Riverbend Journal

In honor of Veteran's Day here in the U.S., I thought I would pull a picture out of my great grandfather's World War I photo album of pictures he took on his deployment to France and beyond. Above is one that doesn't feature him because I assume he is taking the picture and so one I haven't researched before. I popped it into Google Image Search which told me that it is of Place de la Comedie in Bordeaux, France. I hopped online to see if I could to a tour of the modern place and could at least situate myself somewhere nearby, I think. I'm not certain that this is the same place. The tallest building with the mansard style roof on the center left of the above photo certainly looks like the same building in the top photo but really none of the others so. It may be time has just changed appearances or I'm in the wrong location altogether. So I started focusing on the fountain which isn't to be seen in the newer lower photo. I retrained Google's A.I. to jus...

  When I first started into genealogy, I mostly traced my family through census records which was fairly easy in most cases to do. Soon I had the basic family tree sketched in through many generations but it fell like a fairly hollow victory. I know their names, birth, marriage and death dates but I really don't know THEM personally. They were just names on a computer screen. So I set out trying to "flesh" out my ancestors by learning more about THEM personally and one of the best ways to do that is to read things they wrote. Very few things of that nature survive but fortunately there are a lot more things written about them that survive in the form of newspapers. I have founds many hundreds if not thousands of articles on various ancestors and I now feel like I know many of them in such a deeper manner that should we meet on the street, I would be able to have a pretty good conversation with them. But I still have a big problem, or hole to be exact. Five generations of ...

  He wasn't the first Father of our church when we moved to town but came a year or two later when the first one was reassigned. I still remember shaking his hand after mass that first Sunday and introducing myself while pondering how in the world he would remember all of us. That turned out not to be an issue for Father. He soon knew my name, that we shared similar backgrounds of being raised on rural farms and many other details.  Over the years, I served for him in the church in a variety of ways but mostly as an usher on Sundays. I had the pleasure of serving with him on a counsel and a school board. Like me, he was slow to anger, always able to find common ground to keep things peaceful and moving in a productive manner and for the most part, kept his counsel unless asked directly but would always share his opinion if asked.  Over the years, he frequently was invited out to our house for dinner, often times as part of a larger gathering but occasionally just him. We ...

  Not sure why I didn't post this sooner but better late than never I guess. Or more specifically, better this than nothing which is where I am at in creating posts right now.  Earlier in the fall I had lightly tilled up the garden where our spring and summer vegetables had grown. I left the fall things like okra and eggplant alone because they would produce up until the first frost. Unfortunately, I was lazy and didn't put the fence up around them thinking the deer couldn't reach the okra which was by then probably close to 10 feet tall and they didn't seem to touch the eggplant. I was wrong. The deer indeed couldn't reach the okra but they stripped off the lower leaves. When those were gone they chewed and rubbed the lower stalks until weakened, they fell over and then they ate the upper leaves. They never touched the okra though but killed the plants. When there was nothing else to eat in our garden, they finally decided to eat the eggplant.  All of this is reall...

I received the call from my elder daughter a couple weeks ago on a Monday afternoon. She had gone out to the student parking lot, a long affair involving a 30 minute bus ride and a 5 minute walk, to get her car and go with her roommate out to some store for something or other. She couldn't get into her car using the key fob. I knew what was likely coming but I walked her through removing the built in key inside the fob and getting the door open. She tried to start the car but nothing happened. No noises, no nothing. I told her that I was sorry but her battery was completely dead and that she wasn't going to be able to use the car that day nor could I help her fix it over the phone. They ended up calling an Uber and continuing on their way. Amazing what modern technology does. In my day without cellphones, the only option would have been to walk back to the bus stop for the long wait for the next bus and the long ride back to where I came. I had replaced the battery before my da...