time to make fun of the robocommenters

robocommenting is big business. it is part of the grey and black hat operations of dubious little people selling SEO packages to dubious little people or with dubious little businesses and what they NEED is a lot of backlinks or to find patsies who will link farm or link exchange and what they need is for YOU, little blogger, to keep their comment on your blog so that their link is out there, because somebody's paying by the link or the view.

yeah, it would be awesome if everybody all at once got interested in my youtube videos i guess, but there's little point in buying "views" which aren't any more than a lot of clickthroughs.

i mean, really. are you telling a story here, or do you just want to show how much other people are willing to click on your link?

nevermind.

i know the answer to that.

anyway, manipulative crap meant to take advantage of people with low self-esteem or low intelligence kind of burns my butt, and you see a lont of that crap in the robocomments.

the process works like this: some shady little person who wants a lot of clickthroughs for their get-rich-quick scheme pays x amount of dollars to a black hat SEO outfit that offers bazillions of views or clickthroughs or backlinks for a price.

then the blackhatter whips up a couple of generic comments that are meant to sound like real people and they use bots or low-paid labor to paste their spam comments to a lot of blogs hoping that good natured people will allow those comments onto their blogs.

you might could just filter and delete them, but i don't. i read them, because i am fascinated by the way they try to capitalize on people's vulnerabilities.

so let's take a look at some classic stuff i've been saving, shall we?

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this is the generic "wow, i love your layout!" it has a popular variant that goes something like "wow, this layout is almost exactly the layout of my old blog!"

the layout of my blog is a standard blogger template with some minor adjustments. but thanks.

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i'm so glad to be useful to you.  i am kind of puzzled why you consider this post to be "helpful information", but whatever.

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educational. well, that's not really a thing i would expect, but it's your education so i guess you'd know.

and i guess some people are just really, really stupid:

You really make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and extremely broad for me. I am looking forward for your next post, I will try to get the hang of it! My blog post 

you keep trying. i'm sure you will eventually come to understand pudding. i know it's a struggle, but it will be worthwhile for you to gain mastery of it in the end.

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huh. if my description of the pond skimming is reading your thoughts, i have worries about you. come to think of it, you comment is slightly less coherent than a simple bad translation of a foreign language spam, so what exactly ARE your thoughts? and what's the deal with the omegas instead of w's?  is that some sort of way for you to sign your scuzzy work?

and then i noticed that some robospams are getting hostile, because apparently they think criticizing people's work will get responses and backlinks:

I think that what you composed was actually very reasonable. But, consider this, what if you added a little content? I mean, I don't want to tell you how to run your blog, but suppose you added something that grabbed people's attention? I mean "how to make awesome pudding" is a little plain. You should look at Yahoo's home page and watch how they create news headlines to grab viewers interested. You might add a video or a picture or two to grab readers interested about everything've got to say. In my opinion, it could make your posts a little livelier. My site :

mmmhm. yes, what if i added a little content? i have been thinking just that thing. flask, i says to myself: maybe you should put a little content in here and maybe be more like yahoo's home page, because that's all FULL of content and not linkbait and spam and cheap advertising. i am so glad this commenter stopped to put me on the right track, because with all of these posts and no content i was starting to wonder what the purpose of the exercise is. thank you, oh, THANK you spambot commenter, for showing me what i was missing from my content-empty blog!

and this, designed, i guess, to rile up the commenters while not saying anything specific:

I drop a comment each time I like a post on a website or I have something to contribute to the conversation. It is triggered by the passion displayed in the article I looked at. And after this post "how to make awesome pudding". I was actually moved enough to post a thought :-) I actually do have a couple of questions for you if you do not mind. Could it be only me or does it look as if like some of the comments appear like left by brain dead visitors? :-P And, if you are posting on other online social sites, I'd like to follow you. Could you make a list every one of all your communal sites like your twitter feed, Facebook page or linkedin profile? Here is my web-site -

my, but don't you sound all casual and friendly! it's like the two of us are in here together against ALL THESE LUNATICS. clearly we have a special bond.

and then there's this, and a lot like it:

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huh?

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and whut?

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*blinks eyes*

and finally:

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really? you have a blog similar to mine? because mine covers a pretty small niche, namely THINGS I AM THINKING ABOUT. but yes, now that you mention it, i do get a lot of spam remarks. i think one of the best ways for me not to get so many spam remarks would be for you not to write them.

and no, i will not be surfing over to your webpage, even though i feel free to do so. my webpage: http://furthermoreflask.blogspot.com/

living descendants

i am not yet down writing about the mintzes.  i'm mostly done, but i'm wrapping up the details of my picture of who they were.

you know, because i happened to have been walking by that one grave on a saturday afternoon.

but that one guy wasn't a tidy little picture. THERE WAS A TON OF STUFF TO READ! and as i kept learning about the family, i kept having questions.

and if you can't for instance, figure out where jay went after he graduated from cornell or how exactly harry is related to ben, you just start pushing outward on the things you DO know, looking for clues.

and the clues i found led me right to living descendants of lawrence and lionel. original ben.

i wrote to them best i could. had to log into facebook to do it.

hi, i'm a total stranger and i have spent two weeks of my life researching your family, just for giggles. if these are your people, please write back. i want to share with you what i know.

i don't know if they will think i am a crackpot or a blackmailer or a genealogy-for-hire cold caller or what, but at this point i probably know more than any person living on this planet about this particular branch of their family and i believe they ought to have all the links to the files and the junior sleuthing i did because they're kin.


i have not heard from them yet.

hope.

it's about the cheese

last month i think i mentioned that i'd gotten the breakfast burrito at good to go, a market in trumansburg. i got it because the nice young woman at the counter said it was good.

and it was.

but i was noticing that they have all kinda good things there, including some very nice looking local cheeses and if you've known me for more than a day you know i like cheese.

there's a guy buying one of the local cheeses and i ask him a few questions about its pungency and staying power which are the sort of thing you want to know if you're living in your car and do not have a refrigerator.

and here's a thing about local people: when you start asking questions about products made locally, they are usually very happy to tell you just what's good and what you should not miss. it's like that pretty much everywhere you travel.

and the people in the store had a number of cheese recommendations for me, and also told me that the cheese counter at the shur-fine has a DIFFERENT selection of good local cheese.

really? the shur-fine?

yep.

the shur-fine is not the brightest or most up-to-date of grocery stores and its selection is limited but by golly they have a whole case devoted to fine local cheese.

i put that information on my list.

but then i happen to be coming back through trumansburg in the afternoon on a wednesday which is AWESOME because i had so far missed being in trumansburg on wednesday afternoons and that's when they have the farmer's market.

and it turns out the farmer who makes that cheese i was asking about at the store is there selling her cheeses and i thought i'd just pick one up direct from the farmer because awesome.

i bought one and went off happy and whistling, knowing that it would keep (properly stored) until i was good and ready to eat it.

now, i am nearly always ready to eat cheese, but when the cheese is nice, i like to be ready for it. ready means i can store unused portions properly. ready means i will have opportunities to finish the cheese while it's still at its practical best.

fast forward to last week.


it was a kenton bianco and i didn't do anything fancy with it. i ate a couple of slices plain, just because. mostly i ate them the way i like to eat brie: on toast with my homemade feral apple jam.

the one cheese lasted me about four days. the first day it was light and relatively firm and quite lovely. it matured a little each day and by the last day it was creamier and more flavorful, but oddly not more pungent. sometimes a soft-ripened cheese gets decidedly stinkier over some days. depending on the particular cheese, more stinkier is better, or it's not. it depends largely on how much you enjoy any one cheese's signature stink.

this kenton bianco got more complex flavors, but not stronger flavors, if that makes sense to you. by that last day it was a cheese i would have elbowed you out of the way to get more of.

life in clippings: the mintzes in military service

this whole thing for me started with lawrence.

LAWRENCE M.
MINTZ
-
NEW YORK
-
2 LIEUT. INFANTRY
JUNE 29, 1889
APRIL 14, 1944


his headstone doesn't say he was a judge. his headstone says he was a second lieutenant.

he graduated from cornell university in 1911 and very soon after he received word  that he had been "designated by the state department to try examinations in Washintgon on Jan. 29, which, if passed, will make him eligible for appointment to a position in the consular service. "

this is front page news. his return from washington in 1912 following the exam is also reported, although i have seen no record of the result. in 1915 he is practicing law in ithaca.

about a month after president wilson announced the breaking of diplomatic ties with germany, he enlisted in the army. it is worth reading the newspaper account of his service record. most of the news items that exist about him talk of his appearance in ithaca with a recruiter, or his furloughs while he was still stateside, or his promotions.

there is little evidence he spoke much about his combat service with the 108th ny infantry, and you don't have to read too much of the regimental history to know more than maybe you want to know. there's a book kind of like a yearbook of this unit from 1918, and on page 27 you can find a little picture of color sergeant lawrence m. mintz. i'm going to encourage you to go to the digitized copy of the whole document and look at the faces of those men.

just because.


lionel was the baby of the family. he was a singer, a storyteller, and  a comedian. he was a frequent performer on local stages, and if a group of people went on an outing, he led a great deal of the singing. in high school he started a fraternity and got elected captain of the football team. out of high school, he was a volunteer fireman, and commissioner of the city baseball league.

he was such a large and flamboyant personality that newspapers even reported RUMORS about him, which then had to be retracted.

in march of 1918 he reported for duty to camp upton for radio classes with the 321st field signal battalion.

now, the actual service record of this unit is a bit of a mystery to me. there is a great deal of news from them while they are in training at camp upton, and a lovely photo of one of their radio training classrooms.

there is a news account that the unit has arrived in france, but after that, there is simply nothing i can find until the point at which they are shipped home.

i am going to assume, based on the mountain of information i have read about signal battalions in WWI europe in general that they did actually did do some stuff, but that the record of what they did may not be digitized and online.

that's kind of a key concept when you are researching historical events from old newspapers and obscure books: it used to be you had to track down everything and GO TO THE LIBRARIES and sit for hours with unindexed copies and nowadays anyone like me can just sit online and search (granted, you have to be good with search) the digitized copies.

but digitizing those copies is slow work, and while every day more and more of these records are available for public use, a great deal of it is simply hidden.

anyway, i'm assuming that lionel and his unit did some stuff.

in 1919 once he was stateside he did a series of big patriotic town meetings where he and two other guys who'd fought in europe, a latin professor (why?) and a musical ensemble made a tour of finger lakes towns telling people about it.

when gustave enlists it's a big enough deal to be covered in the paper, but it's already june of 1918. those three months between march and june make a big difference in how your war goes.

here is a thing i learned while working on this post: the gears of the great machine bringing american men into the army and getting them trained move so slowly that many of american men who enlist and train for world war I never actually get shipped out.

what i know for sure is that gustave shipped to washington for engineer training at camp a.a. humphreys and that of the ten regiments of replacement engineers authorized, only five were ever trained. i have record that the "first quota" (however many men that is)  was shipped to france and that shipments continued until armistice, but i have not yet seen any indication if gusatve is among those sent to france, or among those who were at home getting ready to ship to france when the war ended.

i am taking a flying guess based on gustave's popularity among the men of the ithaca chapter of the newly chartered american legion that he did manage to serve in france.

in any case,  when the ithaca daily news runs a full-page spread naming all the "The Boys From Tompkins County Who Did Their Share in the World War to Help Keep the Huns From Destroying Civilization", all three brothers ore on the list.

in the next generation, lawrence's son ben graduated from cornell in 1943 and reported to field artillery replacement training at fort bragg. it is possible that he served with the 690th field artilery battalion in europe and may have been be the author of a small (31 pages) volume titled From normandy to leipzig, the 690th Field artillery Battalion.

that volume was written by a ben e. mintz under supervision of a US army officer but -and this is a big "but"- the volume is in german, published in leipzig.

still, it may only be an excerpt of the army's own history of the battalion, one chapetr of which is titled, oddly, From normandy to leipzig, the 690th Field artillery Battalion.

OUR ben e. mintz, we know, served in europe in a field artillery unit. we also know he could write, so it's not a huge leap of imagination to think that he may have been one of the junior officers that wrote up reports.

he was discharged in 1946 a captain and returned to cornell to work in ints athletic department, eventually becoming the director of publicity for cornell athetics and being named to cornell's hall of fame.

meanwhile, aaron's son edward  (cornell AB 1931) was commissioned a 2d lieutenant in the army air corps in 1942 and was stationed at mitchel field. there's rather a lot written about his service in the CBI theater, which involved legal, insurance and disposition work with aircraft.

oh, and intelligence work.

they don't hardly mention the intelligence work, but talk a lot about insurance.

because he was an insurance salesman.

yeah, there was a little thing about being a lawyer and all that, but insurance.

and if you have the time and inclination and want to know a lot more about him and his service, you can inquire at the air force historical research agency or the library of congress.

product placement

we need to have this talk because last last month i bought a cheese and very soon i will be telling you how very, very much i enjoyed it.

because the whole point of this blog is to tell you about stuff i'm thinking about or stuff i'm doing or whatever i'm interested in, sometimes that will involve products or services that are for sale.

i just need to make it clear that when i'm talking about somebody's business or their product, it's because i have something i want to say about it. i am not paid for these commentaries, not in money or in samples and quite frankly some of those companies would probably just as well i not mention them.

i need you to know that if the day ever comes that i am shilling for a product because i am receiving some sort of compensation, i will tell you right up front because i don't believe it's inherently immoral for a company to offer compensation for people to write about their products.

here are my rules (like it's ever going to be an issue, right?):

if i am reviewing a product because i have been asked to, i will say so.

if i am reviewing a product and i have received any of it without cost to me, i will say so.

if i am affiliated with the business, i will say so.

and if they out-and-out pay me to write good things about product, i will label it as paid advertising.

i do not imagine this is ever going to be an issue, but it's good to have rules right up front.

if we're going to talk about full disclosure, though, i do go on and on about how much i like riding at my local mountain bike venue, and for some years now i have paid for my membership by assorted services. mostly my job is to ride around in uniform and help people find trails they will enjoy riding. i also check to see if people have trail passes.

there's my disclosure.

later on i will talk about cheese.

you know, because it's awesome cheese.

life in clippings: joinery

i'm about to wrap up my study of the mintzes of ithaca.

you know that awkward stage in a relationship where you're just falling in love with a whole group of people who have been dead for a few decades and at first blush everything they do is fantastic but then you start to notice the little things about them, like their family fights and it's a little embarrassing but then you realize they're just regular people like you and you think it's cute when they have spinach in their teeth?

i think i'm done finding all the information i'm going to find, and i'm trying to tie the bits of news into some data you can look at.


i have a lot of information about the mintzes and their affiliations with various organizations, and i have been thinking for some days how to make a graphic representation that shows the sheer volume of their affiliations and memberships.

the mintzes are joiners. they join civic and service clubs, professional and alumni associations, fund raising drives, sports clubs, and political parties.

where there exist insufficient clubs for them to join, they found new ones.

they go right ahead and join the military if there's a need, and i think i want to devote a whole post to that.

(i know, right? i swear, at some point i'm going to stop blogging about the mintzes and post about some civil war soldiers whose graves i found on my way BACK from the party that saturday afternoon because when all is said and done what this blog is really about is telling the story of where i am, what i'm doing, and what i'm thinking about. and right now what i am thinking about is some people who are buried in a place where i happened to see them and wonder what i could find out about their lives. you know. like you do.)

all right, so i've been going back and forth about how to represent the data about organizational affiliations. i keep making charts and tables and then as i move data in, it looks very flat and what i am concluding is that not all information is interesting when you look at it in a graphic representation.

so i've settled on just listing anecdotally the organizations the mintzes belonged to or worked with.

etta was a member of the choir at the first presbyterian church and performed as a soloist as parts of shows for the cornell music clubs and a lot of assorted pageants and concerts.

the mintzes were heavily democrats. they are recorded as belonging to the democratic party, running democratic campaigns, being endorsed by the democratic party for office, helping to run democratic party machines, and even serving as a delegate to the democratic national convention. it should be noted that the ithaca daily news, for which lionel worked, is the democratic party mouthpiece of tompkins county.

they worked in local government, serving on various boards and commissions.

lionel and gustave were involved in the chartering of ithaca's brand new chapter of the american legion. it is possible that lawrence also was involved in the organization, but the clippings i have seen do not mention it.

they belonged to professional organizations and alumni organizations. they ran charity drives.

they belonged to the elks, the rotary, the royal arcanum, and the maccabees.

they were active on sports teams, and lionel was commissioner of the ithaca city baseball league.

they sang and acted in pageants, variety shows, and comedy routines. they gave lectures. one or two of them even appeared in silent films.

if you could join a thing, they joined it. if a thing was not available to join, they opened up a chapter of it or created a whole new club from scratch.

the mintzes were enmeshed in the fabric of their community.

live news!

cicadas!!!!

it's a brood II year, which means i have a chance of going somewhere i can see them.

i am waiting (im)patiently, checking the live map every day to see if there are reports of the emergence coming far enough north for me to go.

i figure i need them to come as far north as bennington sort of, so i can stay on a campsite down there.

but there's a map!


did i mention a LIVE UPDATING MAP????


WITH DAILY REPORTS OF SIGHTINGS???????


*hops up and down with excitement*

life in clippings: what the....?

ok. maybe you want to get out a pencil and paper so you can make a little diagram.

later on i will show you my diagram, but we are still a few days out from that.

i kept seeing articles in which harry mintz, attorney and teacher, of binghamton (NOT harry mintz, attorney, son of ben the clothing store owner) is a relation of ben.

and they all seem to be intertwined and i KNOW it's a close relationship just from the frequency these people overlap.

but i can NOT make sense of it.

ben's wife is named rachel and she was born in 1857.

harry's mother is named rachel and she was born in 1854.

harry has two brothers, hiram and jacob.

hiram, jacob, and harry are all buried with their mother (rachel) and father (ephriam) in binghamton.

ben is buried in syracuse.

ben's son aaron has a daughter named ruth who is a niece of hiram.

harry is ben's brother.

ben's children are buried in ithaca.



now who lives in the yellow house?



here's my working solution:

ben is buried in syracuse with his wife (1857 rachel) and mother. ben's mother is ephriam's FIRST wife. harry, hiram, and jacob are ben's HALF brothers, and ruth is hiram's GREAT niece.

i can't prove this puppy beyond all doubt, but it is the simplest explanation for the facts that i know.

life in clippings: everyday antisemitism

this has less to do with the mintzes and more to do with the time in which they lived.

stupid stinking anti-semitism isn't over, but among polite people it's at least not stylish so bigots mostly pretend not to be bigoted.

oh, did you think i was going to write as a neutral?

ha.

so anyway, i was looking at clippings that detail the donors to various charities and causes, and there are a LOT of examples where the mintzes are either performing for charity events, organizing charity events, or ponying up cash.

and a fair amount of cash, too.

but then i noticed a couple of disturbing items.

let's back up a little.

ok, let's back up a lot.

the jewish people have been sitting on the ugly end of systematic persecution for a LONG time.

so maybe we'll only back up to about 1820 when a specific wave of systematic violence and persecution against jews in russia was just getting rolling.

we'll just call those the pogroms.

in these years, a lot of russian jews emmigrated to the US and the UK. some of them were actively escaping, and some simply looked around them, noticed the future wasn't looking bright for jews in russia, and they packed up and left.

i'm making some guesses when i say that the mintz family arrived in america to escape the pogroms. what i know for certain is that they were russian, they were jewish, and they began arriving in the US in the late 1860s.

it might fairly be said that they were in fact escaping the pogroms because even if that was not their intent, it was certainly the outcome. the worst of the pogroms came after they were already here.

we know that many russian jews arriving in the US in these years were poor, but there is some evidence that the mintz family arrived with at least some of their wealth intact.

once again, i'm making some guesses based on the prosperity of the family even in that first generation.

they were wealthy enough to employ live-in servants and to send multiple children to cornell university. they "took cabins" on the lake and went on a great deal of vacations, many of which were reported in the newspapers.

by contrast my family, which arrived in the US from eastern europe starting in the 1880s has never achieved that level of affluence.

what i'm saying here is that these people were not a drain on the resources of the american economy.

so now we get to the part where i'm sitting here at my desk reading the clippings about the mintzes and of ithaca in those days and my search turns up a nice little article about the jewish new year.

it serves the purpose of telling people a little about the holiday and also informs the town that the stores in town owned by jewish families will be closed in observance.

the article seems harmless, but it does have a quality about it where jews are odd foreigners among us, even if we like them.

by itself, i would not have thought twice until i got to a 1905 article in the ithaca daily news about money being raised to help the victims of the pogroms and what really burns my butt here is in the headlines:

RUSSIAN JEWS AIDED 

BY ITHACA BRETHREN 

-------

NO OTHER CITIZENS SOLICITED 

----------

Members of Race Careful Not to, Ask 

Help of Christians, But Any Such 

Contributions Will be Gratefully 

Accepted—News Believes That 

Publicity Will Help On This Good 

Work Here. 

really? dafuq? i don't even know where to start. first of all,  jewish is not a race, nevermind the wrongness of  dividing people into races for any purpose other than description.

(newsflash for racial purity hatwipes: we're all interbreeding now, and it turns out we have neanderthal DNA, so we're not even species pure. get over it. isn't it nice that we come in such a wide variety of colors? you can select a mate to match your sofa!)

but anyway. we want to help people who are being brutalized and for some reason we need to take an apologetic tone deferential to christians that we are even asking? because only jews should be properly concerned with helping other jews? and christians should not be troubled by the request?

ugh. that is so wrong it makes my brain hurt.

happily, in a 1915 article about relief for russian jews (yes, still the pogroms), there is no such caution about being careful not to ask the christians. happily, many of the names on the list are christian people of ithaca.

there's still that feeling of "other", though, that i do not like. i know, it is very progressive and tolerant for its day. i know, in the day it is simply smashing for jewish families to be able to live and work and go to school with everybody else and be in the society pages and the institutionalization of "otherness" is not as bad as the institutionalization of oppression.

and everyone of the era seems to take part in a cheerful racism against all non-whites.

but still.

on a mintz-study note, although the mintzes show up on donor lists for just about every other cause, they are absent from the lists of donors to aid the russian jews. since they ARE russian jews, maybe they feel it is poor form to be connected with such a fund? maybe they are already contributing to this cause by helping out their own extended family? already paying to bring more jews out of russia?

i don't know.

often study of a thing raises more questions than it answers.

life in clippings: why?

it started out simple.

i wanted to look up a few things about a couple of guys whose headstones i happened to have passed on my way to meet some people on a saturday afternoon.

as people, we mark the graves of our dead. we list our dates of birth and death and our relationships and sometimes our accomplishments. there is something about us that wishes to be remembered and commemorated.

so it's a thing i do pretty often, when i'm near a cemetery with old graves: i take a few pictures of stones that catch my eye and i try to put together a small picture of the person's life.

i wanted to say here is lawrence m. mintz. he was in the army. he had a family. he lived here in ithaca.

but it turned out that there was a LOT of information available with just a little digging and a great deal more information available with a lot of digging, and when you collect enough fragments about one person and then one family and then the community they lived in, you learn a lot about not just how this one guy lived, but how people lived.

there's broad view history, and there's narrow view history. i like the narrow view. ithaca ny is a city i care about. you can maybe tell its story in a general way but it is made of individual people living in a community. the really interesting things about the city are expressed in the lives of its people.

and you can't tell the story of all of the people, but you can take some small samplings. you can build a larger general picture from the fragments.

i kept finding interesting things, so i kept digging. it tickled my brain like a puzzle.

i still do not know in what year the clothing store closed. i still do not know in what year rachel died, or if jay married or had children. i still do not know in what year ruby was born, or the anything about the other infant who died. i don't know which of aaron's daughters married jack, and which married sol.

and they are no kin of mine, yet they feel to me like more than accidental strangers. i have a great fondness for them and the story of their lives, and i want to tell you who they were.

i keep thinking of ways to try to answer one question, but then a lot of answers to questions i didn't ask pop up, and of course more questions.

i hope you are not bored to death with them, because i'm going to keep telling their story.

i am not sure yet how to tie the pieces together.

Month of MAYhem Residential Neighborhood Blogging Challenge™ day 31

i was all bunched up about number 9 on the list of activities, thinking that i had to make the house numbers match the calendar day on which i did them, but then i realized it's totally acceptable (once again, they're MY rules to start with) to do all these things in advance -and quite frankly you just HAVE to do some in advance- so all i really have to do is make sure i report to you on the proper day that matches the house numbers and even relaxed some it was still not so easy to find two houses with the same street adresses, one located in the state where i AM and one in the area of the state where i was GOING.

i tried really hard, both on the way out and the way back.

it is a lot harder than i had originally thought, because there are fewer and fewer houses with numbers below 31 these days on account of enhanced 911 addresses.

and there's the additional challenge of your research. if you can FIND two matching addresses, even if you use multiple sources, when you get ont eh ground you might find that number 13 main street in that  town you have painstakingly gone to simply does not exist.

or that while according to your sources it is a residential property and in google earth it LOOKS like a residential property, when you get there it is a used car lot.

you can devote several days to this project and still not complete it.

WHY you would do such a thing is beyond me, but it's there all the same.

life in clippings: what the mintzes are doing

i am still organizing what i have read about the ithaca mintzes.

it's not that i have a particular obsession with this one family, but the study of one group of people tells you a lot about their time and place, which i find maddeningly fascinating.

to be sure, the mintzes are in the papers a lot more than, say my family but just reading the papers of the time with some kind of focus gives you a view of the time.

i suppose i could do a study of all the mentions of benwick beach or fires in the city or the funding of the poorhouse, but i accidentally fell into the story of the mintzes.

i am developing some ideas about the function of newspapers in the 19th century as opposed to contemporary newspapers. maybe it says something about the plight of modern print papers, and maybe it doesn't.

to be sure, if there was a story that was shocking or lurid, it got covered and although there are many things no longer  considered shocking and lurid, some things just don't change.

the papers of that day included a lot of information about people visiting other towns or providing entertainment to local organizations and giving to charitable funds. i think this serves partly as both social glue and pressure to conform to social norms.

"we see you are here, visitor.", they say. "here's  who is doing their part in our community." "our local people are well-connected". "we know who stole that sign".

shocking to my sensibilities, it was at one time thought that the guest registers of hotels were news items.

i have no doubt that one of the reasons everybody bought newspapers is that they were in them. you hosted a card party? you can read about that in the paper. you went on the train and people were singing? it's in the paper. broke your arm? in the paper.

no, it is not facebook. there is a very big difference between "i had lunch in auburn" and "we noticed you had lunch in auburn and thought the whole city might like to know". there is a difference between "notice me!" and "we noticed you."

i know i keep telling you that i am providing links to the digitized versions of the pages in which i am finding the mintzes, but i really hope you are reading some of them.

anyway, here's my timeline of the various comings and goings of the mintz family as represented by newspaper clippings across a century and a half. the items on the timeline are all sourced to the newspaper pages on which they appear, so have fun with that.

hey, ho, the wind and the rain

for the rain it raineth every day.

last sunday (18 may) it rained in the afternoon. ten it rained again monday afternoon. tuesday night the sky opened up late and it rained heavily most of my sleeping hours. on wednesday there were a few hours in which it wasn't actively raining, but then at about 6 pm it really started RAINING.

and then it kept raining filthy blattereing, slat-splitting, barrel-busting rain right through until sunday afternoon when the sun came out and the weather tried to pretend everything was all good between us but the damage had been done.

thursday night the police were out in force, crawling the roads with their spotlights glued to the shoulders and i thought: i wonder if they're looking for washouts?

of course they were. when the water comes it eats away the dirt under the pavement and sometimes you see the sharp gully where the shoulder used to be and sometimes you don't see it so much until the pavement collapses and our road crews have been hot juggling to backfill with big stone just to keep the roads open, the ones they can save.

thursday night the water came and swept away a good deal of weed road.

used to be a lot of road up in essex and westford that were sitting low in relation to the lamoille river and its feeders would just get closed until the water backed off, and in the spring kayakers just use pettingill road as a temporary parking lot for the meltwater playground.

so when i saw the ROAD CLOSED signs i just thought that i'd have a little look at how much water is across weed road because that can be cool.

but the problem is not that there's water on weed road. the problem is not that the shoulder's been eroded or some of the pavement washed out.

there's a chunk missing so big you could drop a dumptruck into it and have room left over for a few smartcars.

i went to look at it on this first day of sunshine, this first day of not-raining and i was not the only person with that idea. it's like a party going on, all the cars and trucks parked and people walking in and out with cameras and -for some reason- paintings of guitars.

we were out to look at the damage to our roads, and weed road was the place to be.

Month of MAYhem Residential Neighborhood Blogging challenge™ day 28

woo!

it's day 28 of the Month of MAYhem Residential Neighborhood Blogging challenge™ and here's my map of 28 school street, every state, USA.



View 28 school street in a larger map

telephone survey

when the young man calls me on the phone to ask me lengthy questions about waste disposal in my district, my first thought is that he is poorly suited for the job because he has difficulty reading the questions to me.

telephone survey people should be able to read well enough to ask the questions.

and i am not super fun for him to try to sort out answers.

i do not have a choice about who hauls the trash in my neighborhood. i also do not mow my own lawn.

i therefore do not have opinons on waste disposal in my district, nor do i have opinions on how yard waste is composted.

i also do not know what my income is. yes, i've heard the figure. i simply don't remember.

it's a LONG survey. there are a lot of things on it i might have an opinion about if they were things i had to arrange for or take care of, but since haulage is the province of my HOA, however the trash gets taken care of is how it gets taken care of.

i follow the directions about recycling, but past that it's really not up to me.

i figure the only reason i'm not a total waste of this young man's time is because he's probably getting paid hourly and his supervisor is probably checking to see that he made the calls he was supposed to make.

the fact that he has this job and that his reading skills are poor indicates to me that he is probably some broke-ass kid with few prospects so even though i'm ticked off to be disturbed by phone surveys at my home, i try to be nice.

life in clippings: ben mintz, inc.

i am STILL not writing my geocaching logs for the afternoon of may 4th because in the telling of the story i am totally stopped in playing junior historian around the mintz family just because i happened to have walked by some of their graves and for some reason gotten interested.

i found altogether more stuff than you probably need to know about one family living in the 19th and early 20th century in one small town in central new york, but i find the portrait of that life to be really, really fascinating.

it's not just about the mintzes; it's about life of that time and place.

in 1876 ben mintz established a clothing store at 129-132 state street in ithaca. apparently there is a louis mintz operating a clothing store in ithaca also, but it is not clear to me whether this louis mintz is ben mintz's brother or another louis mintz who appears to be living in ithaca also at this time.

later on maybe i will have answers.

just not now.

but as i was following the lives of the mintz family in ithaca, i kept seeing notices and ads from their store, and i put together a timeline of some of those ads as a sort of rough history of the business.




so far i know that ben mintz dies sometime before 1922 and that the family carried on the business for some years after. the 1930 ithaca business directory lists a bunch of mintzes as employed there.

and parenthetically, if you're in the mood for clicking links, i'm telling a sort of narrow story but i am linking you in many cases to digitized copies of the original publications where i found the information and by golly you can get LOST in those things. i totally recommend it.

i have not yet been able to find in what year the business closed.

there is a book in the tompkins county public library called Ithaca and its past : the history and architecture of the down-town by Daniel R. Snodderly, and it is available in two parts for online viewing:

http://tcpl.org/local-history/documents/ithaca-tc/Ithaca_and_its_Past/001to48.pdf
http://tcpl.org/local-history/documents/ithaca-tc/Ithaca_and_its_Past/041to94.pdf

(oh, goodness! how totally awesome is that?)

i mention it mostly because on page 32 there is a handsome illustration of the 100 block of state street and also because there are many lovely photographs state street buildings and the town in general, which is nice if you like that sort of thing.

i do.

it is interesting to note, however, that the author mentions only briefly the building at 121 to 131 east state street (page 36). he says:

Note also the alternation of
two- and three-window groups on the second floor, and the change
in brick color. (The first floor was originally divided into two stores.)
S. S. Kresge's built this structure to house a five and dime store, and
CVS bought the building in 1969. Barr Brothers hardware was at 127
from the 1880s until the 1920s.

he does not mention that half of the first floor was taken up by ben mintz inc.  from 1876 to at least 1930. i have no idea why he leaves this bit of information out; there's certainly no shortage of evidence and the book mentions a large number of stores with lesser tenures.

that's enough for now, i think. i am still up to my armpits in mintz histories, but i'm done writing for today.

life in clippings: the mintzes of ithaca

yeah, i'm still working my way up the hill toward the party. i parked at the bottom of the cemetery to have a look around, but then i noticed that i was not too far to walk to a party i was going to, and i had some time on the way to visit with the graves.

no, it's not incongruous.

because i said so.

anyway, up in the jewish section there was a plain stone that caught my eye and it turns out he's an interesting fellow. there is much one can learn about him just from newspaper clippings.

the stone reads:

LAWRENCE M.
MINTZ
-
NEW YORK
-
2 LIEUT. INFANTRY
JUNE 29, 1889
APRIL 14, 1944

i'm just giving you the pertinent excerpts that illustrate his life, but i'm linking you to the full pages in the publications where i found them, and they are worth reading.

lawrence m. mintz lived at 402 west seneca street with his parents, ben and rachel mintz and his brothers harry, aaron, and jay.




ok, let's face it: i've waded in pretty far here to construct a biography of a long-dead stranger, and there are some things i KNOW and some things i think are true.

there are a lot of mintz children in ithaca; up until some point after 1901 but before 1916 ben's brother louis also lives in ithaca with his family and in july of 1884 the ithaca daily democrat reports that the family business, mintz's clothing, is owned by louis. the proprietorship seems to have passed to ben at least by 1912.

the 1901 ithaca city directory lists ben as the proprietor of "ben mintz clothing and men's furnishings" and louis's occupation as "com trav", or commercial traveler, which is a travelling salesman.

in 1901 both brothers have homes in ithaca. ben and his family live at 402 west seneca street and louis and his family live at 222 spencer street.

in ben's family beside the four sons listed in the 1916 poole account, there is a daughter, ruby whom i know about by way of a headstone inscription and i think she died in infancy.  there are two other sons, gustave e. and lionel. there is also a daughter, esther etta)

i have some guesses about the birth order of the mintz children.  i do not know in what year ruby was born. it is equally likely that she was born before or after jay. the size and inscription of her headstone suggests she died in infancy, which i'm going to say makes her up to about two at her death, so a death date of 1887 puts her birth somewhere between 1885 and 1887. i believe jay was born in 1886, assuming he is 21 when he graduates from cornell.

i'm making that assumption about jay's age at graduation because of those mintzes whose birth dates and graduation years i know, they are 21 at graduation, so if it's not exact, it's a pretty close approximation.

the 1901 ithaca city directory lists the ben mintz household as including ben, aaron, etta, gustave, and jay. since wives do not appear to be listed as separate persons anywhere, i will assume rachel is implied. aaron and jay are listed as students, while gustave is listed as a clerk at the clothing store, which makes him of employable age. 

harry, lawrence, and lionel are not listed in ben's household in the 1901 directory. harry would have been about 24 years old and old enough to have his own residence.  lawrence and lionel would have been 12 and 10 respectively. since wives are not listed in the directory, i am guessing that minor children are not listed either.

since aaron and jay are both listed as students but are about six years apart in age, i am going to guess that aaron is a student at cornell and that jay is attending ithaca high school in 1901. i am also going to take a wild flying guess that in the mintz family all children at least finish high school, so even if gustave never went to college, he falls in the birth order somewhere between aaron and jay.

for the purposes of my handy-dandy chart, ive gone ahead and placed estimated values and relationships alongside known ones. i would love to SHOW you my handy-dandy little chart, but i'm having trouble getting the thing to download properly so you can see it.

it's a pretty safe bet that when the daily democrat reports in 1884 that

Mrs. B. Mintz and family, Miss Anna
Mintz and Mr. Louis Hurwitz returned this
morning from a trip to Cazenovia and Sy­racuse. 

the only two children of her family present are harry and esther.

louis's 1901 household lists louis, aaron, dorothy, and fannie.

yes, a different aaron. both brothers were owners of the clothing store at some point. both brothers have sons named aaron. both brothers have sons named gustave. this suggest an interesting family dynamic. i have no idea what that dynamic is, but i bet it's interesting.

louis and his wife sarah have five children that i know of: dorothy, fannie, gustave, herschel, and aaron.   gustave, a lifeguard at benwick beach dies at the age of 18 when he is rather famously drowned by alexander karst. dorothy and fannie both become teachers and when louis moves the family to newark NJ sometime before 1916, apparently only dorothy stays behind in ithaca.

herschel dies in newark in 1916, and louis the following year.

there's an anna associated with louis's household and i suspect she is a daughter, but i do not yet know enough to say for sure.

it's kind of a lot of work to go through to construct a biography of unrelated people who i don't know, but it's interesting to look at this one slice of life and what can be discovered.

there's a harry mintz of binghamton who is not ben's son harry, but is a relation of ben.  he promises to be interesting in his own right.

later on i will have some charts for you.

charts are awesome.


timelines! maps!!

*shakes tiny fists in paroxysms of joy*

two guys you've never heard of

near the bottom entrance of the ithaca city cemetery i a monument that it very large and unusual in its design. it is very "modern" and ornamental and includes a bronze relief of the deceased.

edgar kelsey apgar or at least his surviving friends and family seem very much impressed by his importance in the world and his role as man of means and destiny. to be fair, his obituary was run in the new york times and he was a friend of grover cleveland, but if you google him, you won't find much about him beside the book (privately printed) that his friends engaged a prominent historian to write in his memory.

the historian was fairly important, and the book is listed as an oh-he-also-wrote.

the book, in memoriam: edgar kelsey apgar: obiit a.d. 1885  is available in its entirety for free as an ebook and i will quote for you a portion of the preface:






you still probably never heard of him.

farther up the hill i walked by the simple monument of a world war II veteran. i had pretty much only been researching civil war veterans because there's so much that can be found out about them, but i thought maybe i would like to try with men of more recent times and see what could be found.

there isn't  a lot you can find online about most of these soldiers without going to a paid site (not in my budget). there is a wealth of information available to you in the national archives if you can actually GO there and request the specific rolls of film by hand.


but still, there are some things you can find out about their general circumstances if you can follow at all  the history of the regiments they were attached to. it isn't always a good indicator, because while a regiment may go here or there and fight such-and-such battle, and individual man might have gone right with them or spent his time in a hospital from wounds sustained on patrol early on.

things happen and it's often hard to track individual men.

george f. hall jr.  was 33 years old when he died in 1956. he had been assigned to company c of the 53rd armed infantry battalion and i'm going to assume that he did some of the heavy lifting since he was awarded a bronze star.

the 53rd AIB (part of the 4th armored division) saw heavy fighting in normandy and their first engagement involved getting "hammered by a strong counterattack, courtesy of the 2nd SS "das reich" panzer division".

more of that general history can be found here.

name restored

i am sitting down to write my geocaching logs from my may roadtrip and of course while i love a good ammocan as much as the next person, i'm not really about racking up those smilies. i'm about going to see what's there and telling the story, so if i happen to be passing a cemetery often i check it out because THERE ARE STORIES THERE.

when i was a kid i got kind of involved with a group of graves in a back corner of a cemetery and subsequently spent a LOT of time in the town clerk's vault poring over the spidery handwriting of old records to piece together as much of those stories as i could.

it's become a thing with me, passing through old cemeteries and snapping pictures of stones that catch my interest and later on looking up what i can.

the internet makes this a lot easier than it used to be, and digital photography helps you not have to take so many notes and digital manipulation of images can reveal worn down features of stones and saves you the trouble of having to get permission to do rubbings.

you know that, right? rubbings are now known to be a thing that wears down stones. back in the 70's we used to think they were an excellent conservation tool -and properly done they are- but they are not without consequence and they do contribute to wear so if you're going to do rubbings you should get permission and do it right.

anyway, a couple of weeks ago i was in the ithaca city cemetery and i looked at a lot of graves there and bit by bit you're going to be hearing about a lot of those people but right now i'm just going to tell you about one.

civil war veterans are great for looking up, because even though records of that era are often incomplete or inconsistently spelled, we were a people who recorded every engagement and casualty in a way we did not do in subsequent wars. you can find a LOT of informaton on these guys and their units.

a lot of civil war veterans are buried under their veterans' benefit headstones, which makes them easy to find. and where the stones are not too worn, you can take the information about their company and regiment that's usually on the stone and go to town with the looking-up.

but sometimes the stones are too worn, or too mossy, and you can't read a name or you can't make out a unit and that's when you have to do some sleuthing between military records and cemetery records and anything else you can find.

i am not certain in my present crisis of faith if there exists such a thing as an immortal soul, but i am certain there is an immortal portion of us, even if it is comprised only of that part of us that wishes to be remembered and commemorated.

sometimes the name on the veteran's headstone is misspelled. sometimes his name is misspelled in his service record. sometimes he didn't spell it the same way from time to time himself.

so i found a grave with the name nearly obscured and i took a picture and figured to sleuth him up later and call out his name for the first time in a long time.

i hunted him up in the ithaca city cemetery map, which took some figuring based on where he was buried, and found him listed as "edward fraylie", and no known date of birth or death.

his regiment is worn down, too, so i had to go through the rosters. is that the 148th? 146th? 149th?

143rd. not company o, but comapny d.

i found his service record.

from the new york state military museum and veterans' research center:


FRALICK , EDWIN.—Age , 22 years. Enlisted, September 23,
1862, at Ithaca, to serve three years; mustered in as private,
C o. D , October 8, 1862; mustered out with company, July 20,
1865, at Washington, D . C.

if you want to see the history of his regiment, it can be found here.

so i wrote to the woman at the city cemetery to tell her what i'd found and this is what she said:

Thank you for the information regarding Mr. Fralick.  When the cemetery database was created we had 3 data sources to combine into it. A lot of the information was handwritten in the fancy script of the 1800's and depending on the writer and the script it was difficult to determine the spelling of some names.  The veteran information you provided certainly was valid proof of the correct spelling of Mr. Fralick's name.  The information we had did indicate he was a Civil War veteran for the times you indicated as well.

I appreciate you taking the time to note the information from the headstone and to share the same with our office.

edwin fralick, born 1840, here's your name back.