Genealogy 01: PGGF-M-1

Paternal great-grandfather/maternal 1

The promise of this blog is that any writing will be short. Well, I guess it’s time to break promises, and I trust you’ll find it interesting.

From time to time, I dig into genealogy to see if I can find something new. Revisiting familysearch.org, I realize my rudimentary family tree has grown in my absence. How? Why? No clue.

The maternal lines go back only to my grandparents.

My surname (paternal line; somewhat obscure French) has been my main interest, but it only goes back to 1832. The family history of seven Huguenot jeweler brothers fleeing France would have put them there long before that. (In a strange coincidence, when I moved to a small town in the Taunus mountains of West Germany in 1981, with my first piece of mail the postal worker asked if I was related to the recently deceased shepherd who kept his flock on the hillside opposite, with the exact same surname.)

My middle name, Clayton, I can trace back only to 1719.

So that, I thought, was that: the interesting stuff stops with my 5th great-grandfather.

But I started following the line of his wife, Abigail Powell (b 1717). Soon I was tumbling back to the 14th century, 13th…until it stops with Pierrede Rode, 1020-1080. Wow.

I started following Marmaduke Constable (1275-1378: 103 years old?). The first line breaks into the 10th century, though a grandfather being born the same year as his grandson does raise an eyebrow.

(Reassuring to note that people born over 1,000 years ago are deceased.)

Another line and we start hitting kings and queens.

That line only goes back to 778, but along the way we’ve picked up six kings, a princess, and a queen. Not bad, even if I’d never heard of them. And some great names too: Eudo I Munby Mumby Mundebi has a certain ring to it.

Another line goes back to Eadwulf I, king of Northumbria (670-717), and adds five more kings and a lord.

A line starting with Flocwald of Asgard adds my first ancestors who lived before the birth of Christ. I can’t be sure which are kings but hell, Cerdic, Alfred the great…at this point I think it’s safe that they’re basically all royalty, else why would they be remembered?

Here we get our first taste of red flags. I will consider that these types of red flags render a line unreliable (a lot have red flags for “no standardized” birth or death place, but otherwise their dates work). This is going back 73 generations.

Another line ends with the King and Queen of the Picts, but Wikipedia names the first King of the Picts as Vipoig (died c. AD 341). I don’t think too many people in the 4th century lived to 91 (but what do I know?).

Another Irish line.

Another: 0ili0ll Oaisfhiaclach ‘crooked teeth’ Macconnla 77th high king of Ireland. But he’s listed elsewhere as living two centuries earlier, which corresponds with the dates of his son the long-hair dude. BTW I was always told my crooked teeth resulted from my mother’s large teeth and father’s narrow jaw, but maybe it goes back further?

One line goes back to Gotfrid, the Duke of Alemannia in Bavaria. Somewhere along in here we’ve got Normandy, Bayeaux, King Ludwig I….

Another goes back to Rome.

And another.

And then this line gets weird.

Adding a roof

Fascinating to watch progress on the neighbors’ project. The roof is metal-clad plastic-foam panels with enough structural strength to stand on, as you can see. The contractor told me the roof would be done in an hour, which was pretty much true for the full-length panels. They are gently sloping toward the background. But now they have to intersect the existing roof.

So roof work grinds to a halt for a few hours as they cut away part of that. How will they proceed now? I have no idea. It’s almost as if they’re making it up as they go along.

Roots

Erosion around tree roots on the beach. There’s also a dog in there.

Dog adds to waste pickup

The beach was quite filthy today, with a mix of organic stuff—shells and some kind of eggs—and the ubiquitous plastic.

For some reason (it not being tourist season), beach cleanup crews had been at work, as evidenced by the bags everywhere waiting for the tractor that will carry them away. So of all of that expanse of beach, where do you suppose my dog decides to take a shit?

You’re right if you said on top of one of those bags, and not only that, exactly where someone will reach to pick it up.

You really have to wonder.

Under the amphitheater

You may recall a few weeks ago when I unraveled the mystery of the amphitheater. I was puzzled that I only noticed the obvious drain when looking at it in a satellite photo.

I’m even more puzzled now, after returning to inspect it.

It’s huge! Probably five meters across and three high.

So of course I had to go through it. This is the view from the other end. I didn’t even notice the painting on the walls until I loked at the photo. Obstacles and debris had my full attention.

And here’s that pedestrian bridge and its highest. I couldn’t really determine if there was anything to prevent a person from falling off the side. There might have been some wires.

An evolving enigma

Still trying to figure out what the neighbors are building in front of their house. I would ask, but it’s too much fun wondering.

Along the Rambla, Atlántida

There a very few buildings here between the beach front road (Rambla) and the water, which, as we saw yesterday, is hard to call a river but the locals do anyway. From the left, there’s the Atlántida Yacht Club (you will see no pictures of yachts, for a reason), a couple of small buildings which may or may not be occupied, the fish place, another house, then Indigo restaurant, a thoroughly inconsistent and generally mediocre “resto-bar” that is nonetheless popular. On hot days, its shaded back deck overlooking the water is quite lovely. Further to the right in the overhead view is Pîedra Lisa (flat rock). I’ll get back to that.

First, zoom out more.

The Yacht Club and Indigo are circled on the left. Far to the right is a building nestled in the dunes. I don’t know what it was, since it’s been abandoned since we arrived in 2009. You can take a tour of it here.

From there on east, until the Rambla ends, no other beach-side structures exist that I’m aware of.

Let’s go back to Piedra Lisa.

When we first arrived, for several summers it was a bane: a disco/nightclub, whose drunken and deafened clients awakened us in the wee summer hours as they staggered past our house, shouting and singing loudly. They also left a trail of plastic cups, and tipped over trash containers or set them on fire. On early morning beach walks, it was not unusual to find some of them passed out in the dunes.

Well, the lease ran out and the noise factory moved across the Ruta Interbalnearia to the Atlántida Country Club (the “Country;” don’t get your hopes up), where it has since tormented a new collection of neighborhoods. Piedra Lisa became a cooperative restaurant-pizzeria for a while, and I understood it was leased from the local government. We ate there once: ordered the “Breakfast Pizza” out of curiosity. It was quite good, with fried eggs and bacon, but also ironic because bacon and eggs is not something Uruguayans eat for breakfast.

Recently I noticed it’s become a target of graffiti. But first, this from Google Maps.