Donald Trump is President Elect

December 19, 2016

This is only the second post of "Wading Into the Stream" for 2016.  The first was just a video filmed by my niece.  It was a video review of my father's ninetieth birthday party in May. She did a great job and I am proud of her and my Dad.

Today I write about the Presidential election of 2016.  To review, after a grueling Primary season, Hillary Clinton, Democrat, ran against Republican, Donald Trump.  All of the pundits and experts were shocked and amused by Trump's outrageous campaign, but on Election Day, they predicted Clinton would be the victor.  To more than half the voters amazement, Trump won the electoral vote. Clinton received well over two and a half million more popular votes than Trump did, but he became the President elect.

The College of Electors met and voted today, officially electing Trump.  This man will be President of the United States.  A great many extremely smart, accomplished, successful people are afraid of the various probable outcomes of his administration.  They have spelled them out in endless articles, blogs, interviews, speeches, and by now, even books.  The people Trump has nominated and has spoken of appointing to his administration represent many kinds of backward, destructive, divisive, earth-destroying, profit driven, bizzarely religious, and wantonly immoral ideas that American public figures have expressed in the last thirty years.

Several of these people have failed at the highest offices and jobs they achieved. A couple were fired. One or two were nearly prosecuted.  And among these individuals, it is my opinion, based on what I have read, seen, or heard, most of which, I assume, is factual, Donald Trump is the most likely one to have committed serious felonies.  I think it is only a matter of time before his crimes are exposed. Even with a Republican House and Senate, I think he has the best chance of being impeached and removed from office.  That is, assuming those who supported and voted for him don't rise up in civil war, which is a remote and horrible possibility.

Alan Fothergill's 90 Birthday Celebration

No Dramatic Results, Please

    Politics in the United States of America has slowed the legislative process to a near stop. I would speculate, without a poll, that most Americans would say, if asked, that there are laws that need fixing and social problems that could be solved only by legislation. American government needs to get to work to fix the things only government can fix, and right away.
     Yet what is the problem? Better yet, what are the problems that prevent government from functioning? First of all, there is far too much money involved. Whatever is successfully legislated, creates or costs enormous amounts of money. Corporate America or worldwide corporations are far too large and far too powerful to allow any significant legislation to affect the bottom line.
     The second problem is that significant legislation usually affects a large number of people. People are afraid to do this anymore. Even well paid members of Congress refuse to risk this.
     Finally, backlash from significant legislation is so huge, mail volume, email volume, media hype and anti-hype, that no one wants to be responsible for it. Congress would much rather leave things as they are. If the government is minimally functional, that is good enough for them. As long as the rocket of government is inching along towards its gantry, it will be a long time before it takes off.

The Best People are the Best Americans

   It is so easy to post a social or political opinion these days. So many people do it. I am doing it now. But many people exclude or demean groups or individuals they are against. Political foes, other races, and other religions are very common targets of hate, or just being labelled, "other". Is this necessary? If love and happiness are any part of reality, should we all not wish our fellow human beings these states of being, first and foremost? Yes.
   If you are, in any way, intelligent, then pointing out the differences between yourself and those who differ from you is unnecessary. If you are smart, you will know that you will be more appealing if you are humble and let your actions speak for you.

The Game of Online Genealogy

   When I began to look at my family history in 2008 I was earnest about finding accurate records of my relatives as far back as I could.  I had many family stories and hundreds of photos with which to begin. Then I found Geni.com.  After entering my family's essential information, name, where and when they were born, date of death, and in some cases, a photo, I started to find relatives who I did not enter into the system. My family was growing.
   The next six years found me entering an occasional distant relative I had neglected.  But more often, I started collecting new relatives that other people had entered.  I possess family records that go back six generations in three lines of my family.  The other lines were not that extensive.  Just for context, six generations got me back to the 17th century, in terms of time. What the millions of people participating on Geni.com did for me was to trace my family back to the 13th century or further.
   I learned a few tricks for searching for relatives like Googling possible relatives, then plugging them into Geni. This way I found how I was related to Confucius and even Biblical figures.  Let me stop, at this point, and say that not all of Geni's records are accurate. Surprise!  Of course many are inaccurate. When I found the first King that was my 21st Great Grandfather, I knew there were inaccuracies. It didn't matter.  Searching for interesting relatives like William the Conqueror and Charlemagne became the game and it did not matter how accurate the results were.
   Geni made it easy to collect relatives.  I stopped collecting 18th Great Grandparents when I had more than eighty.  Then I started doing the math.  Typically, people have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great grandparents, and on and on. At your tenth great-grandparents, you could potentially have 4096.  At eighteenth, the number is 524288.  That is, people could have as many as a half million or more eighteenth great grandparents.  The real number is impossible to know because at a certain (unknown) point, the same person can be a great grandparent and great great grandparent at the same time from different relative perspectives.  It can be extremely complicated.  You'll have to trust me, or ask a real genealogist.

                                                      Pope Gregory X 1210-1276


The game continued when I found that you could pull up your family tree, horizontally, on Geni.com, and then follow one line as far as there were relatives.  It didn't surprise me when I traced my line back to Ostrogotha "The Patient", King of the Goths.  My family can be very uncivilized.  But when I found I could directly trace myself back to Pope Gregory X, 1210-1274, my 23rd Great Grandfather, then I knew it was all silliness and I had to treat this as a game only.  I hope all of the genealogists forgive me.

Opinion without Education

    If you are not educated enough, you are not going to learn anything from me.  I will write my opinions each month, but do not make the mistake of thinking that I will teach you anything.  Teaching was never going to be one of my objectives.  If you need more education and you know it, you are my kind of reader.  One can never have enough education.  Learning must continue ad infinitum. Unfortunately, this forum, "Wading Into the Stream", is not educational and will never seek to educate its readers.  Those who came here for that will just have to try somewhere else.  May I suggest Khan Academy.
    My writing is expression of thoughts, opinions, ideas, and just-plain statements that occur to me, that I suppose you may have not verbalized for yourself.  You may have come close to thinking the same thing yourself, but not quite.  If you say to yourself, "I always thought that, but I've never seen it in print before," then I am on the right track.  Many people have said I have a knack for stating the obvious.  Wait a second. That is not a compliment, is it?
    While studying English Literature at the University of Cincinnati, many years ago, I decided that pursuing teaching as a profession that English majors fell back upon when real jobs could not be found, was not a place I ever wanted to be.  And I have not been able to land a full time job for seventeen months, now.  Nevertheless, I'm sticking to my guns and will not pursue teaching unless faced with homelessness and starvation.  Thanks for supporting me, Suzie.  You are the real teacher.
_________________________________________________________________________________   March will bring my one thousandth blog view.  Thank you to all of my readers.  You guys are the best.  But you didn't know you were exclusive.  Most worthwhile bloggers celebrate their one millionth or ten millionth readers.  Not me.  Very few people have read this blog.  I do not market this blog.  I do not collect any revenue from it, at all.  (And I have no income, at the moment.)  Finally, I have only mentioned it to a few people.  It is, more or less, a secret.  No need to forward this to anyone.  It is not funny, and definitely not educational.
So those of you who are reading this and those of you who have read more than one posting must really want to be here.  I salute you!

Woodchurch to Cincinnati in 579 Years

In the village of Woodchurch,
in the county of Kent, in the country that called itself England was born a
girl named Katherina to the wife of Richard Endingham. The year was 1435. She
may be my 16th great grandmother. 



She married a man named Robert
Clarke. One of their sons was named William Clarke. William married a woman
named Benedicta Ashburnham. They had a son named Richard. The year adult Richard's wife had a daughter named after her mother was 1504. The place was called
Wellbourne, in Lincolnshire. 



When Margaret Thomas Clarke
grew up she married a man who was made a Knight of the Realm, Sir Richard Smith. Together,
they produced thirteen children, the eldest of whom was born William, in 1518.
His daughter Eleanor, grew up and married Alexander White. Sometime around 1546
or so, they had a daughter named Frances. 



They also had a daughter named
Katherine, who would grow up to travel with her husband, John Carver across the English
Channel to Holland. A couple of years later, they would take a small ship
across the Atlantic with a group of religious dissenters to start a new life in
a wild land near the James River in the New World. That trip would be
interrupted by bad weather and that group of Protestant dissenters, later
referred to as Pilgrims, landed and named Plymouth in 1620. Frances did not
follow her sister. Instead she stayed behind in England and grew up to marry
another Francis. 



Frances and Francis also followed her sister to Leiden, Holland, but at some point, they ended up going back to England.  Their son, John, was born in Leiden in 1602. Sometime after 1620, John made his way across the Atlantic in the
great Puritan migration, and ended up in Connecticut. He married a woman name
Johanna Whitmore. Their daughter, as was the custom at the time, was also named
Johanna. 

When little Johanna became a
young woman, she married a man named John Burrows. To them was born another
John Burrows in 1671 in Groton, New London. Young John married a woman with a
name typical of the time and place, Patience. Patience later gave birth to
Eunice. 



Eunice grew up to marry a man
named Jonas Curtis. Jonas and Eunice lived for time in Stratford, Connecticut,
where their daughter, Hannah, was born in 1739. Hannah grew up and married my
fifth great grandfather, Henricus, known also as Henry. Henry Ellsworth saw
action as volunteer for the Revolutionary militia. He had a famous lawyer for a
cousin by the name of Oliver Ellsworth. Oliver would become the third Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court a few years after helping to write part of the
Constitution of the United States. Oliver was also a friend of George
Washington. 



Much more ordinary Henry and
Hanna raised a family containing one son named John. John became a man and
married Mary Whitney, probably in New York state. They had two sons, one of
whom fought for the Union in the American Civil War. His name was Freeman. 



Before going off to war,
Freeman married young Scottish immigrant, Jane Smith. They had several children
before Freeman's unit went to Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1863. This was where
Freeman probably died of dysentery. 



Jane had to raise the younger
children, the last of whom was a spunky but mildly deformed girl named,
Marilla. Not one to let a little deformity deter her, Marilla met young Orlando
Richmond, whose family was also from New York. 



They married and had three
children. Their son, Harry was born in Ohio in 1875. He grew up in North
Baltimore, Ohio. Harry met and married a young Pennsylvanian girl named
Ninetta, who insisted on being called Nina. Nina rhymed with china. In North
Baltimore, Nina gave birth to Gladys, Grace, and Harold. Gladys was born in
1903, the year those Dayton boys, the Wright brothers, flew a motorized vehicle
in North Carolina. Early in the 1920's, Gladys, having gone to the teacher's
college in Bowling Green, married a man who towered almost a foot over her five
foot, one inch height. 



His name was Forest Borough.
Being from Weston, Ohio, Forest and Gladys bought a house half way to North
Baltimore, in the village of Deshler. Gladys and Forest had only one daughter.
Her name was Roberta, but like her grandmother Nina, she insisted on being
called by her nickname, Bobbie. Bobbie grew up to become a nurse and married my
father in Cincinnati, in 1951. I was born in 1958, third of four children.
Cincinnati was a long way from fifteenth century Woodchurch in Kent. By the
records written and maintained by many other people, I found my way there in
2013.