Pauline and the Perils

So we had an earthquake yesterday morning. No biggie. Well, not as these things go:

Buffalo and surrounding communities appear to have emerged virtually unscathed from the 3.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Erie County, but it certainly gave people a fright.

"I heard a loud bang, and then the building started shaking," said Jorge Luis Vega, who lives at the Mill at Crossroads on Doat Street. "I live on the third floor, and I thought the lady upstairs from me took a mattress and hit it against the wall. It really scared me."

The U.S. Geological Survey reported a 3.8 magnitude earthquake at 6:15 a.m. centered on the northeastern edge of West Seneca. The Canadian government's Earthquakes Canada initially reported the seismic event as a 4.2 magnitude earthquake.

That would place the epicenter about 10-20 miles (by crow or car, respectively) southeast of where we are. I was unusually asleep at that hour and didn't notice a thing. It was all anybody was talking about around here for most of the day, though.

Coming after the Bills onfield cardiac event in January (and finding out only today about another near-fatal one last year that struck one of the team's owners), we have to wonder what other marvelous things this year has in store for us.

For me, it's a minor bug and some revelations of family history.

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I woke this morning feeling kinda crappy, and it's gotten neither better nor worse. Since I've been to COVIDland, I don't think it's that, but things are getting busy with work and out-of-home activities and I really don't need a setback right now. Eleanor's setting up all the pre-surgery Things that need checking before the March 7 launch date: bloodwork, an EKG, a chest X-ray, and a final clearance from our own primary will be coming in the next couple of weeks to make sure she's cleared. I have my own physical long scheduled for the end of next week, too, so I can see if there's any more to whatever this is as well as whether my sister's recently diagnosed condition is something I need to be looking into.

The other "family history" that I have looked into came up in an odd way. As in "came up from the cellar," where Eleanor found this fairly tiny picture in a frame and had no idea who it was:



It wasn't one of her ancestors, and it's nobody I ever remember having seen in a picture. Most of the old photos from my family's side had identifying words on the back (usually in Mom's handwriting), but this one didn't. So I sent it off to Donna via a friend on Facebook and got back this word:

Hi Ray, showed Donna the photo today. She said it is your great grandma on your mom's side. Her name is Pauline Timper. She immigrated from Germany with Grandma YOU'RE NOT GETTING LAST NAMES HERE.

I know relatively little about either side of my parents' ancestry, and even less about Mom's side than I do about Dad's.  I did a little digging about my maternal grandparents a few years back and found some possible connections to where Birth Grandpa Anton might have wound up.  None of that traced the trail up the family tree, though, so Pauline here is news to me.  I haven't done any deep diving into ancestry databases- a lot of the ones that were made free during COVID times have been shuttered from viewing at home without payment- but the name's unusual enough for me to have found out a few things about Pauline:

She was born in either 1866 or 1867, probably in Finland, and as of the time of her arrival at Ellis Island was most recently a resident of Chemnitz in the German province of Saxony.

By the 1910 census, she was residing in Brooklyn (consistent with where her daughter and our own mother would be living in that decade) and was married to a Rhinhold (or possibly Rheinhard) Severin Timper.

There's no record I've found yet of my maternal grandmother being in Pauline and Rheinhard's family tree, but they did have at least one other child named Theodore Timper, born in 1898 in Brooklyn and dying in 1973 in Illinois.  His marriage, to an Isabella Ligouri, produced a Theodore, Junior (1926-2005) and a Robert Louis Timper (1924-2007). There appear to be some of the Timper name still alive in Palm Bay, Florida that may, or may not, have anything to do with us.

That's plenty to start with if I ever want to start diving down rabbit holes. Or earthquake faults. Whichever come first.