Family Sayings

 My family has a stock of family sayings that date back to the 1890s.  We are a bunch that likes to play with words.

 My great-grandaunt and great-granduncle, Rachel Anna (Sleeth) LeSourd and Levi Curtis LeSourd, would go on buggy rides of a Sunday afternoon in rural Carroll County, Indiana.  Levi was a farmer and Rachel was a farm wife, and they were keen in their observance of Sunday as a day of rest -- after church, of course.  One day, they passed a rural roadside stand.  Among the vegetables on sale there, was a goodly lot of fresh corn.  Rachel looked over the corn, noting the price of two cents an ear.  But she also saw that the ears of corn lay nestled in their green jackets, heavily tasseled with their silk.  She sniffed, "Corn's not shucked!  Drive on!"  This phrase has come to mean, in our family, that something we're considering buying does not meet our standards, and we will continue our search for one that does.

At about the same time, the late 1880s or early 1890s, my great-grandmother Florence Elizabeth (McKee) Reed had made a large pot of oyster stew.  She probably found oysters at a bargain price.  Since no tale of illness upon consuming the stew has come down in my family, I assume the oysters were still fresh.  Anyway, Great-grandma Flo decided she would share some of the copious quantity of the stew with an elderly woman in the neighborhood who had no kin nearby.  You know the one -- the old lady in the slightly unkempt house and yard whom all the kids were sure was a witch.  We had one in our neighborhood in the 1950s when I was a young'un.  Great-grandma corralled a few of her nine boys to carry a tureen of the oyster stew to the old lady.  Filled with trepidation at actually having to interact with the neighborhood witch, they carried out their duty.  They told the woman, when she answered the door, that their mother had made a lot of oyster stew and would like for the woman to have some.  The old lady said with Midwestern directness, "Well, I don't really like oyster stew, but seeing as your mother was so kind as to make it for me, I'll eat it if it pukes me."  The boys ran home, laughing.  So, today, gratitude for a meal or a delivered dish of food is expressed with, "Seeing as you were so kind as to make this for me, I'll eat it if it pukes me."   Inelegant, but it makes its point.

 Sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, a phrase emerged out of the practice of a family member or friend stopping by briefly to return a book, or a pot that had been sent with food in it.  There wasn't even time for the visitor to come into the house.  The phrase, "Come again when you can't stay so long," was born, indicating that the visit was too short, and there was hope of a much longer visit in the near future.

Family sayings can also be alternative names for objects, foods, or even people.  Family sayings can also be hatched any time, anywhere.  One evening in the middle 1980s, our two teenage daughters were a little bored.  The younger one, who did not yet have her driver's license, suggested to her sister that they go out for frozen yogurt.  The older one, who was driving by then, and who is deaf in one ear, got a puzzled look on her face, and said, "Fuzzy donuts?"  Having not been paying full attention, and having her hearing problem, she thought her sister had said, "Let's go get some fuzzy donuts."  From that time on, in our house, frozen yogurt has been called "fuzzy donuts."

 In 2007, I went back to college, at the age of 60.  I was pursuing a double post-baccalaureate major of history and Spanish at the University of North Florida, aiming to make a study of family life in colonial Spanish St. Augustine, Florida, in the Second Spanish Period (1784-1821).  I had training in genealogy, so my approach to this subject was both historical and genealogical.  One day, our older daughter, who worked at the University, and I were sitting in the rather crowded old student union.  We were on high stools at a high table, eating our lunch of sushi.  I was nearly finished, when a boy who had been doing some fancy moves involving a soccer ball and his knees, hit the soccer ball and it ended up on my sushi plate.  Fortunately, it landed away from my two remaining morsels.  The room went quiet.  The young man got a horrified look on his face, leading me to think his train of thought must have been, "All these people here in the room, and I knock the soccer ball in the old lady's plate."  He probably expected to get a tongue-lashing, but I took a different tack.  Relieved at having been distracted from the dismal political discussion my daughter and I were having by this bit of comic relief, I wailed in a child-like voice, "Mommy!  There's a soccer ball in my sushi."  My daughter took up the cue without skipping a beat:  "Don't make a fuss, dear, or everyone will be wanting one."  The relief in the room -- and especially on the face of the young soccer-kicker -- was immediately and strongly palpable.  Laughter broke out.  I fished the soccer ball out of the soy-sauce wet plate, wiped it off, and tossed it back to the fellow.  Since the incident had mercifully changed the subject of our discussion, my daughter and I glommed onto "Soccer ball!" as an expression meaning, "Let's change the subject."

Today, I found another expression for us in a response to a post I made on a social-media forum on a specialized website.  I was bemoaning my extraordinarily frustrating afternoon trying to get hold of someone at the Internal Revenue Service about a letter we received making some outrageous changes to our 2024 tax return.  Their telephone system kept messing up, and the human beings I was talking to made some boo-boos, too.  I insisted that I was going to do no more adulting that day, I was going to turn my back on the world, and was going to go play a computer game.  One reply to my post referred to a children's book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst.  Author Viorst describes young Alexander's awful day, in which he is constantly insisting he is going to move to Australia.  The lad comes to the end of the day reflecting on his mother's having told him that "some days are like that.  Even in Australia."  The respondent praised my tactic: "You moved to your 'Australia.'"  So now, "I'm moving to Australia," will mean that I've reached my limit of frustration and am going to go ignore the world for a while.

What family sayings have grown up in your family?  What expressions did your parents and grandparents donate to the family, and how are they used today?

 

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: January Highlights

This weekend, Randy wants us to comment on what genealogy fun we've had in January, what happenings do we consider the highlights of January, 2026? 

One highlight for me in January was playing around with FamilySearch's "Simple Search."  That gave me hours of fun, as it presented me with a huge fountain of sources for my ancestors.  And I'm not done yet.

Oh, sure, there have been some searches that turned up nothing or next to it, and there have been searches that have turned out to be an exercise in Finagle's Law ("Any port my ship enters is someone else's home port, not mine").  But overall, I have found a huge number of sources to run down, investigate, analyze, and evaluate.  This has brought some of my family lines forward by leaps and bounds.

Another highlight shed a blanket of comfort over a sad occasion:  One of my dearest friends, who has been more a sister to me than my own sister for forty years, died on 4 January.  It was rather sudden, but not truly unexpected.  But I miss her!  The blanket of comfort: she was not just a friend.  It turns out she was kin, my 16th cousin once removed.  So now I have a whole passel of new kin to research.  I'm in contact with this new cousin's sister, another cousin.  We're exchanging genealogical information.  

In light of January having been a particularly tough month for my family, these highlights have been a welcome reservoir of joy to me.

 

That Which Survives

 I was directed to a post on Substack in which this quotation appears:

"One reason I started as far back in the family tree as I did in the 17th and 18th centuries is that no one is left alive who has a personal stake in what I might uncover. That gives me emotional distance, and the freedom to follow the evidence where it leads without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings." -- Arik Hesseldahl, "Turn Every Page," Arik Hesseldahl's Advice on Digging Deep into your Family History, quoted in "The Writethrough," on Substack.

Hesseldahl is a journalist, and recommends digging into family history as a journalist would, to find the facts.  Like journalism or history, he tells us, what we find depends on "what has been saved," the documents and books and diaries and everything else that has managed to survive war, fire, other natural disasters, and retention policies.  It's the same in genealogy.

The quotation does get one thing backwards, though.   In genealogy, we don't start far back, we start with ourselves and work backwards.  For us, a step backwards is progress.  But I do agree that the farther back we go, the more we can reveal, because anyone affected is long dead, and beyond being upset about things.  The emotional distance assists objectivity.  

So, what survives?  I have found that most medical records might survive five to ten years.  The local hospital where my family tends to be treated keeps records only five years.  I can't go back and find, at 78, record of the tonsillectomy I had when I was 18, which had me in the hospital four days right after high school graduation.  Some graduation present.

Government agencies, local, state, and federal, have retention policies that dictate what will be kept, what won't, and where it goes when it goes somewhere else -- such as the state or national archives.  Not everything makes it into the archives.  They're vast, but they're not infinite.  Someone, somewhere, is making decisions on what will be kept and what won't.

Even government archives, stolid as some of their buildings may appear, are not immune to losses.  The fire in 1973 at the National Personnel Records Center that destroyed a large chunk of U.S. military records, is a case in point.  Wherever it's housed, paper has one disadvantage -- it burns.

 These days, a lot of information is being preserved on electronic media.  One problem there is "feature creep," or the advancements in technologies that render older preservation methods and materials obsolete.  And these days, some technologies become obsolete just a few years after being born.  Floppy disks, anyone?  Another problem is that electronic media can be compromised or destroyed by the very thing that gives them life -- electricity.  A random spike or worse can scramble data.  Electronic storage is also subject to attacks by vicious little worms of people who should meet frequently with someone's horsewhip.  I'll volunteer mine.

 So we ferret out that which survives from any period of time.  Having a field of data to do that surviving is another part of the equation.  How good was a particular society at a particular time at record-keeping?  How good was a particular society at indexing, cataloging, or otherwise maintaining records?  I've found, in my study of Spanish colonial Florida between 1513 and 1821 that the Spanish were absolutely anal retentive about creating and keeping records, bless them.  Indiana had marvelously informative marriage license applications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Illinois didn't even record the names of the parents of brides and grooms until 1872.  And, of course, my paternal great-grandparents got married in Illinois in 1871!

 Search on, dear hearts!  Record your searches, document those facts, and write the stories of your family.

 

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, Week 4: A Theory in Progress

This week, for Amy Johnson Crow's  52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, we are to talk about a genealogical theory we are working on.  This one is not pleasant, but it's been nagging at me.

In the obituary for my granduncle Edmund McKee Reed (1893-1921), who died in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, there is mention of Edmund's brother, my grandfather Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed, who also died in Detroit.(1)

Frank died 20 October 1917, when he was hit by a yard engine in the Wabash Railroad yard in Detroit.(2)

 His death certificate states the cause of death as "crushing injuries to head, run over by steam engine."(3)  The mention of Frank's death in Edmund's obituary states, "It will be remembered that a brother of [the] deceased, Frank Reed, was decapitated in an accident in Detroit about two years ago."

This raises some questions . . . 

Frank Reed was married to Ruth Nave.  They wed 25 November 1913.  Their first child, a son named Donald Francis Reed, was born 19 May 1913.  A tad early.  Donald was followed in making his entry into the world by sisters Margaret Elizabeth in 1914 and Martha Shideler, my mother, in 1916.  There is no way of knowing for sure what their home life was like.  The only photograph I have of my grandmother Ruth is one taken about 1920, with her and Donald and Margaret, Martha having already been taken from Ruth by the Reed family and placed with Frank's oldest brother Perry and his wife Mary LeSourd after Frank's death.  In that photo, Ruth has a very slight smile, but to me her eyes hold a sadness.  My Aunt Margaret, Ruth's other daughter, told me that Ruth had lived a sad life.  There might have been stress in the marriage caused by the rapid arrival of three children, close in age, and all the exhaustion and tension involved in child care.  The possibly unhappy couple had not begun their marriage with time alone to explore their relationship and engage in any family planning. 

 I just wonder if Frank saw no other way out of a stressful and possibly deteriorating situation except suicide.

Is it possible to be partially or totally decapitated when hit by a railroad yard engine while standing up, walking, or running?  Did he cross in front of the engine, badly underestimating its speed and/or distance from him?  Or did he, in a moment of despair and psychic pain, lay his head down on a rail with the engine bearing down on him?

 I want to find out if any records of the Wabash Railroad exist, and if, in those records, there is a report on the incident.  Would the Detroit police department have had any cause to investigate the death?  Where would a report issued by that department on the incident be housed, if it exists?  

I just would like to know.

(1)  "Obit of Edmund M. Reed" Newspapers.com, database with images, The Pharos-Tribune (Logansport, Indiana, United States) 28 Jan 1921, page 6, Imaged: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-pharos-tribune-obit-of-edmund-m-ree/189449669/ (accessed 21 January 2026).

(2) "Engine Kills a Switchman," Newspapers.com, database with images.  The Pharos-Tribune (Logansport, Indiana, United States) 22 October 1917, page 3.  Imaged: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-pharos-tribune-death-notice/95893929/ (Accessed last 26 January 2026).

(3)  State of Michigan, Department of State, Division of Vital Statistics, Transcript of Certificate of Death, Benjamin Franklin Reed.  Verified by Glenn Copeland, State Registrar, Michigan Department of Community Health, Lansing, Michigan, 3 April 2009.  Registered no. 10695.