Forward! Into the passsst......!
Dec. 19th, 2020 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThe heading is from Nick Danger, Third Eye, an old Firesign Theatre bit parodying noir-genre detective serials and old-time radio. I first heard and immediately learned it in high school days, and can still recite all almost 30 minutes of it word for word. Years later, when AOL came along and screen names were limited at first to 8 characters, I used a shortened version of it; some people who met me then still refer to me as "Nick." I've now resurrected that 8-character variant for the rare times I use Instagram, mostly to follow streams there.
Anyway, there's a fair amount of time-turning going on in the Firesign piece, as there will be today. No new news on work or weather or kitten(s), but we will go back to my growing-up place and even further back....
----
From a fellow East Meadow person who still lives there and chronicles things, I've come across a lot of local history from back there. Scott's the one who unearthed the original history of East Hempstead Park, the subdivision I grew up in which was built on one long street (ours) named for the farming family which had tilled it previously and finally built homes on it at the beginning of the post-WWII boom.* The nine side streets perpendicular to it, which I can still name like LIRR stations in a blur- AlbertCoakleyAdelphiPattersonBenitoChamberlinHullMaitlandBernard- were originally just given numbers, but since another subdivision on the other side of (then) Newbridge Avenue were also numbered First through Eighth, ours took their fancier names, none of which I've ever traced. Many streets, back then as now, took names from the developers' own names (as our street did), from amalgams of those which had multiple developers, or from their kids; others would honor presidents, English counties, and eventually dead astronauts, or, as also near us now, unfortunately, Ninja turtles:
Scott also chronicled other nearby neighborhoods I was familiar with, but his most recent post is far racier than any of that pedestrian stuff; in the southern reaches of East Meadow in the late 19th century, a love triangle turned almost deadly!
For much of the 19th century, the Brower (or Brewer) Family lived near the intersection of Newbridge and North Jerusalem roads, with another farm a block away at Newbridge Avenue. Parmenus and Jane (Carman) Brower’s son Lewis married Sarah Ann Raynor around 1848 and took over operation of the family property with his parents. Lewis struck up a romantic relationship with Mary Jane Baldwin, who had been married twice and was previously known as Mrs. Samuel Lewis and Mrs. David Waring. Mary Jane was a younger woman who lived about a mile away on Bellmore Road in North Bellmore, across from brother DeWitt Clinton Baldwin and her mother Charity Southard’s family. She became known as Lewis’s “morganatic wife” who seemingly had free use of his farm’s bounties. As Lewis became increasingly enamored with Mary Jane, he moved livestock and household goods to her cottage, neglecting his sickly wife (with whom he had children and grandchildren).
Ultimately, farm implements got into the act:
In the early morning hours of Saturday, September 10, 1887, Sarah Ann was axed in the head and suffered grave injuries. Lewis claimed to have been in bed, awakened by his wife’s cry. The community, knowing of the Brower-Baldwin affair, rendered swift moral judgment and failed to believe his story. Lewis Brower and Mary Jane Baldwin were both arrested for the “braining” and held in the Jamaica Town Hall. Lewis said he went a mile away to his grandson rather than going to Powers, his nearest neighbor, because he was frightened. Barney Powers, a respected farmer, said he saw Lewis washing blood off the ax. He went to the house with three sons, armed and ready to defend their neighbors. When they arrived, a dreadful sight met them. After searching in vain for “thieves,” Lewis claimed that $342 in cash had been stolen from the house. The furniture had been disturbed in a way that the Powers might believe a burglar had searched for the money. Neighbors knew, however, that Brower was in significant farm debt and wouldn’t have that kind of money in the house. Mrs. Spates found the weapon the following day, which had been suspiciously cleaned. Baldwin had seemingly fled to the Bellmore train station but was located.
Fortunately for the cause of justice, even then the LIRR didn't run on time;) And Scott confirmed to me that indeed, the Barney of this story was related to the Powers farming family that later developed our childhood neighborhood. It certainly adds a new spin to hearing that other Barney singing ♫I love you, you love me.....♫
There's lots more if you click the story link above, going into the next century, where at least one relative of these adulterers proceeded to form yet another love triangle. In my time, a famed love triangle hypote-neuse, Amy Fisher, achieved puberty in Merrick, one school district over from us and not far from the Bellmore train station where MJ was captured. And we won't even talk about the serial killer in my kindergarten class who also had a thing for sex and tools....
----
So instead we'll head to the Netherlands. (No, not Mary Jane's nether lands....)
When things got quiet and a bit boring in early pandemic days, I took advantage of the free access our library provided to some genealogy databases. I've mostly gone down rabbit holes chasing connections from my father's side; some inspired by an apparent non-relative who was born in Rochester who became famous enough to block any attempts to find my uncle or cousins with the same name, the rest coming from the Benedict Cumberbatch Edison film featuring his first wife who we are related to.
But what about your.... mother?
(Sorry, another stray Nick Danger reference there- speaking of "Nick," who's also in Current War as both character and actor).
This, in about a paragraph, is all I know about my maternal side genealogy:
Mom is the daughter of a woman named Martha, who I vaguely remember, and a man named Anton, who I don't. (You don't get the last name out of me; too many security questions are tied to that.) They produced one daughter, our mom, in 1916. At some point when she was very young, they briefly went to Holland by boat. My recollection of it is that her Dad went back to the Old Country and never came back. Martha married or remarried, I don't remember which, and she lived until my preteen years. I have vague recollections of her living in a house in Brooklyn, which is probably crawling with hipsters and free-range chickens now.
Anton had completely escaped my radar until a couple of weeks ago, when I came upon a Karen. But it's not pronounced that way, and she's very nice and didn't even demand to speak with a manager. She now IS one, in fact; she was hired by my Rochester office to clean up their office accounting after they'd made a couple of unfortunate appointments in the financial management department- no outright theft, but plenty of incompetence. Karen literally fit the bill, so I met her a few weeks ago. It's pronounced differently because she is a longtime resident who immigrated from the Netherlands, and she still speaks Dutch.
To make conversation, I told her about my mom's connections to the old country, even mentioning the YOU'RE NOT GETTING IT last name and that Anton had, last I knew, gone back there. Nobody she'd ever heard of, surprising, given my amazing ability to be connected to everyone I ever meet. But that got me wondering: did he go back to the Netherlands?
Maybe not.
It's not a common last name, at least not over here, and some quick googling produced some things. An Anton of that name is shown in Ancestry records as having been born in Holland in 1882, which would be about right, and dying in Norfolk, Massachusetts in 1940 at the age of 58. A wife is also mentioned.
I've seen his naturalization petition from the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts from 1927. It lists his occupation as "captain," his wife Anna as having been born in Holland in 1882, and three kids:
Cornelia, born in Holland in 1903, living in Florida as of 1927;
Catherina, born in Holland in 1911, living with him and the then-missus; and
Maria, born two months after my mother was, living with him and her mom in Boston at the time.
Same guy? Plenty prolific if he was!
So now I've got new names to track down.
Maybe Nick Danger will take the case. I'll see if I can find a pickle in a brown paper bag.
* Speaking of boom: Anybody want to join on bidding for this?
Atlantic City auctioneer taking bids to push plunger on abandoned Trump Casino
----
ETA. "Math class is tough!"
Apparently THAT NAME is more common than one might think. I've tracked a marriage record between Anton and my grandmother:
That's definitely them, and the date would be right for my mother's birth that year, but this gives his birth year as 1892, a decade off from the trail into Massachusetts I was following. Then there's maybe a third Anton, whose birth year is listed as 1881 and who married a woman named Carolyn in Cuyahoga County, Ohio in 1923. The 1881 Anton would have been 94 in 1976, and there's a grave with that name and those years in San Diego.
Brooklyn. Boston. Cleveland. San Diego. All of these places have (at least nearby, or had) MLB franchises. Maybe that explains my almost lifelong love of baseball. And if somehow he's the same guy with three wives, I am duly impressed. Just hope he didn't take any of them out with an axe.
Anyway, there's a fair amount of time-turning going on in the Firesign piece, as there will be today. No new news on work or weather or kitten(s), but we will go back to my growing-up place and even further back....
----
From a fellow East Meadow person who still lives there and chronicles things, I've come across a lot of local history from back there. Scott's the one who unearthed the original history of East Hempstead Park, the subdivision I grew up in which was built on one long street (ours) named for the farming family which had tilled it previously and finally built homes on it at the beginning of the post-WWII boom.* The nine side streets perpendicular to it, which I can still name like LIRR stations in a blur- AlbertCoakleyAdelphiPattersonBenitoChamberlinHullMaitlandBernard- were originally just given numbers, but since another subdivision on the other side of (then) Newbridge Avenue were also numbered First through Eighth, ours took their fancier names, none of which I've ever traced. Many streets, back then as now, took names from the developers' own names (as our street did), from amalgams of those which had multiple developers, or from their kids; others would honor presidents, English counties, and eventually dead astronauts, or, as also near us now, unfortunately, Ninja turtles:
Scott also chronicled other nearby neighborhoods I was familiar with, but his most recent post is far racier than any of that pedestrian stuff; in the southern reaches of East Meadow in the late 19th century, a love triangle turned almost deadly!
For much of the 19th century, the Brower (or Brewer) Family lived near the intersection of Newbridge and North Jerusalem roads, with another farm a block away at Newbridge Avenue. Parmenus and Jane (Carman) Brower’s son Lewis married Sarah Ann Raynor around 1848 and took over operation of the family property with his parents. Lewis struck up a romantic relationship with Mary Jane Baldwin, who had been married twice and was previously known as Mrs. Samuel Lewis and Mrs. David Waring. Mary Jane was a younger woman who lived about a mile away on Bellmore Road in North Bellmore, across from brother DeWitt Clinton Baldwin and her mother Charity Southard’s family. She became known as Lewis’s “morganatic wife” who seemingly had free use of his farm’s bounties. As Lewis became increasingly enamored with Mary Jane, he moved livestock and household goods to her cottage, neglecting his sickly wife (with whom he had children and grandchildren).
Ultimately, farm implements got into the act:
In the early morning hours of Saturday, September 10, 1887, Sarah Ann was axed in the head and suffered grave injuries. Lewis claimed to have been in bed, awakened by his wife’s cry. The community, knowing of the Brower-Baldwin affair, rendered swift moral judgment and failed to believe his story. Lewis Brower and Mary Jane Baldwin were both arrested for the “braining” and held in the Jamaica Town Hall. Lewis said he went a mile away to his grandson rather than going to Powers, his nearest neighbor, because he was frightened. Barney Powers, a respected farmer, said he saw Lewis washing blood off the ax. He went to the house with three sons, armed and ready to defend their neighbors. When they arrived, a dreadful sight met them. After searching in vain for “thieves,” Lewis claimed that $342 in cash had been stolen from the house. The furniture had been disturbed in a way that the Powers might believe a burglar had searched for the money. Neighbors knew, however, that Brower was in significant farm debt and wouldn’t have that kind of money in the house. Mrs. Spates found the weapon the following day, which had been suspiciously cleaned. Baldwin had seemingly fled to the Bellmore train station but was located.
Fortunately for the cause of justice, even then the LIRR didn't run on time;) And Scott confirmed to me that indeed, the Barney of this story was related to the Powers farming family that later developed our childhood neighborhood. It certainly adds a new spin to hearing that other Barney singing ♫I love you, you love me.....♫
There's lots more if you click the story link above, going into the next century, where at least one relative of these adulterers proceeded to form yet another love triangle. In my time, a famed love triangle hypote-neuse, Amy Fisher, achieved puberty in Merrick, one school district over from us and not far from the Bellmore train station where MJ was captured. And we won't even talk about the serial killer in my kindergarten class who also had a thing for sex and tools....
----
So instead we'll head to the Netherlands. (No, not Mary Jane's nether lands....)
When things got quiet and a bit boring in early pandemic days, I took advantage of the free access our library provided to some genealogy databases. I've mostly gone down rabbit holes chasing connections from my father's side; some inspired by an apparent non-relative who was born in Rochester who became famous enough to block any attempts to find my uncle or cousins with the same name, the rest coming from the Benedict Cumberbatch Edison film featuring his first wife who we are related to.
But what about your.... mother?
(Sorry, another stray Nick Danger reference there- speaking of "Nick," who's also in Current War as both character and actor).
This, in about a paragraph, is all I know about my maternal side genealogy:
Mom is the daughter of a woman named Martha, who I vaguely remember, and a man named Anton, who I don't. (You don't get the last name out of me; too many security questions are tied to that.) They produced one daughter, our mom, in 1916. At some point when she was very young, they briefly went to Holland by boat. My recollection of it is that her Dad went back to the Old Country and never came back. Martha married or remarried, I don't remember which, and she lived until my preteen years. I have vague recollections of her living in a house in Brooklyn, which is probably crawling with hipsters and free-range chickens now.
Anton had completely escaped my radar until a couple of weeks ago, when I came upon a Karen. But it's not pronounced that way, and she's very nice and didn't even demand to speak with a manager. She now IS one, in fact; she was hired by my Rochester office to clean up their office accounting after they'd made a couple of unfortunate appointments in the financial management department- no outright theft, but plenty of incompetence. Karen literally fit the bill, so I met her a few weeks ago. It's pronounced differently because she is a longtime resident who immigrated from the Netherlands, and she still speaks Dutch.
To make conversation, I told her about my mom's connections to the old country, even mentioning the YOU'RE NOT GETTING IT last name and that Anton had, last I knew, gone back there. Nobody she'd ever heard of, surprising, given my amazing ability to be connected to everyone I ever meet. But that got me wondering: did he go back to the Netherlands?
Maybe not.
It's not a common last name, at least not over here, and some quick googling produced some things. An Anton of that name is shown in Ancestry records as having been born in Holland in 1882, which would be about right, and dying in Norfolk, Massachusetts in 1940 at the age of 58. A wife is also mentioned.
I've seen his naturalization petition from the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts from 1927. It lists his occupation as "captain," his wife Anna as having been born in Holland in 1882, and three kids:
Cornelia, born in Holland in 1903, living in Florida as of 1927;
Catherina, born in Holland in 1911, living with him and the then-missus; and
Maria, born two months after my mother was, living with him and her mom in Boston at the time.
Same guy? Plenty prolific if he was!
So now I've got new names to track down.
Maybe Nick Danger will take the case. I'll see if I can find a pickle in a brown paper bag.
* Speaking of boom: Anybody want to join on bidding for this?
Atlantic City auctioneer taking bids to push plunger on abandoned Trump Casino
----
ETA. "Math class is tough!"
Apparently THAT NAME is more common than one might think. I've tracked a marriage record between Anton and my grandmother:
That's definitely them, and the date would be right for my mother's birth that year, but this gives his birth year as 1892, a decade off from the trail into Massachusetts I was following. Then there's maybe a third Anton, whose birth year is listed as 1881 and who married a woman named Carolyn in Cuyahoga County, Ohio in 1923. The 1881 Anton would have been 94 in 1976, and there's a grave with that name and those years in San Diego.
Brooklyn. Boston. Cleveland. San Diego. All of these places have (at least nearby, or had) MLB franchises. Maybe that explains my almost lifelong love of baseball. And if somehow he's the same guy with three wives, I am duly impressed. Just hope he didn't take any of them out with an axe.