It is summer again.  And again, summer is nearly gone.  This morning I was walking by a school on my way to the busstop.  There was that feeling again, of all those old school days.  The children were dressed in navy and white, plain uniforms.  In my own school days there were no uniforms.  We wore the clothing our parents agreed to buy for us.   These children were playing on a hot playground in mid-summer.  I was one of the lucky ones:  we went back just after Labor Day, in early September.  It made sense.  By then we would have swam all our days away.  We would have been sufficiently sunburned.  We would have healed since the last one.  We would have seen the Fourth of July and sat on the pavement in front of the house with dad while he lit the sparklers for us until they were all used up.  He lit the snakes too.  Next morning you could see the smudgy trail they left behind.  The raw paper fragments of the roll caps were everywhere, waiting to be swept  (my parents did not wait long to assign this task).  On the night of the Fourth we would have worn one of our new school outfits from the shopping trip we would have already had.  I remember in particular my navy-blue and red-and-white plaid shift with the drop waist and pleated skirting.  By that first school day we would have shopped for everything we needed.  It wasn't so hard then, even for three children:  you just shop for different sizes of the same things.  We bought one pair of oxfords or single-strap leather shoes each.  The specific shoe was our choice, within reason (my parents were great at setting boundaries).   In those days  -- in the 1960s  --  they had real shoe salesmen.  They measured your foot almost as soon as you walked in.  Your foot was placed on the wooden incline.  The salesman would go into the back to gather the selection of sizes and styles which he thought best based on the brief interview he would have had with his little customer.  I would have a stack of ten or so.  I loved shoes even then.  I used to keep the one pair boughten for school under my bed until the big day.  I would take them out frequently, out of the small box they came in.  I would have rolled back the tissue to reveal the pair.  I would have smelled the paper smell of the box inadvertently in the process of taking them out, One and then the other I secretly put them on; and walked around the room in them.  This was the exquisite personal moment of shoe appreciation.  I could almost wear them.  But school was still weeks away.  Until then small moments of adoration of the contents of the box would have to suffice.  In those days you had time to be a child and to have summer.  In summer you do many important things.  You have to get skinny and brown.  You have to get stung at least once and howl like a banshee (the neighbors will of course open their doors because you're such a baby to cry when a yellow-jacket stings you).  Summer isn't over until it is fully ripe.  Not until it has become again that exquisite thing in your life are you ready to let it go and start school again.  Signed G. Claire, this 26 August 2011.  Copyright 2011 by G. Claire.<><> 

The boy died while in San Francisco.  He had been the scholarly light of a small agricultural town.  And he was apprenticed to the local judge.  His name was Arthur Lloyd Page.  He was the son of Annie and Daniel George Lawrence Page.  Annie, born in Kansas in 1875, the eldest daughter of Evan (son of the Welshman) and Marguerite (daughter of Scots parents), lived in Oroville nearly all her adult life.  Arthur's father Daniel was the son of a local pioneer.  The records show that the couple lost their son after he left town to pursue his profession, attorney-at-law.  My recent visit to the San Francisco Public Library on Larkin Street produced a new fact about Arthur Page, perhaps inconsequential, but interesting:  the boy had lived at 3245 Clay Street in downtown San Francisco in 1923 (page 1370 of the Langley-Crocker S.F. Directory).  This is the address given for the listing "Arthur L. Page."  The 1924 directory (the record for the following year), which I consulted on the fifth-floor shelves along with other potentially relevant volumes, did not show the name.

I did not travel to San Francisco to research Arthur Page.  I had, rather, closed the book on the Page family several years ago when I had finished my research on the couple and their children.  The news about Arthur's early, unlooked-for demise had left me feeling rather despondent and unlikely to approach the subject again.  But, as you know, matters are rather connected within the family tree.  In particular I went to The City to find out whether Margaret Morgan Richards, widow of Thomas the gold miner, had survived her residence in San Francisco in 1906, the year of the great quake.  I knew that she and some of her grown children had moved to The City by 1900  --  the Federal Census of 1900 shows this.  But did they survive the quake?  In fact, Margaret, at least, did survive the quake.  My travel and research assistant discovered this.  Margaret appears in a number of the directory volumes which follow 1906.  I was glad to discover this fact.  (Thank goodness for the wonderful accessibility of hardcopy primary source volumes at the San Francisco Public Library!  I know of at least one other library  --  the State Library in Sacramento  --   which, in order to microfilm the directories on its shelves, has in the past  t o r n  the books apart on the basement floor.  The volumes would never be utilized again.  The directory volumes which I sought at that time in the State Library were not respected as the useful historical tools that they are.  Let's be honest: some of us would rather look at a real book than microfilm, wouldn't we?  Microfilm has in fact a shorter shelf-life than a well-made book; the reels won't last forever.  Then what?  NO HISTORY?  NO PRIMARY SOURCES?)

One of Margaret Richards' children was Daniel Bradford Richards.  My research assistant began looking for his name among the many well-kept directory volumes at hand.  What happened then was quite interesting.  His name became the dominant feature of our research day.  His name appeared in directory after directory.  He had taken up residence in San Francisco while many of his family members were still in the old Butte County gold towns, as early as 1892.  He was both notary and "atty-at-law."  He took law rooms at various downtown addresses until the earthquake of 1906.  Did he survive the quake?  Yes he did.  In fact he subsequently took up law rooms in what came to be known as the Monadnock Building.  As of my writing this piece, the building sits right downtown on Market Street, not too far from the Westfield Shopping Mall, the multi-level showy space with a distinctive curvilinear gold escalator.  The  ten-floor Monadnock was only partly constructed by the time of the quake.  Officials wanted to use it as a fire-break to protect the Plaza Hotel.  But it came to be known as indestructible.  Why wouldn't a fellow set his offices there?  And so he did.  The 1907 directory shows Daniel Bradford Richards, Margaret's son, my grandmother Ellen's first cousin, to be there, at 681 Market, on the sixth floor.  By 1908 he was on the ninth floor.  All of the directories we checked show his law rooms to have remained on the ninth floor: "969 Monadnock Building."  He kept these rooms until his retirement (if one may extrapolate from the elliptical information offered in these directories).  He is not listed at all in the 1955-1956 directories (Polk's Crocker Langley).  In 1957, only his home residence is listed.  His wife's name no longer appears next to his in the entries.  Rather, in 1957 (the year of his death, according to Ancestry.com Library Edition records), 969 Monadnock is occupied by the Atlanta and Westpoint Railroad Co., the Georgia Railroad, and the Western Railway of Alabama.  It was as if the wind blew in through one of the double-hung warp-glazed windows and at last change had come.  When my assistant and I visited the Monadnock yesterday, August 12th, it was nearly evening.  The tourist crowds were filling the Market Street sidewalks.  German and French speakers filled the space around me with their different sound.  You board with all the world when you board the old green railcar, Line F, on Market.  We took this line down the long street to find the Monadnock for the first time.  It is no surprise, given its initial reputation, that it still exists.  The door-jambs are gold and the glass doors are framed in gold.  The cross bar of the door is gold.  I pushed in to enter.  The young bald man in the stark black suit looked puzzled.  I felt that I had trespassed somehow.  The barrel vault ceiling, I quickly took note of, has large clear murals in lovely colors.  I stood beneath these.  I explained to the man that we had just been researching our family tree and that we would like to see the ninth floor.  He couldn't let us do that, he said.  What's up there, I soon asked?  Macy's.com, he directly replied.  These were private offices.  He offered brightly that (however) it hasn't been too long since a law firm left the premises.  There was, I observed, still a law establishment of sorts there.  It is a beaux-arts building (this is its architectural category).  But you have to look way up at the corniced edge of the building outside to notice enough decorative details to determine that. The man in the black suit suggested that the building had been remodeled.  The floor was a brown and yellow mosaic of large triangular pieces set at patterned angles to one another.  Trianges were featured in general.  The richness of brown prevailed.  And there were interesting designs on the narrow gold-finished elevator doors.  The man offered to us as consolation that we might look at the courtyard.  A small courtyard does exist.  I don't know whether it is original, but probably it was part of the original plan.  It is very easy to replicate the look of age, and these days the antique seems to be in style.  One cannot make assumptions about these matters.  Looking up, however,  one could imagine our Daniel Bradford Richards, Esq., there, on the ninth floor.  The window panes are warped-looking, suggesting original glass.  There is a simplicity to be found here, looking upwards, trying to find the history of an early-twentieth century member of the family.

Perhaps this Daniel Bradford, first cousin once removed of young Arthur Lloyd Page, was an example to Arthur.  I wonder if they met.  Was there an apprentice relationship between the two, between Margaret and Thomas's son Daniel, and Annie and Daniel George Lawrence's son Arthur?  Arthur, in short, would not, then, have been the first in the family to take on the Big City.  I still don't know how Arthur Page died.  It is however heartening to know that one of the children in the family succeeded there.  Daniel lived to be 88 years old.  We also found that Daniel's father, who died in 1897 and was only middle-aged at the time, may have died while living with or visiting Daniel Bradford.  What a twist!!  Who would have guessed it!  I had surmised that Thomas, placer miner, son of the Welshman and brother to my great-grandfather Evan Richards Jr., died in the mining region that he claimed as his residence all those years of the latter nineteenth century along with his family, Margaret included.  But no . . . . . .you just never know what the records will reveal.  I do enjoy researching old library-bound directory volumes. 

Between you and me, well . . . . here is the real revelation, as I hinted at, regarding Arthur Page.  He died young, yes, though as I have stated I do not know the cause yet.  But records which I found about Arthur while looking into Margaret's family show that he had been regarded as a good member of both his family and his community.  Young as he was, he had people who regarded him highly.  Moreover, I guess, there were (to put it plainly) good people in his midst, for they acted well, supportably, morally, and lovingly in his behalf.  The father Daniel George Lawrence Page, whose name I had many times observed re-printed in the sequence of Oroville Directory volumes, along with his wife's name, signed his own name, this time:  he avows his son's birth date, which is two years off the date offered in the census accounts.  The local men of the WWI draft board concur.  And the love of their life is saved, if only for a few short years.  Signed researcher G. Claire. 
Copyright 2011 by G. Claire. <> <> <> <>

The San Francisco History Center is located at 100 Larkin Street, in the big San Francisco Main Library.  Take the Bart (underground bay area transit), and the doors open right onto it.  There, you see a different part of the city:  somewhat stark (for the light has nothing natural to fall back on, only the gray of the solid buildings which have and do serve the city in various official functions).  At right angles to the library structure, for example, you will see very clearly, and not at too much distance, City Hall.  It's as big as our state capitol building in Sacramento  --  pretty impressive for just city affairs I think.  But the important signatory note about the City Hall building is the unseemly (somewhat inartistic) presence of gold all along the facade.   The first time I observed this intrusive use of decorative gold was inside the downtown Wells Fargo Building.  There, if you hold the handrail drawing up into the main floor, you're touching gold.  Well, one doesn't know whether it is currently authentic or not.  Suffice it to say that San Francisco doesn't need to justify the presence of gold or the color of gold anywhere on or in any of its buildings:  the more inartistic, the better (that is the San Francisco way); if it blended in  --  if it were beautiful  --  it wouldn't stand out like a sore thumb and talk to you and say, "this is gaudy San Francisco, home of the man, Sam Brannon, who tried to talk the miners out of their gold right in the mines!"  There is gold, gaudy gold on that City Hall.  And I noticed it elsewhere, too, though not on the library. 

San Francisco has another trait, just as noticeable to me as the Golden Gate and the Gold on City Hall:  it doesn't know how to give a direct answer to any question.  I have called various offices on several occasions to ask straightforward questions.  I never get the straight answer I am looking for.  Of course, there is that language barrier.  I regret that.  There was a time when people who were paid from the public coffers to help you via the phone lines had to speak your language.  Not anymore.  And (to take this a bit further), I find some of the more recently constructed buildings just as frustratingly indirect and unusable.  Of course, post-modern architecture in general could learn a thing or two from the builder of a kwonsit hut:  the building is for people, not for the architect to use as a mirror of his own genius.  People must be able to find their way in, and out, too!  Let's not forget the importance of people when you build a building!  In San Francisco of all places, there should be directness in the plan of a building.  If you don't live there, and if you're in a newer structure, make sure to figure out how to exit the building, in case of an earthquake or other emergency.  For they don't generally build to the masses.  The Guggenheim offers me an interesting general comparison by which to tell you about the innards of the San Francisco Public Library on Larkin Street.  There is a central atrium in the S.F. library, so that on the top floor you may look down on all the floors and onto the means to getting to all the floors (i.e., staircases, et al.)  The progress of movement is intended to be circular.  Except it is very counterintuitive:  how do you get from one floor to the next?  Where is the elevator?  Why are there two separate sets of stairs for each floor, one to go up to the next floor, one to go down again to the one just below it?  I don't understand.  I'm not a San Franciscan  --  that must be it.  I'm sure it's right for them, and that they could successfully back out of the library during an earthquake with their eyes closed.  I wouldn't want my family in there in a crisis.  In a crisis you look for the door.  But modern architects  --  they don't know that . . . . . .And S.F. has ceased to see the importance of the direct route to anything except your money . . . . . just my opinion.

Tom Carey works at the San Francisco Public Library.  He wears a natty beret, gray tweed, I think, if I remember correctly.  I told him the nature of my visit:  that I would like to look for the family of Margaret (Morgan) Richards in the old San Francisco directories.  Margaret was born in Wales.  She was the wife of Thomas, the elder brother of my grandmother Ellen's father, Evan.  Margaret's children were, then, my grandmother's first cousins.  The Federal Census of 1900 shows Evan and family to be in Butte County, California.  They had finally left the mines where years earlier, before the railroads, Evan and Thomas and their Welsh dad Evan Richards, Sr. had come to mine gold (before that they had mined coal in Kansas and had their own land on which they raised fourteen acres of corn).  My great grandfather Evan and wife Marguerite (descended from Scotsmen and Scotswomen) and their six daughters, among them our Ellen, the youngest, would live the rest of their days in a small agricultural community, a place that remains small and is in fact fairly inconsequential.  But in those days they were a family, and my grandmother was growing up and attending school.  They lived in a box car for awhile (this I was told by a senior member of another branch of the family).  By contrast, Evan's brother Thomas' family seems to have removed themselves to San Francisco after their mining days were fully spent.  Until our visit to the Library on Larkin (and with the help of the librarian and my research assistant who accompanied me on my trip) I had no idea how strongly connected the family was to The City.  There were even sad moments of realization that came out of this trip.  I thought I'd left the matter of the young lawyer who died young in The City, alone for good.  It must have been such sadness for his mother Annie Richards Page (our Ellen''s older sister).  Annie lost both her Scottish mom and her young bright boy within a couple of years of each other, in the mid-1920s.  I had researched Annie Richards, and her husband with the great name Daniel George Lawrence Page, on a reel of microfilm at the State library.  I grew used to their names appearing together in so many of the old Oroville directories.  I imagined them young lovers, a true good family, who raised a barber as well as the lawyer, the young light of the town (I would assume to myself upon reflection).  Here, during this research trip, the boy's name and his whole life came forward again, to be viewed from another angle, though only vaguely at this great distance, by me, a mere researcher . . . . Signed G. Claire, 12 August 2011.  All rights reserved by the author.  Copyright 2011 by G. Claire.  <>  <>  <> 

[Part III of "Big City Research" to follow.  Have a pleasant research day!]

7:42 a.m.  Cloudy.  Passing through San Carlos.  Runner in red sweatshirt turning off the main road, the El Camino Real, and onto hilly side-road.  "Belmont  --  transfer point for 250, 252 Caltrain" (announcment over the intercom).  I look left.  "Belmont Hardware," gray letters above large facade windows.  This road goes uphill.  The houses are built against the hill, terrace-style, behind each other and behind the main row of random and small businesses.  Green light again.  Sound of the bell coming through.  We're at 42nd Avenue, San Mateo . . . . My travel partner sleeps on the solid-blue vinyl bench seat in front of me.  Doors open  --  the bus has stopped.  I look left again  ---  "San Mateo Investment Co. Real Estate," yellow square sign not too prominent.  Passed "The Pantry -- Breakfast -- Lunch -- Dinner" to the right.  Passed now a gargantuan Barnes and Noble, left of us.  Store still open for business (all the Borders stores near us recently closed).  Lots of glass in the multi-storied facade.  The low single-story plane of lengthy Hillsdale Shopping Centre follows the street, Macy's, Nordstrom's, et al.  I look to the left again (having for awhile focused my sight on my writing page):  "Peninsula Clock Shop -- Antique and Modern Clocks -- Sales -- Repairs -- Restorations -- (650)-345-2460" reads the hand-painted signage on the building front.  They even have a clock with Roman numerals, which reads 7:58 a.m.  Our stopped bus goes on.  My good friend sleeps.  It's a caterpillar bus; it rises in places as we follow the slight grade, still on the El Camino Real.  Under the shadowy underpass, and out again into the light we go, rather slowly.  People talk here and there.  The bus is filling.  The fare-box beeps again.  And footsteps come my way as I sit here, passenger and writer of the moment at hand. . . . .    
 
The sun comes out and shines on the wood-shingle face of a three-tiered apartment building.  Our bus takes on another passenger filling the box with coin after coin.  And a mighty and old row of towering tall and pealing Eucalyptus border the roadside.  And as we continue on, and as I look forward out the window-glass I see more of the group  --  the trunks swirl in vari-colored beige and brown peeling manes.  The umbrage is only at the top, higher than all the apartment buildings and a church and houses and others that find themselves here on the Old Real.  The road is rough.  The bus shakes and the roadway dips the two sections of the bus  --  we rise at times like a ship on a swell, and then down again as we point the way.  My legs shake, paper, everything and here we stop, for just a moment at the light  --  "Classic Cleaners," "Little Lucca."  The vista opens, the clouds (gray, dark gray) begin to separate.  And the sun casts shadows on this very paper.  "Walgreens" (automatic doors).  Here we are in the City of Milbrae, transfer point  --  facade looks like a prehistoric bird,  boarding platforms are on the second story.  I call it the pod  --  the departure points are placed around a circle; and the roof (the "wings") are literally raised off their pillars.

Style maven in burgundy-striped stockings and pointed-toed shoes with silver buckles at the ankles can't sit down  --  pretty full bus, going down 19th, past San Francisco State University.  Waiting at red light, and we resume, and stop.  Iron-grilled gate over residential door at my right.  The bus ascends and so the building fronts climb higher; most of the residences show only doors and garages and before them steep cement sidewalks.  "Flyers"  --  gas to the left.  We're on line 28.  Balconies beneath some large window-fronts, second level.  Stopped again.  And to the right and the left, hills, streets bent sharp-wise up (Flyers gas -- 3.85 for regular).  Most buildings are stucco, they're often white.  The grates which fence off doors and inter-house pathways often have elaborate iron- or metal-work.  Now:  steep stairs up the sides of some residences.  "Please hold on"  --  strategy recommended by recorded message; the seats here are unupholstered, brown slippery plastic.  Down some now.  We stop.  Muni train crosses paths with us ---- Still on 19th, passing Lincoln, lady with big pink tote boards and many others.  It's standing room only now.  Thicket of trees ahead, either side.  We pass through a pair of monumental gate-sculptures, and we turn, and turn again, and rise.  We are bounded now by everything natural.  The clouds persist.

My travel partner holds my extra bag for me, the striped one where I carry my writing sheets and pen.  We're now on "Park Presidio" (so reads the green sign to my left).  I look ahead.  The road dips first then rises.  and people around me lift themselves out of their cold seats to leave.  They stand and wait.  The bus pauses at Geary.  Speedy straightaway, and up: and briefly through the trees to my right I see sailboats.  There's the top of the Gate!  the Golden Gate! to my right, hidden in much fog.  There it is like a Business or a House, before us, looming.  There it is my friend.  We're out on foot, base of the Big Bridge.  Sailboats.  Lots of tourists in the cold.  My best friend next to me to the right.  [We see across the water] the little island of The City itself, for we're removed from it now.  My friend is patient while I record this.  People taking pictures.  We could walk [it] now if we wanted.  About to walk it.  My friend [looking over her shoulder] observes, we got to skip the toll!  I look down just a seond to see the green water below.

Wonderful plaque on the archway:  "The Golden Gate Bridge . . . ." construction began 1933, completed 1937.  The John A. Roebling's Sons Company completed the cables.  My friend reaches out over the rail and holds a vertical orange cable in her hand.  "This is what is holding us up . . . ."

This is our planet.  the boats are coming towards us and all the water.

My friend waved her arm open, I looked left:  out there is the inlet to the bay.  Beyond that is the whole Pacific world:  out there is Brisbane and Papua New Guinea, the Caroline Islands, the Marianas, and Hawaii . . . .

No name no history?  ---  I can feel the Presence of all those men of the 1930s who came before.  This is the grand scale.  the scale speaks, reaching out [as I look at the low valley of the span], how close it is and large and round, it is defined of men and people and here they are they speak and truly persist.

Here I approach the self of the world, as it was before the bridge.  It is o.k. to go back in time to just earth.  these are of course the headlands and they're covered in mist today.

Today our day the sea gull floats effortlessly through its whole life all across the sea.  Signed G. Claire this 6 Aug. 2011.
((All rights reserved by the author, G. Claire.))  ><  ><  ><  ><  ><  ><  ><  ><   

{Part II of Big City Research, Written by G. Claire, to come . . . . .}




      

Today I sat in the coffee house I usually sit in at 6 a.m.  The people gather there who always gather there.  They are mostly the street derelicts.  I do not like to share their company.  The whole world consists in putting yourself forward and not acknowledging that we come from the same race, and that (the truth told) we have the same story to tell.  Each of us tells a different part of the story, that's all.  And maybe we'd tell the story as our own which we see in front of us if the factors were the same.  Maybe not. I hope not.  Cherish the strength you have to resist pointless responses to hard trials.   I only wish to comment that theirs is a human response, to be looked at objectively if possible, even though seeing other people suffering creates the stir in one's inner core.  In objectivity we see patterns and causes. 

There were eleven people around me.  All were men.  None were doing well.  Nione of these would ever have their story told.  None would tell his own story.  And no one else would care enough to tell it for him.  I looked out the glass of the window-walls into the cloudy day.  Some few people stood on the light-rail platform, poised for the early run.  Nearly everybody comes here though, first, to get what is needed the other side of a dark and irresponsive night, even the locals who commute to work via  light rail.  Usually it's coffee.  Some move on.  Some linger here.  I will tell their story.  But there will be no names.

They don't deserve for me to tell their story.  They are likely addicts.  They choose to disfigure their lives.  It is their choice.  But they present the picture of poverty, too, so they receive our attention and make us wonder.  They are gray, have unkempt hair, wear gray clothes with sometimes some faded blue.  They are as bleak as a mass of watery clouds in the sky.  There seems no difference to me,  dreary day or washed out soul.  They seem listless.  Take the worst of what's offered.  Smoke  --  they must do it outside these days, but they pollute the just-washed cement after they're done smoking with the remnants of their persisting dirty habit, a habit that owns them like the world owns them  --  oh yes the world owns them.  They are in the vice of hatred among those who have jobs, who have succeeded, who have families still growing.  They are dirty, they go against our general principles of cleanliness therefore.  And they are cursing people.  They bring forward a carelessness for their fellows that I think I do not understand.  The clothes droop though they are dry, but as if very damp.  It is all old cotton.  Sometimes they find a way to buy a small yogurt.  Somehow, too, there is the single custard danish.  The jerky man  --  Tourette's?  --  makes big gestures every time he moves.  He will get no help.  I do not know his name.  He will be sick until the day he dies.  And no one will have known that such-and-such (put his name in here) was alive.  His birth record will be his only record, probably.  Maybe some genealogist somewhere will want to know his whereabouts for collateral history purposes.  No one knows.  He tried to cut the danish with a knife.  First of all the knife wasn't sharp.  Second, the Danish was cold and rubbery, so not likely to cut easily anyway.  He'd get up when after trying to cut the sugary pastry like an excited conductor of a Tuba symphony he was too frustrated (as it seemed he was sometimes).  He wears two feathers in his hat.  Have never seen this man before.  Wears fairly new athletic style black shoes with black patent features on the upper.  His cloth was dirty.  He didn't actually speak.  No one will ever know who he was, once he chooses to leave.  That is just fine with me.  He must write his own story or it will not be told.

It is hard to understand.  But I think that in many many cases the causes can be traced back to pure grief.  To loss.  To emotiional devastation (here, I am not talking about mental illness only the bad condition of those who have chosen a lifestyle of self-deprecation, who sleep in the cold, who take our change from us, who probably form the basis of a local database as part of receiving some services locally).  Grief:  someone lost a husband; someone lost a mother, a son, a daughter . . . .  It is loss that sometimes is at the heart..  The story would reveal a sadness that wouldn't admit to itself, but that would quickly evolve into self-destruction.  We do not all handle grief so badly as these men and these women (the women are out there too); but the story is the same for us human beings, that we need each other, that we need those whom we are blessed to have.  That without the complement of beauty, of care, of commitment something big would be missing and we would take our tea in lonely corporate coffee-houses at six a.m. and be written about anonymously by people who do not know us and who do not bother to ask our names.  Signed G. Claire, this 4th day of August 2011, a Thursday morning.  <>  <>  <>  <> 


.

"J.K. Rowling Uncovers Roots in T.V. Show."  This is the current headline appearing on my Yahoo! mail site.  Rowling, authoress of the supremely popular book series Harry Potter, was featured in an episode of the BBC's genealogical game show (this is my personal term for it), Who Do You Think You Are?, to be aired "later this month."  According to the AP report of Rowling's connection with the show, "she was so emotional she cried several times."

The American version of the program has featured several celebrities.  I watched the episode which featured Sara Jessica Parker as the wide-eyed co-sleuth of her own family tree.  While the series has some merit (it promotes family history research) it is rather over-produced with its obligatory close-ups of teary-eyed celebrities.  The creators of the show must have known how valuable it was to potential popularity of the show to include close-ups of our favorite media people made vulnerable.  "People just like us"  --  that is the subtext of it.  It is my personal viewpoint that we do not need celebrity to see the value in researching our own families.  The program implies that there is something about "drama kids" like Parker, for example, and her successful acting cohorts that makes them intrinsically central to the discussion.  I don't believe it.    The show incorporates very little of the actual research process into the final product.  Of similar nature, PBS' History Detectives, on the other hand, has typically emphasized research over results.  Celebrity is not the point, opening the door is the point (though I must interject here that the PBS program has its own set of production agendas).   Signed G. Claire.