Happy All Hallows’ Eve

Posted on by hollyfrostgoldportpress

By Holly the Assistant

(Sarah’s well, I spoke with her earlier today. You might just be stuck with me through the weekend, but at least this time I’m not also traveling.)

Interesting time of year in America, isn’t it? A rather interesting and very commercialized holiday, harvest has wrapped up or is wrapping up, children scrambling for costumes or begging for boughten costumes, creativity on high display, sugar highs . . . memento mori . . .

My travels a couple weeks ago included accompanying my mother to graveyards where some of her ancestors, and my father, were laid to rest. A lot of interesting and not always nice family history came up, and I’ve written it down with relevant photoes for my kids, the great-great-great-great (counts on fingers) grandchildren of the perpetrators. I don’t mind graveyards: they’re very empty and quiet, a nice place for an introvert, but I know a lot of folks do mind them. Most of the old family houses are gone, no living relatives remain in the area in close enough degree for us to know of them, but her childhood church and the graveyards remain.

We’re coming up on an off year election here, and it’s been interesting seeing all the local political kerfluffles and drama. Oh yes, this town has pulled off as much drama about a mayoral election as you’d expect in a presidential race. No one has been arrested . . . yet . . . This is your reminder to go look up your local candidates before the vote, and also any ballot measures. (Assuming your candidates have not been putting on the show ours have, in which case you already know far too much of the dirt.)

Once the sugar rush is over, it’s worth taking a few moments to think about those who came before and how we ended up where we are today, and to talk about it with the next generations. Whether that’s the families moving to find work or congenial neighbors that led us to the places we live in, or the politicians they chose to fix the most urgent problems of their time and place, which fixes have led to the problems of our times and places, we, and our world, did not spring fully formed from nothing. We come from the past, including the past we do not know, and we’re going to the future, which we also do not know, but have great hopes and dreams for. Being mindful of the past and the ideas passed along to us, and who gave them to us and why, and after due consideration discarding those that are harmful, is only wise on this one-way trip.

Have a safe, sugary, and peaceful holiday.

48 thoughts on “Happy All Hallows’ Eve”

  1. Oh, do write down the stories!

    I have received a somewhat garbled family story, with no documentation.

    According to that story, my father was part of an ethnic gang in Chicago, and in 1944 he was given the option, by a judge, to either go to jail or join the Army. He picked the Army (Army Air Corps). I guess I’m glad he did that, if it’s true. But it came from my sister, through our cousin, from our aunt, my dad’s sister. All of the principals are long gone, so I cannot ask them, and I didn’t hear the story until they were all departed.

    Also be sure the portrait artist puts a nice diamond necklace on your picture. (Old joke: to drive descendants mad looking for the non-existent jewelry.)

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    1. If your dad did follow that path, there might be news articles about an arrest and maybe court records about the appearance. Regardless, his military records would be fun to read.

      I recently found some of my Dad’s old orders, each one in two languages, English & the local country’s language. Mostly travel permissions but some of the comments are illuminating, like whether a uniform is required while he and some of his fellow military intelligence officers travel to a certain location

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  2. I gave the readers a gift for the All Hollow’s Eve post sugar high and post horrification event: a new chapter. Other than that, no new deaths, no changes in constant-state-of-health-emergencies, and the foo xi crew has been scampering about, preparing for the invasion of wee hoomans.

    Othercat barely fits in the giant pumpkin that used to be big as a house to him, but he likes it still. He will be on scare duty, poking his big fuzzy head out of the pumpkin for pets as the scurrilous scavs of the second generation creep fearfully up to the biggest house on the block. Neighborcat has been busily extirpating the squirrely menace, three just this week just on his own, and the RLF are, as ever, full of empty headed outrage.

    “The RLF demands to occupy this tree! Reparations for our fallen fellows! All Cats Are Bad! Come my verminous brethren and sistren! They can’t stop us all!”

    Spoiler alert: They did.

    Nastycat has been feeling poorly of late. Eating sparingly, demanding snuggles, sleeping a good deal with pink dino firmly wrapped up in his paws. Vet says it’s a passing augh, he will get over it with what medicine they gave him, which is good. Doofus misses the crazycattinus zoomybonkinous that is Nasty.

    Speaking of his orangeness, Doofus managed to (somehow) find his way outside. Which to those who know the lad, is something. I came home to the quivering howls of a dying fuzz (the way he made it sound- everything is the end of the world, forever, with him). Scooped him up out of the leaf pile and he burrowed his fuzzy head into my elbow. Back inside with a bit of chicken soup and suddenly all is amazing with the world. Easily sated is poor Doofus, but he’s one of us forever.

    Life stumbles on like a determined drunk for the foo xi crew. Neighborcat is eying the oversized lawn rodents (i.e. deer) like he thinks he could take one. Othercat probably could, the mutant monstercat he is. Nastycat keeps trying to nest himself in the standing lamp, which won’t hold him, and getting annoyed that his perching spot wobbles him right out. I’ll make him a nest of towels above the armoire soon so he can at least nap with a commanding view of the stick-filled yard. Poor fuzz, he’ll get better soon. Doofus is licking his paws, trying to get the chicken juice to last (it is long since devoured, of course). And Othercat is demanding brushes so he looks his pet-able best for the festivities tonight.

    Y’all be well out there, wherever you haunt. Keep a steady eye on the wee ones as you go. Tolerate some shenanigans (as one does) but know where to put a stop to it. As Neighborcat would say, respect boundaries- and murder any vile vermin that crosses yours. Or the equivalent, to a tall hooman that is. Let not a single mouse nor a bug survive. But accept pets and scritches, because that’s just proper and good.

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  3. Grumble Grumble

    I dislike Halloween.

    Nobody lets Dragons go Trick-or-Treating and for some strange reason, Trick-or-Treaters don’t visit my cave. [Very Big Crazy Dragon Grin]

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  5. Definitely write down the family stories, even if you can’t prove them accurate. I’m Scottish/Cherokee, and my poor mother has spent the past twenty-five or so years “tracing” (fabricating out of wishful thinking) our ancestry. Any tenuous connection to any famous person with the last name of Butler has been teased into direct descent, no matter how impossible or improbable. I’m just waiting for her to announce we’re “direct descendants” of both Anne Boleyn and Rhett Butler, which will serve me right for producing fake British newspaper clippings to convince my roommate’s Aunt Cissy that their lineage went back all. The. Way to Robin Hood himself, after she’d announced at Thanksgiving dinner that they were ‘dorect descendants” of Odin.

    I really hate genealogy crap.

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    1. Despite my interest in reciting my father’s research into his ancestry, I have no interest in digging up anything myself. My attitude is best summed up by the only thing useful David (The Execrable) Brin ever said, “I’m not a descendant. I’m an ancestor!”

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  6. My history on my father’s side seems totally ordinary. As far as my Dad could trace them, a family of brothers shipped out from Northern Ireland sometime after the Civil War (ours not theirs). Probably due to immigration restrictions, they settled first in Owen Sound Canada, where my direct ancestor married a French Canadien. Then, without explanation, they turned up homesteading in Iowa. I refer to them as Canadian wetbacks. Other than my grandparents being the proverbial traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter, nothing much scandalous or even notable seems to have occurred.

    My mother’s side is even more mysterious since she was adopted soon after birth by an older Irish couple. I was too young to get to talk to them much, so I don’t know much about them other than my Grandfather worked for the railroads. My mother didn’t find out she was adopted until she was 30 when her adoptive father died. Her real birth certificate (they had one fudged) claims her father was named Kelly and mother named Stenl. So half-Irish. I only found out a few years ago that Stenl is a typical Austrian name. Amazing thing, this internet where you can befriend people half a world away. ;)

    As to graveyards, we found it very interesting when we were in New Mexico and found a lot of the rural, abandoned churches had attached and mostly abandoned graveyards with most of the wooden markers intact.

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    1. Coz.

      I’m three-eighths French Canadian and I’m my own cousin many times over.

      Also we had a story about an ancestor who came over so early that he married a local.

      My sister, tracing the tree, found them. Also that she died without children, and we’re descended from his second, French wife.

      In spite of being descended from the very first settlers of New France, and being able to trace back our ancestry on this continent 13 generations — any trace of intermarriage has to come from the Acadian branch. They weren’t all sent to Louisiana. Some were sent to New England. One escaped, and turned up in Quebec. There’s a few women up his family tree that came out of nowhere on their wedding days, as far as the records go.

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      1. Bonjour!

        My husband’s famile descends from settlers in Noveau France also. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to trace anything because the spellings are so wildly variable. (St. Cyr, Saint-Cyr, Sancyr, or they just leave the “Saint” part off and list it as Cyr, Sear, Sieur, or any combination of the previous.) Geneology is fascinating but can be very frustrating.

        Per family tradition, his immigrant ancestor came across the border from Canada during the Guerre de Secessione, promptly enlisted and thus earned citizenship. Most recently, the paterfamille married a woman of PARISIAN French extraction, adding to the Gallic influence.

        Turns out that my late mother-in-law spoke French with a BOSTON accent, of all things. (Being raised in MA will do that.)

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        1. Great-Grandpa McK came from Scotland in the late 1800’s via Canadian rail. Hit Nova Scotcha, came across Canada, went south through Washington, into Oregon. Grandma said her mother and sisters had to marry immigrants. They were related to everyone else in the valleys and hills, south of the Willamette valley (Curtin/Drain/Yoncolla/Scotts Valley/Elkton).

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    2. Also, it was normal and legal to issue a new birth certificate on adoption. This enabled the adoptee to produce it without having to explain the adoption whenever a birth certificate was required.

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      1. Still legal. Niece is adopted. Her birth certificate was *reissued on the adoption being finalized at 6 months of age. Adopted at birth, but legally foster to adopt giving birth mother 6 months to back out.

        (*) Might have been held before issue given birth mom gave up custody immediately.

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  7. Halloween has become a pet peeve for me. I live in the middle of a big city, where no kids come to the door. Maybe they still make the rounds in suburbia? My pet peeve is that a number of years ago, Congress insisted on expanding so-called Daylight Savings Time until after Halloween, presumably to let the kids run around while it’s still light out. It was always fully dark when we went out for candy when I was a kid in Detroit.

    In any case all it does for me is delay sunrise until 0700, subverting my usual 0600 or earlier rising time. I don’t think DST is a bad idea, because I prefer late afternoon sunlight over early, really early, sunrise. But that only works in real summer, not November!

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    1. Trick or Treat in Standard Time worked when I was a kid, because all the mothers stayed home. Nowadays both parents work, so either someone has to take PTO or Daylight Time has to last until November. 🤷

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  8. Document what you have and don’t give up. My Mom’s side we have fairly good trace quite a ways back, at least as far as the Neu Amsterdam colony, but on my Dad’s side we had one generation, his dad (my grandfather) who legend says snuck over to dodge an Austro-Hungarian Imperial draft before 1900. We had a garbled village name and that was pretty much it, as he’d changed the spelling of the family name after he got here. I’d documented what we had and dug around using one of the genealogy subscription sites to no effect.

    Then just this year, completely out of the blue, that same site notified me about a match on my grandfather from a Hungarian native’s family tree, filling in the real village name, birth date, and a full swath of further ties going way back over there.

    The company’s marketing in Europe built enough critical mass that enabled a match between two family tree separated by over a hundred years and an ocean.

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    1. “snuck over to dodge an Austro-Hungarian Imperial draft before 1900.”

      My mother’s father did that, but it was the Tsar’s service he avoided. Rumor was, that was for life.

      Found the family’s immigration records in the online Ellis Island stuff. I’ve forgotten the year, but after 1900.

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      1. The family story was my Dad’s Dad used someone else’s identity papers to immigrate, and since that name is not known, there’s no way to find his Ellis Island record.

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    2. We had something like that happen, too. We (well, my mom; she’s the geneology hound) could only trace my dad’s lineage back to his great-grandmother in England, who had two illegitimate children with no record of who the father was.

      That is, until someone tracing from the English side, where the Anstey family of Yorkshire (with a rather unique ancestral story and records that go back to early Anglo-Saxon days) has gotten very invested in tracing its progeny, discovered the name of some ne’er-do-well hussy one of their ancestors got busy with way back in the early 19th century. Bam! Just like that, ancestral mystery solved…and it turns out we are provably (if peripherally) related to all sorts of noble/famous historical Brits, if anybody cares about that.

      But those aren’t the stories that interest me. I’d pay money to know what was going on with the ancestor who created that mystery by having children out of wedlock with two men, one of them a scion of the north-country nobility. And the stories I do know are pretty dang cool also. There’s the guy who immigrated to America from the Liverpool area who, as a self-taught reader with zero education, became a brilliant chemist; the company he worked for offered him anything he wanted if he’d stay; nobody else could do what he did, and he could’ve been rich, but instead he hared off to the western US to join the Mormons in Deseret. On my mom’s side, Huguenots who got run out of France; they stopped over in Holland for a generation then became wealthy businessmen across the Atlantic in New Amsterdam, owned most of Staten Island at one point, and then sold everything for peanuts to…repeated theme here…move west (and neither they nor their descendants would ever be wealthy again). As some of the earliest adopters of Joseph Smith’s new religion, they were eventually driven out of the United States as well, settling way out in the middle of nowhere in Mexico’s claimed territory beside a giant salt lake. (And you probably know the general outlines from there.)

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  9. Here in Kalifornia they’re having a whole special election for ONE ‘initiative’ — Prop 50, which would turn redistricting control over to the Democrat-ruled state government from the ‘citizens commission’ that does the job now.

    With everything else that’s going on in the People’s State, THAT is the Crisis!! they need to spend $280 million on. The Democrats have already got Kalifornia gerrymandered up the ying-yang, but they have to Save Democracy!! by guaranteeing that no Republican will ever win an election in Kalifornia ever again.

    At least with the commission we have a chance, some remote possibility it’s not 100% corrupt.
    ———————————
    Elections are far too important to be left up to a bunch of uncontrolled voters. The Party MUST exercise oversight and management to prevent mere voters from electing the wrong candidates!

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    1. I sent off my useless vote today. I’m usually reluctant to vote early because I believe it just gives the fraudsters the number of votes they need to manufacture to win, but I got lazy and did it anyway. All my representatives all the way up the line are Democrats, and polls supposedly show that the redistricting is favored by 60%. I refuse to let anyone stop me from casting my useless vote however. As for my thoughts on redistricting, I said my peace here: https://frank-hood.com/2025/08/15/is-it-cheating-if-we-do-it/.

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        1. Make it a square rather than a circle, and add a rule that if one side of the perimeter is wiggly because it conforms to a naturally-wiggly boundary such as a river then that side is treated as if it were a straight line between the point where it starts conforming to the natural boundary and the point where it stops conforming to the boundary, and I’ll be on board with that rule.

          Why square rather than circle? Because most map lines are straight lines, and many districts would make sense dividing along Main Street of some town, with the east side of town in one district and the west side in another one. That allows for enough wiggle room for sensible districts to be drawn up, whereas a circle (which is the most efficient shape in terms of perimeter-to-area) would not give much wiggle room. 1.5 times pi is about 4.71, whereas a square of the same area would have perimeter 4 and the red fag would start at perimeter 6. That’s enough wiggle room for all kinds of sensible districts, whereas restricting them to 4.71 before being red-flagged would be too tight for some cities and would cause some neighborhoods to be divided in two along lines that don’t actually make sense for the neighborhood.

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          1. I thought of the wiggly boundaries issue after posting, but more in terms of coastlines. Your solution is a good one.

            Long narrow districts would also have high ratios, even if they were perfect rectangles. Should there be long narrow districts? Probably not.

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            1. Left a reply that went into moderation, of all things, pointing out an elementary math mistake I made. A circle with radius 1 and a square with sides of length 1 do not have the same area. Shrug; the math doesn’t matter to the actual point.

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          2. “A square of the same area would have perimeter 4” is, of course, not correct. A circle with diameter 1 and a square with sides of length 1 do not have the same area. In my defense, it was late (and I was left unsupervised). :-)

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    2. The ads are effing annoying, I can tell you that. “California has to save the country from Republican total control!” I wish I were joking about that.

      Sooooo many people not getting the problems with the rationale, or wondering why all of these NATIONAL voices are talking about a STATE problem.

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      1. Of course what they mean is “Kalifornia has to lead the country to eternal absolute Democrat control!!” Because 95% is just not enough.

        Oh, that’s right — what districts do the cemeteries go in? It’s important!
        ———————————
        Grandpa voted Republican until the day he died — but he’s been voting Democrat ever since.

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  10. My mother spent the majority of her time on family history. I don’t know how she had time to raise 9 kids. I remember skinning through microfiche and microfilm when I was six or do. She would set the reel, tell me what to look for, and leave me to it.

    Mostly Dad’s family. Her family hit a dead-end in NY in the early 1800s.

    Dad’s family got more interesting when we did his DNA thing. We found his sperm donor, for one thing, but also found that his grandmother apparently wasn’t the daughter of her official father, but was instead the daughter of the sperm donor’s uncle. Both of whom lived in Illinois, but somehow made it to an obscure town in southern Utah.

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  11. My niece traced my maternal grandparents’ ancestries. Grandma Pete’s family came from Brittany by way of Dorsetshire, then to te US in the early 1800s, Grampa Pete was Danish, with the family mostly living in Holstein/Schleisswig (going from memory on the spelling), so Danish/German, maybe some Svensk or Norsk, depending on who won which war. He came to the states via Canada, worked in a munitions plant for the Great war, then did carpentry & contracting since.

    Paternal G’parents more unknown; Dad’s mom was a piece of work, and Dad broke contact a few years when I was a teen. He died a couple years later. We kept contact w/one of his brothers, but I got little additional history. Family lore said one ancestor avoided involuntary transport to Oz by getting out of England before the law caught him. Another bit said one uncle, a devout atheist, was disgusted to learn he was descended from a famous minister and hymn writer. A very familiar hymn is one of his. (Rather not say which.)

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  13. I’ve mentioned my family tree a time or two. We can trace back in Oregon, six generations, goes down to 8, or 9, for cousins grand children, and the second cousins might hit 10 (inter-generational ages). Been here since Oregon Trail in 1843.

    Also been here in the America’s very early. Not on the Mayflower, but hints are “right behind”.

    No stories of marring any native princesses, or into any tribes at all. Although by family stories, the Oregon pioneers were advocates for the Willamette and Umpqua tribes (not successfully, but they spoke up against PTB line).

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    1. AAR: intermittent surges of goblins, including a fair number of really little ones – only scared one little girl with my costume, the rest all said it was cool – but a light night overall, with the last straggler ringing by 8:30pm.

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      1. Still a few adult-escorted chilluns as of 2045.

        Our habit in years past was to shut down at 2000.

        But, we had a division of labor set up. I decorated, but wife answered the door. With only one of us here any more, just not in the mood, so no decorations, lights out, and the little beggars pass me by.

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    1. Many of the churches that don’t like Halloween, usually for reasons involving “it encourages people to seek out the occult, which will harm them in the long run”, have a Reformation Day celebration that just so happens to include dressing up in non-occult costumes (princesses and superheroes okay, ghosts and witches not okay) but also various stations giving out candy to kids with costumes. Because that’s such a traditional Reformation Day activity, don’chaknow.

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  17. In the country where I live, going door to door trick-or-treating isn’t a thing. But some of the restaurants that serve foreign (i.e., Western) food and cater to kids had a Halloween celebration. We went to one of our favorites, a restaurant that has a big ship-themed play structure in the middle of their courtyard with tables all around it so that parents can sit at the table and eat while keeping an eye on their kids. About 7:30 PM they handed out a plastic plate full of candy to the parents at each table and the kids went from table to table asking “trick or treat” and getting candy.

    My seven-year-old boy, when he saw that our table had run out of candy to hand out, pulled a handful of candy out of his own bag and handed it to me to hand out to other kids! And then later I saw him going around with his bag and offering it to other kids who had less. He told me, “Daddy, we have so much candy at home, we don’t need more”. (We actually still have some candy still left over from LAST Halloween, when we participated in a trunk-or-treat but bought way more candy than we could actually hand out). I’m so proud of that boy.

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  19. I have various relatives who have done all of the hard genealogy work so I don’t have to. One even put together a salic descent tree (which is honestly more reliable anyway), which is how I know that have have relatives such as Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye (heavy metal poisoning, quite possibly) and Cerdic the Pirate, who terrorized the Saxon shores ca AD 360. (How do we get fifty generations back? Well, once you’ve connected to a royal line, there are people who have done all the hard work for you.)

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  20. Pedigree: Pretty respectable on Dad’s side, except for the gent in TN who petitioned the legislature to legitimize his 20 kids by 2 different ladies so that the kids could all vote. Somehow the legislature didn’t find time to take up the matter. Otherwise Scottish, English, and Dutch tool makers, ship builders, and so on. Mom’s side ranges from Jewish engraver and jeweler to French opera singer (they married and lived in New Orleans in the late 1800s), Border Rievers who eventually got kicked all the way into the New World, someone fleeing conscription in the mid-1800s who ended up designing currency for the Confederacy against his will before fleeing to Texas, and a few other interesting souls.

    halloween: The carved pumpkins were a big hit, the giant inflatable dragon likewise. About 250 kids came to the door, mostly grade-school and younger.

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    1. 250 trick-or-treaters…wow. I’ve taken the kids trick-or-treating in destination neighborhoods that might’ve seen that many, but we get maybe a dozen if we’re lucky. Wife says she only got four or five visits this year, and for some reason she prepared for a horde, so we’ve got like five pounds of candy sitting around now. (Which I’m not supposed to eat…damn diabetes.) I played a Halloween gig with the band in our singer’s front yard last night; very few kiddos out and about, so we played for an audience of ourselves most of the night, but it was a lot of fun anyway. I actually managed to keep my fingers warm enough the whole night, but our poor guitar player got cold fingers about halfway through; said it felt like trying to play chords with popsicle sticks. :)

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      1. Given we can see one grade school from our front door (not across the street, we’re two houses down from the street fronting the school), and < 1/2 mile from another (two different districts), one would think we’d see more than couple dozen of grade and middle school aged out and about. In 36 Halloween’s we’ve never seen more than that (moved in 37 years ago Thanksgiving weekend). We are 100% urban. Not rural separated by acreage. Why? Street is full of retired folks. Changing somewhat as grandparents pass or get moved into nursing homes. But one at a time. Just a few children on the street, ever. Most kids we ever had was when across the street was an in-home daycare, because we got the normal neighborhood groups boosted by the daycare families.

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