I liked curry but have never tried actually cooking a curry dish. This was pretty easy and I had most of the ingredients. Next time I’ll probably make it with rice instead of noodles though. Basic recipe comes from Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2001.
2½ cups uncooked egg noodles
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
½ large onion
2 cups fresh basil leaves
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 teaspoons Madras curry powder
dash of salt
¼ teaspoon ground red pepper
1 boneless chicken breast half
¾ cup light coconut milk
Prepare noodles according to package directions, but without salt.
Cut chicken into 1 inch pieces
Slice onion thinly
Heat 1 teaspoon oil in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat
Add onion and stir-fry for one minute
Add basil leaves and stir fry for an additional two minutes
Remove from pan
Add remaining teaspoon of oil to pan and heat
Add garlic and stir-fry for one minute
Add curry, salt, and red pepper and stir-fry for 10 seconds
Add chicken and stir fry for three minutes
Add coconut milk
Reduce heat to medium
Cook until chicken is done (about 4 minutes for me)
Last summer was really rough for me. While taking care of my grandparents was stressful, a lot of the time I could power through the part where it brought me down. I had stuff to do and people’s lives depended on it. But after they died, I went into depression for months. I couldn’t deal with other people hardly at all. For example, I stopped checking if people wanted to take my extra ticket to the Sounders games. I didn’t want to negotiate over whether they could go, where to meet before, etc. So I just went alone.
That passed somewhat in the fall, but I’ve been been up and down since then. Over the years, my mood swings were smoother because I had close friends who I was able to call on. When I was in Idaho, it was the people I sobered up with. Here it has been Jason. Without those daily influences, I hole up a lot. It’s not a deep depression. I’m able to function. But a lot of stuff doesn’t get done, and I tend to do only the things that need doing now.
I’ve actually had a few days in a row now where I’ve felt good. I have a side job that I can focus on, for one. I’ve gotten myself out walking. I cooked today. (I know, I wrote I was going to cook 3 times a week. I’ve not stuck to that.) I’m about to suit up and go out for the evening. The last month I’ve generally felt better.
I don’t know if the momentum is something that builds on itself, if doing something help me do something else. Or perhaps it’s just that my moods have a natural frequency and not a virtuous cycle. I really hope it’s the former.
Yes, this is all genealogy all the time. Deal! Right now, I share with you something that occurred since about 10:30 last night. It is 12:07 a.m. right now. This is mostly to document how pieces get connected.
The story starts with Mary Weiss, my 2nd great aunt. According to the inscription in 2010 Quotations of Emo, she died June 21st, 1898 in Denver Colorado. That’s a long way from Cassville, Wisconsin. Because the 1890 census was destroyed in a fire, I have no easy to find records of her between 1880, when she was 11, and her death in 1898. Why did she move to Colorado? Teaching? Nursing? Was she running a hardware store like her brothers?
The Colorado State Archives has an online index of documents, and one of them was the death record for a Mary Weiss in June of 1898, which meant it was pretty likely the same Mary Ryan. The document itself is available for purchase. However, they want $25 for a copy of it, so I put off buying it. Last week I bought it for myself as a birthday present, and it arrived today. No scan of it yet. But really, it’s pretty minimal, and it doesn’t even look like the original document. More like a transcription that was typed out. Mainly it is independent confirmation of the information inscribed in 2010 Quotations of Emo. Otherwise, it didn’t give me much additional information of the useful variety.
She died in St. Anthony’s Hospital, where a cursory search of the internet did not reveal it’s history. This confirms her status as single, which was easy to guess since she still had the Weiss surname. The cause of death is listed as pulmonary tuberculosis. Which made me think perhaps St. Anthony’s was a famous sanatorium at the time and she was shipped there by her parents as a chance for her to get better. No idea as yet. It has a line for Dr., which is listed as J.N. Hall, and the undertaker as Waters and Simpson. None of that will be useful in tracking her down except that she died in St. Anthony’s.
So I started searching. The Google search didn’t have anything. So I jumped on NewspaperArchive.com, which has an extensive inventory of Madison newspapers, but previously only had a paper from Colorado Springs from that state. Still the case. But for some reason, this time I Googled Colorado newspaper archives perhaps hoping to find something I could eventually visit and dig through microfilm. But on the first page was the Colorado Historical Newspaper Archive. Holy crap! Why didn’t I know that was around?
So I searched for Weiss in 1898 in Denver, but found nothing relevant. Some perusing around seems to indicate they have no digitized newspapers from that year for Denver. Damn.
On a whim, before I closed my laptop for the evening, I search for Nat Leonard. That’s the son-in-law of my another 2nd great aunt, Julia Ryan Dolphin. Julia Ryan married Harry Dolphin and moved to Colorado from Glen Haven with her sister Laura Ryan and daughter from her first marriage to William Grimm. They are buried in the main city cemetery in Colorado Springs. Her daughter Kathleen married Nat Leonard, who was a boxer and later ran tour companies. But I hadn’t been able to track down who Nat’s parents or other immediate family. I have a couple of clues from their graves, but I hadn’t pursued them yet.
The first couple of items that showed up were from 1918 and were about Nat and his wife visiting her parents in Colorado Springs arriving by stagecoach. The 4th item was from July 1923:
News item from the Plateau Voice
Mrs. George Gibson is entertaining her sister, Miss Laura Ryan; nephew, Edward Leonard; and an uncle, Nat Leonard, of Colorado Springs.
I immediately said (out loud even), Holy crap! Laura Ryan had 4 sisters: Frances Ryan Weiss (my great grandmother), Alice Ryan (who lived in Beetown, Wisconsin), Julia Ryan Dolphin, and Mary D. Ryan. The last had disappeared after the 1900 census. I’ve been trying to find her for 8 months! She has to be Mrs. George Gibson!
Not necessarily. I know she doesn’t have a nephew named Edward Leonard (grand-nephew though), and Nat Leonard himself would be a nephew, not an uncle. So if those are wrong, its possible the sister designation is wrong too.
But I think it is her. Plugging her husband into the Ancestry.com search engine finds him in Collbran, Colorado in 1910, 1920, and 1930. All with a wife named Mary listed as being born in Wisconsin around 1868. Which matches what I know about Mary Ryan.
So I did a search on Find a Grave, to see if I could find her burial site. Bingo! There’s a George and Mary Gibson buried in Calvary Cemetery in Orchard Mesa, Colorado, not far from Collbran and Plateau City.
Tombstone for Mary and George Gibson
And now that I have an online source for Colorado newspapers, I have a lot of digging to do.
A great source of information for my family genealogy has been burial records. I don’t mean lists of tombs in cemeteries, though those have been a good source too. Some cemeteries have put their burial records online, and they have been awesome.
The first relevant cemetery I found that did this is Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison. I stumbled on this last summer. They don’t put original copies of their records online, but at some point they transcribed everything into electronic form and that is there. Here’s what they had for my great grandfather, William Solle:
Burial record for William Solle
Prior to finding that, I’d thought he’d died in 1945, as that’s the year I was told. Mind you, the information isn’t all correct. For instance, the record states that there is no monument and no marker. I’ve been there and have photographed the marker.
Brigham City Cemetery and Ogden City Cemetery in Utah have also transcribed their records, including parents and spouses of the deceased. Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs put a listing of their burials online too. Theirs has plot location and year of burial, and sometimes birth and death dates.
Even though I don’t have any relations buried at the grounds, Lake View Cemetery locally put their records online.
Most of the ones that put their records online are government owned cemeteries. A lot of private cemeteries will charge anyone but family wanting to look up where a grave is. I find that kind of irritating.
I found a really fun one last week though. The Solle family originally settled in Springfield, Illinois. There are a number of them buried in Calvary Cemetery. I came across a set of interment records for Oak Ridge Cemetery last week. Curiously, all the Solles are listed in their records. I don’t know why this is, but perhaps the two cemeteries were jointly managed for a while. I don’t know. Anyway, this was an awesome find because this set of records are scans of the original burial log books. They include age, date of death, location of death, and cause of death.
Edit: I found out why they are listed in Oak Ridge Cemetery in the official records but Calvary Cemetery elsewhere. The two cemeteries abut each other, and there isn’t clear demarcation in all places. Years ago, someone inventoried graves in Calvary Cemetery and the Sangamon County Genealogical Society posted their list. However, due to the lack of a good boundary, they included some markers from Oak Ridge in their list, including my family. Then people copied that list to other places, and so the misinformation spread.
Here’s the page for my second great grandmother, Maria Solle.
Burial record for Maria Solle
One obstacle to using these records is that the Illinois Digital Archives decided to display these images one section at a time.
Row 2, image 1 of page containing Maria Solle burial record
No problem. I downloaded all the pieces and started lining them up. But that was very time consuming. Thanks to the lazyweb (specifically Fes) I found Microsoft Image Composite Editor. It’s made for stitching together panoramas, but these is a very easy case of the same problem. I simply dropped in all the pieces and it sorts and merges them, though I had to adjust things once or twice. There are a few old maps that I can get pieces of online the same way, so this is gonna be a great tool.
And here’s a bonus for reading this far. Oak Ridge Cemetery is where Abraham Lincoln was buried. Like everyone else there, the cemetery entered his information in the log book. Here’s the re-assembled page. I’m sure someone else on the internet has already done this, but I couldn’t find it.
Ever wonder why there aren’t any places that deliver coffee to you? Some days I’m not capable of contemplating going to the coffee shop until I’ve had my coffee first. It’s just too much.
A Cup of Coffee by Maxime Seguin (CC By-Nc-Nd)
Today, I relieve the dilemma for you. Comment here (or on the Facebook thread to be posted when I wake up) with your coffee order(s) and delivery address*. I will deliver to you free of charge. You know you want it.
While in Wisconsin earlier this month, I wanted to find out some information about my great great grandparents, Clara and Anton Weiss. I knew when Anton died because of some scriblings in a book a cousin found at my great Aunt Babe’s house:
from the inside of 2010 Popular Quotations of Emo
Most families at the time wrote down births, baptisms, christenings, deaths, etc. in their family bible. The Weiss family? That’s the inside of 2010 Popular Quotations of Emo, a book published in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Why that? I don’t know. My second cousin Christopher Weiss thankfully snapped a photo of that page. I now know whoever wrote that, but it was between 1911 and 1914, because it has Anton’s death but not Clara’s.
I looked through the microfiche holdings of the Wisconsin Historical Society and found a copy of Anton’s obituary a few days after his death in the Cassville Index. I was going to include that obituary here, but I just found out that it didn’t upload properly or something to my archive, so I do not have a copy! Fuck!
Edit: I requested a copy of the obituary from the Wisconsin Historical Society. They didn’t even charge me the normal fees for research and copying (I had a a complete cite including the microfiche reel catalog number), and they emailed me a copy before I woke up. Huzzah for the Wisconsin Historical Society!
Obituary for Anton Weiss
Anyhow, the obituary stated that Anton had been buried in the Cassville Cemetery. So I drove two hours to Cassville that night and got a room in a really rundown motel. As best as I can tell, there are only two places of lodging in Cassville, which has about the same population today as it did in the 1880s. The people at the restaurant there were not friendly either.
The next morning, I drove up the bluff to the cemetery outside of town. I’d guess the cemetery is a three or four acres in size. Not super-large, but not tiny either. I parked and looked around.
The rows aren’t particularly neat, and I didn’t immediately see the marker. My fear was that the graves would be unmarked. I could have written to the cemetery association, but the turnaround time would have prevented me from getting a reply before I returned home. Tombstones tend to blend together so I went systematically. I walked crosswise to the rows, straight out from about where that photo was taken. Got to the end, moved over about 10 feet, and walked back. It was on the second return leg that I looked over (outside of my 10 foot range) and saw the headstone a ways off. You can see it in that photo just behind the tree.
Here’s the plot close up.
That’s a huge headstone! Pretty much my entire family in Washington is buried at Evergreen Memorial Park, which means flat markers. The Sorenson markers I found at Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison were actual tombstones, but they were maybe 6 or 8 inches tall. That thing is about 4 or 5 feet tall and wide, and around 18 inches deep above the base. It is a massive piece of rock!
Buried in the plot are Anton and his wife Clara. She died in California 3½ years after him at the home of one her daughter Celia Klindt in Ontario California. I took the year of death from the marker and went back to the Historical Society and looked up her obituary to find that out. Also buried there are two of their daughters, Mary and Agnes. I know Mary died in Colorado, and Agnes in Cassville.
Obituary for Clara Voigt Weiss
After getting a few shots of the individual markers and the headstone, my next task there was to photograph every tombstone in Cassville Cemetery. Yup. Every damn one. I suspected that I’m related to additional people buried there, but I didn’t know who. Since I won’t get back there for a while, I figured I might as well walk the entire cemetery. I’d purchased an 8 GB memory stick for this, which gave me room for about 2,600 photos. I took about 1,550 photos there.
The side with the older markers took a long time. Some of the markers are nearly unreadable. So I took multiple photos from different angles hoping to catch the shadows different ways so I could read them. At first I tried to dictate into my phone some of my guesses as to names while I was there to actually touch the markers and feel the words. However, after one such marker I decided I didn’t have the patience for that and stopped.
In addition to the Weisses, I also found the graves for Clara Weiss’ brother Peter Voigt and his family, and the first husband of one of Clara’s sister. I’ve barely begun to track down the Voigt branches. Also buried in the Cassville Cemetery are a couple dozen of the Grimm family. I’m not directly related to any of them, but William Hugo Grimm Sr. was the first husband of a third great aunt, Julia Elizabeth Ryan. They had one child and then divorced. Theirs is one of the earliest divorces in my family tree. Julia Ryan remarried and moved to Colorado with her husband and William Grimm’s daughter.
After all that, I drove to three more cemeteries, two of which I also photographed in their entirety. Although they were smaller. And the bugs started getting to me so I gave up 80% of the way through the last one. But it’s 1:45 now, so end of story.
While looking for information on Robert Weiss, my second great uncle, I came on some advertisements for his business. If there’s a family business, it’s being a hardware dealer. Second great grandfather Anton Weiss was a hardware dealer for a while after initially running a tinning business when he immigrated. His sons Joseph, Robert, Theodore, and Frank were all hardware dealers. However, after that generation, I don’t know of any who continued in that profession.
Robert was the oldest. Somewhere around 1880 he moved from Cassville to Jenny and started a hardware business. There, he married and had one child who passed away. The following is an advertisement for his hardware business that ran in the Lincoln County Advocate on 12 Jan 1880.
By 1894, my great grandfather Joe Weiss had also moved to Merrill, as Jenny came to be named. There he joined Robert in the business.
The Merrill Advocate could print much nicer graphics by 1894. The business would remain in Joe Weiss hand’s until he moved to Madison in 1907 where he also dealt in hardware. Robert moved to California and Utah by 1900. There he worked as a hardware dealer and occasionally as a prospector.
The mobility of my Xoom tablet was a major plus for me yesterday. I’m staying a few extra days in Wisconsin after Wiscon (more about Wiscon later perhaps) in order to do some genealogical research. I decided yesterday to search for graves. I first went to Resurrection Cemetery to find the graves for my great grandparents Weiss. The cemetery office printed up a helpful map and I found the plots with little difficulty.
Then I went across the street to Forest Hill Cemetery, where many of the Sorenson’s were laid to rot (“laid to rest” is the euphemism of choice I suppose). However, by that point it was after their office had closed. The burials records for Forest Hill are online though. I hadn’t written down the locations, but I was able to look up everything online while wandering the cemetery.
At this point, having the tablet with me only made up for having been lazy and not having written down the locations ahead of time. Which is awesome by the way. Anytime technology allows me to be lazier I am all in favor. But it was really useful beyond that. The locations at Forest Hill aren’t exactly easy to find. Some sections are on a grid. Some use rows and tiers. Some just numbered the plots semi-sequentially. They did not mark plots with their locations (Pacific Lutheran Cemetery in Seattle does). What I could do was look at names on markers and look them up as I walked, giving me their locations and thereby guesstimating how far away I was from the ones I sought, and whether I was getting hotter or colder.
At Resurrection Cemetery, in addition to my great grandparents Joseph Weiss and Frances Ryan Weiss, the plot also had the marker for my great uncle Joe Weiss, who died young. A family member had told me he thought Joe Jr. died around 1926, but that turned out to be 5 years off. The marker had his year of death as 1931. That allowed me to find his obituary (page 1 in 2 Madison newspapers).
At Forest Hill, I found my great great uncle Theodore Weiss and his wife Anna Franey Weiss. Then while walking away I serendipitously found my great grandfather William Solle, who I hadn’t looked up yet. Forest Hill is a giant cemetery, so that was kind of weird. Other graves found there included my great great grandparents Nels and Katherine Sorenson, their son Alfred Sorenson, daughter Marie Bouchard, son Emelius Sorenson and wife Anna Bjelde Sorenson, and other relatives William Martin Sorenson, Elmer Bouchard and Elizabeth Frutiger Bouchard, Edward Bouchard and Donna Moran Bouchard, and Carolyn (or Carlynn) Bouchard. I also photographed the space where Mae Sorenson should be buried, but there was no marker. I still don’t know if this is the ex-wife of Alfred or someone else. Today’s project is to research Alfred and Mae at the Madison Library.
Earlier today John posted that he needed to do a quick run to Skagit and asked if any of his funemployed friends wanted to ride along. For those who don’t know him, John owns a flight school training people to fly small planes. So a quick run to Skagit with John means hopping into a small plane, rather than driving. I’ve done that trip driving many times, it’s not so exciting. Flying it probably isn’t for John either. But I’ve only been in small planes twice that I can remember, and once in a helicopter.
So I hopped in my car and drove to Boeing field. I watched John and Chase pull the plane out of a hangar barely big enough to hold the plane, and go through what appeared to be a very thorough checklist. John had me sit in front, rather than Chase. Which meant he explained to me how to kill the engine and deploy the plane’s parachute in the unlikely event that he went unconscious and we were headed toward the ground. (Which he did not.)
Plane ride was uneventful, other than the normal taxiway in Skagit being closed so we had to take 5 to 10 extra minutes to go the long way around to get to the airport buildings.
On the flight back, John let me fly the plane for about 10 minutes. I don’t think I showed it, but I was hella nervous beforehand. I played Microsoft Flight Simulator in like 1991 and things did not go well. But I figured he wouldn’t be letting me do anything I couldn’t handle, so what the hell. It was fun. If I was that kind of rich, I’d totally blow money to buy a plane and learn how to fly.
The French Leek Pie I made for Pie Night was gone in 11 minutes. It was super easy to make. I used the French Leek Pie recipe at allrecipes.com, with some minor adaptations.
1 pie crust
1 tablespoon butter
3 leeks
1 pinch salt (to taste)
1 pinch pepper (to taste)
1 cup cream
1 1/4 cup shredded Gruyere cheese (more or less)
preheat oven to 375°
grate the Gruyere
chop the leeks
melt butter in a large saucepan over medium-low heat
add leeks
cook, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, or until soft
reduce heat to low
add salt and pepper
stir in cream and shredded Gruyere cheese
heat on low until mixture is warmed through
pour mixture into the pie shell
bake for 30 minutes, or until the custard is set and golden on top
