I just noticed (via google) that my grandfather is mentioned in a recent book on the war: Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (Holt, 1994), p. 443, on the allied advance near Soissons on 18 July 1918: Pershing’s biographer cites the diary of Marvin H. Taylor, who recorded reaching a German machine-gun […]
In the spring of 1917 my grandfather, aged 21, left college to become an infantry officer in the first wave of volunteers for what would be called the American Expeditionary Force in France; he was comissioned lieutenant in August and shipped to France the next month. He saw service in the heavy fighting in northeastern […]
Posting Wilbur’s Air Service Command patch got me to go back over the fragments of his war memorabilia to flesh out his service. He was in England from February 1944 to July 1945, rigging parachutes at an Eighth Air Force Liberator base in Norfolk, but we didn’t know where. It now looks like he was […]
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Wilbur Floyd Whiting (1919-2006) died just over a year ago, around Christmastime. He was my grandmother’s first cousin. His mother Mamie (Marie Henriette Lembke) was my great-grandmother’s baby sister, and she and her husband Floyd were always close to my great grandparents. Wilbur, their only child, was sort of an auxiliary sibling alongside my grandmother’s […]
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Trolling through hymns while recently masquerading as a substitute organist, I noticed an interesting setting of the melody of the Agincourt carol in the Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church(*), which sent me scurrying back to the edition in William Chappell’s Early English Popular Music (1893). And that sent me to MS Arch. Selden B.26 […]
Saturday, January 26, 2008
I can’t remember when I first held this up to the light. Maybe before, but maybe not until after cousin Dick had pulled a copy of the municipal record from the City of New York, showing a different date. Maybe before, but maybe not until after I had spent a year in European archives, carefully […]
Thursday, January 3, 2008
My wife’s family has handed down to us an interesting trio of early case photos, Daguerreotypes, all meticulously well identified. But from my father’s family in Kentucky have come a couple that alas remain unidentified! One is a hand-colored Ambrotype under glass in a typical mid-19th century case (photo after the jump). Another image is […]
Sunday, December 23, 2007
[Part of a series of posts and pages dedicated to Sancha de Ayala] Here we continue to look at the palace of the parents of Sancha de Ayala, which has since become the Franciscan convent of Santa Isabel de los Reyes, Toledo. The convent’s ‘sala capitular’ (chapter, or meeting room) was once a formal room […]
Thursday, September 27, 2007
For those interested in what genealogies looked like in the middle ages, I just noticed that one of the rare scroll-format versions of Peter of Poitiers’ Historical compendium in the [form of the] genealogy of Christ (Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi) is online. It is Harvard University, Houghton Library MS Typ 216.
It unrolls easily. I coil it artfully on the black velvet under my camera. The leather is supple enough, but also feels fragile. The belt is very light, as if desiccated, and the buckle seems disproportionately heavy. Waxed black thread, worked erratically but securely, still holds the brass clip onto the tongue end of the […]
