Recently in Family Category

Kudos again to the excellent research being done by my 3rd cousin, Dave. Yesterday, he sent me these articles about the death of my great-great grandfather, John Ulrich Mahler. Oddly enough, yesterday was also the 122nd anniversary of his death.

My great-grandfather, John Ulrich Mahler, was killed on March 1, 1988 by a shifting train engine. The inquest indicated that he wasn't paying attention. My great grandfather was only 7 or so when this happened.

What I find particularly interesting is the misspelling of the name in the inquest article. Growing up, we didn't have much contact with my dad's side of the family, so I do'n’t know how they pronounce our last name. My immediate family has always pronounced our last name, so that it sounds like it was spelled Mailer, as opposed to pronouncing it like the name of the composer, Gustav.

I always wondered whether someone might have changed the pronunciation or the spelling. However, in the 1880 census that Dave had sent me, the name is definitely spelled with an H, as we do today. (And the article about the train crash also spells it that way.)

But the article about the inquest consistently spells his name Maler (no H), which suggests, but doesn't prove, that maybe the reporter heard it pronounced as we do today, and spelled it without the H.

So, I am guessing that the non-standard pronunciation might go back to John Ulrich Mahler.

The ever amazing 3rd cousin found another piece of cool family history. It was a New York passenger list for the SS Orizaba that left Havana, Cuba on September 7, 1929 and arrived in New York on September 10, 1929. My great grandfather, John Joseph Mahler, apparently went my his son, John M Mahler, who was 18 at the time. I just realized that this was about a month and a half before the stock market crashed on Black Tuesday, and it was slightly over a year before my great grandfather died. He was only 49 when he died.

John M Mahler, the 18 year old, was the half brother of my grandfather, Richard John (usually referred to as RJ)  Mahler. As I mentioned before, John Joseph’s first wife, Lovina Fremouw, died giving birth to my grandfather, RJ. John M Mahler’s mother was John Joseph’s second wife, Margaret Sadie McIntyre.

I have been in contact with Ellen, John’s daughter. As I figure it, she is my half first cousin once removed. I wanted to send her the info that Dale, my 3rd cousin, sent as I thought it was pretty cool.

Oddly enough, I was chatting with someone earlier this evening, and we wandered into talking about history and genealogy. It’s a small world.

Three cheers for my 3rd cousin! He found the grave site of our great great grandmother, Anna Mahler, in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester NY. The stone had sunk into the ground.

A blogger friend in Germany has been very kind and helpful in trying to get more info.

A cousin found this and sent it my way. This is a page from the 1880 census.  On line 42 is my great-great grandfather, John Mahler, who was a blacksmith. He was born about 1844 or so, and died about 1888. His wife was Anna Mahler, and the census lists their 3 kids (as of 1880) - Frank, Ferdinand and Anna.

My great grandfather, John Joseph Mahler, was born in 1881.  (Hmm, just realized that meant that he was 7 when his dad died.)

John Joseph married my great grandmother, Lovinia Fremouw, who was born in the Netherlands. She died giving birth to my grandfather, Richard John Mahler. Lovina's dad, Cornelius Fremouw, died in a mining accident before she was born.  I never really knew my paternal grandfather, or very much about Dad's side of the family. Hmm, interesting that I have photos of my great grandparents, and no images of my grandfather, nor any real memories of him. There does seem to be a history of parents and children on that side not being close.

It may be a silly tradition, but it’s mine, darn it! Every year, I tape the holiday cards that I get to the fireplace and then take a photo. I was bad this year – money was kind of tight, so I skipped sending cards out this time. Hopefully, next year things will be better.

It really makes me feel warm and fuzzy to have so many good people in my life. I have a lot to be grateful for.

My dog Heracles decided to pull a Crasher Squirrel and got in the photo.

Although I don’t observe Christmas a a religious holiday, I very much enjoy spending it with family.

I spent a fair amount of the day before heading over to Mom’s keying 2009 entries into the Erie Gay News section for local history. Yeah, I am kind of wild and crazy guy, I guess. ;)

My brother’s friend Karen needed a ride, so since she was en route, I picked her up. My brother Steve had to work until 6 PM, and he had a car rented, so that was okay.

Mom made Rock Cornish game hens for dinner. They were yummy! Mom noted at one point  that they were still rather pale (“blonde” is the word that she used.) Then Karen and I noted that the rest of the food was also light colored, so we joked about a very Merry Aryan Christmas. (My family has kind of a macabre sense of humor.)

We told Karen the Orange Julius story. About 1990, I was over at Mom’s for Christmas. My brother was in the Army at that point, so he wasn’t there. Mom had found a recipe for something like orange Julius and wanted to make it. It ended up burning out the motor on the blender and was not exactly a crowning culinary success. At the time, I didn’t have the heart to tell Mom that I wasn’t particularly a fan of Orange Julius anyway. Years after, we all kind of laugh about it.

I helped Mom and Karen later with how to post photos to Flickr for linking to a sewing site called Ravelry that they are on. Hopefully, I wasn’t too complicated. I think that they got it.

It was a really nice evening, and I very much enjoy that it was low key. I am not very big on the need to have some ornate celebration of the holidays. I tend to think that the urge to buy stuff and plan elaborate stuff tends to get in the way. Fortunately, my family is pretty much all of the same mind.

I went out to the Zone later and talked with a couple that are good friends. The wife mentioned that they had visited her mother, and on the way back, they had stopped at an adult book store that was right on the way because “nothing says Christmas like a shiny new butt plug!” I guffawed.

All in all, I think that I had a great holiday!

I stopped over last night to visit my stepfather in the hospital. He was sleeping. I went downstairs to call my Mom to see what the story was. Apparently, they took care of some stuff and he is on the mend. That was good news.

However, it turns out that my brother had an accident earlier that day and totaled his car. He was unharmed. My brother + white car + winter = this can only end in tears.

Mom and my brother held off on mentioning the car woes to my stepfather, so as not to stress him out.

Mom dropped off my brother and his friend Karen at a nearby church because Karen was in the sing along version of Handel’s Messiah. Apparently, Mom also had a small car accident after my brother. The guy that she hit had Pagan in his name. (“See??”, I said, “You Christians ARE out to get us.”) It sounds like there was no major harm done.

I explained to Mom that I would have to cut the call short to go and wrap my car in a few layers of bubble wrap. (Or I might have said something like “Keep your bad luck to yourselves, you jinxes!” Whatever.) I was scheduled to drop off my car to be inspected this morning.

Since the church was only a few blocks away, I walked over to hear the rest of the performance and offer my brother and Karen a ride home. The performance was very nice. Karen was wearing heels and was nervous about falling on the icy sidewalk, so my brother and I each proffered an arm and walked her back. It was quite a few blocks since I had parked a few blocks away on the other side of town before going to the hospital. We got back okay.

Deb and I are working on putting the newsletter to bed for tonight in a rather abbreviated layout period. I am juggling a few things, but it is really her putting in the hard work at this point. We had some weirdness with the printer, so it was hard to get a proof copy. I will probably need to poke around a bit.

I stopped by our graphics designer to grab the USB flash drive with a revised ad en route to dropping off. (Because I was going to be without a car, and I figured that I could always email the proof from work.) When I went to drive away, the driver’s door was not staying closed. “Crap!” I thought.

However, a few blocks later, I was able to get it to close and it seemed fine. I did ask the garage to check the door out.

My mom just called. My stepfather was feeling under the weather yesterday, and he suggested that they might want to go to the hospital. Mom was very calm, but she kind of suspected what it might be. So, it turns out that it was a heart attack. He is doing okay, but they are running some more tests. I am going to stop down after work.

He was wondering this morning if having a lot of spicy brown mustard on his hamburger last night triggered it. Mom said that she didn’t think that was the cause. He is a pretty healthy guy, so I think that he will be alright.

I had been planning to upgrade my PC to Windows 7 this weekend, since it was far enough away from newsletter layout time. I spent a good portion of Friday trying a few things, but it seemed to get to a certain point and then it locked up. My mom called to let me know that she was making leftover turkey soup. So, I took a break and spent a very nice evening over at Mom’s. It was basically everybody that was over the other day. Since I left my 2 dogs at home, Mom’s cat Tiburon was a bit more outgoing. Mom also had a new small camera/camcorder that she was trying to figure out, so we went over that.

When I got home I looked at the PC a bit. I was able to check email on my Palm and iPod, but the iPod cou;dn’t charge, so I thought I would head into work to check email there and charge the iPod. Outlook at work was locking up, and it turned out that our Exchange server had apparently crashed.

Saturday was mostly throwing in the towel and just rebuilding my PC on Windows Vista (which does seem to have cleaned up some issues.)

I decided to head out to the Zone to do at least some interaction with human beings. Towards the end of the evening, my friend Alex said something about a guy who was up for stripping down to his boxers if 10 people asked him to take off his pants. I figured, “What the heck?” and was apparently the 10th person. He was a very nice guy, kind of hot with some tattoos. I believe that he was straight. He was very outgoing and got quite a few of us out on the dance floor for the last song. All in all, it was a fun way to end the night.

I had an absolutely wonderful time at my mom's for Thanksgiving. I picked up my brother's friend Karen, and brought my 2 dogs along. Mom had also invited her neighbor Laura. My brother Steve had to work, so he arrived later. My stepfather Carl was also there. I spent a fair amount of time doing some computer geek stuff on Mom's desktop. It had been crashing, but I couldn’t get it to do that. Nonetheless, I loaded some OS updates and some other stuff.