Wordless Wednesday- A Visit to The Ward O'Hara Agricultural Museum

Saturday Challenge: A Question Meme

From Randy Seaver’s GeneaMusings: Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1. Who are you named after?  Nancy is probably just a random selection; I’ve never heard any real reason for it other than they liked the name. Alice. My middle name. My mother’s first name. Her mother’s first name.

2. Last time you cried?  Sometime this past week? I cry from frustration, pain or exhaustion. With chronic illness, one or more of these things come to the surface fairly often. I cry, get some relief, move on and forget about it. Therefore, I can’t really recall when the last time was.

3. Soda or water?  Both. I love the taste of soda and drink it for the caffeine, as I can’t stand coffee or tea. However, I try to drink water the majority of the time.

4. What's your favorite kind of pizza?  Red sauce with tomatoes and feta cheese! I don’t find that very often. Otherwise, probably sausage and either mushrooms or onions.

5. Favorite Flower?  I love just about any. Probably my favorite would be iris.

6. Roller Coaster?  No way! I get dizzy and nausea from just about any kind of amusement park ride.

7. Favorite Ice cream?  Again, just about any. Chocolate is my usual favorite, followed by black raspberry.

8. Favorite book?  I don’t really have a favorite anymore. When I was a child, the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder were my favorites. Now, when it comes to fiction, I like historical, and romances the most. For non-fiction, I’m usually reading genealogy or writing books.

9. Shorts or jeans?   I live in jeans. They are the most comfortable.

10. What are you listening to right now?  The quiet of a Sunday afternoon.

11. Favorite color?  Most shades in the green family. Although, if it’s a bright and cheerful color, I like it.

12. Tattoos?   I figure I have enough scars without adding tattoos.

13. Favorite thing to eat?  Good, home cooked food. With my food intolerances, it is usually preferably my own cooking.

14. Android or iPhone?  Cheap android. I finally moved up from a dumb phone that only worked as a phone and texting.

15. Favorite holiday?  Thanksgiving. I love all the food and the fact that I don’t need to stress about presents!

16. Night owl or mornings?  Neither. Mid-morning to mid-afternoon is my best time.

17. Fave day of the week?  Any day I get a break!

18. Favorite Season?  Autumn if only it didn’t lead to all the snow and cold.

19. Favorite Sport?  I am uncoordinated and not athletic. Gym class taught me to hate all sports equally.

20. Mountains, Beach, Forest or snow?  Forest. It is so peaceful, especially if you can set up a campsite, sit back and relax!

Upcoming Conference At CNYGS with Jane Wilcox

Here is an upcoming CNYGS all day event with Jane Wilcox! Mark your calendars. I've heard most of these talks at regional conferences and they are good. If you haven't heard them already you don't want to miss this event. If you've already heard them, you probably would enjoy hearing them again!

Wordless Wednesday: Cayuga, New York

Saturday Challenge: How I Met Your Mother

From last week's Randy Seaver Saturday Night Fun Challenge:

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to: 1) Do you know how, when and where your parents met? 

Mom & Dad a few years later

Hmm. I know how my parents met, but I don’t know who introduced them. Does this sound like I’m going in circles? Well, it’s because over the years I heard the same story, but two different versions. Both involve a classmate of my mother’s and a friend of my father’s. This couple later ended up marrying each other.

Carrie Bockes married Gordon Bross

Katherine Potucek married Jerome Nast

Both of the women above were in my mother’s class at Skaneateles High School. Both men were from the Moravia area and were either in Dad’s class or within a few years of it. Therefore, I’m not sure which set of names belongs in this story, as I have heard both couples mentioned in the telling of it.

Dad was hanging out in the village of Moravia near his parents’ farm one evening. This was not unusual as there was a roller skating rink and a bowling alley that he enjoyed. Sometimes he would help out at the bowling alley resetting pins if the regular employee wasn’t there as this was the time before mechanized lanes. A friend of his approached him that night and asked him for a favor.

“Gordon, I need you to help me out. I want to go see my girl Friday night, but she won’t go out with me unless I bring a date for her friend.”

“Oh?” Dad said.

“She’s a nice girl, but she doesn’t have a boyfriend and Carrie/Katherine doesn’t want to leave her sitting home alone on a Friday night.”

Dad agreed to go along with him as a favor and they had a double date. The friend that would have been home alone Friday night, of course, was Mom. Both couples continued dating and often would go out together. As fate would have it, my parents got married before the couple that introduced them.

My uncle is pretty sure that the girl he remembers fixing his sister up was Carrie Bockes. But, I’m positive that when I was a child, Mom told me this story and she mentioned Katherine. At the time, my school bus driver was “Mr. Nast” and she was telling me the story about people that I knew.

Whichever couple it actually was, the people involved were part of a group of friends. The three women grew up in and around the small village of Skaneateles. They all ended up marrying men from the Moravia area, a few miles to the southwest of there.

Addendum: Jim, my oldest brother, remembers Dad definitely blaming Gordon Bross for that happening. He remembers the story being told about Laverne (Carrie’s middle name that she also went by) and Gordon Bross. That is more definite than my uncle’s vague memory and closer to the time happening. As I grew up with Jerome Nast as a bus driver and in school with his youngest daughter, that is likely how the people drifted in my memory.

Telling stories gets them recorded. Sharing them with others adds details and sometimes, like above, fills in where we don’t know the answer.

Wordless Wednesday- Sodus Lighthouse

David Kendall At the CNYGS Fall Meeting

This Saturday the Central New York Genealogical Society will have the first of its' fall meetings: