Riverbend Journal

Note: We have gone on a small mini vacation and depending on my level of relaxation and access to my iPad (my girls like to use it for their entertainment), your comments my be slow appearing as too my comments to them. ************************* When we moved into this house a dozen years ago, I discovered some rodent residents in the attic space and bought some poison which I scattered out up there and they went away. I fortified the defenses such as repouring a severely buckled garage floor and put in a new door as well as stuffed steel wool into a couple perforations through the side of our house for various utilities. I declared victory and haven't seen a rodent in the decade plus years since. Last week, my wife said she spotted a mouse in the garage as she pulled her car in for the night. I assumed he must have gotten in at some point when the garage door was open during a yard work session but I wanted to take action before things got out of control. I found my bucket of pois...

  Now that the Laura Jane Harvey Murder series has drawn to it's conclusion, in it's place, for a few Fridays or so, I will post some stories about my great grandparents, the ones I knew the longest and the best, from the 100's of newspaper articles I found about them a couple months back. This one explains some mysteries now solved and others will be copies of letters written home by Victor during his time in France during World War I along with some selected photographs he took with his camera. Victor and Grace Smith Kuck I have always wondered how my great grandparents met. Unlike all my other ancestors, growing up in the same proximity wasn't involved. My great grandfather grew up and lived in Rockford and my great grandmother grew up and lived near Grand Mound. The were separated by 180 miles of cornfields, streams and hills. But yet my great grandfather stopped going to college, served in World War I and returned only to get married in less than a month after he r...

  Christmas tree in the old farmhouse

A couple weeks ago, I had an appointment to get new tires put on my vehicle. It is an AWD and I have learned, it really chews through tires, the price I pay for being able to drive on the horrible slick river bluffs all winter long around here. From experience, I knew it would be a fairly lengthy wait and also based on past experiences, an unpleasant one. Let me explain. The waiting room at the local dealership is a small room with 8 or so chairs arranged around two walls, a television on a faux fireplace on the third and the fourth side being open to the restrooms across the hallway. The television is forever blaring and people in the waiting room are always making lots of noise which means for me the book reader, I have a hard time concentrating. This wait started off as no exception. The television was tuned to some loud program excitedly talking about sharks who apparently ate someone who had been trying to record their night adventures. They would excitedly talk about some discove...

Perhaps as to be expected when a sentence that excited the general public wasn't carried out in front of the general public, McComb still lived on in the news for a time. Several people claimed that McComb was still alive in the days following the hanging and one woman who saw his body on display afterwards at the Court House claimed McComb had winked at her. Yet another woman claimed that McComb had laughed in her face.  The Rockford newspaper published a brief stating that McComb's remains had reached them three days later on the Monday following his execution and that they had been given to his relatives to commit to McComb's final resting place. I have found no word of where that final resting place ended up being.  McComb had been prophetic about future reported confessions because a couple weeks later, one of McComb's lawyers related that McComb had confessed over the course of many conversations they had over the courses of his trials. According to M. J. Williams...

  John Baker (left), Blanche McKee Baker (right) and their first three children John Baker was born with humble roots. His father died at age 37 for reasons unknown to me and his family was split up. John at age 11, disappears from the records for awhile, presumably working as a servant of some sort until he became an adult, while his younger siblings were farmed out to other relatives to raise. When the records pick up on John's life, he is working as a gate maker and would continue that profession for the rest of his life, which turned out to not be terribly long lived.  During his 61 years though, he had a total of 10 children from two different wives. I descend from his first wife Blanche, the one seen above and his first born son sitting on his lap in the picture above. Blanche bore him seven of those children before dying young, at age 37, of an infection that was a complication due to the birth of her last child. John would have three more children with his second wife....

I don't remember why but sometime while living in an apartment, the first one since graduating from college, I bought my first wood working tool, a skilsaw. I suspect that it had to do with sizing a chunk of basswood for hand carving which I used to do on those long weekend nights before I knew many people. But I can't guarantee that I didn't buy if for some other reason that I've since forgotten. When I was leaving my second job post college for the third one, I do remember buying a table saw, my first big purchase of my still developing woodworking hobby, simply because the company I was going to work for were paying for my move. I decided to get a washer, dryer and a table saw for them to move while they were at it. Eventually during those years of working at the third (and final) job, I got into remodeling more seriously and picked up other tools of the trade and started developing a love of more fine woodworking.  After I left that job for the stay-at-home-dad/reti...

On the morning of February 17, 1865, it was cloudy and snowing moderately in Ottumwa. The streets were wet and muddy. A military company from nearby Kirkville arrived and joined forces with two Ottumwa companies to act as guards for the expiation of the great crime. By 10 o'clock, there were a considerable number of strangers in town and some estimates were that some 2000 people were by noon there for the hanging. It was also noted that despite the crowd, people were still able to move freely around.  The city mayor, in an attend to keep things calm, had already ordered that all saloons be closed for the day and surprisingly, they had listened. Twelve respected individuals from around the community were called upon to witness the execution to ensure that it was duly carried out as prescribed by law. It was said that although McComb did not sleep well the night before his execution, he was in fair spirits when the morning arrived. The Catholic priest, Fr. Kreckle, the same one who g...

  While answering a question on my previous post, I realized I was wrong. Fortunately I said I was 99% certain the above picture was taken in the fancy house described in the newspaper article in my previous post. As it turned out, my 1% uncertainty should have been closer to 100%. The question I was answering was about who took the photograph. I didn't know and still don't know who since the entire family group was in the picture but I wondered if it could have been a timer. The internet assured me that external triggers were around as early as 1910 and built in timers came around in the 1950's. Since my grandfather, the blurry boy on the left, was born in 1929, I figure this picture was taken somewhere near the mid 1930's and in the external trigger era. My great great grandfather on the right appears to be clutching something in his hands, perhaps a remote trigger. That is when it hit me that this picture was taken in the mid 1930's, after my great great grandfat...

  Elizabeth Cogswell Kuck (third from left) and George Washington Kuck (far right) This is a treasured picture in my collection for several reasons. First, it is the only picture I have of George and Elizabeth Kuck in the same photo. I have many photos of them individually but only this one of them together. Second, it also has my great grandparents (fourth and fifth from the left), the ones who lived long enough that I have found memories of both and also my grandfather (blurry fellow on the left) and favorite great uncle (sitting next to blurry grandfather). It was taken during obviously a prosperous time in their lives.  My grandfather always told me a story about how he was born during the start of the great depression and that his father had been away on business and had frantically called my great grandmother (in the process of giving birth to my grandfather) directing her to sell all their stocks. She couldn't and didn't, the stock market crashed and my great grandfathe...

  Not long ago, while watching a YouTube video of a genealogist whom I occasionally learn a tip from, I saw her using a microphone to dictate into a Word document. Since I often transcribe the more informative newspaper articles I find into my research notes, typed in Word, I thought to myself, why I wasn't using a microphone. So after searching for a bit and reading reviews, I settled on one that looked fairly nice but didn't cost an arm and a leg like the professional ones seem to charge.  After it arrived on my doorstep, I plugged it into my computer and tested it out using the Sound app that comes on Windows 11 and it seemed to be working well. I fired up a blank Word document and started searching for the little microphone shaped dictation button that I saw the YouTube genealogist click but couldn't locate it. I searched for it using the search box and came up with nothing. Finally I used Google for help and it promptly gave me the correct answer. Despite buying a full...

As many of my long time readers can probably guess, when we have some time around the holidays, odds are we end up at the family cabin in the Boston mountain of NW Arkansas along the Buffalo National Wild and Scenic river. The prior post "painted" by the A.I. Claude was supposed to depict me hiking through the woods of said mountains and not picking cabbages or being mooned by giants as some guessed. Claude really does need to practice his art skills. We did accomplish some hiking and a whole lot of disconnecting from society which were our two main goals. Above is Magnolia Falls which we hiked too on the first day. On the second day, we headed down to the Buffalo River to scope out some of the damage caused by a historic sized flood a few weeks earlier. Above was the remains of a low water crossing on the upper Buffalo. All my life, I have walked, driven and paddled canoes underneath that low water bridge and even swam in the pool on the upstream side. The same flood that de...

As perhaps to be expected, the District Court's guilty verdict of Lant McComb was appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court which set a date of mid December to hear the case. The Supreme Court was going to rule on eight different issues relating to the trial of McComb. I am not a lawyer and have read through the eight charges several times over the years and am only to scratch the surface when it comes to decoding them into a form that a layman could understand. What I can tell you is that the defense was unsuccessful on many of the charges and the ones they were successful on weren't enough to warrant a new trial. The decision of the District Court was upheld and the court left it up to the Governor of Iowa to decide the date and time of the execution. No more about the case was posted in the local newspaper but toward the end of January, there was an article in the Rockford newspaper, McComb and victim Laura Harvey's home town, about the city board stopping all payment of reward...