It’s very warm out, I mean, relatively warm, in the 40s. But some of my snow and ice isn’t melting because it isn’t in the sun. I think that’s totally unfair. I was checking my mailbox (nothing yet…where are youuuuuuu Mr. Mailman?) and hit a patch of black ice. Did that weird arms “akimbo” dance and dropped a brand-new notebook into the snow, messing up at least half the pages. I’m just lucky I didn’t fall or pull something. But why the hell was there black ice anyway?
Category: Uncategorized
NOT what I had planned for today
Some schmoe decided to try to park his truck closer to the curb by backing into me this morning in the Y parking lot. Right. I was standing still, and he used his bumper to remove my grill. I hope Junior doesn’t actually retain ANY of the language his lovely and demur mother used when it happened. sigh
Swimmingly
Looking for Contacts
A Darned Shame
Okay, what kind of diner doesn’t have egg salad sandwiches? I spend 4 hours doing research at the library this morning, and decided after all my hard work I deserved lunch out. On the way home I decided to stop for an egg salad sandwich at the Northend Diner…well they don’t HAVE egg salad. Actually this is the conversation:
Me: I’d like an egg salad
Waitress: Okay
Me: On wheat bread
Waitress: Ya, we don’t have egg salad, only tuna or chicken salad.
Maybe she could have said that FIRST. Also, just because one wants egg salad does not mean tuna or chicken are an equal substitute. Silliness. So I got a burger to go, because my head shut down and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted. I suppose I could have just left to find another place, maybe Jaspers, or the Turnout, but it was pushing 1:30 and my blood sugar was starting to dip, y’know? Anyway, the burger was decent enough. Nothing to write home about, but I don’t think I’ll die from it.
Oh, so the research was on job stuff, owning your own business stuff, and then I tucked myself into the “employees only” basement hole where they store all the genealogy stuff. Way very cool books there, made me wish you could borrow some of them so that you could maybe sit in an area that had, oh, say windows.
I didn’t find out a lot of new information, but it did give me a chance to see some of the major resourses first hand. As in the Lynn Vital records prior to 1850. I had seen the content online, but I had the book in my hands today. It’s very cool to be sitting there flipping pages. I got out of my “Dr. John Henry Burchsted” mode (trying to figure out when he arrived in the US, or when his parents did if he was born here) and looked up some more recent stuff. The Leominster Library has all the official city records bound up, and I was able to get some street addresses. Apparently my GG-Grandfather’s farm was at 117 Lincoln Street. Pawing through books he’s listed as a farmer until sometime around 1914, when he moved to 735 Main Street. GG-Grandfather first appears in the 1896 edition of this directory. Now my G-Grandfather, Frederick Roydon, was born in 1876 in Salem MA, so his dad must have up and moved the whole family here. Fred-Roy is not listed as living with David W. in any of the books I found. Actually, he wasn’t listed at all until later, and then in 1914 he was removed from the town directory because he moved to Shirley. Hmm.
Oh, and I also looked up my paternal grandmother’s family, just for grins, although I’m not working on that family right now (I do have that one traced back already to Scotland, but only to 1798). But my G-Grandfather MacDonald was listed in the 1908 directory as a shoemaker, and there were two addresses given, so I assume one was a store. 38 North St. was the business address, and 81 Myrtle was given as a home address.
Aren’t you sorry you didn’t ask? (I just wanted to type some of this up.)
(While I was in there I tried to find my grandparents’ high school yearbook(s) but the year(s) when they would have likely graduated wasn’t there. Or else they didn’t graduate from high school. I need to ask my aunt about that.)