For some reason I read three books in a row on Salem, MA. Two were by Brunonia Barry, The Lace Reader and the map of true places (the title is in lower case). The first  was given to me by a neighbor and I really enjoyed it. The second I purchased because I enjoyed The Lace Reader, but it seemed like a something written because the The Lace Reader was successful. The third of the Salem series, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe, was recommended by my local bookseller as something difficult to put down.

As  time passes since I read it, I understand more about why I disliked it. The cover states “Spooky” –People and “Bedeviling” — New York Daily News. I found it to be neither, but I don’t even know what “bedeviling” means. I do know that it was simplistic and trite.

Names are important to this story. The names are also what prevented me from really getting into the story. The main character’s name is Connie Goodwin. Goodwin is my last name. Goodwin was also the last name of the first girl who was “possessed” starting the Salem witch hunts. Connie is a brilliant, Colonial history, doctoral candidate at Harvard who returns to her grandmother’s home in Marblehead, MA. As Connie learns of women named Deliverance, Mercy, Prudence, and Patience and mocks their names while forgetting that her name, Constance and her mother’s name, Grace are similar to those.

What bothered me most was that although she was a historian and researcher, she was so close minded that she continually overlooked the obvious. What I love about historical research is how if you sense the process; look at what is there; and listen to the messages you’re given the answers are there, although they often are very different from what your mind may tell you they should be. That is part of the mystery and the fun of research.

This is also true of family history and looking at family photographs. By getting beyond the mental hypothesizes, you’ll find answers that take you further than what the mind can perceive. The answers are there, but you have to trust, you have to sense, look, and listen to what is there.

Earthquakes

For the past week I’ve had trouble sleeping through the night.  One factor is Cleo, one of my two nine month old cats, has been attacking my feet in the middle of the night (I kick her out of the room when this happens).

Another is that early Friday morning I woke to windows rattling.  About ten minutes later they rattled again and both cats (Cleo’s littermate Smokey is the other) jumped from the bed and ran for safety.  Since it was 2 am I didn’t get up to check the USGS quake site, but I did it as soon as I got to work (I’m still at Bay Ship & Yacht.  I don’t start at Xerox until July).   I really like their “did you feel it?” feature where they track the distance and area in which it was felt by having site visitors click if they felt it.

There were three quakes, although I only felt two. They were centered about six miles from here–five miles west of Danville, three miles SW of Alamo.  The one that freaked out the cats was a 3.5. The first was a 3.1.  Not very big, but still sleep distruptive.

This morning I again woke to rattling windows.  Today’s 3.1 quake was at 4:31 am and located in the same place as the three on Friday morning.  When I moved to San Ramon in February 2007 I wanted to be east of the hills, away from the Hayward fault. Within two weeks of moving here there was a quake centered about 10 miles away, just north of Lafayette.

Nightmares

Yesterday morning at 2 am  I woke screaming.  I had a nightmare. I had been dreaming about lack of money. My Grandma Fannie was in my dream.  I think that a cat jumped on the bed, but I screamed thinking that Fannie was at my bedside.  I was so shaken that I had to get up for a couple of hours.  I couldn’t fall back to sleep.

For those of you who didn’t know Fannie you’re probably wondering how and why my grandmother would make me scream.  For those of you who did know her, there’s no reason to explain.  She was scary.  She was mean and evil and looked like the witch of the west in the Wizard of Oz.

What’s also scary is that in the photo below she is about 57 — a few years older than I am now.  She looks significantly older.

Fannie resented the fact that my mother married and had four children.  Her marriage ended when my mother was three.  We heard that it was an arranged marriage — her father worked out an agreement with a man who had stayed at his boarding house that Fannie marry the man’s troubled son Harry Stern.

When I was four she moved in with us.  She didn’t have any friends.  She did have a brother, Abe who was equally mean.  Fannie liked L and A, but disliked M and me. She made all of our lives miserable.

One positive thing I can say about Fannie was that she was  talented at knitting and crocheting.  She made crocheted tablecloths for each of us girls.

Amy inherited Fannie’s engagement ring.  It was stolen after Amy died.  We all felt the ring was cursed by the years of exposure to Fannie — it had terrible energy.  Since none of us wanted it, we felt that whoever took it did us a favor — the curse is on them.

Working on WHJ Webpage

After writing my last post I began to prepare to get my thesis up on this site. Today I scanned the text pages.  I may even have the attribution list up this weekend.  I need to scan images, the slowdown being in organizing them.

To become psyched to to all of this I did a Google image search on William Henry Jackson to get an idea of what is on the web. I found a wonderful website http://www.photochrom.com/ that is a gallery of Willliam Henry Jackson’s Photochrom post cards. There are histories of the Photochrom process, the Detroit Publilshing Company, and Williiam Henry Jackson, as well as  images of what is available for sale.

Cathedral Rock Near San Diego

One of the images that is available to purchase is #53064 of Cathedral Rock Near San Diego.

The Original Version

It is the same image as Jackson’s 011107 San Diego Cal Cathedral Rock La Jolla, Copyright 1899 Detroit Publlishing Co. This is a sepia toned photo.

I’m including another version.  This one I created on PhotoShop Elements. I removed the color creating a greytone so that it would look like a black & white.As you can see, each has it’s own feel and look.

Unfortunately you can’t go to the La Jolla Cove to rephotograph this image. Cathedral Rock is no longer there.

Today I got an email from Paul Clark. He collects William Henry Jackson images, primarily of Yosemite. He is also an Ansel Adams expert and collector.

Paul found me through a Google search. In January, while I was still working for ReadHowYouWant I got an email that he sent to info@readhowyouwant.com “Subject: Looking for Rosanne Goodwin–Author of Thesis on William Henry Jackson, 1982″.  It’s a good thing that he sent the email when he did because three weeks later my stint with RHYW ended and I would have never gotten the email.

His first email said  “I am a researcher-collector-writer on/of Ansel Adams & Yosemite.  This has led me to researching the pioneer western photographer William Henry Jackson.  At the Colorado Historical Society, Denver, CO I discovered a 1982 thesis on WHJ by a Rosanne Goodwin and I would like to make contact with her through this post if possible.  Thank You!  –Paul P. Clark”

I hadn’t heard from Paul since January. He lives in Japan and he and his wife headed off to Hawaii for a vacation. I was surprised to hear from him again.  Paul had found an image on eBay and wanted background information. He had read my thesis and knew that a big part of it was the attribution list for the Detroit Publishing Company images of California.

I was able to supply him with the information I had — I don’t have images of all the California photos.  I only copied the San Diego images.

I am planning on getting my thesis up on this website. I want to include more photos than I had in the thesis. I plan on scanning the negatives (I used a Bronica ETR-S 2 1/4 camera.) and reformatting it – working digitally is very different from typing it on an IBM Selectric and printing contact sheets to mount onto the pages.  Perhaps I’ll make it available for sale Print on Demand.

Hopefully I’ll be able to start working on it before my new job begins in July. 

I’m unable to post too many photos. I guess I haven’t learned to properly work with this site. So I’m doing yet one more posting to give you the the other paintings by Lizzie. I think that there were more. I know that my father took some to copy, but I don’t know if they were ever returned or if they were lost.

The painting above was inspired by two photographs of my grandparents and by a painting by my Grandma Lizzie. It was painted by M Goodwin about 1969.  M never titled it, but I titled it The Goodwin Family Tree. During the 1950s Lizzie took painting classes at the Jewish Community Center that were taught by the painter John Baldessari. Her style was primitive and M modeled this style in this painting.

The photos that inspired the painting are shown here.  The photo at the right of Grandpa with his arm around Lizzie, holding a bottle of beer in the other hand. The other was the photo of Grandpa smelling the blossoms on the peach tree that was in their backyard.

The painting  that inspired M is to the left. It is of the peach tree in blossom with the sun coming through.  The palm trees Grandpa planted to raise and sell surround the tree. He did not understand the slow growth of palms and the variety he planted never had the popularity of other palms.  When Rozzie had the house moved she didn’t make anything on the palm trees.

Lizzie’s Paintings

When I was in the Cooperstown Graduate Program I did a project on Lizzie’s paintings for my Folk Art class. The instructors, Louis and Aggie Jones wanted the paintings for the Fenimore House Museum collection, I gave them the slides instead.

I have two of her paintings.  One is of trees and hills reflected in a pond, although they don’t match. 

The other is of me. It has the notation To Dora Frumkin, May 10, 1963. I was eight years old.

I’ve been unemployed for 3.5 months now.  About five weeks ago I began working part-time at a friend’s business.  I’m not naming the business or any names because some may deem the following sexist or demeaning.  It is a ship yard and over 90% of the employees are men.

On the Friday before last I took some things to the yard manager’s office and found a group of people hanging around talking.  I was told that they were trying to come up with a name for the printer / copier.  They wanted to name it after a favorite porn star.  The only woman in the group pointed out that it is unlikely that her favorite would be a favorite of any of the others.

They asked my opinion.  I told them how porn stars and strippers get their names — that they use the name of their first pet and the street they grew up on.  I assume that if the street is a number like 55th you would use the cross street or if you didn’t have a pet you could also use the cross street — Laurel Balboa.

I can’t remember the names that they had  One was Tiger Elm.  Another was Buddy Main. Mine is the politically incorrect Sambo Laurel. Which I think sounds better as Laurel Sambo.

I saw one of the guys this past Friday. He said that he remembered me because of the name game.  They never named the copier because they were having too much fun with their own new names and were using them for their names using the walkie talkies.

Family Stripper Names

I’d love to hear from people about their stripper / porn star name.  My cousin V doesn’t have one because she never had a pet.  I’ll take that back, she had guppies.  I wonder if she named them.

My older sisters and I all have the same name, although there may have been a pet prior to Sambo, a black cat who was left at our door when I was four years old. I searched for a picture of him, but couldn’t find one. We had a cocker spaniel for three days.  L had a hamster.  We also had goldfish, but I have no memory of their names.

Amy’s would have been Pasha Laurel, but she probably would have used Pasha Bothe instead since we moved from Laurel Street when she was two. We got Pasha when we lived on Bothe. My friend Robin had a pregnant cat show up at her door.  The cat had two kittens and left after they were weened. Pasha was a long haired calico that looked just like the momma cat  I named her after the card game Pisha Pasha.

Amy and Pasha, 1976

Annie Leibovitz Exhibit at the Legion of Honor

The exhibit ends in a week so I headed to San Francisco on Wednesday to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibit, “A Photographer’s Life” created by the Brooklyn Museum. I got there early before the crowds and was able to have the space to look at the photos at my pace.

The exhibit was a combination of photos of her family, of Susan Sonntag, and her well known photos shot for magazines. For the most part the commercial photos did nothing for me, although there were a few that stood out — The photos of Cheney and Rice that looked like mug shots; chaotic photos of the Bush gang and the regal photos of Clinton, Schwartzkopf, and Powell; and the more personal photos of Queen Elizabeth.

I was interested in the family photos. They were what captured my soul (as did the photo of Susan Sonntag at her funeral). In looking at the photos of her parents and siblings I saw the love and the individuality of the family. They are very different then my family — I can’t imagine having a portrait taken topless of my sisters and brother in law. I was touched by the photos of her father and nephew. I enjoyed the family images taken of the gathering for her nephew Ross’ bar mitzvah, but not of the service or party itself.

In one label of a photo of her mother she commented that they had to smile in photos as children. Yes, the photos all looked like they had fun together, but the photo it described was of a mature woman who didn’t wear a smile, but did have presence. As someone who has a great smile and who has always been told to smile if I wasn’t smiling I am sensitive to being told to smile when I’m not in the mood, or it’s just not where I am at the moment.

I was also touched by the photos of her father immediately before his death. Showing his hospital bed in her parent’s living room and her brother visiting with her father was extremely touching.

Grouping the photos in twos and fours were very effective. The grouping and the smaller size offered intimacy and told a story. They captured my soul.

Unlike genealogy family history isn’t always direct, linear, clean, or pretty. In genealogy you have a chart with names, dates, births, deaths, and marriages – the facts. As I mentioned in my last blog once we add the factor of pictures and place of births we can make assumptions of connections, but just because Vava Brodsky or the poet Joseph Brodsky have the same last name, it doesn’t make them related. Just as births in very distant places doesn’t mean that they’re not. As with all history writing, family history is about interpretation of events. It involves sensing and perceiving what happened and, in the case of identifying the contents photos, intuition.

I recently read a manuscript of an  unpublished book Wonderlust my friend Laurie MacDougall just wrote. It is a fast moving account of her life as the daughter of a Hollywood screenwriter living on a farm in the San Fernando Valley in the 1940′s and ‘50′s. What makes her book work so well is that she found her mother’s journals and poetry and had the transcripts of an interview of her father written for the Screenwriters Guild. It is a caring account of the humanness of family. There is no blame, just compassion and humor.

It is with this type of compassion that I am writing. We all have faults, problems and inconsistencies. Perfection isn’t interesting, but the stories that make us laugh or cry are. This blog is not a memoir or autobiography. It is what comes up for me or others when looking at these pictures. Laurie told me “My family wrote. Yours took pictures”.

Who’s in the photo

After my last post my cousin V wrote me asking “Ok the picture with the Brody Sisters 1946,,,,who is everyone???”

I meant to identify it, but it got late and I just wanted to post the piece. I asked my second cousin Mark to verify that it was his grandfather, Meyer in the photo. He said that he was unsure.   I assume that it is (intuition) because of where he is standing in relation to both Alice and Reine.  I also looked at other photos with Alice in them and he’s there.

Seated:  Shirley, Rozzie (Lizzie’s daughter), Alice, Dora, and Lila (Dora’s daughter).  Standing: Meyer Gaffen (Alice’s husband), Reine (Alice’s daughter), Lizzie, Robbie (Lizzie’s son), and his first wife (whose name I don’t know).

V also asked “Is that the ranch house on Laurel Street…what is the structure to the right???” It is Grandpa and Lizzie’s house, but in the ‘40′s the property was still a chicken ranch and not yet divided.  That happened in the early ‘50′s.  I’m unsure of what the structure is in the background to the right.  It looks like scaffolding to me.

V grew up in that house.  She was born after the property surrounding the house was sold and turned into a housing subdivision.  The property was on Laurel St. between 53rd and 54th in east San Diego.  I grew up about four blocks away.Up the hill at 55th and Laurel.

Comments from V

V also wrote:I read your new insights…you have an amazing, and accurate memory! I enjoy what you write, and I think you are very insightful. Thank you for doing this.I don’t think we are of the same family (rg: as Vava Brodsky)…but, she does look a lot like grandma. I think L looks the most like grandma Lizzie.

I too looked in the mirror and for a moment…I thought I looked just like my Mom.  My Mom and I had the exact same feet, but our features on our face were very different…but, for that moment…I looked just like her…I remember how it struck me…as it did with you as well, when it happened to you.  I think my teeth were a lot like my Mom’s as well, and our teeth were more from the Goodwin side of the family.

RG’s note:  We all have small jaws.   As for the teeth, I think that she’s referring to the size and shape.  She had to wear braces–I didn’t.  She is blonde and freckled and I’m dark and olive complected.

Grandma’s family lived on a Grofts land.  Her father was a blacksmith. I think he was manager of the property and lived well, compared to many Jews.  That is why they had so much money when they came. I think they also needed the money, since they had no one in the US, and needed the money to be able to stay, by showing they didn’t need someone to sponsor them, and help support them.

RG:  The story I remember is that the Groft’s sons and Lizzie’s older brothers immigrated to the US together after the Groft warned Lizzie’s father Max that things were going to get bad.  This is much like Tevya being warned in Fiddler on the Roof. They settled in Providence, RI. The Ellis Island manifests document that Lizzie’s parents were going to join their sons in Providence.

Grandpa’s side of the family was very orthodox.  Grandma was called the shicksta when she married Grandpa.  I believe Grandpa revolted from what he considered the extreme rules of being orthodox and left home at a fairly early age.  Grandma fit his world well…being Jewish was very important…but the orthodox ways were not what Grandpa wanted any part of.

Family resemblence

I heard from Birgit Wolz today.  She took the time to look at what I wrote about her last week.  She wrote “you look just like your grandmother”.  I took no offense to that since she was referring to my Grandma Lizzie, not my Grandma Fannie.  I think that I look like both my parents.In fact, I had an experience about fifteen years ago where as I was washing my face, I looked into the mirror and saw what Lizzie probably looked like in her 30′s.  I told my father about it and he gave one of his famously negative retorts of, “yeah, no great beauty”.

What Birgit doesn’t know is that most of us Brody’s look alike.  We have the high cheekbones and the short heavy legs (with the exception of Valerie) that my mother referred to as “Brody legs”.   The ten Goodwin cousins we do look a lot alike.  Although not V, as I think that her father’s family’s genes must have been stronger, but B and N look more like my older sisters and me than A did.  R certainly looked like us and D did when he was thinner.  It’s not just us Goodwin cousins, but it includes many of the children and grandchildren of Lizzie’s siblings.  But I more than the rest of the cousins have the deep set eyes.

Brodsky family from Kiev

As I thought about the family look or traits I was thinking about how much Marc Chagall’s wife, Vava Brodsky and Lizzie looked alike.  So I just spent the past couple of hours going through articles about Chagall on the web.  Chagall is my favorite painter so I enjoyed looking at the images of the paintings.  I really enjoy the ethereal quality of his work and the colors.  I found plenty of pictures of Chagall, but no photos of Vava-in all of the articles about her or them the photos had been extracted.  I did come up with this painting of Vava.

I learned that she was from Kiev, as was Lizzie, but I don’t know the actual town.  Chagall had commented, “I have another wife-the third-from the Brodsky family itself from Kiev”.  The Brodsky’s were sugar magnates.  The writer Shalom Aleichem who wrote The Tales of Tevya, better known as Fiddler on the Roof, worked for this family. 

I don’t know if my family is this group of Brodsky’s, but it brings to mind Lizzie’s story of getting off the boat at Ellis Island and being asked if they had any money and her father pulled out his money belt to show that they did.  In the Ellis Island logs it showed that they came with $150-more than any of the other immigrants on the ship, and what was a lot of money in 1904 when they arrived on December 15^th on the Hekla that shipped out of Copenhagen.

Vava was 25 years younger than Chagall.  She was his muse and he felt she was extremely beautiful and highly intelligent.  Nothing wrong with that.  Those are good qualities for men to notice.  I certainly like being noticed for both, but sometimes, especially now as I’m getting older, I’ll take the beautiful over the intelligent.

I also found this painting of a chicken that goes along with Lizzie’s chicken rancher days.