Me and Steve Buscemi

The past is a foreign country.  They do things differently there.  —Leslie Poles Hartley, 1953.

So once I got started trying to figure out the family history, I picked up a piece of family-tree software which comes with a six-month trial subscription to Ancestry.com .   I figured, you know, what the hell, it's cheap enough.  Well, it's been pretty useful.  But we'll get to that in a minute.

On Friday nights, NBC has a show called Who Do You Think You Are? in which celebrities of higher and lower order search through their family trees to see some interesting or dark secrets from their past.  Happened to see it tonight for the first time, and the actor Steve Buscemi was the featured family seeker.  (The show is sponsored in part by Ancestry.com, so there's THAT connection.)  It was fun to watch him find Civil War records showing that his great grandfather was a deserter from the Union army, but it was even more interesting watching him sit around a Brooklyn kitchen table with his mom and dad, explaining what he'd found.   What a completely working-class family!  Surrounded by "fancy," circa 1973.  I already liked him, but now he's my hero.  He's known for being somewhere between plain and homely, and has very disorderly teeth.  He discovered that his great grandfather, before going into the war, had been a dentist.  "I never imagined that there could have been a dentist in our family," he mused...

Anyway, back to my own family tree, which is pretty much full of squirrels and nuts.  Between Ancestry.com (and a lot of members who've done their own histories) and an extensive family project by one of my mother's distant relatives, I've been able to get back a ways.  On my mom's side, I can go back to my 9th Great Grandfather, William Averill, known as William of Ipswitch, arriving in America in 1630; on my dad's side, I can go back further than I expected, to my 4th Great Grandfather, Pleasant Childress, born in Virginia in June 1772.

And some of the names are fabulous.  I mean, Pleasant Childress!  (That should be me, right?)  He named his son Guilford Pleasant Childress, so he must have been happy enough about it. We think that hippie names like Willow and Moonglow are 60s inventions, but that used to be some normal stuff back in the day, along with some serious Old Testament references.  Here's a few:

• Menton Lafayette Childress (Hey!  That's my dad!  Named after a town in France where my grandfather served in WWI.)
• his mom, my grandma Maude
• my third great grandmother (dad's side), Nicey Collins
• my Mom's mother, Melba Nellie Farwell
• my 2nd great grandmother Electa Gay (no, not Electra.  Electa.  Electa Gay.  And yes, as my friend Ryan says, sometimes the jokes just write themselves...)
• my 3rd great grandfather Lot Mayo.  Who the heck would name their kid Lot??  First off, the original Lot tried to give up his virgin daughters to placate a mob at his door; he had to run for his life before the angels destroyed Sodom; then his wife got turned into a pillar of salt; and several years later, his daughters got him drunk on two consecutive nights and slept with him (older daughter on the first night, younger daughter on the second night) so that they wouldn't be barren.  That's a real Jerry Springer car wreck of a life, but somebody thought Lot would be a nice name for their newborn son.  Moonglow's starting to sound a lot better, isn't it?
• my 6th great grandfather Ichabod Averill (and his wife, Bathseba Pain—how'd you like to grow up in THAT household?  With their nine kids Phebe, Ebenezer, Cyrus, Issac, Thomas, Josiah [or Isaiah, depending on the records], Luke, Moses, and... well, there are two independent records that show that Ichabod and Bathseba Averill had a daughter who they named That Averill.  She was the original That Girl!  HAHAHAHAHAHA!  Man, I crack myself up...)

And nobody knew how to spell their own names.  Every time the Census workers came to town, the families would spell everybody's name differently.  Bathseba's name was in some records Bathsheba, named for the woman seduced by King David (David, in the end, ordered her husband Uriah killed on a battlefield so David could marry Bathsheba.  Bad idea, as it turned out...).  My dad Menton was Minton in some records; my great grandmother Alice was sometimes Alose.  Nicey Collins was sometimes Nici, or in one particularly bad reading, Nini.  Elsie Mayo Fuller (whose middle name was from her mother's maiden name, Ellen Cordelia Mayo) was in some records Elsie May, which sounds like the daughter from the Beverly Hillbillies.  Elsie May, git in here from that see-ment pond!

Given our respective ages, Nora and I will only be responsible for naming cats and dogs, a fact for which history should be grateful on many counts.  As many of you know, she's already had one adventure in the naming regard, having named her Angora rabbit Bob, only to discover six years later that Bob was a girl.  Anyway, at present, we have two cats, Simon and Edward (when the census takers came, we spelled their names Thymon and Aadward, just to mess with future cat genealogists).  Nora's had the recently departed chocolate lab Argus of Blackamoor, named in part for Argos, the faithful dog of Odysseus.  Now, our Argus was a wonderful and heroic dog, but the original Argos had a pretty gruesome story, so that one's kind of like my grandpa Lot...

Prior to Argus, and before I knew her, Nora had a black lab whose full name was Dr. Leonard Timothy O'Sullivan McRuibinigh, known to all as Sullivan.  And back when she was a kid, she had a dog named Cricket (but not a cricket named Dog), and two parakeets, Valentine and Señor.  So the family tradition of oddball names clearly is going to continue.  Our next family members (whether dogs, cats, rabbits or otherwise) will likely be named Buscemi, Lemuel, Namuel, and Although.