R. Collins celebrates his birthday

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

R. Collins Farquhar IV, aristocrat and scientist.
To my longtime readers and adoring fans. May you someday become enlightened.

Greeting:

I have just returned from my four-week tour of Europe in celebration of my 29th birthday. Aristocracy, unfortunately, is in decline in Europe just as it is in the United States, with the old money dying out and the Nouveau Riche taking over, but as there are more ruins of the old aristocracy in Europe than in the States, it still makes a worthwhile visit. I predict that within a generation, the old aristocracy will, sadly, be little more than a memory. I have made many predictions in the past and all of them have come true. You may read them by visiting Aristocraticguys.com and signing up for the premium-level subscription. I accept payment in U.S. currency, Pounds Sterling, and gold.

Speaking of the Nouveau Riche, I do wish I had spent my send-off with Raunche rather than with my so-called relatives. Little of my fine aristocratic blood seems to have seeped into them, sadly. I visited them on 27 November (November 27) for what they called “dinner.” They said it was something about Thanksgiving. Well, yes, for my enlightened readers, every day is reason to give thanks for the bountiful irrefragable enlightenment which follows my every footstep. I was very glad they were beginning to recognize this, and I told my manservant as much as he pulled my Rolls into my mother’s quaint little driveway.

After a feeble attempt at badinage, I noticed a smirk on my brother’s face. I always know I am in for something fetid and callow when I see that look. He suggested we sit down to dinner. I had my manservant sit at the table while I sojourned outside for a few puffs of my pipe. (My unenlightened family has not yet discovered the healing properties of tobacco smoke.) I always have my manservant eat my meals before I do, as it reveals two things. First and foremost, if my manservant lives, then I know the meal is not toxic. Second, I can interrogate him as to whether the meal was fit for aristocratic consumption.

I took a sip of my brandy (decaffienated, of course), thinking I might need it to face what awaited me inside. I needed not proceed with the interrogation upon my return. As my brother was stuffing his face with his third helping of a vile concoction called turkey and noodles, I scanned the table. Most of the usual traditional foods consumed by the rabble on that particular day were present: turkey, some vile concoction made with old bread that is commonly called “dressing” (I can only assume the French came up with that idea), mashed-up cranberries, some concoction that appeared to be made with apples and cream, mutilated potatoes and yams, and large quantities of white bread. No exotic animals. Nothing requiring the skills of a chef. Not even any haggis. Haggis is what commoners once ate in Scotland, but at least it is Scottish. Someone in this family needs to remember our roots. If they must be commoners, the very least they could do is be Scottish commoners.

Then, on the corner of the table, I spotted something worthy of an aristocrat’s refined palette: a jar of caviar.

But the caviar was not blended with red onions, scallions, sour cream, cream cheese and spices and wrapped in flaky puff pastry fit for an aristocrat, but it sat in an unopened jar, in the middle of a plate, garnished with small commercially-produced cakes resembling hockey pucks in plain white wrappers. My manservant told me they were a product manufactured by Hostess, commonly known as “Ding Dongs.”

My brother is a big enough ding-dong that I can only presume they are named after him. I need not contribute to his ego by indulging in them. Besides, my aristocratic gastrointestinal tract probably cannot handle such things.

I instructed my manservant to save one for Jacques Pierre Cousteau Bouillabaise Nouveau Riche Croissant le Raunche de la Stenche.

“Have some caviar and Ding Dongs,” my brother offered, before he resumed shoveling noodles into his face. I thought about offering him a second fork. I can only assume that this insult to my aristocracy was his idea, no doubt a result of a conversation with the Archduke of Stenche. I shall have to inquire at an appropriate time.

I decided it was time to depart. I instructed my manservant to warm up the Rolls. I waited a minute for some acknowledgment of me having graced their table with my presence. Finding none, I departed, unappreciated. No matter, as there were vintage antique radios to be refurbished and Europe was ever waiting. As the 31st great-grandson of William the Conqueror, I sought to return to Europe to plan my next conquest.

I can only assume they resumed stuffing their faces with noodles.

Optimizing Windows networks

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

My church’s IT czar asked me a good question the other day. His network performance was erratic and Network Neighborhood was messed up. Some computers saw different views of the network, although if you manually connected to other computers, that usually worked.
There are probably 35 or so computers on the network now, so it’s no longer a small network. He asked a few good questions, and the tips that came out of the discussion bear repeating here.

1. Establish a master browser. There’s supposed to be one and only one keeper of the Network Neighborhood’s directory, if you will. Whenever a Windows computer comes online, it calls for an election. Usually the winner of the election makes sense. But sometimes a computer that has no business winning the election wins. Or sometimes the computers seem to get confused about who won the election.

Networks shouldn’t be like the U.S. political system.

Windows NT, 2000, and XP boxes run a service called Computer Browser. Ideally, you want one master browser and a couple of backups online all the time. So pick four computers who are likely to always be on, and who are running Windows 2000 or XP, preferably (since they’re likely to be newer computers). Then turn the Computer Browser service off on all but those four computers. Browser elections and related bureaucracy can chew up 30% of your network bandwidth in worst-case situations, so this can be worth doing even if you’re not yet experiencing the problem.

2. Use WINS. Unless you have an Active Directory domain and you’re running DNS on Windows 2000 or 2003 Server, Windows boxes have to broadcast because they don’t know the addresses of any other computers on the network. All that broadcast traffic chews up bandwidth and can cause other unusual behavior. WINS is basically like Windows-proprietary DNS. Set up WINS on one of your Windows servers, if you have one, or on a Linux box running Samba, and you’ll end up with a faster, more reliable network.

If you’re running a home network with fewer than 10 PCs, this probably isn’t worth the effort–especially the WINS server. The Computer Browser service might be worth disabling but more because it’ll save you a little bit of memory. If you’re a large enterprise with hundreds or thousands of computers running that service, the freeware PSTools suite from Sysinternals has some command-line utilities that can help you turn off services remotely, to avoid the daunting task of visiting every desk.

More tips for playing with toy trains

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , ,

As you can probably guess from the length of time between postings, the Lionel has proven to be quite the distraction. A welcome one, but definitely a distraction.
I’ve picked up a few tricks along the way.

Clean old plastic buildings quickly. My buildings had accumulated a decade or so of dust and grime sitting in a box, and they probably weren’t clean when they were boxed either. The solution? Put a dab of hand soap and a small amount of laundry detergent in a bucket, then fill it with warm water. Just put in enough soap and detergent to make some suds. Disassemble the buildings and drop them in. Let them soak for a few minutes, then scrub with a toothbrush. They’ll look almost new. Note: Don’t do this if they have decals, or if you deliberately weathered the buildings. If you don’t know what weathering means, then go get your bucket.

Cleaning severely rusted track. To clean severely rusted track, give it a thrice-over with a drill’s metal brush attachment. It’ll mark the track up badly, but it’ll clean it up fairly nicely and may allow a dysfunctional train to run again. Don’t worry about ruining a prized collectible; used Lionel track sells for 25-50 cents a section at a hobby shop. This also means you shouldn’t put a lot of time and effort into salvaging rusty track–especially considering the new stuff sells for a dollar.

Lubricate your cars’ wheels for smoother operation. Unlike the engine, WD-40 is fine for this. Put a small quantity of oil into a bottlecap, then use a toothpick to apply it anywhere that the axles come in contact with other parts of the car. After doing this, your train will run more quietly and smoother, and your locomotives will be able to pull approximately 30% more weight, so you can feel free to add another car or two.

Buildings on the cheap for the nether regions of your layout. If you have some kind of structured drawing program (Adobe Illustrator, KDE Kontour, Macromedia Freehand, or even something like Visio) you can draw the basic shapes of buildings, print them out on heavy card stock, and cut them up and glue them together. Get started by taking measurements from an existing building and use that as a guide to help you learn the height of a door, window, and floor. Export the file to some kind of raster format (JPG or PNG) prior to printing and use GIMP or Photoshop to add textures if your drawing program doesn’t support it. For added realism, cut out the windows and glue in pieces of transparent plastic (kitchen plastic wrap is fine but cutouts from clear plastic bags are nicer). It doesn’t take any longer than assembling and painting a plastic model, the results are surprisingly convincing–the only advantage plastic offers is more realistic texture–and you’ll never beat the price. And if something happens to the building, you can always print out and reassemble another one.

Polystyrene sheets for scratchbuilding plastic models on the cheap. Once you’ve built some paper models and want to move up to building plastic buildings from scratch, you can pay $7 for a small sheet of polystyrene at a hobby shop, or you can buy 88-cent Beware of Dog signs from the nearest hardware or discount store. It’s the same stuff, only bigger and printed on one side. Put the printed side on the inside of the model and cover it with paper if you want to keep your secret safe. If you live near a big city, I’ve heard that plastic distributors sell big 4’x8′ sheets of polystyrene for about $7. A square foot of material makes for a good-sized building, so a 4×8 sheet will probably yield more than 30 buildings.

Recapturing the charm of Dad’s Lionel train

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , ,

I unboxed Dad’s old Lionel train Monday night. They don’t make them like that anymore.

Dad’s train led a rough life. My investigative reporting skills tell me he got the train sometime between 1949 and 1952, and then sometime after 1953 he got a new locomotive and cars. And then sometime in the 1960s, the trains ended up in a box. I remember him telling me it came out a few times in the 1970s for Christmas, but most of my memories of Dad’s train are four big pieces of plywood with rusty track mounted on it, sitting in the garage next to a stack of repurposed liquor boxes containing train parts.

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Easy and secure remote Linux/Unix file transfers with SCP

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sometimes you need to transfer files between Linux boxes, or between a Linux box and some other box, and setting up Samba or some other form of network file system may not be practical (maybe you only need to transfer a couple of files, or maybe it’s just a one-time thing) or possible (maybe there’s a firewall involved).
Well, you should already have SSH installed on your Linux boxes so you can remotely log in and administer them. On Debian, apt-get install ssh sshd. If you’re running distro based on Red Hat or UnitedLinux, you may have a little investigative work to do. (I’d help you, but I haven’t run anything but Debian for 2 or 3 years.)

The cool thing about SSH is that it not only does remote login, but it will also do remote file transfer. And unlike FTP, you don’t have to stumble around with a clumsy interface.

If you want to transfer files from a Windows box, just install PuTTY. I just downloaded the 240K PSCP.EXE file and copied it into my Windows directory. That way I don’t have to mess with paths, and it’s always available. Make sure you’re downloading the right version for your CPU. The Windows NT Alpha version won’t run on your Intel/AMD/VIA CPU. Incidentally, Putty.exe is a very good Telnet/SSH client and a must-have if you’re ever connecting remotely to Unix/Linux machines from Windows.

SSH includes a command called SCP. SCP works almost like the standard Unix CP command. All you to do access a remote file is append a username, followed by the @ sign, and the IP address of the remote server. SCP will then prompt you for a password.

Let’s say I want to move a file from my Linux workstation to my webserver:

scp logo.jpg root@192.168.1.2:/var/www/images

SCP will prompt me for my password. After I enter it, it’ll copy the file, including a nice progress bar and an ETA.

On a Windows machine with PuTTY installed, simply substitute the command pscp for scp.

I can copy the other way too:

scp root@192.168.1.2:/var/www/index.php .

This command will grab a file from my webserver and drop it in the current working directory.

To speed up the transfers, add the -C switch, which turns on compression.

SCP is more secure than any other means of file transfer, it’s probably easier (since you already need SSH anyway), and since it’ll do data compression, it’s probably faster too.

Preserving those new (and old) holiday memories

Dave Farquhar Photography , , , , ,

Sorry, I never got around to those promised posts because, well, I’ve become a genealogy addict. But don’t you worry, this post is relevant even to people who are sick of reading about genealogy.
Mom and I were going through some old photo albums, and some of the photographs were in pretty bad shape. For all the talk about concerns over how long inkjet prints of digital pictures might last, some of Mom’s 30-year-old prints are, well, fading fast. Meanwhile, Mom has some prints that were taken 30 years ago that look like they could have been processed yesterday, except for the clothes the people were wearing.

I remember almost 15 years ago, when a neighbor’s house burned, going through their rescued photo albums, opening up the drenched pages, taking out whatever photos would come out in one piece, and putting them on towels scattered about the house to dry. I noticed that Polaroids are very difficult to get remove intact from sticky album pages, even under ideal conditions. Well, now I wonder if anyone pays attention to the acid content in those album pages and what else might contribute to pictures deterriorating.

But I’m not going to spend too much time thinking about that (why not leave that to the infamous self-proclaimed aristocrat and scientist?) because there’s an easy solution.

Scan those bad boys.

Most people have mountains of photographs, so it’ll take a while, but if you set out to scan a page a day, or a few pages a week on Saturdays and Sundays, you’ll eventually get through them. Burn them to a quality CD–I know among the name-brand discs you find in stores, the most consistent performer you’ll find is Kodak. If you buy in bulk, your best bet is either Mitsui or Taiyo Yuden, which are the two brands that CD duplicators most frequently use. The estimated lifespan under reasonable conditions for a high-quality CD-R is around 100 years. Some of my cheap house-brand CD-Rs haven’t lasted two years. So buy good stuff, and store the discs at room temperature. Don’t put them in the attic unless they’re full of pictures of former significant others whom you wish you’d never met. Remember the basic scientific principle that raising the temperature 10 degrees doubles the speed of a chemical reaction, so in theory, raising the temperature 10 degrees halves life expectancy. Storing your CD-Rs in a closed box in the basement, assuming it’s not terribly humid down there (40% relative humidity is optimal, according to Kodak), would be a good idea.

Actually, that same principle would be just as true for your prints as well.

Anyway, what do you do when the prints have already started to fade? Scan them anyway. Sometimes the scan ends up looking better than the original. If not, then try turning them into B&W pictures. Use your imaging software to convert it to greyscale, then play with the brightness and contrast. You’ll lose the color, but you might very well save the print. In the case of some of the old pictures of me, it’ll be harder to tell that I had blonde hair when I was really young, but it’ll at least be possible to tell what I looked like.

If you don’t have a scanner or you’re dissatisfied with the speed or quality of your existing scanner, I can recommend Canon’s LiDE series. They’re inexpensive and offer a very nice combination of speed and image quality. Most of them get their power from the USB port, which saves you a power outlet. And they’re small and light enough that they can fit into a laptop bag, making it possible to take a scanner and laptop along with you when you visit family and scan some old photos.

Getting those photos into digital form gives you other advantages as well. Some imaging software allows you to add captions or descriptions to the photos. If you’re Linux-savvy, you can set up a nice family website using one of the 12 bazillion gallery programs out there. You can keep it on your local LAN if you don’t want that stuff on the public Internet–you and your family can still enjoy punching through pictures on a strategically placed computer the same way you flip through old photo albums. If you’ve got a nice color printer, you can make as many reprints as you want, and if they fade, you can always just print them again. And while you’re burning CDs, you can burn an extra copy or two and keep them in someone else’s basement. If disaster strikes, insurance can replace most material items, but not the one-of-a-kinds like your photographs. Fortunately it’s easy to ensure they’re no longer one-of-a-kinds.

Yet another genealogy tip

Dave Farquhar Genealogy

One more tip for those of you looking to get started in genealogy: Don’t forget the library. You know, that place with tons of books in it that you don’t want to set foot in since you discovered the Internet. The Internet’s less reliable and the information on it definitely leans towards some subjects more than others, but Google’s always open and it’s faster to turn on the computer than it is to hop in the car and drive.
The St. Louis County Library, for example, offers access to U.S. Census data and historical biographies through HeritageQuest.com and access to numerous newspaper archives. It’s arguably as good as the $80/yearly packages offered by a lot of online services, and I’m already paying for it. Some of the newspaper archives are only available inside the library from its own computers, but there’s plenty of data available from home using your library card.

It’s worth a look to see what your local library offers.

I’m going to try to post again later today, and maybe tomorrow before I hit the road and head west.

This is still a blog

Dave Farquhar net.culture ,

A year, or maybe two years ago, I wrote a piece called “This is a blog” in response to an overly full-of-himself author who said that serious professionals don’t blog. It infuriated some people and got me kicked off the daynotes.com web page. I don’t have anything like that to lose this time around, so I don’t approach the topic with the same kind of eagerness–you’re always more eager when you know someone’s going to be offended and throw a temper tantrum–but since everyone and his uncle seems to be writing about John C. Dvorak’s current PC magazine column, Co-opting the future, I might as well weigh in, since it’s the in thing to do, and disagree with the majority knee-jerk reaction, since that isn’t the in thing to do. But I won’t do it to be counterculture. No, I’ll disagree with the majority reaction because the majority reaction is wrong.

Yes, I find it funny that the guy who was recommending novelty domain names as Christmas presents back when a domain name still cost $99 a year is today opposed to blogs. What else is someone going to do with a personalized domain name? I’ll tell you what I’d do if someone gave me the davefarquhar.com domain–I’d run a mail server on it and I’d hang my blog off it. Dvorak would run a mail server off it and post some recipes on it and some pictures of his pets. But my site would be more useful–at least blogging software provides a search engine so you can find the stuff. Isn’t it tacky to tell people to go to Google and type what they’re looking for, followed by site:yourdomainnamehere.com?

But unlike the vigilante masses, I don’t take issue with the majority of what Dvorak says. So he cites a paper that says the majority of blogs get abandoned. The blogosphere goes nuts. Well, I’m sorry, folks, but Dvorak’s right. Go to any public blogging community and start navigating random sites, and you’re going to find a lot of abandonware. It’s like any other hobby. It’s great when the novelty is new. But eventually the newness fades away. Some people abandon their blogs for a while, for various reasons, then come back. Hey, I posted as much in the months of September and October as I used to post in a week. It happens. I came back because I love writing. Some people find they don’t love writing. Some people find they love writing but they run out of things to say. It happens. Large numbers of people trying it and deciding they don’t like it doesn’t invalidate it. How many millions of cameras sit in closets, only to be taken out during birthdays and holidays, if then? Does that somehow invalidate photography?

Then Dvorak says the people who stick with blogging are professional writers. Interestingly, the people rebutting Dvorak bring up the blogs written by–guess who?–professional writers. Now I don’t see how that invalidates Dvorak’s point that the longest lasting, most popular blogs tend to be written by people who do it professionally. I think it’s obvious. If you’re going to write professionally, you have to love it. And if you love writing, you’re more likely to blog.

In other news, computer professionals are more likely than others to build their own computers, dogs are more likely to bark than cats, the sky is blue, and if there’s snow on the ground it’s probably cold outside.

The really incendiary statement Dvorak quotes is that the majority of blogs have an audience of about 12 people. Sometimes reality hurts. I remember checking my logs in my early days and being shocked when I had 40 visitors. Then I was shocked when I found out some people looked up to me because I had 40 visitors. I thought I was the only small-market guy.

Eventually, one of three things happens to every small-audience blogger. Some get frustrated and quit. Others toil on in obscurity. Still others one way or another stumble onto something that people like and they grow their audience.

Today, my audience is closer to 12 hundred people. That doesn’t make me a superstar, but it’s not bad. Some people I remember celebrating breaking 20 readers a day five years ago aren’t doing it anymore. Others are, and they probably get 1200 people a day too. Or more.

I didn’t like Dvorak’s tone, but Dvorak will be Dvorak. I didn’t like Dvorak’s tone when he wrote about OS/2 either, and I think Dvorak’s personal crusade against the caps lock key is idiotic and annoying. He needs to just download a utility that remaps it to a control key and shut up. Those of us who really know how to type will continue to use it when we need it. So Dvorak doesn’t like blogs either. If I only ever read people who agree with me, I wouldn’t ever read.

The only thing I really disagreed with was Dvorak’s assertion that big media is taking over the blogs. Yes, big media is blogging. But the little guys will always outnumber big media. There’ll always be professional writers who blog on their own time to keep sharp or to experiment. There’ll be part-time pros like me who don’t like big media and don’t like most editors–well, I can name four editors I worked with who I liked–who blog because it’s a way to write and stay in touch with the craft and be true to one’s self. There’ll be up-and-comers who are in high school or college and decide to start blogging as part of the process of finding one’s self. There’ll be people who do it just as a hobby.

And guess what? Google starts out with no assumptions. It treats all links the same. That’s why little guys like me can get 1,200 hits a day.

And next week Dvorak will be off on another crusade. There’s about a 50% chance of him being right. I’ve known that since I started reading the guy a decade ago.

Getting started in Genealogy

Dave Farquhar Genealogy , ,

I’ll admit it. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m a johnny-come-lately to the genealogy game. My computer can tell you how I’m related to more than 1,200 different people. And I just started last week.
I’ve accumulated more names than my mom did in years of research, working the old-fashioned way in the 1970s, searching libraries, museums, LDS records, and graveyards.

So how’d I do it?

Talking about Mom’s side of the family is cheating, because she can easily trace her ancestry to pre-Civil War days. Dad’s side of the family was the challenge, because his parents never talked about their roots (my grandmother actually told my mom to quit nosing around in the past and spend time with her two young kids instead–advice that I, as one of those two kids, disagree with, but it’s too late now).

Here’s what I did. I knew that my great great grandfather was named Isaac Proctor Farquhar (I didn’t know if the middle name was spelled “Proctor” or “Procter”), that he was a doctor, and that he lived in Ohio. I literally punched “Dr. Isaac Proctor Farquhar Ohio” into Google to see what came up. What came up was a family tree tracing my ancestry back to 1729. I verified it because I knew the names of my great grandfather and grandfather.

A better approach is to visit a pure genealogy search site, such as ancestry.com or the Mormons’ familysearch.org and punch in the names of any deceased relatives you can think of. The further back they are in the past, the better. The names of living relatives aren’t very useful, since people almost always strip out the names of any living people from their online records due to privacy concerns.

Once you’re reasonably certain you’ve found a relative, enter whatever you can find into your computer. Family Tree Maker is a good piece of software for tracking your roots, and it’s not terribly expensive. Several sites offer free genealogy software. I haven’t looked at any of it. There’s little risk in trying it though–virtually every genealogy program can import and export data in GEDCOM file format. A number of free Linux genealogy programs are available too–just search Freshmeat.

I need to stress entering anything you can find. Often I find incomplete genealogies online. I’ll find a record for a great great great grandfather that lists two children and a birthplace. If I’ve previously entered all available data and I know my great great great grandfather had 10 kids, including the two on that genealogy I just found, and the birthdates and birthplaces and spouses’ names all match, then I can be reasonably certain that I’ve got the right ancestor and I can see where that trail leads me. It’s more fun to track direct ancestors and see how far back into the past you can go, but you need aunts’ and uncles’ and cousins’ names to prove relations sometimes. Besides, sometimes you find a distant cousin who married someone interesting.

If you don’t find anything, talk to your living family members. Ask if they can remember any relatives’ names, birthplaces, and anything else about them. I only know about Isaac Proctor Farquhar because of some conversations I had with my dad. My sister may or may not have known about him. But I know there are relatives she knows about that I don’t. Old family photo albums and Christmas card lists are other sources of clues.

Here’s how I cracked a tough problem. My great grandfather, Ralph Collins Farquhar, married a woman named Nellie McAdow. Nellie McAdow was a dead end. Her mother’s name was Mary Lillian Miller. I didn’t even have her father’s first name. All I found was a guy named McAdow, born in Ohio. A subsequent search revealed her father’s initials were A.G. and he was born in Pharisburg. So then I had A. G. McAdow, Pharisburg, May 25, 1859-January 15, 1904. I did a Google search and found the text of an old book that casually mentioned A. G. McAdow owned a store in Pharisburg in 1883. Great, so the guy’s in the history books, and I still can’t find his first name. Somehow, somehow, Mom knew his first name was Adalaska. Adalaska!? No wonder he went by “A. G.” I searched for Adalaska McAdow. Nothing at ancestry.com. But at Familysearch.com, I found 1880 census data. I found Adalaska living with someone he listed as his stepfather, Smith May, occupation farmer. His mother’s name was Virginia, and she was born in 1838 in Ohio, and they had a daughter, Lena, who was born in 1871. That was enough information to feed a couple more searches, which gave me Virginia’s maiden name, Evans, and the name of her first husband, James W. McAdow.

He was tougher than most, and I still don’t know nearly as much about this line as some others–including Nellie’s mother, Mary Lillian Miller’s line–but I broke the dead end.

I still have no clue why two people with normal names like James and Virginia would name their son Adalaska.

The grandmother who told my mom not to pry into the past remains a tough one. Social security records confirmed her dates of birth and death, and place of death, because my memory was hazy. Mom knows her parents were German immigrant Rudolph Keitsch and Irish immigrant Bessie Bonner. A Google search revealed Elizabeth Keitsch graduated from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1932. So far I’ve found absolutely no trace of her parents. I’m hoping that census records may help–a Google search for “ancestry records search” turns up several sites that will let you search various U.S. censuses for free, but they all use ancestry.com for something or another, which is down for maintenance as I write.

But I’m reasonably confident that once I can search census records, even my stubborn half-German grandmother will finally yield some information after all these years.

You can subscribe to ancestry.com to get to information that you can’t find online for free, and I’m sure that at some point I’ll end up doing that. For now I don’t have much reason to. You might as well see what you can find out for free as well. And I honestly hope you don’t have four grandparents like Elizabeth Keitsch. I hope yours are more like Ralph Collins Farquhar Jr., who took about 30 seconds to trace back to 1729, and whose grandmother, Elizabeth Stratton, led me back to the sixth century and gave me a splitting headache that forced me to temporarily abandon the search to return to this continent and four-digit years.

May all your lines do the same.

Royal roots

Dave Farquhar Genealogy

This past summer, someone told me he’d traced his genealogy back to William the Conqueror. I acted impressed, but I didn’t believe him. I dismissed it as wishful thinking.
When I traced myself back to the late 1600s, I felt pretty proud of myself. I mean, I wanted to go back further, but there just didn’t seem to be any trace of Adam Farquhar’s father or Dugal McQueen’s parents. Dugal was shipped over because he participated in a little rebellion intended to overthrow the King of England. I don’t know why Adam did. It was probably something boring, like an inability to get land.

The only way at the time to go back further was to trace a few other mothers’ families. The majority of them only went back a generation, maybe two. Then I got to my great great grandmother, Elizabeth Stratton. I mentioned that via her, I was a very distant cousin of the patriots John Adams and Samuel Adams. But it goes further than that. She also makes me a distant–very distant–cousin of Teddy Roosevelt, his wife, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George Bush. I always knew I probably had distant relatives in Texas, but I didn’t expect Dubya to be among them.

But I wanted direct relatives, so I traced her back. And back. I started finding knights. Then I started finding people with higher noble titles, like Duke and Baron. Then I found someone with a title of Princess. One link later, I’d connected with William the Conqueror. And within a couple of hours, I’d also with Charlemagne (twice) and Alfred the Great.

I also found people who fought in the Battle of Hastings (besides William), a number of kings of France and Italy (you know something’s wrong when you cease to be impressed when you see a note on an ancestor that lists his occupation as the King of Italy), and people who appeared to be among the invaders who led to that whole Anglo-Saxon thing.

Eventually I had to return to the 19th century though. The inconsistency of last names gives you a headache when you research genealogy in 3-digit years.

Along the way, I found speculation that every person of European descent is probably related to Charlemagne. One genealogist has identified more than 50,000 descendants of Charlemagne. I’ve lived half my life in towns smaller than that. I wonder if the same thing is true of every person of British descent and William the Conqueror.

I think I also know where the plot of the John Goodman movie King Ralph came from now.

But now I want to trace my line back to 1382 in Scotland, when the Farquharson clan was founded. I now believe that Adam Farquhar’s father was a James Farquhar, who lived from 1670 to 1728 in Aberdeen, Scotland, and that James’ father was named Robert. That still leaves a gap of 300 years.