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captainsblogWith the removal of the birdfeeder (aka the "kitty television"), our living room sofa's residents will be pointed more at the inside one now. Pepper's already made the adjustment:
That was her sometime last week, staring at me and ignoring The Rise of Skywalker. Evil Cat and I have watched a couple more Dexter episodes from its first season; Eleanor and I both found a streaming made-for-Netflix film called Uncorked that was quite nice; and later we will finish watching Motherless Brooklyn, an Ed Norton/Bruce Willis film noir that I picked out almost randomly to cash in a Redbox BOGO deal. We both wound up liking it a lot more than the Feature Presentation part of that: the finally-released director's cut of A Current War.
This film joins any number of retellings of the amped-up dispute between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla (see The Prestige, this season's fourth Doctor Who episode, passim), but adds George Westinghouse to the menage a turbine, and also adds some not-filmed-here scenes of Buffalo to the frequently filmed uses of Tesla's adventures in Niagara Falls. I remember vague rumblings about this film when it was shot and screened at festival time back in 2017, but Harvey Weinstein's company was behind it and his #metoo moment came just as it was about to be released. It ultimately got sold off to another distributor, and the "director's cut" of the film finally came out late last year after a full Harveyectomy, with the DVD release arriving last week.
My sister had already seen it in cinema- not so much out of love for Benedict Cumberbatch or Michael Sheen, but because it has a significant role in it for Edison's first wife Mary, aka our very own great-great aunt.
----
I'd vaguely known some of the history for years, but between some notes Donna gave me back in December and the suddenly free-with-library-card access to the Ancestry Dot Com archive, I've been able to piece together a first draft of a family tree, linking the former Mary Edison and me:
It began, ironically enough, with a Nicholas. (Tesla spelled his name differently, but so what?) I count eight siblings in the next generation, including Mary the heroine of our "Current" film and Charles, born in New Jersey in 1861. A decade later, Mary married Edison, just in time for Tuppence Middleton (who I am NOT related to /sads) to play her through the move to Menlo Park, the invention of the phonograph, and the casting of BC/DC in the role of her husband in electrifying the world.
Those eight sibs, though, also included Charles, who unbeknownst to him at the time had been chosen to become my great-grandfather. He went on to be as almost as profilic as his father Nicholas (who was apparently made part of the Menlo Park Mafia, dying there in 1884 of "Cirrhosis of Liver -- Pyelitis -- ac mania -- (Exhaustion from)"); Charles had seven children of his own, including my grandfather Frank and, 13 years later, a daughter Willetta Alice, who in my very early years was the "Aunt Allie" I remember visiting up in New England once or twice. (If she ever mentioned Edison, I certainly don't remember it.)
I only took this as far south as my own father's generation on his side (and naming those three sons of Frank's is from my own knowledge, not any genealogy site). I know that my Uncle Rod died childless, and that the other brother Arthur had two sons who I remember but who have always resisted any attempt at researching (and probably just as well, as this history of things from 2018 will remind you;), but I've never run down any of the other trails of Charles's loins.
----
Anyway: back to Mary. I'd always thought that she had died childless, possibly dying during childbirth. So it came as a bit of a surprise to see two little kids of hers and Tom, nicknamed "Dot" and "Dash," running around precociously at the beginning of Current War. My running joke has always been that his lack of heirs through Mary was the reason we never saw fame or fortune from this connection (heh), and that he'd left everything to his son from his second marriage, Conrad.
Alas, those two kids, along with a third to later arrive, did that entirely on their own. The oldest child, Marion for reals, lived into my lifetime, with little to remember Dad by other than her maiden name: Her father remarried and when he died in 1931, he left the bulk of his holding, valued at $12 million dollars, to two children from his second marriage. She did remain active in honoring her fathers memory, and though the oldest of those original three kids, she outlived the other two significantly.
Dash? Yeah, pretty much dashed: After selling the use of his name to advertise "quack" medicines and dubious inventions, his father asked Tom Junior to change his name. This he did, briefly going by the name of Thomas Willard. His efforts at inventing and, later, starting a mushroom farm failed. His father told a friend about his oldest son, "I never could get him to go to school or work in the Laboratory. He is therefore absolutely illiterate scientifically and otherwise." He died on August 25, 1935.
All that privilege and potential (heh), and I've still outlived the dude already.
Finally, Sir Not Appearing In This Film, William: Relations between William and his father were strained. Edison once responded to a request for money from Blanche Edison by writing, "I see no reason whatever why I should support my son. He has done me no honor and has brought the blush of shame to my cheeks many times." Like his brother he turned to farm life, breeding chickens. He died on August 10, 1937.
The only place you'll see our name in this entire piece.... misspelled:P
Best as I can tell, all three died childless, so there are no fourth cousins any-times-removed to chase down from that line (heh). I still need to find how we went from New Jersey to Canada and back to Noo Yawk.
That was her sometime last week, staring at me and ignoring The Rise of Skywalker. Evil Cat and I have watched a couple more Dexter episodes from its first season; Eleanor and I both found a streaming made-for-Netflix film called Uncorked that was quite nice; and later we will finish watching Motherless Brooklyn, an Ed Norton/Bruce Willis film noir that I picked out almost randomly to cash in a Redbox BOGO deal. We both wound up liking it a lot more than the Feature Presentation part of that: the finally-released director's cut of A Current War.
This film joins any number of retellings of the amped-up dispute between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla (see The Prestige, this season's fourth Doctor Who episode, passim), but adds George Westinghouse to the menage a turbine, and also adds some not-filmed-here scenes of Buffalo to the frequently filmed uses of Tesla's adventures in Niagara Falls. I remember vague rumblings about this film when it was shot and screened at festival time back in 2017, but Harvey Weinstein's company was behind it and his #metoo moment came just as it was about to be released. It ultimately got sold off to another distributor, and the "director's cut" of the film finally came out late last year after a full Harveyectomy, with the DVD release arriving last week.
My sister had already seen it in cinema- not so much out of love for Benedict Cumberbatch or Michael Sheen, but because it has a significant role in it for Edison's first wife Mary, aka our very own great-great aunt.
----
I'd vaguely known some of the history for years, but between some notes Donna gave me back in December and the suddenly free-with-library-card access to the Ancestry Dot Com archive, I've been able to piece together a first draft of a family tree, linking the former Mary Edison and me:
It began, ironically enough, with a Nicholas. (Tesla spelled his name differently, but so what?) I count eight siblings in the next generation, including Mary the heroine of our "Current" film and Charles, born in New Jersey in 1861. A decade later, Mary married Edison, just in time for Tuppence Middleton (who I am NOT related to /sads) to play her through the move to Menlo Park, the invention of the phonograph, and the casting of BC/DC in the role of her husband in electrifying the world.
Those eight sibs, though, also included Charles, who unbeknownst to him at the time had been chosen to become my great-grandfather. He went on to be as almost as profilic as his father Nicholas (who was apparently made part of the Menlo Park Mafia, dying there in 1884 of "Cirrhosis of Liver -- Pyelitis -- ac mania -- (Exhaustion from)"); Charles had seven children of his own, including my grandfather Frank and, 13 years later, a daughter Willetta Alice, who in my very early years was the "Aunt Allie" I remember visiting up in New England once or twice. (If she ever mentioned Edison, I certainly don't remember it.)
I only took this as far south as my own father's generation on his side (and naming those three sons of Frank's is from my own knowledge, not any genealogy site). I know that my Uncle Rod died childless, and that the other brother Arthur had two sons who I remember but who have always resisted any attempt at researching (and probably just as well, as this history of things from 2018 will remind you;), but I've never run down any of the other trails of Charles's loins.
----
Anyway: back to Mary. I'd always thought that she had died childless, possibly dying during childbirth. So it came as a bit of a surprise to see two little kids of hers and Tom, nicknamed "Dot" and "Dash," running around precociously at the beginning of Current War. My running joke has always been that his lack of heirs through Mary was the reason we never saw fame or fortune from this connection (heh), and that he'd left everything to his son from his second marriage, Conrad.
Alas, those two kids, along with a third to later arrive, did that entirely on their own. The oldest child, Marion for reals, lived into my lifetime, with little to remember Dad by other than her maiden name: Her father remarried and when he died in 1931, he left the bulk of his holding, valued at $12 million dollars, to two children from his second marriage. She did remain active in honoring her fathers memory, and though the oldest of those original three kids, she outlived the other two significantly.
Dash? Yeah, pretty much dashed: After selling the use of his name to advertise "quack" medicines and dubious inventions, his father asked Tom Junior to change his name. This he did, briefly going by the name of Thomas Willard. His efforts at inventing and, later, starting a mushroom farm failed. His father told a friend about his oldest son, "I never could get him to go to school or work in the Laboratory. He is therefore absolutely illiterate scientifically and otherwise." He died on August 25, 1935.
All that privilege and potential (heh), and I've still outlived the dude already.
Finally, Sir Not Appearing In This Film, William: Relations between William and his father were strained. Edison once responded to a request for money from Blanche Edison by writing, "I see no reason whatever why I should support my son. He has done me no honor and has brought the blush of shame to my cheeks many times." Like his brother he turned to farm life, breeding chickens. He died on August 10, 1937.
The only place you'll see our name in this entire piece.... misspelled:P
Best as I can tell, all three died childless, so there are no fourth cousins any-times-removed to chase down from that line (heh). I still need to find how we went from New Jersey to Canada and back to Noo Yawk.