» On 1/01/2025 12:05:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
A boy named Sue & a wife named Fear. 

(Armchair Genealogist Dep't.) Several years ago, I signed up for a free subscription at MyHeritage, which has a powerful matching service. When I put in the birth/death dates of my close relatives, MH began providing suggestions, based upon other families' entries in their database. Eventually, I discovered my lineage could be traced back several hundred years!

So I started looking up my long-lost (think "unknown") relatives on FamilySearch and Find a Grave. After what seemed like an eternity of climbing around in the branches of the ol' family tree, I eventually ended up at the memorial page of Captain Benjamin Burgess (BB, portrait below), who was born in 1751, lived to the ripe old age of 101, was a Revolutionary War veteran, and had a wife named Fear. ("Æt" on his gravestone stands for the Latin word "aetātis," meaning "of or at the age of." And in his obit, #273 in the 1865 Burgess Genealogy, O.S. means Old Style, Julian calendar - England and its colonies didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, when 11 days were dropped after September 2. [I'm planning to impress all my friends, during the next Trivia challenge. 😉])

So BB is my great-great-grandmother's grandfather! To see the generations, scroll down to Cap'n Ben's "Children" section and click these names, as they appear in the "Children" section of each subsequent page: Thomas, Henrietta, Frederick, Ella, and Chester, who's my Dad. Later, I went back even further and found Thomas Burgess Sr. (born in 1601), who is BB's great-great-grandfather... which means he's my direct ancestor, ten generations removed. FOUR centuries. Wow. But meticulously tracking down, verifying, and cross-checking each connection was driving me a little bit nuts. In fact, my new book will be coming out soon: "Zen and the Art of OCD Genealogy." 😉

When I was young, one of my aunts in Maine was researching family history, but she was supposedly stymied by a fire that destroyed all the vital records in a New Hampshire town office. This was back when all transactions went through snail mail, before the internet. After I heard that a grownup was unsuccessful, I figured a kid like me had no chance of doing any better. So I basically lost interest in Genealogy for the next 60 years. But websites like MyHeritage, FamilySearch and Find a Grave are suddenly making things easier. I've even considered starting a "Genialogy" service - "researching your bloodline with a smile." 😉

PS: My wife and I were recently FaceTiming with son Jenő in Hungary, and he had dug up some incredible documents about his grandfather's years in a Soviet gulag. They were for his daughter Lilla's homework assignment, a family tree. So I emailed a link to the first draft of this Genealogy essay, and he replied: "I showed the picture, only the picture [BB] to Lilla and asked her: Who do you think he looks like? And she immediately said: Alan."
So I wrote back: "Spank her. Now. 😉"

 
» On 1/01/2025 12:01:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
Ball Drop. 

OK, let me set the stage for you: on December 31, 1978, I was working as a taxi driver in Manhattan, while still decompressing from my Year Of Failing Miserably on the Côte d'Azur with a buddy from Denmark. Our laughable attempts to sell t-shirts to the tourists had gone up in smoke, but our dreams of making an indelible mark on the world were not so easily crushed. In fact, we were oddly energized by our experiences in southern France. I had finished the first five-borough New York Marathon a couple of years earlier, and I was making vigorous attempts to get hired as an NBC Page, but that project would require a few more months. Most importantly, I was still naive enough to be in love with Sinatra's ephemeral promise of NYC success: "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere." And on this last day of the year, I had an insatiable hunger for the ultimate Big Apple christening: I wanted to spend New Year's Eve in Times Square.

So, at 5pm, I locked the door of my sh*tty little one-room apartment in a slumdog area of West 73rd, and walked the two miles down to 42nd. The streets had been blocked off to cars, and people were starting to gather. It was an odd feeling to be strolling in the middle of Broadway, rather than standing on the sidewalk, watching traffic whiz by. Around 8pm, revelers gradually started pressing closer and closer, as the massive hordes arrived and pushed us up against each other. Personal space became non-existent, but the mood was festive, right up until the gangs of teenage toughs arrived, swinging motorcycle chains and knocking people down. All you could do was avoid making eye contact and hope they didn't turn in your direction. Nobody was able to escape. In fact, some of the shorter folks were picked up by the crush of the crowd, and moved in whatever direction the rest of us decided was best. But the only people who could really move at all were the gangs. Their violence and mayhem cleared a path wherever they prowled. The rest of us exchanged worried looks, as we slowly realized that we were locked into this unholy h*ll for several more hours, at least. We couldn't go home until the people on the edges of the crowd chose to go home.

The next few hours passed in a haze, punctuated only by the "10, 9, 8..." chants at midnight. I finally arrived back at my sh*tty little room around 2am, thankful that I hadn't sustained any serious injuries and grateful that I could finally pee. 😉