Sunday night thoughts

Eventually I have to get things in gear to post photos of the things I finished (the best thing: the Mary Quant style dress; the biggest thing: the Harvest cardigan) but I need to charge my camera first and do it at a time when the light is better and when I have time.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon (got home around 1 pm or so from Sherman) cleaning house - the floors needed doing, and there was stuff that had to be put away. My bedroom is not as clean as it might be and I've not touched my office/guest room (which really never sees guests, and I admit I'd be in a bit of a swivet if someone unexpectedly arrived in town and needed to be put up for a night or two). Did the accumulated laundry, too, including sheets and changed them on my bed tonight - it had been a while and my allergies were acting up first thing in the mornings, so maybe I needed to do it. (No, I DON'T have a dust-mite allergy, and don't talk to me about washing my pillows on hot - I ruined a pillow that way - or taking my stuffed animals off the bed. But I know I track in pollen from outside).

Anyway. I didn't do much else today other than get sucked into the Ancestry website (note to self: see if the library here has a public account you could use, and remember to cancel before your free trial is up, the monthly fee for an individual is REALLY expensive, especially given all the dead ends I kept hitting trying to add in to the family tree....I may have gone as far as I can short of doing some daft thing like going to Quebec or western Massachusetts and trying to track down records in old libraries where my mom's people lived).

But yeah. I really should make a list of the towns in Quebec where my "dit/e Rochefort" ancestors lived and someday consider taking a trip there just to look around. Several of the families in my genealogy from there are listed as either "dit" (surname) or "dite" (surname) (for women). Turns out this is a thing in French. Apparently it was related to both military conscription (before official serial numbers were a thing, you had to have a "nom de guerre") or taxation. And I guess among some of the rural "peasant" people (aka, the people that were my ancestors in France and Quebec), surnames were not a thing as early as they were with the gentry...

Or, I guess, in some cases, it acts like a hyphen does in English, so some of my people might have their names rendered in modern English as something more like "Audon-Rochefort," which sounds rather nice and grand. (I joked on Twitter that I now have some excellent names in mind if I ever, for example, write a pulpy mystery and don't want to take flak from colleagues for having done it, by publishing under an assumed name).

So I learned something today, at least. (I also learned some of my relatives bore the name Boudreau, which makes me laugh, given the Boudreau/Thibodeau "Cajun" jokes out there, which are just variants of the Ole and Lena jokes of the upper Midwest, or other jokes other places. Though now I do wonder if some of my distant French-Canadian relatives did move down to the bayous, and if maybe I have some fourth or fifth cousins there...)

And yeah, I find the genealogical research scratches a very specific intellectual (and maybe emotional, as you'll see) itch for me: it's basically puzzle solving, looking at some information and going "does this fit together, does it seem likely?" I'm more willing to accept some dude as a "possible father" of someone if that someone has what strikes me as an unusual name (on my dad's side, there's a John O'Connor, and I didn't accept the suggested father for him because....well, I figure there were very likely a couple hundred John O'Connors born in that particular county around the time that MY John O'Connor was born, and without a better link....)

But anyway. I wound up spending a lot of time on that. Which was probably actually good for me; I find Sunday afternoons/evenings to not be a great time (often Friday evenings are worse, though). I don't know why weekend afternoons/evenings are often lonely for me, but they are. And yes, even though I'm an introvert, I often feel lonely on Sunday evenings. Part of it is tied to the "things to do and people I can't avoid tomorrow" feeling; but part of it is also just....I don't know. I guess growing up it seemed like "Friday night is date night" (my parents often went out on Friday nights, or the older kids I knew who dated went to the movies or stuff), "Saturday night is fun-with-friends night," and "Sunday night is family get-together night" (many of my friends had a lot of family within a short drive, and often they had big Sunday dinners together. My own family...well, it was just the four of us; often times the tradeoff with being an academic is that you have to move far from your "roots" for a job).

And yeah, okay, part of it is "fear of missing out" - the sense that the choices I made in my life have cut me off from some other possibilities (e.g., being an academic and needing to move where the jobs are - one thing I've noticed from  my mom's family tree, there are three or four generations that lived in Rapid River, and before that, on her mom's side, people lived mostly around Connecticut and Massachusetts since before they were anything but British colonies). Part of is I think the regret that I didn't either "do more" or "have more fun" with my weekend.

(And yes: another reason the genealogy thing interests me is that it does feel like it fights against the "rootlessness" I often feel - the fact that not only am I the first generation (and the only generation, it will be) to have lived specifically here, but I'm also a fairly recent incomer (yes, 20 years is "recent" in this part of the world) and I STILL sometimes wind up on the fringes of conversations where people who have lived here "forever" get to talking about what happened in high school and I admit it sometimes feels a little lonely. And there is that.... "fall off the edge of the earth" thing that I referenced from that book I gave up on....that there's not enough to tether me or ground me).

And yes, on some level, I know this was a choice I made. Though really? My choice was already made for me, I guess: either I have a good job where I can support myself, or....I don't. Or, I found someone to marry in the town where I grew up and stayed there, but then again - my parents moved from that town in 1989, so that wouldn't even have been a thing. And moving to northern Michigan where some of my other relatives were would have been even less of a thing, on the job front (and if I had married a local-to-me boy, good luck convincing him to pull up stakes because I wanted to be close to cousins that I really barely knew)

But yes. One of my favorite games/forms of mental torture (depending on my mood and how far I go with it) is "how would your life be different if" and sometimes I think maybe things would be better or I'd be happier if I had an enormous number of relatives within a, say, 30 minute drive. Oh, I know: relatives can drive a person up the wall, and a lot of people, they prefer what are called "families of choice" and all that. But being here all by myself sometimes drives me up a wall, too....I think maybe some of the "modern problems" some of us have is that careers have got so specialized that families fragment all over the country (or, heck, all over the world: I had one cousin living in New Zealand for a while, and another one, last I heard, he was in Hong Kong, though I hope he's not going to stay on once China fully takes over, because,well....as an American citizen, things might not be so friendly for him, depending. We're not close, exactly, but I don't wish him ill)

Another thing I noticed, especially way back in the Quebec relatives: enormous families. (French Catholic, I wonder....) So there would have been lots of siblings and lots of cousins (and it seemed that, at least in the Boudreaux and Berthiaumes, relatively few kids died young). That's another thing that would be an interesting contrafactual: how would my life had been different with multiple siblings, or with me being a middle child or even, I daresay, the baby of the family, rather than the oldest kid (who fits a lot of the stereotypes of the oldest child, and who still, I think, has a bit of the jealousy/trauma/fear-of-being-abandoned-for-a-favored-new-baby going on)