Riverbend Journal

  Several years after starting my blog, I had a series I called the "Little Abbey" series about my eldest daughter as we and her experienced her birth and childhood for the first time. Eventually time ran it's course and those posts faded away. She is now in her second year of college.  I got married later than most of my peers and my wife was going through her residency soon after the birth of our first child so it was six years later before we had our second child and by then, we were in the "higher risk" category according to the doctors. But the second one arrived just fine and I started another series that I put tons of effort into naming calling it "Littler Abbey". It faded out much more quickly as there wasn't a lot of mystery left to behold or figure out. Thus our second one never got much written about her on this blog. That likely won't change anytime soon but I saw this picture on my phone and thought I would temporarily break and sh...

  I thought I would do a post detailing a bit about the search for news articles, using my great grandfather Lee Roy as an example. Although he lived across the border and I have found some articles for him in newspapers there, his wife, my great grandmother Dorothy, lived on the Iowa side of the border in the region where until a month ago, no historic newspapers were online in searchable format. Knowing that they probably spent a lot of time in her neck of the woods, I did a search for his name in the new online site for the local historic newspaper. It returned 224 articles for the name Roy Luther alone! He also went by Lee Roy, L.R. Luther, R. Luther, etc., all of which return even more results to sort through! The newspaper site returns each result in the format above. Essentially, the program that reads the newsprint and transcribes it into searchable text, reads from left to right across two columns at a time, one line at a time. Why it does this I do not know but it makes t...

  I surreptitiously took this photo the other day of a trend I am seeing with more frequency. People buying white sneakers and then wearing plastic bags on them presumably to keep them looking white. I'll go out on a limb and assume that at some point, they will get to where they are going and remove said bags while inside and then put on the bags again to return home.  I don't understand all the labor that goes into preserving something that likely nobody will notice. The only reason I noticed was because this boys feet were twice as wide as normal, kind of like a duck and flapping in the breeze. But then again, perhaps that is one of those assumptions that makes an A$$ of me (reference to an old saying about assuming). Perhaps in the world that I don't frequent much anymore, the cleanliness of white shoes is actually quite noticeable among the younger generations, but only when inside.  

Above is a picture of my great grandfather Dewey, wife Bernice and their four children. My grandfather is the older boy standing between Dewey and Bernice. Sometime shortly before this picture was taken, their fifth child, a girl by the name of Elizabeth Rose died at only 2 weeks and 5 days old. Awhile back I mentioned about a local newspaper now being available online and searchable. I have started in on the long process of seeking articles on nearly 1/3 of my family tree who lived in the area of the published newspaper. I started with myself, finding a letter to the editor I wrote at the age of 12, an announcement of my birth and various other tidbits and moved on through my parents and grandparents. My grandparents and great grandparents had hundreds of articles on each of them as per customary at the time, the newspaper was a gossip conduit of who went where, saw whom, etc. With that many articles, it is tedious work and I try to skip some to speed up the process. But one article c...

On my recent trip to Wyoming a few months ago, I wrote about stopping to see the ranch once owned by my great great grandparents. You can read that post here.  I mentioned in that blog post, that I had been most likely recorded by a security camera. So when I got home, I looked up the address of the current owner of the property and wrote a letter that mentioned why I had been knocking at the door of the abandoned house.  Nearly three months later, I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from the current owner of the property. She informed me that she had gone to the court house and verified that my ancestors had owned the place from 1902 to 1914 and had purchased it for $450. She seemed happy that someone had thought enough of their ancestors to seek the homestead out. In short, I don't think my uninvited presence was an issue. 

  On one of my trips down to the farm, about four miles from where I turn off the highway to start heading down the gravel back roads, I was following a semi and two other vehicles as we all passed a white construction truck driving along the side of the highway with flashing lights and a huge orange sign that said "wet paint". I started focusing to stay between the lines and indeed in another mile or so, I could see the white paint glistening in the early morning sun. About then, I noticed the dark colored pickup truck in front of me and behind another car and semi, start to drift towards the freshly painted white stripe. Driving my new vehicle with it's beautiful Blueprint Blue paint job, I immediately slowed down and built up some space in between him and I. Sure enough, the dark colored pickup drifted over and started driving on the white line. I could see a white stripe immediately form on his passenger side rear tire and I could see a mist of white paint aerosolized...

  Although we normally do our burning in late winter or very early spring, due to some other factors at play, I got to help in burning a few odd patches here and there on the farm. The tenants who rent it are going to seed some of these patches into alfalfa for hay which they will use to feed their cattle they raise elsewhere, during the winter months.  It was not without it's tribulations though for me. In order to safely burn it, a fire break needs to be disked around the perimeter so that fresh non-flammable earth is exposed. Normally this is done in the fall as was this case, but when we burn it in the spring, rains and snows have time to settle things down so one can walk on it without too much issue. Freshly turned when we burned it this time, it was horrible to walk over. I was staggering and reeling like a drunk after an all night bender except I have a container of flammable fuel that I'm spraying across a flaming tip that shoots fire into the grass right next to wher...

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...