Now I am REALLY mad! Public Documents Disappearing

I do not usually put politics in my blogs because it really isn't a good thing to offend potential readers, but tonight I MUST make an exception.  What is going on in our government right now offends me deeply.  Public documents are disappearing.  This should offend anyone researching their family history, anyone who has a federal pension, Social Security, or Medicare.  It should offend our veterans who require medical care for wounds and injuries they sustained doing their duty. 

I found a post on BlueSky about the questionnaires for all the censuses, right up to the 2020 census, being available online.  Oh, goodie, this is great, thought my naive mind.  So I started downloading or copying and pasting the lovely fount of information available there.

How wonderful this is, I thought.  I did not save copies of the past years' censuses, so here was my chance to reconstruct them with these questionnaire forms from 1960 to 2020.

And one-by-one, they started disappearing right before my eyes.  At first, I got a message saying that something had gone wrong and they were working to fix it.  Yeah, right.  Then it was a straight-out 404 error.

Already having trashed the online files of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), now Elon Musk's storm troopers are at the Census Bureau, trashing those files, too.  Pretty soon, accessing past census information for family history research will be NO MORE.  

These are PUBLIC documents.  They belong to US, We the People.  They do not belong to the current (mal)administration, that arrogant power-mad South African, or anyone else in the government.  They belong to US.

The OMB trashing really worries me, because my husband is retired federal civil service.  This looks, to me, like the first move in taking away our pensions.  With a daughter suffering from cancer, and the medical bills associated with all that, we can ill afford to lose any of our income.

And neither can millions of other Americans, squeaking by paycheck-to-paycheck, many working two or even three jobs just to make ends get at least within a foot or two of each other.

And those rich, arrogant, power-mad, greedy pieces of trash in the nation's capital cackle with the obscene exercise of their power.  

There is a quotation from a computer game, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, that I think applies here:

"Beware of him who would control your access to information, for, in his heart, he sees himself your master."

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Five Fun or Different Facts

This week, Randy Seaver, on his blog Genea-musings, has given us this task:

1)  We all find "fun" or "different" information about ourselves, our relatives and ancestors in our genealogy and family history pursuits.  What are five "fun" or "different" facts in your life or your ancestors lives?

2) Tell us about your five fun or different facts in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.  

1)  My aunt, Elizabeth Reed (1909-1967), was a public health nurse and Director of Health Information for the State of Florida from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s.  In this capacity, she traveled the state giving instruction and lectures concerning various public health topics.  She leavened these talks with her monologues, amusing and absorbing vignettes satirizing or dramatizing a variety of sorts of people.  There was one in which she portrayed a hospital volunteer chatting with a patient, giving an earful about the food, the doctors, and the administration.  At the beginning of her talk, she would obtain a volunteer (or sometimes, a conscript) to play the part of the patient, tell them, "Now, you just sit there and look intelligent," and turn to talk to another individual on the dais, leaving the "patient" somewhat embarrassed and the audience laughing.  Then she would begin the monologue.  In another, she played the part of an old grandmother consoling her tearful teenage granddaughter, weeping over a boy.  She was a fine actress.

2)  My maternal grandpa was a great punster, and the rest of the family had to keep up.  My father's family had a good sense of humor, too, but my father was baffled by the punmanship and humor of his prospective in-laws.  He, trying to make a good first impression, asked my grandma what he should call her:  Mother Reed, Mrs. Reed, Mary?  She wasn't particular, and the question mildly vexed her.  "Call me anything!" she blurted out.  "Call me 'Charlie.'"  This morphed into "Chollie," and that is how we always knew her.

 

3)  My husband went through Coast Guard Officer Candidate School, gaining his commission in January of 1971.  The uniform he and his classmates wore while in this training was a bit odd.   He and some other officer candidates were on liberty, and went to a movie.  Sitting next to my husband was a young Navy enlisted man.  He kept giving my husband and odd look.  As the house lights came on after the movie ended, the young sailor looked again at my husband, and in his bafflement about this odd uniform, he asked my husband, "Sir, what are you?"

4)  My father was a great storyteller.  One of his stories involved a Navy carrier task force at sea.  One of the destroyers saw another ship go off course and come across its path.  The bridge crew summoned the captain, who had retired to his quarters for the night.  The captain came onto the bridge in his pjs and robe.  Immediately assessing the situation, he instructed, "Everybody remain calm!  Don't panic!  Be calm, like me."  Then he gave his orders:  "Two toots on the rudder; right full whistle." 

5)  One Christmas during the economic downturn of the 1970s, we were broke.  We'd been able to get our two children a few small gifts.  We could not afford a Christmas tree, and resolved to do without.  Christmas Eve came, and my husband could not stand it.  We had to have something.  We had a raintree sapling in our yard.  The very large raintree in the back yard had spawned it, along with myriad seedlings that we just kept under control by mowing.  My husband brought the sapling indoors in a pot, and set it in front of the windows in the living room.  Then he went out and cut a dozen or so ligustrum branches.  He brought those, and with tape and twine, secured them to the trunk of the raintree sapling. Laughing ourselves silly, we decorated the scrawny "Christmas tree."  It made our uncomfortable economic situation bearable that year.