Sept 15, 2023 — Veloutine Deictic

Hello there!

It’s been yet another week.

What an observation, right? I mean, you definitely come here for the deepest insights I can provide, and I’m clearly off to a good start with that winner. Sigh.

About the title: random word generators are a thing and titles are hard. Those are both real words. Have fun looking them up!

Anyway, looking back it seems last week was reasonably productive. There was more progress on the upper deck in particular. The last post discussed removing the old decking and painting the flashing. Now I’m in the midst of installing the replacement. We had a couple of days of rain/muck that kept me from working, so it’s not done, but such is life.

Here’s a photo of the stringers being laid out:

The deck boards turn out to be exactly eight feet long, and trying to get the stringers evenly spaced is a challenge. You can’t see the little in-cut that affects things in these photos, but you will next week.

The short pieces at the top (and bottom) are just there to keep the long pieces straight relative to each other, since this thing just floats on the roof. Each of the stringers was ripped to a specific height to make the deck flat. That only worked so well because the roofing material underneath is highly uneven, but it’s pretty close.

Once the stringers were down, I covered their upper surfaces with the protective tape and started on the deck boards:

The green tape is there to let me write the measured distances from the far edge to the screws holding the boards down in each stringer, and there is a one quarter inch gap between the boards. I’m being excruciatingly careful with this work. It’s possible for a floating set of stringers like this to get tweaked into a trapezoid instead of a rectangle, and that would look bad. I stopped work on Thursday at 4:30 pm because I was tired and worried about making mistakes. Thankfully, once the deck boards are fully screwed down it won’t be able to move anymore.

I hope to get back to this on Saturday, and have it done before the weekend is over. More photos next week.

Progress was also made on the genealogy research project: I finished entering the data from my great (x3) grandmother. There are only a few more files from my mom’s mom that I need to go through, and I will finally have it all entered.

What came up this week? Well…

There are a few more veterans in the family past. So far I have found references to people serving in:

• The US Revolutionary War
• The US Civil War
• The War of 1812
• King Philip’s War (I had to look that one up)

Interestingly, no one has yet shown up as serving in WWI, WWII or other (more recent) conflicts. There must be a few people in the family who did so, but perhaps the emphasis of the researchers so far was looking farther back, trying to make connections to the founding of the USA, or to their European ancestors.

In addition to that, I found a family that was attacked by Indians in 1725, with multiple people killed. A daughter was left for dead but survived — bedridden — for another 20 years.

It was a brutal time on all sides.

There were a handful of ministers in the family. Mostly Methodist, as far as I can tell.

The only other careers I have noted are farmers, a financier who lost everything in 1929, a town clerk, and a couple of tailors. Of course I know more about my grandparents, but that’s not through this research.

I haven’t pushed the time frames back any farther, but the tree has branched out quite a bit. There are over 550 people in it now, mostly dead I think. Of those still alive, most are cousins so far removed they have no idea I exist.

A specific thing I tried to figure out: did my maternal grandmother and grandfather actually divorce and then remarry in the 1940’s. Mom was told this happened around their 50th wedding anniversary, but that information had never been shared before.

As best I understand it, my grandmother wanted to get a degree and a job but my grandfather didn’t like that idea. The conflict got bad enough that she left them all — husband and three children — and went off to get a library science degree. A couple of years later she showed up on the doorstep — with both the degree and a job — and her former husband took her back in.

No one talked about it.

Then, in the 1980’s it came out, but no one got the details.

Mom gave me what she knows about the dates and location so I could attempt to verify this. And it’s entirely possible she will correct me about a point or two after reading this as well. (Hi mom!)

Anyway, I went off to research this and ran into a problem: no data. It turns out that Iowa (the state where this all happened) has a rule about not releasing divorce or marriage records until 75 years after the event, and we’re right on the cusp. The divorce records for 1946 are available though, and someone at the Iowa State Historical Society pointed me to them. So I had look.

That was … painful.

What happened in 1946 as far as Iowa divorces go was as follows:

• Each county used the same standard form to collect very limited divorce data.
• That form was usually filled out by one side of the divorcing couple (I think) by hand, though a few were typed.
• Those forms were collected in batches and forwarded to the state.
• Later they were bound into books, organized by county.
• At some point the books were photographed, one page at a time, possibly as part of putting them into microfiche.
• Eventually those photographs were digitized and stored somewhere, and after 75 years they are made available via the website FamilySearch.
• Access is free, but there are no search aids. These records have not been run through OCR (optical character recognition) of any kind; all you get are the raw photos. As a result you have to page through thousands of hand written forms looking for the right name, and the only thing you get to limit your search is which county the divorce happened in.

It turns out that if my grandparents actually divorced, it should have been recorded in Polk county, the most populous county in Iowa. And while divorce might still have been a bit taboo in 1946, thousands of couples in Iowa got divorced that year.

Each volume of divorce records contains about 7700 images. But about half of those are the backs of the single sided forms, so there are about 3850 actual divorce forms per book, give or take a few hundred. And there are six books of divorce records for Polk County in 1946.

I paged through them all. It took hours and I did not find my grandparents’ divorce.

Of course it might have happened in 1947, or not at all, or I might have zoned out while their record was on screen. (It was a mind numbing task.)

But going through those records did give me a sense of divorce in Iowa at the time. It was a bit like rolling in deep, stinky mud.

• The vast majority of divorces were initiated by women.
• I only saw two grounds for divorce given: “desertion” and “cruel and inhuman [sic] treatment”. I don’t know if other options were allowed, but those are the ones I saw. (Technically, sometimes they just wrote in “cruelty”, but I assume that was short for the longer term.)
• The vast majority were white couples. A few black couples were present, but I have to assume there just weren’t that many blacks living in Iowa in 1946. I didn’t note any other minorities at all. (Today Iowa is over 89% white and around 4% black. They must have been an even smaller minority at the time.)

So that was fun. Not.

Even better, I learned nothing useful about the family.

The 1947 divorce records aren’t available to review yet, though I can see they were already scanned. They might open up on Jan 1, 2024, but I am not sure of that. Time will tell.

If you are thinking about genealogy research, that’s an example of a thing you can look forward to doing. We may be living in a computerized age, but not all of the data is readily accessible yet.

Another item or two, just because I can. First, here are some of Anne’s house plants.

She recently added the grow lights in an attempt to keep some of her garden herbs alive over the winter. I thought the lights made for an interesting composition, and my phone was in my pocket.

And finally, I note with interest that this is post number 327 here on Medium. Wow.

To be fair, about half of those posts were originally written on another site and migrated here, but regardless of where they came from that is a lot of posts. It’s been over six years since we moved to the Vancouver area and I started art school.

I am shocked that I have been writing these things for that long.

Thanks for reading, and for keeping me updated on your life when you can.

Cheers!