"When He Says Daddy to Me"

My grandfather Sidney Allen Mellen wrote a column called “What’s Going On,” using the name Mock Allen. It appeared in the Plymouth Wisconsin newspaper when he lived there in 1917 and maybe after. Sometimes it consisted of humorous verse.
When my father was about nine months old, this was the column on November 10, 1917. I have transcribed it verbatim as it appeared without editing a couple of likely misprints.
“When He Says Daddy to Me”

I’ve met with actors erratic,
Who’s antics caused laughter galore;
I’ve met with singers dramatic,
At whom I laughed, til sides were wore sore,
Of all the antics I’ve been lampin’,
There’s none that gives me the glee,
As the baby, when after some vamping,
Tries to say “daddy” to me.
I can speak to him of Horatio,
I can prate of Wagner’s technique,
I can deliver a complex oratio,
I can tell him of Athens in Greek,
I can warble of Browning and Keating,
I can lisp of the old Pharisee,
But he has me hands down and a bleating
When he stutters out “daddy” at me.
I’ve told him of Yaphank and Hoboken,
I’ve whispered of Kalamazoo,
Of the baker whom they’re always a jokin’,
Meaning Bunn of old Baraboo.
I’ve told him a bit about Reno,
I’ve jollied him ‘bout Kankakee,
By the little tyke gets my goatino,
When he tries to say “daddy” to me.
I’ve talked on questions portentious,
And he lends a listening ear;
I’ve expounded on matters momentous,
Of which he seems glad to hear.
He pays most ardent attention,
And I spout entertainingly,
Until he tries intervention,
By saying “daddy” to me.
At times I think he’s most trying,
As a bit of temper’s evinced,
And when that bambino starts crying,
Of his waywardness I am convinced.
His voice I’m sure is projected
Far over the land and the sea,
But from harshness he’s fully protected,
When he tries to say “daddy” to me.
Of tricks he has a full measure,
Each one an accomplishment rare,
To do them gives him great pleasure,
On this “parlor stuff” he is a bear,
But the stunt that makes me most happy,
The one that fills me with glee,
Is when he looks up at his pappy,
And tries to say “daddy” to me.

Ethan's Baby Book and his First Press Notices

My grandmother, Jessie Mae (Green) Mellen, labeled the Notes page of my father’s Baby Book “Baby’s presents.” The first entry is “Mrs. C. F. Kade This Baby Book.”
Another page is labeled “My Press notices” and contains six clippings, some dated, some not. Among these are:
FIRST MELLEN OF THE SEASON
The brightest son shines and at the same time joy reigns in superabundance upon one branch of Mellens in our city of late, notwithstanding the fact that the barometer has been doing stunts way below the zero mark this week. It is not Old Sol, but the first son that shines at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Mellen on Kensington Avenue, the glad event having transpired on Wednesday about the noon hour. The glad dad thinks that he will soon have some one to help him hustle the news for the REPORTER.

and
“Some Climate” He Says
C. F. Kade has opined that the climate of Wisconsin is some salubrious, when you can raise eight pound Mellens in the winter time.
On another page is a Christmas card to “Ethan Allen” signed “Grandma and Grandpa” Kade. I don’t know who the Kades were, but I’m on the case.
I’m posting images of the relevant pages.

This post first appeared on my Facebook page.

Begin again

After a five year hiatus, I am resuming this blog with a new focus.   Partly in response to queries from my cousin Barbie and my niece Michelle, I have begun again to work on my family history.  (Sorry, Barbie, but I'm starting on my father's side.)   I plan to post here  any family history material that I have posted on Facebook, as well as other pieces.  We'll see if I can do it.

Connections

We finally got home for good about a month ago, and it has taken me until this week to began working on my data.  I have three file boxes with things to review and I decided just to work through the papers in their physical order, rather than try some logical system.  As it happens, the first folder I picked up was my copy of pages from The Garnsey - Guernsey Genealogy, second edition.  I'm pretty sure my entries from this source have been properly cited in TMG, so I simply began reading the pages.  I saw that John Garnsey, my 9th great granduncle, married in 1716 at Rehoboth, for his third wife, Elizabeth Miller, widow of John Titus, son of John, son of Robert.

I wondered whether there was a connection to the Nine Partner Ezekiel Titus.  I still haven't found the answer to that question, but I do notice that the Tituses are connected to the Carpenter family.  (Three of the Nine Partners were Carpenters.)

In order to facilitate the search, I decided that I had to update my data to include the info I have from Stocker's Centennial History of Susquehanna County Pennsylvania and from Weston's A History of Brooklyn Penna. Ezekiel Titus married as his first wife Lois Richardson, who was the daughter of Caleb Richardson, Sr., the Nine Partner.  Lois was the niece of Hosea Tiffany, the Nine Partner, and the niece of Hosea's sister Melatiah (Tiffany) Tingley, my 5th great gandmother.  Lois and Ezekiel's son Preston Titus married Tryphena (or Triphena) Whitney, whose brother Orange married Clarissa Swetland, my 4th great gandaunt.  Triphena's brother Roswell is an ancestor of the Heart Lake Whitneys as well as the father of Permelia Emeline Whitney, who was first married to my 3rd great granduncle Nelson Tiffany and after she was widowed was married to my 3rd great grandfather Joseph Hawley.

I'll keep looking for connections in the generations before they all came to Susquehanna County.

Status

The website at allenandliz.com is available.  Last weekend, at the family gathering here at Heart Lake, I gave the password for the private "Cousins" site to everyone.

The only feedback I have received is from a distant connection in Florida who found me by googling.  Meanwhile, I have been working on the housekeeping aspects of the site.  I added a copyright notice, and I'm working on links.

Since the summer is drawing to a close, I'm also working on packing up the things I want to take home so I can continue to work on the project at home.  That includes a number of pictures.

Uploading Complete

On Tuesday, August 17, 2011, I completed uploading the relevant (and some of the irrelevant) part of my genealogical data to my public website and to my private website.  Both websites contain genealogical information on my family, Liz's family, and Jane's family.  The people included are ancestors, descendants, aunts and uncles, and cousins, as well as in-laws of all of these.

The public site includes mostly people who are deceased.  There are a few exceptions -- there is minimal information on a small number of persons in my parents' generation.  The public site also includes the narrative sections I am writing, starting with my mother's Goodrich ancestors and their connections.

The private site includes living people.  It also includes their parents, and in some cases grandparents, in order to provide links to the public site.

Both sites show the relationship, if any,  of each person to Earl Ashton Goodrich, Grace Alison Dayton, Victor Hathaway Brink, Richard Ewing Hanson, Margery Frances Day, and Bronson Dudley.

My New Site

A little under two weeks ago, I announced to some of my cousins and aunts and uncles on my mother's side that I had just put up a new genealogical website at allenandliz,com.  As of today, I am linking this blog to that site, and will use the blog to announce updates of the website.

Today, the site now includes genealogical information on the families of all four of my grandparents.  I am in the process of adding Liz's and Jane's families, but I ran into a slight hitch.  At the risk of boring anyone who happens to read this, I'm going to talk (write) it through here.

My data includes at least three categories of persons: The first is RELATIVES of one or more focus persons, The complete set of RELATIVES is all the ancestors of a given person and all of the descendants of those ancestors.  To expand on that, taking me as the focus person, my RELATIVES include me, my parents, grandparents and great grand parents all the way back, my children and grandchildren and any great grandchildren, my neices and nephews including their children, my aunts and uncles including all the great aunts and great uncles all the way back, and my cousins of whatever degree, that is, the children, grandchildren and so on of all those aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles.

The second category I'll cal CONNECTIONS.  My CONNECTIONS are the spouses (including partners) of my RELATIVES and all of the OTHER relatives of my RELATIVES and their spouses.  (If every couple had children, I wouldn't need to specify spouses.)  An easy example of OTHER relatives is the grandparents and cousins of my grandchildren on their father's side, as well as theri father himself.  None of these folks are related to me.

One thing about CONNECTIONS is that the CONNECTIONS also have CONNECTIONS, and so on.  Sometimes it is difficult to determine exactly why a particular person is in my data, especially if they are a distant CONNECTION.

The third category I'll call ASSOCIATES.  These are unrelated people who I want to include for variousreasons -- perhaps they officiated at a wedding or baptism; perhaps they are neighbors who might turn out to be RELATIVES or CONNECTIONs -- there are lots of reasons to include them,. and I haven't always been careful to put down my reasons for including a particular person..

One reason for including an ASSOCIATE is the hope that I can discover a link so that the person becomes a RELATIVE.  But on the way I ,ay enter a lot of CONNECTIONS and RELATIVES of that person who do not turn out to be demonstrated RELATIVES of my focus people.  An example will make this clearer:  I entered a person I know who js descended from the British peerage.  It turns out she is my 25th cousin -- that means we have a common ancestor 27 generations back, or about 600 years ago.  Now I am interested in keeping in my data the people who form the link between me and my friend, but I am not terribly interested in the extraneous people I entered along the way -- especially those who are not even her RELATIVES but are merely CONNECTIONS.

There is also a group of people in my data who I did not enter directly -- people who I imported wholesale from GEDCOM's produced by other people who made them available on the internet.  There are people form at least two such sources -- at this point I have lost track.  Of these people, some are RELATIVES of my focus persons and some are CONNECTIONS.  The thing is, CONNECTIONS can be CLOSE CONNECTIONS or more distant CONNECTIONS.  There are two difficulties -- First, it takes a goos deal of work to determine how close a CONNECTION a given person is, if I don't know already, and second, further research often demonstrates that CONNECTIONS are really RELATIVES or the CONNECTIONS are closer than I thought.

Well, as I have written this, I have realized that despite the fact that they seem to clutter up my data, I am going to leave everybody in for now, regardless of whether they are currently RELATIVES or  CONNECTIONS of my focus people.  It does no harm, and I can clean it up later.  What I haven't said, is that I have also figured out what I have to do to determine who to remove as I get time.

Writing this has helped me think through the course I will follow.   If you have read this, I hope I haven't bored, or confused, you too much.

I'll recast some of this as an explanation and post it elsewhere.
  

December 9, 2010

I use this blog, in part, to keep track of what I am doing.
Currently, I reattaching notes that date back to the early 1990's when I was using Brother's Keeper. In that program, notes were stored as external text files. These were imported into TMG as external exhibits, but at some point two things happened. First, some of the notes became garbled and so I combined all of them with an earlier version. That accounts for the fact that many of them now have the same information twice. Then the path changed, and the notes became detached from the the data file.
I am currently reattaching the notes, but this time internally, in what I have dubbed an Exhibit tag. I did some of them earlier, at a time I cannot now determine, and edited the notes as I went. This time, in the interest of finishing, I am not doing any editing, except in a very few cases.
Many of the most valuable notes come from Gordon Fisher's data from the early 1990s. Gordon Fisher transcribed entries from several genealogical works, which is a great help.
My data still includes a lot of extraneous, to me, people, because years ago I imported data incautiously from several gedcoms, including Gordon Fisher's.
Because I am working to actually produce something, I am putting off the cleanup of extraneous data until later.

Goodrich Project Update

Starting with Earl Ashton Goodrich, both as the logical starting person and as an exemplar.
Earl was born in 1866 and died in 1933. Using Ancestry.com, I have found him in the census for 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930.
Earl appears as person 6789 in The Tingley Family, by Raymon Meyers Tingley, Tuttle, Rutland Vermont, 1910, along with his wife Grace and five children.
In The Tingley Family Revised, volume VIII by Harold E Frye, privately printed, 1996, Earl is person 10-03811, and is shown with Grace and 6 children. Some of the information is cited to Esther Mead.

Some Green and Joyner progress

Over the past couple of days I have been following leads on my godmother Jessie's ancestry. What I do is just almost willy nilly add people to my tree at Ancestry, based on other people's trees. Some of the reasearch looks good, some is basically unsourced.

I wish there were good Mellen leads.