county records and newspapers. I also stopped at a number of cemeteries.
One of my goals was to establish for certain whether or not the Stephen Parker buried in Saint John’s Cemetery in Clarion, Iowa is my third great uncle. I wrote about Stephen Parker last year. The census records show him as insane. I can now definitely conclude that Stephen Parker related to me is the same one buried near Clarion.
Stephen Parker headstone
First, a visit to the cemetery shows his headstone includes the notation Company C, 12th U.S. Infantry. I know the Stephen Parker that lived in Grant County Wisconsin served in Companies C and F of the 12th U.S. infantry. So that’s him. Unfortunately, the grave doesn’t have any dates on it, as is common on many Civil War veteran headstones.
Death of Stephen Parker
I knew he died before Jun 1897 due to news reports on his autopsy that appeared in that month. The Iowa Historical Society library had on microfilm the Wright County Monitor, the local Clarion newspaper. I started in June and worked backwards looking for a report on his death. I almost missed it, since it doesn’t include any headline at all. Just a long paragraph on his death. It appeared on the 2nd of June, and reports his date of death as being on the 29th of May.
I still have some details to figure out on this collateral branch. I don’t know exactly when or where Stephen Parker was born. It was between 1935 and 1937 in Ontario. And I don’t know anything about his wife’s parents other than their names on Margaret Parker’s death certificate. She emigrated from Ireland, but I don’t know where in Ireland. I don’t know if she immigrated with her family or on her own. The first mention I’ve found of her is when Stephen and she married in 1873.
I am tired of the zombie apocalypse. I don’t mean books or movies featuring diseases run rampant that turn people into mindless flesh-eating things. That’s still awesome!
I am tired of people talking about zombie apocalypses as if they are real. Except, not. See, if the zombies come, it’s not going to be like Shawn Of The Dead and Zombieland. It’s going to be more like Contagion, except with shambling people who can easily infect you. People won’t be out in the streets blowing off zombie heads with shotguns and shovels. They are going to be holed up in houses wondering when they’re next, and wondering if there’s going to be any food.
So to all the glib zombie apocalypse macro-ers, and to the marketers asking questions like How will you survive the zombie apocalypse?, I saw meh. Do it if you must, but I’m just not interested.
